Levinas
In my reading today, I arrived at a paragraph from Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity. It comes at the very end of the first essay, “A. Metaphysics and Transcendence.” I feel the need to quote it in full as a way to meditate on it. For some reason, it feels like an important expression of the journey through the spiritual exercises of philosophy and religion that I’ve been on in the latest few weeks of these meditations. I have added numbers and italics to emphasize certain aspects for myself:
Between a [1] philosophy of transcendence that situates elsewhere the true life to which man, escaping from here, would gain access to the privileged moments of liturgical, mystical elevation, or in dying — and [2] a philosophy of immanence in which we could truly come into possession of being when every “other” (cause for war), encompassed by the same, would vanish at the end of history — we propose to describe, within the unfolding of terrestrial existence, of economic existence (as we shall call it), a relationship with the other that does not result in a divine or human totality, that is not a totalization of history but the idea of infinity. Such a relationship is metaphysics itself. History would not be the privileged plane where Being disengaged from the particularism of points of view (with which reflection would still be affected) is manifested. If it claims to integrate myself and the other within an impersonal spirit this alleged integration is cruelty and injustice, that is, ignores the Other. History as a relationship between men ignores a position of the I before the other in which the other remains transcended with respect to me. Though of myself I am not exterior to history, I do find in the Other a point that is absolute with regard to history — not by amalgamating with the Other, but in speaking with him. History is worked over by the ruptures of history, in which a judgment is born upon it. When man truly approaches the Other he is uprooted from history. (“A. Metaphysics and Transcendence” 52)
So many other phrases and thoughts come rushing through this passage not as a summation or fulfillment but more of a release:
Lyotard’s “bearing witness to the differend” as a practice of justice;
Weil’s “implicit love of God” as the ability to attend to the malheur of another human being bereft of their humanity “lying in a ditch by the side of the road”;
Nietzsche’s fear of nihilism represented by the madman seeking God in the marketplace, whose lamp only illuminates and invites the mockery of modernity’s atheists;
Plato’s Socrates’ belief that the soul can be separated from the body as a philosophical practice — as “practicing philosophy in the right way” — that is not guaranteed by an afterlife (which could be consummated in a suicide he explicitly rejects) but is a way of “caring for our souls” in this world as Athenian citizens;
Seneca’s capacity for reason as only ever activated as a response to impressions provoked by fortuna, but this response must be backed up by a faith that fortuna is in fact providentia as a way to overcome nihilism;
William James’ “varieties of religious experience” that restores to our modern world a spiritual and pragmatic need for each of us to contemplate seriously our variety of relationships to “the Divine” as eternity without disabling the spiritual value because the “truth value” of the underlying beliefs doesn’t measure up to our standards of knowing what is really true;
Descartes’ “proof” that he exists as fundamentally an I that experiences (not just thinks) in the First and Second Meditations, but also seeks, through the Third Meditation’s “idea of infinity,” a guarantee that he is not alone in the world;
Evagrius’ Plotninian-inspired praktikos that relentlessly turns inward by rejecting images, words, ideas and representations that can be the anchor for his incredible catalog of all the forms of nihilism (resentment, acedia, kenodoxa, et cetera), and in this inward turn finds a radical exteriority that is not an afterlife but an apatheia and agape that returns oneself to the world better for the journey.
All of these thinkers show me how it is possible to express “a relationship with the other that does not result in a divine or human totality.” They demonstrate, in the spiritual practices that are their writings, the idea of infinity that is a practical (meditative?) activation of a relationship with oneself and others that does not seek ultimate answers, does not seek a fundamental ground on which to judge, does not hope for or actively seek a kingdom (here or in a heaven beyond us) that will vindicate one’s own view of things. Nor does it proclaim a radical and nihilistic relativism that sees all truths as equals, nor sees nothingness as a ground on which to embrace apathy or atomized individuality or an empty and futile art of living as a new Dandyism.
The “idea of infinity” can only be activated in our thinking as a way to respect our capacity for experiences as the ground of our existence. “What is a thing that thinks?” Descartes asks in the Second Meditation. “A thing that doubts, perceives, affirms, wills, does not will, that imagines also, and which feels.” His idea of inifinity in the Third Meditation never allows this thing that thinks to sum itself up and be finished with thinking and experiencing. Expressed in the idea of infinity is a faith that we can drop our historical baggage — that we can “radically doubt” — and experience ourselves and others outside of history without that outside being the revelation of a Truth or a stable ground on which to stand in judgement of all that we doubt, perceive, affirm, will, and imagine.
Looking backwards on himself, Montaigne felt no need for repentance because he didn’t believe that his current self occupied a better vantage point from which to sum up and judge his former actions. Death as the complete end of personal experience allowed for a genuine choice about how to value this world here and now. One can choose nihilism, but one must realize that this is an active choice that need not be made and that there is no basis for this choice. If death is the same total lack of experience as before birth, then this absolute void can provide no meaning (good or bad) for this life that he is living. This is l’condition humaine as Auerbach titled his chapter on Montaigne.
To be clear, the idea of inifinity is not a mysticism that makes contact with another world beyond this one here and now. Nor is it an immanent (and equally mystical) belief that History is marching to a close where the infinite will arrive as a new Kingdom of God here on earth. This arrival is always imagined with required violence as revenge and purging, and always seems to require a downpayment on its arrival with gulags, inquisitions, trails of tears, gas chambers and the like. Rather, it is the spiritual practice of conversation with the Other, of “speaking with him” (Levinas above) as a way to push one’s thoughts to the limits of the finite without believing that this pushing to the limits is headed toward a new and all encompassing finality: the infinite is not just a really big (finite) bucket containing all the finite stuff.
And what of Plato’s Socrates? His “What is?” questions are not definitively answerable but there is value in pursuing the answers if only to learn how to speak about what we believe and, with Nicias (Laches), to enjoy the pleasures and pains of aporia. The Forms are not Forms but techniques in a spiritual practice of dialog that draws one out by forcing one to put beliefs into words while making those words accountable to the Forms as the idea of infinity. The finite definition never arrives and can never arrive. However, to strive to define the infinite and eternal is the very act of “caring for our souls” (Apology) and “practicing philosophy in the right way” (Phaedo). The key concepts — elenchus, aporia, parrhesia (speaking frankly) — themselves have no Forms and are never subject to the “what is?” interrogation. They are practical commitments made to the practice of the dialog. They teach us the importance of putting words to our beliefs while recognizing the inability of words to finally provide a definition — yet one’s experience is transformed in the process of using words in a disciplined way of aligning one’s beliefs with something eternal. Without this ability to transform the self through a dialog that reaches for the eternal, Plato would remain merely an historical curiosity. Yet he leaves us with an unresolved problem: can the eternal and infinite be defined? Is the infinite really finite? Should we just keep trying harder?
It would take Plotinus and his heirs to strip out Plato’s Socrates’ desire for the eternal to be reducible to the finite — to decouple the eternal from the finite and thereby open up the idea of infinity. Allowing the idea of inifinity its expression requires apatheia as the Plotninan monk Evagrius defined it. Apatheia is a peaceful state of the soul that makes it possible for the idea of infinity to be activated and expressed without a desire for it to be finite. Apatheia is not, however, the experience of this idea, but only the preparation of oneself for the experience: “If Moses, when he attempted to draw near the burning push, was prohibited until he should remove his shoes from his feet, how should you not free yourself from every thought that is colored by passion seeing that you wish to see One who is beyond every thought and perception” (Chapters on Prayer 4). Apatheia is removing our shoes that allows the approach, but it is not the experience of infinity. “Agape is the progeny of apatheia” (Praktikos 81), but agape is not apatheia. Agape is returned to us through the experience of the idea of infinity. Apatheia allows the return to be received by the soul.
The experience activated and expressed by serious contemplation of the idea of infinity yields agape as the “implicit love of God” articulated by Weil. Agape does not reduce the other to a version of ourselves. It does not see the other as someone to be saved through professions of doctrinal beliefs. Instead of “Who do you say that I am?”, it is the ability to ask, “What is your malheur?” and to honestly attend to the answer without demanding the form of the answer ahead of time — as demonstrable proof, as confession, as the definition of a Form, or as any other genre. It is to “bear witness to the differend” (Lyotard) and confront the incommensurability of agonistic games that vie for supremacy. It is to understand that this incommensurability is not abstract — it is emotional, violent, frustrated, silenced, and sheds tears as it struggles for words and claims itself in that struggle that finds it difficult to speak. Bearing witness to the differend is beyond the ossified positions of subjects and objects — it is the idea of infinity expressed as a practice of justice.