Although some have credited Levinas with the return of the religious (retour du religieux), there is possible a secular reading of Levinas, done with great seriousness, I believe, by Derrida. However, Levinas's thought has also inspired philosophies that combine aspects of religious ethics and questions of justice. This is as much evident on the Jewish side1as it is on the Protestant and Catholic sides. That said, the return of the religious is a phenomenon that could have no single instigator (for example, revisiting Kierkegaard) because it has itself taken so many forms, from a defense of "theophany" in Marion, to the re-reading of Cohen and Rosenzweig, to the exploration of the identity and meaning of Paul as apostle and as Jew, and Jesus, to the assertion by intellectuals like Vattimo, that Catholicism has long been present in their thinking. The phenomenon is broad-based and proceeds from a host of interests and toward different ends. If John Milbank is right, then it is an inevitability, for post-modern thinking exemplifies Adorno's conception of reason turning upon itself and revealing its groundlessness and occasional service to terror. The return of the religious would thus be a viable response to the nihilism of Western, instrumental rationality. On the other hand, this return is far from inevitable in matters of ethics, according to others.
This question of the return of the religious opens onto the question of the fate of contemporary philosophy and notably, since I will be speaking about Levinas, that of phenomenology. I will come back to this question. For his part, Kierkegaard maintains a philosophical rigour as he challenges the idealism of his time. Still, he is from the first less troubled by the challenge of remaining in philosophy than Levinas is, but this is due to several things: first, Kierkegaard's use of pseudonymy; second, his employment of irony; third, and most important, the insistence that philosophical questions must be inscribed within a field-that of faith or man's religious life-that exceeds philosophy in capacity for truth, and belongs to a qualitatively different order than does philosophy. Note that Kierkegaard can argue this because the philosophy against which he is doing battle, above all, is Hegelianism and speculative system building more generally. He writes, in The Concept of Anxiety, "Every human life is religiously designed. To want to deny this confuses everything and cancels the concepts of individuality, race, and immortality. To explain how my religious existence comes into relation with and expresses itself in my outward existence, that is the task" (105). For this last reason, Kierkegaard will say of his Concept of Anxiety, that it is "a psychologically orientating deliberation" on sin, or evil. It is, therefore, not philosophy or metaphysics eo ipso, and it permits itself one access to Christian "dogmatics" that philosophy could not allow: the presupposition of human evil as trans-temporally present, and as affecting each person individually as well. Therefore, Kierkegaard is not concerned, here, that the ethical questions he approaches belong to a philosophy synonymous with secular, rational inquiry. His is a critique of the possibilities and limits of psychology in the wake of evil and freedom. That position, which I am highlighting here in its independence from certain norms of philosophical inquiry (secularity, rationality, deduction or consistent description), is one that Levinas approximates in his work after Totality and Infinity, notably in his Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1972).2
Now, in 1961, Totality and Infinity unfolded an ethics that displaced metaphysics as first philosophy. It did so by showing the intersubjective origin of our notion of transcendence, and of reason itself. Otherwise than Being explored the subjective 'experience' of investiture by a force (or alterity) that it could not integrate in the synthesis of everyday consciousness. This subjective 'experience' is thematizable as experience only if we accept two suppositions: first, that the 'expression' of suffering and redemption by the prophets signifies preeminently as an experience of investiture by alterity and opens to the creation and preservation of a community constituted in ethical service to a principle of difference, a wholly other that commands. Second, that sensibility--in its moments of exasperation--as vulnerability, obsession, expiation, has a significance rooted in the excessiveness of sensible 'experience'. This excess is indeterminate, its symptom is suffering, but one ought to avoid saying too much about it, or romanticizing it, lest it become either a conceptual moment in a prescriptive ethics or an aesthetics of suffering or sacrifice. Thus, in the late Levinas, prophetism mobilizes figures of speech that denote an excess in the experience of self-consciousness, before consciousness consolidates itself. This opens us to the other person in an original way-generally, in a peaceful way, and it explains the possibility of the unexpected act of generosity. By 1972, Levinas, like Kierkegaard, had stepped beyond philosophy. And he was not the only one in the second and third generations of phenomenologists to do so. This brings me back to my question about phenomenology's destiny.
Why does phenomenology venture out of philosophy whenever it is interested in something more than Husserl exegesis? If we hold aside Heidegger's destruction (which arguably amounted to the closure) of the tradition of metaphysics by the recollection of its forgotten ground, we still confront thinkers like Max Scheler who attempted to extend phenomenology into a philosophy of values. But more recently, we note Levinas, we note the later Merleau-Ponty who sought to step beyond logics of 'consciousness' toward a thinking in which the thinker was intricated in its thought: the Merleau-Ponty of the chiasmatic logic. We also find the recent works of Marion taking donation out of ontology.3 Indeed, Marion has used phenomenology and ontology to read the third Critique Kant against the Kant of the first Critique. To what end? To show that theophany, like the gaze of the human other, belongs to an interpretative phenomenology that has no recourse to metaphysics. Given these moves by the second and third generation, phenomenology appears to open both beyond its own epistemological boundaries and beyond philosophy. Is this the mere structural repetition of the fate of German Idealism after Kant, such that figures like Schleiermacher, and Kierkegaard, turned attention to the missing wealth of a logic of existence, in its particularity and its dependence vis-à-vis an alterity that it could not subsume in thought? Is the age and aftermath of phenomenology the repetition, in the 20th Century, of the drama of Idealism? It may well be this-but if it is so, then we must keep in mind that the Kant of the third Critique resembles the later Husserl in as much as both men were stepping outside of the epistemological systems theyelaborated in earlier works. 4 Thus the seeds of a hermeneutical and historical turn in phenomenology, like the seeds of some of existentialism's precursors, were already sown in phenomenology and Idealism themselves. In both cases, we should speak of an impetus to get past the limitations they establish.
The question that concerns me today touches on the figures of Levinas and Kierkegaard both in their relation to phenomenology and Idealism, and in relation to the question of responsibility, which is also the question of the relationship of their thought to ethics. For, if responsibility, is the paradoxical pre-reflective yet describable and thinkable, possibility of our spontaneously being-for another within being itself (although according to a temporality different than being's time), then ethics, as a vertical, unchosen commitment to the other, is both constitutive of all discourse including traditional first philosophy, and ethics is a promise that entails neither prescription nor a telos whether eudaimonistic or functional. And so, Levinas's ethics is both inside and outside of philosophy; that is its 'radicality'. Indeed, Levinas calls his thinking 'ethics' in the original sense I just described, but he also calls it "religion" in Totality and Infinity [TI 40], playing on the sense of a pre-reflective human bond.
Kierkegaard has a more ambivalent relationship to ethics. A systematic ethics explains too much for him: its principle of the good proposes to integrate human acts and interiority to such a point that even sacrifice is amenable to rationality (at least, when it is Agammemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia). We find this evaluation of ethics in Fear and Trembling. In The Concept of Anxiety, the problems of evil, moral suffering and turpitude are necessarily of interest to ethics, but neither ethics nor psychology can explain how and when evil arises. I suspect Levinas would agree with this formulation. He is certainly convinced, as Kierkegaard is, that evil is found both in historical societies and in individuals.
Indeed, what Levinas calls the "invisible," or the evil done to another who is reduced to a statistic, must be made visible through speech. This is what bearing witness is-in its most extreme formulation, bearing witness, as the subjectivity that apologizes or proclaims the unseen wrong, gives voice to the "judgment of God" (TI 244). What else would the notion of God represent, at least understood as a god of history, than the vision that perceives from a point for which all are equally seen? Since this is not ontology, the judgment of God can only be taken up and ventured as a risk.
Thus, in T&I, Levinas approaches the concept of 'sin' from the perspective of history, and from that of him who endures others' sins, unseen and unhelped. Kierkegaard approaches sin from the perspective of the one whose sin has come to pass like a leap into a void. Later, in Otherwise than Being, Levinas turns in this direction as well, developing concepts like 'recurrence', 'obsession', 'persecution', 'expiation', and Saying. These represent the moments of the vertigo of the other as a force within me, as a memory whose incipience I cannot recall.
As the making visible of evil, the so-called judgment of God is a figure in T&I, but God operates as the principle of alterity or the absolute other that gives rise to our pronouncing the word "God," as Levinas put it in "God and Philosophy."5 The point is not that the other is human or divine or some synthesis of each, it is that what we call divine, and what we call the particular person, is other: unknowable in her fullness, unanticipatable, unbanishable in her call. Alterity becomes the principle of ethical life in a time that is punctuated by the gesture Levinas called "the judgment of God" in 1961.
This 'Continental' ethics has little in common with what the Anglo-American tradition calls 'ethics' because it gets behind theoretical foundationalism to what might be called a transcendental anthropology. In recent years it has been both attacked and defended within Continental debates. These debates engage two questions of interest to me here: first, if we bracket those ethics of virtue that blend the ethical and the aesthetical vision of a beautiful life in a community, then is an ethics 'without philosophy' possible? Second, can an ethics be developed without the assumption of an extra-temporal ideal or perspective, whether this be the perspective of the ideal discursive community, or a hypothetical, super-individual perspective (H.M. Hare), or the ideal of a reconciliation of duty and happiness, or the idealized calculus of happiness, or the Other who affects me despite my rational judgment even in the wake of history's vicissitudes? My second question about possibility is related to the first: is there an ethics without a belief in a good that is not an entity and, if that good is pragmatic and processual in character, then is there implicit in it a meta-physical assumption about subjects and their capacities? In a sense, the two questions turn around the relationship between ethics and so-called religion. Kierkegaard and Levinas address these two questions in a similar way.
Alain Badiou has answered the questions recently in his L'Éthique.6 Yes, there is an ethics without an ideal conception of the good; yes, emphatically, we can conceive our ethics without including a transcendental presupposition. To that end we find in his work a scathing attack on Levinas and his "human rights" epigones. I quote Badiou at length to allow him the fullness of his argument.
"Ethics is for Levinas, the new name of thought, which has tipped its 'logical' containment (in the principle of identity) toward its prophetic submission to the Law of founding alterity" (L'éthique, p. 20). For Badiou, Athens has tipped toward Jerusalem.
And, Badiou continues, "The capital-but also superficial-objection one could make to ethics (in Levinas's sense) is the following: what is it that shows the originality of my de-votion [dé-vouement] to the Other? We require the explicitation of the axioms underlying the thinking that decide such an orientation.The difficulty, which is also the application point of such axioms, can be stated this way: the ethical primacy of the Other over the Same demands that the experience of alterity be ontologically 'guaranteed' as an experience of a distance, or an essential non-identity, whose crossing is the ethical experience itself. But nothing in the simple phenomenology of the other person [autrui] contains such a guarantee, because it is certain that the finitude of appearing of the other person can be invested as resemblance, and thus lead us back to the logic of the Same. The other person always resembles me too much for the hypothesis of an originary opening to his alterity to be necessary."
The crux of Badiou's critique therefore is dual: he presupposes Being as the only game, or scene, thinkable, and he focuses on necessity versus possibility-two themes of extreme concern to Levinas and Kierkegaard, to which I will return. It is not clear in any case, that ethics ought to be a domain in which ethical ties, ethical behavior, or ethical sentiment be governed by an axiom, i.e. by logical necessity. Moreover, Levinas's phenomenology proceeds on a reduction that could be called, with prudence, "semiotic" in the sense of tracing the encounter with the other back to a moment inaugurating the creation of a sign. Curiously, this sign is extra- or pre-linguistic. By 1972, Levinas will call it "sincerity," in a Kierkegaardian move. I would emphasize that such a reduction is 'radical' in that it has no eidetic and no perceptual content. Its difficulty, like its novelty, lies in its sensuous character, its highly punctual temporality, its disconnection with Husserlian intuition, and its resistance to integration into any intentional act. It is like a shock. And it is likenable to Kierkegaard's insistence that the qualitative leap into sin is irreducible to quantitative accumulations of forces. Badiou's criticism is based on a "simple phenomenology of the other person." One assumes that he means a simple Husserlian phenomenology here. Any simple phenomenology should be suspect to readers of Levinas.
Despite the avowed superficiality of his critique, Badiou argues that Levinas's possible absolute other cannot produce an ethical philosophy per se. "In truth, there is no philosophy of Levinas. It is no longer even a philosophy "servant" to theology: it is philosophy (in the Greek sense of the word) annulled by theology, which moreover is not a theo-logy but, precisely, an ethics. Taken out of its Greek usage (where ethics is clearly subordinated to the theoretical) Levinas's ethics is a category of pious discourse" (22-23). Badiou insists upon this for a good reason. The West calls for the respect of the other's rights; provided that that other accept as their own the principal tenets of the Western rights credo. This credo masks important abuses in France, he argues. Its reiteration serves a host of interests not the least of which are conservative. Have we come so far with the other, that we've no difficulty in recognizing the Same? asks Badiou of Levinas's 'epigones'.
His argument against Levinas could be directed to Kierkegaard as well. An ethics that lacks a logical guarantee of the transcendence of the other, which in Kierkegaard's schema implies his "faith" and "earnestness," becomes a pious discourse grounded on the unverifiable supposition of transcendence, or the possibility of a call or leap that is qualitatively different from all other events in Being. Now, Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety eludes this charge by calling itself a work of psychology and ethics. It reflects upon the psychology of anxiety and sin, and on the supplement afforded by dogmatics for the significance of a sin that is hereditary. Nevertheless, the logic of the work depends upon three quasi-philosophical notions: inwardness, earnestness-which resembles Levinas's concept of "sincerity" synonymous with the "Saying"-and faith. Kierkegaard's central presupposition is "pious" and yet better than pious: it states that human life is "religiously designed," and that human particularity shows this religious vocation precisely through sin as humanly inevitable, but avoidable in particular instances provided one has inwardness.7
My purpose is not to argue, against Badiou, that Levinas's thought is in no sense tied to piety. But there is piety whose end lies in the service of a God believed by faith, and there is piety that influences but does not conclude philosophical arguments concerning good andevil. This claim walks a thin line. It asks in essence: are there insights from a religious tradition that can be appropriated for their existential meaning, without thereby returning to that religion's dogma?
This is precisely what both Kierkegaard and Levinas attempt to do. Levinas does it through a discourse expressly non-dogmatic. And if we find parallels between his Talmudic readings and his philosophy, then we should point to the spirit of Hermann Cohen's essays on the "ethics of Judaism," in which it is no longer clear whether ethics is in service to religion or religion in service to ethics. Despite this fluidity, many have suspected a crypto religiosity beneath any argument for the movement between religion and ethics. Their claim is founded upon the idea that any religious inspiration behind an ethical scheme taints the ethical claims with ideology.8 Moreover, it sets up a distinction between those discursivities that qualify as merely ideological, those that employ rationality toward ideological ends, and those that ideally escape ideology. But what escapes ideology, and unless we deny that every significant text has an imaginary dimension--whether this be utopian or paranoid or narcissistic, we must ask where does piety begin and end? We must ask what the relationship between ideology, piety, and the imaginary is in a work of ethics.9
Let me resume and go on. My purpose is to muddy Badiou's claims about piety and ethics using Kierkegaard's discussion of anxiety and Levinas's exploration of responsibility. Before doing so, I would emphasize the most significant difference pervading their work, without which their rapprochement will be forced: faith is a central concept in Christianity, and for Kierkegaard, but above all for Protestantism with its emphasis on grace. Faith concerns belief in the incarnation of God and it concerns a commitment to the promise of redemption and resurrection. Such a faith is not central to Judaism. Fidelity to the revealed Law-oral and written-is central, however, and this Law has a long tradition of rational interpretation, which underscores its ethical reason for being.10 Thus, for Levinas, who was influenced by the rationalist rabbinics of Lithuania, it is not that ethics is a dimension of piety; piety is meaningful only if it is ethical from the outset. For Kierkegaard, it is not that ethics is a dimension of piety, either, it is that the meaning of anxiety, inwardness, earnestness, and faith are misunderstood by ethics, which takes them as spiritual modes of a search that reason can endeavor with greater transparency. Instead, Kierkegaard argues that anxiety, inwardness, and earnestness are the preconditions in possibility for an ethical selfhood that unfolds neither in self-prescription (Kant) nor in the aestheticization of a life (in narcissism). Anxiety, inwardness and faith are the preconditions for self-opening.11 They constitute an original disposition or personality. In this personality, "Earnestnessis the acquired originality of disposition, its originality preserved in the responsibility of freedom" Earnestness alone is what makes it possible for us to repeat our tasks; earnestness makes Kierkegaard's famous concept of "repetition" possible and "repetition," taken in the sense of doing the same act again and again--if this is possible--is the only form of eternity available to humans. In the human sphere, repetition belongs to infinity, to speak like Levinas. Indeed, repetition is what Levinas designates by his "recurrence" of responsibility. Moreover, like Levinas's recurrence of responsibility, Kierkegaard's "inwardness" is not conquered by the will and has nothing to do with Idealism's self-consciousness or the "pure subject" [CA 151]. It is a movement that begins in the state of anxiety and it is the precondition of ethics.12
II. Levinas and Kierkegaard on Ethics
I am going to assume that the Levinasian description of responsibility is better known to people than is Kierkegaard's argument in The Concept of Anxiety. So I will begin with that. Having pointed to the most significant difference between them, I would suggest that three intuitions unite their thought: one is logical, the second is temporal and existential; the third is psychological and phenomenological, it concerns the subject.
Both thinkers break with logics built on sufficient reason and identity, and argue that the concept of quality cannot be reduced to quantity. Both men establish qualitatively different levels of being and transcendence (Levinas's Being and better-than-being, and Kierkegaard's "leap"), which cross each other chiasmatically but cannot be reduced to each other. These levels are what characterize existence in its human form. Now, the peculiarly human form of existing is to surpass its worldly existence in three ways: (1) in conscious acts of wrongs (Kierkegaard's "sin"); (2) to open oneself to a sociality of generosity (Kierkegaard and Levinas); and (3) to hollow out or deepen our interiority by loosening or removing subjective limits (Kierkegaard and Levinas)13. This human form of existing is made possible by the supposed duality of immanence and transcendence characteristic of human 'being'.
Second, both thinkers attach distinct temporalities to modes ofexperience, and they show that existence is 'understood' throughdifferent moods, which form distinct layers. Transcendence inLevinas and Kierkegaard is not something from which one returns;it has the distinctive temporality of the interruption. For Levinas,transcendence is interruption by the other person whose approachfills my sensuous pre-consciousness: I am for-that-other in asplit second of vulnerability. In Kierkegaard's Concept ofAnxiety, transcendence is a leap from anxiety about one'spossibilities, into an act: sin or faith. The definitive qualityof transcendence is in each case its temporality: it is sudden,it is already past when we become aware of it. Only a temporalitythat could not be reduced to the countable and the accountablecould be said to be different from subjective duration and objectivechronometry.
As this other temporality, transcendence is immeasurable and so, irreducible to any determination of quantity. But this brings up a genetic problem in both philosophies: how did this leap, or this moment, come to be? The answer is that it did not; it was already there before an 'I' discovered it. This is the famous deformalization of time in Levinas, which he calls, in T&I, the "posteriority of the anterior" (TI 54). It is found in Kierkegaard as well, worked out in regard to sin as the cumulative acts of the entire human race and as the choice each one of us enters for reasons which are inexplicable to logic or metaphysics. Both thinkers therefore deploy a paradoxical temporality following the same chiasmatic logic that we saw in their separation of being and better-than-being (Levinas), or being and the transcendence of sin or radical faith (Kierkegaard).
Third, each philosopher seeks a proto-subjectivity beneath the self-positing, and self-synthesizing consciousness of idealism and Husserlian phenomenology. In Levinas, as we know, the subject is fissured, an irreducible and alien dimension always already inhabits it--we become aware of this through modes of being and their accompanying moods, like the mode of division against oneself that is remorse. Writes Levinas, "The psyche is the form of a peculiar dephasing, a loosening up or unclamping of identity: the same prevented from coinciding with itself, at odds, torn up from its rest, between sleep and insomnia, panting, shivering" (OB 68). Levinas's psyche is "sensibility when phenomenologically reduced," though we must keep present to mind the unique turn Levinas gives to his phenomenology. It is prior to the sensible subject perceiving its objects; it is rather the meaningfulness of sense or "animation" (OB 69).
But as meaning and the root of the act of signifying, it is like Kierkegaard's "anxiety." What is anxiety for Kierkegaard? It is the 'sign' and mood of spirit. What he calls "spirit" is the non-spatial, non-logical site-the mode-in or by which body and mind are united in a human being. Spirit is not intellect but an evolving sort of perceptual and sentient intelligence, capable of making a leaps or of "sobering up" within existence, as Levinas puts it. Anxiety is, therefore, as Levinas claimed of ethics: "an optics": the condition of a precise way of perceiving.14 In Levinasian terms, spirit is like dis-inter-ested-ness, a momentary but recurring stance outside of any commitment to physical being and political history. However, in Kierkegaard, spirit has a historical evolution and an individual one. In both the historical and the individual cases, the more developed spirit is, the greater the human capacity for that vertigo before its own possibilities, which Kierkegaard calls "anxiety." He puts it beautifully,
Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down?15
This anxiety, which is a mood not unlike the horror experienced by Levinas's insomniac before the indeterminate positivity of being, characterizes with spirit the proto-subject, the self in Levinasian terms, before indeterminate being and its accompanying possibilities. As a mood, it is prior to distinctions of subject and object; and Kierkegaard adds that it is the "middle term" between human possibility and actuality, which pervades both possibility and actuality. Anxiety preconditions the transcendence of the leap into evil, just as it constitutes the trial of human possibility itself and can be used otherwise than to plunge into sin. Here, Kierkegaard presages Heidegger; but he gives us an insight into Levinas's thought, in which anxiety grips us both before the "There is", before the positive presence of Being, and as the trace of the other who has fissured my consciousness before I was aware of it happening. As Kierkegaard writes in what is a very Levinasian sentence, "He who becomes guilty through anxiety is indeed innocent, for it was not he himself but anxiety, a foreign power, that laid hold of him" (CA 43)16. Anxiety is likened to a foreign power much the way that the Other, absolutely other to me yet immanent in me, functions for Levinas as a foreign power over the will, "like an inversion of the conatus of esse" (OBBE 75). These 'powers' and this blurring of the borders between subject and self, subject and other, subject and being, constitute the proto-subjectivity that lies beneath our cognition of sensible moments in Levinas and Kierkegaard alike.
Thus, the Kierkegaardian schema can be summarized as follows. He approaches sin in order to approach questions of ethics and faith. At the heart of ethics is the question of evil, which is, for Kierkegaard and Levinas both, the question that is prior to the question concerning being.17 The question of evil is also, for both men, one approach to the meaning and possibility of transcendence and alterity (DDVI, 198). This is because sin appears first as humans' 'other', the counter nature that was nevertheless a possibility open to them. Why it was possible, and why sin is committed are more difficult questions. Psychology can begin to answer them, provided we accept the claim from Christian dogmatics that each human being can and will 'sin,' and that the history of the human race is a history of an accumulating reflection on acts of 'sinfulness' that it commits.
Psychology can answer the question of why sin is possible by examining the state of mind that precedes sin: anxiety. As we have seen, anxiety exists in various intensities according as human possibilities get focused upon conscious ends of good or evil. But anxiety is found in all human beings because of their more or less developed sense of "being-able-to-do." At the extreme, anxiety can by itself give rise to the sense that one is guilty of something, of X, or that one has already transgressed. Kierkegaard illustrates this using the notion of the concupiscent gaze of the Other, who constitutes me in anxiety and shame: as though I had already desired that Other! Here, without glimpsing all the implications of his move, Kierkegaard gives us a Levinasian face to face, in which the self contains both self and the other in the self--even if that other is simply his/her desiring gaze and makes no appeal for help. Shame suggests, in any case, a sense of guilt assumed in advance, its temporal form is like Levinas's posteriority of anteriority, and shame and guilt weaken the self, which, ultimately, may take a leap into sin.
Psychology cannot explain the nature of the leap itself. It can simply trace the stages and states that lead, temporally and quantitatively, up to the leap. However, the notion of a leap introduces the existential distinction of quality into the quantitative accumulation of everyday time, words, and deeds.18
Kierkegaard's leap into sin is thus a transcendence from which, like Levinas's ethical transcendence, one does not return. One sins, one is henceforth guilty, and each person individually brings sinfulness into the world through her sins. Now, the sins that receive Kierkegaard's attention are sins of concupiscence; eros is the first sin because, through fecundity, it constitutes humans as historical, generational beings (our discontinuous mode of infinity).19 Erotic sin results from a leap out of anxiety over possibility. For all individuals, how one responds to anxiety and what its principal objects are, determines the sort of personality one develops. Kierkegaard speaks of a personality caught up in the state of the "demonic."20 This is a state in which freedom, entangled with itself in anxiety, slowly turns into non-freedom and obsession. The visible symptoms of the demonic are enumerated like a hodge-podge of psychoanalysis and more literary troubles: "a hypersensibility and a hyperirritability, neurasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria, etc." (CA 136-37). These symptoms accompany and are heightened by the principal phenomenon of the demonic: the refusal to speak and to open oneself to the other, which is Kierkegaard's concept of "inclosing reserve" (CA 123ff.). The state arises in one of two possible sorts of anxiety: anxiety before the good and anxiety before evil. It is not difficult to imagine what, or why anxiety is found before evil: the apprehension of harm or of sin is its content. But as a human being shuts itself off, in cynicism, skepticism, or some emotional state like envy, it shows an increasing anxiety about the good, about love and the other transcendence that expresses itself in "confession," like Levinas's apology. Inclosing reserve thus desiccates freedom as possibility; it is anti-sociality, a negative ethic of sociality par excellence. States Kierkegaard, "The utmost extreme in this sphere is what is commonly called bestial perdition. In this state, the demonic manifests itself in saying: 'Leave me alone in my wretchedness'" (CA 137).
We cannot fail to be impressed by Kierkegaard's exploration, under-represented in Levinas, of anti-sociality arising from anxiety. But note two significant Levinasian themes in Kierkegaard: first, that such a refusal of the other is possible. Was it not Levinas who, in speaking of the face, said that it is the only thing that "I can wish to kill?" The interpellative power of the face in T&I opens a subject up, but it may also produce a decision to turn away. The gnawing remorse Levinas calls "substitution," and which comes to pass in the diachrony or peculiar temporality of being-for-the-other, this remorse may remain with us even if we do turn away from the other.21
The second Levinasian theme here is language. Early in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard argues that it is inconceivable that man could have invented language, by himself. Thus Kierkegaard writes on the Biblical story of Adam, father of hereditary sin: "Here we must remember what was said about the prohibition [of the tree] and the word of judgment The imperfection in the narrative-i.e., how it could have occurred to anyone to say to Adam what he essentially could not understand [because he did not yet know good and evil]-is eliminated if we bear in mind that the speaker is language," (CA 47, emphasis added). Precisely so: in freedom, and in any trial of possibility, the speaker is language; language is immanence, the "voice of conscience." But we need not follow Heidegger reading Kierkegaard and insist upon maintaining the dichotomy between the inner and the outer. In his note to that page, Kierkegaard adds "But this much is certain, that it will not do to represent man himself as the inventor of language" (CA 47 n). It is readily admissible that man would not invent language on his own, in his pastoral soliloquizing."
What Kierkegaard grasps (notwithstanding his 'die Sprache spricht') is Levinas's insight that language is speaking-to, it is responding-to This supposes that the origin of language would be the entre-nous, as Levinas puts it. Further, in so far as language is response and responsibility to, it is so when we are able to stay clear of the Kierkegaardian "inclosing reserve" or narcissism. For Kierkegaard and for Levinas, then, what saves us from inclosing reserve is "the Word" (CA 124). Kierkegaard does not mean, here, Jesus stricto sensu; he would rather say, I suspect, that Jesus is called the Word, because he operated as an interpellator, opening those who listened to him; or again, that in interrupting our reflexive anxiety over the good, Jesus, and the prophets generally, extended humans' possibility of escaping from inclosing reserve. That would be the ethical-psychological reading of Jesus as the "word." Kierkegaard writes, "Language, the word, is precisely what saves the individual from the empty abstraction of inclosing reserveFor language does indeed imply communication" (CA 124, emphasis added). Moreover, if Levinas's self, interpellated by a force that is both within and without him, responds without first choosing to do so, in sincerity, then Kierkegaard also glimpsed that the linguistic response is not sufficient: the proper tone and modality of the response must be specified to understand the difference between the response of responsibility, and the mechanical responses of everyday temporality, whatever their resemblances. Kierkegaard will take pains to show that and how the notion of salvation is expressed, in the everyday, by "disclosure" (CA 127); and disclosure itself requires a measure of what he calls "inwardness." This "most concrete content [where "concrete" means real] that consciousness can have, is consciousness of itself not the pure self-consciousness, but the self-consciousness that is so concrete that no authorhas ever been able to describe [it]" (CA 143). This inwardness "is action" and "cannot be something completed for contemplation" (CA 143). But if inwardness is action, and self-consciousness is not pure self-consciousness, then Kierkegaard is reaching toward what is prior to the Fichtean posited 'I' of formal freedom; and he is deliberately blurring the notion of action and passivity-something he does throughout the work. Why should this paradoxical consciousness of self-for which Kierkegaard clearly could not come up with a more distinct category to help himself here-not be likened to Levinas's "sincerity" of the "Saying?" Recall what this means in the section "Responsibility for the Other," in Otherwise than Being.22
"Sincerity is not an attribute of saying; it is saying that realizes sincerity. It is inseparable from giving. Sincerity undoes the alienation which saying undergoes in the saidIs not a salutation the giving of a sign signifying this very giving, this recognition of a debt? Sincerity in which signification signifies, in which one is exposed without holding back to the other, in which the one approaches the other, is[a] fission of the ultimate substantiality of the ego" (OB 143-44).
Viewed in light of Levinas's emphasis on intersubjectivity, which goes under-discussed by Kierkegaard whose path is more solitary, Levinas's 'sincerity' and Kierkegaard's 'inwardness' and 'disclosure' resemble each other. In a sense, Kierkegaard's claim that the word suspends anxiety (over the good) is echoed in Levinas's chapter on "Substitution," where obsession and persecution open into a Saying that is not tragic but comparable to "laughter through my tears."23
Language thus arises as a giving of signs; not as sign-indices, or deicticals, but as giving, which Kierkegaard calls "disclosure" but also "accounting and judgment" (CA 153). Together, and like Levinas's sincerity before the Other, these are "modes of eternalizing earnestness [read: sincerity] that are neither abstract nor metaphysical, because they complete the process of the communication, all the way into the Levinasian moment of the Third Party, who brings the demand for justice with him. Accounting and judgment also suggest the sense of being accounted and judged by another. These moments have a purgative effect on anxiety, and they modify everyday temporality. Writes Kierkegaard, "Precisely because the accounting and the judgment are essential, what is essential will have the effect of a Lethe on whatever is unessentialThe soul has not been essentially present in the drolleries of life, in its accidental circumstanceshence all this vanishes except for the soul that was essentially in this" (CA 154). This hollowing out, the burning up of the inessential occurs in the face of the other as well, for this too is a moment of apology, accounting, and judgment. For Kierkegaard, this kenosis and its aftermath allow humans the little eternity we can glimpse: the possibility of repetition.24
Like Kierkegaard, Levinas assumes that the ontological difference is preceded by the ethical difference (DDVI 201). Like Kierkegaard too, Levinas agrees that ethical questions are intelligible in their proper mood. Levinas writes, "Husserlian phenomenology has opened new possibilities. It asserts the rigorous solidarity between any intelligible thing and the psychic modes through which and within which the intelligible is thought: not just any meaning is accessible to any thought" (DDVI 192). If we take the question of mood seriously, then a path of communication between so-called religion and ethics can be understood in terms of one mode of approach: earnestness, or the sincerity of the Saying. Although this does not sound so 'religious'-after all, where is the master signifier, the distance of transcendence crossable only by faith, where is the dogma in this 'religion'?-a suspicious intelligence might suspect such postulates beneath all the talk about moods and modes of thoughts in their limited accessibility. But mood concerns the meaning of inwardness (Kierkegaard), or obsession (Levinas), and that much broader meaning of belief, which accompanies our adherence to any ethical, and ideological, system, consciously or unconsciously. Mood concerns belief as the argumentative and descriptive impetus to conclusions that cannot be logically verified and this forms the core of ethics and values theory. We see this core in the elegant failures of recent ethical systems, whether they are the failure to define The Good (G.E. Moore), or the failure to remain under Rawls's "veil of ignorance," or the failure to maintain consistent adherence to a regulative ideal, etc.
Badiou's argument that Levinas requires the logical axiom of absolute alterity in order to maintain human alterity, states (as Derrida did already in 1967) that Levinas's thought relies on the supposition of a Deus absconditus. Against Kierkegaard, Badiou would criticize the 'axiom' that "human life is religiously designed," even more so than Kierkegaard's presupposition that the historical and individual fact of evil is necessary. In the case of Levinas, the notion of absolute alterity is largely unverifiable, but this axiom nevertheless has a demonstrable, operative temporality. Furthermore, Levinas's axiom is radically modified in Otherwise than Being, though Badiou is not concerned with that work. There, absolute alterity is meaningless as a logical category unless we derive it from our own immanence and our interactions with others. In other words, first person responsibility 'verifies'--if verifying an axiom is always possible and desirable-the efficacy of what Levinas calls 'absolute alterity', not the other way around. In Otherwise than Being, it is human speech that verifies, at the level of enactment not logic, the alterity of the human other. Speech verifies this alterity in the form of an answer or account given to another and in the form of the sincerity of the response. Is this sufficient verification to allow us to assert that there is a circle, rather than a linear deduction, between the (logical) concept of absolute alterity and the enacted unique 'response' to the other? I am not sure, becausethere is always the risk of magical thinking when one speaks of the power over me of something that affects me before I can think about it. However, I contest that in its pure form, Levinas's thought is philosophy consumed by religion.25 If Levinas's thought is religion, then it is religion become ethics and, as such, it reminds us of Hermann Cohen's ideal of Judaism as religion of reason, running parallel to Kant's project. That does not mean that Levinas's readers are not free to reintroduce religious notions. Indeed, anyone is free to remind us that religion is never far from a thinking that asks, "What must I do?" and "For whom?", "in the name of whom or what?"
In The Concept of Anxiety, the postulate of the religious design of human life implies something we are now familiar with thanks to psychoanalysis, genealogy, and critical theory: reason's limitation in making the human being transparent to himself. The novelty of this notion is clear.[26] For Kierkegaard, writing as a psychologist, the religious design assumes that the category of possibility exceeds the binaries of rational freedom and necessity. Guilt, not necessity, is the contrary of freedom for Kierkegaard (CA 108). Guilt arises with anxiety in the wake of the experience of the possible as being-able-to-do. Guilt accompanies anxiety as "freedom tangled up in itself." So the expansion of the experience of the possible, and with it anxiety about good or evil, takes the place of traditional notions of freedom. In so doing, Kierkegaard's experience of the possible becomes a trial and a kind of modalized comprehension, a comprehension through moods. What I comprehend is that I belong to my history as much as to my personal choices, and that I can flee my anxiety in a host of ways.27 Faith enters Kierkegaard's schema last in this book, as belief in the good, in God, within the disposition of earnestness. It does so because The Concept of Anxiety offers a genetic account of faith for a historic humanity, rather than a study of a knight of faith. I would argue that this schema of the possible admits a religious and a secular reading. It is not necessary here to hypostatize or reify divinity or eternity to grasp that anxiety before what is possible to me can be a call to seriousness. Indeed, Badiou misses the rethinking of ethics in Levinas and Kierkegaard when he focuses solely upon the axioms on which their thought is based.[28]
My point is this: the movement between religion and ethics in both Kierkegaard and Levinas enables us to rethink ethics as a summons and a call, before it is a prescription or a calculus. The axiom underlying the summons may be absolute alterity, but it may well be that the source of the summons is undecidable, and it may well be that it is a human other who is like and unlike me. In any case, it is 'verified' in conscience and practically, in simple and courageous instances. But that does not necessitate the devastation of philosophy by piety.
1 With Alain Finkielkraut on the Jewish side and with Paul Ricoeur and Marc Faessler on the Protestant side, and Jean-Luc Marion, on the Catholic side. Levinas's concepts of alterity, responsibility, Saying, sincerity, prophetism has also been used by theorists, of whom two are African Catholic clerics, of human rights.
2 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Alphonso Lingis, tr., (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), first published in French in 1961; Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, A. Lingis, tr., (Dordrecht and Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1974), first published in 1972. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as TI and OB.
3 Marion argues that Kant's first Critique epistemological analyses failed to account adequately for a host of instances in which the given, or donation, overwhelmed either the immanent structures of intuition, or those of conceptuality, within the schematism.
4The Husserl of the third volume of the Ideas, and of the "Origin of Geometry" is a historicized Husserl; one who comes nigh to abandoning the transcendental subjectivity he markedly set forward in the first volume of the Ideas. Merleau-Ponty shows clearly how Husserl transformed his project toward the end of his writing career; and third Critique Kantianism has been called "Kant stepping outside of Kant" (Claude Imbert).
5 Emmanuel Levinas, "Dieu et la philosophie" in De Dieu qui vient à l'idée (Paris: Vrin, 1986), p. 104ff.; English translation by Bettina Bergo. "Can discourse signify otherwise than in signifying a thematic? Does God signify as a theme of the religious discourse that names God-or as a discourse that precisely, at least on first sight, does not hame him but says him in another way than denomination or evocation."
To put it differently, if we reduce God to another being, then, for Levinas, we diminish the alterity of humans!-and we approach Levinas in Christian fashion, or from a pre-Maimonidean Jewish framework. The other is a principle and alterity is a reality but they are not beings. "The future comes to me across an absolute interval whose other shore the Other absolutely other-though he may be my son-is alone capable of marking" (TI 283).
6 Alain Badiou, L'Éthique: Essai sur la conscience du mal (Paris: Hatier, 1993).
7 The point of interest to me is this: that the ethical happens at all, given war and the continuous competition of 'commerce', suggests that generosity and goodness have nothing of the bestial to it, and also nothing of the 'will' that we find in Nietzsche, or that in Spinoza, or the desire for recognition in Hegel-all of which resume the essence of humans. Perhaps it is a 'moral sentiment' based upon a certain empathy, in which case it is the proper of Scottish moralists and Husserl alike; but Levinas shows that this sentiment often takes the form of a pang of conscience or even the distraction of a call that we would like to be rid of; so the possibility that it be something other than the above options, leaves Levinas's 'moment' open. As to Kierkegaard, the argument works in such a way that none of us can deny that we understand wrongs and wrong doing, even if it is up to us to define what these mean personally. From there, the notion of the demonic leaves faith as the only option of courage in being, since both unbelief and superstition will be shown to be two sides of the same coin made up of passivity and activity: Actively believing in forces invisible to us, superstition holds us demonically and passively in our anxiety about the eternal by placing hope in something more like fate; actively denying that there is a divine, unbelief holds us passively in our anxiety about the good (which is his definition of the demonic). Again, it comes down to allowing ourselves to be tried by the possibility of our own capacity, our being-able-to-do x, which is the heart of anxiety, and which opens onto the leap of sin or onto a deeper understanding of what it means to be tried by possibility, rather than determined by necessity.
8 But does this then mean that Kant's categorical imperative has rationalized the Christian golden rule, while reading it through the ideology of pietism? To argue this suggests a naïveté about ideology.
9 Badiou's own ethics posits a pursuit of 'truths' and operates under the imperative "Continuer!"--"Continue!" But if we ask: continue for the sake of whom? For the sake of what? Are we forcing an ideological supposition, disguised as the desire for grounding, back into Badiou's work? How shall we avoid the questions, For what? and For whom? recognizing that they are also philosophical questions?
10 This interpretation takes different forms in Jewish thinkers from Saadia and Maimonides to H. Cohen. The ethical core of the Law is precisely why it was revealed to humans and that which allows humans to escape the reign of bestiality: It makes possible the human being to assume the position of "shepherds of Being."
11 Kierkegaard writes, "If [we] now turn back and pursue [Rosenkranz's] definition of 'feeling' as the spirit's immediate unity of its sentience [Seelenhaftigkeit = 'soulfulness'] and its consciousness, and recall that in the definition of Seelenhaftigkeit account has been taken of the unity with the immediate determinants of nature, then by taking all this together, [we have] the conception of a concrete personality." He adds that this is the best of possible human dispositions, "earnestness is a higher as well as the deepest expression for what disposition is. " Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, Reidar Thomte and A. Anderson, trs., (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 148-49. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as CA.
12 Just as an unchosen responsibility and later a tormenting sense of remorse and obsession are the preconditions of ethical generosity in Levinas. Let us now look more closely at the parallels and differences between their thought.
13 That is, whether these limits are stated in philosophical discourse or in experienced in the care we exert in our lives
14 Writes Kierkegaard, "As soon as [spirit] is posited not merely as that which constitutes the synthesis [of sentient body and cognitive psyche] but as spirit, the erotic [the pure bodily experience] comes to an end. The highest pagan expression for this is that the erotic is the comic" (CA 69). So, [with the development of spirit beyond the pagan semi-awareness of it] "it is the power of intelligence and its preponderance that in the indifference of the spirit neutralize both the erotic and the moral relation to the erotic," i.e., to sin (CA 69).
15 "Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness" (CA 61, emphasis added).
16 The passage begins, "Just as the relation of anxiety to its object, to something that is nothing, is altogether ambiguous, so also the transition that is to be made from innocence to guilt will be so dialectical that it can be seen that the explanation is what it must be, psychological" (CA 43).
17 Compare Levinas's remarks in his essay, "Transcendence and Evil:" "The ontological difference is preceded by the difference between good and evil," in Levinas, De Dieu qui Vient à l'idée (Paris: J. Vrin, 1986), p. 201; English translation by Bettina Bergo, 1999. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as DDVI.
18 Kierkegaard insists that this distinction cannot be found in logic, where the qualitative is the result of quantities of quantitative modifications. If the qualitative change that is sin is merely quantitative, then the individual is mechanistically determined in time and by the events in her/his life. Yet that would destroy the meaning of sin, as evil, since sin occurs for each individual in gratuitous possibility, that is, in the temptation of one's own possibility, which is to be able to do X, Y, ad infinitum.
19 Indeed, Kierkegaard hardly mentions any other form of sin than the sexual-sensuous. Perhaps if he did so, the leap that is so clear in the passage to carnal knowledge would be obscured and the notion of sin would be problematized by attempts to find the reasons behind these other acts. Still, the temptation of Abraham to kill Isaac would have resulted in a leap had Abraham been allowed to act; yet Abraham did not sink under the weight of anxiety precisely because he believed he would receive everything back. So, faith redirects anxiety and teaches us the meaning of trial by the possible.
20 Concept of Anxiety, pp. 118-146.
21 If it does remain, it certainly will not diminish our wretchedness. For it is a singular circularity that has it that the one who locked himself up within himself can simultaneously feel unworthy of help in getting out.
22 "But if time is to show an ambiguity of being and the otherwise than being, [then] its temporalization is to be conceived not as essence, but as saying. A linear regressive movement, a retrospective back along the temporal series toward a very remote past, would never be able to reach the absolutely diachronous pre-original which cannot be recuperated by memory and history. The relationship with such a past is included in the extraordinary and everyday event of my responsibility for the faults or the misfortune of others" (OBBE 9-10, emphasis added).
23 Now, if earnestness is how Kierkegaard characterizes the self that is prior to any formal, reflective subjectivity or ego, then sincerity is Levinas's notion of earnestness. And although Kierkegaard does not underscore the fissure in the proto-subject, anxiety, as the 'middle category' between possibility and actuality, anxiety serves as a site comparable to Levinas's situation of being fissured. It should not be forgotten, here, that one of the most difficult questions of Otherwise than Being asks how we can hold on to the idea of the other as externality (that does not appear the way that an object does) and internality or "transcendence within immanence." But we must hold on to both, and when we do, we may choose to speak of an inter-space, or a middle category like Kierkegaard's anxiety and the trial of the possible that it offers us.
24 For Levinas, something like repetition occurs prior to our conscious pursuit of it, (and of which the pseudonymous Constantin Constantius, author of Repetition, despaired). Something like repetition comes to pass, unchosen, in "recurrence"-for, before the other, responsibility comes to pass, it flickers. I do not choose it, and I can reject it. But Levinas argues that it increases in the measure that it is assumed, and this is a heightening of Kierkegaard's notion of repetition. Thus recurrence is the spontaneous fact of responsibility in everyday life, a fact whose temporality is so condensed that its descriptions have recourse to the agonistic and exalted language of the prophets. If repetition is the opening of eternity within the present, then recurrence is similarly the opening of eternity, the eternity of transcendence in immanence this time, in the compact moment of interruption by the other.
If I have here made Kierkegaard into Levinas's direct precursor, that was not my intention. Their works, their readers, and their interlocutors (imaginary and real) are generally not the same. On the one hand, Kierkegaard owes a debt to Schellingian and Hegelian idealism for his concepts of the abyss of freedom and for "Spirit." Levinas's conceptual debt is to Husserl, Bergson, and Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology. Nevertheless, they come to the same question as if from two different sides: Kierkegaard approaches the question of sin and evil via the psychology of anxiety and faith. Levinas approaches the question of evil in light of the wrong done to the Other, a wrong that is not seen by history but by the one who bears witness. A host of reasons, many quite obvious, can be evinced for this. The absence of original, and certainly "hereditary," sin in Judaism is one such reason. Nevertheless, Levinas and Kierkegaard both deem evil to be a qualitative difference in being. In reviewing Philippe Nemo's book on Job, Levinas calls evil the "excess" that leads us past all logics of the quantity. "Quite remarkably, the purely quantitative element in the notion of excess shows itself in the guise of a qualitative content characteristic of the malignity of evil. In the appearing of evil, in its originary phenomenality, in its quality, a mode is announced, a manner: the not-being-able-to-find-a-place, the refusal of any accommodation with, a counter-nature,the deranging and foreign in itself. And in this sense transcendence!" ("Transcendance et mal," in DDVI, 198). Leaving aside these remarkable resonances, here, with Kierkegaard's central distinction between quality and quantity; leaving aside the question of the counter-nature that Kierkegaard approaches in his concept of the "demonic" and its monadic "inclosing reserve," note that both men discern one sense of transcendence in evil itself. This is possible in each case, if we allow the anxiety of an evil done to us, in this case done to Job, to constitute an interpellation, a call. Just as in Kierkegaard's logic, "inclosing reserve" threatens Job. Indeed, inclosing reserve and any tendency to a counter-natural demonism are modes of evil different from Job's plight, but they are such that he could easily have sunken into them in anxiety. These now are broken open by a call in the midst of suffering, and by the recognition of the good in the trial that caused the suffering of anxiety. In the case of Job, as Levinas puts it, "the first 'intentionality' of transcendence [is that] someone is looking for me. A God who causes pain, but God as a You [Toi]."
This is precisely the movement of faith in Kierkegaard. In The Concept of Anxiety, it is what he calls the trial by possibility. This is ethical and religious at once because the domains overlap at the categories of evil and, if you will, with the modes of atonement and redemption. But ethics traditionally conceived gives us essentially three manners for grounding or deriving responsibility: either, a practico-aesthetic manner (Aristotelian phronesis); or a law as the form in which freedom recognizes itself bound and enabled (Kant), or finally a calculus for determining the contribution of responsibility to general happiness. This leaves open the question of the rise, or the possible incipience of responsibility such as Levinas conceives it (even Kant's freedom must first recognize itself in the moral law). So responsibility remains problematic in ethics. Something similar is true for evil or "sin.". As Kierkegaard points out, "The concept of sin does not properly belong in any science; only the second ethics [which presupposes the reality of evil] can deal with its manifestation, but not with its coming into existence." And he adds, evil is part of the human race, but it comes into being for each individual (in relation to an other), and repeats itself in each life as a qualitative leap, "with the suddenness of the enigmatic" (CA 21, 30). Thus sin for Kierkegaard, like responsibility in Levinas, works at two levels: "The race has its history, within which sinfulness continues to have its quantitative determinability" [Levinas: there is responsibility; it comes into being through response, but it is not the proper of any group or particular individuals]; "but innocence is always lost only by the qualitative leap of the individual" (CA 37) [Levinas: the "Here I am" of responsibility is diachrony, it breaks from being's course as conatus essendi, and it repeats as diachronous].
25 In so far as religion is present in Levinas's later thought, it is present in a form purified of any traditional metaphysical notions of transcendence.
26 Levinas, "Idéologie et idéalisme" in DDVI, p. 18. For Levinas, it is "that the appearance of rationality[has] powers of mystification [that] dissimulate themselves to the point that the art of logic cannot suffice to its demystification."
27 Some flights will lead me to commit a wrong; others will commit me to the self-enclosure of despair. But the possible, as a trial, directs me to seriousness about myself and my condition: that is the sense of the concept of earnestness.
28 Of course he does so in order to maintain that we still require an ethics without metaphysical axioms--which he seems to take to be equivalent to axioms that require an engagement of belief. Werequire an ethics without metaphysical axioms, it seems, so that philosophy, as a logos, is not robbed of all content by a pious discourse. No need to argue here that piety takes more forms in recent ideologies than it did in historical religions.