Jewish Thought

Journal of the

Goldstein-Goren International Center for Jewish

Thought

Editors

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal Jonatan Meir Shalom Sadik

Howard Kreisel (editor-in-chief)

Guest Editors

Avriel Bar-Levav Oded Ysraeli

Editorial Secretary

Asher Binyamin

Volume 3

Asceticism in Judaism and the Abrahamic Religions

Beer-Sheva, 2021

Table of Contents

English Section

Foreward

Sexual Desire in the Book of the

Watchers (1 Enoch 6-36) and the

New Testament Exhortation to

Sexual Abstinence

Rivka Nir

Karaite Mourning of Zion as an

Ascetic Movement

Daniel J. Lasker

Returning Every Good to the

Lord: The Ascetic Exemplarity of

Francis of Assisi

Krijn Pansters

Asceticism among the Judeo-

Sufis of Egypt: The Cases of R.

Abraham Maimonides and R.

David II Maimonides

Paul B. Fenton

Ascetic Eating Practices and

Torah Study in the Pesaqim of R.

Moses of Evreux and His Circle

Ephraim Kanarfogel

115

The Ambiguous Attitude to

Asceticism in Medieval Jewish

Philosophy and the Case of Levi

ben Avraham

Howard Kreisel

137

Potencies of the Body and Soul:

Ascetic Ideals and Ritualistic

Meals in the Writings of R.

Baḥya ben Asher

Adam Afterman and

Idan Pinto

181

Otherness Precedes Asceticism:

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of

Onto-theology

Stavros Panayiotou

221

Contributors

Hebrew Section

Foreword

The Affliction of Minors on Yom

Kippur

Rabin Shushtri

Some Remarks on Medieval

Jewish Rationalism's Extreme

Asceticism

Dov Schwartz

Preaching, Art and Ascetism in

the Italian Renaissance

Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby

The Way of Piety of Don Isaac

Abarbanel

David Ben Zazon

100

“To be Strangers in Your Land”:

Israel as an Ascetic Space in Early

Modern Ashkenazi Culture

Avraham Oriah

Kelman

134

Asceticism, Sexuality and Torah

Study in Slonim Hasidism

Noga Baror-Bing

158

Contributors

Otherness Precedes Asceticism:

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

Stavros Panayiotou

St. Kliment Ohridski University

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I explore Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical dialectic on asceticism

and its relation to otherness and closeness. In parallel, I argue that Levinas’s

stance on asceticism constitutes a vehement criticism of the analytic

insistence on onto-theology. In Levinas’s later works, particularly Otherwise

than Being or Beyond Essence, he maintains that Christian asceticism (especially

in the Orthodox and Protestant traditions) has mistakenly focused on onto-

theology, i.e., on an incarnated God who comes to mind. On the one hand, a

number of continental thinkers argue that an individual can achieve direct

communication with God through a symmetrical, reciprocal relation as a

self-contained unit. Kierkegaard, for instance, claims that the subject’s

isolation through asceticism is a necessary and sufficient condition to meet

God. As each person is responsible directly to God and his responsibility is a

matter of his faith, the religious life does not coincide with ethics and

sometimes even appears as an absurdity if measured by ethical norms.

Similarly, Heidegger endorses the radical replacement of religion,

prioritizing consciousness and cognition as necessary and sufficient

conditions to comprehend God, via the esotericism of Dasein. Levinas raises

severe objections to these positions. He claims that God exists outside of the

cosmos and that we can seek only His trace through the other person. Hence,

an individual cannot be in a direct relation with God as the person is a finite

being and God is Transcendence (Infinity). This is why God disappears from

human relations after sending the Other to me and subjugating me as a

hostage. It is only here that we can speak about asceticism, that is, the

individual must appear only as an equal interlocutor, as a subject, not as an

object, emptying itself and abandoning all its ontological narcissistic criteria

for the Other. In this sense, the ascetic self always starts from the Other.

However, Levinas goes further, arguing that God leaves all human affairs in

our own hands, absenting Himself almost entirely from our world. To

1 I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. M. Dimitrova (University of Sofia)

and Dr. A. Georgallides (University of Cyprus) for their wise guidance, advice,

and productive feedback on a previous draft of this article. They both

immensely improved the argumentation and methodology of this text.

Jewish Thought

3 (2021): 181-220

Levinas, the individual is a subject in the sense of being commanded by and

thus subject to God. One’s thinking and consciousness is awakened not by

exploiting the face of the Other but by serving it eternally as an infinite call

and response, as a substitute for a direct relationship with the Divine. One’s

self-conscious personality, the “I,” is secondary to the morally subjected

“me” which practices asceticism for the sake of the Other.

Introduction

“...moi responsable je ne finis pas de me

vider de moi-même”

The question of asceticism as a matter of consciousness begins with

Plato, who argued that a utilitarian process of goodness must be

distinguished from the absolute Good.

Plato, the first Theologian, as

a number of analytic thinkers characterized him, was the first

philosopher to systematically address asceticism and the Good in

terms of morality.

In medieval Byzantine

philosophy, in the Patristic

(Eastern) tradition, Christian Fathers strove to isolate the subject – to

achieve kenosis – by following a path that recognized only the self and

the spirit of God as necessary and sufficient conditions of the soul’s

salvation.

This line of thought has been further explored in the

2 E. Levinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris: Librarie Philosophique, 1986), 120;

trans. B. Bergo, Of God Who Comes to Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1998), 73: “…as a responsible I, I never finish emptying myself of myself.”

3 See H.L. Stewart, “Was Plato an Ascetic?,” The Philosophical Review 24.6 (1915):

603-13.

4 It is worth mentioning that Levinas was a great admirer of Plato, and summed

up his view of Plato’s contributions to philosophy, theology, and ethics in his

remark that “philosophy is Platonic.” See E. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence,

trans. M.B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), ix. See also his

comments on Plato in Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis

(Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 23.

5 Levinas seems to have been familiar with Byzantine theological tradition. In his

work Time and the Other, trans. R.A. Cohen (Pittsburg: Duquesne University

Press, 1987), 70, n. 43, he discusses Heidegger’s view on death in relation to

Byzantine tradition: “Death in Heidegger is not, as Jean Wahl says, the

impossibility of possibility, but the possibility of impossibility. This apparently

Byzantine distinction has a fundamental importance.”

6 By Patristic tradition, we mean the Christian Orthodox perspective in which

self-transcendence depends on Trinitarianism through kenosis and faith. This

thesis sets up an intriguing opposition between the Orthodox conception of

human and divine personhood as being grounded in love and the relationship

to the other, on the one hand, and conceptions of personhood drawn from post-

Stavros Panayiotou

182

Cartesian philosophy, emphasizing such attributes as rationality and self-

consciousness, on the other. criterialism: Concerning the theory of criterialism

see T. S-G. Chappell, “Knowledge of Persons,” European Journal for Philosophy of

Religion 5.4 (2013): 31-56. Fr Sophrony of Essex, one of the major defenders of

Patristic tradition, insists that God is not a mere essence or an Absolute Being

without direct characteristics. On the contrary, he reminds us that God says:

“ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν” (I am who I am) (Exodus 3:14), and demonstrates that God is a

person and human beings need the same personal adjustment to be called

persons. Sophrony insists that if we want to justify personhood we must turn

towards the Triune God, the real and perfect personal existence. Sophrony

posits an absolute correlation and symmetry between God and Man, as in

Kierkegaard. Although God is uncreated and Man is created, it is possible to

share the same personal measures, thus enabling an entity to become a person

exactly as it happens to the Triune God. Levinas, on the other hand, would

reject this argument, since, in Judaism God does not become a person, and there

is no becoming in God, especially not the essential becoming described by

Sophrony. Thus, for Levinas, God cannot become a person in the same way

humans do, because there is no way that God has become a person (or three

persons into one substance, as held by Christian Trinitarianism). Levinas takes

a clear stand in the debate on incarnation, vehemently rejecting any theories

that could objectify God’s essence. For Levinas, everything is about Ethics, and

whether Man can realize and understand his power to ethical consent, namely,

to seek the trace of God through the face of the other person. Levinas

understands kenosis only through man’s capabilities and not through God’s

direct interference in the world (as Orthodox Christians do). For Levinas, “more

important than God's omnipotence is the subordination of that power to man's

ethical consent. And that, too, is one of the primordial meanings of kenosis.” See

E. Levinas, “The Name of God According to a Few Talmudic Texts,” in Beyond the

Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. G.D. Mole (Bloomington: The

Athlone Press, 1994), 126. The most valuable and comprehensive works

concerning asceticism as kenosis in (medieval) Patristic tradition is N.V.

Sakharov, I Love Therefore I am: the Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony

(2002): 93-115. See also J-C Larchet, “Suffering in Spiritual Life and Teaching of

Elder Sophrony (in Greek),” Πρακτικά Διορθόδοξου Επιστημονικού Συνεδρίου:

Γέροντας Σωφρόνιος. Ο Θεολόγος του Ακτίστου Φωτός (2007): 435-56; see

especially the English summary: 455-56. A comparative study between Levinas

and Orthodox Patristic tradition on the relation of beings and freedom has been

published by T.A. Ables, “On the Very Idea of an Ontology of Communion:

Being, Relation and Freedom in Zizioulas and Levinas,” The Heythrop Journal 52

(2011): 672-83, especially chapter 2: “The Levinasian Critique of Ontology,” 676-

78. For Levinas’s view on ascetic suffering, see his chapter “Useless Suffering,”

in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. M.B. Smith and B. Harshav (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 91-102; and W. Edelglass, “Levinas on

Suffering and Compassion,” Sophia 45.2 (2006): 43-59, where the author

discusses suffering along with being and alterity. See also a valuable text on

Levinas and kenosis written by R.D.N. van Riessen, Man as a Place of God: Levinas’

Hermeneutics of Kenosis (The Netherlands: Springer, 2007), especially Part II:

“Ethics, Religion and Kenosis,” 101-206, where the author defines and discusses

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

183

Western philosophical and theological tradition through the writings

of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, where the subject must be seen as

a self-enclosed unit before God: asceticism of the spirit. We suggest

that for the Thomistic tradition, asceticism precedes otherness and

individualism precedes relationalism, something that begins through

the strict esotericism of God’s essence and His relation to human

beings.

It is worth noting that the definition of esotericism, which has

then been translated as kenosis (asceticism), can be traced back to

Thomas Aquinas, in his works Summa Theologica

and Contra Errores

Graecorum,

where he claims that God’s mind is absolutely outside of

the cosmos and has nothing to do with our intentionality. God

provides a rather ascetic esotericism on how He explores His relation

to human beings. In other words, for Aquinas, God has no real

communication with nor relation to human beings, as He can neither

exceed His essence nor be compared to anything. God thus

communicates and relates to human beings only through an inner

esoteric dialogue

with Himself, in a process called by Aquinas

“esoteric asceticism.” Hence, the God-Man relationship is real from

the side of human beings but an illusion from that of God. However,

according to Aquinas (and centuries later through the Hegelian

dialectic), God’s spirit is translated (and there is only one way to be

translated) through the human being’s consciousness, due to the fact

the paramount importance of kenosis in Levinasian thought through Ethics and

Religion in comparison to other philosophical and theological accounts. The

terms “kenosis” and “self-emptying” sometimes also refer to the God-person

relation. For a helpful discussion on this matter, see M.L. Baird, “Whose Kenosis?

An Analysis of Levinas, Derrida, and Vattimo on God’s Self-Emptying and the

Secularization of the West,” The Heythrop Journal 48 (2007): 423-37. As Baird

correctly points out (p. 424), “Levinas’s model of kenosis [which he defines,

borrowing Levinas’s phrase, ‘as subordination [of God’s omnipotence] to man’s

ethical consent;’ see E. Levinas, In the Time of the Nations, trans. M.B. Smith

(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 126] is a diachronic and

transcendental self-emptying that has no immediate real time analogue.”

7 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English

Dominican Province (Indianapolis: Christian Classics, 1981).

8 Concerning the analysis of Aquinas’s monograph see M. Jordan, “Theological

Exegesis and Aquinas's Treatise Against the Greeks,” Church History 56.4 (1987):

445-456.

9 Concerning Levinas’s view on dialogue, divine and cosmic, see H. Ben-Pazi,

“Ethics Responsibility and Dialogue: The Meaning of Dialogue in Levinas’s

Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 50.4 (2015): 1-20.

Stavros Panayiotou

184

that God cannot escape His necessity or His absolute essence.

Whatever enters a human being’s intentionality is solely through the

Spirit of God; our spirit derives and recalls ideas from God’s Spirit.

This is the only way, according to Aquinas and Hegel, for God to enter

humanity.

The aforementioned syllogism introduced by Aquinas is not far

from the contemporary Western tradition, as regards the analysis of

subjectivity in the fields of history and political philosophy. For

instance, a pessimistic line of thought runs that politics nowadays

(especially under socialism and capitalism) react exactly as the

Thomistic dialectic suggests: modern states develop a similar model

of thinking, that is, conventions, regulations, terms and conditions to

decide what is right and wrong, constructed and determined via

states’ esotericism. Modern states seek self-vindication through their

inner narcissistic esotericism, which is possible to trace back to

Aquinas’s onto-theological theory.

To return to our main discussion, Levinas is not far from the

above tradition, which is quite anti-Christian.

Philosophically

speaking, he follows the same path as those who reject deism and hold

that God does exist infinitely and beyond metaphysics, above any

secular onto-theological knowledge and apprehension.

In parallel,

he would agree with Aquinas that even though God exists, He cannot

exceed His essence and His Absolute necessity, and thus cannot

possibly interact directly with human beings, as Christians mistakenly

believe, through the appearance of a Man-God incarnate.

However,

Levinas takes the argument a step further. He maintains that the

Thomistic tradition of kenosis (i.e., inner esotericism of Spirit)

demands further clarification and modification. Crucially, Levinas

states that, “human existence should not be thought of as self-

10 By anti-Christian, I mean that, for Levinas, the incarnation of Logos cannot be

construed philosophically.

11 H. Ben-Pazi correctly maintains that the Levinasian perspective must be seen

primarily ethico-philosophically, through Jewish tradition, and not onto-

theologically, through the cosmic chain of immanence. He claims that “Levinas

offers a philosophical-ethical reading of Jewish wisdom, which gives religion

metaphysical meaning, but maintains its connection to normative ethical

discourse.” See especially H. Ben-Pazi, “Theodicy as the Justified Demands of

Atheism: Yeshayahu Leibowitz Versus Emmanuel Levinas,” Modern Judaism: A

Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience 36.3 (2016): 266.

12 Concerning Levinas’s argumentation on the Christian principle of incarnation

of Logos, see Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, 53-60.

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

185

orientated, but as a reception of the other.”

This otherness, in turn,

precedes any asceticism. In this approach, the self must be exterior to

any esoteric narcissism. It must be responsive, hostage, subjected to

otherness, self-emptying, dispossessed.

This is the Levinasian

explanation of asceticism, bearing no resemblance to Aquinas’s divine

esotericism, which directly affects self-consciousness and the history

of man in general. Moreover, Levinas, like Kierkegaard, criticizes the

established Church’s mistaken use of the term asceticism by

defending secularism as a cosmic ideology that exploits humans’ free

will.

Kierkegaard, therefore, in order to bolster his ressentiment

against the established Church, proposed a rational, ascetic way of

life, combining the aesthetics-ethics-religion triptych with a kind of

isolationism, where self-consciousness and individual perception are

necessary and sufficient conditions to meet God.

On the other hand,

Levinas, who was familiar with Kierkegaard’s existential accounts of

asceticism, unpacked a different dialectic: otherness precedes

asceticism and relationalism precedes individualism. Levinas argues

that what stimulates an individual’s subjectivity to God is not a

rational mind or a systematic apprehension of intentionality (i.e.,

fundamental ontology) but the face of the Other (i.e., ethical

metaphysics).

Levinasian Ethics and the Problem of Onto-Theology

It is worth investigating whether we can provide valid arguments or

a proper ethical intuition to answer the following question: can

conscious human beings be cognitively aware of God? Philosophical

accounts integrating God with man’s thinking appeared centuries

before Christ. Socrates (470-399 BC) and especially Plato (427-423 BC)

13 Van Riessen, Man as a Place of God: Levinas’ Hermeneutics of Kenosis, 1.

14 S. Benso clearly defines Levinas’s notion of asceticism by saying, “Levinas

maintains, the other is always a step beyond, always further than the I can

reach (the ascetic ideal!);” See S. Benso, “Levinas: Another Ascetic Priest?,”

Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 27.2 (1996): 142.

15 Concerning Kierkegaard’s notion of asceticism, see N. Khawaja, The Religion of

Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2016), loc. 1601-2580 [Kindle version].

16 For instance, Plato, in his work Parmenides, denies any ontological relation

between God (τό Ἕν) and logos. He contends in Parmenides’s dialogue that “[...]

οὐδαμῶς ἄρα ἐστί τό Ἕν. Οὐ φαίνεται […] τό Ἕv οῦτε ἐστίν […] Οῦδ’ ἄρα

Stavros Panayiotou

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together with Aristotle (382-322 BC)

systematized the philosophy of

religion during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. But it was Plotinus

(204/5-270 AD)

who – having pre-Socratic influences – first initiated

ὅνομα ἐστίν αὐτώ, οὐδέ λόγος, οὐδέ τις ἐπιστήμη, οὐδέ αἴσθησις, οὐδέ δόξα.

[…] Οὐδέ ὅνομάζεται, οὐδέ λέγεται, οὐδέ γιγνώσκεται.” See Plato, Λάχης,

Μένων, Παρμενίδης, (in Greek), tr. B. Τatakis, (Athens: Daidalos, 1990), 72: 142a.

(Trans.: “The One cannot be shown. It is invisible, separated from the Being,

which should be neither named, nor described not thought of nor known.”) For

the hypothesis of the Idea and Good in Plato, see J. Grondin, Introduction to

Metaphysics: from Parmenides to Levinas, trans. L. Soderstrom, (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2012), 21-45.

17 Concerning Aristotle’s Metaphysics, especially book E’, Z’, Λ’ and his

consideration of being as being and Being as first philosophy, see Grondin,

Introduction to Metaphysics, 46-55, and regarding onto-theology, see 55-66. For

Aristotelian Ethics, see Aristotle, (in Greek), vol. 1-4 (Thessaloniki: Zitros, 2006).

18 Concerning Plotinus’s Metaphysics of the One, see Grondin, Introduction to

Metaphysics, 68-73. In parallel, Levinas refers to Plotinus’s works several times.

Levinas is an admirer of Plotinus’s theological aspects especially concerning

Plotinus’s argument on “the One” (Τό Ἕν). The majority of Medieval and

Byzantine philosophical and theological theories developed upon on the basis

of Plotinus’s and Neo-Platonists’ theology of the Ἕν. The most comprehensive

monographies on Plotinus are written by H. J. Blumenthal, Soul and Intellect:

Studies on Plotinus and Later Neo-Platonism, 1993, especially ch. VI, 140-152, where

he comments on the Ennead V, which analyzes the notion of the One and what

it is to be intellectual. Also see J. Bussanich, “Plotinus’s Metaphysics of the One,”

in L.P. Gerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), 38-65; and K. Corrigan, “Essence and Existence in the

Enneads”, 105-129 (both texts) in Gerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to

Plotinus, 1996. Levinas argues that “Plotinus conceived the procession from the

One as compromising neither the immutability nor the absolute separation of

the One. It is in this situation, at first purely dialectical and quasi-verbal […]

that the exceptional signifyingness of a trace delineates in the world” (Levinas,

Collected Philosophical Papers, 105-106). Presumably, Levinas derives several

ideas from Ennead V, where Plotinus explores his argument on the conception

of the One and his attributes against intelligibility, humans and absolute

knowledge. For instance, Levinas might agree with Plotinus’s position

regarding the Transcendence of the One: §6. [The One] is beyond being. This is

the requirement of negative theology. See Plotinus, The Enneads, ed. L.P. Gerson,

trans. G. Boys-Stones et al., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 581.

However, Levinas would disagree with Plotinus’s generic remark that “the

Intelligibles are not outside the Intellect” (ibid. 5.5 [32], 583). Levinas argues

against this view since he believes that intelligibility is prior consciousness, will

and freedom. It dwells between me and the eternal a priori responsibility for the

Other. Levinas shows familiarity with Plotinus’s texts, saying, “if you read the

Enneads, the One doesn't even have consciousness of self, if it did have

consciousness of self, it would already be multiple, as a loss of perfection. In

knowledge, one is two, even when one is alone. Even when one assumes

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

187

the ‘duality of the One’ (τὸ Ἕν ἐν δυσί ὑποστάσεσι), which influenced

a number of medieval thinkers such as Augustine (354-430 AD),

Maximus the Confessor (580-662 AD) Aquinas (1225-1274 AD), and

Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 AD), who brought questions about

God and philosophy of religion into metaphysics.

However, it was

Martin Heidegger who first introduced onto-theology, a term

unpacked in this chapter, into the philosophy of religion.

Specifically, this chapter analyses whether we can speak of God

beyond and above onto-theology. Before diving into arguments

regarding Levinas’s and Kierkegaard’s insights on God and our

subjectivity as a response to God’s command, several terms must be

defined.

By onto-theology,

we mean the integration of thinking

between beings qua beings and God. In short, onto-theology supports

the radical replacement of religion, giving priority to consciousness

and cognition as necessary and sufficient conditions to comprehend

God. In Kant’s words, “ontotheology describes a kind of theology that

aims to know something about the existence of God without recourse

to scriptural or natural revelation through mere concepts of reason

consciousness of self, there is already a split.” See Levinas, Entre Nous: On

Thinking-of-the-Other, 112.

19 Concerning the philosophy of religion from ancient times to the twentieth

century, see The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, 5 vols., ed. G. Oppy and

N.N. Tsakakis (London and New York: Routledge 2013).

20 Immanuel Kant coined the term “onto-theology,” but it was Heidegger who

introduced it to the context of the relation between theology and ontology.

Kant remarks that the belief that one can actually “strive for a supposed

contact with God” involves a “kind of madness.” See Kant, Religion within the

Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. A. Wood and G. di Giovanni (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169–70. In parallel, Heidegger points out

that the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics brings God into

philosophy, leaving to be answered the question of how the deity enters into

philosophy. In Kantian thought, there is a return to onto-theology “in which it

determines the idea of God where God is posited as the totality of reality.” See

E. Levinas, God, Death and Time (California: Stanford University Press, 2000), 154.

21 One of the most “dangerous” pitfalls of onto-theology is the danger of

“reducing God to another familiar object of our worldly experience which is a

constant reality and threat in so much of theology and church life, often

exploding into public life in the form of fundamentalism.” See A.K. Min,

“Naming the Unnamable God: Levinas, Derrida and Marion,” International

Journal for Philosophy of Religion 60.3 (2006): 114.

Stavros Panayiotou

188

alone.”

By contrast, for Heidegger, “ontotheology is a critical term

used to describe a putatively problematic approach to metaphysical

theorizing”, something that, as Heidegger claims, “is characteristic of

Western philosophy in general.”

Influenced by Western tradition,

Heidegger “tries to turn existence into entities which can be

understood and mastered through technological drive.”

According

to Levinas, onto-theology “consists in thinking of God as a being and

in thinking being on the basis of this superior or supreme being.”

Levinas considers onto-theology as a misleading theory since it

“corrupts our thinking about God,” and thus we need to “think God

without Being.”

From the moment that God came into philosophy,

we can speak of onto-theology, in which world and being are always

“apprehended and comprehended by thinking.”

According to

Heidegger, “the comprehension of being in its truth was immediately

covered over by its function as the universal foundation of beings, by

a supreme being, a founder, by God. The thinking of being, being in its

truth, becomes knowledge (logos) or comprehension of God: theo-

logy.”

However, when “being is immediately approached in the form

of a foundation of beings, it comes to be named God”: this is onto-

theology.

The more thinking and logic are developed, the more we

22 See M. Halteman, “Ontotheology,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

(London: Taylor and Francis, viewed 14 October 2019).

23 See S.R. Uttley, “‘Exorcising the Curse of Sisyphus’: English Catholic Education

and the Possibility of Authenticity: A philosophical Study after Heidegger,

Derrida, Lonergan and Boeve,” unpublished PhD thesis (Nottingham:

Nottingham Trent University, 2016).

24 See S. Minister. and J. Murtha, “Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion,”

Philosophy Compass 5.11 (2010): 1029.

25 See Levinas, God, Death and Time, 160. Sometimes Levinas refers to God using

Platonic terminology: The Good/God. Levinas claims that “the Good is, in spite

of us” (M. Dimitrova, In Levinas’ Trace [Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars

Publishing, 2011], 42). By this statement he means that even if God exists, He

does not exist as most people think, but it is impossible to comprehend (as

beings) how God evaluates human situations and issues.

26 See note 16.

27 See, Levinas, God, Time and Death, 167.

28 Ibid., 123.

29 Ibid., 123. Several thinkers contend that Levinas does not intend to negate

Heidegger’s ontotheological insights entirely, but rather to recast them, since

he himself inserted God into conversation as well, albeit within an extremely

different framework: through the face-to-face relation. For instance, A.

Peperzak claims that Levinas has no intention to reject or to ‘destroy’

Heidegger’s thinking on ontotheology, but to criticize it as a “a manifestation

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

189

can speak of onto-theology. We can say that onto-theology is parallel

to fundamental ontology.

The image of God alone cannot be

construed without beings’ power of comprehension. People

throughout history did not have the power of comprehension because

they lacked technology, and only in modern times, with modern

technology, can they construe the image of God. Thus, onto-theology

needs a neo-technological culmination of modernism in order to

reveal itself. We can infer that, according to onto-theology, there is

no God without beings and no beings without God. God as Θεός, the

supreme infinite Being, is signified by beings, and beings are signified

by God. In western (Anglo-Saxon) philosophy of religion, onto-

theology is the mediator between God and beings (όντα) qua beings.

The Heideggerian being is an impersonal power leading “to an

account of history as impersonal destiny.”

The ethical stance of

Levinas “is not an instrumental contract that the self of will to power

[…] makes to defend itself against the other and to launch its self-

aggrandizing onslaught on the freedom of the other,”

but an infinite

command of goodness.

Meaning,

in onto-theology, does necessarily have to be.

Thought and comprehension are inseparable from meaning. To be

of the natural egoism which constitutes the elementary form of [immanent]

life.” See A. Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press, 1997), 10.

30 By choosing this mode of thinking, that is, by considering God with the power

of knowledge and comprehension, we inevitably reduce God’s essence into

beings. This is a huge mistake, as God, according to Levinas, is irreducible to

human knowledge and Physics. R. Scruton, in support of this thesis, notes that

not only subjects but God is unrelated to objects and physical laws. It is only

objects that follow these laws. This is the reason why Levinas prefers the term

“humans” rather than “beings”: “Look for them [i.e. subjects] in the world of

objects and you will not find them. This is true of you and me; it is true too of

God. Physics gives a complete explanation of the world of objects, for that is

what “physics” means. God is not a hypothesis to be set beside the fundamental

constants and the laws of quantum dynamics. Look for him in the world of

objects and you will not find him.” See R. Scruton, The Face of God: The Gifford

Lectures (London: Continuum, 2012), 166. However, Levinas would have taken

this a step further, clarifying that not only cannot God be understood by the

laws of quantum physics, He cannot be understood directly by subjects either.

R. Kearney (ed.), Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century (London-New York:

Routledge [kindle paperback edition], 2003), loc. 4733.

32 Ibid. loc. 4905.

33 Levinas gives proper attention to meaning in his work Of God Who Comes to Mind,

trans. B. Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 152-171.

Stavros Panayiotou

190

meaningful is a necessary and sufficient condition for being. That is,

being necessarily must confirm thought and knowledge. All these

characteristics of fundamental ontology imply that we cannot speak

of God outside the framework of onto-theology. However, ethical

philosophers raise several objections to the arguments discussed

above. For ethical thinking, in general, God must be understood (if we

ever can understand God) beyond onto-theology.

What is more,

according to Levinas, “it is from a certain ethical relationship that one

may start out on this search.”

Deriving from Plato’s view that

34 This is a very interesting point that requires further consideration. Even

Levinas, who vehemently rejects ontotheology, which gives priority to

rationality and teleology of reason (see D.F. Courtney, “The Teleology of

Freedom: The Structure of Moral Self-Consciousness in the Analytic,” in The

Teleology of Reason: A Study of the Structure of Kant's Critical Philosophy [Berlin: De

Gruyter, 2014], 248-291), “apologizes” to God and to himself because even

outside ontotheology, he attempts to speak about the Infinite (that is God) by

expressing his thoughts and insights, even if he provides ethical implications.

See Levinas, “The Temptation of Temptation,” in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans.

A. Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 30-50. For

instance, in Of God Who Comes to Mind, Levinas uses in the title the relative

pronoun who (who comes to mind). Thus, even if he wants to provide

arguments against ontotheology, he indirectly attributes human definitions to

God since the relative pronoun who is referring to humans: men and women. In

the second chapter of the above work he claims, “not to philosophize is still to

philosophize” (Of God Who Comes to Mind, 55). Even if Levinas clearly rejects

ontotheology by saying that the problem with ontotheology, that is finally a

kind of rational theology, is that “in thematizing God [and attributing Him

human conditions such as mind, voice, thinking, logic etc.] Theology has

brought Him into the course of being” (ibid.), he himself admits that he is

obliged by speech to express his opinion that there is no opinion about God.

However, he claims that in saying that there is no opinion about God we are

already expressing our opinion. This view is expressed by several thinkers who

claim that Ontotheology is inseparable to God-talk and God-discussion in order

to accept or raise questions about His essence and His relation to human beings.

For instance, J.W. Robbins alleges that we cannot escape Ontotheology even

though we do not accept it. Ontotheology together with the issue of death of

God cannot be overcome in no way since they are necessary and sufficient

condition for a possible God-talk. Inventing and using the term “God” in any

science, we automatically adopt ontotheology as a subsidiary factor for a God-

talk. “For, the endeavor at overcoming remains trapped within ontotheology,

and what is worse, it confuses this trap as the problem when in fact it is the

very clue needed for thinking otherwise.” See J.W. Robbins, Between Faith and

Thought: An Essay on the Ontotheological Condition (Charlottesville: University of

Virginia Press, 2003), 3.

35 See Levinas, God, Time and Death, 125.

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

191

“Good

[by which Levinas presumably means the divine supreme

God] is beyond being,” Levinas builds up the structure of his “radical

alterity.”

As he points out, there is an urgent need to distinguish

philosophy from theology, for “to philosophy belongs being and to

Theology there is faith, revelation and God.”

It is worth noting that even though this chapter analyses and

compares Levinas’s and Kierkegaard’s views regarding God, and how

beings are interrelated to God, we need to begin with Heidegger in

order to better understand the vital role of Sameness and Otherness.

Onto-theology gives priority to Sameness, tying logic to the relation

between God and people. Thinking of God starts from beings and

returns to the beings themselves. In this way, the Same presses the

Other to be absorbed and return to Sameness, all the while without

revealing itself. Thus, the Other depends on the Same, even while it is

addicted and integrated into the latter. The Other, according to onto-

theology, is trapped by the Same, unable to escape.

However,

according to Levinas, Otherness is a separate version of one’s self

which has never been adopted or absorbed by Sameness. In parallel,

only through one’s relation to the Other can one find God:

To be oneself is already to know the fault I have committed with

regard to the Other. But the fact that I do not quiz myself on the

Other's rights paradoxically indicates that the Other is not a new

edition of myself; in its Otherness it is situated in a dimension of

36 See below Levinas’s definition of Good: “The Good invests freedom - it loves me

before I love it. Love is love in this antecedence. The Good could not be the term

of a need susceptible of being satisfied, it is not the term of an erotic need, a

relationship with the seductive which resembles the Good to the point of being

indistinguishable from it, which is not its other, but its imitator. The Good as

the infinite has no other, not because it would be the whole, but because it is

Good and nothing escapes its goodness.” See E. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or,

Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (The Netherlands: Springer, 1991), 187, n. 8.

37 See ibid., 16; J. W. Robbins, “The Problem of Ontotheology: Complicating the

Divine between Theology and Philosophy,” The Heythrop Journal 48 (2002): 142.

38 See J. W. Robbins, “The Problem of Ontotheology,” 147. Even though Levinas

stops short of admitting that his work is theological, there are several

similarities between his work and Karl Barth’s “theology of language,”

especially when he tries to explain the notion of the Saying. See Graham Ward,

Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1995), 147-170.

39 See Kearney ed., Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, loc. 4790.

Stavros Panayiotou

192

height, in the ideal, the Divine, and through my relation to the

Other, I am in touch with God.

(Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 1)

Levinasian Prioritizing of Ethics as First Philosophy over Onto-

Theology

It is [for Levinas] a question of attaining, via the royal road of

ethics, the supreme being, the truly being […]. And this being is

man, determined as face in his essence as man on the basis of his

resemblance to God. Is this not what Heidegger has in mind when

he speaks of the unity of metaphysics, humanism and onto-

theology? […] ‘The Other resembles God.’ Man’s substantiality,

which permits him to be face, is thus founded in his resemblance

to God, who is therefore both the Face and absolute substantiality.

(J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 142)

It is crucial to unpack the Levinasian notion of God outside the context

of onto-theology. Before discussing Levinas’s arguments concerning

God and His relation to human beings, we have to understand why he

considers ethics as first philosophy

and how we can approach the

relations among ethics, knowledge and philosophy of religion.

40 Several thinkers who study Levinas agree with this statement. Some of them,

however, instead of ethics, use Levinas’s phrase “Metaphysics precedes

Ontology” to explain the differences between Heideggerian ontology and

Levinasian ethics. See E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. A. Lingis (Pittsburg, PA:

Duquesne University Press, 1969), 42. For instance, J. Grondin maintains that,

mistakenly, “driven by its will to power and its egoism, ontology is transformed

into first philosophy”. He continues with the observation that Levinas, “in

order to combat [without infringing – as Levinas’s intention is not to infringe

on or entirely skip over Heidegger’s ontology, but rather to put priorities

between ontology and metaphysical ethics] its ontological imperialism

proposes a terminological inversion: the primacy of the Same becomes that of

the other, and ontology’s primacy is transferred to ethics.” See Grondin,

Introduction to Metaphysics, 244. Here Grondin analyses metaphysics as ethics

and not as a science which investigates Being as Being nor as the fundamental

ontological event of our existence.

41 That is to say, “Being only discovers itself by its being called [and not by its will]

by the call [and not the will] of the other. Thus, before being comes

responsibility, which implies a more originary origin than being itself.” See

Robbins, “The Problem of Ontotheology,” 146.

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

193

Levinas, in his renowned article “Ethics as First Philosophy,”

raises several objections against traditional classical knowledge,

explaining that there are various disadvantages to the ontological

basis behind knowledge which is explained by analytical thinkers

merely as experience and apprehension. The problem, as he points

out, is that the classical notion of knowledge starts from immanence:

“The ideal of rationality begins to appear as the immanence of the real

to reason.”

The problem Levinas observes can be traced to a

mistaken approach to freedom of knowledge which, according to

classical tradition, is essentially the inspiration for the mind where

(Hegelian) wisdom of first philosophy is reduced to spirit as self-

consciousness.”

“It is to be found in the concept of consciousness

with the interpretation of cogito given by Descartes,”

something that

has been described by Husserl as intentionality – “consciousness of

something.”

Also, for Levinas, experience mistakenly expressed by

western analytical thought as “collective and religious experience.”

42 R. Kearney and M. Rainwater (eds.), The Continental Philosophy Reader (London

and New York: Routledge, 1996), 124-135.

43 Ibid.

44 G.L. Aronoff, Guilt, Persecution and Atonement: Moral Responsibility in Loewald and

Lévinas (unpublished PhD thesis, Concordia University Press, 2010), 148, n. 295.

45 See Kearney and Rainwater (eds.), Continental Philosophy Reader, 125. It is

important to consider briefly what is the main difference between Levinas and

Descartes regarding their views on God, as both affirm the existence of God but

within different metaphysical frameworks. Although Descartes admits that

there is a God who is absolute and infinite, he “employs causal and ontological

arguments to demonstrate that there is a God.” See R. Bernasconi and D. Wood

(eds.), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (London-New York:

Routledge, 1988), 139. Levinas, who agrees with Descartes on several points,

especially on the proposition that a subject has different thinking of his self and

different thinking of his finitude, as well as the belief that “infinitude is the

positive notion in terms of which the notion of man’s finitude is understood”

(ibid., 142) underlines that one major difference with Descartes is that Levinas

does not care to provide ratiocinative arguments on what it is to be God because

we cannot say what God is at all. At this point I would like to express my sincere

gratitude to my supervisor, who patiently gave me specific directions on how I

can reflect Levinas’s terminology on God, illeity and transcendence, as well as

differentiating Levinas’s perspective on God from other thinkers who, while

admitting the existence of God, try to explain His existence with rational

exegesis, something that Levinas sees as absolute madness, maintaining that

we cannot compare or think of infinity with our finite mind.

46 R. Kearney and Rainwater (eds.), Continental Philosophy Reader, 125.

47 Ibid.

Stavros Panayiotou

194

Levinas argues that Husserl’s claims concerning intentionality

and self-consciousness are based on a faulty foundation.

According

to Husserl, “knowledge is a ‘filling out’ that gratifies a longing for the

being as object causing the world to be rediscovered as noema,”

where self-consciousness is a necessary and sufficient condition of

knowledge. As Husserl points out, “All acts generally — even the acts

of feeling and will — are ‘objectifying’ acts, original factors in the

‘constituting’ of objects, the necessary sources of different regions of

being and of the ontologies that belong therewith.”

For Levinas,

“reduced consciousness rediscovers and masters its own acts of

perception and science as objects affirming itself as self-

consciousness and remains a non-intentional consciousness of itself.”

48 Levinas agrees with the Husserlian dyadic relationship as a fundamental locus

of concern and responsibility. He also admits that his philosophical thinking on

the ‘Other’ derived from Husserl’s idea that “the Other is the condition of

correctness of my world and that each transcendence, including the

transcendence of the outer world, exists for me and is comprehensible to me

only by virtue of the transcendence of the Other.” However, for Husserl, “both

the Other and Transcendence are constituted in my immanence, whereas

Levinas refuses to consider the Other as my Alter Ego” (See Dimitrova, In Levinas’

Trace, 19-20). The Other calls me, teaches me how to transcend my potential

into Infinity. Thus, I cannot escape responsibility and morality, which precede

both my freedom and my decisions against my neighbor. In parallel, a second

major problem with Husserlian phenomenology of the Other, as Levinas claims,

is that Husserl insists on the fact that the relation to the human Other be

understood as a relation of knowledge; in fact, Levinas argues, the Other can be

understood as a relation of being: “our intuitive grasp of the other depicts him

or her as a center of intentionality and hence as alter ego, as a sensuous-

conscious subject” (See H. Jodalen and J. Vetlesen [eds.], Closeness: An Ethics

[Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997], 5). Levinas discusses Husserl’s view

on intentionality of consciousness and his method of Intuition by inferring that

they provide an overall evaluation of phenomenology: noesis-noemata are

revealed through the horizon of intentionality of consciousness, that is, the

latter is inseparable from the former. See E. Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in

Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. A. Orianne (Illinois: Northwestern University

Press, 1995), 37-52 and 65-96. However, for Levinas, both terms lack an ethical

standpoint. Levinas argues that we need to take a step forward, from intuition

of essence to the philosophical intuition of existence: “Philosophical intuition

must not be more directly characterized without mentioning the

phenomenological reduction which introduces into the realm of

phenomenology” (ibid., 135).

49 Kearney and Rainwater (eds.), Continental Philosophy Reader, 127.

50 E. Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R.B. Dixon

(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), section 117.

51 Kearney and Rainwater (eds), Continental Philosophy Reader, 127.

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

195

Thus, Levinas suggests “a consciousness of consciousness, indirect,

implicit and aimless without any initiative that might refer back to an

ego.”

Levinas also discusses another term, duration. By duration,

Levinas means “a consciousness that signifies not so much a

knowledge of oneself as something that effaces presence or make it

discreet.”

This duration in phenomenological analysis remains “free

from the sway of the will,”

and the most crucial thing is that which

continues to be “absolutely outside all activity of the ego.”

Levinas thus initiates, in contrast to Husserl, not an ontological

but a transcendental phenomenology of the face where “the

proximity of the other is the face’s meaning” – there is a “face to face

steadfast.”

In contrast to the classical notion of knowledge, Levinas

argues that (ethical) knowledge lies in the Other “prior to any

knowledge.”

The Other (l’Autre) thus presents itself as human Other (Autrui);

it shows a face and opens the dimension of height, that is to say,

it infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge. Positively, this

means that the Other puts in question the freedom which

attempts to invest it; the Other lays him — or herself bare to the

total negation of murder but forbids it through the original

language of his defenseless eyes

(Levinas, Transcendence and Height, 12).

52 Ibid., 127.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 130. I would agree with Grondin’s claim that “the Other is always a face,

which can never be reduced to an idea I may have of it.” See Grondin,

Introduction to Metaphysics, 244-245. This statement can be justified if we look

carefully at Levinas’s phrase: “the way in which the other presents itself,

exceeding the idea of the Other in me, we here name face.” See Levinas, Totality

and Infinity, 50. For Levinas, in parallel, “the Other, Autrui, is not simply an alter

ego, an appresented analogue of myself. He and I are not equals, citizens in an

intelligible kingdom of ends…There is between us, an absolute difference. The

Other is he to whom and in virtue of whom I am subject, with a subjectivity that

is heteronomy, not autonomy, and hetero-affection, not auto-affection. The

Other is not the object of my concern and solicitude.” See Bernasconi and Wood

(eds.), The Provocation of Levinas, 140.

57 Kearney and Rainwater (eds.), Continental Philosophy Reader, 130.

Stavros Panayiotou

196

To answer another crucial question concerning the relation between

Christian ethics

and Levinas’s ethics, for Levinas, the Other becomes

my neighbor, not in the same manner as the Christian dictum ‘Love

your neighbor as yourself,’ but through a primordial concern about

the Other, that is, “the Other becomes my neighbor precisely through

the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so

doing recalls my responsibility and calls me into question.”

For

Levinas, responsibility exceeds the notion of Being as we know it in

the Heideggerian Being and Time, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or in

other contemporary thinkers.

Being according to Levinas is of less

worth than people’s relations to each other. Responsibility is beyond

being and beyond being’s immanence.

Responsibility goes beyond being. In sincerity, in frankness, in

the veracity of this saying, in the uncoveredness of suffering,

being is altered. But this saying remains, in its activity, a

passivity, more passive than all passivity, for it is a sacrifice

58 Even though there are hundreds of discrepancies between Christian ethics and

Levinas’s ethics, Christian thought derives several principles and aspects from

Levinas’s thought. See specifically A. Peperzak, “The Significance of Levinas’s

Work for Christian Work,” in J. Bleochl (ed.), The Face of the Other and the Trace

of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (New York: Fordham

University Press, 2000), 184-99. One of the most crucial discrepancies between

Levinas and Kierkegaard is the term kenosis, that is, abandoning everything and

everyone for the sake of the Other. This term is explored in particular by

Kierkegaard’s Christology. See D.R. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 64-153.

59 Kearney and Rainwater (eds.), Continental Philosophy Reader, 131.

60 For instance, in Descartes the self is the I of the cogito (cogito ergo sum); the

center of consciousness leading to self-awareness and intentionality. In

Spinoza and several analytic philosophers, being is enriched by additional

emotions, desires, autonomy and freedom as well as second-order volitions,

something that it lacks in animals. In Hume, the character of beings is like a

container of ideas and expression that are expressed in language and self-

consciousness. With Husserl the being is embedded in the world within a

noematic-noetic framework explored as intentionality. In Heidegger this

embeddedness in the world is mainly practical and emotional, with being’s

attributes and conditions returning to itself. And finally, with Hegel, being is

totalized and thematized, taking its power and consciousness to its core and

depending on its interiority. With Hegel’s notion of the self, history ends.

“Hegel explicated the progress of reason in history that coincides with God’s

self-development toward absolute consciousness. Thus, for him, God becomes

Absolute Reason or Geist, the totality of reality.” See R. Urbano, “Approaching

the Divine: Levinas on God, Religion, Idolatry and Atheism,” Logos 15.1 (2012): 66.

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

197

without reserve, without holding back, and in this non-

voluntary – the sacrifice of a hostage designated who has not

chosen himself to be hostage, but possibly elected by the Good,

in an involuntary election not assumed by the elected one.

(E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 15)

Despite the fact that Levinas agrees with Sartre’s expression of

“existence precedes essence,” he provides a different notion of freedom

and responsibility from that of Sartre’s “sincerity.”

Levinas contends

that responsibility matters if and only if it goes beyond one’s

commitment to the Other, before being devoted to oneself, even

before being. In short, for Levinas, ethics precedes ontology,

and

61 According to Levinas, freedom is a characteristic that is misused, especially in

Western contemporary philosophy. By necessity it is related to human rights

and free will. If I have freedom, I am free to express my opinion without any

coercion. However, Levinas provides a different view on “Westernized”

freedom, which is relevant solely to reason and power: “In a civilization which

the philosophy of the same reflects, freedom is realized as a wealth. Reason,

which reduces the other, is appropriation and power” (Levinas, Collected

Philosophical Papers, 50).

62 Concerning similarities and discrepancies between Levinas and Sartre on God,

subjectivity and politics, see C. Howells, “Sartre and Levinas,” in Bernasconi

and Wood (eds.) The Provocation of Levinas, 91-99. The most profound

discrepancy between Levinas and Sartre is that the latter, in his work Being and

Nothingness, as an Atheist, prefers the Greek model of knowing, in which he

contends that the encounter between the I and the other person is an event of

cognition, where selfhood becomes another piece of “furniture” in a mere

procedure of intentional objects. See J-P Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans.

H.E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 344-58). On the contrary,

Levinas, as a Jew, comes from the Biblical tradition where the Other is quite

relevant and important to ethical subjectivity of the pace of my life. The Other

appears as a “naked image” where she eternally seeks me to heal her wounds.

As G.L. Bruns correctly puts it, “for Levinas, the ethical subject is defined by a

responsibility that is prior to any rational deliberation executive decision; it is

an anarchic responsibility prior to the kind of commitments that rational

subjects […] know how to contract or refuse or hedge with loopholes and

provisos.” See G.L. Bruns., “On the Coherence of Hermeneutics and Ethics: An

Essay on Gadamer and Levinas,” in B. Krajewski (ed.), Gadamer's Repercussions:

Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics (California: California University Press,

2004), 34.

63 As M. Ruti correctly states, “this [relational] way of envisioning subjectivity is

one reason that Levinasian phenomenology has played such a crucial role in

recent ethical theory, for Levinas sought to understand precisely what it means

to proceed from ethics to ontology rather than the other way around.” See M.

Stavros Panayiotou

198

transcendence

precedes immanence.

In contrast to Sartre,

responsibility for Levinas is “stemming from a time before my

freedom”.

It is the excellence of ethical proximity

— before any

Ruti, Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (London and New York:

Bloomsbury, 2015), 2.

64 According to Levinas, “the transcendence of God is his actual effacement, but

this obligates us to men.” See W. Large, “The Name of God: Kripke, Levinas and

Rozenweig on Proper Names,” Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 44.3

(2013): 331.

65 At this point, I raise objections to those who believe that there are two different

meanings of the Other in Levinas’ Totality and Infinity. For instance, Large insists

that immanence is related to transcendence, and that there would not have

been transcendence without first analyze immanence. And this is necessary

and sufficient condition to understand both God and human beings. See

William Large, “The Two Meanings of the Other in Lévinas’ Totality and Infinity,”

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42 (2011): 243-254. Large claims

that “the other meaning, which is much less well-known, but which I believe is

its true meaning, is the Other of immanence and interiority” (ibid., 243).

Levinas, however, makes it clear in his work Entre Nous what he means by

asymmetrical relationship: “The relationship from me to the other is thus

asymmetrical, without noematic correlation of any thematizable presence. An

awakening to the other man, which is not knowledge” (Levinas, Entre Nous ,168).

Thus, from my point of view, immanence has nothing to do with ethical

transcendence, as the former is about rational beings and knowledge, and the

latter about infinite God. They cannot be related to or considered together.

Immanence, as an ontological term, deals with beings qua beings and

knowledge of beings. Transcendence, as an ethical term, deals with God. I agree

with A. Kin, who notes that for Levinas, “it is especially the encounter of a

particular kind of Other, the hungry, that shakes up our ordinary

ontotheological consciousness in its complacency, closure, and arrogance,

break the circle of immanence that imprisons us in mystification, deception,

and ideology, and open a break or fissure in the epic of being in the direction

of the beyond where another mode of transcendence can appear” (Kin 2006:

101). I would also agree with Grondin’s statement that for Levinas, all

ontological thought is one of immanence, of the same present in all individuals,

leveling over differences. But [on the other hand metaphysical [ethical]

thought is one that discovers the transcendence of the Other which exceeds all

my effort to understand it” (Grondin, Introduction to Metaphysics, 244).

66 Kearney and Rainwater (eds.), Continental Philosophy Reader, 131.

67 Proximity is a crucial term in Levinas’s thought. It is related to sensibility in

accordance with the matter of surprise. It has nothing to do with knowledge

and cognition since it strives to get to know the other not through experience

but mainly as a trace. Levinas states that sensibility “is itself exposed to alterity

[…] is the for-the-other of one's own materiality; it is the immediacy or the proximity

of the other […] a relation not of knowing but of proximity,” where the latter is

defined as an “anarchic relationship with a singularity without the mediation

of any principle, any ideality” (Levinas Otherwise Than Being, xxvi, 74, 100).

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

199

present. The most crucial and vital difference between Levinas and

Sartre (and the above Christian dictum) is that, for Levinas, “responsibility

for my neighbor dates from before my freedom in an immemorial past

[…] to which nothing in the rigorously ontological order binds me […]

an immemorial freedom that is even older than being.”

Though Levinas started his philosophical thought from

phenomenology, he abandoned the Husserlian observation of beings

that focused mainly on a metaphysical transcendence of what he calls

“Ethics as first philosophy”.

For Levinas, philosophy of the Other

echoes to infinity and the idea of the divine Other, whether or not this

Other is God or the other person. However, Levinas insists that we can

only see God and communicate with Him through his trace, that is,

the promise of openness to the other. R. Urbano correctly states that

for Levinas, “God is disclosed to man at the moment the person

responds to the call of the Other. This responsibility for the Other

attests to the presence of God.”

However, I would add that this

“presence” must be considered as indirect, since God’s presence is

impossible to our finite minds. “This is why the face, in contrast to

Hegel, is primordial and irreducible and it cannot be totalized, as the

infinite, i.e. God comes to epiphany there.”

What matters at all for

Levinas is not onto-theology but “the vulnerability of the eye of the

other,”

who commands you “Thou shalt not kill.”

The first word of the face is “Thou shalt not kill.” It is an order.

There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a

master spoke to me. However, at the same time, the face of the

Other is destitute; it is the poor for whom I can do all and to

whom I owe all. And me, whoever I may be, but as a “first person”

I am he who finds the resources to respond to the call.

(Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 89)

Responsibility for the other – the face signifying to me “thou

shalt not kill,” and consequently also you are responsible for the

life of this absolutely other – is responsibility for the one and

68 Kearney and Rainwater (eds.), Continental Philosophy Reader, 131-32. For a study

of immense importance concerning the immemorial time, see Dimitrova, In

Levinas’ Trace, 37-48.

69 Kearney (ed.),

Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, loc. 4718.

70 Urbano, “Approaching the Divine,” 59.

71 Kearney (ed.), Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, loc. 4902.

72 Ibid., 4902.

Stavros Panayiotou

200

only. The one and only means the loved one, love being the

condition of the very possibility of uniqueness […] The alterity of

the other is the extreme point of the “thou shalt not kill” and, in

me, the fear of all the violence and usurpation that my existing,

despite the innocence of its intentions, risks committing.

(Levinas, Entre Nous, 168-169)

According to Levinas, “to separate God from onto-theology” is to

reexamine the notion of meaning.

As Levinas states (alongside

several postmodernist French thinkers such as Derrida

and Jean-Luc

Marion),

in order to escape from onto-theology and its quasi-

73 Levinas, God, Death and Time, 127.

74 Concerning similarities and discrepancies between Levinas and Derrida, see J.D.

Caputo, “Adieu-sans Dieu: Derrida and Levinas,” in Bloechl (ed.) The Face of the

Other and the Trace of God, 276-312. A variety of secondary literature is dedicated

to discussions on God, infinity, metaphysics and selfhood between Levinas and

Derrida (Baird, “Whose Kenosis?,” 423-37;

R. Bernasconi, “‘Only the Persecuted’:

Language of the Oppressor, Language of the Oppressed,” in A. Peperzak (ed.),

Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy,

Literature and Religion (London: Routledge, 1995), 77-86; idem, “Levinas and

Derrida: The Question of the Closure of Metaphysics,” in R.A. Cohen (ed.), Face

to Face with Levinas (New York: S.U.N.Y. Press, 1986), 181-202; D. Boothroyd, “Off

the Record: Levinas, Derrida and the Secret of Responsibility,” Theory Culture

and Society 28 (2011): 41-59; A.K. Min, “Naming the Unnamable God: Levinas,

Derrida and Marion,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 60.3 (2006):

99-116;

M. Papastephanou, “Onto-Theology and the Incrimination of Ontology

in Levinas and Derrida,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31.4 (2005): 461-485; H.

Zaborowski, “On Freedom and Responsibility: Remarks on Sartre, Levinas and

Derrida,” The Heythrop Journal 41 (2000): 147-165.

75 Derrida and Marion also raise several objections concerning the God of onto-

theology. For instance, Marion claims that “the God of ontotheology is only an

idol.” See J-L Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. T.A. Carlson (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1991); idem, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans.

T.A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). However, Marion

applied a different theoretical framework in discussing the philosophy of the

other and selfhood, criticizing Levinas that he did not escape from ontology (or

ontotheology) even if he provided an alternative to the phenomenology of

Husserl’s egology and Heidegger’s Ontotheology. On this issue, see C.M.

Gschwandtner, “The Neighbor and the Infinite: Marion and Levinas on the

Encounter between Self, Human Other, and God,” Continental Philosophical

Review 40 (2007): 231-249, esp. 233-37, where Marion expounds a vehement

critique of Levinas’s endeavor to destroy the self by giving absolute dominance

to the other. Gschwandtner on p. 234 cites Marion’s phrase that Levinas’s

“[insistent] sincerity phenomenologically destroys the terms of the ontological

difference,” imposing such a dramatic reduction of the Self that it is placed in

danger of elimination. For Marion, therefore, this “obedience to the ethical

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

201

immanent characteristics, we need to decenter the subject from

fundamental ontology and take into consideration “forms of thought

different from intentionality.”

Levinas observes that “to think God

outside of onto-theology [is] to think no longer on the basis of

positivity.”

Otherness must be separated from Sameness so that the

former is not continuously absorbed by the latter. In this way, ethical

relationship is no longer subjugated by onto-theology or “from the

thinking of being”.

Levinas calls for reconsidering knowledge and

the manifestation of thinking beings. Unlike the Greeks, who

categorized knowledge within a tautological framework, Levinas

considers that meaning does not need manifestation of being; i.e. not

merely to be, but to become, since Levinas does not want to erase or

reject being (ontology), but he insists on giving priority to the ethical

term becoming, where the “I,” as subject, needs the Other to become.

Levinas raises objections to the onto-theological idea which

prioritizes a power of being that invites God to come to our minds

through logic and comprehension. Levinas opposes this concept with

a metaphysics of the good and the face-to-face intersubjective

relationship

“wherein a nameless universal Being does not have

final sway.”

Levinas sees Heideggerian ontology as an “ontology of

power which is tempted to relate to the other by murder.”

Instead,

infinite would identify, in the new phenomenological reduction, he who

oversteps the ontological difference” (ibid.). Thus, for Marion, this insistence

in Levinasian ethics that “the self is defined by its responsibility to the neighbor

who is always prior to the self” (ibid., 243), increases the danger of Self’s

elimination.

76 Levinas, God, Death and Time, 149.

77 Ibid., 167.

78 Ibid., 127.

79 Even though Levinas’s concept of the face-to-face relationship derives from

Husserl and Heidegger (his predecessors and mentors), it has nothing to do

with reciprocal and symmetrical intersubjectivity (Dimitrova, In Levinas’ Trace,

27). We may assume that Husserl’s phenomenology is an ontology, and

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is a phenomenology, both trying to

thoroughly analyze the Greek term physical. Levinas contends that he has taken

a step forward, proposing that the main topic of his thinking is metaphysical.

As J. Llewellyn correctly infers in his article “Levinas, Derrida and Others Vis-

à-Vis,” in Bernasconi and Wood (eds.), The Provocation of Levinas, 136: “It is

metaphysical because it is ethical. And it is ethical not because he aims to

present a code or a metaphysics of ethics.” Llewellyn also adds that “ethical is

older than justice… [and] prior to all structures of being-with” (ibid., 137).

80 Kearney (ed.), Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, loc. 4737.

81 Ibid., loc. 4759.

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202

Levinas proposes a different dialectic, focused on defending the

ethical community of the other. Levinas insists on the phrase ‘thou

shalt not commit no murder’:

To kill is not to dominate but to annihilate; it is to renounce

comprehension absolutely. Murder exercises a power over what

escapes power. It is still a power, for the face expresses itself in

the sensible, but already impotency, because the face rends the

sensible. The alterity that is expressed in the face provides the

unique ‘matter’ possible for total negation. I can wish to kill only

an existent absolutely independent, which exceeds my powers

infinitely, and therefore does not oppose them but paralyzes the

very power of power. The Other is the sole being I can wish to kill.

(Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 198)

However, killing in Levinas’s work is not real or pragmatist but

ethical. He is not interested in criminology or facts related to the

penal system. Levinas focuses on the ethical crime of the Other:

If the resistance to murder were not ethical but real, we would

have a perception of it, with all that reverts to the subjective in

perception. We would remain within the idealism of a

consciousness of struggle, and not in relationship with the Other,

a relationship that can turn into struggle, but already overflows

the consciousness of struggle. The epiphany of the face is ethical.

The struggle this face can threaten presupposes the

transcendence of expression.

(E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199)

Ethically speaking, Levinas claims that we need to escape onto-

theology by reconsidering meaning. However, the question that

demands further consideration is this: How can we approach meaning

without infringing on it in order to speak of God outside of onto-

theology? In analytic philosophy, a number of thinkers give priority

to immanence where meaning seems to be doxic, expressing a logical

exposition. In the Western tradition, logical thinking is fundamental,

characterized by the verb ‘to be.’ Everything which is logical, thetic

and analytical posits itself as reflecting to immanence and is in itself

presence, therefore revealing onto-theology. This tradition derives

from the Greeks, who focused on profound and fundamental

experience, bringing God into onto-theology through a logical being

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

203

qua being. The meaning of philosophical thought is drawn from

cosmos. In Heidegger, the Same, which is the rational and the

meaningful, is what really matters.

Levinas, on the other hand, tries to manifest whether Ethics is a

necessary and sufficient condition to justify God outside onto-

theology. The answer is yes, if and only if we find a means to speak

about meaning “without reference to the world, to being, to

knowledge, to the Same.”

Ethics can provide this means, signifying

a transcendence that would not be interpreted with analytical, thetic

and doxic arguments in presence. Levinas considers the possibility, “to

transcend oneself toward the other, to go from the Same to the Other

without the Other being absorbed and adopted by the Same. If the

same can contain the Other then the Same has triumphed over the

Other.”

However, Levinas contends that if transcendence is focused

on appropriation (as Husserl claimed), it remains phenomenological

immanence. The in-itself indicates the triumphant truth of the Same

over the Other, suppressing all ethical transcendence.

For Levinas,

82 Levinas, God, Death and Time, 135.

83 Ibid., 137.

84 Ibid., 141.

85 It is worth noting that for Levinas there are two different views of subjective

truth: (a) the triumphant truth and (b) the persecuted truth. Both terms are

invented and discussed by Kierkegaard, as Levinas notes in his work Proper

Names, ch. 8: “Kierkegaard: Existence and Ethics,” 1996b, pp. 66-74. Levinas

explains that the triumphant truth, as Kierkegaard calls it, derives from

idealism, and especially from the Hegelian dialectic of egocentric orientation

of the subject. Truth triumphs, as Hegel explains, by “letting the human subject

be absorbed by the Being that this subject uncovered. Idealism claimed that the

unfolding of Being by thought allowed the subject to rise above itself and hand

over its last secrets to Reason” (ibid. 66). This line of thought, in brief,

culminates in the triumph of absolute Being and Reason, which both empower

the self to be nominated as the core center of meaning and all reality. The self

is universal and alone controls and commands everything through totalization

and apprehension of Being: “Being was the correlate of thought” (ibid., 67). On

the other hand, Levinas credits Kierkegaard’s contribution in presenting a

counter-argument against the above idealistic proposition. He proposes that

subjectivity is irreducible to objective being (ibid., 68). Hence, truth must not

be considered as a triumphant perfect realization of Being which totalizes

experience, but as a “belief linked to a truth that suffers” (ibid., 69): as truth

persecuted. By persecution, Kierkegaard means that “it is through suffering

truth that one can describe the very manifestation of the divine: simultaneity

of All and Nothingness, Relation to a Person both present and absent -- to a

humiliated God who suffers, dies and leaves those whom he saves in despair. A

certainty that coexists with an absolute uncertainty-to the point that one may

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204

the phenomenon of transcendence (of the infinite) is based on “the

responsibility of the neighbor,” an aimless meaning without vision.

Levinasian ethics gives priority not to doxic ontological criteria but to

paradoxical transcendence toward the Other and not toward the Self.

Levinas strongly favored the subversion of phenomenological

immanence, turning to the phenomenon of enjoyment which does

not credit “self-constituting or the primacy of the same over the

other” but rather “the privilege of the other over the self.”

For

Levinas, “paradox inscribes the glory of the infinite in the

relationship called intersubjective.”

Hence, Levinas states that we

can speak of God escaping onto-theology if and only if the Other as a

nonthematizable, invisible interlocutor reveals prior freedom and

essence in our intersubjective self. Ethics cannot be interpreted as

knowledge of being and comprehension; instead, it is the relationship

between me and the other, the neighbor. However, in contrast to the

Christian Triadic God,

the neighbor comes to me first without any

wonder whether that Revelation itself is not contrary to the essence of that

crucified truth, whether God's suffering and the lack of recognition of the truth

would not reach their highest degree in a total incognito” (ibid., 69). However,

Levinas notes a problematic point in Kierkegaard’s discussion of the distinction

between triumphant and persecuted truth. He contends that Kierkegaard’s

contribution to existential philosophy and his correct critique on Hegel and

Idealism leaves out something crucial: responsibility. Levinas underlines that

“[True] Subjectivity is in that responsibility and only irreducible subjectivity

can assume a responsibility. That is what constitutes the ethical. To be myself

means, then, to be unable to escape responsibility” (ibid., 73), an idea that is

marginal in Kierkegaard’s thought. Thus, persecuted truth for Levinas starts

from Kierkegaard but ends with responsibility for the Other who chases me,

eternally driving me into infinity. And the Other “is the poor, the destitute, and

nothing about that Stranger can be indifferent to it […and] I am responsible for

the very one who commands me.” (ibid., 74).

86 Levinas, God, Death and Time, 142.

87 Kearney (ed.), Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, loc. 4815, 4819.

88 Levinas, God, Death and Time, 162.

89 Levinas would strongly reject views such as: “the clearest personal expression

of religion and the view of God as Trinity (Τριάς) exists in the relations that

make us persons [...] Τhe search for meaning in Christian spirituality is enacted

primarily by entering into relationship with Christ and the Blessed Trinity [...]

God the Father corresponds to our carbon relations because the Father is the

creator of the carbon universe” (K.A. Bryson, “The Ways of Spirituality,” Sophia

Philosophical Review X.2 (2017): 11). Such a direct communication with God

reduces God to our minds and therefore we then speak of onto-theology. For

Levinas, the ‘face of God’ is irreducible to finite human beings. The structure of

spirituality depends neither on rational theology (as in several Christian

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

205

specific criteria or preconditions. Levinasian ethics is beyond freedom

and essence; rather, it is about responsibility and reciprocal

authenticity. Ethical relationship is a responsibility for the other. “It

is not a disclosure of something given but the exposure of the me to

another, prior to any decision.”

In parallel Levinas states that ethical

relationship, in contrast to onto-theology, is “a responsibility that

obsesses, one that is an obsession, for the other besieges me, to the

point where he puts in question my for-me, my in-itself, to the point

where he makes me a hostage.”

Thus we can infer that autonomy, in

Levinas’s view, can be marginalized. What matters in this sense is

heteronomy.

The latter is ultimate the former is not, as

doctrines such as Catholics and Protestants) nor on ascetic contemplation (i.e.,

Orthodoxy). For Levinas, when the Holy is reduced to the Sacred, we are left

with idolatry and rational theology which are both unacceptable. See Levinas,

Part II: “Transcendence, Idolatry and Secularization,” in his work God, Death and

Time, 163-66.

90 Levinas, God, Death and Time, 187.

91 Ibid., 138. The term ‘hostage’ is mistakenly construed by some thinkers as they

confuse it with the modern term imprisoner or being taken violently by

someone, i.e. slavery or servitude. By saying that ‘I am eternally hostage toward

the Other’, Levinas means that responsibility precedes freedom and autonomy:

“a responsibility that obsesses, one that is an obsession, for the other besieges

me, to the point he makes me a hostage” (ibid.). As Saracino correctly

underlines, “as hostage for-the-Other, the subject is called to care for the Other

in non-totalizing ways, that is, by the way of gestures of justice, generosity and

sacrifice” (M. Saracino, On Being Human: A Conversation with Lonergan and Levinas

[Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003], 96).

92 Concerning the difference between autonomy and heteronomy, Levinas gives

priority to heteronomy: he states that “subjectivity, as responsible, is a

subjectivity which is commanded at the outset; heteronomy is somehow

stronger than autonomy here, except that this heteronomy is not slavery, is

not bondage […] The responsibility for the other comes from the hither side of

my freedom” (Levinas,

Of God Who Comes to Mind, 111, 114). See further

comments in A. Strhan, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education, 2012, 73-94. J. Raz, in

addition, defines autonomy by claiming that “the autonomous person is a (part)

author of his own life. The ideal of personal autonomy is the vision of people

controlling, to some degree, their own destiny, fashioning it through successive

decisions throughout their lives” (J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom [Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1986], 369). For Levinas, this statement would be correct to

define autonomy, but lacks ethical content. If the autonomous person is the

author of his life, controlling his own destiny, egology and ontology appear to

a high degree. If all my thought is focused on how to build and maintain my

personal pursuit of happiness above all, this is for Levinas Ontology. Autonomy

produces an equal-to-thought status (Levinas,

Of God Who Comes to Mind, 180)

whereas the Other is inevitably marginalized for the sake of self-interest and

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206

heteronomous ethics is assumed in infinite responsibility. In parallel,

eros and agape (love)

are “breaking out of monadism and the

egocentric predicament, where the self agapeically goes towards the

other as other.”

The self is for the other and not the other for the

self. In this sense, difference or différance

of the other as hostage

gives priority to religion and ethics to speak of God outside onto-

theology, since the I (ὁ ὢν) depends on the Other as an interlocutor,

and not the Other on the I. Thus the I, according to Levinas, must be

transformed into the accusative case: “me.” “Me” needs someone else

in order to exist; it cannot be alone. “Me” (in accusative case)

needs

Sameness. Levinas develops his thought concerning autonomy and its

integration into reason in his work Entre Nous, ch. 15: “Uniqueness,” 190-91.

93 When Levinas was asked about the difference between Eros/love and Agape, he

confessed: “I do not think that Agape comes from Eros […] Eros is definitely not

Agape, that Agape is neither a derivative nor the extinction of love-Eros. Before

Eros there was the Face; Eros itself is possible only between Faces. The problem

of Eros is philosophical and concerns otherness […] I have a grave view of Agape

in terms of responsibility for the other” (Levinas Of God Who Comes to Mind, 113).

Eros has a dramatic nostalgia which remains to presence. Levinas contends that

love as agape has more ethical and metaphysical repercussions. For Levinas,

“love [as agape] desires not a nostalgic return to stasis but reaches out instead

towards the other and ultimately towards a future: the impossibility or failure

of fusion is the very positivity of love” (S. Sandford, The Metaphysics of Love:

Gender and Transcendence in Levinas [London: The Athlone Press, 2000], 97).

94 Kearney (ed.), Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, loc. 4924, 4932.

Concerning the phenomenology of Eros, see P. Moyaert, “The Phenomenology

of Eros: A Reading of Totality and Infinity,” in Bloechl (ed.) The Face of the Other

and the Trace of God, 30-42.

95 The term différance is developed by J. Derrida and it is adopted also by Levinas

in order to explain the importance of transcendence over immanence. In

deconstruction and post-modern philosophy, according to Derrida, subject

must be decentered and must be replaced by intersubjective conditions beyond

knowledge and logic. Differ, according to Derrida, means to differ from itself.

For Derrida, différance is not an analytical concept or even a word. It is not what

we represent to ourselves as beings. “It is the nonfull, nonsimple origin: it is

the structured and differing origin of differences” (Kearney and Rainwater

[eds.], Continental Philosophy Reader, 449). “It is a trace of something that can

never present itself; It is a trace that lies beyond what profoundly ties

fundamental ontology to phenomenology” (ibid., 459). Levinas insists that in

this way we can speak of God outside onto-theology.

96 As Levinas states, “for all eternity, the I were the first one called to this

responsibility; non-transferable and thus unique, thus I, the chosen hostage,

the chosen one. An ethics of the meeting—sociality. For all eternity, one man is

answerable for another” (Levinas, Entre Nous, 227).

97 Levinas writes, “Everything is from the start in the accusative. Such is the

exceptional condition or unconditionality of the self, the signification of the

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

207

the Other as an equal interlocutor

in order to be meaningful.

According to Levinas, “pre-reflective, non-intentional consciousness

would never be able to return to a moral realization of this passivity.

The non-intentional is from the start passivity and the accusative [is]

its first case (me and not I).”

One must speak in me and not in I. As

Blaise Pascal observes, the I is “hateful”;

100

“one has to respond to

one’s right to be.”

101

We can assume that Levinas is in favor of a

transcendence, in the sense of “the awaiting without something

awaited.”

102

Such a transcendence “without aiming and without

vision” tends to speak of God or to see God outside onto-theology.

103

In this sub-chapter, I do not intend to delve into the ontological

sphere. Rather, I seek to explain Levinas’s ethics through criticism of

fundamental ontology and onto-theology. In ethics, as Levinas

observes, the concept of the ontological “I” urgently needs to be

changed to the accusative case “me”; and as Levinas states, “no one

could replace me.”

104

An ethical I-Thou relationship, as well as the

relationship between an individual and God, needs not to be

systematized. Instead, each one relates to the other through

responsibility. However, a relation between two people is direct,

while the relation between a human and God is indirect. According to

Levinas, “the absolutely other is the Other (Autrui). He and I do not

form a number. The collectivity in which I say you or we is not a plural

of the I. I, you - these are not individuals of a common concept […]

Alterity is possible only starting from me [and not from “I” or ego].”

105

pronoun self for which our Latin grammars themselves know no nominative

form.” (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 112).

98 Levinas, Entre Nous, 4-9. By the term “ethical interlocutor,” I do not mean a

procedure where the other will be absorbed by sameness. Dialogue and equal

response in Levinasian ethics is not the same as the connection of parole and

langue to language. In Levinas’s ethics, by saying that the other must be equal

interlocutor we mean that the Same allows the Other to show her otherness in

an equal procedure without coercion, [Hegelian] power or [Husserlian]

noematic-horizontal intentionality.

99 Kearney and Rainwater (eds.), The Continental Philosophy Reader, 129.

100 B. Pascal, Pensées (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958), Part I, 1, 2, c. 1, section 4.[44],

v. 455.

101 Kearney and Rainwater (eds.), The Continental Philosophy Reader, 130.

102 Levinas, God, Death and Time, 139.

103 Ibid., 139.

104 Ibid., 152.

105 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 39-40.

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208

The “Holiness of the Holy”: Otherness Precedes Asceticism

Levinas speaks about the Other in the context of the “ethics of

holiness.” The holy is a significant concept in Levinas’s thought.

Derrida reports a short conversation with Levinas where the latter

said: “You know, one often speaks of ethics to describe what I do, but

what really interests me in the end is not ethics, not ethics alone, but

the holy, the holiness of the holy.”

106

The idea of sanctity or holiness

has not often been discussed by scholars interested in Levinasian

ethics.

107

Yet throughout his works, Levinas insists on distinguishing

the holy from the sacred.

108

In his usage, the term “holiness” is similar

to “desacralization.” His intention was to deconstruct the meaning of

the term “sacred,” since he saw it as reduced to mystical theology,

something unacceptable in his eyes.

109

Levinas criticizes several

106 J. Derrida, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, trans. P-A., Brault and M. Naas (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1999), 4.

107 Two articles of immense importance on Levinas’s interest in sanctity can be

found in J. Hansel, “Utopia and Reality: The Concept of Sanctity in Kant and

Levinas,” Philosophy Today 43.2 (1999): 168–75 and J. Caruana, “Levinas’s Critique

of the Sacred,” International Philosophical Quarterly 42.4 (2002) 519–34. For

Levinas, sanctity has an allegoric meaning and has nothing to do with idolatry.

Levinas integrates the concept of sanctity with death. As he himself mentions,

sanctity appears metaphysically and ethically when “the death of the other can

have priority over my own death,” precisely when “the death of the other

matters more than my own.” Thus we can call this procedure sanctity, which

derives from biblical ethical law (https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=qbGaXEqxSvU: 46:40-47:04).

108 Levinas rejects the notion of religion as sacred for the same reason that he

abhors mysticism. Both terms support immanence and ignore the direct

separation of God and humans.

109 For Levinas, God is neither an idea nor a being, not because there is a kind of

mystical knowledge that we (as humans) do not have the rational ability to

surpass, but mainly because there is a “brick wall” between me as a finite

human and God as infinite transcendence. Beyond this wall there is something

I cannot think of, I cannot see, because of my “personal stupidity” (Large, “The

Name of God: Kripke, Levinas and Rozenweig on Proper Names,” 322). However,

when Large says “stupidity,” he does not mean that humans are stupid or

disabled, but he means that humans’ rational and finitude logos cannot explain

what it is to be God because they are of different essences. According to Large,

there are three possible ways to think of God: as an idea, as a being or as a word.

He then claims that the first two alternatives for Levinas are impossible since

God is transcendence and cannot be reduced to immanence. However,

according to Large, Levinas accepts the fact that God can be named as a word.

It would seem quite absurd to allege that God is a word, but what Large means

by the phrase “God is a word” is that God is a name and not a description. In

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

209

sociologists who were unable to distinguish between the notions le

sacré and le saint.

110

Additionally, he refers to Plato

111

in order to show

that holiness is of immense importance for ethics, not as a theological

term but as an ethical one.

112

Levinas defends the thesis that the

sacred, as well as mysticism, strengthen immanence and the ego’s

conditions, thus slipping away from transcendence and infinity.

The rigorous affirmation of human independence, of its

intelligent presence to an intelligible reality, the destruction of

the numinous concept of the Sacred, entail the risk of atheism.

That risk must be run. Only through it can man be raised to the

spiritual notion of the Transcendent. It is a great glory for the

Creator to have set up a being who affirms Him after having

contested and denied Him in the glamorous areas of myth and

enthusiasm; it is a great glory for God to have created a being

Judaism, the word God cannot be described by presenting ritual attributes to

God. Rather, the safest path to approach God is the prohibition of decorating

His essence with cosmic attributes. Thus, we can infer that the allegoric

reference to God as a word can only be construed as responsibility for the

Other. Levinas queries: “Does not the transcendence of the name of God in

comparison to all thematization become effacement and is not this effacement

the very commandment that obligates me to the other man?” (Levinas Levinas,

“The Name of God According to a Few Talmudic Texts,” 124). To express God’s

name, what matters is the Other; when I address the Other – even someone

lowly – I address God. “As the stranger passes, so too does God” (Large, “The

Name of God,” 331). Therefore, I would strongly agree with Large’s implication

that “the word ‘God’ names for Levinas is the ethical responsibility for the

Other. It does not name a being with certain properties or attributes, nor an

idea necessary for human freedom” (ibid. 332). The terms stranger, meek,

humble and hostage are used a number of times by Levinas. On the crucial role

of and encounter with the stranger, see particularly R. Bernet, “The Encounter

with the Stranger: Two Interpretations of the Vulnerability of the Skin,” in

Bloechl (ed.), The Face of the Other and the Trace of God, 43-61; R. Bernasconi, “The

Alterity of the Stranger and the Experience of the Alien,” in Bloechl (ed.) The

Face of the Other and the Trace of God, 62-62-89.

110 E. Levinas,

“Secularism and the Thought of Israel,” trans. N. Poller.

in Unforeseen History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004) 113; idem,

Otherwise Than Being, 11-14.

111 It is worth noting that Levinas was a great admirer of Plato’s philosophy,

expressing his gratitude for how he had developed the history of philosophy,

theology and ethics by saying that “Philosophy is Platonic.” (Levinas Alterity

and Transcendence, ix).

112 See comments on Plato in Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 23.

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210

capable of seeking Him or hearing Him from afar, having

experienced separation and atheism.

(Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 15-16)

Levinas shares with Plato and Kant a distrust of any religious

experience for the sake of the uniting of transcendence. For Levinas,

reconciling the sacred with the holy is a ridiculous endeavor, as the

former relates to ritual concepts and the latter to transcendence.

According to the analytic thinker Durkheim, the sacred is a

“catchword meant to capture the totality of religious experience.”

113

In parallel, another analytic thinker, Bataille, contends that

“everything leads us to the conclusion that in essence the sacramental

quality of primitive sacrifices is analogous to the comparable element

in contemporary religions.”

114

Levinas reproves both of these scholars

by promoting a more ethical intuition. He explains, as a Jewish

thinker,

115

that Judaism “consists in understanding this holiness of

God in a [different] sense [than analytic thinkers] that stands in sharp

contrast to the numinous meaning of this term, as it appears in the

primitive religions wherein the moderns have often wished to see the

source of all religion.”

116

In ordinary speech, according to Levinas and

Buber,

117

the meaning of sacred is imbued with power and cosmic

113 J. Caruana, “‘Not Ethics, Not Ethics Alone, but the Holy’: Levinas on Ethics and

Holiness,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 34.4 (2006): 563.

114 G. Bataille, Eroticism, trans. M. Dalwood, (London and New York: Marion Boyars,

1962), 22.

115 It is worth noting that Levinas never proclaimed himself as a Jewish theologian,

but rather a thinker who comes from a Judaic and Talmudic angle, where his

texts run parallel with his philosophical (not religious) works. Scholars such as

S. Rosenberg, S. Wygoda, C. Chalier and D. Banon have revealed the importance

of Levinas’s thought for the understanding of Judaism today. Concerning the

contribution of the above thinkers as regards Levinas’s Jewish thought

throughout his works, see E. Meir, “Hellenic and Jewish in Levinas’ Writings,”

Veritas 51.2 (2006): 79-88.

116 E. Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand (Baltimore: Athlone

Press and John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 14.

117 A comprehensive article on Buber and Levinas is R. Bernasconi’s “’Failure of

Communication’ as a Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue between Buber and

Levinas,” in Bernasconi and Wood (eds.), The Provocation of Levinas, 100-135. It is

obvious that Levinas disagrees with Buber’s enthusiastic intention to imbue

reciprocity to the I-Thou relation. Levinas intends to link heteronomy and

transcendence, claiming that the autonomous is primarily linked to ontology,

isolating the subject to itself absorbing otherness and the face of the other is

being subordinated to Hegelian totalization. See Levinas, Of God who Comes to

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

211

religious experience, something that God does not welcome.

118

It is

only with sanctification as holiness that religion can find genuine

expression. Rational individuation must be transformed into moral

separateness through the holiness which can only be found in ethics.

Levinas hence insists on the transformation of the sacred through an

ethical perspective into holiness or sanctification:

The numinous or the sacred envelops and transports man

beyond his powers and wishes. ...The numinous annuls the links

between persons by making beings participate, albeit

ecstatically, in a drama not brought about willingly by them, an

order in which they lose themselves.

(Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 14)

Levinas thus tries to argue that what matters is not a ritual sacred

experience, which is merely an action in the world, but rather an

ethical holiness which h exceeds ontological practices. On the one

hand, holiness for Levinas is the only way to access (genuine) religion.

On the other hand, the sacred consists of “a seething subjective mass

of forces, passions and imaginings.”

119

Once the sacred rite separates

the finite self from the divine, there is no possibility for the self to be

called from the other as she loses her identity. This dissolution affects

the relationship between the ‘me’ and the other and thus the

ego/being returns into itself.

What we need, in Levinas’s eyes, is a massive return to

desacralization through ethics. For Levinas, the ethical character of

the holy is the nonrational surplus that emerges not from ontological

practices but from anarchy. Holiness and ethics stem from the same

anarchic source.

120

As Levinas points out, “To say of God that he is the

God of the poor, the God of justice, involves a claim not on his

Mind, 150: “[…] in Buber, the I-Thou relationship is frequently also described as

the pure face-to-face of the encounter, as a harmonious co-presence as an eye

to eye […] In this extreme formalization the Relation empties itself of its

‘heteronomy’ and of its transcendence of association […] There would be an

inequality, a dissymmetry, in the Relation, contrary to the reciprocity upon

which Buber insists, no doubt in error”.

118 M. Buber, “Dialogue,” in Between Man and Man, trans. R.G. Smith (New York:

Macmillan, 1968), 15.

119 Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 102.

120 Caruana, “‘Not Ethics, Not Ethics Alone, but the Holy’: Levinas on Ethics and

Holiness,” 569.

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attributes but on his essence.”

121

Here Levinas means that the sacred

is connected to attributes of God while the holy relates to His essence.

In other words, it is holy that is transcendent and not the sacred. As

Levinas states, on the basis of the Torah, we can assume that the

sacred is equal to idolatry where, in contrast, holiness represents “the

absolute opposite to idolatry”.

122

For Levinas, idolatry has increased

not because of the intervention of other gods, but because of moral

indifference, as well as worship of the being itself. This is the reason

that monotheism is so strictly observed in Judaism, because God in the

Old Testament “does not give Himself over to human fantasies.”

123

From the Old Testament, however, we also learn that people

become moral objects, not through their response and obedience to

God’s commandments, but by violating them. Man became a moral

being after eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge and began to

distinguish good from evil. Since then, he began imitating God and

wanted to become the master of human fate. Levinas blames both

Christianity and paganism for one and the same sin of idolatry. As

paganism created its gods according to the norms of the time and

began to pray to the forces of nature as gods, so Christianity created

an image of God to befit human representations and began to pray in

front of icons that replaced God or the Absolute Other. While in

Christianity, man is the image and likeness of God and prayers begin

with ‘my God’, the Hebrew God retains his position of exteriority –

God is the Absolute Other, God is Transcendence that even could not

be named. Levinas insisted that Transcendence could not be

contained within the ideas of it, nor could it be embodied. For Levinas,

true monotheism is not compatible with my belief in myths or with

idolatry.

124

Does holiness affect us in our contact with the divine? In short,

is holiness a channel in between the human and God? The answer,

121 Levinas, “Secularism and the Thought of Israel,” 116.

122 Idem, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, 58.

123 Idem, Difficult Freedom, 102.

124 Dimitrova, Sociality and Justice, 79.

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

213

according to Levinas, comes through negation

125

– neither/nor.

126

Levinas states that “the infinite who orders me is neither a cause

acting straight on, nor a theme, already dominated, if only

retrospectively, by freedom.”

127

He adds that “this detour is the enigma

128

of a trace we have called illeity.”

129

Illeity is a term coined by Levinas

to indicate a special symbolic allegory. It contains three different

words or endings in one word: il (he), ille (she) and -ty (it, as an object).

Levinas’s use of this term aims at indicating “a way of concerning me

(and not I) without entering into conjunction with me.”

130

In my view,

the neologism illeity constitutes a counter to the Buberian I-Thou

dyadic scheme,

131

since, as Levinas says, “illeity lies outside the ‘thou’

125 Negation for Levinas plays a decisive role in understanding the subjectivity of

persons. Not as Hegel understands negation, that is, as power and totalization

through the dialectic of Master and Slave, but as “total negation, which spans

the infinity of that attempt and its impossibility – is the presence of the face.

To be in relation with the other face to face – is to be unable to kill” (Levinas Of

God Who Comes to Mind, 10). This inability to deny the other, the incapacity to

negate her “noumenal glory […] makes the face-to-face situation possible. The

face-to-face situation is thus an impossibility of denying, a negation of

negation” (ibid., 34-35).

126 See D. Braine, “Negative Theology,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

(London: Taylor and Francis, viewed 15 October 2019).

127 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 12.

128 Levinas prefers the term enigma over than Kierkegaard’s silence, to develop his

argument regarding God’s trace in the world. For Levinas, the interconnection

between God and humans is an enigma, that is, God’s trace which can be found

only through the face of the other: “The semantics of the enigma breaks out of

the order of autonomous thought, whereby the enigmatic as such becomes

visible only as a trace – which means that it cannot be expressed by a direct

representation of language (i.e., the sign or the signifier). The enigma is,

according to Levinas, always older than, it is presupposed by, the intellectual

cognition; but it cannot be reduced to a coherent system” (M.T. Mjaaland,

Autopsia: Self, Death and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida, trans. B. McNeil [Berlin-

New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008], 127). Concerning Levinas’s view on enigma

as an ethical phenomenon, see Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 1987, 61-73.

129 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 12.

130 Ibid., 12.

131 From my point of view, A.K. Min correctly points out that “the true Infinite is

revealed and accessible only as illeity, neither as a [Buberian] Thou of

unmediated dialogue nor as an [Husserlian horizon] object of thematization”

(Min 2006: 102). Concerning the notion of Husserl’s concept of horizon, see J.

Mensch, “Life and Horizon”, Sophia Philosophical Review XI.2 (2018), 7-18. Min

borrows two phrases from Levinas’s work God, Death and Time: that the true

Infinite is revealed only as “a way of concerning me without entering into

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214

and the thematization of objects.”

132

Levinas goes on to say that “the

illeity in the beyond-being is the fact that its coming toward me is a

departure which lets me accomplish a movement toward a

neighbor”.

133

In parallel, Levinas contends that illeity “is excluded

from being, but orders it in relation to a responsibility, in relation to

its pure passivity, a pure 'susceptibility': an obligation to answer

preceding any questioning which would recall a prior commitment,

extending beyond any question, any problem and any representation,

and where obedience precedes the order that has furtively infiltrated

the soul that obeys.”

134

Ultimately, what is the connection between holiness and illeity?

Levinas claims that “illeity overflows both cognition and the enigma

through which the Infinite leaves a trace in cognition. Its distance

from a theme, its reclusion, its holiness, is not its way to effect its

being (since its past is anachronous and anarchic, leaving a trace

which is not the trace of any presence), but is its glory, quite different

from being and knowing.”

135

The call of the other is holy and dramatic. The drama of being

can be overcome by holiness through the face of the other. Levinas

tries to present a “battle” between me, the Other, and God outside

ontotheology,

136

between an ontological drama and an eschatological

conjunction with me" (Levinas, God, Death and Time, 285) or as "the non-

phenomenality of the Other who affects me beyond representation,

unbeknownst to me and like a thief" (ibid. 201). Thus, Min clearly separates his

thesis from Husserl’s Ontology. In parallel, contrary to Buber’s I-Thou, Levinas

stresses that “there is no initial equality […] Ethical inequality: subordination

to the other, original diacony: the first person accusative and not nominative”

(H. Jodalen and J. Vetlesen [eds.], Closeness: An Ethics [Oslo: Scandinavian

University Press, 1997], 48, 52, n. 2). Another reproach that Levinas has against

the Buberian I-Thou relationship is that it seems quite symmetrical and

reciprocal; those two terms are unacceptable in Levinas’s philosophical

approach.

132 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 12.

133 Ibid., 13.

134 Idem, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, 128.

135 Levinas, God, Death and Time, 183.

136 Levinas, as a Jewish thinker, derives several times from Talmudic aspects.

Levinas underlines that “monotheism would thus be asserted in its absolute

vigour without it being from the onto-theological perspective” (Levinas, Beyond

the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, 164), but the essence of God (En-Sof in

Talmudic writings, which means infinity, God) “is hidden away more than any

secret, and no name must name it” […] “not even the end of the smallest letter”

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

215

one, where both dramas can only be surpassed by an ethical

’intrigue’ — not an ethical experience

137

— where holiness (as ethical

sanctification) tries to escape from the ritual-cosmic sacred. In

parallel, in order to understand the holiness of the other, we can say

that it is not me who knocks on the door of the other human so he will

open it to me; rather, the other already finds me prior to freedom and

autonomy. The other’s presence “hits me straight on with the

straightest, shortest, and most direct movement”.

138

In parallel,

Levinas connects the prohibition of the sacred with the directness of

the face of the other with its proximity.

The comprehension of God taken as participation in his sacred

life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because

participation is a denial of the divine and because nothing is

more direct than the face to face, which is straightforwardness

itself [....] There can be no ‘knowledge’ of God separated from the

relationship with men.

(Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78)

The straight line between me and the Other’s uprightness forbids

me to participate in the sacred; it sobers me.

(Levinas, Outside the Subject, 94)

In conclusion, we can infer that holiness is an ethical tool for Levinas

to shape his intuition about the indirect connection between humans

and God and humans with the Other. In contrast to the materialistic

experience of the sacred, holiness awakes the self, outside of the

subject, in a process of ethical individuation. One of the most difficult

things for the self is to achieve awareness of his holiness towards God

and towards the Other. We come closer to meeting this challenge only

through the progressive paradox of Ethics.

(ibid.). For Levinas only the “act of thinking of the Absolute which never

reaches the Absolute is infinite and never-ending” (ibid.).

137 J. Caruana, “The Drama of Being: Levinas and the History of Philosophy,”

Continental Philosophical Review 40 (2007): 251-73.

138 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 95.

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216

Is Asceticism a Necessary and Sufficient Condition in

Levinasian Ethics?

In this paper I argue that the term “asceticism” in Levinas’s thought

differs from the use of the term in the Patristic and Thomistic

traditions. While Aquinas and several orthodox Fathers of Eastern

Christianity contend that asceticism begins and derives from a Man-

God affirmation, Levinas raises severe objections to this approach. For

Levinas, kenosis

139

has its starting point not with God’s direct

mediation between subjectivity and human beings, nor the Greek

μίμησις (imitation), but with the movement towards dispossession.

This movement is revealed in the Biblical kenotic approbation from

me (in the accusative) to the Other, who appears as a trace of God

before my freedom and my subjectivity.

For Levinas, we can speak of asceticism only regarding human

affairs when a person, emptying herself for the sake of the other,

sacrifices her inner narcissism in favor of the otherness which

precedes freedom and autonomy.

140

Thus, we can infer that asceticism

is necessary and sufficient condition if and only if it is focused on the

face-to-face relation without absorbing otherness into itself.

141

As R.

Cohen correctly states, “the only alterity sufficiently other to provoke

response, to subject the subject to the subjection of response is the

absolute alterity of the other person encountered in the excessive

immediacy of the face-to-face”.

142

In brief, asceticism is useless and

empty of spiritual concreteness if it returns to the subject.

At the same time, Levinas rejects any conversation about

asceticism and self-emptiness related to infinity and

139 Baird, “Whose Kenosis?,” 423-37.

140 Levinas, in his work Entre Nous, chapter four, A Man-God?, 60, wonders: “How

can I expect another to sacrifice himself for me without requiring the sacrifice

of others? How can I admit his responsibility for me without immediately

finding myself, through my condition as hostage, responsible for his

responsibility itself. To be me is always to have one more responsibility.”

141 Ibid., 58, in which he reminds us, through a Biblical verse (Jeremiah 22:16) that

what matters, in approaching God, can be achieved only through the face of the

Other: “He judged the cause of the poor and needy... Was not this to know me?

saith the Lord.” Ben-Pazi’s view on forgiveness and reconciliation among

human beings is quite connected to individuals’ kenosis for the sake of the other.

See H. Ben-Pazi, “Levinasian Thoughts on Witnessing: Forgiveness, Guilt, and

Reconciliation,” South African Journal of Philosophy 35.3 (2016): 345-58.

142 R.A. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139.

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

217

Transcendence.

143

It is impossible, philosophically speaking, to

develop or predict an “idea of a self-inflicted humiliation on the part

of the Supreme Being, of a descent of the Creator to the level of the

Creature; that is to say, an absorption of the most active activity into

the most passive passivity”.

144

Levinas also wonders whether God,

who manifests Himself in the world through his covenant, can Himself

become present in the time of the world? Levinas’s answer is no,

because time in God’s essence is immemorial, and we can seek Him

only through the face of the Other as a trace and proximity. Moreover,

Levinas rejects divine ascetic onto-theology of Western tradition

because “the Infinite cannot incarnate itself in a Desirable, cannot,

being infinite, enclose itself in an end. It solicits through a face. A Thou

is inserted between the I and the absolute He. It is not history's

present that is the enigmatic interval of a humiliated and

transcendent God, but the face of the Other.”

145

The meaning of ascetic kenosis in Levinas’s thought, as opposed

to onto-theological and Christological perspectives, can be grasped

only if we construe Levinas’s ethics from an anthropological angle. As

R.D.N. van Riessen correctly contends, “as a Jewish thinker Levinas

relates the kenosis of God and the self-emptying of the subject to each

other without reference to the figure of Christ”.

146

Similarly, A. Wells

underlines that for Levinas a “non-immanental ethical interaction

can occur without the Absolute Paradox (i.e., the God-man, Christ).

One need not be Christian to recognize the Other’s transcendence.

Every Other, on Levinas’s reading, is sufficiently enigmatic to force a

break with immanence.”

147

143 In this case, Transcendence is God, an absent God, which has no direct

involvement with human affairs. E. Meir, in his work “Hellenic and Jewish in

Levinas’s Writings,” 83, states characteristically that “direct contact with Him

is absent; the mediation of reasons and of a teaching, of the Torah, is required.

In this way, a place is created for consciousness and knowledge. The idea of a

God who does not forgive in place of the other man is parallel with the

Cartesian idea of the infinite, much appreciated by Levinas. God is not powerful,

but powerless, His kenosis is the humility of leaving His trace in the Other,

without forcing man to respond.”

144 Levinas, Entre Nous, 53.

145 Ibid., 58.

146 Van Riessen, Man as a Place of God: Levinas’ Hermeneutics of Kenosis, 174.

147 See A. Wells, “On Ethics and Christianity: Kierkegaard and Levinas,” The

Heythrop Journal 52 (2012): 71. In addition, Wells continues his discussion about

Levinas’s exteriority of the subject by saying that “Levinas has shown that one

does not need the Absolute Paradox (i.e., Christ) to establish ethical relations

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Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that asceticism begins with the ethical

metaphysics of Otherness. On the one hand, Levinas agrees that

humility is a starting point for decentering the subject, but he holds

that what is crucial is to begin with the other and not with the self. In

contrast, onto-theology, which derives from ancient Greek tradition,

insists on consciousness and intentionality, that is, placing

individualism prior to relationalism. Therefore, in analytic and

continental philosophical traditions, as well as contemporary

religious tradition, asceticism gives priority to consciousness as well

as to the dominance of the subject, who reflects and apprehends its

own validity through its esotericism. Thus, historicity of the subject

as an enclosed-self unit echoes narcissism and its capability to

comprehend the essence of God within the self alone.

Following Hegelian totality and Heideggerian manifestation of

being qua being, subjectivity became cemented within an

epistemological framework, which seems quite sufficient to proclaim

itself absolute. In addition, Descartes’s cogito has been considered as

the culmination of cognitive dominance over metaphysics, aesthetics,

and ethics. On the other hand, post-Hegelian critique on the thinking

subject influenced various analytic and continental thinkers across

Europe. Postmodernity offers another view based on ethical

metaphysics and intersubjectivity as well as on faith and religion.

Emmanuel Levinas, for his part, introduced a new understanding of

ethics, arguing that it is the Other who gives meaning to the ascetic

self and not the opposite. Overcoming the notion of self-reflection of

the thinking subject, Levinas proposed an alternative notion of

subjectivity, claiming that what really matters is the moral

responsibility for the Other. For Levinas, God commands me through

the face of the Other, but it is my responsibility to understand and

answer. I suggest that Levinas initiated a new dialectic on asceticism:

an infinite intersubjective called by the Other as the trace of God.

148

with others. Every Other, according to Levinas, is enough of an enigma, enough

of a paradox, to force a break with immanence – i.e., every Other has the power

to force the subject to relate to something outside itself” (ibid., 58).

148 R. Gibbs, in his monograph Correlations in Levinas and Rosenzweig (New Jersey:

Princeton University Press, 1992), chapter 4: “God speaks with Human

Language,” 92-100, analyzes the above argument, that is, that God’s presence-

in-the-world cannot be sustained or adopted in Levinasian Ethics, but can be

seen, through the unseen, only as a trace, through human intervention as “the

Emmanuel Levinas’s Criticism of Onto-Theology

219

Let us conclude with the words of R.D.N. van Riessen, who noted that

to grasp Levinas’s notion of ascetic kenosis, we need to recall Jewish

tradition: “the concept of kenosis [in the Jewish tradition] sees God’s

absence as an event which is painful but at the same time creates

space for human action.”

149

language of the meek, the orphan and the humble.” This concept has been

called by other scholars “Levinas’s a-theism”. They do not mean necessarily a

lack of a Supreme Being outside universal norms, but mainly, as W. Large points

out in his article “Atheism of the Word: Narrated Speech and the Origin of

Language in Cohen, Rosenzweig and Levinas,” Religions 9 (2018): 1, that “God is

no longer interpreted as a being necessary to understand the existence of a

rational universe; the monotheistic God is neither a being nor an idea, but the

living reality of speech. What menaces the reality of God is not whether God

exists, or is intelligible, but the externality of language without a subject.”

149 See Van Riessen, Man as a Place of God: Levinas’ Hermeneutics of Kenosis, 11.

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