of care for others.
Levinas entitles the first section of Totality and Infinity with
a parallel when he calls it “The Same and the Other” and it is the face
of the other than can breach my totality and open me to transcendence.
Levinas sees ethics in the West as a self-realization ethics in which
I will be virtuous in order than I might be happy but he sees Judaism
as having an ethics that looks out for the good of the other and especially
for the needs of widows, orphans, and aliens who look to me for help.
The Hellenic philosopher loves wisdom to understand the totality
and the Hebraic sage is given wisdom’s love when he welcomes infinity.
II,1.2 Philosophy’s Love of Wisdom and the Wisdom of Love
In his book Levinas and the Wisdom of Love Corey Beals quotes
Levinas’s Otherwise than Being (p. 161):
Philosophy is the wisdom of love
at the service of love.
This formula of the wisdom of love as distinct from the love
of wisdom may distinguish Hebraic ethics from Hellenic
philosophy and get to the main point of Levinas’s philosophy of
ethics in which he wants to show how ethics is beyond philosophy.
On page 13 Beals quotes Derrida who, after reading Totality and Infinity,
said that it “proceeds with the infinite insistence of waves on a beach.”
Beals says that this means that Derrida sees Levinas as just
insistently repeating the same point and Richard Bernstein
takes up the metaphor and agrees that Levinas is always repetitious.
However in trying to be clear about Jewish postmodernism we
will here explore the ideas that once Derrida criticized Totality
and Infinity Levinas took it to heart and moved on to the new
position of Otherwise than Being, which stresses the wisdom of love.
As we examine the repetitious points of Totality and Infinity
we will prepare ourselves to see why and how Derrida criticized
the very relation of totality as logically exclusive of infinity.
In Totality and Infinity Levinas’s main point is that Jewish ethics
is based upon a belief in a bond of responsibility between all
members of the family of man and I should be responsible
to the face of others especially widows, orphans, and aliens.
The look of need on their face calls me to an infinite responsibility.
However, Derrida shows how Levinas is working with a logic of
exclusive opposites characteristic of modern logic.
Totality and infinity might better be conceived as mixed with
each other, and with that in mind Levinas moves from the image
of widows, orphans, and aliens to that of the suffering servant
who reveals the glory of God by suffering for others with love.
II,1.3 By Letting my Totality Welcome your Infinity
In Section One of Totality and Infinity Levinas discusses
the same and the other and the totality of the same has to do
with everything in my world making it up in the same way.
I can enjoy each thing within my world and the peace
of this enjoyment is the first form of my egoism, which is
a movement by which my self-centered life is a being for-itself.
But then the face of the other can look at me and make
a demand upon me and I can become responsible to the other.
If I in my totality welcome the other I discover that they can
make infinite demands upon me and thus infinity invades
my world by making more claims than I can imagine.
In my world I can enjoy others but if I respond to the call
of the other and become responsible to him or her my responsibility
is not a pleasure but a pain and an affliction in which I
welcome my neighbor so that he is more important than myself.
Welcoming the other’s infinite demands becomes
more important to me than the totality of my own world.
On page 75 of Totality and Infinity Levinas gives a good description
of what it is like for my totality to welcome your infinity.
The nakedness of the face is destituteness.
To recognize the Other is to give.
But it is to give to the master, to the lord,
to him whom one approaches as “you”
in a dimension of height.
In a footnote he says that the “you” is the “you” of majesty
in contrast to the “thou” of intimacy so that widows, orphans,
aliens, and any one whose face pleads with need is my lord
and master and thus they have a special height and majesty.
The welcoming of Levinas sees the great worth and dignity
that is equal in every person and takes responsibility for that person.
II,1.4 With a “me voici” beyond Buber’s “I and Thou”
Martin Buber’s I and Thou beautifully expresses how the
Jewish religious ethic works as it poetically shows how
love is the responsibility
