existentialists but it was Levinas and Derrida
who first taught me the meaning of postmodernity.
Levinas as a Rabbi had a deep understanding
of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish worldview.
For him ethics had to be first philosophy
and he heard from the infinite face of the other
the call to serve widows, orphans, and aliens.
Derrida as a Jewish Philosopher of great knowledge
agreed with Levinas about ethics as first philosophy
but as he wrote on Levinas’s book Totality and Infinity
he showed how Levinas was still using a logic
of exclusive opposites and thus excluded not only
Buber but also Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Derrida showed how the infinite face of the other
implied a metaphysics of excess that in turn
would imply a logic of mixed opposites.
Derrida’s deconstruction of Totality and Infinity
made sense to Levinas and he went on to write
Otherwise Than Being, which agreed with Derrida
but went on to show how the epistemology
of postmodernity had to be a nominalism.
Levinas developed a new model of ethics
as first philosophy with the Suffering Servant.
Levinas went on to the passages in Second Isaiah,
which had the Suffering Servant as suffering
to the point of death out of love for others.
The Gospels also used these images to show
how Jesus fulfilled this Suffering Servant philosophy.
This Suffering Servant as Levinas saw him
already loved his enemy and would suffer for him.
Derrida knows the history of philosophy
very well and especially works with Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche as he develops his own philosophy.
Classical philosophy was based upon the four D’s
of demonstrating a thesis with proper definitions,
key distinctions, and a dialectical answering
of objections to those first three procedures.
As Derrida thought about ethics as first philosophy
he saw with Kierkegaard that we cannot get
objective certainty about religious ethical decisions.
Rather those decisions made over the abyss
of indecidability will bring us to Derrida’s four D’s
of deconstructing demonstrations, by showing
the dissemination of definitions and the differance
of all distinctions that takes dialectics into
the realm of an existential uncertainty about decision.
Derrida’s aporetic faith lead from pride to humility
as he discovered a logic of the paradox and
its mixed opposites that governed each decision
that we make over the abyss of indecidability.
It moved him from pretension to honesty
as the question of responsibility about the
dissemination of all knowledge and definition
led him to a metaphysics of excess.
It led him from being ponderous to being humorous
with a psychology of the decentered self
because of the differancing of all distinctions.
It led him from being pompous to being healthy
because of his new epistemology of embracing
uncertainty as he saw justice as deconstruction.
With this Derrida made clear for me
the meaning of a postmodern philosophy.
None of the modernists from Luther and Descartes
to Calvin and Hobbes, to Henry VIII and Locke,
to Newton and Rousseau, to Hume and Kant
and to Hegel, Marx, and Adam Smith got to
this postmodern view that Levinas and Derrida
spell out with such philosophical clarity.
One could show that their postmodernity
goes back to the premodernity of the Franciscans
as their thought culminated in the metaphysics
of excess with Scotus’s haecceity and then
the consequent nominalism of Ockham’s epistemology.
With this help from Derrida I came to see
how Kierkegaard had first clearly spelled out
the logic of mixed opposites as he built his
philosophy around the paradox of the God-man.
Levinas’s definition of glory as a manifesting
of the unmanifest even in its unmanifestness
clearly expressed the paradox of giving glory
and this helped me to understand Kierkegaard’s
Works of Love, which would give that glory
and the Drama of Zarathustra, which revealed
more and more glory with each act of the Drama.
Any act of love that we perform, be it of
Nietzschean
