Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Auschwitz, Politics, and the Twentieth Century
- 2 Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy
- 3 The Ethical Content of the Face-to-Face
- 4 Philosophy, Totality, and the Everyday
- 5 Meaning, Culture, and Language
- 6 Subjectivity and the Self
- 7 God and Philosophy
- 8 Time, Messianism, and Diachrony
- 9 Ethical Realism and Contemporary Moral Philosophy
- 10 Beyond Language and Expressibility
- 11 Judaism, Ethics, and Religion
- Conclusion: Levinas and the Primacy of the Ethical – Kant, Kierkegaard, and Derrida
- Appendix: Facing Reasons
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - God and Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Auschwitz, Politics, and the Twentieth Century
- 2 Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy
- 3 The Ethical Content of the Face-to-Face
- 4 Philosophy, Totality, and the Everyday
- 5 Meaning, Culture, and Language
- 6 Subjectivity and the Self
- 7 God and Philosophy
- 8 Time, Messianism, and Diachrony
- 9 Ethical Realism and Contemporary Moral Philosophy
- 10 Beyond Language and Expressibility
- 11 Judaism, Ethics, and Religion
- Conclusion: Levinas and the Primacy of the Ethical – Kant, Kierkegaard, and Derrida
- Appendix: Facing Reasons
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Our appreciation of what philosophy is at any given historical moment, how it is understood by its practitioners and derided by its critics, is helped by examining its relationships with what is commonly called theology and religion. The stories of the relation between philosophy, religion, and theology are complex and lengthy. Frankly, the more we understand of these stories, the better would be our grasp of Levinas's references to religion and God and his penchant for using theological and religious expressions to refer to the face and the ethical. Both features are present early in Levinas's works. Long before Totality and Infinity, he could say, “The absolute which supports justice is the absolute status of the interlocutor. His modality of being and of manifesting himself consist in turning his face to me, in being a face…. This is not at all a theological thesis; yet God could not be God without first having been this interlocutor.” These words come from 1954; even then, Levinas struggled to articulate how his insight about the central importance of the face-to-face and responsibility is related to God and religion. His views, I believe, certainly changed and developed, but at the same time they retained a common core. In this chapter, I want to look at what he says about God, how he should be understood, and why he says it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Discovering Levinas , pp. 174 - 207Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007