Why Levinas?

Finally, here’s something to write.

I must say that 60% of my philosophical life is spent with and for Emmanuel Levinas. Yes, I never grew tired of him. But my sojourn with this philosopher is like a teeny-bopper love story that ended with a shotgun marriage. I started out starstruck, making an undergrad thesis about him as an effective proponent of postmodernity. Seeing the nuances of being responsible, I tried solving the problem of justice, however through a scapegoat – the Holy Scriptures (A Levinasian Hermeneutics of the Anawim). Realizing that I could have just played around despite my conviction that I have proven enough points, I felt the need to go into the depths of the paradigm in order to directly confront its immanent problems and perhaps also to escape from the grandstanding tendencies of intellectual snobs who earn their degrees by discursive necrophilia (taken from Dr. Hornedo – love for the dead i.e., penchance to resurrect dead issues) or complicating life by a.) deceitfully giving élan vital to tribal axioms, b.) synthesizing concepts with highfaluting names as if they are just mixing chemicals in a beaker, or c.) putting up an ontological-epistemological-psychological discourse to what a beauty title contender could just summarize in two words, “WORLD PEACE”.

I’m doing a Levinasian dissertation for the following reasons: 1. his philosophy deserves to be treated in the most human sense, 2. to flex his paradigm to pastoral, developmental and formation concerns (teaching, religious formation, good governance –philosophers, I believe, can also handle these concerns), 3. to humble transcendental treatments to a concept that is supposed to be lived, 4. to show that this is best applied by people who may not have even thought of it (ontology can never create saints). My previous works were all ambitious, but were detached from what people should understand about him. Now I have a simpler task, but I’d like to come up with foreboding ethical challenges.

There are many things that should be cleared up in the philosophy of Levinas, not because he’s wrong but because he did not write anything clear. (Sorry…) There is a big difference in the "flavor" of his written works and his interviews. Levinas’ writings are difficult; interviews on the other hand are easy. The text is by itself a misnomer since it is so open to different contexts. Levinas employed phenomenology as his mode of inquiry, but he kind of avoided Heidegger and so tried hard to avoid the ontological-talk. For trying so hard, he was not able to avoid the Heideggerian mode of talking. His readers tried to liberate him from this mode, setting him and his paradigm at the intersection of every imaginable philosophical topic. As a result, he is then taken as a post-structuralist, even postmodern.

I think the easiest way to get what Levinas means is to seek for his immediate and candid, all of these i think are evident in his interviews. When he "talks" of his philosophy, he’s being human.

I find a need to understand Levinas in the most human sense that is possible, and that is to go back to the corporeality of the ethical encounter. I find the profundity of Levinas’ concept of responsibility when he talks of it in the simplest way – the human side of Levinas shows the human side of his ethics. And I think that’s how Levinas would like us to understand the meaning of responsibility.

My task then in my dissertation is not to parrot Levinas and more definitely not his minions, not even to glorify and synthesize concepts – it is to bring out what is most human in his ethics, to extend what Levinas could have discussed when asked casually of what he truly means and how he’d like responsibility to be predicated and absorbed by mankind. In my work, I’d like to bring out the following, which I think are truly Levinasian: a.) the humble acceptance that an “authentic corporeal encounter” exists, b.) the primordially-organic character of goodness, c.) the possibility of saintliness, d.) the possibility of giving something and perhaps even of all despite having less and e.) the possibility for human solidarity of out of a common orientation to goodness.

Just that, and I think what I’d like to do already fits for a dissertation. Simple, but human – I didn’t dream of big things in the first place, I just want my work to be meaningful.

So help me God.