Abrahams dilemma a levinasian ethical exegesis of the divine command in genesis 22

Chapter One Defining Abraham’s “Dilemma” 1. Introduction: Religious Violence and Divine Commands Religious violence has never ceased to be a thorny experience of world history. In every corner of the world, wars are waged for reasons of race, nationalism, etc. and also religion. Thus, religion and violence often go together. At the beginning of the 21st century, the tragedy of terrorist attacks on September 11 2001, in the land of the United States has reminded members of this global village a fact: We are living in a world in which religious violence has been a recurring pain to humanity. Some tough questions are inevitably raised to the communities of faiths: Does religion not aim to bring peace and harmony to the human race? Are the divine commands of God not demanding his believers to love each other and to renounce the enmity among foes? Then a gnawing question casts a long shadow to religious belief in our time: Does theistic faith inevitably lead to religious violence? Besides the mentioned pressing questions, it is more stunning to read what Hent de Vries claims, “No violence without (some) religion; no religion without (some) violence,” in the opening of his recent magnum opus Religion and Violence.1 Can his claim be justified? Borrowed mainly from Emmanuel Levinas, de Vries locates the understanding of religion as “the relation between self and the other Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence (London: The Johns and Hopkins University Press, 2002), p.1. p.1 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com without constituting a totality.”2 In this case, religion is supposedly bringing forth the otherness of others before me or within self, in spite of the possible differences that exist among peoples in terms of cultures, languages, races, nations, etc. Every living soul is valuable, honourable and sublime. Having said that, however, de Vries evaluates the definition of religion mentioned above in the religious experience that Kierkegaard considered as an incident which would have cause one to fear and to tremble. What is that incident? Those who are familiar with Kierkegaard’s groundbreaking masterpiece, namely Fear and Trembling, would have no difficulty in identifying the cause of the fear as lying in a God who commands his servant to sacrifice an innocent life. By taking up the account of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible, chapter 22 of the Book of Genesis, Kierkegaard triggers the fear in a God who commands his faithful believer to carry out a command to kill an innocent life that causes traumatic pain in the God-fearing believer. To obey or not, one is inevitably trembling before this commanding God. The story of Abraham is closely relevant to my endeavour in exploring a possible interpretation of the difficulty that Abraham faces, which sheds new light on the issue of religious violence. It is helpful to read the story before we delve into the discussion of the relevant issues:3 Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" "Here I am," he replied. Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Ibid. Explicitly de Vries appropriates Levinas’s definition of religion as found in Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonson Lingis (Pittsburg, PA: Duquesque University Press, 1969), p. 40. Of course, Levinas would never ascribe the other as the Divine Other. For, the other is always the human other in Levinas’s definition. The translation of the Scripture I am using is the New International Version. p.2 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about." Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, "Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you." Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?" "Yes, my son?" Abraham replied. "The fire and wood are here," Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them went on together. When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. Then he 11 But the angel of the LORD called out to him from heaven, "Abraham! p.3 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com Abraham!" "Here I am," he replied. 12 "Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son." 13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide. And to this day it is said, "On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided." 15 The time angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second 16 and said, "I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me." 19 Then Abraham returned to his servants, and they set off together for Beersheba. And Abraham stayed in Beersheba. In this narrative, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac as a burnt offering. At first glance, the biblical narrative heightens the kind of ethics which seeks to be based on God’s will or divine commands, namely the divine p.4 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com command morality, and raises a perpetual religious terror embedded within it: to obey divine commands gives rise to violence. It is easily seen in the history of religion, especially in that of monotheistic faiths, founded in the tradition of the Hebrew Bible, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam that martyrdom for the sake of a commanding God has been the climax or consummation of a devoted life to God. Be it in the name of a “Just War” in the West, or the “Holy War” in the Middle East, religious peoples see death in battles against their “religious” enemies as a sacrifice to God, for whom they are prepared to die in honour, and in whom they are sanctified. Hence a religion that champions a pious devotion to divine commands inevitably falls into the ethico-political semantics of violence. In the shadow of a global religious terrorism that has broken out at the turn of a new century, it is thus crucial for members of a multi-faith society to ask: Can the religious peoples of the Abrahamic faith(s) -- obeying divine commands on the one hand, and loving others as themselves on the other -- build a more hospitable community? In this research I would like to address the issue from a philosophic point of view. In the first chapter, I attempt to define the “dilemma” in the Genesis 22 narrative, in which the divine command is an indispensable element that causes the crisis in Abraham’s faith in an all-loving God. This leads to various attempts in resolving the conflict between religion and morality, which will be evaluated more fully in the second chapter. Through a survey and a review of the various ways in which major figures such as Immanuel Kant, Phillip Quinn, Robert M. Adams and Kierkegaard try to overcome the conflict, it is seen that all their theories seem to be inadequate in one way or another in overcoming the dilemma, which points to p.5 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com the need to reinterpret the divine command in Genesis 22. Particularly at this point I find Levinas’s ethics promising in working out the task. In the third chapter I will bring forth the Achilles’ heel of the divine command theory – the commanding God, which serves an interpretative role in the entire endeavour of reinterpreting the divine command in Genesis 22. Applying Levinas’s critique of an ontological conceptualization of God that ultimately challenges one to shoulder an absolute ethical responsibility for the other (or the Other), I set up the backdrop to introduce a Levinasian ethical exegesis of Genesis 22, in which the commanding God is inviting the faithful and obedient Abraham to be responsible for his neighbour, namely Isaac his only son. In the last part of the chapter, I will give an ethical exegesis of the Genesis 22 to round up the search for an alternate interpretation of the narrative so as to overcome Abraham’s dilemma. Before getting to the exegesis part, we have to understand the efforts of some leading figures in the discussion of the divine command theory and its relevancy to Genesis 22. 2. The Divine Command Theory and Genesis 22 What is the divine command theory? Classically, the issue of the divine command theory is formulated in Socrates’s dialogue with Euthyphro, in which Socrates asked Euthyphro, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it (are they) pious because they love it?” (Euthyphro, 10a) To say the gods love X so X is pious is to say that the commands or approvals of the gods are without rational justification, in which case piety is dependent on God and deemed to be arbitrary; p.6 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com traditionally, such conception is termed as the Divine Command Theory (hereafter, DCT). On the other hand, to say X is pious so the gods love X, is to say that their commands or approvals are rationally justified, and it is to that justification, rather than to the action or attitude of the authority (gods or God), that we must look for the meaning of the normative term; such conception is usually termed as the Morality Autonomy Theory (hereafter, MAT). For centuries, philosophers, theologians, and moralists have enquired into the plausibility and workability of these two theories. Though I am not going to give a similar weight of attention to the MAT, I am aware of some significant contributions of the philosophers who hold fast to the MAT. It is worth to take note of the voice of one contemporary theorist of the MAT, Professor Kai Nielson, internationally known for his works on the philosophies of ethics and religion. Nielson comments that the statement of faith “God is good” is a tautology, which bears no weight in ethical instruction by virtue of “God” not being a value or attribute, while “good” is a moral value or moral standard. Hence God has nothing to with the moral value of the acts one is performing. He concludes in his God and the Grounding of Morality, “God, let us assume, could, and indeed did, create the world, but he could not – logically could not – create moral values. Existence is one thing; value is another.”5 Nielsen explicitly addresses his thesis of “an ethics without God” to religious moralists, urging them to abandon their infantile conviction in a commanding God and be courageous in Cf. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), s.v. “Euthyphro’s Dilemma,” by Gareth B. Matthews. Kai Nielsen, God and the Grounding of Morality (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1991), p. 218; also his Ethics Without God (London: Prometheus Books, 1973). p.7 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com making moral decisions for the welfare of their society as adults. Admittedly, Nielson has posed a convincing argument for the MAT, but nonetheless, he has overlooked another plausible way to bring both the MAT and DCT into harmony such that, on the one, we are obliged to make moral decisions independently of God, and on the other, take the ends of the moral consideration to be compatible with the divine commands. This is exemplified in Kant’s theory of ethics, which will be explicated in fuller details in the following chapter. Most religious believers -- particularly Jews, Christians and Moslems -- tend to accept the DCT, and claim that something is good because God commands it. God creates good and evil by his commands, or to put it in another way, it is God’s commanding that makes something good; it is God’s forbidding that makes something evil. Theistic moralists such as Immanuel Kant, and some other contemporary philosophers such as Richard G. Swinburne, James Rachels, Robert Young, Peter Geach, Dewi Z. Phillips, Richard M. Adams, Phillip Quinn, Avi Sagi, also join the camp, striving to uphold the DCT in various ways. For these divine command theorists, religion is not necessarily in conflict with morality, rather, religion reinforces moral strivings and efficacy by virtue of its precision and clarity in moral teachings, instructions, and most importantly, the archetypal models in the tradition and the sacred texts of a religion. All in all, the commanding God is the one who shapes morality for the welfare of individual believers and vast humanity. Furthermore, some DCT supporters claim that without the commanding God, morality tends to be arbitrary, or naturalistic and egocentric at best. God, be it in a realist, critical realist or non-realist idea, has to Kai Nielsen, God and the Grounding of Morality, pp. 221-22. p.8 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com be the pivotal point of reference for moral accountability and ethical responsibility. Through God our moral concerns and behaviours are not merely matters for the sake of humanism, but also acts of worship and doxology. Having said that, the theory is by no means free from problems, especially when we come to some biblical accounts in which we see numbers of divine commands in the Bible seemingly violate the belief in an all-loving and faithful God. A characteristic narrative is Genesis 22. From the outside, we find Abraham facing two horns: to obey God's command, which means to sacrifice his son Isaac, or, to keep his moral duty of not killing any innocent life, which means he has to disobey the divine command. The biblical account in Genesis 22 violates the belief in a loving and faithful God, who, supposedly, ought to prohibit the killing of innocent lives. Of old, this biblical account has been problematic in both philosophical and theological circles. Nonetheless, the biblical scholar Dr. R. W. L. Moberly comments that the story “has been one of the highpoints in scripture where the nature and meaning of the Bible as a whole is illuminated with unusual clarity,”7 meaning that, the story “has served as an interpretative key to other parts of scripture, and has interacted with continuing post-biblical patterns of faith and life.”8 For the religious communities in the tradition of the Abrahamic faith, the story gives an everlasting archetypal figure of the one who fears God and obeys God at all cost.9 Yet some persistent questions concerning this story always recur: How could one obey a God who commands to kill an innocent life? Should a R. W. L. Moberly, The Bible, Theology, and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 71. Ibid. The central concern of Genesis is highlighted as “the fear of God,” Ibid., pp. 78-97. A fuller account on the exegetical tradition of Genesis 22 can be found in Ronald M. Green, Religion and Moral Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). p.9 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com pious soul follow such a divine command? One of the most furious critics of religion, Bertrand Russell utterly rejects the God of Job who shows “no hint” of “divine goodness” but demands Job to worship his “naked power”.10 Obviously Russell would have no hesitation to say “no” to such a divine command and such a commanding God. It is likewise for Immanuel Kant, who, though embracing the divine command theory (as far as it supplies the ratio essendi to moral reasoning and autonomous freedom), nonetheless remains skeptical that such an abhorrent command should be a divine command.11 In the following chapter, we will come to Kant’s response to Genesis 22 and will give his viewpoint a considerable length of discussion. 3. Moral Dilemmas and Logic Yet some philosophers and theologians would find it difficult to agree with the possibility of anyone facing moral dilemmas in any situation of moral decision, least of all the father of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, Abraham. Hence it is a methodological necessity for us to define “moral dilemma”. What is meant by “moral dilemma”? Classically, in Book I of Plato’s Republic,12 Cephalus defines “Justice” as speaking the truth and paying one’s debt. Socrates quickly refutes this definition by posing the possibility that it could be wrong to pay certain debts, for instance, returning a borrowed weapon to a friend who is mentally disturbed and 10 Bertrand Russell, "A Free Man's Worship," in The Basic Writtings of Bertrand Russell, ed. R. Egner and L. Denonn (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), p. 67. 11 Anh Tuan Nuyen gives an excellent summary of Kant’s DCT and MAT which are interchangeable in terms of practical reason and categorical ethics. See A. T. Nuyen, "What Does the Free Man Worship?" Internation Journal for Philosophy of Religion 46 (1999), p. 41-2; also A. T. Nuyen, "Is Kant a Divine Command Theorist?," History of Philosophical Quaterly 15, (October 1998); and Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 12 Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press). p.10 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com highly useful and applicable to understand the biblical God too. This shall be elaborated through the exegesis of Genesis 22 in this chapter. (1) Test: a double-will setting The narrative begins with “God tested Abraham.” Obviously, the nature of a test is a double-will process. The first will is to posit the examinee in a testing ground with no certainty of the end or the result. The second will is to assess the examinee for his or her performance throughout the test, bringing forth the resulting evaluation and conclusion. In the context of being tested, Abraham obeyed the command (the first will), nonetheless he was also hoping that the faithful God would have prepared him a substitute sacrifice for Isaac (the second will). Levinas writes concerning the near sacrifice of Isaac, "Perhaps Abraham's ear for hearing the voice that brought him back to the ethical order was the highest moment in this drama."205 Elsewhere Levinas comments that Abraham is greater than Noah because he appealed to God for the few righteous ones in Sodom and Gomorra when God willed to destroy the two cities for their sins and evils. But not Noah, who did everything to comply with God's command, and saved his household from the flood, yet did not appeal for those who perished. Better than Noah, Abraham asked God to conform to His divine command standard. This is why, Abraham and not Noah is called “our father.”206 Any test conceives of this sort of double-will motif, on the one hand, the testing itself is an open-ended question to the examinee, on the other hand, the testing is a process of revealing the answer of the question from the end of the examiner. 205 Levinas, Proper Name, p. 74. Richard Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 211. 206 p.113 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com (2) God: the Other Otherwise in the Hebrew Bible For Levinas, the God is the Good beyond Being. Under this light, the commanding God is not adequately perceived as the being par excellence among beings. Rather, in the trace of a face God is revealed in such a state of presence and absence. By phenomenological analysis of a face, theology is able to its job of God-talk in a new way. Levinas would not hesitate to clarify that his notion of the presence of God is not the incarnated God in human face. Rather, God is present only while you are faced with a human face which demands your ethical responsibility. 207 In this way, God is not a being-in-the-world. God is the Other, and other than others, the other otherwise. To juxtapose the infinite God and beings who are bound to the structure of the world is, in any sense, an absolutely wrong kind of thematization of God. The God who commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, is the God beyond the language of beings. But, we have to obey the command to kill an innocent life? No, because God is the Good before Being. He is the “Good/God”. For Levinas, the Good/God comes to mind to wake us from the stable status of a rationalized ethics. It is a test of our ethical vigilance for others. As such Genesis 22 is a narrative or a narrative-metaphor to represent the infinity that comes into the finite ones—Abraham, Isaac, and the readers -- to the deepest level of their consciousness. The infinite dwelling within Isaac the finite one awakes Abraham to respond to the divine command ethically and in proximity to the other. Richard Cohen expounds the ethical exegesis of Levinas as follows, 208 207 Typical in Levinas’s “God and Philosophy,” Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 64; “Hermeneutics and Beyond,” Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 108. 208 Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy, pp. 340-41. p.114 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com Exegesis, never forgetful of the ultimate moral underpinning of the real, and never forgetful of the imperfect or “unredeemed” moral character of the reality we live concretely, can show the good in an apparent evil as well as it can show the evil in an apparent good. And it does this without the least hint of sophistry, knowing well the difference between good and evil. Holiness is found in the “Thou shall not kill” – this is the living word of the living God, inscribed on the face of every other who faces. This is Levinas’s teaching. This is why he roots himself in religion – but not in the “God talk” of a self-confident faith, nor in the fearful and trembling faith of a Kierkegaard, a faith whose potential immorality is more fearsome than fearful, more terrifying than trembling. (3) Abraham: the Self that is Responsible for the Other In Levinas’s analysis of self as subject, the self is asleep when it has subjectivized others into the I. This assimilating of others is a reduction of every alterity of others into the Same. In this sense, Abraham could be at fault if he subjectivizes God and the divine command in the ghetto of self. However, God grants Abraham a totally new milieu to know God by negating his preconception of God. The test brings Abraham into a crisis where he fell between the two stools: promise of God (Isaac) and the command of God (to kill Isaac). In the dilemma, Abraham's self is brought to the brink of ruin. In such an extremely critical situation, Abraham found no way out in his self, but in the other, yet not in the pole other than his pole which he found in the other, rather, in the other that is beyond the other, the other otherwise. Such a relation of I-Other is not reducible by any totalizing intent p.115 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com of thought. It is “a relation without relations,” which is vividly depicted as “Abrahamic departure from totality,”209 in which “this ‘non-relation’ to the other cannot be described in terms of ‘relation,’ because every relation constitutes a totality whose elements are ultimately reversible. Since the absolute exteriority of the other precludes reversibility and totalization, there is no ‘other’ pole to form a relation. Therefore, ‘toward the other’ cannot be grasped as relation.”210 The “relation without relations” gives Abraham a possibility to escape from the boxedin situation. The other otherwise that emerges on the face of the other (Isaac), calls upon Abraham to bear an asymmetrical responsibility, which was anticipated in his first response to the commanding God, “Here I am!”211 Likewise, Abraham is responsible for Isaac, to give himself to him, in Levinas’s expression, 212 “It is the ‘here I am,’ said to the neighbor to whom I am given over, and in which I announce peace, that is, my responsibility for the other. ‘In making language flower upon their lips…Peace, peace to him who is far off, and to him who is near, says the Eternal…” (Isaiah 57:19). (4) Isaac: the Face that Demands Abraham's Ethical Response From the surface of the narrative, Isaac is a “hostage” of Abraham. A hostage demands nothing from the one who takes him captive. But Isaac as a hostage, has caused the one taking him captive, namely Abraham, to face the fate they share 209 Krzysztof Ziarek, "Semantics of Proximity: Language and the Other in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas," Research In Phenomenology XIX (1989), p. 214. 210 Ibid., p. 214. For Levinas, Abraham is the archetypal figure whose journey into the foreign land, essentially outgoing and transcendent, contrasts with the Western philosophy of ontology, as the Odyssean journey, in intent, which remains locked in immanence and its end is always a return to its starting point. Cf. Michael Purcell, Mystery and Method: the Other in Rahner And Levinas (Marquette: Marquette University Press, 1998), pp. 172-81. 211 Genesis 22: 1. 212 Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 75. p.116 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com together. It is the “binding”213 between Abraham and his only son Isaac. In Levinas’s understanding of fecundity, the subject I “discovers” oneself in the child, an other who is transcendent, or rather, in “a total transcendence, the transcendence of trans-substantiation”. 214 He goes on, “the child is a stranger (Isaiah 49), but a stranger who is not only mine, for he is me. He is me a stranger to myself.”215 By binding the parent-child relation in unicity, he stresses, “the relation with the child -- that is, the relation with the other that is not a power, but fecundity – establishes relationship with the absolute future, of infinite time.”216 Obviously the command to kill Isaac threatened Abrahamic line. If the killing had happened, the eternity offered to all humanity would have vanished. Someone has to speak out for the terrible situation. Yet the hostage remained silent, at least during the three days of the journey to the mountain before his father sent him to the altar. In the journey, Isaac remained silent. Abraham likewise. Did the silence provoke violence in the face of violence, the violence par excellence, due to the condition that Levinas’s nonviolent language would only without the verb “to be”? 217 This is the question posted by one of the most prominent critics of Levinas, who is none other than Derrida who, comments as follows, 218 Thus, in its most elevated nonviolent urgency, denouncing the passage through Being and the moment of the concept, Levinas’s 213 The noun “binding” is taken from the Hebrew verb in Genesis 22:9 “Akedah”. Cf. Moberly, The Bible, Theology, and Faith, p. 71. 214 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 267. 215 Ibid., p. 267. 216 Ibid., p. 268. 217 Derrida gives an in-depth analysis of and a direct response to Levinas’s idea of a nonviolent language in his Totality and Infinity. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 183-86. 218 Ibid., p. 185. p.117 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com thought would not only propose an ethics without law, as we said above, but also a language without a phrase. Which would be entirely coherent if the face was only a glance, but it is also speech; and in speech it is the phrase which makes the cry of need become the expression of desire. Now, there is no phrase which is indeterminate, that is, which does not pass through the violence of the concept. Violence appears with articulation. And the latter is opened only by (the at first preconceptual) circulation of Being. Based on such a comment, Levinas works out his philosophy of language in a fuller and more sophisticated version which appears in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. In the previous chapter, I have discussed Levinas anxiety over the language of Being, by which the Greek voice subjugates and assimilates all the otherness of others into a totality. Now, we shall take Levinas’s “Otherwise Said” into the context of Genesis 22. When approaching the place of offering, Isaac did speak to break the silence (as Derrida desired), “Father…the fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” However the voice did not offer any substitution for the sacrifice. The violence still prevails in the narrative. Levinas has nonetheless given the priority to the Unsaid of the Said, the unsayingness that exposes in the narrative. In the Greek (Western) Philosophy of Being the possibility to stop the violence is to voice up; yet for the Hebrew Philosophy of Ethics, it is the silence that breaks through the Greek voice pointing to the other beyond other. Thus a non-content ethics is unfolded in the silence, in which it demands a relation (the Unsaying) without relation (the Saying) that is p.118 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com more ethical than the spoken word (the Said). Levinas responds to Derrida’s criticism as follows, 219 Indeed, it would be necessary one day to find, setting out from Saying and its own meaning, Saying’s correlation with the Said – and this is not impossible. But the saying is not exhausted in this Said, and the sign did not spring from the soil of the ontology of the Said, to receive from it its paradoxical structure of relation (which astonished Plato to the point of pushing him to parricide) and make up for a self-eluding presence. The sign, like the Saying, is the extra-ordinary event (running counter to presence) of exposure to others, of subjection to others; i.e. the event of subjectivity. It is the one-for-the-other. It is meaning that is not exhausted in a simple absence of intuition and of presence. Levinas enquires further by appealing to the irreducible nature of the otherness, that is beyond the Said, “Is not substitution, replacement, the one-for-the-other – in its decisive suspension of the for itself – the for-the-other of my responsibility for others?” It is the ethics that the Derridian deconstructive analysis aims for, which is accentuated in Levinas’s words, “as a lacking of self is not the surplus (which would be yet another promise of happiness and a residuum of ontology) but the better of proximity, an excellence, an elevation, the ethics before being or the Good before Being…”220 219 220 Levinas, Proper Names, p. 61. Ibid., p. 61. p.119 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com Here again we come to the semantics of proximity in Levinas's philosophy of language, which has been explicated more fully in his two essays: "Meaning and Sense" and "God and Philosophy", after his magnum opus Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. One can locate his theory of language in the backdrop of Heidegger's philosophy of meaning, which is summed up in Levinas's words, "For Western philosophy meaning or intelligibility coincide with the manifestation of being."221 We have discussed in chapter three how Levinas encounters Heidegger's philosophy of language and meaning. Here we recapitulate the discussion and push the implication further to apply Levinas's understanding of meaning as the Saying beyond the Said, that meaning cannot be translated into a gesture of Being. But the text of Genesis 22 had been said and this inevitably reduces it to the horizon of Being, so how could the reader discover the meaning in Genesis 22 so that he or she is able to encounter the face behind it? The text must be said again, so that the Unsaid can be exposed. Through saying, when the Said is heard, the Unsaid in the Said will be spelt out in the hither side, the unsaying is then exposed in the ethical relations between the hearer of the said and the face behind the said. Levinas gives a vivid picture of the unsayingness of the language being said, the trace of the trace as the erasure of the trace.222 Thus, the meaning (unsaid) of the text (said) bears the trace (unsaying) of the face (saying). The process of the exegesis is dynamic in nature. It leaves a trace, and immediately the trace erases, and forms a new trace, then the trace erases 221 222 Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 155. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, p. 91. p.120 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com again .giving rise to unceasing rupture of meaning. In this sense, the multiinterpretation and unending interpretations of Genesis 22 are the ethical task to heighten the Good/God beyond Being. Hence, says Levinas in the last paragraph of Otherwise than Being, 223 In this work which does not seek to restore any ruined concept, destitution and the destituting of the subject not remain without signification: after the death of a certain god inhabiting the world behind the scenes, the substitution of the hostage discovers the trace, the unpronounceable inscription, of what, always already past, always 'he,' does not enter into any present, to which are suited not the nouns designating beings, or the verbs in which their essence resounds, but that which, as a pronoun, marks with its seal all that a noun can convey. Elsewhere Levinas spells out this philosophy of language in the light of ethics,224 Ethics is like the reduction of certain language. In this respect, it is more adequate; but I will also say that the Saying must be accompanied immediately by an Unsaying, and the Unsaying must again be unsaid in its manner, and there, there is no stopping; there are no definitive formulations. 223 224 Ibid., p. 185. Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 88. p.121 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com (5) Journey: into a Foreign Land with No Wish to Return Abraham is always an itinerary man who wanders into an unknown foreign land. By such a metaphor it gives us another angle to look into the narrative. In the journey, Abraham was heading to an unknown destination, which is impossible to perceive or to imagine. The itinerary begins with Abraham’s response to the command of God. Isaac was asked to follow his father to join the journey. In other words, while Abraham was woken by the divine command, it is perhaps Isaac rather than Abraham who is really the archetypal ethical person for he is utterly passive, vulnerable and open.225 Isaac is the one who is passive with a passivity more passive than any passivity joined to the itinerary.226 The destination is full of uncertainties and unknown matters. As for the divine command, on the one hand, it is crystal clear in terms of its instructive content; but, on the other hand, the exact outcome of the divine command is still unknowable along the journey. Still of course, Abraham has always been the archetype for Levinas. The itinerary Abraham took had indeed displaced himself and he had become homeless. In short, Abrahamic itinerary is a way to resist the philosophy which underpins modern thinking as the absorption of otherness into the ontology of politics, economics, education, social classes, etc. To be homeless, or a refugee, is to relate to the world in a different way. Purcell, after contrasting the Abrahamic with Odyssean itinerary, writes, 227 225 It is interestingly to see Purcell praises the obedient Sarah in a similar way. Cf. Purcell, Mystery and Method, p. 177. 226 Parallel to Levinas’s saying about the infinite that comes to mind, “The breakup of the actuality of thought in the ‘idea of God’ is a passivity more passive than any passivity, like the passivity of a trauma through which the idea of God would have placed in me.” Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 64. 227 Purcell, Mystery and Method, p. 178. p.122 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com In other words, the displacement which accompanies exile signifies the dependency of the self upon what is dependent upon the Other. To be homeless, or refugee, in addition to the many needs which it brings to the fore (food, clothing, shelter), point to a more fundamental vulnerability which is an essential openness to the Other. Whereas the self-satisfied and self-complacent self enjoys the security of its own “place in the sun,” and is deaf to the Other; the exile, living under a foreign and alien sun, has lost that place and must wander in another land, which is the land of an other. The Abrahamic itinerary is different from that of Odyssey; it acts as a metaphor to delineate the non-indifference, that is to say, a difference that is not being defined in polemical relations, but in a relation otherwise than relations. It happened in the journey to Mount Moriah when the destination was seen without a definite end. Is Levinas doing “an opposite of philosophy,” or empiricism? Already Ziarek answers the question so well, 228 It is probably the importance of the Abrahamic journey and of the Judaic prescription of "doing before understanding" from the Talmudic lectures. It is used by Levinas to suggest a direction, a direction without a thematizable destination, yet not an empty one. It is a direction (un sens) that "makes sense" par excellence. Without that direction which "makes sense" there would be no meaning, there would be no Odyssey. Therefore it seems legitimate 228 Krzysztof Ziarek, "Semantics of Proximity," p. 220-21. p.123 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com to say that Abraham is not really an opposite of Ulysses, and that Levinas' writing is not an opposite of philosophy. To be sure, no matter what would happen there in the mountain, Abraham would have said, "I am here for you." (6) Ram: the Substitution for Isaac Has Abraham failed to see his responsibility before the face of Isaac? Probably yes, but just momentary. It reveals the vulnerability of the knight of faith or the father of faith. But his vulnerability opens to the Infinite as a break-in to consciousness, albeit taking place in his very passivity of consciousness. In turn, vulnerability brings awareness of our responsibility for the other, or rather, to be a substitution for the other. The term “substitution” which Levinas employs in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence is to re-examine the Western philosophical concept of identity, which he has failed to so in his previous Totality and Infinity.229 The identity of I is challenged in the notion of “substitution,” particularly when self-coincidence, self-possession, and sovereignty are perceived in Hegelian ontology as resulting in the I assimilating all the others into itself, or the I to see itself the same as others. Substitution puts the Hegelian I -- the ultimate reality that synthesizes the same and the other -- into question. Hence, Levinas writes,230 Modern anti-humanism, which denies the primacy that the human person, a free end in itself, has for the signification of being, is true 229 See the introductory notes in Levinas, “Substitution,” Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 230 Ibid., p. 94. 79. p.124 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com over and above the reasons it gives itself. It makes a place for subjectivity positing itself in abnegation, in sacrifice, and in substitution. Its great intuition is to have abandoned the idea of person as an end in itself. The Other is the end, and me, I am a hostage. To abandon the idea of person as an end in itself demands a substitution. Where is the substitution for a face? In the narrative, it was a ram that substitutes Isaac as a burnt offering. The fact is, the ram is given. Again, the given substitution is the only possibility to resolve Abraham’s dilemma, but it is the I in the narrative that is called to take the place for the other. Yet, would this encourage human sacrifice? Levinas writes,231 It is Me who is a substitution and sacrifice and not another, not the Other, in whom I would like to discover a soul identical to my own. To say that the soul should sacrifice itself for others would be to preach human sacrifice. To say that the ego is a substitution is not to proclaim the universality of a principle, the “essence” of an Ego, but, quite the contrary, it is to restore to the soul its egoity, which supports no generalization. From this situation, the way by which the logos attains to the essence of the ego, passes through the third party. 231 Ibid., p. 94. p.125 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com A balanced view of Ego, so that it will not be absorbed into a totality of human sacrifice, is to hold that the Ego is not universalizable.232 It has to be done in the presence of the third party, which demands justice and equality, conversely, it demands the Ego to move out to the other as a hostage, on the other hand. 5. Conclusion: Levinasian Ethical Exegesis of the divine command in Genesis 22 From the previous chapter in which is given an account of Levinas’s philosophy of language, we are informed that the text as the Said must be said and heard again. By saying the Said, the unsaid meaning is revealed. Only when the Said is said again, the Unsaid invites the hearer to take heed of the face behind the command in the height of ethics. The command to kill is thus a command that challenges the command of “Thou shall not kill.” At this critical point, the DCT is deemed to collapse if the divine command is to be interpreted literally. But through saying the Said, so the Unsaid could be heard and demands the hearer to respond ethically, then the divine command is a collapsing of God and ethics (the Good). Thus the divine command to kill is a revelation of the innocent face, which spells clearly “Thou shall not kill.” Isaac definitely needs a substitution rather than a slaughter. Thus the divine command in Genesis 22 is a disclosure of the innocent face to Abraham. The disclosure demands Abraham to look at the face and hear the voice from the commanding God. Levinas consistently asserts, 233 232 233 Ibid., p. 183-83, footnote 45. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 54. p.126 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com The presence of the face thus signifies an irreducible order, a command which puts a stop to the availability of consciousness. Consciousness is called into question by the face. Being called into question is not the same as becoming aware of this being called into question. The “absolute other” is not reflected in consciousness. It resists it to the extent that even its resistance is not in consciousness. Visitation consists in overwhelming the very egoism of the I which supports this conversion. A face confounds the intentionality that aims at it. As the narrative unfolds, the first hearing and the second hearing of the divine command(s) coincide. To use Levinas’s phenomenological terminology, in the first hearing, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about,” the receiver is in the state of sleep when the divine command breaks into his consciousness and wakes him up; in the second hearing, “Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not anything to him,” in the state of insomnia, the commanding God was breaking into Abraham’s vigilant mind to unthematize God and “interrupt” the previous command by returning Abraham to the ethical order. In this way the whole narrative brings the seemingly contradictory commands together into harmony. It heightens the ultimate divine command: "Thou shall not kill". The divine commands thus lead Abraham and Isaac to know a God as the other otherwise. Thus the divine command still stands the test in Genesis 22 because the essence of the language in the discourse reveals the face beyond the text itself by saying the said. Again, for Levinas, language is the only relation, p.127 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com which, despite the consequent thematization, self-identification and totalization at times, is "in essence non violent and respects the alterity of the other,"234 as what Levinas puts forth, "speaking is before anything else this way of coming from behind one's appearance, behind one's form, an openness in the openness."235 234 Krzysztof Ziarek, "Semantics of Proximity: Language and the Other in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinasl," Research In Phenomenology XIX (1989), p. 227. 235 Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p.53. p.128 PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.com [...]... see in the delineation of the idea of God and Abraham in Kant, Kierkegaard and, more importantly, in Levinas Thirdly, the DCT has caused the transcendent dimension of the commanding God disappearing from the existential context of the moral agents, to a point where the weight of the whole story is posited on the “reasonableness” of the divine command and the moral maxim Lastly, a divine command, as... language, human as a being is named Da-sein (being there) We are human beings Consequently, qua beings, the law of being is our law Yet we have to make sure what the “law of being” is Levinas elaborates the meaning of the law of being clearly:37 A being is something that is attached to being, to its own being, which is always a persistence of being That is Darwin’s idea The being of animals is a struggle... practical reasoning that produces moral maxims is in line with the divine commands in the Bible Then, in order to avoid the dangers of arbitrariness in divine commands, he undertakes a narrow path to strike a balance between practical reasoning and divine commands: What God commands must be morally good and also must conform to the moral laws that are produced by autonomous practical reason 48 As such, Kant... examine the various attempts of Kant, Quinn, Adams, Kierkegaard and finally points to a more promising way in Levinas’s philosophy of ethics One may wonder why Levinas stands out for the divine command theorists, since Levinas has never claimed explicitly that he is a divine command theorist I am going to show in the following chapters that Levinas’s theory of ethics is different and unique among theories... resolve the problem of the DCT is equivalent to resolving the dilemma that Abraham was faced In this chapter I suggest we should situate Abraham’s dilemma in a broader landscape of philosophical and theological enquiries, into which the text of Genesis 22 and its underlying implication for the DCT will be evaluated The strategy is to begin the search from Kant’s DCT and his reading of Genesis 22; and then... on the one hand, holds fast to the traditional idea of divine commands as instructive guidelines for moral life; but on the other hand, maintains a consistent autonomous reasoning for the advancement of humanism and scientific knowledge It is thus not out of a blind chance that Kant has always taken the DCT and the MAT into his fabrication of ethics How does he strike the balance of these two seemingly... inadequate to deal with, and are deemed to fail before the test of Abraham’s dilemma? I think there are a few elements that are lacking in the DCT Firstly, the DCT does not conceive of an interpretive capacity to expound the narrative of Genesis 22 Secondly, the DCT does not take the nature of the commanding God and its relevance to the moral agents (Abraham and Isaac) seriously enough, as we are going... and Isaac In short, the dilemma in Genesis 22 remains unresolved in these consequentialist theories.17 In view of the fact that many moralists are trying to downplay the possibility and plausibility of moral dilemmas, is dilemma- generating theory tenable after all? The defenders would argue for the possibility of moral dilemmas on the grounds that such things are often met with in life and in literature... is allowed to take action A first, then B But in Abraham’s case it was impossible to prioritize between his religious duty and moral obligation Logically one can conclude that the dilemma that Abraham experienced was indeed an ontological dilemma 4 Theological Considerations of the DCT and Genesis 22 One can, however, argue that Abraham was not facing a moral dilemma, if one sees the case from a theological... Heideggerian being and its association with the law of being, we can see the rationale behind Levinas’s claims that the fulfillment of saintliness is not an accomplishment of moral duty or obligation It is a value, or an ethics, or an ethical relation that calls upon me to be responsible for the life of the other However, can this understanding of saintliness or ethics help to resolve Abraham’s dilemma? Drawing . identifying the cause of the fear as lying in a God who commands his servant to sacrifice an innocent life. By taking up the account of Abraham in the Hebrew Bible, chapter 22 of the Book of Genesis, . Achilles’ heel of the divine command theory – the commanding God, which serves an interpretative role in the entire endeavour of reinterpreting the divine command in Genesis 22. Applying Levinas’s critique. ascribe the other as the Divine Other. For, the other is always the human other in Levinas’s definition. 3 The translation of the Scripture I am using is the New International Version. PDF Creator