Messianic Triumph of Ethics? Emmanuel Lévinas and the aporia in the thinking of the Other
- Žarko Paić
Abstract
There are only three philosophical ideas of "great ethics" to nowadays:
1) Aristotle's idea of distributive justice in a community (polis) determined by the "natural" limitations and ethnic reducibility of citizens with the fundamental virtue of prudence (phronesis);
2) Kant's idea of a moral Law established by the action of an autonomous subject in a categorical imperative within the world as a cosmopolis;
3) Lévinas' idea of compassion with the sufferings of Others in a direct encounter beyond "nature" and "culture" as an event of the sanctity of life.
Greek and modern experience has always presupposed the existence of a political community. For the Greeks, it is a limited world-city-state (polis), and for the modern age, it is a nation-state political order with a regulatory idea of a world order based on mental principles. In both cases, originally Greek and modern, ethics has its homeland, place, topology, it has its "world". In the case of the modern age, after the experience of the diabolical evil of the Holocaust and the "end of theodicy", the idea of homeland, home, the abode of man no longer exists or is destroyed. Neither the city-state nor the nation-state is any longer the abodes of modern man. He is a wanderer and a nomad, an exiled and stateless person in a world that becomes a network of structures and functions. Man is not only a planetary nomad in the age of technoscience, but he is without a homeland that becomes like in Tibetan legend that Cioran mentions camping in the desert. Lévinas's ethics of the Other denotes the search for the abode of a man at the end of his tragic historical drama of wandering and the "useless suffering" of peoples and individuals. It is the source of this metaphysical ethic of the sanctity of the life of the Other. It is terrible, and hence in its homelessness exalted as an absolute evil. In the face of it, the sanctity of life seems to be the last mystery of that encounter with the face of the Other, which radically changes all history so far. Ethics without a world necessarily requires the uncanny event of the creation of the world when everything is just either this or that violence in the name of freedom, equality and justice.
Keywords
messianic, ethics, Lévinas, nomadism, Other
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