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Know thyself
Delphic epigraph
Ignore thyself
J. Marion2
This seemingly insoluble, yet highly generative tug-of-war alluded to by the epigrams above, has traditionally been recognized as the Athens versus Jerusalem conundrum, first formulated by the Roman writer Tertullian, himself a Christian. In his seminal work on the subject, the Russian philosopher Leon Shestov writes the following:
In pursuing knowledge and always aspiring to the principles of ‘universality’ and ‘necessity’, the philosophers have lost… freedom…. Within the ‘limits of reason’ one can create a science, sublime ethic, and even a religion, but to find the Ultimate Truth, one must tear oneself away from the seductions of reason with all its physical and moral constraints and go to another source. This other source bears the enigmatic name ‘faith … It is here, that there begins for fallen man, the region - forever condemned by reason - of the miraculous and of the fantastic i.e. the fortuitous. (Shestov, 1966 pp. 66-68)
Years later, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, comparing these same two fundamental attitudes to human existence, expounds how philosophy as a specifically Greek way of articulating and thinking has, as its most distinguishing feature, the equation of Truth with the ‘intelligibility of Presence’. ‘Being’ in philosophy, he claims, is essentially Presence. He then goes on to contrast that, to man's ethical, not philosophical stance, which, according to him, skews the above mentioned equation, and places the ‘Relation to the Other’ at a position preceding the ontological relation to oneself. The Presence of the Other would henceforth, stand forever beyond and before the Presence of the Self - and would be irreducible to the synchrony of the Same.
Ethics thus ends up defining subjectivity as a heteronomous responsibility towards the Other, preceding any autonomous freedom, that can only come after it. From the very beginning therefore, this ethical stance, views the Self or the Being-in-the-Worl