Levinas inspires because he brings the spiritual impulse to philosophy, bestowing upon modern (even post-modern) men and women a non-mythical version of the religious spirit, one that does not depend upon a supreme being. (Alford 2002: 8)
Typically when we in Western society say ‘religion’ we mean some kind of monotheism and, whether it originated with the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten or with the Biblical patriarchs, the idea of monotheism is at least as ancient as Western thinking itself. At its heart is the idea of perfect unity, an idea which is as incomprehensible to the finite human mind as it is alien to human existence. Monotheism is fundamental to Western thinking because it is yet another re-articulation of the ancient Greek rational dilemma—that is to say monotheism, with its emphasis on the divinity of oneness, demands that we, a multitude of finite beings, reconcile the essential plurality of our existence with the idea of unity. How we do this, and whether we are able to do this honestly without denigrating either the plurality of humanity or the idea of unity will determine whether monotheism, as a religious ideal, is an illusion or not. It is in grappling with the problem of trying to make sense, to find a coherent meaning in the apparent chaos of life, that thinking originates, so religion persists, not because of what it produces, that is to say not because of its relationship to normative ethics or to human flourishing, but because the question of how unity relates to plurality is identified with the very structure of thinking itself. We cannot stop thinking about religion because once religion is connected to the question of unity, so that there is ‘one God’, it is bound up with the same metaphysical questions that condition the fact that we think at all.
Emmanuel Levinas, the notoriously challenging philosopher of ethics who brought phenomenology to France in the 1920s, writes not
only that ‘ethics is first philosophy’ thereby identifying ethics with metaphysics, but also that monotheism is ‘a religion for adults’ (Levinas 1990: 11-23). This essay will explore what Levinas means by this and aim to show why monotheism as Levinas articulates it is indeed fundamental to Western thinking and why his kind of monotheism is so philosophically interesting. In order to understand what Levinas means by religion we must also make sense of his ethics of infinite responsibility because the idea that monotheism is a religion for adults is bound up with this idea of ‘infinite responsibility’. I shall begin the paper by reference to the work which Nietzsche and Freud have done in explaining what religion is and why it is a problem. Having shown why this critique of monotheism is sound, I will then be able to demonstrate why it is that psychoanalytic thinkers like Marcus and Alford read Levinas as a conventional monotheist and why this makes it impossible to make sense of his ethics of infinite responsibility. Finally, I shall turn to Levinas's own work and indicate how it is Levinas's distinctive understanding of the idea of infinity which not only makes his ethics philosophically coherent but also explains why monotheism really is a religion ‘for adults’.
In ‘The future of an illusion’ Freud defines religion as dogma, writing:
What, then, is the psychological significance of religious ideas and under what heading are we to classify them? The question is not at all easy to answer immediately. After rejecting a number of formulations, we will take our stand on the following one. Religious ideas are teachings and assertions about facts and conditions of external (or internal) reality which tell one something one has not discovered for oneself and which lay claim to one's belief. (Freud [1927] 1961: 25)
The role that these statements play is a normative one, so that religion maintains culture, establishing the laws which determine the form of society. Freud's argument shows the extent to which the idea of God
has become a tool, that is to say, ‘God’ has become a marker against which things, specifically things like good and evil, can be measured. ‘God’ is the fulcrum on which justice swings. The cultural or political objective in establishing this norm is to construct unity out of the diversity of human experience. Freud is worried about the fact that this so-called unity rests on a lie. He is worried about building morality on such shaky foundations. He writes:
Civilisation has little to fear from educated people and brainworkers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilised behaviour by other, secular motives would proceed unobtrusively… But it is another matter with the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed, who have every reason for being enemies of civilisation. So as long as they do not discover that people no longer believe in God, all is well. But they will discover it… [and when they do] is there not a danger here that the hostility of these masses to civilisation will throw itself against the weak spot that they have found in their task mistress? (Freud 1961: 39)
The fact that Freud is anxious that the idea of God is a ‘weak point’ in the manufacture of a culture demonstrates that he is working within the framework of Western metaphysics, that is the philosophical tradition which traces its lineage back through Plato and Aristotle to Parmenides, a tradition whose fundamental approach to the question of the one and the many, will be questioned by Heidegger and Levinas. Freud's perspective is structured by his position as a psychologist: he is interested in relationships. His perspective on religion is a human one so that his approach to the question of the one and the many leads him to try to find out how God and man are related. Levinas will say that quite simply they are not related, that this approach is doomed from the outset by a misunderstanding of the radical incommensurability of the two terms. Alford, a psychologist who has many interesting things to say about Levinas, takes the same vantage point as Freud, writing: ‘the question I want to ask is… is not all human experience relative, in between, one thing measured against another?’ (Alford 2002: 33) The
question for these thinkers therefore is not what religion, or monotheism is, but how the idea of God is used by people.
It is because of their human standpoint that religion is problematic, illusory, fantastic. In order to understand how Levinas's position differs, it is important to note the distinction between asking what having the idea of God entails in itself and asking how the idea of God functions in society. Essentially the problem with religion which Freud identifies is a legitimate and serious one, and one that Levinas would also recognise, yet this problem is not a problem endemic to the idea of unity (or ‘God’) itself but arises from the analysis of the way that human beings use this idea.
It is a cliché, but nevertheless true that the real problem for monotheism is sectarianism. No doubt there would be fewer conflicts if we all agreed, were ideologically identified. As David Hume explained in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, where there are many religions, there are only relative truths. Hume writes, ‘in matters of religion whatever is different is contrary … it is impossible that the religions of ancient Rome, of Turkey, of Siam and of China should, all of them, be established on any solid foundation.’ (Hume 1975: 121) The question becomes almost comic when these different religions all claim to be the only true monotheism. By implicitly relativizing the claim for one truth in this way, so-called monotheist religions place relationship itself above any metaphysical ideal. This is why the relationship between God and society, the political status of God, becomes an interesting topic for Freud and Alford to study.
Whilst sectarianism within monotheism presents ethical and political challenges, the problem is a philosophical one first: philosophical even before the ethical and political problems can arise. This is because the social problems which develop as a result of sectarianism are, in fact, the result of our tendency to gloss over the logical lacuna at the heart of monotheism, illicitly trying to resolve the epistemological paradox which lies at the heart of metaphysics by pretending that we can construct unity out of diversity. Relativism obscures monotheism. So when religion is understood Freud's way, as a system of dogmas designed to provide the legal codes for a particular society, Nietzsche is right to declare the death of God.
It is Nietzsche who demonstrates the logical or philosophical nature of the problem: sectarianism invalidates the claims of monotheism at
the outset, prohibiting the idea of unity that monotheism allegedly prioritises. We can either think in terms of unity or in terms of plurality (relationship) but these two are antithetical and cannot legitimately be thought together. Whilst ideologically monotheism claims to have overcome the problem of relativism by unifying the totemic gods into One God, in practice religious believers in monotheist religions are still likely to conceptualise their religion in tribal or sectarian terms, reckoning their own articulation of monotheism to be valid where others are not. By insisting that my religion is the ‘true’ one, I imply that your religion is the untrue one, but do I also acknowledge two religions, two Gods… two unities? The idea of relationship makes nonsense of the idea of monotheism and, in a way that is important to psychoanalysis, the idea of monotheism makes nonsense of the idea of relationship.
Levinas rejects the idea that monotheism can be compatible with relationship and he builds his refutation of this understanding of monotheism from a foundation in Heidegger's analyses of ‘onto-theo-logy’. The word ‘onto-theo-logy’ is designed to indicate the point which Nietzsche has made, that is the fact that Western metaphysics has conceptualised unity (‘God’), containing it and claiming to know it well enough to be able to allocate it a place within the structure of human rationality. Onto-theo-logy describes how the ancient Greek ideal of unity is inserted into ontology, so that unity is no longer an incomprehensible ideal but simply the amalgam of all beings, the biggest being relative to all other beings and so simply another concept (‘totality’) which can be debated, traded, translated. In his paper ‘The onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics’ Heidegger asks ‘“how does the deity enter into philosophy?” in terms of the essence of metaphysics.’ (Heidegger 2002: 71) But by ‘metaphysics’ Heidegger means precisely the same metaphysical economy whereby the ultimate becomes merely a being amongst beings—the best, truest, most beautiful being against which other beings are measured. This is God as Caesar, God as a super-being within the political economy. Heidegger writes: ‘The essential constitution of metaphysics is based on the unity of beings as such in the universal and that which is highest.’ (Heidegger 2002: 61-64)
Heidegger laments the fact and seeks to ‘overcome’ this metaphysics so that in his philosophy relationship is articulated as ‘difference’ and it
takes centre stage, usurping the place of ‘the deity’, understood Freud's way, the conventional or ‘onto-theo-logical’ way. Heidegger recognises that in order to retain God, metaphysics must become ‘a godless thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui’ (Heidegger 2002: 72). But Heidegger cannot think how to un-think the idea of God. If God (or unity) has become simply a philosophical idea, thought in relation to other philosophical ideas, how can it be extracted again out of the plurality of philosophical ideas? Can we think of something which we do not comprehend?
Building on Heidegger's analysis of Western metaphysics but jettisoning Heidegger's pessimistic outlook, Levinas articulates a philosophy which is an affirmation of monotheism; a philosophy which absolutely separates God from ontology and the connections and relationships that exist among beings. Levinas writes, ‘Heidegger's thesis consists in positing that being is at the origin of all meaning. This immediately implies that one cannot think beyond being.’ Refusing to accept this, Levinas asks ‘Is thinking of God by way of onto-theo-logy the wrong way of thinking about being [the Heideggerian thesis], or is it the wrong way of thinking about God?’ (Levinas 2000: 126) Like Heidegger, Levinas presents a critique of ‘relative’ unity and argues that in order to think about God it is necessary to think beyond conceptualisation. But exceeding Heidegger, Levinas sees a way to reconceive unity, retaining the idea of unity by separating it from the relativity which is essential to human existence. We can either think in terms of unity or in terms of human beings but it is logically impossible to suggest that absolute unity could exist in the world. Whilst unity is something that human beings desire, there can be no direct relationship between beings and absolute unity. Since beings are by definition many and irreducible to one another, unity is not the sum of beings but must be ‘otherwise than’ beings. This is atheism with respect to the kind of God that Freud critiques. Levinas and Freud are both atheist with respect to the same idea of God. Levinas writes:
While the atheist independence of the separated being does not posit itself by opposition to the idea of infinity, it alone makes possible the relation denoted by this idea. The atheist separation is required by the idea of infinity but is
Page 30not dialectically brought about by it… without separation there would not have been truth; there would have been only being. (Levinas 1969: 60)
Levinas's philosophy is traumatic and difficult for us to understand precisely because the very idea of thinking without relationships is so alien to the understanding of what ‘thinking’ is that we have inherited from the Greeks, that it demands that we break the cultural habits of millennia and abandon our prejudice in favour of rationality where ‘rationality’ indicates the building of ratios and relationships. Levinas is able to indicate how we might break these ancient habits because he is a phenomenologist, which means that Levinas's work originates in the analysis of the things that appear to consciousness and the manner of their appearing to consciousness rather than in an analysis of what consciousness does with the data that it receives. Levinas is interested in ideas and the way ideas occur to us rather than what we do with ideas after we have had them.
Levinas's whole philosophy centres on an aporia; he indicates that it is that which stands beyond comprehension, that which is otherwise than being. On this view, an aporia, an unknown and unknowable, has to precede thinking if thinking, questioning or wondering is to begin in the first place. For Levinas each human being experiences both the finite temporality of being-in-the-world, the world of multiple beings whose meaning appears in terms of relationship and each also an equally real desire for metaphysical unity, a unity which is metaphysical in the sense that it is beyond (meta) being (physis); transcendental in the sense of incomprehensible rather than in the onto-theo-logical sense of a being that is highest among beings. In order for these two aspects of our thinking to retain their own integrity, for unity to remain single and for relationship to remain plural, they must remain absolutely separate.
If Levinas rejects the idea that philosophy is simply a matter of making sense, of placing concepts into coherent relationships with one another in order to construct meaning, he deliberately opposes the conventional way of understanding what philosophy is about. As
Alford writes: ‘Levinas would explode the myth of mutuality and with it the myth of a supreme being, one capable of being characterised by any image at all, let alone a human one.’ (Alford 2002: 13)
Levinas's philosophy is an ethics and it is in his articulation of ethics that Levinas becomes most abstruse. His conception of the ethical relation is difficult to follow because its conception of ‘relation’ is so unconventional. Following his rejection of the onto-theo-logical understanding of metaphysics, Levinas prioritises the other in his ethics - not merely in the sense of a kind of etiquette in which I would cede right of way to the other, declaring ‘after you’, but in a radical sense. Levinas says that ethics is first philosophy. He conceives of the ethical relationship as a relationship with an other who precedes and exceeds me ontologically. In line with the idea that the idea of Infinity indicates that which is otherwise than being, the structure of the ethical relation in Levinas is such that ‘I’ am reduced to extreme passivity, surrendering my own concerns for the sake of the other to whom and for whom I am always already infinitely responsible before any ontological relationship comes into the question. Levinas writes: ‘Ethics slips into me before freedom. Before the bipolarity of Good and Evil, the I as ‘me’ has thrown its lot in with the Good… before having chosen it.' (Levinas 2000: 176)
Theorists are drawn to the novelty of Levinas's radical vision and attempt to use his ethics constructively, seeing his work as an inspiration for re-envisioning inter-subjective relations in fields as diverse as literature and psychoanalysis. So, for example, in his book, Being for the Other, Paul Marcus suggests ways in which Levinas's ethical theory could be put to work in psychoanalytic practice. Marcus writes:
Paraphrasing and playing off Freud, a Levinasian inspired psychoanalysis with its demand for infinite responsibility and obligation to the other… makes analysis, in a certain sense, interminable. In this context the role of the analyst is to expand the analysand's awareness and understanding of what factors… impede, diminish or take the place of, an ethic of responsibility for the other as well as for oneself… this means encouraging the analysand to see how his
Page 32various moral lapses… make his own and his loved one's lives miserable. (Marcus 2008: 237-8)
Marcus does not replicate Levinas's ethics of infinite responsibility, instead his idea for a reinvigoration of psychoanalytic practice is inspired by Levinas. Marcus contra Levinas, remains entirely within the sphere of onto-theo-logy. There is a telos, a developmental or therapeutic goal to Marcus's project here which is alien to the radical passivity of Levinas's articulation of the ethical. Marcus's analyst and analysand are fraternally engaged together in a therapeutic project the benefit of which has already been decided beforehand. He also claims to have a viable conception of what the moral right is, insofar as he is able to demonstrate to his analysand how his moral lapses make life miserable and to be able through his analytic practice to determine what the analysand should do. This normative impulse runs counter to Levinas who considers that the ‘I’ is radically isolated in his ethical subjectivity so that on Levinas's view it is impossible to suggest to another what he ought to do in order to be ethical. Levinas writes:
To say that the other has to sacrifice himself to the others would be to preach human sacrifice! “Me” is not an inimitable nuance of Jemeinigkeit that would be added on to a being belonging to the genus “soul” or “man” or “individual”, and would thus be common to several souls, men and individuals, making reciprocity possible among them from the first… It is I, I and no one else, who am a hostage for the others. (Levinas 2004: 126-7)
In Totality and Infinity he writes:
The idea of Infinity implies the separation of the same with regard to the other, but this separation cannot rest on an opposition to the other which would be purely antithetical… A separation of the I that is not the reciprocal of the transcendence of the other with regard to me… what I permit myself to demand of myself is not comparable with what I have the right to demand of the Other. This
Page 33moral experience, so commonplace, indicates a metaphysical asymmetry: the radical impossibility of seeing oneself from the outside and of speaking in the same sense of oneself and of the others. (Levinas 1969: 53)
But of course rationality lies at the heart of ethics, even for Levinas. Ethics is about adjudicating justice. And so, critics wonder, on what basis this is an ethics: how can a philosophy which prioritises the incomprehensible and which rejects mutuality be ethics? Is adjudication possible without mutuality? Ethics is meaningless if I cannot situate myself relative to this other. In response to Levinas, Derrida asks: ‘What then is this encounter with the absolutely-other? Neither representation, nor limitation, nor conceptual relation to the same. The ego and the other do not permit themselves to be dominated or made into totalities by a concept of relationship.’ (Derrida 2001: 117) Critics argue that despite Levinas's best efforts he falls into the very trap which he claims it is necessary to avoid and that he domesticates the other by attempting to explain who this other is and how the ethical relationship with the other works. Derrida writes, ‘By making the origin of language, meaning and difference the relation to the infinitely other, Levinas is resigned to betray his own intentions in his philosophical discourse.’ (Derrida 2001: 189) This slide back into ontology and language is the very problem which stumped Heidegger, leaving him frustrated by the inability to make the transition into a ‘godless thinking’ once God has been thought, and the problem that the attempt to tell someone about an encounter with the incomprehensible entails forming a representation of the transcendent, and that this representation necessarily invalidates the message dogs Levinas's project. His response to this challenge is to plead, ‘but the philosopher has to come back to language to translate—be it by betraying them—the pure and unspeakable’. (Levinas 2006: 65)
In his book on Levinas and psychoanalysis, Alford is keen to defend ‘a human connection with this other person’ (Alford 2002: 20), agreeing with Derrida ‘that the category of other is always relative to some other. Other always means “other than’” (Alford 2002: 25). Contra Levinas, Alford defends the idea that human relationship, that is to say, ontology precedes metaphysics, writing ‘what I argue is that
Levinas cannot place others at an infinite distance from oneself while continuing to value human relations.’ (Alford 2002: 34) Levinas takes the opposite view dedicating a section of his book Totality and Infinity to explaining why ‘Metaphysics precedes ontology’ (Levinas 1969: 42-48). Alford thinks that I cannot value the other unless I value him in relation to me, that is to say Alford considers himself to be the marker against which the value of the other man is assessed. No matter how benignly I relate to this other man then, he will always remain someone whose subjectivity is an object of my reckoning. I do not relate to him as an incomprehensible individual in his own right. This is fair enough—for I cannot form a rational evaluation of the incomprehensible. Alford's position, which is not onto-theo-logy and so does not draw God into being to operate as the mark against which all other beings are measured necessarily remains atheist. He eschews onto-theo-logical claims to attain a position sub specie aeternitatis and stoically limits the ethics which he is able to articulate to the real relationship between man and man, always evaluating the good in the context of culture and situation. Alford's is an honest ethics which makes no false claims and does not pretend to make justification relative to an illusory ‘theos’. But Levinas's ethics, in its identification with ‘adulthood’ is honest in this way too. Levinas will argue, that conventional ethics ultimately fails to be truly ethical because it necessarily entails the objectification of the other man. In order to liberate ethics from the egocentricity of the ontotheological approach, Levinas's ethics value the other with respect to his own incomprehensibility. His incomprehensibility, that is to say his existence as an individual who is not reducible to my machinations, supersedes my rationality. In ethics the other takes priority over me. This understanding of human relations, depends absolutely upon having an idea of value which is irreducible to beings, this is the ancient metaphysical idea of the ideal of unity, the ideal which monotheism alleges to value. Levinas solves the problem of how I am in contact with an other who is more than just ‘not me’, an other who exceeds all the comprehension of him that I can have, and explains why ‘metaphysics precedes ontology’ by suggesting, like Descartes, that the idea of unity is not simply the totality of beings but is the idea of infinity, an idea which is innate in me. He writes:
Can't subjectivity relate to—without representing it to itself—a past that passes all present and thus overflows the measure of freedom? This would be a relation prior to the understanding of a vocation, preceding understanding and unveiling, preceding the truth. Well in the approach to others, where others are from the start under my responsibility, “something” has overflowed my freely made decisions, has slipped into me unbeknownst to me, alienating my identity. (Levinas 2006: 62)
In the critical evaluation that he makes of Levinas's ethics, Alford puts his finger on the central moment in Levinas's conception of monotheism. Alford writes:
Francis Jacques… [suggests] that to render the other person absolutely other has the ironic effect of leaving me as the only human in the world… Paul Ricoeur makes a similar argument in Oneself as Another. (Alford 2002: 18).
Alford and the other thinkers whom he cites here are absolutely right in this characterisation of Levinas, but the isolation which characterises Levinas's ethics is not ‘ironic’, it is necessary to the essence of real monotheism and it in this that we can begin to see the basis on which the ‘I’ of Levinas's ethical subjectivity is classified as an adult.
Like other modern thinkers, Levinas is atheist with respect to the God of onto-theo-logy. He writes, ‘The impossibility of escaping God, the adventure of Jonas, indicates that God is at least here not a value among values’ (Levinas 2004: 128). But unlike them, he does not choose to remain exclusively within the sphere of human relationships, only thinking of that which can be said in human conversation. Freed of the need to represent his ideas to another Levinas is able to think the ‘one’ of monotheism. By bracketing his relationship with others whilst retaining his ability to think, to be rational, Levinas can testify to his own experience of the idea of infinity. But what is this experience
that Levinas has? Is he claiming to have a special relationship with the divine or is he bracketing the idea of this kind of relationship too?
The real question is, ‘how many ‘ones’ are there in ‘monotheism’?’ The question is pertinent because it illuminates the fundamental difference between the meaning of ‘adult’ in the structure of normativity which characterises contemporary Western atheism and in Levinas's paradoxical monotheist atheism. Atheism rejects the idea of one because as finite human beings all we can really know is the many. This position appears in Levinas's work too in his description of the ‘totality’ of being. But instead of rejecting monotheism out of hand, as atheists do, Levinas rethinks it. On his view real monotheism is a development of thinking after atheism, a position which is however always running the risk of atheism. He writes:
Monotheism surpasses and incorporates atheism but it is impossible unless you attain the age of doubt, solitude and revolt… Judaism teaches us a real transcendence, a relation with Him whom the soul cannot concern and without whom the soul cannot, in some sense, hold itself together. All alone, the I finds itself rent and awry. (Levinas 1990: 16)
Levinas's monotheism develops after atheism, rejecting not only the illusory claims of a relationship to the divine which onto-theo-logy makes, but also the egoism of an idea that my evaluation, or even society's evaluation, is sufficient to be the foundation of ethics. Relationships are, by definition, insecure, fluid, finite, they are not able to support the ideals upon which ethics depends. The impossibility of building ethics on a symmetrical or social relationship with others therefore leaves me, and me alone, responsible. In Levinas's ethics, God does not count because God is not part of the equation. Levinas writes, ‘God is outside and is God for that very reason.’ (Levinas 1990: 29) The God of monotheism is unity and so is otherwise than the world, but here I am, so when the other human being calls out in outrage or grief, I am here to respond. It is my responsibility. Levinas writes:
What can this suffering of the innocents mean? Is it not proof of a world without God, where only man measures Good and Evil? The simplest and most common answer would be atheism. This is also the sanest reaction for all those for whom previously a fairly primary sort of God had dished out prizes, inflicted punishment and pardoned sins—a God who, in His goodness, treated men like children… the path that leads to God must be walked in part without God. True monotheism is duty bound to answer the legitimate demands of atheism. The adult's God is revealed precisely through the void of the child's heaven. This is the moment with God retires from the world and hides his face. (Levinas 1990: 143)
Similarly, God cannot pardon sins committed against another man, because it is not God's business to forgive such sins. The offence can only be pardoned by the victim. Levinas explains:
The personal responsibility of man with regard to man is such that God cannot annul it… He who has created and who supports the whole universe cannot support or pardon the crime that man commits against man… the fault committed with regard to God falls within the province of divine pardon, whereas the fault that offends man does not concern God… No one, not even God, can substitute himself for the victim. (Levinas 1990: 20)
So is this inability to concern himself in the affairs of man, to forgive human sins and so forth, a sign of weakness on God's part? Is Levinas's God impotent? Levinas sees things differently and reckons that it is a great glory that God treats man with such respect. This God does not take a paternal stance such that man is rendered subservient, childish. On Levinas's view the fact that man is left in charge is to man's credit. He writes:
To hide one's face so as to demand the superhuman of man, to create a man who can approach God and speak to
Page 38him without always being in his debt—that is a truly divine mark of greatness! … Man can have confidence in an absent God and also be an adult who can judge his own sense of weakness. The heroic situation in which he places himself gives the world value and equally puts it in danger. (Levinas 1990: 145)
So if God is absent and man is responsible, how does Levinas differ from those other atheists who think from the position of human relationships? What differs is that ethical fraternity is missing from Levinas's ethics and with it goes all the equivocation and trading that characterises the practice of normative ethics. On Levinas's understanding of a monotheist ethics, I cannot demand that the other man takes on responsibility. I am the adult, responsibility rests with me and I cannot delegate. In Levinas's monotheism the ‘one’ is not God but me: I am the adult in charge.
At the heart of the idea of monotheism is a paradox, namely the fact that although we are many, we have an idea of unity. This idea of unity is compelling but mysterious, the simplicity of the idea is fundamentally alien to our ontological status as finite and complex beings and so the quite literally incomprehensible character of the idea of unity is the original question which nags at us, forcing us as thinkers to try to make sense, to rationalise or unify the chaos that is being. This original metaphysical question translated into monotheism is more than the starting point for a religious outlook, it is essential to our nature as rational beings. We could say that the idea which monotheism recaptures ‘creates’ us as thinking things.
But Freud is right to criticise monotheism because it has become diminished and domesticated. Like frustrated children unwilling to sit with the problem and acknowledge our limitations we have broken the idea of unity that monotheism indicates in order to fit it into the social and psychological schemes that we can understand. No longer complex and impenetrable, in modern times monotheism has, as Freud suggests become no more than a political tool; a way of falsifying cultural
identity in order to control and organise society by subjecting the people to dogmatic belief systems. Freud's monotheism, the monotheism which is ‘illusory’ and problematic is onto-theo-logy and he is right to be critical of this kind of religion. It is false because it pretends to place the many in relationship with a totemic ‘one’ positioned in order to validate cultural laws and practices. Modern thinkers have seen through this subterfuge and rejected this false monotheism, preferring the honesty of ontology, the honesty of the complexity of human relationships where dialogue and negotiation is always at play. Freud writes:
It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilisation. Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and unchangeableness as well. People could understand that they are made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary to serve their interests. (Freud [1927] 1961: 41)
After onto-theo-logy, and having more philosophical integrity than onto-theo-logy because it does not rely on enthusiasm and dogmatic belief, comes atheism. Atheism recognises the false and hasty claims that onto-theo-logy makes and prefers the honesty of a form of political praxis that is open, rational and fair; it places human relations first and is ethical in so far as it establishes an ethos, a way of being, which is comprehensible to all.
Levinas, along with thinkers like Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Alford, prefers atheism to onto-theo-logy but unlike them he insists on a return to a metaphysical grounding for ethics. Critics complain that either Levinas can have an ethical relationship with other human beings, or he can have monism, objecting to the fact that he insists on a ‘diachronic rupture’ between metaphysics and ontology. So what is ethics? The common conception is that in order to be ethical one must know what the good is for the other for whom one is responsible. Conventionally we claim to know this by reference to a God or ‘highest being’ which functions as the representation of goodness, or by
reference to a system of politically created laws conventionally held by the people to function as the structural form of society. Levinas rejects the claim that in order to be ethical one must comprehend the good, one must be in a relationship with the good. Levinas thinks that one finds oneself responsible before knowing the situation. And perhaps he is right, for in practical situations are we ever entirely sure that we know what is best? In trying to be ethical, we act as though we know what the best outcome would be and how to achieve it, in reality we are only acting as if we know. In truth, all that we can really affirm for certain is that we desire what is best. If it has done nothing else, the critique of onto-theo-logy has demonstrated that absolute goodness is beyond us: knowing the good is either based on allegiance to a dogmatic system of rationally unfounded beliefs or on what is commonly held to be in the best interests of the majority.
The paradox of the one and the many is played out in physical form in the being of an ethical human being, a being who is isolated and yet simultaneously in the world. The isolation of the ethical subject is not an ontological isolation, he exists as a human being within the complex plurality of human political and social relationships. Levinas's monotheism is philosophically sound because it retains the essential incomprehensibility of the idea of unity by refusing to identify that which is beyond beings and refusing to substitute endless relationships for real unity. This means that in relating to the idea of real perfection, that is to say the kind of ultimate goodness that is impossible for beings by virtue of their temporal and spatial limitations, Levinas's responsible and ethical adult does not pretend to be superhuman but nevertheless he takes on his ethical responsibilities knowing that they exceed his abilities. His ethical relationship is not to one single other, but to all others. Levinas writes:
We can tolerate the pluralism of great civilisations and even understand why they cannot merge. The very nature of truth explains how this is impossible: truth manifests itself in a way that appeals to an enormous number of human possibilities and, through them, a whole range of histories, traditions and approaches. But even when this multiplicity
Page 41is acknowledged, it does not absolve the individual from a rational choice. (Levinas 1990: 54).
Ethics stands outside of politics and so the ethical subject who has passed through atheism has neither a direct relationship with God nor any claim to be able to adjudicate justice amongst the many other others for whom he finds himself responsible. Acknowledging one's limitations at the same time as one's responsibility is part of the trauma of adulthood. Monotheism leaves me isolated and it is for this reason that it is a ‘difficult freedom’.