4 - Learning something of God

Summary

As I sought to describe it in my introductory chapter, there is more to ‘dialogue’ than an exchange of ideas which leads to a consensus. Broadened to include moments of inter-personal encounter which give rise to a diffuse variety of forms of discourse, the experience of dialogue turns out to have an irreducible–and, therefore, in Levinas's terms–an ethical character. It is not just the moral authority of Levinas's Jewish experience which draws our attention to the horizon of responsibility against which the other is to be encountered. His relentless insistence on the asymmetrical nature of the ethical relationship contests the naïveté of an unproblematic ‘openness’ by stressing the infinite obligation that the relationship with the other person opens up. All of this seems very persuasive and promising for the future of inter-faith relations, especially where history and culture conspire to prevent rather than enable communication across the divide. Levinas sensitises us to power-differences and the latent areas of violence which underlie all relations with the other.

The question, however, is whether his project enables him to defend subjectivity and establish a non-totalising account of alterity, or whether it just leaves him locked within the polarities of same and other. As the discussion in the previous chapter tried to show, it is impossible to speak of a relationship with what is other without dropping back into the language of the totality. Is it possible to make coherent this shift from ontology to ethics as ‘first philosophy’?