First, I am not an expert on Ricoeur, though I am certainly familiar with his work. I know that he respected Levinas's philosophy, but he was also at times harshly critical of it. Rather than venture into areas with which I lack sufficient depth of knowledge, permit me to focus on the part of your question about Levinas-- someone whose work I deeply admire.  I am sure others can answer the Ricoeur part of your question.  (I also note that you have rightly mentioned a 2002 work "Ricoeur as Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity," by Richard A. Cohen and James L. Mars.  I have found this to be a useful resource, since it explores what Ricoeur did and did not like about Levinasian ethics, and it is written in a way that those of us who are not philosophy majors can still understand!)

As a professor of Communication, I find the teachings of Emmanuel Levinas (of blessed memory) both relevant and useful, although quite challenging at times.  His writing can be very dense, making it difficult to understand without a second or a third reading; further, living in accordance with Levinasian ethics, while certainly a worthy goal, is something very difficult for the average person to achieve, given the human tendency to judge, evaluate, turn away from that which seems threatening, etc.  Still, what Levinas calls upon us to consider is a complete reworking of what it means to be human.  It's not about "I" nor about focusing on what will make "me" comfortable.  It's about my relationship with the Other.  For Levinas, that relationship is how we demonstrate our humanity:  the face of the Other calls to us, and we must respond.  The face of the Other reminds us that we are not alone in the universe, and that whether or not everyone looks like us or believes like us or acts like us, we have an ethical duty to interact with and engage with the Other. 

Levinas has said in many of his books that ethics must be first philosophy. We are responsible for the Other; when we look into the face of the Other, it reminds us of that responsibility; it tells us to respect the Other's right to be.  (The Biblical Commandment "Thou shalt not Murder" is very relevant here: Levinas notes that the Face of the Other says to us, "Don't kill me.")  As a religious Jew, Levinas certainly believed there is revelation, and as someone who taught about Jewish theology, he was quite familiar with what Judaism says about the ways in which God reveals Himself to humanity.  But Levinas did not see revelation as something that magically swoops into our life like the happy ending of a Hollywood movie, nor something that makes everything easier to understand. He warned against these interpretations, noting the human tendency to want to have total control over our lives, including even having control over the Deity.

But God is not that easily controlled:  sometimes, the Deity sends a revelation into our lives when we least expect it; similarly, sometimes, we encounter the Other, created by God, and that relationship too is something we may not have expected.  The Holy Scriptures, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament, remind us that the Other will always be there-- the poor, the downtrodden, the widow, the orphan, the sinner.  And we have an ethical duty to engage with the Other, rather than to turn away and say it's not my problem because "they" are too different from me.  In some ways, God (who loves us all) reveals Himself to us in the face of the Other, and asks us to love the Other as He loves us.

May I recommend a wonderful essay about Levinas and revelation that you may or may not have already seen:  "Levinas and the Other Side of Theology" by Terry Veling.   http://www.jcrelations.net/Levinas+and+the+Other+Side+of+Theology.2234.0.html?L=3     

Donna L. Halper, Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Lesley University, Cambridge MA USA

While Levinas was a Talmudic scholar, his ethics begins with an ego that is ‘atheistic’, meaning that the locus of the ego, the psychism, was left untouched by God. Levinas’s ethics of the other is a humanism and this humanism comes directly from the pre-originary need for all humans to be responsible to others. This pre-originary responsibility Levinas calls ‘the good':

"There is no enslavement more complete than this seizure by the good, this election. But the enslaving character of responsibility that overflows choice—of obedience prior to the presentation or representation of the commandment that obliges to responsibility—is cancelled by the bounty of good that commands." (Levinas, Emmanuel. 2006. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. P. 53)

From where does this humanism, this pre-originary responsibility come? Is it revelation? No it is anarchy (anarche – no center point) meaning that the I and other are irreversible, the notion of which he explores in detail in ‘Totality and Infinity’ in the section called The Breach of Totality. We must recall that Levinas was struck by Descartes’ explanation in his third meditation of how he came to be in possession of the idea of infinity: “It is true that my being a substance explains my having the idea of substance; but it does not explain my having the idea of an infinite substance. That must come from some substance that is itself infinite. I am finite.” Descartes saw God as an infinite substance and as a necessity that must come before his own understanding of the infinite.

If God for Descartes and Levinas is a necessity, the question for this discussion is whether God reveals or has revealed God and also ethics to humans. If Levinas’s ethics is a humanism and our responsibility is unlimited but not revealed, meaning we must determine what responsibility means in our actions and considerations of others, why would Levinas want ethics to be a revelation? I suggest, rather than divine revelation, Levinas’s ‘face’ represents the possibilities for revelation in the humanistic sense allowing for both a revealed God and the infinite other who is not constructed by a God who had the foresight to atheistically construct the psychism. Said Levinas, “The God who passed by is not the model of which the face would be the image. To be in the image of God does not signify being the icon of God, but finding oneself in his trace.” (Ibid p. 44). This pre-originary responsibility that is the cornerstone of Levinas’s ethics is revealed in the face and if one’s face is in God’s trace, then even though responsibility is pre-originary, it too must be in God’s trace. Therefore, I submit that the primordial revelation of God contains within it the necessary notions of the atheistic psychism and pre-originary humanism of responsibility to the other. I do welcome other thoughts and ‘revelations’ on this.  

Levinas, Emmanuel. 2006. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

While I certainly respect Christopher's answer, I am not entirely persuaded by it, especially with respect to atheism.  My reading of Levinas (of blessed memory) is that he was not an atheist, nor even a humanist in the commonly-understood sense of someone who believes in an ethics not emanating from religion. Levinas was a religious Jew. He did believe in God.  But he did not believe in the Christian concept of a God who took a human body (Jesus), nor in a God who magically appears, like the Greek Deus ex Machina, to rescue us when we fall.  Rather, he believed that God shows up in ethics, and we emulate God every time we choose to behave ethically. 

Further, he believed that God, while transcendent, shows up in His attributes. That is, in the Hebrew Bible, what is often translated as "God" or "the Lord" actually refers to aspects of the Deity's character-- the Holy One, the Righteous One, the Faithful One, the Guardian of Israel, the Forgiving One, etc.  For Levinas, God was certainly beyond our mundane descriptions and far beyond our ability to capture Him in mere words.  But finding the right words was not that crucial.  Rather, as Levinas explained, God shows up for us in what we DO:  God manifests in His creation.  So, the Other is a reminder of the One who created that person; and as God demanded that we be both just and forgiving (as He is), when we reach out to embrace the Other, we are acknowledging God.  In "Totality and Infinity" (p. 78), Levinas asserts that "The Other is the very locus of metaphysical truth, and is indispensable for my relationship with God . . . The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed."

This does not sound atheistic to me at all.  It sounds as if Levinas is saying that just because God is invisible, that does not mean He is unknowable.  God reveals Himself in justice, in acts of compassion, and in our relationship with the Other. When I do a mitzvah (often badly translated as a "good deed," but it actually carries the meaning of a positive action that makes the world better in some way), I am working in partnership with the Deity to repair the world.  Agreed-- and Levinas does say this-- one can work to repair the world or act in a just/righteous/compassionate way and still be an atheist. There is no necessity for belief in a deity when it comes to doing the right thing. However, Levinas did not see the world as devoid of God. Rather, he saw God in ethics. He saw God in positive action. And he saw God in the face of the Other, which is why the concept of the Face is so important in Levinas's philosophy.

Thank you Donna for your clarifications. Levinas did not deny God, nor was he an atheist. Yes, he saw the trace of God in the face of the other. Delightful concept! His take on atheism is a bit more complex. Levinas says, “The atheist separation is required by the idea of Infinity” (Levinas 1979, 60) What does this mean?

Mary Ann Crumplin points out that Levinas’s rejection of Parmenides concept of deities begins with the fact that unlike Parmenides’ Gods, his God does not live in and amongst people. Crumplin said, “Levinas’s ‘rejection of Parmenides’, understood as a rejection of the interpretative character of Western philosophy as a historical unfolding of thinking, is an affirmation of separation rather than unity and it is this which, ultimately, is able to demonstrate that atheism is the human being’s truthful relationship to a transcendent and ineffable God: a God who cannot be brought into being either through direct revelation (Parmenides’ ontology) or through mediation (Socratic dialogue as transcendental realism).” (Crumplin 2012, 107)

The radical separation of the ego and the transcendent and ineffable God who is the infinite that Descartes saw before his own understanding of infinity is this atheistic separation. It is not an atheism wrought of ‘no god’ but the radical separation from God, a kind of a-theism, an otherwise than the direct experience of God that is at issue.

What about the psychism? April Capili explains, “The I that is created or given to itself is given space to accomplish psychism or to achieve its own inner life and the interiority of the self establishes an order apart from that of history. This independent will can assert itself and even establish ever-new starting points in history.” (Capili 2011, 688)

What of this independent will? If this will is to have any capability at all to ‘assert itself’ must it too be radically separated from the transcendent God? I believe it must, but let’s let Levinas explain the psychism:

The soul, the dimension of the psychic, being an accomplishment of separation, is naturally atheist. By atheism we thus understand a position prior to both the negation and the affirmation of the divine, the breaking with participation by which the I posits itself as the same and as I. It is certainly a great glory for the creator to have set up a being capable of atheism, a being which, without having been causa sui, has an independent view and word and is at home with itself. We name "will" a being conditioned in such a way that without being causa sui it is first with respect to its cause. The psychism is the possibility for such a being. (Levinas 1979, 58-59)

The being Levinas refers to has not been caused by itself but has an independent view which is will. This will maintains its own chain of causes independent from other causes. I believe that what Levinas was saying was that he found it quite remarkable that a being created by God could possess a will that could begin in such an atheistic separation where it could think for itself. In other words, that God did not assert prior cause into the will; that the will would establish itself in a being radically separated from the divine. A very intriguing idea indeed.

Whether or not Levinas was a humanist is a difficult question to answer because as Richard A. Cohen says, “Responsibilities are infinite, even if humans are insufficient for them.” (Levinas 2006, Introduction, xxxvii) The insufficient human juxtaposed against the infinite other and the infinite responsibility to the other brings into question of whether Levinas’s ethics can be a humanism if humans are not equipped for the task. We are not to abstract the practical from the infinite because the practical is never enough. Perhaps that is where Levinas wanted us to understand the dilemma of ethics, that humans, and that which has been called humanism, are not up to the task of an infinitely responsible ethics of the other that cannot be abstracted into categories such as humanism. Yet I wonder whether humanism isn’t a good place to begin the discourse as we grapple with the infinite other and our unlimited responsibility to that other. I say this only because the radical separation, the atheism so to speak, from the transcendent God may permit an opening towards thinking that there can be human goodness.   

Capili, April D. 2011. "The Created Ego in Levinas’ Totality and Infinity."  Sophia 50 (4):677-692.

Crumplin, Mary-Ann. 2012. "Emmanuel Levinas On Onto-Theo-Logy: Parricide And Atheism."  Heythrop Journal 53 (1):100-110. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00503.x.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1979. Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Vol. 1: Springer.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 2006. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

I'm delighted to engage in conversation about the late, great Emmanuel Levinas (obm) any time, but especially appreciate the thoughtful analysis provided thus far.  Christopher asks an excellent question: "...His take on atheism is a bit more complex. Levinas says, “The atheist separation is required by the idea of Infinity” (Levinas 1979, 60) What does this mean?"  Alas, there are times when Levinas's writings, in the original French or in translation, are difficult to fathom, and require multiple readings, as well as going to other writings of his, or to scholars who interviewed him during his life. I take this one to mean that it is not surprising, nor even problematic, to Levinas that there are skeptics in the world; yet as he sees it, those who don't believe in a deity are still required to be ethical.  In other words, not having a theological belief does not preclude acting in an ethical manner. We must choose to be ethical, whether we are doing it for some religious motive or just because we're persuaded that it's the right way to act. (It's about what you DO, rather than what you believe.) 

Regarding "the idea of Infinity," the understanding of the Infinite, is by definition, nearly impossible for mortals to attain, since we mortals are limited in our knowledge or comprehension of the Divine.  The Bible frequently states that God's actions are beyond what we can understand, and while that may just seem like an example of apologetics or a convenient way to excuse actions that appear unfair to us, even in science, there are events we may not fully understand till years later (when more knowledge becomes available to us). 

So, perhaps Levinas is acknowledging that even great philosophers, scholars, and theologians may not have an easy answer to every difficult question.  Some answers may not come for years, or even centuries.  But that does not mean we should not continue to seek out God, or try to become attuned to how He reveals Himself.  In the Hebrew Bible, for example, we are told to "seek peace and pursue it (Psalms 34:14)-- that may seem redundant, but the Rabbis explained it was a reminder that while we should search for peaceful ways to resolve matters, if the search is difficult or does not yield immediate results, we should not give up and we should go the extra mile, and keep on trying until we find that peaceful solution.       

I want to circle back to how God shows up in Levinas's philosophy-- the concept of the Face.  The Face calls to us, and we must respond, "Hineni" (Here I am), as Moses did when first spoken to by God in the story of the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:4).  And it is not just the human face to which Levinas is referring.  In several verses in the Hebrew Bible, the Face is mentioned as being associated with God Himself--  for example, as the Protestant theologian Elder Lindahl has noted, "...[in] the access to the face, there is certainly also an access to the idea of God.... Numbers 6:24-26: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you; The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”  Thus, "Respecting the Other testifies to, and seems to receive a “nod” from, the Ultimate Other."  (His entire essay, which is worth reading, is here: http://www.pietisten.org/summer02/facetoface.html) 

So, whenever we welcome and acknowledge the Other and treat the Other with compassion, whenever we answer the call of the Other, we are doing what God would do-- whether we believe in a Deity or not. Levinas says something along those lines in Richard A. Cohen's 1985 translation of Levinas's "Ethics and Infinity, Conversations with Philippe Nemo."  He asserts that "The Holy Scriptures do not signify through the dogmatic tale of their supernatural or sacred origin, but through the expression of the face of the other man that they illuminate...[emphasis mine]... The Holy Scriptures signify to me by all that they awakened in their readers in the course of centuries, and by all they received by exegesis and their transmission.” (pp.115, 117)  And so, by doing that which is ethical and reaching out to the Other (Micah 6:8 tells us to DO justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God), we can draw closer to the God who reveals Himself in ethics. 

Donna has circled us back to revelation again…where the question originated! We can say that Levinas found examples for his philosophy in the bible. He says as much. However, that is not the whole story.

I find it so interesting that we have in Levinas, a Talmudic scholar, who intended to differentiate his Talmudic readings from his philosophy. In a 1988 interview with Tamra Wright etal, he is asked a question about the face and bible. Here is the exchange:

Wright: “But, more specifically, does the image of the face have Judaic or Biblical roots?”

Levinas: “No. The word ‘panim’, which means ‘face’ in Hebrew, is not a philosophical term in the Bible. I would say that the conception of the face is a certain way of expressing philosophically what I mean when I speak of the conatus essendi, the effort to exist which is the ontological principle…. I didn’t find this in a Biblical verse. But, in my opinion, that is the spirit of the Bible, with all its concern for weakness, all the obligation towards the weak. But I didn’t find that in a verse. You see, my terminology does not come from the Bible. Otherwise it would be the Bible to the very end.” (Tamra Wright 1988, 173)

What does he mean here? Throughout Totality and Infinity (the subject of the interview) he addresses the tension between the conatus essendi and responsibility. He has the I dwelling in itself in enjoyment and then suddenly interrupted by the face of the other who cries out ‘please don’t kill me.’ However, he shows in radical passivity and substitution for the other how the I obviates its self-preservation resolve in deference to the other—the pre-originary nature of responsibility. This tension is not the same as, for example, Abraham might have experienced after God’s demand that he sacrifice his son Isaac, rather, it seems more likely couched in the biblical verses associated with offering hospitality to travelers and others. Divine will is not Levinas’s subject, but human will and his reorientation of the good before being. This produces a hospitality that defers to the other before the I. Such inspiration can be found in the bible, but as he says, he uses radically different terminology to express this idea.

In a follow-up question he is asked whether one should have familiarity with the Jewish tradition to understand his work. He responds:

“In the philosophical texts, the Biblical verse never serves as a proof, but as an illustration. On the other hand, there are the texts which I call confessional. The nonphilosophical texts are exegeses. But there is certainly a relationship between them. (Tamra Wright 1988, 173-174)”

We must be cautious in attributing Judaism to Levinas’s philosophical work, but how can we separate the man and his experiences of the holocaust, his religion, and his ethics of responsibility into neat categories? Even he suggests that each influences the other in some way.

In a way it seems that he uses the bible (through illustration) to reveal to him and to his readers. He does the same with his frequent quotation from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, “Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more than the others.” We recall that the Brothers Karamazov contains the very famous Grand Inquisitor story of the return of Jesus and his treatment by a certain high official of the Catholic church—not a story from Judaism to say the least. However we are reminded that the entire novel is a response to Ivan’s concept of freedom encapsulated in Levinas’s aforementioned quotation (from Alexei as reiterated in Zosima’s death-bed soliloquy) which offers up the idea of guilt without being guilty and responsibility for all others regardless of guilt. No bigger conflict do we see in Levinas’s work because it is emblematic of the tension between the contatus essendi and responsibility.    

So in circling back towards the question about revelation we must ask ourselves just what ‘revelation’ means. If we must attribute revelation to that which is revealed by a deity, we begin to see that Levinas does not want to infuse his philosophy with that which has been revealed by God other than to serve as illustration. However, understand that the word ‘revelation’ has been used both in terms of that which has been disclosed by the divine, and also that which has been disclosure by a person of something that is otherwise unknown.

Levinas’s hermeneutic of the face and his ethics in general draws from both secular and religious texts for illustration and example. However, he remains quite wedded to a foundation in the Greek tradition of justice. In that same interview with Wright he says, “On the contrary, everything that I say about justice comes from Greek thought, and Greek politics as well.” (Tamra Wright 1988, 174) This is all well and good, Levinas continues, but why the long discussion of the face? He gives three reasons which all have to do with justice. First, that “ethics is the foundation of justice”, second, “there is violence in justice” meaning that after the verdict there is a place for charity, and third, that I can make a difference in the cause of justice. (Tamra Wright 1988, 175)

Even if I do see the trace of God in the face of the other, I am but a humble soul who must exist in this world and not in the next. So I wonder whether the revelation that comes with Levinas’s reorientation of ethics from the “other into the same” to where the “good comes before being” is not ripe for the kind of revelation that reveals itself not only in the face of the other but the good which comes from the radical passivity of substitution for the other. This revelation of the otherwise unknown (rather than from the divine) is: a revelation of the other which is always incomplete; the revelation of self which never leaves the same but in the passion of responsibility returns to itself different than it was; and, the revelation of justice which is never fully revealed because it is continuously under revision—the violence—from which charity and improvement can arise. Infused within this revelatory process is Levinas’s discourse on the saying versus the said. In the Preface to Totality and Infinity Levinas introduces the saying and said:

“The word by way of preface which seeks to break through the screen stretched between the author and the reader by the book itself does not give itself out as a word of honor. But it belongs to the very essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or the exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights. (Levinas 1979, 30)

So, in a way is not Levinas trying to negate the ‘hard-stop said’ in order to enable the revelational saying in his philosophical discourse? We can now begin to see that he wants to overcome the said of philosophical thinking that is mired in the primacy of being and the conatus essendi. He wants the said of the traditional western philosophical discourse to be overcome by the saying, his own philosophical inversion to enable the good before being. Can we suggest that he must separate himself from the ‘revelations’ of the bible, including them not as evidence but as examples so that he does not ossify his own revelations by associating them directly with the revelations revealed as ‘gospel’ in the bible (a quite hard-stop said)?

We can now see that Cecile’s original question about the relation between revelation and ethics (at least in Levinas) is a prescient question deserving of both exegesis and further analysis in to what it means not only to Levinas’s work but to philosophical discourse in general. Perhaps it is appropriate now to ask you Cecile for your take on the discussion so far.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1979. Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Vol. 1: Springer.

Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes, Alison Ainley. 1988. "The Paradox of Morality: an Interview with Emmanuel Levinas." In The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, edited by Robert Bernasconi, & Wood, David, 168-181. London and New York: Routledge.

Thank you for this interesting dialogue,

maybe we could find for Lévinas

in the four talmudic lectures 1968:205, ed. de Minuit and in ofthe sacred to the saint, ed. de minuit, 1977 important  thoughts about oral torah and it's relation with ethics and philosophy, 

THe hermeneutic is the way of  issue of ethics for Ricoeur, and ethic action then can be applied. 

I also  found this comentary:

"Chez M. Ricœur, c'est l'accueil, dans l'interprétation croyante, de la multiplicité irréductible des

modalités du langage originaire de la foi, communiquant cependant par la présence circulante en

elles du mot « Dieu », qui crée cet espace vivant auquel une raison renonçant à la transparence de la

réflexion pure, et ouverte au témoignage et à l'imagination, peut accéder.

Chez M. Levinas, c'est dans la dimension dominante du prescriptif et de l'éthique, celle de la Thora,

et dans l'épaisseur de la lettre, que se creuse la distance où s'opère la rencontre avec ce qui excède

toute appréhension, dans un désistement à quoi correspond une interprétation de la subjectivité

comme pure passivité, qui est aussi le véritable éveil."

http://www.fondsricoeur.fr/uploads/medias/articles_pr/discussion.pdf

Cecile,

It is so delightful to discover new discourse from Levinas and his contemporaries. Alas my rudimentary French and my recalcitrant translating software have combined to make the discussion after Towards a Hermenutics of the Idea of Revelation a garble at best. I cannot find an English version so I ask whether you might be willing to provide a synopsis.

I appreciate the reference to Ricoeur’s Towards a Hermenutics of the Idea of Revelation in English from a Harvard lecture. I think what is most interesting for me about his commentary is this: “Why, I will ask at the end of this meditation, is it so difficult for us to conceive of a dependence without heteronomy? Is it not because we too often and too quickly think of a will that submits and not enough of an imagination that opens itself?...For what are the poem of the Exodus and the poem of the resurrection, called to mind in the first section, addressed to if not to our imagination rather than our obedience? (Ricoeur 1977, 37)

The wonderful idea of dependence with heteronomy deserves a lengthy discussion in its own right which may be a good subject for someone to launch…

What is delicious for me about this comment and question is that it turns directly towards Levinas’s reorientation of the good before being. In other words, it takes the said (as ontology) and asks the saying (ethics) to undo it. In other words, what I believe Ricoeur is asking us to consider is revelation not as a said but as a saying. That the opening up begins with the revelation as both thought provoking and provocative at the same time.

In this vein what are we to make of the story of Abraham and Isaac? It disturbed Kierkegaard enough for him, in Fear and Trembling, to retell the story multiple times in order to try to distinguish between a will that submits without question and an imagination which tries to visualize the nature of the infinite God for which Abraham is inadequately equipped to understand other than in terms of simple goodness and evil. Abraham’s real human anxiety is the anxiety that Levinas presupposes between the conatus essendi and responsibility. Even though Abraham believes God is inherently good, we as readers are being asked at multiple levels to continue the discourse—the hermenuitic. By Jove it has worked because we have been worrying over the message since the first telling of Genesis!

Ricoeur, Paul. 1977. "Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation."  The Harvard Theological Review 70 (1/2):1-37.

 Thank you for all this revelant informations,

maybe Ricoeur's book "Love and Justice"  is also a important document to understand the relation and connection between love and justice in Ricoeur's Ethics. 

If the principe of "love oneself as another" is determinante in Ricoeur's ethics, maybe the principe of response is determinante in Lévinas'ethics, 

translation of the previous comentary : 

"For Ricœur, it is the welcome, in the religious interpretation, of the inflexible multiplicity of the modalities of the language native of the faith, communicating however by the circulating presence in them of the word"God", who creates this living space which one  reason, giving up the transparency of the pure reflection, and opened to the testimony and to the imagination, can reach.

For Levinas, it is in the dominant dimension of the specification and the ethics, that of the Torah, and in the thickness of the letter, that gets dug the distance where takes place the meeting with what exceeds any apprehension, in a withdrawal to which corresponds an interpretation of the subjectivity as the pure passivity, which is also the real awakening."

the main difference between Lévinas and Ricoeur in the access to alterity, Ricoeur preserves ipseity in the responsability, meanwhile Lévinas pretends that responsability includes the passivity of the subject. Maybe the way both autor present responsability explains how revelation is the root of ethics. 

Cecile,

I do not see ipseity undone by Levinas’s passivity and substitution. The ego (I) is/am changed, not completely negated. There remains an I as I have explained in earlier posts in this thread; it just returns different from before after the encounter with the other. I cannot comment further, but I question what it means that Ricoeur preserves ipseity--does he mean the ego as it is was and always will be? Is this the ever-present ego of Schopenhauer that becomes (attaches to) with all life, only borrowed for life's duration while one lives? This is a distinction worth considering if that is the case. However, I return to Levinas for more insight as to the transformation of the I in the experience of the other.

We might consider the Buddha’s thoughts on dependent origination (paticcasamuppada) and the anatman or no self or soul. In the idea of dependent origination there is a chain, even a matrix of causes that continually keeps things in flux. Thus an encounter with the other introduces new causes so that the person who experiences the encounter with the other is changed. The Buddha concluded from this that no one could have a separate self or soul because one is always changing and what purpose would such a permanent thing like self serve? How Frank Hoffman explained this and this idea of change over time even with the Buddhist idea of samsara or rebirth is that there is, “continuity without identity of selfsame substance.” (Hoffman 1987, 17)

Can we say the same about Levinas, that the ego is not undone, only subordinated in the substitution and what returns is changed by the encounter with the other? Is there continuity without identity of selfsame substance discoverable within Levinas? This is a good question for a comparative philosophical analysis.

The question of revelation is also intriguing and complicated by Levinas’s own idea on the subject: “The first revelation of the other, presupposed in all the other relations with him, does not consist in grasping him in his negative resistance and in circumventing him by ruse. I do not struggle with a faceless god, but I respond to his expression, to his revelation.” (Levinas 1979, 197) The question that I have is whether this revelation is what Ricoeur groused about in his statement about not understanding why we should conceive of ‘dependence without heteronomy” or is it the reverse that Levinas sees dependence with heteronomy?

God appears with the face, anyone’s face—dependence i.e. the dependent variable. The independent variable or the heteronomy is the face of the other which is always already different from all others and infinitely alterior.

Ok, but what is the revelation? Is it an opening to the idea of another in the inspiration that comes from the recognition of the divine in the other or the divine revelation itself? Bettina Bergo expresses the tension of the face in his explanation: “The face is arguably the most important ‘concept’ and ‘moment’ for Levinas’s thought. It is both of these – both concept and pre-linguistic ‘moment’ – and in that respect it engenders a tension throughout his work between an original mode of time, the interruption, and a set of discursive strategies that ‘dramatize’ situations, from living in the world, creating a dwelling, to facing the other.” (Bergo 2011, 17) What is it about concept and moment that need to be considered in the revelation of the face? Moment, for sure as an interruption from the il y a, the loneliness of existence within oneself. It is an opening up of time which has been suppressed in the insomniac who watches when there is nothing to watch. The sentry of the self that is forever pacing before the guard tower with no end in sight and where time as the moment of guard duty is interminable.

The concept is the thing that deserves more attention. The concept of the face and its complexity not only with what it hides within—the alterity of the faceholder, but also what it reveals initially (God and the other) and what it may continue to reveal (responsibility as pre-originary and unlimited in nature). How do we make this transition from the aimlessly pacing sentry to the sentry who suddenly sees a face in the moonlight. Perhaps it is passion.

The word passion assumes greater importance as Levinas’s work progresses. He speaks of the passion of responsibility rather than a Kantian rational deduction of responsibility. The Kantian rational deduction would give us ‘the responsible action’ whereas Levinas’s passionate take on responsibility is one is never quite sure what an appropriate response might be. This, of course, we can link to the alterior nature of the other as being infinite.

However, your question about revelation might be asked with, “What is the source of this passion—is it the revelation of God in the face of the other or the revelation of the human in the other as a product of this infinite God who has been given infinite alterity in God’s image? Is this the passion that streams from the love for God or the simple love for the other?  To what extent (in either case) is this transcendental love differ from or the same as eros? I am wondering whether an exploration into the passions of which Levinas speaks can help us understand what kind(s) of revelation are we experiencing with the arrival of the face of the other and then the experience of the other behind the initial manifestation of the face.

Bergo, Bettina. 2011. "The Face in Levinas."  Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16 (1):17-39. doi: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.564362.

Hoffman, Frank J. 1987. Rationality & Mind in Early Buddhism. Delhi, India: Motilal Banasaridass.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1979. Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Vol. 1: Springer.

I agree with you that the face in lévinas philosophie is the key of understanding the place of revelation in his ethics and philosophy. About the face, it's worse checking the frequent use of this world in the old testament "paniym" in hebrew, because this illuminates Lévinas' concept of face. For example Lévinas refers to Moses and the burning bush, (Ex; chap.3) or to the story of Cain in the genesis. 

Cecile,

I will be interesting to see where you go with this. Please feel free to reach out.

I just received notification of a new book about Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur, specifically the chapter on Ricoeur’s Early Approaches to the Ontological Question, which may or may not shed some light on your query.

Abstract:

In The Conflict of Interpretations (1969), Ricoeur makes an important distinction between two different ways to approach the ontological question: a short route (represented by Heidegger) and a long route (Ricoeur’s path). Since then, this well-known distinction has always played a central role in understanding the ontological question in Ricoeur. But the aim of this chapter is to show that, before the Conflict of Interpretations, Ricoeur was considering the ontological question from a different point of view, by using a distinction between unifocal and bifocal approaches. This distinction appears in Ricoeur’s early work, first and foremost, in order to shed light on the difference between an ontology focusing on human existence (Heidegger and Sartre) and another approach insisting on the tension between human finitude and Transcendence (Jaspers and Marcel). But the project of the Philosophy of the Will (1950–1960) was also based on this idea of a bifocal ontology. Directly inspired by the philosophies of Jaspers and Marcel, Ricoeur developed a paradoxical ontology of fallibility, of disproportion or non-coincidence with oneself, but still animated by the sight of a reconciled ontology.

Actually, this approach of Ricoeur evoluated from phenomenology to hermeneutic through the question of evil, the broken cogito and human fallibility. He critics Heidegger's ontology avoiding the moral and ethics in his concept of care. At the same time he tries to conserve some aspects of ontology within his ethics, in The course of reconignition, the mutuallity in the meeting of individual subjects is proposing a way somewhat different from Lévinas. Lévinas says that the subjects meet himself thanks to the responsability and the election, the anachronism in the process explains the anteriority or priority of the otherness from the subjectivity. He refuses any kind of reciprocity.

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The inspiration of the face in Lévinas philosophy as is root in the face "paniym" in hebrew evoqued in the bible and in the talmud where Lévinas found revelant thoughts for his ethics

While some have problems with the idea of the asynchrony of Levinas's ethics. I do not. If I require the reciprocity of the other, then I can deny further responsibility until the reciprocity is offered. This abrogates the idea of unlimited responsibility. Instead, Levinas offers that responsibility is the other's business, not mine which I believe suggests that there is a continuity of the good which is encapsulated in the ideas of: passivity, hospitality, and responsibility.

In the the question of substitution for the other, I follow Simon Critchley's skepticism because in substitution we may be simply replacing one totality with another. In his book, The Problem with Levinas Critchley offers fecundity in the form of my child as an alternative to substitution. I question whether this also is another totalization in an effort to find the otherwise than being.

I walk this idea of fecundity back to the idea of revelation (as I have defined it as both from the divine and from thinking). Does revelation reveal the possibilities for an otherwise than being in the fecundity of the mind? Is the mind which is infinitely alterior in its own right the locus for the good...ethics? Is the substitution thereby substituted by fecundity of mind from an ontological totality either in the substitution for the other or my child into the idea of the otherwise than being? The idea of the otherwise than being as the fecundity of mind is more appealing to me than an ontological replacement for being as substitution or a child. If this is a possible solution to the quest for the otherwise than being, then will the revelation which begins in the appearance of the face of the other as the pre-originary (trace of God) and my own fecundity of mind as post-originary revelation (after God) become constituted as an otherwise than being that can, at the most rudimentary level, begin to cognize or even just begin to engage with the idea of human goodness?

Human goodness is a good perspective to engage the dialogue between Lévinas and ricoeur. 

In the substitution Lévinas describes until where it can lead us: to suffer and pay for the sins of others, the notion of substitution is in connection with hostage's notion, to suffer for the otherone is also to suffer by the otherone. I don't think that there is totality in the idea of substitution, the alterity is always present and come first, and the subject receives enterely his own identity responding to the Other. Godness is the source of possibility of responsability until substitution and comes from the Alterity. 

For Ricoeur goodness can be associated with love, gratuity, charity; But in his mention of "love oneself as another" he offers possibility for the subject to be able of charity. In the "sollicitude" described in his ethics' book,  Oneself as another, the benevolence as an aspect of human spontaneity and natural capacity. 

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An interesting research can be begun in this direction....?

Cecile,

An interesting research can be begun in this direction.

The question that arises between Ricoeur and Levinas to investigate right away is that Ricoeur says to 'love oneself as another' whereas as Cohen explains,that Levinas’s ethics does not begin with “love thy neighbor as oneself,” but “love thy neighbor is oneself. (Levinas 2006, xxvii, Introduction, emphasis in original)” What do these two approaches have in common; what are their differences both in theory and application? Why are these important questions?

You might want to begin where Derrida saw an opening to this discussion in the idea of hospitality. His Adieu, Emmanuel Levinas has a quite interesting take on what hospitality means. You also will want to read Roberte Ce Soir by Pierre Klossowski for his absurd but informative 'rules of hospitality' to get an idea of hospitality in extremis. 

Levinas, Emmanuel. 2006. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

I am very grateful for your contributions!