Levinas’s harsh rhetoric directed at Hegel is well known: Hegel’s system would refer to a rational ground for the ‘ultimate deployment of thinking’, where the movement of the unfolding of spirit makes for a ‘totality of war’ (Cohen Reference Cohen2012: 315). Levinas writes: ‘the visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy’, where ‘individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknownst to themselves’ (TI: 6/21).Footnote 1 Levinas suggests that in theory, which often appears to be the preferred schema for attempting to describe relationality, comprehension makes for a way of knowing the approached being in such a way that its alterity vanishes, because the activity of thought triumphs over the alterity of beings. This process can only take place when a mediating term is used, like spirit: ‘in it the shock of the encounter of the same with the other is deadened’ (TI: 32/42). Levinas finds that in this situation, difference is not respected, as the neutral middle term reduces that which is other to what is the same; to the unlimited freedom of the subject, not allowing itself to be alienated by the Other, which makes the system of the intelligible ultimately a consciousness of the self for Levinas. Therefore, Hegel’s thinking represents the logical consequence of the ‘allergy of philosophy’, and a conceptual imperialism, where consciousness’s quest for reconciliation reveals a narcissistic longing for self-fulfilment.Footnote 2
Levinas contends that Hegel’s thinking equates freedom with rationality, where rationality implies surrender to the total system that is developing in world history. Since for Hegel the essential subject is also rational, the development of the systematic exposition of the notion of truth coincides with the interests of the subject, a development in which all alterity will be absorbed in the rational order. Here, every relation with alterity would be nothing more than an appropriation of one being by another in their common realization of reason, ‘where all beings negate one another’ (TI: 337/302). This is a situation in which ethics, understood as the relation to the other person, is reduced to universality, universality to absolute spirit, and absolute spirit to self-knowledge in the totality of a dialectical system.
Levinas finds that Hegel’s thinking is representative of the history of philosophy as a history of ontology, which, by privileging thinking the truth of being, has been incapable of rendering justice to the alterity of the other person. For Levinas, thinking difference in a proper sense—and thus differently from Hegel—demands thinking ethics. This does not mean, however, that the Levinasian thought of ethical difference is merely in opposition to Hegel. If this were so, he would remain confined within the Hegelian system. By speaking out, Levinas could only confirm Hegel in his discourse, as opposition here would only confirm what it seeks to oppose. This problematic is explained by Michel Foucault, who writes in l’Ordre du discours:
Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously, perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us. (Foucault Reference Foucault1972: 82/235)
Jacques Derrida has explored this issue in Levinas at length, most notably in his essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics: an Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’. Here, Derrida elaborates on the proximity between Hegel and Levinas by scrutinizing Levinas’s views on language, infinity and history. Although sympathetic to Levinas’s attempt to ‘make the very difficult passage beyond the debate—which is also a complicity—between Hegelianism and classical Hegelianism’, he does state that: ‘Levinas is very close to Hegel, much closer than he admits, and at the very moment when he is apparently opposed to Hegel in the most radical fashion. This is a situation he must share with all anti-Hegelian thinkers, and whose final significance calls for much thought’ (VM: 123).
In many ways, Levinas is indebted to Hegel, especially to the Phänomenologie des Geistes. Along with Descartes’s idea of the Infinite and Plato’s good beyond being, Levinas explicitly acknowledges Hegel’s interpretation of recognition as the quest for the other man as one of those instants in the history of philosophy that reveal a trace of transcendence as they break with the primacy of ontological thought. However, Levinas, in a 1981 interview, would describe Hegelian dialectics as a ‘radical denial of the rupture between the ethical and the ontological’ (Levinas Reference Levinas1986: 30).
Being careful with regard to the notion of rupture mentioned here, it is the aim of this paper to show that Levinas is not a thinker merely opposed to Hegel, but instead manages to interrupt Hegel’s thought in a way that neither confirms nor refutes him but opens him up to an eschatological dimension. I seek to show that Levinas does so by presenting a supplement of meaning brought about by the ethical relation. Or, in other words, I mean to show how Levinas presents an ethical meaning that is irreducible to truth as Hegel understands it and that calls truth into question, yet that invokes truth and makes it possible.
I seek to do this by first examining the relation between identity and difference in Hegel and the role that opposition plays in the establishment of truth as the union of the particular and the universal. Subsequently, I investigate the notion of interruption invoked by Levinas and explain in what sense the ethical relation of difference interrupts the Hegelian movement of truth and history. Finally, I show that this interruption leads to an understanding of truth and history that does not oppose Hegel’s understanding of them, yet opens them to a new meaning.
I. Hegel and truth
Hegel claims that philosophy’s entire history is to be thought as nothing other than the development of truth. According to him, philosophy and its history are intrinsically related in the sense that different philosophical systems throughout history can be read as the progressive unfolding of truth, since they are moments in its realization. As the well-known phrase from the Phänomenologie des Geiste states: ‘the true is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development’ (PhG: 24/11). Here, truth is equated with the movement of reason, which is nothing other than the history of philosophy itself.
As a consequence, philosophy is only actual as Science or as a system. Philosophical principles, if they are true, are also false, simply because they are only principles. Hegel contends that finite knowledge is less than the whole and is knowledge that does not exhaust all knowledge because it necessarily stands in relation with that which is other than itself—with that from which it differs. The notion of the negative, often regarded as the false, the other of the True, is for Hegel not independent of the True. He writes that: ‘the substance is itself essentially the negative, partly as a distinction and determination of the content, and partly as a simple distinguishing, i.e. as self and knowledge in general’ (PhG: 41/22). In the same manner, it is inadequate to describe subject and object in their unity, as these terms precisely describe what they signify outside of their unity. Thus, for Hegel, what is considered negative belongs to the content itself, and is therefore also positive, being part of the immanent movement and determination of the content as well as part of the whole. In this sense, thinking truth as infinite knowledge means simultaneously thinking this infinite knowledge in the finitude of its different manifestations, because spirit is already present in all forms of its determined differences.
The task of Hegel’s philosophy is the clarification of the movement by which these differences emerge and the recognition that they are only possible as differences in so far as they are forming in their difference the relation to identity. This, for Hegel, means a movement of reconciliation of difference with itself. Reconciliation is a process in which what is different in difference is negated and aufgehoben to the point at which it is capable of recognizing its possibility as difference, which implies that it is also an attestation of identity. As such, for Hegel, difference is only difference if its difference is, both in itself and for itself, also identity.
Infinite knowledge is identified with an integrated or reasonable whole in which all finite knowledge is mediated or reconciled. Thus, opposing and different concepts are aligned with and lead to one another and can ultimately be perceived as distinguishable aspects of spirit as a single, all-inclusive universal. As such, distinctions or oppositions are not to be thought as independent elements but merely as moments in the unfolding of spirit. Spirit, developed in this manner, understands itself as spirit: it is Science in its actuality. This movement of mediation, as ‘self-recognition in otherness’, is the foundation of science, or knowledge. Spirit ‘wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself’ (PhG: 37/19). For Hegel therefore, spirit is reason realising itself: ‘Reason is spirit when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world and of the world as itself’ (PhG: 324/263). Reason is the self-restoring or mediating movement through which absolute knowledge can be grasped.
For Hegel, then, truth is its own movement, in which what he calls the natural consciousness is projected towards its explication and therefore to the truth of its own being. Then, ‘spirit has made its existence identical with its essence; it has itself for its object just as it is, and the abstract element of immediacy, and of the separation of knowing and truth, is overcome. Being is then absolutely mediated’ (PhG: 40/21). It is here that the meaning of the term dialectic manifests itself: as the possibility for the natural consciousness to elevate itself to its truth, in which there is no longer a discrepancy between being and knowing. Here, the elements of spirit ‘remain in the simple oneness of knowing; they are the True in the form of the True, and their difference is only the difference of content’ (PhG: 40/22). As Hegel writes:
The movement of a being that immediately is, consists partly in becoming other than itself, and thus becoming its own immanent content; partly in taking back into itself this unfolding [of its content] or this existence of it, i.e. in making itself into a moment, and simplifying itself into something determinate. In the former movement, negativity is the differentiating and positing of existence; in this return to self, it is the becoming of the determinate simplicity. It is in this way that the content shows that its determinateness is not received from something else, nor externally attached to it, but that it determines itself, and arranges itself as a moment having its own place in the whole. (PhG: 53/32)
Reality is rational and the goal of human enquiry is to become aware of this rationality and hence achieve a fully adequate comprehension of reality. Thus, for Parmenides as well as for Hegel, the rational is the real and the real is the rational. There is nothing as such that would be aporetic or contradictory to reason. Since this is so, there is never an alterity that remains outside or exterior to the movement of thinking, as any alterity is comprehended within it. It is important to note that this however does not mean that the subject has somehow integrated the whole world as objective reality. Hegel thinks that nature is infinite in all its varied differences, and it is impossible for knowledge to be ‘complete’ in the sense of knowing everything. It is rather the case that in philosophy, thought enacts its unity with reality in the modality of rational comprehension. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that totality is most surely not to be thought merely in terms of a negation of difference, because it is precisely the negation of difference that reveals its possibility as difference. One can read the trajectory of the Phänomenologie precisely as this movement of identity and difference. Hegelian totality, as comprehension of difference, can then be understood as ‘The power of spirit is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition’ (PhG: 18/6). Spirit empties itself completely in phenomena as difference.
II. Difference and recognition
For Levinas, thinking difference differently from Hegel demands thinking the ethical relation with the other person. In order to think this relation, Levinas engages in a re-reading of the history of philosophy. But whereas for Hegel the engagement with this history takes place in terms of a conversation with that which has been thought, for Levinas, this re-reading is about disclosing a difference that has remained largely unthought throughout this history, yet supposed by it. However, as noted, Levinas identifies instants in the history of philosophy, as certain moments of ‘clarity’ that break with the primacy of ontological thought as they reveal a trace of transcendence (AQE: 17/4). Yet, this does not mean that Levinas subscribes to the theoretical or ontological presuppositions of the philosophers in which he locates those instants of clarity. It also does not mean that Levinas renounces the history of philosophy altogether. It is rather that the project of thinking ethical difference entails the explication of the relationship between the history of philosophy (as the history of the deployment of the truth of Being) and that which remains different from philosophy within its very history. In this sense, interruption must be viewed as a surplus of meaning, which does not enter from what is outside, but is awoken in what is interrupted within the philosophical tradition itself.
For Levinas, it is ethics that operates as this interruption: ethical difference interrupts totality, by opening it to an irreducible exteriority and inappropriability. The key to ethical difference lies in the notion of the face of the Other, which ‘breaks the system’ (Levinas Reference Levinas1998: 34). The face of the Other does not present itself as a set of qualities forming an image. On the contrary, the face of the Other destroys and overflows ‘the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum—the adequate idea’ (TI: 43/51). The face is not manifested by certain qualities, but expresses itself. Through the face of the Other gleams Infinity and transcendence; referring to a relationship of radical separation and non-adequation, not in the sense of a negation, but ‘beyond the night and the light, beyond the knowledge measuring beings’ (TI: 23/34). The Other remains exterior to and invisible from the world of phenomena; she exceeds presentation. In Autrement qu’être ou au-delà l’essence, Levinas states: ‘it [the face] is indeed the defection of phenomenology’ (AQE: 141/88). It is in this sense that Levinas writes: ‘one can say the face is not seen’ (Levinas Reference Levinas1998: 86). Or: what is being seen in the face is its own invisibility, what Derrida would call the secret of the other. Since the face is not seen in the realm of knowledge of phenomena, my relation with the Other does not belong to thematization, but to the ethical, which is expressed in discourse. This is because within the discourse that I share with the Other, she remains absolute within the relation and disrupts the solipsistic dialectic of consciousness. Discourse for Levinas proceeds from an absolute difference, inconceivable in terms of formal logic alone, since language accomplishes a relation between terms that break up the unity of a genus. ‘Language is perhaps to be defined as the very power to break the continuity of being or of history’ (TI: 212/195). This is so because the face speaks to me: it calls me to an infinite responsibility and justice.
Levinas’s description of the Other, who interrupts totality by calling the subject to an infinite responsibility, seeks to ensure that the face to face encounter does not coincide with the unfolding of reason in a higher destiny of spirit. The following examination of the relationship between Hegel’s notion of recognition and Levinas’s understanding of alterity will seek to make clear in what sense Levinas’s account of alterity is different from Hegel’s version of it. Like many of his French contemporaries, Levinas was schooled by Kojève on Hegel in the 1930s. He was taught that the master-slave dialectic was one of the key passages of the Phänomenologie. It is certainly this discussion that Levinas refers to when he speaks of the Other in Hegel as ‘my enemy’, and as a situation in which ‘all beings negate one another’ (TI: 337/302).
Before looking at the exact phrases from the Phänomenologie, it is important to note that Hegel was conscious of the possible criticism of idealism that it is a kind of egology that reduces what is other to the same (a criticism raised by Jacobi). Hegel’s attack on Schelling’s interpretation of the Absolute as ‘the night in which all cows are black’ is testimony to this (PhG: 22/9). Whether this is a justified criticism of Schelling is a question that will not be treated here, but the point is that Hegel was aware of the problem of conceiving of an interpretation of the Absolute that would exclude all difference from itself, and would therefore become impossible to express. Moreover, the criticism of immediate knowledge, and the interpretation of the identity of self-consciousness as always identity of identity and difference, reveal a concern with giving the notion of difference its rightful place. In this sense, there is an affinity between Hegel and Levinas’s philosophical questioning.
However, whereas in Levinas the relationship between same and Other is one of asymmetry, where the Other appears to me from a height, Hegel, in his master-slave dialectic, presents recognition as a reciprocal movement: ‘each is for the other what the other is for it’ (PhG: 144/113). For Hegel, this reciprocity makes a self-consciousness into what it is, because only in this way can ‘the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it’ (PhG: 145/110). Thus, recognition can only be brought about by both consciousnesses. As Hegel notes:
[consciousness] is aware that it at once is, and is not, another consciousness, and equally that this other is for itself only when it supersedes itself as being for itself, and is for itself only in the being-for-self of the other. Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. (PhG: 147/112)
Important here is the manner in which the process of recognition as subjection of the other in a paradoxical manner removes the alterity of the other so that, as such, the other serves as a means to secure truth for self-consciousness through mediation. In this process of recognition, Self-consciousness learns that it cannot treat the other Self-consciousness as a means precisely because it is a Self-consciousness, which is both object (which, as such, can be appropriated) and subject (a subjectivity which, for Hegel, cannot be turned into an object). As such, other and self meet in the element of universality.
Thus for Hegel, it is certainly not the case that difference is reduced to identity. But the universal (or the whole) is the True, which implies that the significance of what it is to be an individual self-consciousness can only be understood from the ‘higher’ standpoint of universality. One can thus conclude that there is a thinking of alterity to be found in Hegel, which comes to the fore clearly in his treatment of the problem of recognition of consciousness. However, alterity can only exist because of a third term: the significance of what it is to be an individual self-consciousness can only be understood from the point of spirit, as Hegel writes (about overcoming desire) of spirit: ‘the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: “I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I”’ (PhG: 145/110).
The profound difference between Hegel and Levinas, then, is that within the relation between subject and Other, Hegel does not discern any possible surplus of meaning that transcends his system of philosophy. Furthermore, the movement of reconciliation means that the subject is able to recognize itself in absolute otherness. In this sense, Hegel’s thinking is for Levinas essentially solipsistic. What is referred to as ‘other’ by Hegel is a projection of what is the same on to the object of reflection. Moreover, in the attempt to make alterity accessible as a concept for consciousness, the other person is conceptualized in its objectivity. On the contrary, in Levinas’s account of ethical alterity, reconciliation is not a possibility, because its very structure does not allow for it.
III. Truth in Levinas
Since the Other for Levinas remains outside the realm of consciousness and recognition, she is exterior to the movement of truth as understood by Hegel. This is so because the ethical interruption by the Other who speaks is expression and cannot be articulated in terms of truth and untruth, since expression does not have a place for a term and its contradiction; ‘the privileged case of a being foreign to the alternative of truth and non-truth’ (TI: 221/202). However, this does not imply that Levinas renounces truth in favour of the ethical relationship that he proposes. He states this very clearly in Otherwise than Being: ‘man is a being of truth, belonging to no other genus of Being’ (AQE: 66/37). Nevertheless, a quest for truth only takes place after a relationship is established ‘with a face which can guarantee itself, whose epiphany itself is somehow a word of honour’ (TI: 221/202). According to Levinas, language understood as an exchange of signs derives from this word of honour. This means that it is signification that makes the sign possible, instead of a mediation of a sign that forms signification. ‘Every recourse to words presupposes the comprehension of the primary signification, but this comprehension, before being interpreted as a “consciousness of”, is society and obligation’ (TI: 227/206). In this sense, meaning does not arise as a product of the self. ‘To think is to have the idea of Infinity, or to be taught’ (TI: 223/204). This non-maieutic teaching is not about an exchange of an abstract content already common. On the contrary, it is the foundation of community by a gift; by presenting a phenomenon as given; and it gives by thematizing. The gift in this context is the sentence, where a proposition defines, and relates a phenomenon to exteriority. Teaching is thus to be understood as the thematization of phenomena and the very objectification of truth refers to language. ‘We call justice this face to face approach, in conversation’ (TI: 76/71). It thus becomes clear that the justice in conversation produces truth, and language serves as the condition of possibility of the functioning of thematization and rational thought; ‘it gives it a commencement in being’ (TI: 224/204). The face of the Other who speaks forces people into discourse and ‘founds the true universality of reason’ (TI: 220/201), which means that: ‘the locus of truth is society’ (TI: 59/64). Levinas claims that in the affirmation of truth as modality between same and other, the fundamental aim of intellectualism is not opposed, but rather assured, as the ‘respect for being illuminating the intellect’ (TI: 59/64).
Whereas in Totalité et infini, the discussion focuses on the element of the production of truth in language interpreted as address, the later Autrement qu’être treats the issue of language in a more detailed manner. Here, the elaboration on the difference between the Saying and the Said makes clear that language not only produces truth but also interrupts it, since it consists of a saying to the other person ‘who is situated outside the said that the discourse says, outside all it includes’ (AQE: 264/170). Levinas writes:
[t]his reference to an interlocutor permanently breaks through the text that the discourse claims to weave in thematizing and enveloping all things. In totalizing being, discourse qua discourse thus belies the very claim to totalize. (AQE: 264/170)
In this sense, language exceeds ‘the limits of what is thought, by suggesting, letting be understood without ever making understandable, an implication of a meaning distinct from that which accrues to signs from the simultaneity of systems or the logical definition of concepts’ (AQE: 263/169). This is a situation in which meaning refuses simultaneity and does not enter into being.
It thus becomes clear that the ethical relation is a relation of difference that is not subordinated by, or in the service of, truth, a situation found in Hegel’s movement. Instead, this relation is entirely differentiated from truth, yet supposed by it. Since for Levinas the relation of truth rests on language, the accomplishment of truth does not result in totality, as it does not result in a union of subject and object. The quest for truth is thus not a privation of need as it is in Hegel. ‘To seek and to obtain truth is to be in a relation not because one is defined by something other than oneself, but because in a certain sense one lacks nothing’ (TI: 55/61).
Moreover, in defining truth as deriving from the relation with the Infinity of the other person, Levinas distances himself further from Hegel’s thinking. Meaning is given by the Other and is thus, contrary to Hegel’s understanding of Self-consciousness, exterior to the ‘I’.Footnote 3 This means that Levinas reverses the movement of thematization as accepted by the history of philosophy. By locating meaning exterior to the self, existence for the subject itself is no longer the ultimate meaning of the possibility of knowledge; the concept of knowing, understood as searching for a foundation for its freedom, is not Delphi’s ‘know thyself’. For Levinas, it begins with responsibility, which is born in welcoming the Other. The Other, who eludes thematization, serves as the condition of possibility for it. In this sense, Levinas’s account of responsibility implies a reversal of and a departure from the philosophical tradition, which has always tried to locate the foundation of thinking within the intentionality of consciousness.
IV. History as eschatology
As becomes clear from the above, Levinas finds that it is the relationship of responsibility that produces as well as interrupts a notion of truth, a production and interruption quite different from Hegel’s conception of truth as the union of the universal and the particular. This interpretation of truth interrupts Hegel’s understanding of history as reason realizing itself and calls into question the judgement of the philosophy of history. How? The answer to this question takes the form of an analysis of the relation of the subject with Infinite time, which is meant to demonstrate a mode of being beyond what is pronounced by history. According to Levinas, it is a necessity to think this mode of being, as Hegel’s ‘virile judgement of history’ is unjust for subjectivity since it is viewed solely from the third person perspective (TI: 220/242).Footnote 4 Levinas associates Hegelian history with a totality on an ontological plane and claims that the meaning of the Other is beyond this history. In Totalité et infini, he writes: ‘History is worked over by the ruptures of history, in which a judgement is borne upon it. When a man truly approaches another, he is uprooted from history’ (TI: xi/22).
Derrida, in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, warns against a reductive reading of Hegel in which history would be perceived as a totality, as Levinas gives. Derrida finds that history is precisely not a totality, but instead consists of ‘departures of totality’ and writes that history in Hegel is ‘the movement of transcendence of the excess over the totality, without which no totality would appear as such’ (VM: 117). Derrida finds that it is not the case that history is transcended by ‘eschatology, metaphysics or speech’. Instead, history is transcendence itself: ‘if speech is a movement of metaphysical transcendence, it is history, and not beyond it’ (VM: 117). This is similar to Jean Wahl’s view that ‘the entire history of human thought’ is ‘for Hegel … the history of a consciousness torn apart, opposing itself to itself, rending itself to a within and a without’ (Wahl Reference Wahl1951: 18). This interpretation of Hegelian history could even be applied to his own system, which would mean an actual inversion of it. The critique of Hegel by Schelling and Rosenzweig can be read in this way. They comment that, in order to constitute itself as a totality, Hegel’s system is ‘necessarily led to break this [its own] totality’. This is not the place to pursue this question further, but an interesting discussion of this problematic can be found in Jacques Rivelaygue’s discussion of Schelling and Rosenzweig in his Leçons de métaphysique allemande (1990: 290-91).
Indeed, the term ‘totality’, which Levinas drops in his later works, is part of his harsh language directed at Hegel. However, the point for Levinas is to insist on an ethical meaning as a supplement that interrupts universal history. As noted, the key to this understanding of history lies in the analysis of Infinite time. In Totalité et infini, Levinas describes the fecundity of the subject who, as responsible, is not concerned with his own time and fate, but with a time after his time and with an infinite future. As such, time is not marked by finitude (as in Heidegger), but it is instead the infinity of being that marks the essence of time.Footnote 5 Herein lies the possibility of recovering meaning despite death. Time is punctured by death and birth; its recommencement in discontinuity assures its infinity: ‘time’s infinite existing ensures the situation of judgement, condition of truth, behind the failure of the goodness of today’ (TI: 261/284). This passage appears in a problematic discussion of the notion of paternity in Totalité et infini. Later, in Autrement qu’être, Levinas reformulates the relationship of the responsible subject with the infinity of time in a more neutral way, namely in terms of the Saying and the Said and diachronic temporality. In the essay ‘Revelation in the Jewish Tradition’, the question of time returns as follows: ‘Waiting for the Messiah is the actual duration of time’. It is not about waiting for Godot (who will never appear), but ‘testifies … to the relation with something that cannot enter into the present, because the present is too small for the Infinite’ (Levinas Reference Levinas1982/Reference Levinas2007: 172/141). In the essay ‘La trace de l’autre’ he explains: ‘“Let the future and the most far-off things be the rule for all the present days” is not a banal thought that extrapolates one’s own duration; it is passage to the time of the Other’ (Levinas Reference Levinas1967/Reference Levinas1963: 192/349). In the same essay, he also calls for an ‘eschatology without liberation for my time’. What does the notion of eschatology mean here? A clarification is found in the preface to Totalité et infini: ‘Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. It is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being’ (TI: xi/22). Here, what is beyond should not be viewed in a ‘purely negative fashion’ (TI: xi: 23). Instead, it is ‘reflected within the totality and history, within experience’, and ‘draws beings out of the jurisdiction of history and the future; it arouses in them and calls them forth to their full responsibility’ (TI: xi/23).
These references to what is beyond history must be viewed as the supplement of meaning from the Other who comes to interrupt history and its meaning. Or, in other words: it is the supplement which Hegelian history is unable to retrieve. In this sense, the term eschatology does not take on a meaning in terms of a relation to a future, but must rather be understood as an interruption of the present. Hence Levinas in Totalité et infini makes a clear distinction between ‘the eschatology of messianic peace’, the ‘extraordinary phenomenon of prophetic eschatology and teleology’ (TI: xi/23). Or, as Bettina Bergo clarifies in her book Levinas between Ethics and Politics: ‘Eschatology is not a logos’ (Bergo Reference Bergo2013: 50).
Contrary to how eschatology is viewed in the Christian tradition, eschatology here is not a doctrine of the last days: it is not the last judgement that matters most, but ‘the judgements of all the instants in time, when the living are judged’ (TI: xi/23). With the attempt to inscribe these judgements within history, Levinas does not try to rationalize its movement. Instead, as Bergo comments: ‘Judgement is the fruit of the original relation with being. It entails a particularly individual experience and rests upon an event that forces us outside the closed circle of being, calling us forth to … full responsibility for Others, which is the only thing that suspends reality as conflict’ (Bergo Reference Bergo2013: 50).
Hegelian philosophy of history rests on the understanding of the judgement of history in the sense that world history is the world’s court of judgement. In his essay ‘Hegel and Levinas: The Possibility of Forgiveness and Reconciliation’, Robert Bernasconi refers to Schiller’s words, borrowed by Hegel, to make this clear: ‘die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht’ (‘world history is the court of world judgement’, Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi2005: 50). In this sense, philosophy of history presents a system of thought in which meaning for the subject derives from what is beyond it and will be revealed only at the very end. For Levinas, it is the eschatological nature of the ‘beyond’ of transcendence that presents an alternative reading of the philosophy of history, because the notion of eschatology calls into question the judgement of history by presenting an interpretation of a supplement that refers to ‘all the judgements in time’ that interrupt universal history. In sum, the eschatological character of the ‘beyond’ of history institutes a relation with being beyond history by withdrawing beings from the tribunal of world history (TI: xi/23). Thus, the ethical relation is a supplement inserted into history, which does not renounce it, but opens it to a new meaning. In other words: eschatology is within history as Hegel understands it, and supposed by it.
V. Concluding remarks
It was the aim of this paper to show that Levinas is not a thinker in opposition to Hegel, but instead interrupts Hegel’s thought in such a manner that it is opened to a supplement of ethical meaning. This ethical meaning is irreducible to truth and history as Hegel understands them, yet it invokes them and makes them possible. The first step consisted of an examination of the relation between identity and difference in Hegel. It was shown that oppositions are aligned with one another and can ultimately be viewed as distinguishable moments in the unfolding of spirit. Secondly, I sought to show that Levinas’s interpretation of ethical difference is not in the realm of truth, and can therefore not be appropriated by the movement of consciousness. An investigation into Hegel’s notion of recognition showed that the difference between Hegel’s understanding of alterity and Levinas’s version of it is that Hegel does not discern any surplus of meaning that transcends his system. A discussion of Levinas’s views on language revealed how the Other, who escapes from the comprehension needed for the establishment of truth, serves as its condition of possibility and its interruption. As a consequence, Levinas conceives of an eschatological vision of history, which does not renounce or oppose Hegel’s version of it, yet opens it to an ethical meaning. Thus, there is a meaning that is not only different from universal history; also, the search for truth supposes the ethical relation. Rivelaygue’s words are helpful here. He points out that in Judaism there is one word for both truth and fidelity. He writes: ‘truth is the fidelity to the alliance and to the promise; the truth does not designate a uni-totality, but a relation to history as to that what is promised, that which can not be realized by man alone nor without man’ (Rivelaygue Reference Rivelaygue1990: 288). One can only conceive of truth, as this fidelity, in relation to the intersubjective encounter.
