Ethics qua the Divine: Inflections of Otherness in Socrates and Levinas

This paper explores similarities and differences between the Socratic and Levinasian ethical perspectives seeking to ascertain our responsibility before the dilemmas confronting our century. For Socrates and Levinas human destiny is shaped by our personal response to otherness grounded in ethics par excellence ethics as first philosophy in irrevocable relation to the divine. The fundamental problems of philosophy cannot distort or subjugate the primacy of the ethical imperative posed by otherness. For Socrates human ethos unfolds in direct relation to the divine (ti theon). Divine relation enhances philosophical questioning and enriches the human potential for dialogue, heightening the primacy of the ethical imperative and response. Socrates’ search for wisdom presupposes an aporetics of alterity and his vocation as philosopher begins by putting to the test the very god at Delphi who affirmed that no other man was wiser than he (Ap. 21a). Henceforth, the alleged wisdom and ethos of the other establishes Socrates’ relation to otherness and elenctic questioning, a form of self-examination and also cross-examination of interlocutors, becomes the measure of his self-knowledge. Socrates’ singularity is highlighted by the remoteness of the puzzling ambiguity of the god’s riddle reinforced by the enigmatic otherness of the preventive voice of daimonion (to tou theou semeion), both of which foreshadow his ethical relation to others and otherness. Divine otherness qua the other enables Socrates to attain moral knowledge and opens him to philosophic ignorance, accentuating his ethical response. In Levinas prima philosophia is ethics without ontological foundation an irretrievable relation to divine otherness qua the particular other. Ethics is not a field of philosophical inquiry that ignores the singularity of human beings; the very alterity of the face its unique expression and vulnerability transcends the exteriority of form coinciding with a desire for the divine: infinitely clarifying our response. The face to face personifies a pre-ontological oeuvre into the dynamics of conversation (dialegesthai) augmenting communication (“communion”) it is a straightforward welcoming of the divine in the other. Encountering the otherness of the face is the height in which the divine reveals a welcoming of justice and infinite responsibility. The ethical obligation before the uprightness and dignity of the other’s face bears meaning “beyond being” thus the primacy of ethics is established pre-cognitively outside and against the ideological matrix of the philosophical tradition. Civilization needs a moral and spiritual transformation. The misuses of scientific progress and technological innovation in modernity have resulted in the monumental violence of great wars and the ecological crisis we are presently facing. The crucial questions confronting modernity are neither economic political or military nor are they epistemological, ideological or even intellectual, rather they are grounded in ethics: the spiritual foundation for all spheres of human activity. The advancement of culture perhaps the very survival of humanity depends on our capacity to respond ethically. Nothing less than the devaluation of ethics its deterioration to the relativism of subjectivity along with the looming threat of nihilism which plaques our era makes the philosophizing of Socrates and Levinas more pertinent today.