Fallen Philosophy

In his 2006 volume, Communion and Otherness, John Zizioulas pretty directly connects Western philosophy with the fall of Adam. Adam claimed to be God and thus "rejected the Other as constitutive of his being." As a result, Self took "ontological priority over the Other," with the result that "otherness and communion could not ultimately coincide."

The priority of Self over Other marks Greek philosophy, with its equation of knowing and Being. Even in Husserl and Heidegger, the same principle holds. Husserl sees the Other as "an instrument of self-discovery," which enables constitutes the Self. BUt this is true only in the sense that the Other "is constituted by me as constituting me: the I is primary; the Other exists because I exist and for me." In Heidegger, the world functions as a "necessary medium" through which the Other is known, and this means that the Other cannot have a "constitutive role in ontology." The Other is only "part of the 'panoramic' nature of existence," and thus the particular being is always "within the horizon of Being, forcing us to identify it always with reference to the universal, and in this way ultimately to reduce the Other to the Same."

In recent philosophy, Zizoulas finds a break with this tradition only in Buber and Levinas. But Levinas doesn't deliver the goods: "Given that the Other we infinitely desire is one who attracts our Desire but does not himself desire us or any other, otherness finally evaporates in a Desire without the Other." Desire never rests ultimately in the Other: "For Levinas the ultimate destination of Desire is not the Other but the Desire of the Other," and Zizioulas strikingly notes the similarity with de Rougemont's analysis of courtly love. So long as desire is the desire for desire, as it is for Levinas, the Self retains priority over the Other because the Self is the source of desire.

This is strikingly different from the Greek Fathers, "for whom God, the Other par excellence, as eros both moves outside himself and attracts to himslef as the ultimate destination of their desire those whose desire he provokes." Desire is thus not a movement of the Self, but is evoked by the Other, God, and "there is an event of communion of Desire at the very heart of otherness."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 09:17 PM

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