untitled

HENT DE VRIES

simply mean that Levinas’s insistence on philosophy’s scriptural (more precisely, rabbinic
and Talmudic) counterpart and its exegesis or hermeneutics—even within the terms laid
out by Spinoza’s treatise—is characterized by a universality, interiority, and hence ratio-
nality of its own? This is what Levinas, with Zac, seems to suggest: ‘‘Without opening
onto [de ́boucher sur] Spinozism, without being ‘of the order of reason in the philosophical
sense of the word,’^8 these truths [i.e., the ‘‘eternal truths of faith’’] involve an interiority
of their own.’’ In short, it has a nonphilosophical intelligibility, ‘‘a religious liberalism,
but without philosophy’’ (114 / 163). Is this interiority and intelligibility—indeed, liberal-
ism—already implied and acknowledged in Spinoza’s use, in theTheologico-Political Trea-
tise, of the formulations the ‘‘Word of God’’ and, in theEthics, ‘‘piety,’’ both of which call
for ‘‘obedience’’ and ‘‘charity’’ and entail no more than a ‘‘minimal creed’’? Finally, do
these two possible perspectives—the dual aspects of the philosophical or theoretical, on
the one hand, and the scriptural, practical, and, as we shall see, theologico-political, on
the other (to which both Spinoza and Levinas seem deeply committed), constitute a real
alternative?
Indeed, whatisthe difference between the epistemic truth that adequate, philosophi-
cal knowledge conveys and the nonepistemic, moral ‘‘sui generiscertitude’’ (113 / 161)
that Spinoza reserves for faith? The latter, Levinas comments, is a ‘‘subjective certainty, a
risk, but ‘the customs [l’usage] of life and society oblige us to give our consent to a large
number of things that we cannot demonstrate.’ The moral word thus has a special rank
[statut], placed beside speculation and above the realm that falls to imagination’’ (115 /
164).
There is no simple answer to these questions. At one point Levinas writes that ‘‘the
motives for obedience are not of arational order. They are motives of an affective order,
such as fear, hope, fidelity, respect, veneration, and love’’ (114 / 163). In this reading,
Scripture’s many—and often seemingly incomparable—motifs motivate in a way different
from adequate ideas and deductive reasoning (and, ultimately, the third kind of knowl-
edge, or intellectual love of God). More precisely, they move, mobilize, set in movement
(as ideas and intuitive science would not). And yet, Levinas claims following Zac, they do
not resort to the laws of ‘‘vague experience,’’ but have a separate status as a fourth kind
of knowledge, of sorts, irreducible to imagination, ratiocination, and intuition:

What counts is the difference between those who regard the Scriptures, even if they

are judged to be inspired or naı ̈ve, as a text like any other, and those who regard

them, in spite of the traces they retain of their evolution, as an essential form of the

spirit, irreducible to perception, philosophy, literature, art, science, or history, yet

compatible with political and scientific freedom. Although incapable of being trans-

mittedmore geometrico, the Word of God, which is religion and not merely wisdom,

can be presented as agreeing with philosophy.... In that lies not its inconsistency

but its originality and its universality, its independence in the face of the order that

PAGE 240

240

.................16224$ CH10 10-13-06 12:35:16 PS