Religious Experience in Levinas and R. Hayyim of Volozhin

Abstract

One might reflexively think that if there were any claim that could safely be made about Levinas without getting critiqued by other scholars, it would be claim that Levinas cannot tolerate of religious experience, understood as direct experience of given to consciousness in present moment. The readiest places to find support for such claim are perhaps brief sections on Descartes in God and Philosophy and Totality and Infinity. Here, Levinas reads third of Descartes' Meditations, in which Descartes claims that is condition of possibility of experience, to conclude that is unthinkable. Because awareness of is always anterior to any and all acts of consciousness, idea of surpasses every capacity ... [and] shatters [fait eclater] thinking that only encloses in presence.1 On this reading, falls outside rules of customary account of experience such as Kant's.2 If experience is empirical knowledge, and if empirical knowledge only occurs through consciousness' synthesis of perceptions, as Kant argues in Critique of Pure Reason,3 then an experience of would be impossible. How could an act of consciousness, dependent on categories of understanding, represent that which transcends those categories, because (as Descartes has shown) it is prior to them and therefore in some way greater than them? For this reason, Levinas describes of in God and Philosophy as the very absolution of absolute, and denies that of infinite could be an object for consciousness in Totality and Infinity.4 There are no grounds for thinking that Levinas is here critiquing Kant's notion of experience in favor of another, more Jamesian, account of experience. Levinas does not authorize us to exchange definition of experience as empirical knowledge with definition of experience that grounds it in vague sense of reality, feeling of objective presence, perception of what we may call 'something there.'5 First of all, this is not what Descartes implies at end of Third Meditation (the intuition of infinity ... will not become any sort of invasion of across an inward emotion).6 But more primordially (and more persuasively), all experience claims are necessarily Kantian for Levinas. Any other account of experience is self-refuting: a religious thought that appeals to religious experiences allegedly independent of philosophy insofar as it is founded upon experience, already refers to ? think' and is entirely connected to philosophy.7 As soon as I claim to have an experience, it is my experience and therefore is subject to categories of understanding. That which is made impossible by Kantian categories absolves itself from any and all possible direct with human consciousness, and therefore from all possible experience. The infinite is absolutely other than finite, and nothing can bridge this gap; infinite cannot be aimed at, and infinite cannot engage in dialogue with consciousness as some accounts of revelation hypothesize.8 For this reason, despite any surface similarity between hyperbolic style and that of medieval Christian mystics, one must remain with what Bettina Bergo has described as Levinas's criticisms of ontological and totalizing preoccupations of mystics' writing.9 And yet. There are at least three good reasons not to subscribe to this narrative. The first reason lies in final paragraph of Descartes' third Meditation, which Levinas cites in Totality and Infinity. Levinas describes this as shift away from epistemological language to one of personal relation or majesty, since Descartes' contemplation of ends in language of sensation of admiration and adoration. Nevertheless, in Latin text, Descartes writes of contemplation as not only allowing him to admire and adore [admirari, adorare] beauty of God's immense light, but also as allowing him to intuit it [intueri]. …