Thinking Transcendence as Ethical Relationship and Its Cultural Presuppositions: A Hermeneutical Encounter between Zhu Xi’s ‘Authentic Nature’ and Levinas’ ‘Face’

Abstract

1 Thinking Transcendence as Ethical Relationship and Its Cultural Presuppositions: A Hermeneutical Encounter between Zhu Xi’s ‘Authentic Nature’ and Levinas’ ‘Face’ Diana Arghirescu Department of Philosophy, Université du Québec à Montréal arghirescu.diana@uqam.ca To be or not to be, this is probably not the ultimate question (la question par excellence). (Levinas, 1982b: 265) I. Introduction: intercultural dialogue in a culturally pluralistic philosophy Through an intercultural dialogue—Chinese and Western—this article explores the possibility of building cultural diversity and pluralism in philosophy. More precisely, it develops multiple layers of specific meanings of the connected notions of transcendence and ethics rooted in these two cultural contexts as well as their different “cultural presuppositions.” It suggests that the comparative examination of the similarities and differences of non-Western and Western “preconceptions” of a concept, here the transcendent in the Chinese and Western cultures, could be one way of de-centering the traditionally Western-centred field of philosophy; could make it intercultural and pluralistic, not only aware of the limitations of Western thinking and its tendency to dominate and marginalize other ways of thinking, but also conscious and appreciative of the specificity of non-Western thought patterns. The task is to interculturally extend the meanings of philosophical terms as transcendence, to include in them a Chinese dimension, an African one, and so on. First, this essay suggests that the Levinasian significances of the ethical relationship and ethical transcendence share remarkable affinities with their discernable counterparts in Zhu Xi’s 2 Neo-Confucianism. Second, it also demonstrates that these similarities are based on different cultural presuppositions. Levinas’s Eurocentrism has been widely debated by Robert Bernasconi, Rudi Visker, Oona Eisenstadt, John Drabinski, to name just a few. The present intercultural dialogue argues that despite this disposition, his work is well suited to begin such an intercultural dialogue not only because it advances criticism of the Western philosophy and of ontology as its central dimension, but also because, just as Zhu’s Neo-Confucianism, focuses on ethics. Here I continue to pursue, in a new perspective, the line of comparative and intercultural philosophical inquiry introduced in Arghirescu 2022. II. Levinas’ and Zhu Xi’s non-ontological views on ethical relationship and transcendence From within Western philosophy, but in an effort to include its traditional ontological stand while going beyond it, Levinas offered a new interpretation of the ethical relationship as transcendence, and of ethics as “first philosophy.” In a word, this is pre-ontological. It is understood that the term “ontological/ontology” means here looking for the meaning of being as the core problem of Western philosophy itself (1971: 15). He observed that the ethical relationship is “not at all a layer that covers the ontology, but what is in some ways, more ontological than the ontology, an emphasis of ontology” (1982b: 143). Levinas points out that his work cannot be completely understood starting from ontology (1978: 54)—precisely because the latter does not include the authentic relationship with the other (la relation avec autrui). Levinas makes it clear that transcendence can be thought of in an ethical way, and that in this case, the intelligibility of the transcendence as “the ethical one-for-the-other” (l’un-pourl ’autre éthique) is not ontological (1982b: 125). In his view, this connection is not ontology for a number of reasons. First, the philosopher stresses that there is a distinction between the thinking 3 aimed at an object (ontology) and that concerned with the relationship with another person. In the first instance, we humans are considered as “beings ontologically separated” (1991: 120). As an example of such ontological, “objective” perspective lacking ethics, Levinas refers to the biblical story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:1-13) and Cain’s answer to the God’s question: where is your brother? “Am I my brother’s keeper?” In the same vein, for him, the interhuman connection is not simply a matter of representation but of “invocation”—of the other’s face (visage) that manifests as word (parole). He explains it as “a relation with a depth rather than with an horizon” (1991: 19, 21)—note that the latter is merely the maximum extent of one...