Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation

HORIZONS
comprehension” (GP 129). And, as he also remarks, “[r]ational theology accepts this
vassalage” (ibid.): “as soon as he is conceived, this God is situated within ‘being’s
move’ [‘geste d’être’]” (GP 130). In such a rationalist theology, or what I have
described above as theological positivism (of which Heidegger’s later “Letter on
Humanism” would be an example for Levinas), God must be submitted to the
condition of Being, such that God is subject to Being. But that is precisely the
problem, contends Levinas, because “the God of the Bible signifies the beyond
being, transcendence” (GP 130). So also philosophy, construed as conceptual
knowing, seeks to “grasp” and “encompass,” to acquire and possess its object (BPW
152). The concept (Begriff ) recalls the concreteness of this metaphor, and “[t]hese
metaphors are to be taken seriously and literally. They belong to the phenomenology of
immanence” (BPW 152, emphasis original). Phenomenology, part of the history of
philosophy whose story has been “a destruction of transcendence” (GP 130) offers a
“theory of knowledge” 43 for which
[k]nowledge is a relation of the Same with the Other in which the Other is
reduced to the Same and divested of its strangeness, in which thinking
relates itself to the other but the other is no longer other as such; the other is
already appropriated (le propre), already mine. Henceforth, knowledge is
without secrets or open to investigation, that is to say, it is a world. It is
immanence. (BPW 151)
This is why, as suggested above, Levinas sees the phenomenological ego as a
reproduction of the Platonic soul, since in this phenomenology of immanence “one
only learns what one already knows, . . . nothing absolutely new, nothing other,
nothing strange, nothing transcendent, could either affect or truly enlarge a mind
committed to contemplating everything” (BPW 151).
We must appreciate the sense in which Levinas’s posing of the question is a
fundamentally modern (i.e. post-Cartesian) account of knowledge insofar as knowing
is equated with comprehension. Only in modernity, after Descartes’s equation of
truth with certainty, does knowledge become synonymous with comprehension,
abolishing the medieval distinction between the two. We can thus legitimately call
into question Levinas’s sweeping claim regarding the equation of knowledge and
comprehension “in the West.” For medieval thinkers such as Aquinas, for instance,
one can “know” God without “comprehending” him. Or to put it conversely, just
because one does not “comprehend” God (which is impossible) does not mean that
one cannot “know” God (which is, indeed, the condition of possibility for
salvation). 44 But on Levinas’s reading, particularly of phenomenology, to know is to
constitute, to give meaning on the basis of the ego, to possess the object, to grasp and
comprehend and therefore to reduce to immanence. Thus phenomenology, for
Levinas, is a philosophy of immanence par excellence – indeed another “Hegelianism”
for which “nothing remains absolutely other” (BPW 153). To return to Levinas’s
discussion of “rationalist theology” noted above, such an equation of knowledge
with comprehension means that God either cannot be known, or must be reduced to
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