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The Metaphysics of Alterity and Unity: Levinas andPerennialism.

Jonathan Weidenbaum, Ph.D.

Originally titled “Alterity, Transcendence, and the One: Levinas and the Perennial Philosophy”, this paper was originally delivered at Duquesne University on Wednesday, July 31st, 2013, at the eighth annual meeting of the North American Levinas Society (NALS).

I. Introduction: Metaphysics.

It is widely held among some of the most passionate enthusiasts for the study of World Religions that beneath all authentic forms of spirituality is a unity of vision. First, therealm of appearances is a continual manifestation of a single andineffable ground of all being, an Absolute. Second, our deepest nature—call it the soul, the atman, the buddha-nature, the holy neshamah—is either already a part of this supernal and transcendental reality, or is at least radically akin to it. Thus, this unity of vision promotes an ontological unity, the identification of our true self with the source of all existence.

This worldview is often called The Perennial Philosophy,or perennialism for short. Popularized by Aldous Huxley in his beautifully annotated compilation of contemplative authors, it isalso a central component of a highly influential if less well-known group of scholars and philosophers known as the Traditionalists.1 Founded by the French author and eventual Sufipractitioner Rene Guenon, and further articulated by Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and most recently Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the Traditionalists employ a highly idiosyncratic use of the term metaphysics. Rather than a mere branch of academic philosophy, metaphysics as understood by the Traditionalists as a

1 While Huxley mistaken attributes the origins of the idea of a Perennial Philosophy to the seventeenth century German philosopher Leibniz (The Perennial Philosophy, pg. vii), the concept is found a century earlier in the work of the Renaissance thinker Agostino Steuco. See Oldmeadow (2011), pg. 158.

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direct and unmediated intuition of the Real. It is sacred knowledge gained through the intellect—the faculty not of our capacity for analytical thinking or discursive reasoning, but thereceptacle for the direct illumination of the sacred. It can be said, in fact, that the intellect does not belong to us at all. It is a reflection of the Absolute itself within the deep recesses of the psyche. While the exoteric surface of the world’s religions, their narratives, rituals and dogmas, remain indisputably different for the Traditionalists, it is the supposedly universal character of metaphysics which guarantees the unity of their esoteric core.2

The strength and appeal of perennialism, whether that of theTraditionalists or in general, is that one can indeed find withinmany religions a picture of the spiritual life which resembles its central tenants. The Neo-Platonist undercurrent informing somuch of the mysticism of the Abrahamic religions, from Sufism to Contemplative Christianity, typically extols recognition of a non-personal or transpersonal Ultimate as opposed to the personaland transcendent creator deity of conventional theism, and eitheran identification of the soul with the divine or the quest for aneventual union between the two.

A vivid example of both points, one favored by perennialists, is offered by the fourteenth century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. Eckhart’s German sermons include a

2 The distinction between exoteric and esoteric facets of a faith traditionis at the very center of Schuon’s treatment of religious pluralism—both in TheTranscendent Unity of Religions and elsewhere. It should be recognized that the Traditionalists perceive the exoteric aspect as absolutely indispensable, a protective shell which safeguards, expresses, and leads the pious toward a religion’s esoteric core (depending, of course, upon the individual’s spiritual capacity and maturity). It is for this very reason that the Traditionalists not only stress the importance of an initiation into a coherent and living tradition, but are also highly disapproving of eclectic approaches to spirituality which either seek to bypass a religion by jumping straight into its esoteric core, or mixing and matching from different traditions. For the centrality of initiation in Traditionalism along with itsroots in the lives and ideas of its key founders, see Mark Sedgwick’s controversial Against the Modern World. For Traditionalist criticisms of spiritual eclecticism, including a few scathing discussions of such figures asAldous Huxley and Alan Watts along with numerous others, see the writing of the Traditionalist enthusiast Harry Oldmeadow, including Traditionalism: Religion in the light of the Perennial Philosophy and Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy.

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daring passage which beckons the deity to release us from a derivative and shallow understanding of God—namely as an entity or being separate from ourselves—in order that we may instead immerse ourselves within the godhead, the primordial and unitary source of the cosmos.3 Of the relationship between the soul and the godhead, Eckhart famously proclaims: “The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me.”4 A second example, lauded by Schuon as “the most direct doctrinal expression” of perennialism, is the Advaita or “non-dual” school ofVedanta thought. 5 Established by the ninth century Indian philosopher Sankara, the concept of a transpersonal ground of allexistence and the complete identification of the soul with the divine, among other perennialist themes, are here clearly delineated. As the first of three systems of thought based upon the Hindu Upanishads, Sankara’s philosophy of non-dualism may be said, without too much exaggeration, to unpack the meaning of a highly acclaimed statement found therein. Of the relationship between the Ultimate Reality, or brahman, to our essential Self, or atman, the guru proclaims to his disciples: Tat Tvam Asi, or “That art Thou.”6

Eckhart, Sankara and many other figures seem to vindicate the Traditionalist take on metaphysics as the discernment of a One behind the many, and of a deep and abiding unity between the essential self and the foundation of all things. As more basic than all subject-object duality, the realization of this unity isoften interpreted as a kind of return to our primordial condition, a homecoming rather than a novel discovery.

Metaphysics, however, has received more than one unconventional definition in the previous century. For the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, it means the very opposite of a self-abnegating and ecstatic unity, and it is far from a homecoming of any kind. “The metaphysical desire does not long to return,” he explains in his first magnum opus, “for it is desire for a land not of our birth, for a land foreign to every

3 Selected Writings (Oliver Davies, editor and translator), pg. 205.4 Ibid, pg. 179.5 The Underlying Religion (edited by Lings and Minnaar), pg. 244.6 The Upanishads, (Swami Prabhavandana and Frederick Manchester, trans), pg.

69-71.

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nature, which has not been our fatherland and to which we shall never betake ourselves.”7

For Levinas, metaphysics is essentially the thrust toward alterity rather than a unity, a stretching to what is perpetually other to us. If the general direction of western thought is akinto the journey of Ulysses to his native soil, explains Levinas, metaphysics is the uprooted sojourn of Abraham on his way to an alien landscape. Like many key Continental thinkers, Levinas’s analogies are chosen quite purposefully. Crafted in defiance of Heidegger’s Greco-German ontology of being, a philosophy heavily informed by scholasticism and mysticism (including the influence of Meister Eckhart), Levinas’s metaphysics of alterity is in no small part informed by a “tradition at least as ancient” as the Greeks.8 This is the ethical legacy of the Hebrew Prophets, a heritage expanded and refined within with the Talmudic and legal traditions of Rabbinic Judaism.

The mission of the pages which follow is, primarily, to outline the challenges afforded by the thought of Levinas to the metaphysics of unity—the ontology lying at the very core of perennialism. It is also to demonstrate the value and spiritual potency of Levinas’s metaphysics of alterity. In short, I seek to employ Levinas in order to shatter the pretense of the perennialist to have accounted for all authentic and higher formsof the religious life.

In sections II and III I outline Levinas’s metaphysics of alterity in further detail and examine its ethical and theological dimensions—particularly as it contrasts with perennialist themes. In section IV, I unpack the true relevance of the contest between Levinas and perennialism with a discussionof their positions on theodicy, the justification of God in the face of evil and suffering. It should be noted from the very beginning that I do not aim to dismiss the metaphysics of unity entirely, nor to take for granted the final superiority of Levinas’s philosophy of alterity. In section V, I therefore explore the prospects for a broader synthesis of the two, a task for which I draw upon a few key representatives of classical American philosophy. If this study can contribute to a richer

7 Totality and Infinity, pg. 33-4.8 “Philosophy and the Infinite,” from To the Other (Peperzak), pg. 105.

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and more varied approach to inter-religious dialogue and/or the question of religious pluralism, it will have fulfilled any larger purpose.

II. Transcendence and Totalization.

Perennialism can be said to promote a kind of universalized mysticism—and more specifically, a mysticism of unity. The path of the contemplative is the “flight of the alone to the Alone,” as stated by Plotinus—one of the venerable fathers of occidental mysticism—an immersion of the self within the source of all existence, the One without second. But mysticism is not only of the unitary type, and there are a few revered figures who concentrate not upon the final loss of the soul into the Alone asthe relevant center of the spiritual life, but the journey itself—the ceaseless stretching toward an Absolute that will always elude our cognitive and intuitive grasp.

Consider the celebrated parable of the heart and the mountain from Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav’s tale of “The Seven Beggars.” A heart, standing on one extreme end of the earth, faces a spring situated on top of a mountain located on the otherend. Burned by the sun, the heart pines longingly for the spring; and yet to advance toward the mountain would cause the spring to disappear from view. Should this occur, the heart would die, for as the great Hasidic rebbe and storyteller explains, its soul “draws all of its vitality from the spring.”9

For anyone acquainted with Kabbalistic theosophy, this parable contains many layers of meaning, including the relationship between the different parts of the godhead. One setof significance however is clear, and echoes throughout much of Nahman’s life and teaching: religious faith and commitment can only exist in the (apparent?) separation of the divine from our immediate experience, for in the union of the self with God such passions no longer have a purpose. In his biography of Nahman ofBratslav, Arthur Green states: “The core of religion is faith, faith is manifest in longings, and longings can only exist only over a distance—the greater the distance, in fact, the greater

9 Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales (Arnold Brand, translator), pgs. 268-9.

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the longings.”10 Later, Green duly points out the ambiguity of the Hasidic master’s thought, wherein the more unitary type of mysticism has its place after all. Nevertheless, Rabbi Nahman, in this parable and elsewhere, poignantly articulates the spiritual meaning of the absence of God from our experience rather than the achievement of unity.

In the language of Totality and Infinity, the satisfaction felt bythe heart if it were to actually reach the Spring—a situation where its longings would be fulfilled and would therefore disappear—would be the mark of a mere need. This is akin to vanquishing hunger through consuming a meal. Desire, by contrast,is insatiable, and only intensifies as we pursue the object of our yearning.11 As we indulge our curiosity by exploring the labyrinth streets and narrow alleyways of an ancient city, for instance, our wonder is continuously enhanced rather than diminished. For both Levinas and Nahman, this is the only form of transcendence worthy of the name. The crucial difference between the two authors however is that Nahman’s form of transcendence is romantic and mystical, while that of Levinas is de-romanticized and stringently ethical. For the proper aim of our desire, according to the author of Totality and Infinity, is the other human being.

And here we are brought to the central and thematic core of the thought of Levinas. The aim of Western philosophers, he suggests, has consistently been to totalize: to gather everything before the understanding or to conceptualize the principles behind all that exists. This typically takes the form of creating some all-encompassing ontological category—whether a basic substance or a transcendental unity—and conceiving all particularized things as its expression. The true motivation here, Levinas explains, is the philosopher’s neurotic compulsion to neuter the shock of anything potentially other or different from him or herself. Totalization thus serves as a kind of protective weapon, a giant buffer spun out by the powers of the mind to reduce everything into comfortable and manageable abstractions. This tendency to convert all that is different into the same, as Levinas labels it, can be understood as a kind

10 Tormented Master, pg. 302.11 Totality and Infinity, 33-5.

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of intellectual imperialism. Although Heidegger has advanced philosophy in stressing our more down-to-earth and concrete relatedness to the world, Levinas accuses his ontology of being as the very culmination of this direction in Western thought.

The entrance of another human being into our experience, an event prior to all abstractions and ontological theorizing, resists this process of totalization. As depicted in Totality and Infinity, the visage and countenance of the other person—what Levinas calls the face—is a reality that eludes our capacities for control and prediction. It is literally a revelation from outside of ourselves. It is also an event of great moral significance, for the appearance of the other introduces in us anoverwhelming sense of obligation. For this reason Levinas is fond of invoking prophetic imagery of our debt to the widow, the orphan and the poor when describing our encounters with others. Transcendence, as it is found in the thought of Levinas, is a kind of primordial, pre-conceptual ethics.

The Biblical and theological language employed by Levinas, both in Totality and Infinity and elsewhere, points to the spiritual aswell as moral meaning of our direct relationship to others. God,for Levinas, is the Absolutely Other. Although completely transcendent to all of our concepts and intuitions, there is one exception: A sort of teasing intimation of the divine—a trace as Levinas brands it in his later thought—discernible through the faces of the other human beings. And just as our encounter with the face is an event prior to all of our explicit acts of cognition and perception, so the Absolutely Other is here expressed by Levinas as a “past that was never present.” To return to Nahman’s analogy, the unbridgeable divide between the heart and the spring is here given a temporal dimension, a transcendence in time rather than just in space.

The supernal goal of all genuine spirituality for perennialism is the communion—more accurately the return—of the soul to the Absolute. In insisting upon the cleavage between ourselves and God, along with its accessibility only through our ethical comportments to other human beings, Levinas stands in sharp opposition to the perennialist picture of the spiritual life.

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III. Separation and the Numinous.

The remoteness of God from the world in much of Nahman’s thought is not a reflection of the mainstay of Hasidism—which originated as primarily a mystical and ecstatic movement. Stressing an overwhelmingly immanent understanding of the divine,and possessing as a goal the nullification of the individual self(bittul-ha-yesh in Hebrew), the main thrust of Hasidism fits quite snugly into the perennialist model of the authentic spiritual life.

Although Levinas, in his later thought, would outline a self already disturbed or compromised by the presence of the other, his insistence upon the irreducibility of the individual as a condition for the true ethical and spiritual life is as mucha challenge to postmodern denials of personal agency as it is formysticism and idealism. It is not language, a social context, orbeing itself which is addressed by our neighbor, but a concrete and full-blooded “I.” Typical of his Biblical cast of his concepts, Levinas writes of our becoming a self in terms of our “election,” the intensification of our consciousness and our singularity in response to the other.

To theological trends which aim at the loss of the self into the “sacred” or the “numinous,” Levinas affirms a “religion for adults,” one based upon a real separation between persons, aswell as between human beings and the divine. Such distinctions are the condition for genuine ethical relationships and commitments. The dissolving of the self within some ecstatic andtranscendental whole is seen by Levinas as the ultimate evasion of personal development and moral responsibility. It is to question the very ontological reality of otherness, let alone to ignore our debts to the needs of other human beings. Separation is, in fact, a central concept in Totality and Infinity—the collecting of the self away from all totalities and non-differentiated unities which make it even possible to be addressed by another human being.

It is precisely these charges against self-transcendence, frequently alluded to by Levinas as “participation” (a term borrowed from the anthropologist Levy-Bruhl’s study of the pre-modern mind), which sets his ethical and prophetic spirituality

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so drastically against the unitary forms of mysticism. If the saintly figure of the mystical and esoteric traditions achieves aunity with the Absolute, the very mission of Judaism, Levinas affirms, “consists in understanding this saintliness of God in a sense that stands in sharp contrast to the numinous meaning of this term, as it appears in primitive religions wherein the moderns have often wished to see the source of all religion.”12 Here is an opposition not only to the metaphysics of unity, but to the tendency to conceive such ecstatic monism as the primordial religion from all of the world’s faiths derive—a core tenant of the Traditionalist version of perennialism.

Even with his critique of the main thrust of Occidental thought since the Greeks, Levinas approves of the sober reflection and rationalism of the Western intellectual heritage against the Dionysian indulgences of participation. And yet, perennialism, with its impersonal or non-personal mystical unity,its acosmism in which the material universe is only relatively real,would strike Levinas as the worst synthesis of Levy-Bruhl’s account of participation with a hegemonic ontology of the “same.”

The Ultimate Reality of perennialism, arguably, would resemble for Levinas what William James called “refined supernaturalism” in the Varieties of Religious Experience—the all-inclusive and featureless monism of Emersonian Transcendentalism and neo-Hegelian idealism against which James set so much of his own polemic.13 It may be argued that James did not really do justice to the systems of Hegel, Royce and others—philosophies which do not, finally, destroy the individual as much as preserveit within a broader picture. But this would be enough of an offense for Levinas, whose argument against Heidegger and the whole history of ontology is precisely this tendency to mediate, and therefore mollify, the shock of other human beings by only allowing them to appear against the background of a broader horizon.

12 Difficult Freedom, pg. 14.13 James in fact perceived the transcendental One so prevalent among his

contemporaries as a kind of violent and suffocating juggernaut bent upon swallowing up all that is particular and individual, an insult to the richer textures and complex ambiguities of our actual day-to-day experience. For an eloquent comparison of James with Levinas see Megan Craig’s Levinas and James (2010).

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Perpetually de-centered and rent asunder by a relationship to what always exceeds its powers of cognition and intuition, theLevinasian self is oriented toward other human beings without rest or respite. The fuller implications of this, at least in comparison with the universalized mysticism of perennialism, are most apparent in his approach toward theodicy—the attempt to justify God in the face of evil.

IV. Suffering and the One.

In Pragmatism and elsewhere, William James levels a moral argument against the all- encompassing Absolute of so much contemplative mysticism. If everything is undergirded by a transcendental perfection, what is there to struggle against? Ifthe salvation of the cosmos is guaranteed, we are permitted what James called a “moral holiday,” an excuse to bask in the ultimateperfection of things and dodge the rigors and engagements of the ethical life.14

A perusal of the Traditionalists take on the nature of evil vindicates James’s contention. For in holding the concrete realmof our day-to-day life as possessing only relative existence, perrenialists skirt the danger, however unintentional, of trivializing evil even if not denying it outright. Frithjof Schuon and Seyyed Hossain Nasr for instance affirm evil as a necessary byproduct of the distinction between our apparent worldand the Absolute. If there is no imperfection in creation, argues Schuon, nothing would distinguish it from the creator.15 As the universe “radiates” out from the divine, suggests Nasr, its gradual distance from the Absolute introduces all of the problems and ills which plague our condition.16 Typical of the Neo-Platonist portrait of the cosmos as a series of emanations from the One, a model akin to light growing increasingly dim as it shades away from the bulb, evil here is mere privation, a lackof God’s goodness as opposed to something real in its own right.

To this definition of evil as privation, the Traditionaliststack on other classic attempts at theodicy. “As far as the Will

14 See Pragmatism, lecture two. 15 The Transcendent Unity of Religions, pg. 52-3.16 From his essay “Scientia Sacra”, pg. 128 of The Primordial Tradition.

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of God is concerned,” Nasr explains, “God wills evil not as evil but as part of a greater good to which this segmented reality called evil contributes.”17 And again: “Evil ceases to exist, however, on a higher plane, where transient and partial disorderscontribute to a greater order and privation to a greater good.”18

The major consequence of this combination of the grand design andprivation arguments is this: seen against the big scheme of things or from within the One out of which the universe is an emanation, misfortune is not truly misfortune of all. The eloquent Huston Smith, perhaps the most accessible of the Traditionalists, is at one point refreshingly frank in this regard. After offering his own version of the grand design argument in his debate with David Ray Griffin, Smith responds to the process theologian’s accusation that the other-worldly mysticism of perennialism conceives time and matter as wastes: “To perennialist eyes, nothing is wasted. How could it be, for waste is an evil, and in perennialism (as we have seen) there is ultimately no such thing.” 19

To summarize: By fitting all imperfection into a bigger picture, or relegating it to a feature of the merely apparent, the struggle against evil becomes far from the most pressing and compelling of human endeavors. Since the goal of the mystic or contemplative is the identification with the Ultimately Real, it follows that the follower of the mystical paths, so forcefully advocated by perennialism, must finally perceive evil as an illusion to be surmounted rather than wrestled with. The active and moral life, while not entirely devoid of value for Schuon, isconceived by him as secondary to the higher task of the contemplative to achieve unitary knowledge of the divine. In theTranscendent Unity of Religions, he states: “Morality as such obviously has no meaning outside the relatively very restricted domain of action and merit, and therefore in no way extends to such

17 Ibid, pg. 129. Just below he states: “The doctrine of maya or hijab enables us to understand the metaphysical roots of that which appears as evil.This doctrine explains evil as privation and separation from the Good and alsoas an element contributing to a greater good, although within a particular ambience or plane of existence, evil remains evil as a result of either privation or excess.”

18 Ibid, pg. 130.19 Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology, pg. 75.

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realities as symbolism, contemplation, intellection, and identitythrough knowledge.”20 I am reminded here of my country’s own great perennialist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although the author of Nature and the advocate of the Oversoul finally came around to embrace the Abolitionist cause, here is an earlier remark made byhim on the moral travesty of his age: “I have quite other slavesto face than those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of man, and which have no watchmen or lover or defender but me.”21

If the core of all truth and value is found through the inner depths of our being, and reachable through prayer, meditation, and renunciation, why bother with the entanglements of the world? What then is the final worth of the empirical sciences—outside of the increasingly skillful and clever countingof shadows on the back wall of Plato’s cave? It is therefore of little surprise that so many of the Traditionalists would pack their perennialism with a disdain for the future-oriented and forward-seeking character of modernity. This includes, among other things, a deep-seated skepticism toward the reality of social and scientific progress, a rejection of evolution, a down-playing of the importance of technology and a dismissal of the field of psychology. Traditionalists who have flirted with politics have occasionally supported reactionary and even fascistworldviews (Mark Sedgwick’s controversial Against the Modern World details much of this sordid story). One is tempted to draw a parallel here with the main figure of Levinas’s polemic, for Heidegger’s ontology of being—complete with its rural and romantic tones, its disdain for technology and cosmopolitanism—isfrequently linked with the German philosopher’s notorious embracing of National Socialism. Concerning Heidegger’s view of technology as a lamentable expression of the final concealment ofBeing (or, alternatively stated, with modernity’s fetishizing of particular beings), Levinas states “It is not sure that National Socialism arises from the mechanist reification of men, and that it does not rest on peasant enrootedness and a feudal adoration

20 Pg. 52.21 Quoted by William James in his “Address at the Emerson Centenary in

Concord.” William James: Essential Writings, pg. 288.

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of subjugated men for the masters and lords who command them.”22 It is not technology and industry that lie behind the impulse forfascism, argues Levinas, but the intellectual variant of a “bloodand earth” mentality, the yearning to ground all things within some primordial and uncontaminated whole.

A God that is purely transcendent to us, and not the placid unity underlying the surface of things, offers no such opportunity by which to contextualize or withdraw from the harsh realities of evil and suffering. A deity beckoning us from behind the needful eyes of other human beings, in addition, is one for whom the ethical life and commitment toward social progress is paramount rather than derivative, one which permits no moral holiday. Informed by the moral passion of the Prophets and the ethical injunctions of the Talmudic tradition, the thought of Levinas affirms mo our duty to the other over the lofty flights of the contemplative. “Thanks be to God, we are not going to offer up sermons on behalf of dubious crusades undertaken to ‘link arms as believers’ and unite ‘as spiritualists’ in the face of the rising tide of materialism,” Levinas states in the forward of Difficult Freedom. “As if we shouldpresent a front against this Third World ravaged by hunger; as ifthe entire spirituality on earth did not reside in the act of nourishing.”23

In his essay “Useless Suffering,” Levinas calls for an end to the project of theodicy, for to grant evil a proper role in some philosophical and conceptual scheme, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust and the general barbarity of the previous century, is to rationalize and validate it—what he announces as “the source of all immorality.”24 Far from the otherworldly escape afforded by the inner-oriented life of the scholastic and the mystic, our only justification is to heed the needs of humankind, to embrace the other-directed life of service and compassion. In this same essay Levinas is equally critical of a despairing and cynical nihilism as he is of a self-abnegating mysticism. In the case of the great evil that touched Levinas’s

22 From “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,” found in Peperzak (1993), pgs. 103-4.

23 Pg. xiv.24 Entre Nous, pg. 99.

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life, to give the cruelty and arbitrariness of nature and historythe last word is to lend the National Socialists a final victory—a vindication of the pagan fetish with power. What Levinas callsfor, in agreement with the theologian Emil Fackenheim, is a return to the eschatological mission as envisioned by the Rabbis and Prophets, to bear witness to the moral and ethical vision of the Bible, to “live out sacred history.” In short, Levinas advocates the imperative to be spiritual without the transcendental security of a mystical and scholastic theology; tobe religious without theodicy.

Levinas’s fear of justifying evil, however, should not preclude the possibility of alternative and non-traditional theodicies. In the sixteenth century the Jewish mystic Isaac Luria fashioned an elaborate and highly influential theology comprised of three revolutionary themes: First, the tsimtsum or original withdrawal of the divine from a portion of the universe in order to make room for creation. Second, the shevirah or “breaking of the vessels,” the cataclysmic event leading to a scattering of God’s light throughout the void. And third, the goal of tikkun olam, the “reparation of the universe” achieved through our individual and collective effort. Here is a mysticaland theosophical narrative designed to promote rather than transcend the life of moral engagements. Moreover, it is one which very well may have influenced the thought of Levinas, according to a recent and rather informative article by Jacob Meskin.25

Unitary forms of spirituality, however, have appropriated the Lurianic narrative as well. The tsimtsum is interpreted by numerous mystical and contemplative movements not as an actual withdrawal of the divine, but a mere concealment of God’s nature—the creation of the illusion of something “other” than the One. With the exception of figures like Rabbi Nahman, who took the void or absence of God more seriously, the main thrust of Hasidicmysticism takes something of this strategy.26 Not surprisingly,

25 “The Role of Lurianic Kabbalah in the Early Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.”

26 In his seminal Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem suggests that a Kabbalist’s stand on the divide between “theist and panetheist trends” can be discerned by their interpretation of the tsimtsum. Scholem states: “If the Tsimtsum—as some later Kabbalists have tried to prove—is only a veil which

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so does the Jewish representation of Traditionalism. In the Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah, Leo Schaya, under the influence of Guenon and Schuon among others, offers just such a compromised interpretation of the Lurianic narrative. The tsimtsum, for Schaya, is an event leading to just such a mirage of otherness. God here remains, both before and after the contraction, the “One, without second,” and the mission of the Jewish esotericist is that of achieving a union or identification with this undivided reality.27

Whatever moral gains are made for Kabbalah in the revolutionary and bold concepts of Luria are reversed in the mysticism of unity. Thus, if perennialism would ever become the triumphant and final approach to world religions, much would be

separates the individual consciousness from God in such a way as to give it the illusion of self-consciousness, in which it knows itself to be different from God, then only an imperceptible change is needed so that the heart may perceive the unity of divine substistence in all that exists. Such a change would necessarily destroy the conception of Tsimtsum as one intended to providean explanation for the existence of something other than God.” Major Trends, Pg. 262. While Guenon and others refuse the term “pantheism” for their religious philosophy, Scholem’s intention to depict a cosmology in which all otherness to God remains an illusion remains apt.

27 After briefly presenting the concept tsimtsum as it appears in Jewish esotercism after Isaac Luria, Schaya explains in The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah: “Through this symbolic language, the Kabbalah then tries to expressthe mysterious genesis of the finite in the midst of the infinite. In reality, God, the absolute One, has no ‘parts’, but an infinity of possibilities, of which only the creatural possibilities have the illusory appearance of separate forms; in themselves, these forms are integrated, as eternal archetypes, in the all-possibility of the One.” (pg. 64). And a few pages later: “In fact, in the face of the ‘One without a second’, creation—theapparition of a ‘second’—as well as the creative causes themselves, come to appear as existential illusions.” Schaya goes so far as to claim that this illusion of creation is what Ecclesiastes refers to as vanity (pg. 66). Later still, Schaya qualifies his discussion of the nature of illusion as “not a mere nothingness, for there cannot be any such thing. By its very existence it would no longer be nothing; illusion is a ‘mixture’ of the real and the ephemeral or—in Kabbalistic terminology—of ‘light’ and ‘darkness’.” (pg. 67). Finally, in a chapter titled “The Return to the One,” Schaya summarizes the meaning of the esoteric or Kabbalistic tradition as the overcoming of creator-universe dualism. This is a vision in which “God is One, not only in his ‘Lordship’ but in his whole reality; he is the One in the absolute sense, the ‘One without a second’, the only reality, so that everything which exists is in essence God” (pg. 137).

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lost even for the Jewish esoteric tradition, let alone the Prophetic and Talmudic legacies resounding so powerfully throughout the spiritual ethics of Levinas.

V. Between Repose and Resolution.

The metaphysics of unity—that of an ascendancy toward, or descent into, a truth beyond the distinctions of I and other, self and world—provides a state of peace beyond the vicissitudes and exigencies of our usual harried existence. That of alterity,at least according to the version of Levinas, offers the intensification of our living relationships to other human beingsand the sharpening rather than the slackening of our sense of worldly purpose and moral obligation.

To repeat from the introduction: it has not been my fundamental task in the preceding pages to declare the final superiority of a metaphysics of alterity to that of unity, but only to demonstrate, through an analysis of Levinas, that the former is both compelling and valuable. Along the way, I have shown that a metaphysics of unity, taken alone and without correction from alternative philosophies, is morally problematic.Despite the pretenses of perennialism, the metaphysics of unity should not claim to include or account for all genuine spiritual visions. In this way, the metaphysics of alterity points the waytoward the appreciation of religious and theological alterity, a refusal to hammer down spiritual differences into such a monochrome and one-dimensional picture.

Although recognizing the power of Levinas’s insights along with the specific religious sensibilities upon which they draw, there may be no compelling reason to insist upon an orthodox Levinasianism. Perhaps we may wean his best ideas and yet retainthe experiential truths of a metaphysics of unity. If this possibility is denied from the outset, a broad and inclusive religious dialogue becomes a rather difficult endeavor. But what are the prospects of reconciling a metaphysics of unity with one of alterity, a religion of mystical repose with moral resolution?While I do not predict an easy or even satisfying answer to this question, and perhaps only a rough and preliminary beginning, a

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few theological developments in classical American philosophy immediately come to mind.

Toward the end of The Varieties of Religious Experience, William Jamesargues for an understanding of the deity as a mother-sea consciousness in which our individual selves are a part. And yetin this same book and elsewhere, this greater consciousness is finite, one of many forces in the cosmos, and one whose strugglesfor the Good is either enhanced or diminished depending upon our loyalty and assistance.28 In James’s mature philosophical vision, God is depicted as facing an external environment, as possessing an other so to speak (even possibly other deities) and as “working out a history just like ourselves.”29 This Jamesean picture of the self as ensconced in this broader Mind speaks to the sense of unity felt by the mystic; while the deity’s finitudeand partnership with human beings supports the more alterity-based, worldly engagements of the ethicist.

The process ontology of Whitehead, a cosmology deeply influenced by James, can also speak to a metaphysics of unity andalterity—and from more than one angle. The universe, according to Process and Reality, is composed of an infinite number of living events. Each of these events, while possessing a varying measureof independence and autonomy, is shaped in no small part by theirdependence upon other such events. What results is a dynamic andrelational cosmos; a universe which, while organic and interconnected, does not dissolve its constituent elements as it surges toward the future. The perpetual and spontaneous arising of new events out of old ones is called creativity.30 Unable to force its will upon the cosmos, the God of process ontology can send suggestions into the flux of things, a means of prodding theuniverse toward greater levels of harmony and intensity of feeling. This is a dipolar entity whose primordial part houses allof the fresh possibilities which inform the cosmos, and whose consequent aspect gently subsumes and preserves all of the events of the universe into its everlasting nature.

28 For James’s doctrine of a finite God at its most elaborate, also see Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe.

29 See A Pluralistic Universe, pg. 311.30 Process and Reality, pg. 7.

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Here is a metaphysics in which a person may affirm his or her interconnectedness with the cosmos, bask within the all-encompassing love of God’s immanent presence, or heed the call ofthe deity towards moral and personal perfection. It is relevant that Whitehead’s ontology of internal relations, one wherein events mutually interpenetrate without disclosing themselves entirely, can be understood as extending Levinas’s account of interpersonal relationships to the basic substratum of reality.31

For this is also an ontology in which I can respond to the need of my fellow human being—feeling his or her suffering within my breast—just as readily as I may recline, joyfully, within the ubiquitous and dynamic play of creativity.

A number of Whitehead’s intellectual descendants hold that their “Two Ultimates,” God and creativity, can accommodate both the personal and non-personal ultimate realities of the world’s denominations—the impassioned Voice of the Hebrew Prophets as well as the Mahayana Buddhist notion of the Void.32 I am skeptical toward the claims of process theologians to do justice to the Absolutes of every major form of spirituality. Does the undifferentiated One of Neo-Platonism, for instance, truly resemble Whitehead’s pluralistic and complex principle of creativity?33 While a full discussion of this issue lie outside the scope of this essay, it is a different matter entirely for the intuitions fueling and inspiring the world’s various theologicaland religious frameworks—the spiritual moods and feelings weaned from out of their ossified metaphysical contexts. The philosophyof organism is, after all, a flexible system whose basic categories aim to draw upon, and do justice to, the fullest range

31 A number of philosophers are beginning to appreciate the relevance of James and Whitehead for the thought of Levinas. See, for instance, Simmons and MacDaniel’s “Levinas and Whitehead: Notes Toward a Conversation to Come.”

32 For the most detailed and thorough defense of this claim, see David Ray Griffin (2001). The work of these theologians also bears the influence of Charles Hartshorne.

33 This is similar to Huston Smith declaration in his debate with process theologian David Ray Griffin: “I see little resemblance between Shankara’s concrete Nirguna Brahman and Griffin’s abstract creative experience.”Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology, pg. 171. I make a similar argument in “Between Ecstasy and Eschatology: Immanence, Transcendence, and the Metaphysics of Process,” in The Philosophical Basis of Inter-religious Dialogue: The Process Perspective (Patalon, ed.) pgs. 41-2.

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of human experience possible.34 Whiteheadian thought, with its interrelated cosmos and unique picture of God, may very well provide resources for intimations of both unity and alterity, self-transcendence and radical individuation, repose and resolution.

It should be acknowledged that the version of alterity permitted within Jamesean and process thought may be too compromised for the hardcore Levinasian. In defining the building blocks of the cosmos, the events out of which even God and human beings are constituted, process thought would have beenseen by Levinas as monistic in its own way—a leveling down of allotherness into yet another version of the “same.” It is similar with James’s radical empiricism which holds “pure experience” to be the basic material of the universe.35 Such ontologies, even if pluralistic and relational, fall short of the extreme kind of transcendence championed by Levinas—the latter philosopher’s insistence upon our relationship to what is completely “otherwisethan being.” In addition, the kind of unity allowed within the thought of Whitehead is hardly acceptable to a perennialist whoseNeo-Platonism promotes the complete loss of the soul into the ultimate reality, and not merely our identification with the principle of creativity. Perhaps a final synthesis will be a middle ground between the kinds of alterity and unity advocated by Levinas and perennialism respectively—appropriating the depth experiences of both, and yet without being fully either.

34 Here is a much quoted passage in Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas: “In order to discover some of the major categories under which we can classify the infinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience skeptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in thedark, experience normal and experience abnormal.” pg. 226. It is the full spirit of Whitehead’s meaning that we may add “experience unitary and the experience of alterity.”

35 See James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism.

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VI. Conclusion: A Union of Purpose.

Even if a philosophical system can find a place for both a self-abnegating union with the Absolute and the more worldly life, it is not obvious that the two kinds of existence can be cultivated simultaneously and without conflict. Can one nullify and affirm the volitional self at the same time? This is precisely the first aporia or inconsistency pointed out by RichardGale in his widely influential study of James.36 I would like toconclude by briefly suggesting that in the thought of James and Whitehead, the two forms of selfhood do not have to be understoodas tugging us in opposite directions.

There is a striking image in Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be wherein the confrontation with anxiety, our self-affirmation in the face of finitude and mortality, draws its strength from the continual surmounting of being itself over non-being. In other words, the exercise of personal courage is nothing less than an expression of the very rhythmic movements of the divine.37 A similar structure can be envisioned within Jamesean and process thought, even if anxiety is here replaced with the rigors and commitments of the ethical life. In relating myself to my neighbor, I realize and manifest my grounding in that greater Mind which, being finite, also vies for the world’s salvation. Or in taking up the suggestions sent out by the primordial natureof God, I merge with the forward progression of the cosmos—what Whitehead calls the creative advance.38 In both cases this is a unionof purpose as well as in substance, a situation in which our identification with a greater ontological reality and our

36 For this first aporia Gale comes to settle upon a solution offered by Andrew Reck: the idea that mystical unity with God is a kind of recuperation for the rigors of the ethical life. See The Divided Self of William James, pg. 312. The second and more intractable aporia, according to Gale, is that between the direct and infallible disclosure of the real as experienced by the mystic as opposed to the more relative and perspectival sorts of cognition achievableby the ethical self. I struggle through these aporias in “William James’s Argument for a Finite Theism” (Weidenbaum 2013). Presenting Whitehead’s laterthought as partly an expansion and systematizing of James’s insights (a commoninterpretation), I offer a different approach than what is outlined here.

37 The Courage to Be, pgs. 178-181.38 Process and Reality, pg. 21.

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addressing of the other—the seemingly disparate ways of unity andalterity—are woven into a single gesture.

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