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- Title
EROS AND ETHICS: LEVINAS'S READING OF PLATO'S 'GOOD BEYOND BEING'.
- Authors
Webb, Mary-Ann
- Abstract
This paper addresses the notorious logic and semantic difficulties encountered by Lévinas in articulating his ethics of alterity. Tracing the philosophical genesis of this question in Descartes and Heidegger, it recognises Lévinas's claim that there can be no ontological foundation for ethics because ontology would reduce ethics to a form of mathematical ratio. Lévinas is unwilling to deny his phenomenological experience of a desire for goodness and unable to deny his despair at his ontological alienation from the good and so he is driven to seek an irrational link between the human being and a metaphysical ‘good beyond being’. Retrieving an ancient gnostic neo-Platonist working of the same problem from the work of Hans Jonas, the paper reconsiders Lévinas's reading of Plato, specifically his understanding of Socrates' exposition of eros in the Phaedo, in order to illustrate how his ethics of alterity may allow the human being to refer irrationally to the good beyond being.
- Subjects
LOGIC; SEMANTIC differential scale; ETHICS; PLATO, 428-347 B.C.; HUMAN beings; ALIENATION (Theology)
- Publication
Studies in Christian Ethics, 2006, Vol 19, Issue 2, p205
- ISSN
0953-9468
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/0953946806066151