Confused Horizons, Part 2: Levinas Enters the Fray

Distinguishing our metaphysics from phenomenology

Last week, we consulted with Shankara and Nagarjuna, the two founding thinkers of Advaita Vedanta and Madhyamika Buddhist philosophy, respectively. We saw that both thinkers believed that ultimate metaphysical truths could be discovered through careful phenomenology: meditation and contemplation as well as study. And although they reached conclusions about that reality that in many ways seem opposite to each other, we saw that the basic structure of their metaphysics was surprisingly similar.

Confused Horizons, Part 1: Shankara and Nagarjuna Collide

For Nagarjuna, the fact that at the core of human conscious experience there was a complete absence of any phenomena indicated that ultimate reality was itself actually just a no-thing, a void: all of existence was a play of cause and effect which itself had no cause, no explanation. Shankara, however, interpreted the phenomenological absence at the heart of human subjectivity differently; for him, this bare “witness consciousness” of the atman was actually the fullness of Brahman, the absolute, ultimate reality that causes and sustains all of existence. And in the depth of Brahman, who is absolute Being and absolute Consciousness, one can also find ananda—bliss.

In other words, these two thinkers interpreted the unqualified nature of bare consciousness in radically different ways—either as a complete nothingness, or as a resplendent if quality-less fullness. Interestingly enough, though, each agreed that it was a surrender of the empirical self to this unqualified ground of consciousness that was the route to liberation from the suffering of life in its otherwise endless rebirths (samsara). The void, or the luminous darkness, whatever it was, was itself the very “place” of salvation from the horrors of samsara.¹

As I said at the opening of part 1, I am indebted to both Shankara and Nagarjuna in my own spiritual and philosophical formation. I have immense respect for these thinkers and can’t recommend them enough to anyone interested in spiritual philosophy. Even so, I want to challenge and interrogate the metaphysical assumptions they seem to rely on here.

I have presented each thinker’s approach to understanding what is ultimately real (or ultimately unreal) in basically phenomenological terms: paying attention to the nature of how experience presents itself and is organized, Shankara and Nagarjuna each analyzed their own qualitative consciousness until they found the “bottom” of consciousness, that bare state of awareness that is the condition of possibility for any presentation of phenomena of any kind.² But, crucially, neither thinker draws merely phenomenological conclusions from this phenomenological investigation. Instead, each feels that when they reach this “bottom” point of consciousness, they have discovered not just a phenomenologically primal state, but a metaphysically primal state as well.

Interpreting Horizons

One might describe the primal-ness of bare phenomenal consciousness as a kind of epistemic horizon. The actual horizon, of course, is that place where the sky and the land (or sea) “meet” visually. Past that point, we cannot see any further on the earth’s surface. The horizon appears as a line, but we know that in reality it doesn’t actually exist. It is an artifact of how our vision works and the curvature of the earth; if one were to walk all the way to where the horizon currently appears to be, there would of course be no line there, no demarcation at all. Indeed, as we walk towards the horizon, the horizon itself “moves” with us. The horizon is a relative border or limit; it marks the extent of what we can detect from our current position. If our position changes, so does our horizon.

As well as this actual horizon, we face many various other kinds of horizons in our lives: for example, the future lies beyond a horizon of time. We cannot know with any kind of certainty what will occur in the future. Likewise, the past itself is strictly speaking not knowable; we cannot examine past states of existence themselves. We can, of course, try to reach conclusions about the past from evidence in the present (such as memories, footprints, etc.), and indeed we have reason to believe we are able to do so with a good deal of success at least some of the time. Time, then, is marked by the horizon of the present.

Perhaps the most important thing to recognize about horizons is that though they mark an epistemological limit for a given observer, they in no way mark any kind of ontological limit for what kinds of things can exist. Again, we know this: if I look east from the coast of Massachusetts, I will see only the blue-to-blue horizon of sea and sky. Nothing else appears there. But I know that, actually, if I travelled east long enough, I would eventually see the green shores of Ireland roll up from the horizon as I travelled. Indeed, beyond the horizon there are vast continents, billions of people, whole worlds unknown—but nevertheless, quite real and existent! And again, with the horizon of time, just because I cannot access the past or future doesn’t mean that past or future events never happen or are unreal. It just means I cannot access them.³

A young child might, of course, not be able to comprehend this. For a toddler, the visible horizon might signify the edge of existence, the absolute limit not just of their knowing, but of being. And indeed, there is reason to think that when we are young, we confuse epistemology and ontology in this way. After all, it takes us many months to achieve “object permanence”: very young babies have no sense that their mother still exists when she briefly leaves the room to get another bottle of milk.

But it is my contention that this basic error, this confusion of an epistemic horizon for an ontic limit is all too common even among adults—indeed, too often among philosophers! And indeed, my concern is that, for all their indubitable subtlety and wisdom, both Shankara and Nagarjuna might commit this basic error.

Doubting the Horizon with Emmanuel Levinas

We might discover other kinds of epistemic horizons in our lives beyond the visible and temporal, but the one that is of greatest importance to our conversation here is the horizon we face when considering the “inner” lives of other human beings: the immediate qualitative phenomenal conscious experience that other people have (or are). I have discussed this at some length before, and won’t dive into the technical details here (but if you want to think more on this, this piece may be of interest to you).

Although there are all kinds of ways that I can surmise what someone else is experiencing, I can’t actually experience what they are experiencing directly. And in some cases, I can’t even imagine it: if, for example, one has been completely color-blind from birth, it seems unlikely that one could imagine what the experience of seeing red and green intertwined would be (and much less can any human know the experience of performing echolocation!) Here, again, then, we find a firm epistemic horizon: other people’s qualitative experience is simply not available to me, for structural reasons that I cannot overcome.

This basic fact (and I do think it’s a fact, even though no small number of philosophers of mind and various scientists seem to want to deny this!) was the central metaphysical point that Emmanuel Levinas wanted to drive home. I have written a bit about Levinas before, and hope to dig more into this thought in the future. But for the present conversation, what is important to note is Levinas’s understanding of how the Face of another human being is a phenomenon which marks an irremediable Otherness⁴ which is itself not given as a phenomenon: the actual qualitative experience of the other human being is not available to us (as discussed above) even as we tend to assume that such experience is, in fact, happening (because we recognize in another human face a creature like ourselves, and assume their “inner life” is something like ours—that, in other words, they are not a “philosophical zombie”).⁵

So, here we have the Face of another person as a horizon: a visible phenomenon which marks the limit of our knowing, but behind which we have every reason to believe lies a wealth of existence. But, unlike actual horizons, we are unable to cross into that existence simply by moving ourselves. Other people’s qualitative experience remains structurally unavailable to us.

Levinas is best known as the philosopher who announced that “ethics must be our first philosophy”, but he was a phenomenologist, not an ethicist. And here we can see the phenomenological process by which he arrives at his primal ethical orientation: because in encountering the Face of another person, we believe there is a wealth of qualitative experience “behind” it, but we can never actually access that existence, we are obligated to not only assume that that existence is actual, but to protect the interests of that fellow conscious being. Here, the Jewish-Christian doctrine of loving one’s neighbor and the broad Indic tradition of ahimsa, or non-violence, is given modern philosophical grounding: confronted by a world that is presumably full of fellow conscious beings, but one in which we can never actually know the experience of those beings, we must tread as lightly as possible. Indeed, at times, Levinas will even suggest that we must bow down and worship in the Other’s presence.

In short, Levinas’s philosophy can be seen as a phenomenological delimitation of all possible phenomenology, or to put this in regular English, Levinas was insistent that we must never confuse our epistemological horizons for ontological limits: other people are not just phenomena that present in our consciousness; they have consciousness—and value—all their own, which we cannot strictly speaking know.

Contemplating the Other

Now, in this philosophical examination of horizons, Levinas’s principle target was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had, like Levinas, studied under Edmund Hussserl. However, beginning at least by the late 1920’s, Heidegger shifted to an increasingly “existential” direction, first by critiquing Husserl via Aristotle, and then by developing his own philosophy oriented around that which unites being and knowing—the particular knowing subject who exists concretely in the world, Dasein: “being there”. For Heidegger, philosophy was about a given human subject’s authentic decisions for and to itself; meanwhile, other people ultimately only mattered to the extent that they mattered for that particular thinker him- or herself.⁶

For Heidegger, otherness was an epistemological horizon that could be overcome through proper philosophy; the Being of all beings could be discerned, and the truth revealed. In this way, though he disagreed with Nietzsche about many things, Heidegger ultimately agreed with Nietzsche that other people could be regarded fundamentally just as phenomena, just as things. If other people were a part of one’s volk, one’s own people, if they were useful to a given thinker in their own process of self-realization, then they could be valued allies. If not, though, they could be cast aside or ground underfoot without much thought or concern.⁷

In many ways, we might consider Levinas’s philosophy of the horizon (my term, not his!) as a direct counter to this Heideggerian megalomaniacal existentialism: the Other was not merely a phenomenon, a thing, to either be integrated into one’s own work of self-realization or bulldozed over, but rather a fellow person, at once something unknowable but also invaluable. As I have already suggested, his whole philosophy essentially boils down to the claim that we cannot assume that our own knowledge of reality is exhaustive; indeed, that we must assume there is an infinite amount of further reality beyond the limits of our knowing. And his ethics is then a response to this apophatic phenomenology: we never know when we might be causing harm in the consciousness of another. Therefore, for Levinas, the whole of life is an encounter with an Otherness that demands our attention and respect: take off your sandals, for you stand on holy ground.⁸

But, gentle reader, at this point, you might be asking yourself what any of this could possibly do with poor Shankara and Nagarjuna, honorable philosophers whose good names have now been sullied by proximity to Heidegger’s. And surely, like Levinas, both Shankara and Nagarjuna took the “inner”, qualitative experience of other humans (and non-human animals!) with the utmost seriousness—unlike the professor from Freiburg.

But it is my contention that they nevertheless may have reified another horizon, confusing it for an actual metaphysical limit: that very primal phenomenological state of bare “witness” consciousness or pure emptiness. We saw in part 1 that both thinkers essentially end their pursuit of reality there: for Shankara, this atman just is Brahman, the ultimate reality; for Nagarjuna, this empty phenomenological frame just is the void, the no-thing which is the absence of the ultimate reality that we search for (but also the “location” of the unqualified state of Nirvana).

But again, if my analysis of their method is right,⁹ these thinkers arrived at these metaphysical claims about ultimate reality (or unreality) through a phenomenological process. But this maneuver, where one takes an epistemological horizon as a metaphysical limit is precisely what Emmanuel Levinas has warned us not to do. True, for Levinas, the important horizon was the Face of a fellow human being.¹⁰ But once we understand that all epistemological limits are horizons, and that there might be existence—and even full reality—“behind” them, then we might begin to question all of the seeming limits we face in our perceiving and knowing. And so the question is: is the primal “ground” of phenomenology a true metaphysical limit, the presence of Brahman or the ultimate absence itself? Or is this another horizon, beyond which lies something more?

Chasing God

Cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiescat in Te—“our hearts are restless until they rest in You”. Augustine essentially opens his famous Confessions with this short but powerful phrase, one that superbly summarizes not only that book but Augustine’s whole life. And indeed, it’s a phrase that not only any Christian, but I imagine any Jew or Muslim could whole-heartedly endorse. In the classical Abrahamic tradition, salvation can be effected not merely by the grace of God, but indeed by the presence of God. The early church declared its faith and its mission with the radically pithy motto: “God became human that humans might become God.”¹¹

But God in the Abrahamic tradition is always transcendent, always more-than, always beyond not only the limits of the world, but beyond the limits even of the human spirit, human consciousness. In this, Augustine disagreed sharply not only with Nagarjuna, but with Shankara as well: whereas the great Advaita sage believed himself to already be the ultimately Real, Augustine labored to figure out how he could be reunited with that ultimately Real, because he felt his estrangement from it so acutely. In other words, if the goal of both Advaita Vedanta (and Buddhism, for that matter) is moksha, liberation from the illusory play of phenomena which traps us in suffering, the goal of Christian (and, I would dare say, Jewish and Islamic) life is communion: rejoining the One from whom we have fallen away.

Now, certainly Augustine understood the human soul or spirit¹² to in some way be of like kind to God: God, after all, “is spirit”, and in Christian doctrine, our own spiritual life (broadly if vaguely equatable, I think, to the atman) is the closest of created things to the absolute reality of God. But there can be no doubt that, in the Abrahamic tradition, the human subject, even at its deepest and most quality-less, is not God per se. If for Shankara, one’s liberation is achieved precisely by realizing that one is already the un-generated absolute One, for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, salvation can only be effected by rejoining God who always remains beyond the limits of the self.

And it seems to me this spiritual distinction may come about from a metaphysical disagreement about how to interpret the phenomenological horizon we have been talking about all this time. Shankara and Nagarjuna both discover a limit, a “ground”, of phenomenal consciousness past which no thinking can go. They each in their own way interpret this not just as a phenomenological horizon, though, but as a discovery of what is metaphysically primal: for Shankara, this atman just is Brahman, the metaphysically ultimate. Meanwhile, for Nagarjuna, this anatman, this no-self, reflects the void which stands as the absence of any metaphysically ultimate reality, which is itself the “ground” metaphysical state.

But on the Abrahamic account, each thinker has simply confused an epistemological horizon for a metaphysical limit. For Augustine, God is precisely that ultimate reality which lies on the other side of any human knowing or being; as Jesus says repeatedly in the Gospel according to John, “no one has seen the Father…”. God is not knowable, and when we come to the very limits of our own knowing, we commit a grave error if we assume that that epistemological limit just is the actual border of reality.

In other words, God really is perfectly holy: “set apart, other”. God is always beyond the horizon of our comprehension, even if we do indeed have knowable phenomena which mediate some limited knowledge of God’s will for the world (which could be Torah, Jesus of Nazareth, the Koran, etc.) In essence, then, one of the major distinctions between the Abrahamic traditions and the Indic traditions is that the former generally understand epistemological limits as horizons, whereas the latter generally understand those limits as actual metaphysical limits.¹³

And, indeed, it seems that so much depends on how we interpret our epistemological frontiers. If we take them as metaphysical boundaries, then it seems to me that either Shankara or Nagarjuna may be our best guides to spiritual practice and truth. But if we think that these frontiers are actually horizons, and that there might be more beyond, then we might worry that each thinker has ultimately been too myopic in their spiritual vision.

Into the Abyss

The great difficulty in choosing a path, of course, is that we can’t know who is right! After all, the frontier/limit/horizon we have been exploring is literally the limit of our knowing. We are being asked to make a decision based on what we not only don’t know, but can’t know. In this light, the classic Christian claim that spiritual life must be walked in faith might appear far more reasonable than many modern critics have allowed.

My own hunch (probably not surprisingly, considering that I’m a Christian priest!), despite my genuine respect and admiration for both Shankara and Nagarjuna, and the traditions they pioneered, is that the Abrahamic understanding of this phenomenological horizon is probably the better one: I am continually drawn to the intuition that I am contained within God, but that God is by no means contained within me. The human as spiritual creature, on this view, is a processing-forth of the divine Spirit, intimate to, but not identical with, the absolute and ultimate reality of God. Spirituality for me, then, may begin with a clarifying of the deeper self from the superficial one—but it can only end in communion with the truth which lies beyond me, not merely liberation from untruth.

However, even as I type these words, I find my thought refracting back upon itself. After all, one interpretation of my argument here is that the atman just is the void, and the void just is the horizon of the God-world relation. Perhaps instead of alternate metaphysical systems, these are actually just different views of the same “thing”, just as the three blind men who described an elephant as either like a snake (when touching its trunk), like a tree (when touching its leg), or like a broom (when touching its tail) were all partially right, even if not exhaustively so. Perhaps the Advaita, Madhyamika, and classical Christian metaphysical claims are three different ways of referring to the same mystery. This whole discussion is as much about interpretation and perspective as it is about systematic phenomenological and metaphysical method.

And indeed, many Vedantin and Buddhist thinkers might respond to the whole thrust of my writing here by saying that their own traditions are actually less concerned with the metaphysical description of atman or sunyata and more with the ethical and spiritual process that leads to that point—whether the perceived “ground” of existence is the goal or the horizon that marks the goal, they might argue, the practical impact seems the same: work towards that!

Even so, the “theistic” interpretation does continue to be the one I feel most drawn to—though, admittedly, borne as much by experiential intuition and cultural formation as by careful metaphysical reasoning. Perhaps you find my position convincing, and perhaps not. Whatever our view, I think we can all admit that as we gaze at this horizon, we are seeking something deeply mysterious.

But as I conclude my reflection on this great mystery, my goal has not been to try and instruct you, dear reader, on which choice to make: I am but another ignorant pilgrim, a fellow traveler, and no prophet or enlightened being. But I do hope this exploration has helped in understanding the difficulties of spiritual philosophy, and has honed our skills in testing the horizon, and I definitely believe that all three of these traditions will be of value on the journey. What, if anything, lies beyond? May we come to know the truth, and may it set us free.

1. For Nagarjuna, the peace of Nirvana was possible precisely through the void—so, again, even where there is metaphysical difference here, there are important parallels.

2. Friend-of-the -blog

skaladom

disagrees with my assessment of Nagarjuna’s method here; you can see his counter-position in his comment here.

3. There is a whole debate about whether past and future states are real, or whether only the present is real. I am going to remain agnostic about that question here. What is important to note is that even if one is a “presentist”, one does not deny that the past and future had reality at some point in time. (It may also be worth noting, in passing, the basic Abrahamic doctrine that God, as eternal, is equally present to every moment of time.)

4. In Levinas’s writing, “Face” and “Other” become technical terms of art.

5. Those interested in reading Levinas himself could begin with his most famous book, Totality and Infinity, though he is a notoriously dense and convoluted writer—even in translation. A decent background in Husserlian phenomenology, or at least some Kant and Hegel, will be invaluable to anyone wanting to read Levinas himself.

6. Of course, fans of Heidegger may dispute this reading of his work. But this was certainly how Levinas himself viewed Heidegger’s work.

7. Far too many philosophers and historians are willing to ignore Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi party, and the fact that he never even really apologized for this, even after the war. That Heidegger’s thought proved such an easy fit for Nazi ideology should not be ignored, even if it also does not mean that one can simply dismiss him altogether. The connection was certainly one that Levinas—a Jew who lost much of his family to the Shoah, well understood.

8. This does not mean that Levinas was perfectly consistent in the application of his views to his own ethical and political life. Many have critiqued his views on the conflict between Israel and Palestinians, for example.

9. And again,

skaladom

thinks I made at least some mistakes there.

10. Though, intriguingly, Levinas did at times also reference an irremediable Otherness even within ourselves.

11. It may be worth noting that the western use of “God”, at least in the classical tradition before the great barbarism of univocal nominalist thought, is much closer to the Hindu Brahman than to any understanding of Ishvara, though in some ways it might be fair to say that the Abrahamic understanding of God is a synthesis of the two (though this gets more complicated when considering Christian Trinitarian doctrine).

12. These two terms have a torturous history in Christian theology and philosophy. I intend to write a piece on this in the future. For now, I will be using both terms and intending their reference broadly.

13. Of course, things are not that simple. The univocal nominalist tradition ushered in by William of Ockham led much of western Christian theology to regard God as a being-among-beings, completely collapsing the theology of transcendence outlined above. And both Ramanuja and Madhvacharya introduced a greater sense of divine transcendence into their schools of Vedanta.