Mahatma Gandhi and Emmanuel Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ?
Clara A.B. Joseph
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) declare, in so many ways, that one must not worship the messiah, but become a messiah. From within their respective colonial and holocaust contexts, Gandhi and Levinas share certain premises and goals in common: they predicate the power of language and culture to determine meaning and advocate a vocational search for truth and justice. Thus, the messianic mission, with its emphasis on the transformation of the word into flesh and the redemption, is central to their philosophies. According to both, for linguistic or cultural determinism of meaning and a search for truth and justice to go hand in hand, it is necessary to ground one’s philosophy of life on performance rather than worship of the messiah, without however subjecting the notion of the messiah to the free play of culture or language but recognizing that ethics is prior to culture or language. This paper argues that the apparent contradiction—between a recognition of the priority of language over meaning and at the same time an acknowledgment of the priority of morality over culture—far from turning into a paradox that undermines, is a just means towards the just end of the transformation of meaning itself from the worst to the best possible, from a conception of the human as human to the messiah as human. Thus, two philosophers, one Hindu and the other Jewish, were prompted to pass comments on the incarnation of Jesus, and their interpretations deserve attention. Although they came from different parts of the world and different religious backgrounds, some of their conclusions about the International Journal of Hindu Studies 18, 3: 453–492 © 2014 Springer DOI 10.1007/s11407-014-9166-6
454 / Clara A.B. Joseph incarnation are strikingly similar: that neither ascribes a special place to Jesus as the Son of God is to be expected, but what is interesting is that neither is willing to let go of this figure; in fact, their entire philosophies— as political and/or secular as they may appear to some—are, as it were, structured around the figure of the messiah to the extent that they themselves take on, in their philosophies and lives, the sonship of God and the responsibility that goes with it. If the messiah (mashiach in Hebrew, christós in Greek) was “the anointed one” who was to be the redeemer of human beings, then both Gandhi and Levinas concluded that they (and each of us) had better take up the role of the messiah. Gandhi, who used the political tool of non-violent search for truth, or satyagraha, invoked Jesus as “the prince of satyagrahis”1 and wept before the crucifix at the Vatican2; while Levinas’ whole philosophy of the ethics of the face of the other depends on the messianic character of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah as self. In The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Slavoj iek, as a materialist, rejects both Levinas and Gandhi: he criticizes Levinas’ messianism as “the ultimate form of idolatry”3 (ironically, materialism is not such idolatry for iek), because he interprets Judaic messianism as eternal and passive, therefore as irresponsible waiting. He also dismisses Gandhi, who he seems to have trouble distinguishing from the gangster figure in the movie Sexy Beast (also played by Ben Kingsley!). iek here ignores the genuine challenge that both Levinas and Gandhi take upon themselves in encountering the personhood of the messiah. Instead, in an amazing suspension of logic, he argues: “The fact that Ben Kingsley’s two big movie roles are Gandhi and the excessively aggressive English gangster in Sexy Beast bears witness to a deeper affinity: what if the second character is the full actualization of the hidden potential of the first?”4 Yet, in spite of their obsession with the messiah, why do Gandhi and Levinas caution against worshiping the figure of Jesus Christ? The answer to this leads us to an understanding of the intricacies of their philosophies, but also throws much-needed light on our approach to this figure and reveals the importance of the direction in which meaning changes. Briefly, it suggests that theology begins not with God but with the human person, a point Levinas makes in Entre nous,5 and further that language beckons not games but responsibility. Within Indian philosophy, Gandhi is labeled a karmayogi, one who is committed to ethical political action. His path is not one of piety in soli-
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 455 tude but of action in sociality, not of bhakti-marga but of karma-marga. One is immediately reminded of Levinas’ response to the concept of “solitude” during an interview: I do not have any sympathy for solitude. There is something good, something relatively good in solitude. It is perhaps better than the dispersion in the anonymity of insignificant relations but, in principle, solitude is a lack. My whole effort consists in thinking sociality not as a dispersion but as an exit from the solitude one takes sometimes for sovereignty, in which man is “master of himself as he is of the universe,” in which domination is experienced as the supreme perfection of the human. I would contest this excellence.6 Both Gandhi and Levinas are cautious of the potential for ego display and authoritarianism in even pietic withdrawal when the world demands fraternity. For Gandhi, as for Levinas, spirituality per se could not be structured in “interiority.”7 For Gandhi, the method of action was stamped by the character of non-violence, or ahimsa, defined not as passive but as a greater violence, targeted at the opponent’s conscience and very humanity. The path of non-violent action that he adopted determined his approach to religion, so that the scriptures received unique, highly ethical and fruitful but often unorthodox interpretation and application in his hands, acknowledging at once the priority of language over meaning and of morality over culture. As B.R. Nanda notes: “He [Gandhi] applied the ‘acid test of reason’ to every formula of every religion. When scriptural sanction was cited for inhumane or unjust practices, his reaction was one of frank disbelief.”8 This was not to mean, however, that Gandhi deduced God to reason.9 Two scriptures in particular which were submitted to his readings are relevant to conclusions that Gandhi arrives at regarding the Son of God: the Bhagavad Gita and the New Testament. The Bhagavad Gita, part of the sixth book of the eighteen-book epic the Mahabharata, narrates a point in the story of a family feud at which Lord Krishna himself intervenes on behalf of the numerically weaker party, the Pandavas, and talks Arjuna into taking up the sword against his own kith and kin, something the latter simply cannot bear to do on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Anti-colonial freedom fighters such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Keshav “Bal” Gangadhar Tilak have interpreted
456 / Clara A.B. Joseph the Bhagavad Gita as a call to violence itself, as one’s dharma, duty, and destiny on Kurukshetra, in turn identified as India. In colonial times the Bhagavad Gita was used as an ideological tool to convince and mobilize Indians to resistance against colonialism through violence. Recognizing the priority of language over meaning and yet the supremacy of morality, Gandhi opposed the violent path with a non-violent interpretation founded on karma-marga, an interpretation according to which Kurukshetra was not India but the human soul; the fight between siblings (the Pandavas and the Kauravas) was the struggle between good and evil within oneself; and one’s dharma—even as dictated by Lord Krishna—was to subdue the evil within oneself and do good through selfless service and self-suffering. This interpretation he held to be the central message of the Bhagavad Gita, a message that he would deploy in the anti-colonial movements that he led in South Africa and India. Nanda observes: “Gandhi’s Hinduism was ultimately reduced to a few fundamental beliefs: the supreme reality of God, the unity of all life and the value of love (ahimsa) as a means of realizing God. In this bedrock religion there was no scope of exclusiveness or narrowness.”10 Gandhi writes in the introduction to his translation of the Bhagavad Gita: Even in 1888–89, when I first became acquainted with the Gita, I felt that it was not a historical work, but that, under the guise of physical warfare, it described the duel that perpetually went on in the hearts of mankind, and that physical warfare was brought in merely to make the description of the internal duel more alluring. This preliminary intuition became more confirmed on a closer study of religion and the Gita.11 For Gandhi, the Bhagavad Gita, its characters and its events, was allegorical, not historical; the scripture was thus submitted to some literary liberty. In his systematic dismissal of religions, when iek rushes to conclude that the Bhagavad Gita, too, is ideologically (meaning, inherently) evil, because it was, after all, he says, Heinrich Himmler’s favorite book,12 it is this crucial difference—in interpretation—that he chooses to ignore. The first book that Gandhi wrote in Gujarati in 1909, and later translated into English, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule—considered superior to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 treatise Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique and Karl Marx’s 1867 Das Kapital: Kritik
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 457 der politischen Ökonomie, because “it did not mark the end of an age but the beginning of a new order”13—adopts the genre and message of the Bhagavad Gita, the dialogue invoking the triumph of good over evil.14 Gandhi thus deciphered the seeds of violence in two approaches to the Bhagavad Gita, both of which he categorized as directly or indirectly violent: pietistic and historical. The formula of the rejection of piety towards an incarnation that followed from an indiscriminate and historical reading of a scripture, he would carry into his reading of the New Testament as well. Gandhi held the New Testament to be a scripture of great importance. He quoted it often in communicating his own spiritual and political mission, used it to challenge the corruptions of colonization (which were often carried out in the name of Christianity), and reflected deeply upon it, especially on the Sermon on the Mount, founded, as it appeared, on the karmamarga, as the following verses from the Gospel of Mathew indicate: Not all who sound religious are really godly people. They may refer to me as “Lord,” but still won’t get to heaven. For the decisive question is whether they obey my Father in heaven. At the Judgment many will tell me, “Lord, Lord, we told others about you and used your name to cast out demons and to do many other great miracles.” But I will reply, “You have never been mine. Go away, for your deeds are evil.” All who listen to my instructions and follow them are wise, like a man who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents, and the floods rise and the storm winds beat against his house, it won’t collapse, for it is built on rock. But those who hear my instructions and ignore them are foolish, like a man who builds his house on sands. For when the rains and floods come, and storm winds beat against his house, it will fall with a mighty crash.15 Gandhi invoked Jesus in the practice of satyagraha. Yet he drew a distinction between satyagraha and passive resistance (mistakenly considered a synonym), and this he clarifies in his criticism of the crusade tendencies of European Christianity: Europe mistook the bold and brave resistance full of wisdom by Jesus of Nazareth for passive resistance, as if it was of the weak. As I read
458 / Clara A.B. Joseph the New Testament for the first time I detected no passivity, no weakness about Jesus as depicted in the four gospels and the meaning became clearer to me when I read Tolstoy’s Harmony of the Gospels and his other kindred writings. Has not the West paid heavily in regarding Jesus as a passive resister? Christendom has been responsible for the wars which put to shame even those described in the Old Testament and other records, historical or semi-historical.16 Europe, then, according to Gandhi, had misunderstood the messiah in seeking religious endorsement for acts of violence. Gandhi’s conclusion that Christendom or Europe had engaged in violence well beyond all the war and bloodshed that had distanced him from the Old Testament and his return to the significance of satyagraha as far from passive—that the West failed precisely because it interpreted and worshiped Jesus as a passive resister—underscore his insistence on the non-violent interpretation of scripture. Whereas Jesus succeeded in subduing the tempter upon being asked to worship Satan in exchange for material dominion,17 Christendom succumbed to that fatal temptation. In his engagement with the New Testament, what is also evident is Gandhi’s refusal to ascribe any divinity to the figure of Jesus Christ: he rejected narratives of the miracles and the resurrection of Jesus. Once again, Gandhi’s approach is not historical but allegorical, and only through the latter method could Gandhi vindicate the supremacy of morality in a unidirectional way. Setting aside his own practice of bhakti for his commitment to Truth (the name by which he called and later reduced God), Gandhi insisted that we are all sons of God as much as Jesus was. But interestingly enough, it is this uniquely ethical interpretation which prompted him—as a non-violent karmayogi—to emulate Jesus. Once when challenged as to whether his strategy of indiscriminate fasting did not actually amount to manipulation of the colonizers, he responded that it was as much manipulation as one could expect from the crucified Jesus. Here he pointed to the completely non-violent and ethical nature of the act of self-suffering for the other, because it had within it the power to transform the onlooker for the better.18 The following passage by Andrew Roberts, taken from the British Cabinet papers published in 2005, sheds some light on Gandhi practicing what he preached and some of its effects at a time of political upheaval:
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 459 Jan Smuts arrived in time for lunch, over which he teased the Prime Minister for not giving the British people “truly spiritual inspiration,” such as Gandhi gave the Indians. Churchill replied that he had appointed no fewer than six bishops that year, and “If that’s not spiritual inspiration, what is?” “But has that done any good?” asked Smuts, whereupon Churchill went on the offensive, saying to the South African Prime Minister: “You are responsible for all our troubles in India—you had Gandhi for years and did not do away with him.” To which Smuts replied: “When I put him in prison—three times—all Gandhi did was to make me a pair of bedroom slippers.”19 Philosophies and personalities that went on a tangent from mainstream Christianity and the canon also received Gandhi’s attention. John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, first published in 1860 as a series of four essays on political economy, defined Gandhi’s socialist approach that insisted on the welfare of all. The principle was called “sarvodaya” by him. The Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, first published in 1894, was another mighty influence on the thought of Gandhi, and the two men corresponded intermittently. While he rejected all pretensions to piety before the figure of Jesus as deity, the Christ for Gandhi was a constant source for imitation in his spiritual and political life, the two lives flowing in unison, especially in the redemptive reality of self-suffering. Gandhi’s interpretation of the New Testament, with its emphasis on the extolled worth of the Sermon on the Mount, recognizes at its core the role that universal discipleship plays in the imitation of Christ. To quote Gandhi, “For many of them contend that the Sermon on the Mount does not apply to mundane things, and that it was only meant for the twelve disciples. Well I do not believe this. I think the Sermon on the Mount has no meaning if it is not of vital use in everyday life to everyone.”20 In this context it is also useful to quote from Joseph Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth: “The Sermon on the Mount is addressed to the entire world, the entire present and future, and yet it demands discipleship and can be understood and lived out only by following Jesus and accompanying him on his journey.”21 Gandhi interprets this “discipleship” to mean imitation of Jesus Christ and surrender to the Truth, although he does not succumb to any Heideggerian priority of ontology and instead insists on an ethical route to that Truth, that is, for the good to happen, doing—
460 / Clara A.B. Joseph oriented toward sonship of God—had to be privileged over being. In a manner acknowledging the shared thesis between Gandhi and Levinas, namely, the subordination of meaning to language and the supremacy of oriented ethics, Richard A. Cohen, in his introduction to Levinas’ Ethics and Infinity at once reflecting on the persuasiveness of Gandhi’s satyagraha in the face of the British colonizers and pointing to the significance of Levinas’ priority of ethics over ontology, states: “The power of ethics is entirely different from the power of identities, whether poetic or political, whether knowledge or administration. It escapes and judges the synthesizing, centralizing forces.”22 Again, in his chapter “Better Than a Questionable Heidegger,” in Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy, Cohen argues that the strength of morality lies not in opposing power with power, but in “sincerity, responsibility, and justice” which appear as weakness.23 His illustration of moral strength, by presenting the case of Gandhi, is itself Gandhian insofar as it captures Gandhi’s own concept of “soul force.” Conquering the enemy by self-suffering is, for Gandhi, “soul force.”24 Cohen writes: When in the late 1930s the British colonial administrators asked Gandhi what he expected from his annoying non-violent agitation, the Mahatma…replied that he expected the British would quit India. They would quit India on their own because they would come to see that they were wrong to occupy and rule it. Moral force is a scandal for ontological thinking, whether that thinking would like to be gently attuned to being or to forcefully impose its subjective will. The power of morality is effective in a different way than the power of identities, whether political or poetic, whether knowledge or administration, whether unified or diffused. Moral force escapes and judges the synthesizing, centralizing forces—the powers that be.25 Now, Levinas’ approach to the figure of the messiah is philosophically defined by his response to Martin Heidegger, whose privileging of ontology Levinas countered with a philosophy of ethics. He wrote “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in response to Heidegger’s position and concludes in this work as elsewhere that Heidegger’s “Being” which requires a priori knowledge or intention or assumption of the being of the other is fundamentally violent, for one is responsible beyond intention.26 Historically,
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 461 such priority assigned to ontology had resulted in the holocaust: the people knew the Jew or the Gypsy and therefore killed the already known, that which was so superbly stereotyped. As Levinas notes: In relation to beings in the opening of being, comprehension finds a signification for them on the basis of being. In this sense, it does not invoke these beings but only names them, thus accomplishing a violence and a negation.…[W]hen I have grasped the other (autrui) in the opening of being in general, as an element of the world where I stand, where I have seen him on the horizon, I have not looked at him in the face, I have not encountered his face.27 In privileging invoking over naming, Levinas stresses the priority of “saying” or discourse that is direct, face-to-face, where I and the other do not exchange places or identities, where they remain—crucially—different.28 Thus, the holocaust, according to him, was built on a priority of ontology over ethics, where Nazis comprehended the Jews but never spoke to them. Gandhi, too, it appears, renounces any privileging of the path of knowledge, or jnana. To the question, “Jnana, karama and bhakti—should not they all go together? Unless you know God, how can you have bhakti? You cannot even offer him your karma,” Gandhi replies, “You must not reason like this. If you have no work and so-called bhakti, the result will be lop-sided. Do you know God to whom you pray? I don’t. He is unknown to you and me.”29 Both Levinas and Gandhi, as practitioners of non-violent karma-marga, also reflect on dialogue and discourse. For Levinas, discourse is almost another term for the ethical encounter with alterity which is prior to consciousness, and hence choice. It is distinct from Martin Buber’s philosophy of the “I-Thou” relationship, which Levinas felt was one of reciprocity (where the Thou-God is reduced to the I-self).30 Discourse marks, as it were, the condition of moral behavior, or rather its precondition, where I am always and already, irreversibly, responsible to you. It is as if the other breathes into the self the life (of humanity, not animality) of the self.31 In Otherwise Than Being, this openness of the self to the other acquires messianic proportion as “inspiration” and “breath,” as “inspiration that is already expiration,”32 a point which Levinas attempts to explain in a footnote narrating the death of Moses at the mouth of God: “The absolute expiration, in the kiss of God, is death
462 / Clara A.B. Joseph on order, in passivity and obedience, in the inspiration by the other for the other.”33 Highly reminiscent of Gandhi’s own “Hai Ram!”—his perfect testimony to the divine discourse at the crucial moment of falling to an assassin’s bullet—the messianic I encounters, in the longest inspiration which is also an expiration, the infinite alterity as if in the most perfect mouth-to-mouth communion or discourse. Levinas’ theory of the precondition of the face-to-face encounter neither precludes nor prevents, but in fact facilitates its moral performance at the level of actual speech. According to Levinas, speaking would have forced the Nazis to encounter the vulnerable face of the other, which in turn would have made it harder to kill. “Prior to discourse,” writes Levinas in Of God Who Comes to Mind, “I am clothed in a form; I am where my being hides me. To speak is to break this capsule of the form and to surrender oneself.”34 Form in the Aristotelian sense is a dangerous place, of being. So Levinas resorts to language—speaking—to mark the process of self-giving and meeting. This encounter with the other in speaking is central to Levinas’ philosophy, just as for Gandhi dialogue is both an important stylistic genre, one he effectively used from the start, as for example in Hind Swaraj, and the only civilized means of communication even when the party in question is a terrorist or worse, a Christian colonizer. It is also important to note in this regard that the Socratic dialogues as found in Plato’s Apology contained for Gandhi “the qualities of an elixir.”35 In his introduction to Hind Swaraj, Anthony J. Parel argues, “The major lesson he [Gandhi] learnt from this book [Plato’s Apology], a lesson which was to find its way to Hind Swaraj, was that there was an irrefragable moral link between the order in the soul and order in society.”36 For Gandhi, then, as for Levinas, dialogue engineered or bore the responsibility of this link. Levinas writes: The person with whom I am in relation I call being, but in so calling him, I call to him. I do not only think that he is, I speak to him. He is my partner in the heart of a relation which ought only have made him present to me. I have spoken to him, that is to say, I have neglected the universal being that he incarnates in order to remain with the particular being he is.37 Levinas is at pains to explain his philosophy as ethics, distinct from Hei-
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 463 degger’s philosophy of ontology. Hence, he motions towards proximity of the particular being. The means of remaining with this “person” is through speech that respects alterity of the particular being who asks, commands not to be killed. This perfect form of speech, Levinas terms “saying,” and it is often a stand-in for his other term, “ethics.” Saying is contrasted with its already uttered, comprehending and comprehended version “said,” just as ethics is contrasted with Heidegger’s ontology.38 But saying, as a phenomenon of language, has about it the burden of signs and systems susceptible to deconstruction, for within it is always the trace of the said. However, since saying is pre-original, and hence bears the web of responsibility, Levinas cautions against irresponsible deconstruction: “Saying is not a game.” He goes on to define saying as “the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signifyingness of signification.”39 The closeness suggested in “proximity” is one beyond what is between things; this is closeness to the face of the other. Further, Levinas is careful not to suggest any petrifying of meaning in the definition of saying; instead, one notices the deferral—in the “proximity,” the “approach,” not the signification but the “signifyingness.” This deferral is responsible in its very fear and trembling, in its uncertain approach—“duty without end”40— in the face of the other. Yet, saying is forever and already threatened by the presence of the “said”: “We have been seeking the otherwise than being from the beginning, and as soon as it is conveyed before us it is betrayed in the said that dominates the saying which states it.”41 These key terms—saying and said, and the inevitable presence of the latter in the former—take on added significance through the notion of “betrayal,” also a concept that Levinas himself uses to explain the wrongful presence of the said in the saying. The betrayal, then, is the always already said— the prophecy of the suffering and death of the messiah at the hands of the betrayer, a role that Judas Iscariot takes up through (to borrow a phrase from Otherwise Than Being) “the indiscretion with regard to the unsayable,”42 where the unsayable is the name of God, and in Christology, Jesus Christ. The self can undertake this messianic role only in the impress of the betrayer, of unjust suffering, for the sake of the other, even as a satyagrahi. A philosophy of being has only a negative role in a messianic ethics of the face of the other. So Levinas advocates a philosophy of the ethics of the face of the other, a philosophy of doing rather than being, of
464 / Clara A.B. Joseph performance and not worship on the basis of knowledge or comprehension. This conclusion—with its suggestion that a normative ethics, with at least some absolutes, inevitably evolves from Levinas’ ethics of the face of the other and thus dares a comparison with the philosophy of Gandhi— takes support from the works of those such as Richard A. Cohen, Adriaan T. Peperzak, and Michael Purcell. Cohen argues that the core of Levinas’ philosophy is human relationships, in fact, morality and justice: “At the heart of all his original work lies the irreducible ethical proximity of one human being to another—morality; and through that encounter, the relation of one to all—justice.”43 There is no doubt that Levinas’ theory of ethics is more originary, “pre-original,” even more radical, “anarchical,” than any normative moral theory. But recognizing precisely this, Peperzak cautions: Instead of seeing theoria as the ultimate level of human perfection, he [Levinas] maintains that good practice—the practice of the good— transcends contemplation, and his proof consists in refined analyses of an undeniable, central but trivial fact: the fact of everybody’s being faced by other humans.44 This is the space of responsibility, where philia gains precedence over sophia, or as Purcell simply puts it, “Doing comes before knowing.”45 These scholars recognize the post-structuralist and post-phenomenological strains of Levinas’ philosophy, its critique of logocentrism, its challenge to established ways of thinking, its theorizing of the pre-intentional, so that I am responsible in spite of myself and prior to consciousness, and yet they refuse, unlike others—for example, Michael L. Morgan and Diane Perpich—to conflate Levinas’ philosophy with that of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-François Lyotard. In a close reading of Alphonso Lingis’ translation of Levinas’ seminal essay, “Meaning and Sense,” Morgan sees no difference between Levinas and a host of others—“[Friedrich] Nietzsche, [Michel] Foucault, [HansGeorg] Gadamer, [Richard] Rorty, Hayden White, and Stanley Fish” (who make a normative principle out of suspicion of notions of intelligible truth)—in their interpretation of and suggested understanding of the goal of meaning; according to Morgan, they make “the same claim.”46
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 465 Similarly, Perpich sees both Levinas and Lyotard as equal proponents of relativism: “Levinas would agree with Lyotard when he writes, ‘And so, when the question of what justice consists in is raised, the answer is: It remains to be seen in each case.’ ”47 Yet it is hard to understand how Levinas’ theistic and ethical approach can fall into either the relativism or the utilitarianism that some of these other philosophers are susceptible to. Rather, Levinas’ ethics of the face of the other moves in a particular direction: beyond philosophy, assuming the label of religion. If out of literature, of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and other Russian novelists, grew Levinas’ philosophy,48 out of his philosophy grew his religion. In fact, Levinas gives the name “prayer” and “religion” to ethical performance: The relation with the other (autrui) is not therefore ontology. This tie to the other (autrui), which does not reduce itself to the representation of the Other (autrui) but rather to his invocation, where invocation is not preceded by comprehension, we call religion. The essence of discourse is prayer.49 Such ethics—like Gandhi’s non-violent karma-marga—requires messianic action involving self-suffering in the process of recognizing, or rather submitting, to the dignity of the other person. Gandhi calls this art, “the art of laying down one’s life,” a precondition of religion.50 In Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, and specifically in the second chapter titled “Thinking about Agency and Pain,” Talal Asad argues that pain itself when put to public effect is a form of agency. Against Western liberalism’s rejection of pain and its inordinate desire for pleasure, Asad poses the productive social role of pain in religious contexts: “Ritual drama, such as the Passion of Christ or the Martyrdom of Hussain.”51 Further, Asad invokes the instances of great leaders who called for communal suffering. He writes that when Martin Luther King, Jr. asked activists in the South to suffer, he “extends the experience of pain—like Gandhi before him—from sympathy to compassion, and makes it relevant and effective within a particular secular state.”52 Asad points out that this willingness—“readiness”—to suffer “is not to be detected in the U.S. project of redeeming and humanizing the world.”53 Levinas picks the messiah of the prophet Isaiah. This messiah is the man of sorrows, the supreme sufferer. Levinas writes:
466 / Clara A.B. Joseph The challenge to self is precisely reception of the absolutely other. The epiphany of the absolutely other is face where the Other hails me and signifies to me, by its nakedness, by its destitution, an order. Its presence is this summons to respond. The Ego does not only become conscious of this necessity to respond as if it were a demand or a particular duty it must decide on. The Ego is through and through, in its very position, responsibility or diacony, as in chapter 53 of Isaiah.54 Analysis of this quotation suggests the gravity of Levinas’ philosophy of the ethics of the face of the other. In the face of the other the self is challenged, and this challenge is constituted in the receiving of the other, and that too the “absolutely other,” that is, the other who cannot be known into sameness but only encountered. This signifying comes without predetermined meaning, it comes through language, in a saying that “hails me and signifies to me,” and through the supremacy of ethics, “by its nakedness, by its destitution, an order.”55 Joshua James Shaw explains the priority of ethics in his monograph Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First, responding to those Levinas scholars who assume that Levinas’ ethics of the face of the other, and particularly of the “Thou shalt not kill” plea/command of the other who cannot be comprehended, are such as to render this very possibility of the possibility to kill the other uncontroversial. Shaw writes: “To return to the language of moral realism, a moral fact is not something one acknowledges through words but through deeds, and it is for this reason that Levinas uses the language of transcendence to discuss interpersonal relations.”56 That is, central to Levinas’ ethics of the face of the other is moral responsibility and a call to act, rather than a comprehension of the other who escapes comprehension. The impact is heavy and unbearable when the other’s nudity and vulnerability call to me in, as it were, an order, a commandment not to kill. The freedom of language over sense and the ultimate triumph of morality over culture combine to point to the dignity of the human person, in the messiah as human in the face of the other. This face of the other is also the face in the famous “talisman” of Gandhi, a gift he gave to the world not too long before he was assassinated: I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 467 of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.57 The self is then responsible; the self has to respond to the call of the other, not the other who is reduced to the self-same, but the absolute other. And then, Levinas presents to us the reality of the responding self by simply pointing to chapter 53 of Isaiah. It is when one re-reads this chapter that one is struck, rather heavily by the seriousness of Levinas’ philosophy. Chapter 53 of the book of the prophet Isaiah is traditionally interpreted as referring to the messiah, but a messiah who appears to be, at bottom, a loser. He is physically inferior, socially rejected, a beast of burden, an alibi, an altar of atonement, silent, deprived of even a progeny, someone who has done no violence and spoken no deceit, but he is an intercessor for transgressors and “Therefore I will give him the honors of one who is mighty and great, because he has poured out his soul unto death. He was counted as a sinner, and he bore the sins of many, and he pled with God for sinners.”58 He is the Gandhian satyagrahi who knows no limits: “There are no limits on satyagraha, or rather, none except those placed by the satyagrahi’s capacity for tapascharya, for voluntary suffering.”59 Gandhi names the capacity that lay within such suffering “love-force”: The force implied in this may be described as love-force, soul-force, or, more popularly but less accurately, passive resistance. This force is indestructible. He who uses it perfectly understands his position. We have an ancient proverb which literally means: “One negative cures thirty-six diseases.” The force of arms is powerless when matched against the force of love or the soul.60 As if to prove his statement, Gandhi, almost miraculously, brought peace to a part of India that was hit by the atrocities of the Partition, and Lord Mountbatten sent a telegram to Gandhi: “In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting. As a serving officer, as well as an
468 / Clara A.B. Joseph administrator, may I be allowed to pay my tribute to the One-Man Boundary Force.”61 Gandhi and Levinas ask us to become this figure in the face of the other. This becoming involves high-level performance rather than worship of the messiah. Noticeably, as in the case of Gandhi’s, Levinas’ philosophy, too, refrains from the historical interpretation of scripture as well as either a violent or pietistic approach. One might ask, should we not rather see the helplessness of the other in the helplessness of the crucified Christ? The response of Gandhi and Levinas would be a “no,” for to see the crucified Christ as other, the nude and vulnerable other, is to worship, not imitate. It is to privilege meaning over language and culture over morality. To worship the crucified Christ as other is, in Levinasean terms, violation and murder. Such worship is alienation; it converts the other into the self, engages in self-pity, and imposes the image of the self onto the other so that, ultimately, the self— in all its ontological priority of meaning and culture, of being—rules with power over the other, a process at work within colonization and the holocaust and all forms of self-justifying oppression. In an interview, Levinas responds to the so-called “defenselessness” of Jesus on the cross, the cross that headed the crusade: “The defenseless Christ on the cross was carried at the front of the crusaders’ army. And Christ didn’t climb down from the cross to demand an end to the murder.”62 In other words, Levinas is exposing what is unethical about the alienated worship of the incarnation. In “Language and Proximity,” he refers to “the facile itinerary in which pious thought too quickly deduces theological realities”;63 in Otherwise Than Being, he writes: “a pious thought, or one concerned with order, hastily deduces the existence of God.”64 Elsewhere he cautions, “Watch out for the peace of private worship!…the artificial peace of synagogues and churches!”65 And what is utterly unethical about this form of worship is precisely its space for violence when the other is reduced to the self-same. Yet it is possible that in the path of performance, non-violent karma-marga, the Christ can miraculously put an end to the killing. However, this miracle lies within the self—when I take on a specific role: the role of Isaiah’s messiah in the face of the other. Gandhi goes about this in a somewhat more practical way as he faces dilemma after dilemma in his day-to-day activism both in South Africa and India. He formulates a non-violent procedure modeled on the messiah and constantly tests its effectiveness against “the folly of the cross”:
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 469 Passive resistance is aimed at removal in a most approved manner of bad laws, customs or other evils and is designed to be a complete and effective substitute for forcible methods including hooliganism and lynch law. It is an appeal to the heart of man. Often reason fails. It is dwarfed by self. The theory is that an adequate appeal to the heart never fails. Seeming failure is not of the law of satyagraha but of incompetence of the satyagrahi by whatever cause induced. It may not be possible to give a complete historical instance. The name of Jesus at once comes to the lips. It is an instance of brilliant failure. And he has been acclaimed in the West as Prince of passive resisters. I showed years ago in South Africa that the adjective “passive” was a misnomer, at least as applied to Jesus. He was the most active resister known perhaps to history. His was non-violence par excellence.66 Here, again, Gandhi does not simply make Jesus the object of his misplaced sentiments regarding the other. Instead, he is crystal clear about who the other is within the colonial system. He invokes the figure of Jesus not to displace the other, but to displace himself, as it were, in his emulation of that figure as active resister, as satyagrahi. For both Gandhi and Levinas the key term here is responsibility. Responsibility is neither egoism nor altruism. It never points to any new-found generosity in me who is acting responsibly, but in a very Gandhian manner, it is removed from itself, what Gandhi deduces from his reading of the Bhagavad Gita as non-attachment in action, or nishakamakarma, and which in the Gospel of Luke is narrated as a parable of the “unprofitable servants” who having done their duty can only say that is all they have done.67 Levinas’ concept of “substitution” throws more light on the relationship between the self and the other that is the responsibility for the other: Responsibility for the other does not wait for the freedom of commitment to the other. Without ever having done anything, I have always been under accusation: I am persecuted.…On this side of the limits of identity, the passivity of self-recurrence is not, however, an alienation. What can it be if not a substitution for others? In its passivity without the arche of identity, ipseity is a hostage. The word “I” means to be answerable for everything and for everyone.68
470 / Clara A.B. Joseph It is often considered a sign of maturity when we concede that freedom is simply the other side of responsibility. Yet Levinas’ position is drastic, one is responsible without freedom. Again, we sagely talk of just punishment: you get what is due to you. But Levinas talks about responsibility in terms of being open to undeserved punishment to oneself. Thus, responsibility for Levinas is underscored by a passivity of passivity: a passivity that is not defined on Aristotle’s first principle, or arché, but rather on something beyond or before it, on the anarché;69 where “the passivity of self-recurrence”—of the repeated visits of the ego on the self—is heavily guarded against ontological thought, because, guilty for the persecutor when persecuted, where the recurrence is “neither freedom of possession of self by self in reflection, nor the freedom of play where I take myself for this or that,”70 I am thrown back to the hither side of myself; as Levinas puts it in Otherwise Than Being, “an anarchichal passivity.”71 Cohen interprets this concept as follows, “the only exteriority ‘adequate’ to the passivity of consciousness is a passivity that must exceed the very adequacy or telos of consciousness itself, exceed its intentional character.”72 This exteriority or “outside,” Cohen notes, arrives as a “moral imperative”— “that consciousness has been ‘put into question’—moral question—by the other person.”73 Further, for Levinas, it is a passivity that marks the creation of the human person out of nothing—an “incarnated passivity,” in a manner not found in and beyond the passivity of created matter. The extreme form of passivity which is the character of a human person defines an individual as unique, in messianic responsibility to the other, incarnated so that the oneself is—I will add, like the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew74— “without a place to lay its head.”75 The messianic self is, in substitution, hostage.76 Levinas emphasizes the incarnation of the messianic self in substitution for the other to ward off charges of apathy and alienation: “The psyche can signify this alterity in the same without alienation in the form of incarnation, as being-in-one’s-skin, having-the-other-inone’s-skin,”77 where this very skin is a persecution, like the poisoned shirt of Nissus on Heracles.78 Renée van Riessen interprets substitution as “kenosis” and as follows: “Kenosis or to purge, to empty oneself, is one of the words here that Levinas uses for the change in the conception of the subject that he envisions. In addition to this expressions like substitution, being for the other, to sacrifice oneself for the other, occur
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 471 in his texts.”79 In his article, “To Which Question is ‘Substitution’ the Answer?,” Robert Bernasconi lightheartedly reflects, “There are times when one wonders if the question to which ‘Substitution’ is the answer is not ‘what is the most obscure philosophical concept of the twentieth century?’ ”80 One reason for the perceived denseness of the concept is that Levinas tends to modify meanings of terms in the process of developing his philosophy. Terminology was an event that caused much confusion and resistance among the followers of Gandhi, too, as Nanda records: Gandhi’s use of such words as “swaraj” (self-government), “sarvodaya” (uplift of all), “ahimsa” (non-violence) and “satyagraha” was exploited by the Muslim League to estrange Muslims from the nationalist struggle. The fact is that these expressions when used by Gandhi had little religious significance. They were derived from Sanskrit, but since most of the Indian languages are derived from Sanskrit, this made them more easily intelligible to the masses. The English translation of these words, or a purely legal or constitutional terminology, may have sounded more “modern” and “secular,” but it would have passed over the heads of all but a tiny urbanized English-educated minority.81 To push this point a bit further, none of the terms (swaraj, sarvodaya, ahimsa, or satyagraha) whether in the Sanskrit or in transliteration could automatically or in themselves suggest the complexity and immense depth that these held within Gandhi’s system of thought. The reduction of satyagraha to mean passive resistance and pacifism or even passivism is a well-known error. Sarvodaya, for instance, Gandhi describes as not being “a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom.” For Gandhi, it will be an oceanic circle whose center will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.82 Gandhi’s choice of metaphors, his rejection of the pyramid for the oceanic circle, the latter majestic only in its already determined humility and gen-
472 / Clara A.B. Joseph erosity (not ego-willed generosity), the individual for everyone in a selfgiving, the secret of welfare for all—in a dharmic (pre)determination, where in Levinasean phraseology, “the recurrence to oneself cannot stop at oneself, but goes to the hither side of oneself,”83 is a messianic secret. Sarvodaya is the word that Gandhi used as the title of his Gujarati translation of Ruskin’s Unto This Last, which in turn is derived from the noncapitalist justice recorded in Matthew 20:14. It is a word with more than merely the denseness of Levinas’ “substitution.” Similarly, when Levinas puts forth terms that have been traditionally handled within Western philosophy, one has to approach them with caution for they hold for him different meanings and implications. For example, identity is not ego, as is generally regarded, but me or I who is for the other and thus (pre)determined so that, for Levinas, “subjectivity is being hostage.”84 And being there or ipseity in this context removes itself from any suggestion of a preordained consciousness, instead is the self (already) subjected to and for the other. Thus substitution is to say: “The other is in me and in the midst of my very identification.”85 Further, substitution denies the leisure of freedom of commitment so that there is no space for altruism or generosity. Messianically, “without ever having done anything, I have always been under accusation: I am persecuted.”86 In his paper titled “A Man-God?,” Levinas calls it an initiative stripping “event” of the consciousness which is always guilty in the face of the other, “an event that puts me in accusation—a persecuting indictment, for it is prior to all wrongdoing—and that leads me to the self, to the accusative that is not preceded by any nominative.”87 If for Paul de Man the relationship between “a superior or ‘deeper’ self” and “the actual, given self,” its questioning, is restricted to the realm of language,88 for Levinas the idea of substitution is concretized, beyond grammar. In “Ethics and the Feminine,” Catherine Chalier draws an explicit link between Levinas’ idea of substitution and messianism as follows: We can understand the link between the biblical ideas of Messianism and the strict concept of substitution. It is not a description of a mere fact but it is “the condition of all solidarity.” Without the condition of being hostage there can be no pity, no compassion, and no pardon. Moreover, it is the occurrence of a truly good act springing from this incomprehensible disinterestedness that can restore hope and support
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 473 the whole world even during the darkest time.89 Gandhi becomes a concrete (concretized) example of such a term in his compulsive fasting and atonement and practice of nishkamakarma—“this incomprehensible disinterestedness.” Perhaps the main difference between Gandhi and Levinas is precisely that the former illustrates, often clumsily, the errors and truths of an ethics of the face of the other, while the latter is privileged to erase and rewrite its processes to deliberate conclusions. Even something as mundane as spinning was, for Gandhi, as Dennis Dalton points out, “a symbolic form of identification with the masses.”90 This is the identity that is not ego but “I” as unidirectional: messianic in the face of the other. Their priority of the other pushes both Gandhi and Levinas to privilege responsibility over post-Enlightenment, if humanistic, values of rationality, equality, and freedom. This other is neither the self, the one who within secular humanism declares the death of God, nor the subject of poststructuralist decentering and deconstructing, the one famously traced with cold Darwinian logic by Michelle Foucault in The Order of Things: “It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”91 Instead, the other is unknowable, cannot be subsumed into the same (of the self), and is not in the least obliged to my capacity for choice. The other hails or invokes me as messiah to my own torment and sits like an elephant between me and my God. Gandhi explains messianism itself as the self that does the will of God: “Jesus’ own life is the key of His nearness to God; that He expressed, as no other could, the spirit and will of God. It is in this sense that I see Him and recognize Him as the Son of God.”92 While discussing the moral philosophy of Gandhi, which was always oriented to Truth, Jaladhar Pal points to the imitation of Christ as the method that Gandhi adopted in his practice of satyagraha.93 So, what is more, when such an I (as messiah) encounters the other, there is always a third, and this Levinas calls the trace of God: “the trace is not just one more word: it is the proximity of God in the countenance of my fellowman.”94 Or even more succinctly, Levinas writes, “A you is inserted between the I and the absolute He.
474 / Clara A.B. Joseph Correlation is broken.”95 Reminiscent of Matthew 25:31–45, for Levinas there is no relationship with God in the absence of the other: “As Jews, we are always a threesome: I and you and the Third who is in our midst. And only as a Third does He reveal Himself.”96 The Gospel of Matthew’s “whatsoever you do unto the least of my brothers you do unto me” relies heavily on the golden rule: love your neighbor as yourself,97 a verse Levinas is at pains to clarify: [Martin] Buber and [Franz] Rosenzweig were here very perplexed by the translation. They said to each other, does not “as yourself” mean that one loves oneself most? Instead of translating this in agreement with you, they translated it, “love your neighbor, he is like you.” But if one first agrees to separate the last word of the Hebrew verse, kamokhah, from the beginning of the verse, one can read the whole thing still otherwise. “Love your neighbor; this work is like yourself”; “love your neighbor; he is yourself”; “it is this love of the neighbor which is yourself.”98 The other cannot be reduced to the same. Levinas, here, insists that my identity exists not prior to my experience, but that my identity as “I” is constituted by this work of loving my neighbor. The route is not worship but ethics: “I approach the infinite by sacrificing myself. Sacrifice is the norm and the criterion of the approach. And the truth of transcendence consists in the concording of speech with acts.”99 This is otherwise than Heidegger’s being. The Third is present as sheer witness to the golden rule. He explains this further in Totality and Infinity: The Other is the very locus of metaphysical truth, and is indispensable for my relation with God. He does not play the role of mediator. The other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed.100 Here it is not sufficient that the self exists, incarnate in its ontological grandeur. The self in this sense has to become disincarnate even as it exists for the other, and thus ethical.101 John Llewelyn explains Levinas’ priority of the “non-phenomenal face,” the disincarnate face, as that which intro-
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 475 duces the ethical: “more than the self as ‘I think’ ” and “beyond the self as ‘I can’,” and thus as beyond what René Descartes and Maurice MerleauPonty—the latter with his emphasis on the ontological order—conceive of.102 Merold Westphal in his article, “Levinas’s Teleological Suspension of the Religious,” preempts any dismissal of Levinas’ philosophy of ethics in its relationship to religion. He argues, “If Levinas is willing at times to risk sounding as if he wants to reduce religion to ethics, it is because he knows how easily religion drifts into defacement.”103 Hence, where the other is intrinsic to my theology and spirituality, I have to withdraw from the pious thought that “too quickly deduces theological realities”104 and instead, act out the messiah of Isaiah; I have to replace worship with performance. Whose messiah? Gandhi’s? Levinas’? Isaiah’s? Or mine? The question already assumes the relativism of all concepts, the absence of moral absolutes, and the itch to deconstruct. But to respond, it is, if not without irony, important to examine what language and truth or justice meant to Gandhi and Levinas. Gandhi writes in his autobiography: “To describe truth, as it has appeared to me, and in the exact manner in which I have arrived at it, has been my ceaseless effort. The exercise has given me ineffable mental peace, because, it has been my fond hope that it might bring faith in Truth and Ahimsa [non-violence] to waverers.”105 As a lawyer, journalist, and political delegate, Gandhi’s constant efforts have been to reduce the gap between language and truth. The subtitle of his autobiography, “my experiments with truth,” suggests how he waded through relative truths as a sincere seeker, but as one constantly oriented towards the eternal Truth. Gandhi’s search for Truth, equated with God, required guiding principles—vows—of truth (satya), nonviolence (ahimsa), celibacy (brahmacharya), non-stealing (asteya), control of the palate (asvada), fearlessness (abhaya), equal respect for all religions (sarva-dharma-samanatva), fiscal autonomy (swadeshi), and looking upon all human beings as touchables (sparshabhavana).106 Thus, the end of Truth had to be reached through the just means: the end did not automatically justify the means. In other words, and as Gandhi’s practice of free translation also suggests, language had to be subservient to the natural law and to Truth; satya and ahimsa—the leading principles—guaranteed the very humanity of the practitioner, and truth in particular, for “Truth cannot exist without love. Truth includes non-violence, brahmacharya,
476 / Clara A.B. Joseph non-stealing and other rules.”107 Raghavan N. Iyer identifies Gandhi’s truth as “Paramarthasatya, the highest of human ends [the four aims of life: wealth (artha), pleasures (kama), duty (dharma) and spiritual release (moksha)—collectively known as the purusharthas].”108 Iyer stresses that “Gandhi was prepared to sacrifice even national freedom for the sake of truth and non-violence.”109 This truth was to be preferred to beauty. In an interview on art with G. Ramchandran, a student of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi reverses the “truth in beauty” formula. Gandhi says he sees and finds “Beauty in Truth or through Truth.”110 As Gandhi goes on to explain the presence of beauty in truth, it is impossible not to see the parallel with Levinas’ reflections on justice where justice is higher than beauty and goodness. Levinas’ “said” takes the place of Gandhi’s beauty. In fact, Levinas himself says, “The said is reduced to the Beautiful, which supports Western ontology.”111 This comparison is especially potent considering that Gandhi, too, was responding to one of the most popular art movements in the West, the Decadence, and was making specific mention of the art of Oscar Wilde, a central figure of the “art for art’s sake” doctrine that extolled aesthetics even at the expense of life. Gandhi’s privileging of truth and Levinas’ of the “saying” over the “said” share the definite orientation of language towards ethics. Gandhi’s reflections on truth and beauty lead him to “those starving millions” of famine-ridden Orissa.112 Levinas’ reflections on the impossible possibilities of the “saying” are illuminated only in an orientation towards justice: “there is a question of the said and being only because saying or responsibility require justice.”113 This orientation is messianically performative and as such, testifies to the priority of ethics over language. For Levinas, language may be anterior to comprehension, where comprehension is the knowing that kills the other. But where morality comes in, the sign is subordinate. In “Signification and Sense,” Levinas winds up using terms similar to Gandhi’s: “We will conclude by saying that signification is situated before Culture and Aesthetics; it is situated in Ethics, presupposition of all Culture and all signification. Morality does not belong to Culture; it allows us to judge culture, to evaluate the dimension of its elevation.”114 Signification or meaning is, indeed, outside the Derridean text, because, and it is important to quote Levinas again, this time from “Ego and the Totality,” “The particularity of the other in lan-
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 477 guage, far from representing his animality or constituting the remains of an animality, constitutes the total humanization of the other.”115 It is highly important for Levinas to clarify the “other” in language as not being a concept, but crucially, a person. This particularity in language is a messianic particularity, it has a bearing which is of the other and is thus authorized to judge culture. Contrary to what Homi K. Bhabha might suggest in The Location of Culture,116 at least for Gandhi and Levinas meaning is not within culture, but in the capitalized and performative Ethics. In fact, meaning itself is subordinate to Ethics. Such capital Ethics is simply not relative to culture. The “messiah” is this Ethics, for the messiah is the self who willingly submits, even unto death, in the face of the other. If this messiah is present in the thought of Gandhi, Levinas, Isaiah, or another, then that is whose messiah I should emulate, but not worship. If the theological direction inverts the formula, placing the human person at the center in terms of responsibility, it further engenders “sons of God”117 and reverses the God-Man into the “Man-God.”118 It contemplates the messiah as human. If the logical problem with the incarnation is the humiliation of God in taking human identity, this humility becomes precious enough for humans to perform the messianic responsibility to the other. As Purcell summarizes in his chapter, “Eucharistic Responsibility and Working for Justice,” “The significance of the ‘Man-God’ is the transfiguration of a subjectivity as responsibility, where ‘to be’ is to be ‘for-the-other-person’.”119 To quote from Chalier’s translation of Levinas’ Difficile Liberte: “Messianism does not mean, to be sure, that someone will come who will put a stop to history. It is [in] my power to support the suffering of the others. It is the moment when I recognize this power and my universal responsibility.”120 This scenario explains the withdrawal of God. Purcell cites the insight of the fictional character, Yossel Rakover, who discovered in the ghetto of Warsaw that “the unresponsive God surrendered proximity to enable human responsibility.”121 A reluctant God steps away from me so that I may act responsibly towards my neighbor. The self, the other/neighbor, and the Third—all in one—is not Heidegger’s Being or “there is.” In an interview with Philippe Nemo, Levinas illustrates the “there is” of Heidegger using the following examples: of the child alone in bed who “feels the silence of his bedroom as ‘rumbling’…
478 / Clara A.B. Joseph not that there is this or that; but the very scene of being is open: there is”; of insomnia: “I do not stay awake: ‘it’ stays awake”; and “a night in a hotel room where, behind the partition, ‘it does not stop stirring’; ‘one does not know what they are doing next door.’ This is something very close to the ‘there is’.”122 Levinas interprets Heidegger’s Being akin to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existence out of which the only escape is “deposition,”123 by which he means the relationship with the other that is stamped by the Gandhian nishkamakarma. This alone is being for the other. In being for the other, the self through nishkamakarma has to endure the Golgotha of Heidegger’s Being. Further, being for the other appears to be otherwise than Heidegger’s “being with,” or Dasein, where, and as Levinas points out, Heidegger’s relationship is primarily with death rather than with the Other, focusing on escape from being through knowledge of the other in a being with that is, ultimately, “carried out in terms of solitude.”124 Werner Brock explains Heidegger’s concept as follows: “ ‘Death’ is the ‘end’ of Dasein whereby it becomes a ‘whole’.”125 Since knowledge equals assimilation, the panacea is “sociality”: “Sociality will be a way of escaping being otherwise than through knowledge.”126 As Gandhi points out, while explicating the Bhagavad Gita and alluding to Matthew 6:3, emphasizing the importance of self-control and self-renunciation in the practice of karma: …Jnana signifies the knowledge of man who knows the Shastras and the term yogi means one who knows the science of karma. This Chapter [of the Bhagavad Gita] explains the conditions which must be fulfilled before we can do karma in a disinterested spirit. It is not possible to do karma in that spirit without control of the self. Those who control themselves from hour to hour, only they can work in that spirit. Thieves, robbers and immoral men never talk about doing karma in a disinterested spirit. Many persons use the Gita to justify their actions. But disinterestedness is a state of the mind, and such a state can never be cultivated without effort and without self-control. One whose left hand does not know what his right hand does, such a one knows what it is to be equal-minded.127 Conversely, the implied collectivity of Dasein is personal in that it depends on the self, where alone is authenticity. To quote Heidegger:
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 479 Losing itself in the publicness and the idle talk of the “they,” it fails to hear [überhört] its own Self in listening to the they-self. If Dasein is to be able to get brought back from this lostness of failing to hear itself, and if this is to be done through itself, then it must first be able to find itself—to find itself as something which has failed to hear itself, and which fails to hear in that it listens away to the “they.”128 Whereas Heidegger is haunted by the self, Levinas’ and Gandhi’s concern is the other. And as Robert John Sheffler Manning points out, Heidegger’s is a “collective of comrades” rather than Levinas’ “I-You collectivity.”129 Not surprisingly, both Levinas and Gandhi react not too kindly to Marxism. As Gandhi remarks: This time, while in jail, I read about Marx and whatever literature I could get about the great experiment in Russia. What a great difference between that experiment and our spinning wheel? There also, as in India, the whole nation is invited to join in the yajna. But the experiments there and here are as different from each other as East from West or North from South.130 At another time, when asked if (were Marx aware of its potency) nonviolence could not simply be adopted into Marxism, Gandhi responds: I have also heard it said that often it is more economical to dispose of the old plant than to try to adapt it from one kind of motive power to another. In the present case, the difference between violence and nonviolence is fundamental. It cuts at the very root of the Marxist theory. If you alter the foundation the whole superstructure will have to be changed.131 Gandhi’s response reminds one of Levinas’ in an interview with Richard Kearney: “Marxism was, of course, utterly compromised by Stalinism. The 1968 Revolt in Paris was a revolt of sadness.”132 Further, Levinas tended to ignore Marx in his later works. In spite of their points of departure, in Marx and Heidegger a theory of the collective that begins and ends in the self rather than the other is held suspect in the philosophical thinking of Gandhi and Levinas. This is not to suggest that Gandhi and
480 / Clara A.B. Joseph Levinas did not recognize several of the ethical strands of Marxism: both have stressed the economic in their vision of justice.133 Robert Gibbs highlights a passage where Levinas’ interpretation of the messianic times in the prophecy of Jochanan is, in fact, interrupted by his favorable reflections on Marx. Gibbs writes, “Levinas locates Marx within a Rabbinic argument, an argument about the need for politics and the persistence of suffering. Such a locating is in large measure one of praise.”134 But Levinas’ refusal to engage any further with Marx remains for Gibbs a puzzle.135 To return to Manning’s observation on the “collective of comrades” versus the “I-You collectivity,” for Levinas as long as Marx and Heidegger are planted in the former there is only so far he can proceed with them. After all, Heidegger’s Being, or Dasein, is not being the messiah who is for the other. To place the human person at the center of theology is also to trigger an explosion of Derridean texts that suggest “there is nothing outside the text”136 and “the center is not the center.”137 It insists, in a post-structuralist fashion, on the priority of language over meaning and opens up into a world of relativism where, in William Shakespeare’s words in Hamlet, “there is nothing right or wrong but thinking makes it so.” Yet, this moment of explosive luxury, as it were, is held in check by the priority of the messiah, the one who is for the other. In Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, Llewelyn, in tracing the common sources of Derrida and Levinas, has difficulty identifying the difference between the two: “The paths along which Derrida and Levinas walk cross only because they diverge. They diverge too from the path followed by Kant. But the difference of orientation is difficult to distinguish.”138 But even as Derrida borrows meditations on the “trace” from Levinas, Bernasconi in “The Trace of Levinas in Derrida” exposes a major difference: “For Derrida the trace is of a text and not of the Other”;139 Bernasconi concludes, albeit tentatively: “The question remains whether Derrida, in being deaf to the ethical voice of saying, does not fail to do justice to all the possibilities of language to which Levinas has introduced us and does not therefore ultimately fail in his description of the necessities governing Levinas’ language.”140 On the other hand, Cohen’s response, towards which I am inclined, is categorical. In a footnote in Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas, Cohen writes:
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 481 It is precisely the indetermination that haunts his conception of otherness that has always disturbed me about Derrida’s thought. It is not simply that when he “deconstructs” a text there is no positive result, it is also that when he takes up such topics as friendship, responsibility, politics, and religion, Derrida does not appreciate the extra-ontological ethical force—or ethical significance—of the saying that precedes the said. For Levinas, in contrast, the face of the other, qua the command “Thou shalt not kill,” is the source of all signification.141 Both Levinas and Derrida share the post-structuralist interpretation of the indeterminacy of meaning and thus of the text as signifier. This requires both of them to move towards a more Lacanian understanding of the precedence of language. This point of agreement becomes also their location of divergence: whereas Derrida engages in a deconstruction that is destructive insofar as it is differential play of language destined only for uncertainty, Levinas emphasizes certainty in direction—vulnerability to the other, messianic orientation of the (Gandhian) karma-marga (the “ethical significance” which Cohen finds lacking in Derrida). If in its extreme form, post-structuralism, and in particular as introduced by Derridean deconstruction, in an automaticity of undermining, is without prudence, in the philosophy of Levinas language does not lose its transformative nature, but rather insists in changing signification to its supreme and ethical level. Transformative language becomes oriented. This orientation is not only beyond being and towards the face of the other, but it is also messianically human. To talk about the Son of Man, the way Gandhi and Levinas do, is to talk about the messiah as human. In fact, the messiah is the perfection of communication, logos, where one recognizes that meaning of course changes but that it is undoubtedly enhanced in a certain way, in a performative definition of the messiah as human. Notes 1. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 21, p.116. See also Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (2000), pp. 273–76. 2. Parekh, Gandhi: A Brief Insight (1997), p.10. 3. iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
482 / Clara A.B. Joseph (2003), p.139. 4. iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), p.30. 5. Levinas, Entre nous: On Thinking of the Other (1998c). See also Purcell, Levinas and Theology (2006), pp. 158–59. 6. Levinas, interview with François Poirié, published in 1986. See Robbins, ed., Is it Righteous to Be: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (2001), pp. 57–58. 7. Levinas, interview with François Poirié, published in 1986. See Robbins, ed., Is it Righteous to Be: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (2001), p.54. 8. Nanda, Gandhi and His Critics (1985), p.6. 9. See, for example, Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 89, p.284. 10. Nanda, Gandhi and His Critics (1985), p.6. 11. Gandhi, The Gospel of Selfless Action, or The Gita According to Gandhi (2007), p.127. 12. iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), p.32. 13. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 73, p.290. 14. See Joseph, “Dialogue in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule or the Reader as Truth-Seeker” (2006). 15. Matthew 7:21–27. 16. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 97, p.416. 17. Matthew 4:8–10. 18. See also Smith, Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World (1997), pp. 293–98. 19. Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West (2008), pp. 264–65. 20. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 71, p.328. 21. Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth (2007), p.69; emphasis in original. 22. Cohen, “Introduction” (1985), p.13. 23. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas (2001), p.140.
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 483 24. Gandhi, The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi: The Voice of Truth (1993b), p.185. 25. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas (2001), p.140; emphasis in original. 26. Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental” (1996a), p.4. 27. Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental” (1996a), p.9; emphasis in original. 28. See Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (1999), pp. 93–94. 29. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 89, p.283. 30. See Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969), p.68; but also Kelly, “Reciprocity and the Height of God: A Defence of Buber Against Levinas” (1995). 31. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas (2001), p.197. 32. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.182. 33. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.200, note 1. 34. Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind (1998b), p.89; emphasis in original. 35. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 8, p.248. 36. Parel, “Editor’s Introduction” (1997), p. xxxv. 37. Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental” (1996a), p.7. 38. See Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.6. 39. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.5. 40. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.161. 41. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.7; emphasis in original. 42. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.7. 43. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas (2001), p.146. 44. Peperzak, “Preface” (1995), p. xi. 45. Purcell, Levinas and Theology (2006), p.39. 46. Morgan, Discovering Levinas (2007), p.117. 47. Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (2008), p.149 48. Levinas, interview with François Poirié published in 1986, and with
484 / Clara A.B. Joseph Myriam Anissimov published in 1985. See Robbins, ed., Is it Righteous to Be: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (2001), pp. 28, 84–92. 49. Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental” (1996a), p.7. 50. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 95, p.9. 51. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003), p.78. 52. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003), p.147. 53. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003), p.147. 54. Levinas, “Signification and Sense” (2006), p.33. 55. Levinas, “Signification and Sense” (2006), p.33. 56. Shaw, Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First (2008), p.52. 57. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 96, p.311. 58. Isaiah 53:12. 59. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 16, p.7. 60. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 10, p.290. 61. Cited in Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (1958), p.382. 62. Levinas, interview titled “Judaism and Christianity after Franz Rosenzweig,” published in 1987. See Robbins, ed., Is it Righteous to Be: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (2001), p.260. 63. Levinas, “Language and Proximity” (1987c), p.124. 64. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.93. 65. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (1990), p.193. 66. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 91, pp. 197–98. 67. See Luke 17:7–10. 68. Levinas, “Substitution” (1996b), pp. 89–90. 69. See Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a): “The notion of anarchy…has a meaning prior to the political (or antipolitical) meaning currently attributed to it. It would be self-contradictory to set it up as a principle (in the sense that anarchists understand it).
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 485 Anarchy cannot be sovereign, like an arché. It can only disturb the State— but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation. The State then cannot set itself up as a Whole. But, on the other hand, anarchy can be stated. Yet disorder has an irreducible meaning, as refusal of synthesis” (p.194, note 3; emphasis added). Again he states: “Contrary to what is maintained in [Henri Bergson’s 1907] Creative Evolution, all disorder is not another order. The anarchy of the diachronic is not ‘assembled’ into an order, except in the said. Bergson, distrustful as he is of language, is here a victim of the said” (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence [1998a], p.191, note 6). 70. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.125. 71. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.113. 72. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas (2001), p.116. 73. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas (2001), p.116. 74. Matthew 8:20. 75. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.195. 76. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.114. 77. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), pp. 114–15. 78. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.109. 79. Riessen, “An Empty Place of God: Kenosis in the Philosophy of Levinas” (2002), p.200. 80. Bernasconi, “To Which Question is ‘Substitution’ the Answer?” (2002), p.238. 81. Nanda, Gandhi and His Critics (1985), p.74. 82. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 91, p.326. 83. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.114. 84. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.127. 85. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.125. 86. Levinas, “Substitution” (1996b), p.89. 87. Levinas, Entre nous: On Thinking of the Other (1998c), pp. 58–59; emphasis in original. 88. de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (1983), p.98.
486 / Clara A.B. Joseph 89. Chalier, “Ethics and the Feminine” (1991), p.126. 90. Dalton, Nonviolence in Action: Gandhi’s Power (1993), p.75. 91. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970), p. xxiii. 92. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 81, p.261. 93. Pal, The Moral Philosophy of Gandhi (1998), p.30. 94. Levinas, Entre nous: On Thinking of the Other (1998c), p.57. 95. Levinas, “Phenomenon and Enigma” (1987b), p.73. 96. Levinas, “Ideology and Idealism” (1989), p.247. 97. See Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:39. 98. Levinas, Entre nous: On Thinking of the Other (1998c), p.90. 99. Levinas, “Phenomenon and Enigma” (1987b), p.72. 100. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969), pp. 78–79. 101. Purcell, Levinas and Theology (2006), p.74. 102. Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics (1995), p.101. 103. Westphal, “Levinas’s Teleological Suspension of the Religious” (1995), p.156. 104. Levinas, “Language and Proximity” (1987c), p.124, cited in Westphal, “Levinas’s Teleological Suspension of the Religious” (1995), p.155. 105. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1993a), p.503. 106. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 62, p.95. 107. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 25, p.138. 108. Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (2000), p.150. 109. Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (2000), p.176. 110. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 29, p.264. 111. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.40. 112. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1990), volume 29, p.271.
Gandhi and Levinas: What’s Wrong with Worshiping the Christ? / 487 113. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1998a), p.45. 114. Levinas, “Signification and Sense” (2006), p.36. 115. Levinas, “The Ego and Totality” (1987a), p.42. 116. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994). 117. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 71, p.132. 118. Levinas, Entre nous: On Thinking of the Other (1998c), p.53. 119. Purcell, Levinas and Theology (2006), p.159. 120. Levinas, Difficile Liberté: Essais sur le Judaisme (1976), p.120, cited in Chalier, “Ethics and the Feminine” (1991), p.125–26. 121. Purcell, Levinas and Theology (2006), p.161. 122. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (1985), pp. 48, 49, 50. 123. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (1985), p.52. 124. Levinas, Existence and Existents (1978), p.95. 125. Brock, “Introduction: An Account of ‘Being and Time’ ” (1949), p.69. 126. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (1985), p.61. 127. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 37, p.351. 128. Heidegger, Being and Time (1996), pp. 315–16; emphasis in original. 129. Manning, Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger: Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy (1993), p.51. 130. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 84, p.62. 131. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 83, p.460. 132. Levinas and Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas” (1986), p.33. 133. See Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1999), volume 83, p.461, volume 89, p.296, and volume 85, p.353; Levinas, “The Ego and the Totality” (1987a), pp. 44–45; and Levinas, Entre nous: On Thinking of the Other (1998c), p.37. See also Lohia, Marx, Gandhi and Socialism (1963); Tandon, Studies in Gandhian Thought and Marx-
488 / Clara A.B. Joseph ism: With Special Reference to Vinoba Bhave (2006); and Gibbs, “Marx and Levinas: Liberation in Society” (1992). 134. Gibbs, “Marx and Levinas: Liberation in Society” (1992), p.253. 135. Gibbs, “Marx and Levinas: Liberation in Society” (1992), p.254. 136. Derrida, Of Grammatology (1976), p.158. 137. Derrida, Writing and Difference (1978), p.279. 138. Llewelyn, Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (2002), p.229. 139. Bernasconi, “The Trace of Levinas in Derrida” (1988), p.24. 140. Bernasconi, “The Trace of Levinas in Derrida” (1988), p.27. 141. Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas (2001), p.232, note 24; emphasis in original. References Cited Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bernasconi, Robert. 1988. “The Trace of Levinas in Derrida.” In David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Derrida and Différence, 13–30. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Bernasconi, Robert. 2002. “To Which Question is ‘Substitution’ the Answer?” In Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, 234–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bible. 1988. One Year Bible. Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers. Brock, Werner. 1949. “Introduction: An Account of ‘Being and Time’.” In Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being, 25–131. Chicago: Henry Regnery. Chalier, Catherine. 1991. “Ethics and the Feminine.” In Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds., Re-Reading Levinas, 119–29. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cohen, Richard A. 1985. “Introduction.” In Emannuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (trans. Richard A. Cohen), 1–15. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Cohen, Richard A. 2001. Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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CLARA A.B. JOSEPH is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
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