Infinity as an eschatological complement
25
Nov
Every eschatology has a beginning and an end, it is a mistake to
imagine it only with what will happen at the end of time, the Christian apocalypse or al-dain of the Islamists, which is not in the Koran, but in the sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad,it must be thought of in the process.
In philosophy, the idea of the infinite permeates the eschatology that I call complete because it admits an end like that which Lévinas wrote in Totality and Infinite as the metaphysical desire to tend towards something totally different, the absolutely other, note that it is not God, because it is not theology, but the change that is possible to another metaphysical state, after all the subtitle of the book is “Essai sur l´extériorité”, and exteriority has something essential there.
For Lévinas the idea of the infinite is one that refers to the different and the distinct, says Enrique Dussel that Lévinas when saying different and distinct, affirms that the different occurs in the Totality and the distinct occurs in the Proximity, outside of this we remain in pure idealism of the transcendence of the Subject to the Object.
In the words of Lévinas: “Metaphysical desire tends towards something totally different, towards something else … On the basis of the commonly interpreted desire, there would be the need (bésoin): the desire would mark an indigent and incomplete or fallen being. its past greatness. It would coincide with the consciousness of what was lost”, Its eschatological end is this then, the fallen being of its past greatness and with awareness of what was lost.
This is also where his ethics lies, after all for Lévinas it is called metaphysics because it refers to the transcendence of others, which is not merely physical and the indicative of this transcendence is the idea of the infinite, that which occurs in the face to face, which is therefore the distinct found in Proximity.
It is this proximity to the “face to face” that is primordial in Lévinas, it is the original experience of the inter-human, here I relate it with the cultural origin where there is the identity of the inter-human, that is, of a human a posteriori in function from an a priori, it is in this sense that I consider original cultures.
The original experience is that of someone’s ethical closeness, of a relationship without a mask, and thus anthropology and ontology meet, in Lévinas’s words (I know that the point of view is different) “morality is not a branch of philosophy, but the first philosophy ”, that would be a balanced civilization.
The relation with the being-to-death that I see with this infinite, is that one does not think from the finite, just like death not through the negation of life, this was for Kant for whom the notion of infinity is opposed as an ideal of reason, Hegel modified but placed the positivity of the infinite, excluding diversity.
The infinite is diverse because it starts from the Other, from the other thing, and also the totally other, so its eschatology is complete, the being-for-death and the infinite merge (of course neither Heidegger nor Lévinas say it) because they are in the beyond self and in the beyond life containing it entirely.
