Paganism is a term repeatedly used by Emmanuel Levinas in his ethical thinking, which was for him the first philosophy. After Kant, Levinas is the only thinker who considers first philosophy as ethics. His philosophy arises from his Nazi experience of the massacre of the Jews. Nazism was not atheistic nor was the philosophy of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological thinking on human existence. Hitler was seen by some of the Germans Christians as saviour. He was called the last Ghalifa for the Muslims as Nazis considered the Iranians are Arians. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. “The verbality of being” or “the transitivity of being,” were considered Heidegger’s greatest discovery. The being of an entity does not consist of its substance or constituents but of the activity that makes it what it is. This activity is transitive, because it always refers to other ways of being in multiple relations, possibilities, purposes, affects. It affirms itself and expresses itself in language and activity. It appears and determines itself. Our humanity is determined in our ways of being-in-the-world; being oneself is being involved in active relations with other entities. Of what nature are these relations? The activity of being does not refer beyond itself but back upon itself, there is no reference to any other than itself. To be I, atheist, at home with oneself, happy, created – these are synonyms.
Egoism, enjoyment, sensibility, and the whole dimension of interiority are the articulations of separation. Metaphysical desire, which can be produced only in a separated, that is, enjoying, egoist and satisfied being, is then not derived from enjoyment. I expand, express, act on my own. This is conquest or as Heraclitus said polemos – war and domination. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is simply the lust of existence, riveted in race, region and culture. There is the truth growing in history but not the truth of history. This self-assertion without any consideration for the other becomes the philosophy of Hitler, the provincialism that was the matrix of Hitlerism.
Thinking of the other before the self is Levinas’ route out of the ontology of the self. It is thinking otherwise than being. Levinas opposes the primacy of existence, which philosophy quite naturally accords to ontological interests. It is totalitarian thinking where the other does not exist as other. The face of the other radiates a trace of the Infinite. The face is no idol or image of the Infinite. A critique which assumes that difference gives rise to ethics is stronger, and for this reason alone is worth pursuing. The ethical is written within and renders a memory beyond the consciousness. It over comes the paganism of the sacred groves which are realities of our age. There is impossibility of escaping God, which lies in the depths of myself as a self, as an absolute passivity.
Ethics is the only way of relating to the Divine. God shows himself only by his trace, as is said in Exodus 33. To go toward Him is not to follow this trace, which is not a sign; it is to go toward the others who stand in the trace. Levinas offers an account of human relation in which the ethical impulse always precedes the selfish or murderous impulse. Levinas considers that ‘ethics is first philosophy’. More precisely that ethics is quite simply to perform an ethical act, which is responsibility to the other. Levinas himself finds the otherwise than being in the Old and New Testaments, in the rabbinic texts. Levinas undercuts the primacy of all such ways of thinking, and offers an alternative: an ethics of each-to-each-other commenced in the face-to-face. He tells them through and with the sources of his religion, which is religion of ethics. It is certain that Levinas’ reflection on the complex relation between rupturing ethics and structuring politics – ethical love and the delicate judgments – become more urgent in the light of the need to try and execute judgment on the Nazis. Now we may add that the fact that one must put Nazi on trial, despite being responsible for his responsibility is the distinction between ethics and politics, to illustrate the way the Holocaust bears on the ethics/politics distinction. But the primacy of ethics over politics is demanded by Auschwitz. After the Nazi history, religion without morality is a perennial threat to humanity, the war for supremacy of paganism of caste and nationalism. In India we are facing a return of the caste system. The majoritarian religion creates a situation where religion and power politics become one. Majoritarian religion has apparently divorced itself from ethics. The minority religions do not cut a different picture: look to go a communal way.