21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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This quote very much echoes Grace Jantzen’s concept of ‘natals’ (as opposed to mortals) and her ideas on becoming expressed in her book, Becoming Divine. Looking at Emmanuel Levinas’ critique of morality in Western philosophy, Jantzen comments:

‘The disastrous consequences of such an onto-theological system in which knowledge is itself violence are only too apparent, not least in how ethics is conceived within such a framework. If ethics is held to follow from being… this effectively subordinates ethics to ontology. But this means ethics itself is founded in violence — that is, in the unethical.’

Jantzen goes on to quote directly from Levinas:

‘To affirm the priority of being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone who is an existent, (the ethical relation) to a relation with the being of existents, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom.’

The solution proposed by Levinas (and supported by Jantzen) is simply to know another person as a unique individual, in their ‘radical otherness’. To treat others simply as examples of a universal or as members of a category is already to do violence to them. To treat others as individuals is to celebrate their particular manifestation as embodied persons, (or as Maurice Merleau-Ponty might describe us — ‘body-subjects’).

Levinas again:

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