Nota Trinitaria on Teleo-Spaces: Intelligibility, Normativity, and the Limits of Subjectivity

Methodological Prolegomenon: On Axioms and Ontological Interpretation

This note proceeds axiomatically. That claim requires clarification at the outset.

By axiom I do not mean a syntactic postulate belonging to a purely formal system and awaiting semantic interpretation. Nor do I mean a rule of inference abstracted from its subject matter. The axioms articulated below are already ontologically interpreted constraints. They name what must be the case if intelligibility, normativity, and determination are to be possible at all without collapsing either into brute determinism or into transcendental subjectivism.

The model-theoretic background is decisive here. In classical model theory, axioms belong to the syntax of a theory, while interpretation assigns domains, relations, and functions. That separation is not operative in the present inquiry. The subject matter—divine action, intelligibility, and participation—does not permit a purely formal staging prior to interpretation. To insist on such neutrality would already be to decide the issue in favor of a subject-centered or formalist reduction.

Accordingly, the axioms that follow function as axioms of orientation. They do not generate models by derivation; they delimit what counts as a coherent model at all. Their necessity is not formal but transcendental in the strict sense: they arise from reflection on the conditions under which determination, meaning, and normativity can occur without regress or arbitrariness.

One further clarification is required. The axioms are structurally ordered, not inferentially ordered. Later axioms presuppose earlier ones, but none is derived from another. Each names an irreducible condition that must be respected simultaneously.

Section 1. Axioms Governing Teleo-Spaces

Axiom I (Differentiated Possibility)

There exist real, pre-determinable loci of possibility that are numerically differentiated prior to intelligibility and prior to any determination.

Differentiation must be ontologically real if determination is to be more than brute fact. If this rather than that is ever to occur intelligibly, there must already be a plurality of possibilities such that one outcome can be distinguished from another. This plurality cannot itself be the product of determination without circularity. Difference must already obtain.

The loci named here are not determinate entities, properties, or meanings. They are not universals awaiting instantiation nor semantic contents awaiting interpretation. They are addressable particularity: a real “that” prior to any “what.” This claim blocks two familiar reductions at once. Against Platonist inflation, it refuses to treat possibility as a realm of determinate forms. Against nominalist arbitrariness, it refuses to treat difference as brute haecceity without ground.

Axiom II (Determinability)

Determinability is an ontological condition of determination and is not itself a determinate structure, entity, or higher-order determination.

Determinability must be distinguished both from determinacy and from indeterminacy. If determinability is treated as a determinate structure, it becomes one more item requiring the same kind of explanation as determinate facts, and explanatory regress resumes. If it is treated as mere indeterminacy, intelligibility dissolves into a negative limit incapable of grounding meaning.

Determinability is therefore positive but non-determinate. It is the condition under which determinations can occur meaningfully without being pre-fixed. It halts regress not by stipulation but by category: it is not the kind of thing that can itself be determined in the way determinate facts are.

Axiom III (Teleo-Spaces)

There exist teleo-spaces: intelligible fields of determinability in which determinate actuality can occur meaningfully without closure.

Teleo-spaces name the ontological form of intelligibility. They are not objects, frameworks, or conceptual schemes imposed by subjects. Nor are they merely regulative ideals. They are real structures of room for sense—fields within which what is given can become determinate as meaningful rather than arbitrary.

A teleo-space is determinable without being determinate. It orders possibilities toward articulation and truth without exhausting them in a final inventory of outcomes. To deny teleo-spaces is to force a false alternative: either mechanistic determinism, in which only determinate facts exist, or subjectivist construction, in which determinacy is produced by synthesis. Teleo-spaces articulate a third possibility: intelligibility as ontologically real yet open.

Axiom IV (Normative Weighting)

Within teleo-spaces, possibilities are normatively weighted, and this weighting is real, efficacious, and not dependent upon human subjectivity.

A mere field of determinability does not suffice to explain determination. If all possibilities were equally available, the emergence of determinate actuality would be arbitrary unless grounded either in brute causation or in subjective preference. Weighting names the reality that possibilities press unequally toward actuality; this rather than that is not sheer happenstance.

This weighting must not be construed as coercive. It does not force outcomes or collapse openness. Rather, it orders without closure and draws without determination. Crucially, it is not dependent upon human consciousness. Cosmic, biological, and historical determinations do not wait upon acts of recognition to become real. Human judgment often serves as a site where determinability resolves into determinate decision, but the normative pressures that make such decisions intelligible are not generated by the subject.

Axiom V (Trinitarian Differentiation)

The ontological conditions named in Axioms I–IV require a Trinitarian articulation: differentiated possibility, intelligibility, and normative weighting must be grounded in irreducibly distinct modes of divine action within the unity of God.

If differentiated possibility, intelligibility, and weighting are all real and irreducible, they cannot be collapsed into a single undifferentiated explanatory principle without loss. Nor can they be reassigned to finite subjectivity without reintroducing the transcendental reflex that terminates explanation in the subject.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity provides the minimal metaphysical grammar required. Creation, as the donation of differentiated possibility, belongs to the Father. Intelligibility, as the constitution of teleo-spaces, belongs to the Son, the Logos. Normative weighting, as ordering without coercion, belongs to the Holy Spirit. Human subjectivity then finds its proper place: not as ground, but as participant; not as origin of intelligibility, but as responder within what is already given, intelligible, and normatively ordered.

Section 2. The Problem of Subjectivity and the Location of Determination

The axioms articulated in the preceding section are not speculative additions to an otherwise settled framework. They arise under pressure from a persistent problem in modern thought: the difficulty of locating determination without collapsing it either into brute causation or into subjectivity.

Modern philosophy has rightly resisted naïve realism. It has learned that intelligibility is not simply read off from the world, that normativity cannot be reduced to causal regularity, and that meaning does not float free of conditions. Yet in resisting naïveté, it has developed a characteristic reflex. When pressed to account for intelligibility, it terminates explanation in the subject. When pressed to account for normativity, it appeals to recognition or ethical demand. When pressed to account for determination, it invokes judgment, decision, or synthesis.

This reflex is not accidental. Once intelligibility is detached from ontology, it must be relocated somewhere. And the most readily available candidate is subjectivity. What cannot be explained as brute fact is explained as constituted. What cannot be grounded in nature is grounded in agency. The result is a progressive inflation of the subject, which comes to bear explanatory burdens it cannot sustain.

The difficulty is not that subjectivity plays no role in determination. It plainly does. Human judgment, decision, and action often serve as the sites at which determinable possibilities collapse into determinate actuality. But to move from this observation to the claim that subjectivity grounds determination is a category mistake. It confuses where determination occurs with what makes it possible.

The axioms stated above mark the refusal of this confusion. They insist that the conditions of determination must be ontological rather than epistemic, real rather than projected, and prior to subjectivity rather than constituted by it. Differentiated possibility, determinability, intelligibility, and normative weighting must already be in place if subjectivity is to function as more than arbitrary choice or mechanical response.

This insistence carries a cost. It requires rejecting the comforting thought that the subject is the final court of appeal. It also requires resisting the equally comforting move of evacuating ontology in favor of ethics. Yet the alternative is worse. If intelligibility is not real prior to recognition, then truth collapses into coherence. If normativity is not real prior to decision, then obligation collapses into preference. If determination is not real prior to judgment, then agency collapses into self-assertion.

What is needed, therefore, is an account in which subjectivity is neither denied nor exalted. Subjectivity must be located within a reality already structured by intelligibility and normativity. It must be responsive rather than constitutive, participatory rather than foundational.

This is precisely what the axioms governing teleo-spaces make possible. By distinguishing differentiated possibility from intelligibility, intelligibility from determination, and weighting from coercion, they allow subjectivity to be real without being ultimate. The subject does not create meaning, but it can acknowledge it. The subject does not generate normativity, but it can answer to it. The subject does not originate determination, but it can enact it.

At this point the inquiry necessarily becomes theological. For the structure just described cannot be sustained by metaphysics alone. The distinction between donation, intelligibility, and weighting requires not merely conceptual differentiation but ontological distinction within unity. It requires a grammar capable of naming real difference without division and real unity without collapse.

That grammar is given in the Christian confession of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Before turning to modern philosophy’s attempts to relocate intelligibility and normativity within subjectivity, we must therefore ask whether the Christian doctrine of the Word and the Spirit already provides the resources needed to resist that relocation.

It is to Luther’s account of the Word as divine act and the Spirit as efficacious presence that we now turn.

Section 3. Luther: Word, Spirit, and the Extra Nos of Intelligibility

The Trinitarian structure implicit in the axioms governing teleo-spaces is not an abstract metaphysical overlay imposed upon Christian theology. It is already operative—though not formally articulated—in Luther’s account of the Word and the Holy Spirit. Indeed, one can read Luther as struggling, with remarkable consistency, to prevent precisely the collapse of intelligibility and normativity into subjectivity that later becomes programmatic in modern philosophy.

At the heart of Luther’s theology lies the insistence that the Word of God is extra nos. This claim is often treated as a soteriological or pastoral assertion: the gospel must come from outside the self if it is to console the anxious conscience. But the force of extra nos is not merely psychological. It is ontological. The Word does not derive its meaning, authority, or efficacy from the subject who hears it. It addresses the subject because it already bears meaning and authority in itself.

This point bears directly on the first two axioms. Luther presupposes a reality that is differentiated prior to human understanding. God’s Word is not a projection of faith, nor a crystallization of religious experience. It confronts the hearer as something given, something that can be resisted, misunderstood, or rejected. This presupposes a plurality of possibilities—belief and unbelief, trust and refusal—that are not generated by the act of hearing itself. Differentiated possibility is real before faith, not produced by it.

Yet Luther is equally clear that the Word is not a bare datum. It is not an inert object awaiting interpretation. The Word does what it says. This is the logic of verbum efficax: proclamation is not mere description but divine action. Here Luther implicitly affirms the ontological reality of intelligibility. The Word does not become meaningful because the subject synthesizes it into a conceptual scheme. It is meaningful because God speaks. Intelligibility is given, not achieved.

This is where the Logos dimension becomes decisive. Luther does not speculate about the Logos in metaphysical terms, but his theology presupposes that what is spoken by God is already articulated in such a way that it can be heard, trusted, and confessed. The Word is not an inarticulate force. It is intelligible address. In the language developed earlier, the Word constitutes a teleo-space: a field of determinability in which faith, unbelief, obedience, and resistance become possible as meaningful determinations rather than as brute reactions.

The role of the Holy Spirit sharpens the picture further. Luther’s doctrine of the Spirit is explicitly anti-subjectivist. The Spirit does not function as an inner interpreter who supplements an otherwise incomplete Word. Nor does the Spirit merely ratify what the subject already understands. Rather, the Spirit is the divine agent who makes the Word effective—who brings about faith where and when it pleases God.

This efficacy must be carefully understood. The Spirit does not coerce belief. Luther is emphatic on this point. Faith cannot be forced; it is not mechanically produced. Yet neither is faith a voluntary construction. The Spirit works through the Word by pressing upon the hearer, by creating a situation in which trust becomes possible and refusal becomes culpable. This language of pressure, drawing, and address corresponds closely to what has been described above as normative weighting.

The Spirit’s work, for Luther, is therefore neither deterministic nor subjectivist. The Spirit does not bypass human agency, but neither does he depend upon it. Faith occurs in the subject, but it is not grounded in the subject. The Spirit weights the teleo-space opened by the Word such that trust in the promise is no longer arbitrary. One is addressed, summoned, and claimed. Yet the response remains genuinely human.

This structure allows Luther to hold together what modern accounts often tear apart. On the one hand, faith is a real determination—it is something that happens, something that can be named, confessed, and lived. On the other hand, faith is not a self-grounding act. It is the outcome of divine action operating within an intelligible and normatively ordered space that precedes the subject’s response.

What is crucial for present purposes is that Luther never allows the conditions of intelligibility or normativity to migrate into subjectivity. The Word remains extra nos. The Spirit remains Lord. The subject remains hearer and responder. In this way, Luther preserves precisely the asymmetry named in the axioms: donation without intelligibility (creation), intelligibility without closure (Word), and weighting without coercion (Spirit).

This does not mean that Luther offers a worked-out metaphysical account of teleo-spaces. He does not. But it does mean that his theology is disciplined by a grammar that modern subject-centered accounts often abandon. For Luther, the world is already structured by divine address before it is structured by human understanding. Normativity presses upon us before we choose. Determination occurs in us, but not from us.

With this in view, we are now in a position to see modern philosophy for what it is: not a neutral clarification of conditions, but a series of increasingly radical attempts to relocate the conditions Luther keeps extra nos. The next step, therefore, is to examine how this relocation unfolds—beginning with Immanuel Kant, for whom the conditions of intelligibility are explicitly transferred to transcendental subjectivity.

Section 4. Kant: The Transcendental Relocation of Intelligibility

With Kant the modern problematic comes fully into view. What Luther held extra nos—the intelligibility and normativity of the Word—Kant relocates, with great philosophical sophistication, into the structures of subjectivity itself. This relocation is not accidental, nor is it merely an expression of Enlightenment hubris. It is the result of a principled attempt to secure intelligibility without reverting to dogmatic metaphysics.

Kant’s fundamental question is not theological but epistemological: how are synthetic a priori judgments possible? How can judgments be both universally binding and informative without appealing to metaphysical insight into things as they are in themselves? Kant’s answer is well known. The conditions of possible experience—space, time, and the categories—are not derived from objects but supplied by the subject. Intelligibility is secured not by participation in an ontological order but by the transcendental activity of synthesis.

This move has genuine force. Kant rightly sees that intelligibility cannot be read off from empirical givenness alone. He also rightly resists the idea that reason can simply intuit metaphysical structures. In this sense, Kant preserves a critical insight that earlier metaphysics often lacked: intelligibility is conditioned. It is not immediate access to reality as such.

Yet in securing intelligibility, Kant makes a decisive shift. The conditions under which anything can appear as an object of experience are no longer ontological but transcendental-subjective. The categories do not articulate being; they articulate experience. Teleology, too, is displaced. Where earlier thought could treat purposiveness as a feature of reality, Kant restricts teleology to the reflective judgment of the subject. Purpose becomes a way we must think nature, not a way nature is.

From the perspective of the axioms governing teleo-spaces, this marks a fundamental relocation. Differentiated possibility is no longer grounded in reality as such, but in the manifold as structured by intuition. Determinability is no longer an ontological condition, but a function of conceptual synthesis. Teleo-spaces, if they can still be named at all, are no longer real fields of intelligibility but regulative frameworks imposed by the subject in order to make sense of appearances.

The consequences of this relocation are far-reaching. Once intelligibility is secured by the subject, normativity must follow suit. Obligation becomes a function of rational autonomy rather than of ontological weight. The moral law binds because reason legislates it to itself, not because reality presses upon the agent with normative force. Kant’s moral philosophy is therefore the ethical analogue of his epistemology: normativity is preserved, but only at the cost of detaching it from being.

This detachment is precisely what the axioms resist. Normative weighting, as described earlier, must be real prior to recognition if determination is to be non-arbitrary. Kant’s framework can explain why we must judge as we do, but it struggles to explain why this rather than that occurs in reality except by appeal to phenomenal causation or noumenal freedom—neither of which can bear the explanatory load Kant assigns them.

What is lost in Kant’s relocation is not merely metaphysical realism but the possibility of a coherent account of participation. If intelligibility and normativity are functions of subjectivity, then the subject cannot meaningfully be said to respond to reality. It can only organize or legislate. The asymmetry preserved by Luther—Word addressing, Spirit pressing, subject responding—collapses into symmetry. The subject becomes both the source and the measure of intelligibility.

This is not a flaw Kant overlooks; it is a cost he knowingly accepts. Yet once that cost is paid, theology faces a dilemma. Either it must translate divine action into the language of moral postulates and regulative ideas, or it must retreat into the unknowable noumenal realm. In either case, the extra nos structure that Luther insists upon is dissolved.

The subsequent trajectory of modern thought can be read as a series of attempts to mitigate this loss. Edmund Husserl will attempt to recover givenness by radicalizing intuition, while Emmanuel Levinas will displace intelligibility into ethical alterity. Both moves are intelligible responses to Kant’s relocation. Neither, however, reverses it.

It is to Husserl’s attempt to ground intelligibility in intuition rather than in synthesis that we now turn.

Section 4. Husserl: Intuition, Constitution, and the Relocation of Intelligibility

The transition from Luther to modern philosophy is not abrupt. It is mediated. And it is mediated above all by the attempt to preserve givenness after the collapse of classical metaphysics. If Kant secures intelligibility by relocating its conditions into transcendental synthesis, then Edmund Husserl represents the most serious effort to recover what Kant appeared to have lost: the sense that meaning is not merely imposed, but given.

For this reason, Husserl stands between Luther and Levinas in a decisive way. Like Luther, he resists the reduction of meaning to construction. Like Levinas, he senses that intelligibility exceeds conceptual closure. Yet unlike Luther, and unlike the Trinitarian grammar developed here, Husserl ultimately secures this excess by relocating it within transcendental subjectivity itself.

Husserl’s Principle of Principles—that whatever is given in originary intuition is to be accepted just as it is given—marks a genuine advance over Kant. Intuition is no longer treated as a passive receptacle structured by forms of sensibility, but as the site of fulfillment in which meaning presents itself. Meaning is not inferred, nor merely regulated; it is seen. In this respect, Husserl is right to insist that intelligibility is not an achievement of inference but a mode of givenness.

Yet the price of this insistence becomes clear as phenomenology unfolds. Givenness is not allowed to be ontological in the robust sense. What is given is given to consciousness, and objectivity is secured through constitution. The world is not denied, but its intelligibility is indexed to intentional life. Objects are what they are as correlates of noetic–noematic structures. Horizonality, profile, and fulfillment function as conditions of appearance, but they do so within the space of transcendental subjectivity.

This is where Husserl’s brilliance coincides with his limitation. He sees, with exceptional clarity, that determinacy presupposes determinability. No object is ever given exhaustively; every determination stands within a horizon of further possible determination. In this sense, Husserl comes very close to the logic of teleo-spaces. He understands that intelligibility requires openness, excess, and non-closure.

What he does not do—and what phenomenology as such cannot do—is allow this openness to be ontological prior to subjectivity. Horizonality is secured by consciousness itself. The determinable is ultimately grounded in intentional life. The collapse from determinability into determination, when it occurs, occurs through acts of fulfillment, recognition, or synthesis. Weighting, salience, and relevance are all functions of intentional structures.

From the standpoint of the axioms governing teleo-spaces, this constitutes a decisive relocation. Intelligibility is no longer something the world bears prior to being encountered. It is something that emerges through encounter. The subject does not merely participate in intelligibility; it underwrites it.

The Trinitarian account advanced here breaks with this move at its root. Teleo-spaces are not constituted by transcendental subjectivity. They are not dependent upon intuition, however originary. They are ontological conditions grounded in the Logos. Intelligibility precedes its disclosure. Meaning is real before it is seen. Determinability is not secured by horizon-consciousness, but by the Son as the one in whom what is given is already articulated as intelligible.

Likewise, the Spirit’s activity cannot be assimilated to intentional weighting. Normative pressure does not arise from structures of attention or fulfillment. It is not a function of salience within consciousness. It is the Spirit’s work of ordering and drawing within reality itself—prior to recognition, though never coercive of response. Weighting happens whether or not it is thematized. It presses before it is judged.

In this way, the Trinitarian grammar preserves what Husserl rightly sought without inheriting the subjectivist termination his project requires. Yes, intelligibility involves openness and excess. Yes, determination always occurs against a background of further possibility. But no, these conditions do not belong to consciousness as such. They belong to reality as created, articulated, and ordered by God.

Husserl therefore represents not a rejection of Kant, but a refinement of Kant’s relocation of intelligibility. What Kant secured through synthesis, Husserl secures through intuition. In both cases, the subject remains the final site of intelligibility. What is gained is phenomenological richness. What is lost is the extra nos structure that Luther insists upon and that the Trinitarian account of teleo-spaces restores.

The next step in the modern trajectory is not further refinement but displacement. If intelligibility cannot finally be grounded in ontology without dogmatism, and cannot be grounded in subjectivity without inflation, then it must be displaced elsewhere. It is this displacement—into ethical alterity rather than ontological order—that defines the move made by Emmanuel Levinas. It is to that move that we now turn.

Section 5. Levinas: Ethical Alterity and the Displacement of Ontology

If Husserl represents the most refined attempt to secure intelligibility within transcendental subjectivity, Emmanuel Levinas represents a decisive refusal of that entire project. Where Husserl still seeks a foundation for meaning—however fragile—in intuition and constitution, Levinas abandons the search for ontological grounding altogether. Intelligibility, for Levinas, does not arise from being, structure, or givenness. It erupts as ethical interruption.

Levinas’s starting point is a judgment about violence. Ontology, he argues, inevitably totalizes. To understand is to subsume, to place within a horizon, to render intelligible in terms of what already is. Even phenomenology, for all its sensitivity to excess, ultimately domesticates alterity by placing it within structures of appearance. Against this, Levinas proposes a radical alternative: meaning does not originate in intelligibility at all, but in responsibility. The Other addresses me before I can understand, before I can thematize, before I can judge. Ethics is first philosophy.

There is real power in this move. Levinas names something that neither Kant nor Husserl can adequately explain: the experience of obligation that does not arise from autonomy or intuition, but from being claimed. Responsibility precedes choice. The self finds itself accused before it understands itself. In this respect, Levinas preserves what modern philosophy has steadily lost—the asymmetry between address and response.

Yet the way Levinas secures this asymmetry comes at a steep cost. In order to prevent ontology from totalizing, he evacuates it. Being becomes neutral, anonymous, or even oppressive. Intelligibility is no longer something the world bears; it is something that must be resisted. Meaning migrates entirely into the ethical relation, which now bears the full weight of normativity without ontological support.

From the standpoint of the axioms governing teleo-spaces, this move constitutes not a correction but a displacement. Normative weighting is affirmed, but it is no longer grounded in reality as such. It becomes an event without structure, an obligation without intelligibility. The Other commands, but the command does not arise within a teleo-space; it ruptures all spaces. Weight presses without order. Responsibility binds without articulation.

This displacement solves one problem only by creating another. By severing normativity from intelligibility, Levinas renders ethical demand ultimately unintelligible. One is obligated, but cannot say why—not even in principle. The refusal of ontology becomes the refusal of explanation. What begins as a protest against violence ends as a prohibition against sense.

Here the contrast with Luther and the Trinitarian account could not be sharper. Luther does not deny asymmetry; he insists upon it. But the asymmetry of Word and Spirit is not anti-ontological. It is extra nos without being unintelligible. The Word addresses, but it also means. The Spirit presses, but does so within an intelligible order. Obligation arises not from sheer alterity, but from promise.

In the language developed earlier, Levinas affirms weighting while denying teleo-spaces. He insists that obligation presses upon the self, but he refuses to say that reality itself is normatively ordered. Weight is real, but order is suspect. As a result, the collapse from determinability into determination becomes ethically urgent but ontologically groundless.

The Trinitarian grammar advanced here allows one to preserve what Levinas rightly sees without paying this price. Yes, normativity precedes choice. Yes, the self is addressed before it constitutes meaning. But no, this address need not be unintelligible. Normative pressure can be real because reality itself is ordered—because the Logos articulates teleo-spaces and the Spirit weights them without coercion.

Levinas thus marks the final stage in the modern trajectory traced here. Kant relocates intelligibility into synthesis. Husserl relocates it into intuition. Levinas abandons intelligibility in favor of ethical rupture. Each move is intelligible as a response to the failure of the previous one. None, however, restores the extra nos structure that Luther insists upon and that the Trinitarian account of teleo-spaces finally secures.

What is required is neither a return to pre-critical ontology nor an abandonment of normativity into pure ethics. What is required is an ontology capable of bearing obligation without violence—an intelligible order that presses without coercing. That is precisely what the Trinitarian differentiation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit makes possible.

Transitus: Trinitarian Order, Intelligibility, and the Refusal of Subjectivism

What has emerged across these sections is not a new Trinitarian doctrine but a clarification of order—an ordering that has been repeatedly obscured whenever intelligibility is made dependent upon subjectivity. The pressure driving this clarification was simple: teleo-spaces do real work, yet they cannot be reduced either to formal structures or to acts of consciousness. If intelligibility is real, it must be grounded prior to the subject without being indifferent to the subject. The Trinitarian grammar articulated here makes that claim precise.

The axioms stated at the outset already carried an ontological interpretation. They were not syntactic placeholders awaiting semantic enrichment, nor regulative ideals awaiting phenomenological fulfillment. They named real distinctions in the way intelligibility is given, articulated, and ordered. The Father’s donation of differentiated possibility establishes that intelligibility is not a projection. The Son’s articulation of teleo-spaces establishes that intelligibility is not brute. The Spirit’s weighting establishes that intelligibility is not coercive, mechanical, or exhausted by formal determination.

This Trinitarian ordering allows us to say something that modern philosophy has found difficult to say without contradiction: weighting precedes subjectivity, but determination often involves it. The Spirit’s activity does not arise from human consciousness, nor does it wait upon it. Normative orientation, salience, and pressure toward articulation occur within the created order as such. Yet the collapse of the determinable into the determinate—especially in ethical, practical, and interpretive domains—often requires finite agents who bear responsibility for judgment. This is not a failure of ontology but its proper economy.

Seen in this light, the contrast with Kant, Husserl, and Levinas becomes instructive rather than merely critical. Kant rightly saw that intelligibility cannot be read directly off the world, but by locating its conditions in the subject, he rendered teleology regulative rather than real. Husserl sought to recover givenness without metaphysics, but by absolutizing intuition he relocated donation within transcendental subjectivity. Levinas, finally, refused totalization altogether, preserving ethical interruption at the cost of intelligibility itself. Each, in different ways, preserved an insight while mislocating its ground.

The Trinitarian account advanced here refuses that mislocation. Intelligibility is neither imposed by the subject nor shattered by alterity. It is given—given as articulated possibility ordered toward fulfillment without closure. The Spirit does not generate meaning, secure reference, or complete determination. The Spirit authorizes, orients, and presses—drawing finite agents into participation without absorbing intelligibility into consciousness.

The payoff is methodological as well as theological. Theology need not choose between realism and humility, ontology and ethics, structure and freedom. When teleo-spaces are grounded in the Logos and ordered by the Spirit, intelligibility can be affirmed without domination, and responsibility can be borne without constructivism. Theology speaks here neither as metaphysical system-builder nor as phenomenological witness, but as disciplined confession—attending carefully to the order in which God gives, articulates, and draws creation into truth.

What follows from this is not closure but orientation. The axioms remain axioms not because they are arbitrary, but because they name what must be the case if intelligibility, freedom, and truth are all to be preserved. Further formalization is possible, and further dogmatic elaboration will be required. But the path is now marked: intelligibility is Trinitarian in its ground, teleological in its articulation, and pneumatic in its ordering. This is all prior to subjectivity yet without bypassing it.

Grounding Ethical Vision and Mission Statements

Some of us at the Institute of Lutheran Theology will soon be engaged in consulting work to institutions and businesses to aid them in casting their own ethical mission and vision statements. The increasing use of sophisticated algorithms by companies and institutions have created new situations in which the institution or business ends up treating managers, employees and customers in new ways, yet ways that are not the result of individual people making decisions to treat these managers, employees and customers in new ways. 

People who write computer code construct algorithms that function as decision procedures. For instance, in writing an algorithm for a self-steering car, the coder has to program the car to do certain things given certain inputs. The idea is that the program will give an output as a function of the present state of the machine and relevant inputs it has while in this state. The car would not presumably move to crash into the motorcycle to its left, if it had not already been in states of danger for some time, and if this option had not been coded in as the best response to a certain sequence of danger states given some new driving inputs.   

It is very clear to me that thinking about helping businesses and institutions do ethics on the ground is a different activity than teaching ethics to students at the university. In some ways, it is much more challenging because we deal here not with hypothetical scenarios, but with real flesh and blood human beings. 

When teaching ethics at the university, I always tried to deal with the standard normative ethical theories and the meta-ethical challenges to those theories. This meant that I always dealt with Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory, utilitarianism, Kantian-inspired deontological theory, and divine command or divine will theory.  

Standardly, I treated as well the meta-ethical challenges to normative ethics: ethical subjectivism, ethical emotivism, psychological egoism, and ethical relativism. I introduced ethical intuitionism in light of the Open Question argument proffered by G.E. Moore, and discussed the non-natural intuition of the good in Moore and the non-natural intuition of the right in Ross. There is not much time in one ethics course to do all of this, however, so I made sure to cover the standard four normative ethical approaches.   

Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory is an ethics of self-actualization or realization which attempts to understand the excellence of human beings in terms of human dispositions to behave, that is human habits. In a society like ancient Athens where there was deep agreement on what the good is, there was agreement on what traits or characteristics human beings ought to have to be good. If the telos of human beings is their happiness, that is their "total human flourishing," then one should seek to cultivate those intellectual and moral virtues, that is, those "powers of the soul" whereby human beings together can profoundly flourish. To grow the intellectual and moral virtues is to increase in human excellence and to realize the good.   

Utilitarianism espouses a consequentialism; it claims that the goodness or badness of an act is a function of its likely consequences. There are many kinds of utilitarians. One can be a hedonistic utilitarian who understands the good in terms of crude pleasure, or perhaps a eudaimonian utilitarian identification ing the good with higher human values.  Accordingly, the good is not simply pleasure, but the happiness of human flourishing in general. One can be a global or universal utilitarian claiming that the act should bring about the greatest happiness for everyone in general, or could be a regional or local utilitarian claiming that the utilitarian calculation should privilege some particular group or community. One must also distinguish between an act and a rule utilitarian in that while the first holds that the direct consequences of the particular concrete act are what is ethically relevant, the second argues that it is the rule that the particular act falls under that ultimately determines its goodness or badness.  

The deontological perspective claims that acts or good and bad of themselves apart from their consequences. Kant most famously argued for the categorical imperative, a formal principle by which an act's moral properties obtain apart from any hypothetical antecedents. Kant claimed two subjective maxims of this categorical imperative: 1) so act such that your act could in principle be universalized, and 2) so act such that you always treat the other as an end-in-themselves and not as a means to your end.  

Finally, divine command or divine will ethics claims divine primal intentionality determines the rectitude of an act. It is incumbent on S to do P if and only if God wills P (to be done be S). Divine will ethical theories must then give an account both of the nature of the divine will itself and of our epistemic access to it.  

But none of these normative theories work very well in our present context actually to inform ethical decision-making. The problem is that people disagree rather profoundly on the presuppositions upon which such theories are based. 

For instance, the plausibility of virtue ethics famously depends upon a basic agreement in the community about what the good life is.  Aristotle said that a good person is one that does the good and that the good is that which good people do. This makes sense if there are not competing moral visions within a society. Notice, however, that even if their is near unanimity about what the good is, the theory does seem prone always to the critique launched by Luther and others. Focussing on virtue-building places the action on the self. Cultivating our moral virtues as part of self-realization towards maximal human excellence puts the action on the side of the subject. She or he must train themselves to evince the suitable dispositions to behave, and such training is ultimately the result of what James once called "the dull heave of the will." 

But part of what it is to live morally, it seems, is to be not reflecting upon oneself all of the time.  Yet the ethic of self-realization places the focus of the self on the self as that self endeavors to cultivate the proper dispositions that constitute character,  those general habitualizations that constitute our moral excellence.  

There are deep problems with utilitarianism as well. As it turns out, calculating likely consequences from an act or rule utilitarian perspective makes many positions questionable because we really don't know what the real consequences of our actions are. Claiming that it is probable that act X issues in consequences P is not granular enough it seems.  Would we not need to know precisely what that probability is in order to do the utilitarian calculus rightly?  Moreover, discriminating what the good is, e.g., pleasure, cultivation of virtue, human flourishing, is itself not amenable to utilitarian calculation.

Recall that Bentham claimed that the Principle of Utility need not be argued for because, as it turns out, the principle objectively obtains, and that we humans simply do act in accordance with it. While this is plausible if one is a universal hedonistic act utilitarian perhaps, it is not the case if one is a regional eudaemonistic act or rule utilitarian.  We need some independent philosophical argument, it seems, to say with Mill against Bentham that it is better to be a dissatisfied human being than a sated pig.  Moreover, while the move to rule utilitarianism seems to protect utilitarianism in general from crude counterexamples, it might be asked whether rule utilitarianism does not abandon utilitarianism altogether.  Clearly, the claim that S ought to do act X if and only if X were in accordance with rule R that, if it itself were universally instantiated, would conduce to the maximum distribution of happiness is itself consistent with act X itself causing great pain or unhappiness to S. But this seems like an abandonment of utilitarianism entirely.  

Notice as well that utilitarian calculations place the moral action in our own reasoning. We must calculate the likely consequences of an act or rule, and only after such calculation can we determine how to treat the person standing in front of us. Again, it seems like this kind of moral reflection places the action within the echo chamber of our subjectivity. We do X because we have done the suitable calculus and, on the basis of the kind of utilitarian we are, we can determine that it is rational to do X.  How my doing X impacts Bob who stands before me, is relevant only insofar as I can describe the doing of X in ways that take into consideration the consequences for Bob of my doing of X. 

Our friend Kant gets us to consider the noumenality of duty, and asks us if we can conceive that one ought to do X in the absence of one's freedom to do other than X. We are then told that we should treat others as ends in themselves and not as means because others are denizens of the same kingdom of ends we ourselves occupy. He argues that we must not act in ways that end in moral contradiction. For instance, if I were knowingly to lie, then I must accede that it might be a general moral law that people could lie. But if this were a general moral law, then dissimulation itself could not be specified, because there would be no institution of truth-telling from which lying diverges. This is all pretty heavy stuff, but it is what pure reason does when it is concerned with the practical.  Pure practical reason is human reason set free to investigate what we ought to do mostly unimpeded by historical and cultural conditions.  

Finally, there is divine will theory of either the static or dynamic variety.  Since the latter is demonstrably incoherent, this leaves the former, and clearly it is a matter of reason to discern what the divine command is, and whether we have a duty to do it. One cannot in our post-Christian context simply assume that there is a divine being whose primal intentionality on creation is objectively the case, and whose intentional objectivity is epistemically accessible to human beings.  

In other words, if we want to cast ethical mission and vision statements in the business world by getting people to affirm the objective reality of the ethical and getting them to see that it is rational to accept that they have epistemic access to it, then we shall have a very steep hill to climb in accomplishing our ethical work. 

In Lutheran fashion, one might think that ethical theory provides the light by which the law confronts us as a curb on what we would otherwise want to do, a mirror by which to apprehend our own moral inadequacies, and a guide as to how we should comport ourselves. The light clearly is where the action is. In classical theology it is the primordial divine intentionality manifesting itself in the eternal law, the light of the universe itself. One can connect this light to Wisdom as it was prior to the creation of the world and ultimately to the logos.  

When I was a graduate student, I studied meta-ethics because I already did not believe one could do normative ethics without first getting clear on the sources, grounds, and methods of ethical adjudication.  My meta-ethics class one summer was with an excellent professor whose constructive contribution to the course was to point out that the only motive one could possibly have to do X from a meta-ethical standpoint was that the doing of X was conceptually tied to the desire to do X. From the standpoint of analytical ethics, he might be right. In other words, we are left with a psychological egoism functioning underneath meta-ethical reflection.  

I think I was a pretty good ethics teacher for undergraduate students because I could generate scenarios quite easily on the spot and I was able to keep their attention. The problem, of course, was that normative ethics is unfortunately today in many respects a fool's game. I don't mean that the theories are necessarily wrong, but rather they are all inadequate either when confronting complicated ethical situations we presently face or when they are placed against our moral intuitions. The longer I taught ethics, I found myself actually asking students to consult their moral intuitions as a way to test the normative theories we introduced. I straightforwardly suggested to them that their moral intuitions should function as data for ethical theory-making.  

But I knew that this gets it all wrong. Isn't normative ethics supposed to tell us what is the case? Ought it not trump moral intuitions altogether? Should it not function pedagogically to teach us what moral intuitions are worth having?  We don't form ethical theories in order to be applicable and adequate to ethical data, but rather to give us the principles by which we might act and value.  

Towards the end of my teaching of ethics I developed a rather elaborate way to think about normative ethics, replete with suitable defeaters. Additionally, I would argue that when there was a conflict between utilitarian and deontological perspectives, one had to go outside theory and evaluate the situation from a standpoint external to either theory.  Of course, here one could not help but privilege one's own moral intuitions again. If such a view from above the normative ethical conflicts is not to be a view from nowhere, then that view must be informed by something concrete.  But what could this be if not our moral intuitions? 

Often in teaching ethics, I would discuss G.E. Moore's famous Open Question argument that purports to show that any analysis of the good in terms of natural properties -- actually any properties -- leaves us in the situation of asking with sense if it is good that the good is so analyzed.  G. E. Moore was an ethical intuitionist because of this argument, and I do confess to believing that his comparing the instrinsicality of yellow with the the intrinsicality of the good a first-rate philosophical move. Just as we can identify yellow without conceptually stating its necessary and sufficient conditions, so we might identify the good without being able to give an analysis of it in terms of something more basic.  

It strikes me today that a new approach is needed if we are ever going to get outside of the philosophy classroom when contemplating the ultimate grounds for corporate ethical vision and mission statements. Emmanuel Levinas' notion of the immediacy (and transcendence) of the Other, despite its philosophical complexity, might actually be able to be explained simply to people today-- people within institutions and corporations alike -- who have lost their way among the endeavor to justify what it is that is good and right.  Most of the people we shall speak with in framing corporate ethical vision and mission statements will not seriously ask for the philosophical grounds why the torturing of children is wrong. They will already know it wrong.

Levinas' notion of the exteriority of the ethical, the demand of the Other upon us through the immediacy of the face can provide a way to adjudicate simple ethical questions like the torture of innocent children. Looking into the face of a child and torturing him or her is for most people simply unthinkable. One does not need to plunge into one's own subjectivity -- Levinas called the self and its ontology the realm of the same, the realm of totality -- to ground a demand not to torture. The demand needs no grounding in ethical principles that themselves presuppose ontology, rather the demand is simply given in the face and eyes of the Other.  

Maybe the light we seek in the doing of ethics can be found in the face of the Other, the face which places a demand upon all of us, including managers of algorithms and writers of code. Maybe we don't have to get much deeper than that with people with whom we work. If pushed we can say we are committed to the view that the social situation with its concomitant primacy of ethical demand needs no further justification.  Wittgenstein said, of course, that the spade must stop somewhere.

We can use Levinas' starting point and build defendable, albeit somewhat superficial, but ultimately communicable ethical positions for institutions and businesses. In certain contexts we can do what Levinas does: connect the face of the Other with God through the notion of a trace.  We can always say we could go deeper if we have to. By emphasizing the exteriority of ethics we guard ourselves from falling into some totalizing project of justifying the very nature of ethics to ourselves or whoever might listen before we can deal with the concrete person standing before us. This will get us to the practical much more quickly, and give our audiences a sense that we know what we are doing as consultants without taking them through a 300 level class in philosophical ethics.  

At the end of the day in phenomenology generally one either sees the phenomena described or one does not. If the face of the child before us does not move us out of our own freedom to a position of responsibility for that child, then it is doubtful that an appeal to normative ethical theory will do so. At the end of the day, it seems, the demand of the Other upon us cannot be given an analysis in terms of some set of necessary and sufficient conditions.  While the word 'Infinite' would not have been used by Moore to characterize this non-natural intuition of the good, his claim of the irreducibility of the Good is of the same spirit as Levinas.  Both were, after all, inspired by Plato, whose Good was the presupposition both of the forms and our access to them.  

Plato's Good constitutes, with Levinas, the priority of metaphysics over ontology. The latter is ultimately an affair of the self, but the former points away from the self and towards the divine.  Levinas and Plato document that "invisible desire" towards that which is other than the self, a desire not born of a need or lack within the self, but an ecstatic desire to transcend entirely the self and its machinations. Ultimately, both knew that salvation consists not in a being otherwise, but rather in that which is otherwise than being. 

ILT Commencement Address June 2022

It was an honor to offer the first commencement address for the Institute of Lutheran Theology's graduates from Christ School of Theology and Christ College on Thursday, June 16, 2022.  There were 14 students who walked last week.  Congratulations all!  

__________________________

Grace and peace to you in the Name of the Risen Lord! 

 

You made it!  Some of you made it just this last semester, and some semesters long ago.  Regardless of when you completed your programs, we are proud of you!  

 

We just completed the ILT Board Meeting this morning. We talked about operations, policies, budgets and the future.  And we talked about you!  You are so very important to us, and I want you to remember this throughout what I shall say today. 

 

This summer some of my PhD students are reading two very important books from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995): Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being.  Levinas in these texts does something bold and new. He claims, in fact, that most of the western intellectual tradition has simply missed what is completely obvious: There is much more to things than just our thinking about them, our categorizing, explaining and knowing of them. 

 

There is the Other, he argues, that which is truly not-I, but is irreducibly more than merely not being I. Levinas claims, in fact, that the Other is infinite; we can never think deeply enough or sense precisely enough to be able to grasp the Other as other than my grasping of it. We have an inexorable Desire for this Other, says Levinas. We want to escape our world and flee into it.   

 

This Other, declares Levinas, resists the Totality of the Same. It halts every effort to comprehend it. It confronts my life of freedom with demand.  I encounter the Other though the human Face. The Face and eyes of the Other place a demand upon me that limits the freedom of the world I have built and in which I dwell. According to Levinas, the Face of the Other is a trace of God. Accordingly, religion pertains to the irreducible, unbridgeable gap between my activity and my projects and the Face of the One whose meeting cannot be comprehended in and through my activity and my projects. 

 

The Other meets me as demand, but every fiber of my being wants to deny the pull of the Other and to make the Other into the Same, that is, into more of me. Accordingly, I who am drawn to the world of the Other, want a world without an Other, for I can dwell comfortably in such a world. I am quite at home in the sameness of my world until the Other’s nomadic sojourn, until this Stranger arrives. The Other announces itself to me in and through my discomfort. Now I, who am no longer at home, must have a face-to-face encounter with one who is not of my world. 

 

Levinas has a particular take on the philosophical notion of transcendence.  His teachers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger thought mightily on this topic. Husserl believed that the I transcends itself when it knows what is not it. Because consciousness is directed toward an object, conscious life is ecstatic.  To be conscious, to be self-conscious, is to be conscious of that which is not the self.  In Husserlian talk, every noetic act has noematic content, and all noematic content presuppose a noetic act.  

 

His student Heidegger too was concerned with transcendence.  Human being is that “being-there” which is being-always-already-in-a-world.  To be is to have a world in which to be.  Human existence for Heidegger is thus ecstatic.  To be is to be always already outside oneself. There is no bare identity to the self.  The self is the self in being other than a mere self. It is what it is in the world which it is not.  

 

Levinas thought that both Husserl and Heidegger were not bold enough in conceiving transcendence.  He argued that both philosophers ultimately tried to understand the Other on the basis of the same, and thus never really go to the Other at all. Instead Levinas opts for a real encounter with the Other, an Other that can be no part of the Same.  We live, dream, plan and execute in the Totality of the Same.  Our lives, dreams, plans and deeds are the deposits of our own freedom.  We are comfortable. Then comes the Other from a place outside the Same, an Other that pushes us beyond ourselves, beyond the boundaries of the Same. We transcend toward the Other.  

 

In the Face of the Other, in the vulnerability of his or her eyes, I am lifted beyond my own projects. I am no longer the one I seemingly inescapably am, no longer the one trapped in the freedom and comfort of my self-narrative. The Other grants me an ecstasis beyond being all I can be, beyond being who I authentically am, beyond being the one who in its being lives the possibility of no more being. The Other seizes me and all my dreams of self and Same are shattered.

 

So what does the relation between the Same and Other have to do with you who graduate from ILT?  Why have I started my commencement speaking by speaking in such a way? 

 

You have all been to graduations, and you know the drill. Graduation day is the day to talk about the graduates, their lives as students, their overcoming of adversity, their accomplishments, skills, dreams, and opportunities.  Graduation Day celebrates the student after years of emphasizing the professors.  Graduation day is pregnant with future possibilities.  

 

But the President of the Institute of Lutheran Theology cannot talk about you in this way. Why?

 

Because you are neither your possibilities nor your actualities. You are, in fact, not you. You are beings who in your being are ecstatically connected with something not of your world. Accordingly, you are beings who shall preach and teach without a career. You are beings who shall pray and serve in denial of searching for or finding yourselves.  You are beings who are not who you are, but are only in pushing beyond to what you are not.  

 

Let me make this clear. ILT has not prepared you to live fully, but rather to come and die. ILT has not offered you opportunities to get ahead in life, but has pushed you to the edge of life.  ILT has not given you courage to be yourself, but has robbed you of the illusion of self.  Why say such things on this day of days?  

 

When Christ calls a person, He calls that person to come and die. This death is the death of the self, the end of the Totality of the Same, the abnegation of the creaturely life of enjoyment within the Father’s creation. This Call from the Stranger, from the One who perpetually sojourns, is a call to live outside the self and upon the boundary, it is a call back from the monotony of being into the rupture of meta-physics, a call to that which is beyond physics and all its being. 

 

Let me make this even more clear. ILT is not about its students, its faculty, its curriculum, its staff, its Board, its alumni or its donors. ILT is not about ILT. ILT is not at all about the Totality of the Same, but rather about the ecstasy of the Other. ILT is about that which ruptures all of its own projects.  ILT is in the call toward what is not. ILT is about the Christ.  

 

Graduates of ILT, you have been called to extraordinary lives, because you are called to a life that ends your life. You have a serious task at hand, a task much more serious than your life. Your task is witness to that Other who displays His traces in the eyes and faces of those you encounter. The master lives in his own house, but the servant lives in another’s. You servants who face Faces of divine traces, have ultimately one and only one otherworldly task. You must listen!  

 

You, whose lives are not your own, you, who have no careers, you, who live the discomfort and displacement of all that makes you you, you must listen to a Word that cannot be your word, a Word that destroys your illusions to lead, a Word that  annihilates the deepest pleasures of Creation itself, a Word that seizes you,  strangles you, and suffocates the last vestiges of your own freedom, a Word otherly distant but proximately fascinating. 

 

What advice can I give graduates of ILT?  

 

Live in the ecstasy of this Word. Dwell not in the meadows of the Same, but rather in the desert of the Other. Listen to this Word from that place beyond being that calls you to a deep service of your neighbor, a call not built upon the reasonability of such service, but rather gifted by the absurdity of the call itself.  Live, hearing the Word that propels you to the ultimate boundary of this world, live the Word that demands, but loves in and through those demands.  

What advice can I give to graduates of ILT?  “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom.12:2), a renewing that can never be of this world, but can be only in being otherwise than being, can be only through the free grace of Jesus the Christ.  What I am saying should now be clear. Hear the Word that loves, graces, frees, transforms, and renews; hear this Word not as words about the Word but as the Word itself, as the Word that assumed flesh and dwelt among us.  Hear the Word whose doing in you drives you away from yourself and towards the Spirit, the Holy Spirit who will ultimately equip you for ministry.

 

Graduates, we have learned from you and have been changed by you.  Your faces among us have made us more than we are. Your time here was precious for us. We know that you are not ours, but His. We now wait, listening for the Word that words in and through your words. We wait as you preach, teach, and witness to that Other, an Other that sounds forth from where we ought to be, but can never find ourselves.  We wait as the Word that words in your words reclaims the Same for service of the Other, an Other who is wholly holy.  

 

We are created as nomads who profoundly prefer to wander in the labyrinths of the Other than settle in villages of the Same. But we have exchanged our birthright for a mass of pottage (Gen 25:29-34) and have become squatters upon the Same, thus erasing and defacing the Other. But then the Word spoken by your lips, graduates, speaks Truth. You are not your own, but His, so you need no longer worry about being you. 

So what ultimate good could come from the goodness of life when compared to wandering in the wilderness of the Holy? 

 

Levinas and the Transcendental Project

In anticipation of the Levinas readings course this summer at ILT's Christ School of Theology, I have written this brief summary below on some of Levinas' most salient themes. 

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) is surely one of the more important philosophers of the twentieth century.  He is thinker whose influence in many ways continues to grow. His readings of Husserl and Heidegger are profound for they point the way to "post-modernity" generally and Jacques Derrida in particular. So what is the fundamental insight that Levinas has? Why is he such an important thinker?  

There is much one could say here, but I think his fundamental significance rests upon his realization that the ethical relationship between self and other is irreducible, that is, that the ethical relation as primary. Levinas knew that the immediate, concrete relationship of responsibility between self and other is more fundamental than the self's subjectively-articulated theory about any putative relationship between the self and the other.  Levinas, the philosopher of ethics, understood profoundly that the reality of other  -- the other person -- is irreducible to subjective, transcendental structures or categories of the self.  

Accordingly, instead of ethics depending upon human reason and cognition, it is the other itself that brings the self into being, for it is the other itself that calls the self to responsibility and service. The other cannot be reduced to a congeries of concepts, it is not constituted by its placedness within an ethical theory. Rather, it confronts the self with a justice that transcend's the self's freedom. This other reveals itself to the self in a demand or call to responsibility, a demand or call to serve it as other. With this call to serve the other the self now locates itself with respect to itself and to other others. In so doing, the immediacy of the ethical thus grounds and motivates concerted reflection upon the other. 

All of this means that to become wholly who I am, to achieve self-determination, I must be called by the another into a responsibility for  that other. Accordingly, the other calls me out of self-isolation and into self-determination.  This self-determination includes the coming into being of discourse, the revelation of my separation from that which is other, and the founding of a common world that I share with the other. 

Levinas first and perhaps most important work appeared in French in 1961, and was soon translated as Totality and Infinity. In it Levinas shows how most traditional philosophy went about a "totalizing task" of trying to understand all of reality on the basis of a comprehensive system that humans might know. 'Totalizing' connotes control and possession, fundamental activities by and through which the controlling self tries to maintain its separation from all other things. The self always wants to be both complete and self-sufficient.  

But such totalizing strategies suppress and displace that upon which they themselves are founded. In the immediacy of our experience with the other we encounter traces of that which is not us. This otherness is not projected by a self-identical subject, but is rather a condition for our own efforts at self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction.  

For Levinas, the face of the Other is not a projection of the subject. It is rather that which is encountered, and in whose encounter the self is confronted by the givenness of a world that is not finally its own. It is only in this world -- a world that cannot be merely mine -- that true freedom can emerge. Were the world to be merely my projection, it would be impossible  to define what doing x over and against doing ~x could even mean. Specifying identity conditions for freedom in a world without essential limitation is not possible. Moral choices and moral freedom only make sense on the basis of an already-encountered other. The presence of the other in its vulnerability as Face calls me to service and responsibility; its presence calls me to freedom.  

The world common to the other and me can arise only if the other is truly other and not a projection of myself. The "exteriority" of this world calls into being my own interiority. The confrontation with the other's face calls me into differentiation from the world. The call of the other to serve the other calls forth language itself, language in and through which the world can be shared and communicated. 

Since the other is irreducible to my conceptualizations, it is other than the process of determination, finalization, and ultimately, finitization.  It is thus without bounds, and being without determinacy, must be admitted to be infinite. Accordingly, the other produces in me an idea of infinity, an infinity other that the determinacy of my conceptions of, or my trajectories of service towards, the other.  My obligation towards the other is primitive and has a phenomenological basis. I am always already confronted by an other, and always already called towards serving that other. The demand of the other is not the result of abstract do ut das ethical considerations within a constituted ethical theory, but is simply primordial. My obligation towards the other always proceeds and likely exceeds any obligation that other might have towards me.  

Levinas argues that the condition for the possibility of differentiation is indeed the difference of the other from me. While the difference of the other cannot be accounted for on the basis of the sameness of the self in its enjoyment, experience, knowledge, etc., the determinacy of the self can be conceived on the basis of the difference of the other. While the self and all of its activities are understood as a totality, the transcendence of the other is infinite. This other is no mere memory or projection of the self-- its "echoes" -- but is that by and through which the self can speak, that it can be concerned with justice, goodness and truth, that it itself is made precious by the irreplaceability of its ethical response to that other, an other that is finally a trace of the Divine itself. 

Levinas claims that ontology recapitulates ethics, that the specificity of being itself rests upon the prior ethical relation with the Other. To be in this way is to be for the Other. Accordingly, to be is to be called beyond being, to be other than being, to be unbounded by being and thus infinite. 

The primal ethical relationship between self and other cannot be understood from a position outside the relationship. This ethical relationship must be lived in the first person, a living that eschews totalization. The ecstatic nature of this relationship means that any attempt to understand it sociologically, politically, economically or historically is doomed to failure, for the relationship is itself irreducible.  The irreducibility of this relationship, and the supervenience of the cognitive and ontological upon it, entails that cognitive-ontological explanations themselves rest upon upon the ethical, for ultimately to explain to an other is to always already have an ethical relationship with that other.  

While Levinas' starting point might appear prima facie refreshing, it does produce disquiet for anyone engaged in the project of transcendental reflection. What if such reflection finally has ethical roots? What if meaning encountered in the self's relation to other is meaning that is not synthesized by the self? What if there is a Sinn to things that is not worked out on the basis of intentionality or language? What if the "traces" of the Divine are not the murmurings of our own heart, i.e., our own displaced alienations? What if being a self finally depends upon the immediate meaningfulness of that which is not a self?  

Levinas argues that difference ultimately precedes identity. But is this true? Discerning readers of Levinas must decide this for themselves.