Stavros Panayiotou

In post-Kantian metaphysics, several analytic thinkers argue that criterialism is both a necessary and sufficient condition for personhood. Criterialism contends that there is a specific subset of properties that determines someone’s personal identity, such as social reactive attitudes, mental complexity (second-order volition), value in combination with autonomy, self-consciousness, communication, and (practical) reason. However, Emmanuel Levinas, a prominent continental thinker, argues that behavioral properties are not tests for, but are parts of the ethical ideal of personhood. Levinas insists that the acceptance of others (as persons) cannot be a conclusion inferred from a test procedure; acceptance of others means precisely refusing to submit them to such tests. Personhood, therefore, depends on otherness. It is the other that shapes one’s identity as a person, and the infinite responsibility one has towards the other person calls for an ethical shift away from the subject and the categories of being.

In this paper, I explore Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical dialectic on asceticism and its relation to otherness and closeness. In parallel, I argue that Levinas’s stance on asceticism constitutes a vehement criticism of the analytic insistence on onto-theology. In Levinas’s later works, particularly Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, he maintains that Christian asceticism (especially in the Orthodox and Protestant traditions) has mistakenly focused on ontotheology, i.e., on an incarnated God who comes to mind. On the one hand, a number of continental thinkers argue that an individual can achieve direct communication with God through a symmetrical, reciprocal relation as a self-contained unit. Kierkegaard, for instance, claims that the subject’s isolation through asceticism is a necessary and sufficient condition to meet God. As each person is responsible directly to God and his responsibility is a matter of his faith, the religious life does not coincide with ethics and sometimes even appears as an absurdity if measured by ethical norms.