In Place of Reason

For L.C, and with apologies to everyone else.

If living means dying then the philosopher prefers not to live. Thinking takes place in isolation. 'Speaking thinking' is to speak to someone, and think for someone. The latter needs another person and takes time seriously (these are, ultimately, the same thing). Speech is open, does not know where it will end...
---Rosenzweig.

From Levinas' God, Death and Time':

In looking upwards at the sky, the transcendent , the gaze does not set out to capture (unlike a concept,a hunter)-nor can it. [We are just the right distance from the sun. A step this way and our hearts would freeze; a step the other, we would be blinded by the dazzling truth. Like Plato's charioteers: there is a realisation that there is an "uttermost limit" (to use a Qur'anic phrase)-and this is what is meant by the word "awe" or "wonder"..all that is prior to reflective thought, to consciousness, to philosophy]

The gaze leaves the body and in this separation the complicity of the eye and the hand, which is older than the distinction between knowing and doing, is undone.

The holy is untouchable, inconceivable, sacred...a realm that is set apart (Qadosh). Gaze is deference and to cover 'the gap' is idolatry. Is the knowledge of the West a secularization of idolatry?

The world is always proportionate to our knowledge. Unlike the case for the Romantics or for religious thinking (Realism).

Transcendence is an 'external' that is beyond external, what can be comprehended as external (opposed to an internal). To think this way is to acknowledge that thought can overflow its limits. Is it still 'rational thought' then?

We are responsible to others, others we do not know. Ethics as the first philosophy. The entire opening of consciousness would already be a turning to a something over which wakefulness watches. Insomnia, the passivity of inspiration. Consciousness, on the other hand, is identity, presence of being (the vision, rather than the gaze), a forgetting of the other,a re-presentation, unlike the attention to the other which is not an ex-posure.

It is necessary to put experience in question as the source of all meaning.