| Summary: | 博士 === 國立政治大學 === 宗教研究所 === 107 === Since the sixteenth century, in the inheritance and transmission of the ontology and idealism, what are expressed in the word “religion” have been placed in the context of underlining the subjectivity of in-itself and for-itself, thus continually losing its revelatory role for the finitude of human being, as well as for the infinity of the world of possibility. Although the academic research activities that appeal to “religion” continue to break through the constraint of the “Judeo-Christian tradition”, along with the birth and rapid development of the science of religion, the discursive modes bounded by the “humanity” and “socio-culture” still do not slip the leash of “thought and being are the same”. That “religion” opens infinity is in crisis.
The philosophy of Levinas, aiming at reflecting the internal logic of modern western civilization and regarding the complicity of ontology and idealism as its object of rebellion, indicates that what it interprets as the “religion” oriented towards the alterity provides the important resources for getting out of the predicament of modernity. In a word, there are three main points of this philosophy. First, that this “religion” first appears in the form of “election” reveals the passivity and finitude of the subject, and relocates people in the world filled with strangeness; which thus powerfully resists the subjectivity theory highlighting in-itself and for-itself. Second, on the epiphany on the “face”, or the “face-to-face” relationship, Levinas uses the “religion” distinguished from theology to clarify that the “invocation” for infinity and the Other, and the “interpellation” and “education” for the “self” are of indispensable value and importance to numerous kinds of relations such as ethics, metaphysics, art, and even politics. Especially in politics, what ensure our realization of justice and avoidance of violence will be the sacredness of “le tiers” and “absolute Other”. Third, in such a kind of “religion”, Levinas taking the breakthrough of “the idea of infinity” in “cogito ergo sum” as an opportunity, attempts to radically alter the discursive modes of philosophical statements represented by the phenomenological tradition, and then encounters the other and infinity on the track of the “trace”. Therefore, we can say that Levinas’ “religion” is distinctly characterized by Judaism, which, however, does not logically affect the significance of this philosophical thinking embedded with the “religion” discourse, for opening a new pluralism, and the value of the thorough human self-reflexivity that it foreshadows. That is where the “religion” in Levinas' philosophy ultimately fulfills its responsibility.
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