Daniel Gellner
SUMMARY
Faceless Gods. An Outline of Levinas’s Critique of Paganism
The study focuses on the concept of paganism in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and on its historical context. When Levinas speaks of paganism, he means essentially a mode of human existence that is characterized by a desire for an enchantment with the world, for mysteries that transcend the ethical relation to the other person. The origin of this critical line of Levinas’s thought can be seen in his first essay on the “philosophy of Hitlerism”, later it is developed especially in Totality and Infinity and in his essays on religion. Although the aim of the study is to clarify the meaning of Levinas’s critique of paganism, based on his theory of intersubjectivity, the study concludes by pointing out the overly restrictive conception of spirituality implied in this critique.