The Secular, the Religious, and the Ethical in Kierkegaard and Levinas
Résumé
This paper examines the possibility of an asymmetrical ethics and the role of the secular and the religious in articulating such an ethics in the philosophical and religious writings of Kierkegaard and Levinas. Although it is Kierkegaard who more adequately distinguishes the secular and the religious, I argue against reading Levinas as an author who either atheistically secularizes transcendence or theistically reifies it. Levinas's discussions of an atheistic monotheism for adults and his criticisms of conventional atheism and religiosity suggest that he is pursuing a double strategy and an "ethical reduction" that sacralizes the secular and secularizes the religious for the sake of their irreducible ethical moment.