Abstract
While the history of philosophy is commonly seen as focusing on the problem of unity and multiplicity, the one and the many, an even stronger case can be made for regarding as essential the relation between what Plato calls “the same” (tō auto) and “the other” (tō heteron)—stronger, because when it is properly understood, the problem of the one and the many can be seen as derivative from that of same and other. How can we approach otherness without reducing it to the sameness of our own realm of will or understanding? The difficulty of philosophically addressing the other is traced throughout the history of metaphysics, with only Kierkegaard and Levinas taking seriously the problem itself, and neither arriving at a satisfactory resolution. It is concluded the solution to the problem of the other is to be found in ancient patristic thought, and ultimately in the Christian life—the life that seeks to participates in the self-emptying, self-giving life of the Holy Trinity—the life that gives itself away, abandons itself for the sake of the other, that the other may be, and that it might above all participate in the kenotic love through which the eternally same-in-other God creates and sustains the world, and re-unites it to Himself.
“… for he who loves [agapōn] his neighbor [ton heteron] has fulfilled the law.”
Romans 13:8
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Notes
- 1.
Florensky, Pillar and Ground of the Truth, pp. 23–38.
- 2.
The philosophical interplay between divine and human will, from Ockham to Nietzsche, is explored insightful by Michael Allen Gillespie in Nihilism Before Nietzsche.
- 3.
One disarmingly commonplace reason for this is simply that Augustine, by all admission the most powerful formative influence on the Western Church, was not fluent in Greek, and hence had no direct access to the conceptual vocabulary that was transformed into the Church’s teaching on the Holy Trinity. A more decisive influence was the later addition of the filioque clause to the Nicene Creed. Maintaining, also under the influence of Augustine, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, the monarchical principle of unity in the Father is undermined, leaving only a mysterioius (or better, abstract) substantial unity (a unity in essentia, in Augustine’s terms) to provide the source of unity, rather than the primacy of the Father, from whom the Son “is begotten” and the Spirit “proceeds.” Given this, the task is merely to provide analogies (Augustine liked those drawn from human psychology) to help the reader become comfortable with what he could never understand.
- 4.
Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977, p. 44.
- 5.
Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon, “Communion and Otherness.”
- 6.
Archimandrite Vasileios, The Christian in a Changing World: Monasticism and the New Realities of Life, Alexander Press 1996, p. 36.
- 7.
Ibid, pp. 15, 9.
- 8.
Ibid. p. 22.
- 9.
Ibid. p. 12.
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Foltz, B.V. (2019). Chapter Twelve Tō Heteron: The Problem of Otherness in Western Philosophy and Christian Theology. In: Byzantine Incursions on the Borders of Philosophy. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96673-1_12
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