Plato and Descartes in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity: Teaching the Good and the Infinite

Shaul, Dylan

doi:10.5840/idstudies2023629150

Idealistic Studies

Volume 53, Issue 1, Spring 2023

Dylan Shaul

Pages 53-74

https://doi.org/10.5840/idstudies2023629150

Plato and Descartes in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity
Teaching the Good and the Infinite

This article investigates Levinas’s readings of Plato and Descartes in Totality and Infinity, in relation to the question of teaching. Levinas identifies Plato’s Form of the Good and Descartes’s idea of the infinite as two models for his own conception of the Other. Yet while Levinas lauds Descartes’s theory of teaching, he is highly critical of Plato’s. Plato’s theory of teaching as recollection or maieutics is judged by Levinas to display merely the circular return of the Same to its own interiority. In contrast, the Cartesian God supplies the idea of the infinite to a subject incapable of generating it for itself, offering an account of teaching that respects the Other’s transcendent exteriority. I nonetheless argue for the possibility of a rapprochement between Levinas and Plato with regard to teaching. Ultimately, this serves to bolster Levinas’s own theory of teaching, for which both Plato and Descartes can rightly serve as fitting predecessors.

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