Abstract

In 1982 Emmanuel Levinas contributed a “lesson” on religion to a series in Le Monde. Intended for a general audience, Levinas’s lesson is a clear and concise introduction to his thought in general—and, in particular, to the curious persistence of the idea of God or the Infinite despite modernity. After the death of God, what remains, invoking Descartes, is the “idea of God” or even the “expectation” of God (and, so, of some greater “meaning [sens] and justification”). Between Pascal and Heidegger, Levinas perhaps surprisingly insists upon the Descartes of A Discourse on the Method to emphasize the bon sens (both “good” and “common” sense) that underpins any thought that goes “to God” (à Dieu). Levinas is, here again, after what makes such thought possible, that thought that can somehow relate the finite and the infinite, that “thinks more than it can think.”