Postmodern Ethics and Eastern Thought : to the Sublime Beyond the Rhythm of Difference

Postmodern Ethics and Eastern Thought : to the Sublime Beyond the Rhythm of Difference

This paper attempts to demonstrate how postmodernism works as the way out of such dilemma of the tradition of Western metaphysics and why we need the postmodern ethics of Emmanuel Levinas as the gate to the future, and then discuss how Eastern thoughts can help the postmodern ethics be completed by discussing three texts that represent Eastern thought 10in general. I will focus not on philosophy as such but on philosophical literary criticism of art and literature that takes the sublime and pure enjoyment as its most serious matter. Developing Levinasian ethics and the ideas of some other thinkers, this paper claims that ethics should be used not only to solve philosophical, political, and social problems, but it can also be used for literary criticism. The ultimate aim of the reader is to be aesthetically one with the text through the sensibility of the sublime that leads her to the outside and Infinity, not to logically and thematically analyze the text. We can use Levinasian ethics for literary criticism to develop reading strategies to break genuinely from logocentric and ontological ways of text interpretation. It iS obvious that while the reader reads a novel, the novel, though not a human, is in the place of the Other whom the reader confronts. Upon this basis, this paper discusses three Eastern texts--Dao-te Ching, Chuangzi, and Diamond Sutra, proposing that we need to reconcile contemporary Western ideas of postmodernism and Eastern ideas of aesthetic sensibility Eastern thoughts can be combined with the Western postmodern ethics like the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Deleuze/Guatarri for the work of revealing the fundamentally ethical and aesthetic dimension between humans. As all the Eastern and Western philosophers discussed in this paper think, the primary opposition begins in the fundamental, transphenomenal dimension, and it means that ethics and aesthetics are one in the postmodern sublime sensibility that leads us beyond the rhythm of difference, the sensibility that awakens us to the transphenomenal knowledge of Infinity through the work of art.