Emmanuel Levinas Critical Assessments Vol. II

374 Pages·2005·9.523 MB·English

by  Claire Elise Katz and Lara Trout (eds.)

EMMAÏ^UEL LEVINAS
CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS OF
LEADING PHILOSOPHERS
Eiliisd by
CLAIM ELISE KATZ
EMMANUEL LEVINAS
Critical Assessments of
Leading Philosophers
Edited by
Claire Katz with Lara Trout
Volume II
Levinas and the History of Philosophy
IJ Routledge
Taylor & Francis Croup
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2005
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Editorial Matter and Selection © 2005 Claire Katz; individual
owners retain copyright in their own material
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Uludag Universitesi
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194 Em61 2005 2.C. ion in
uritisn Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
ISBN 0-415 31049-0 (Set)
ISBN 0 415 31052-0 (Volume II)
Publisher’s Note
References within each chapter are as they appear in the original complete work
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Levinas, history and subjectivity 1
22 Levinas - another ascetic priest? 5
SILVIA BENSO
23 Levinas’s ‘ontology’ 1935-1974 25
BETTINA BERGO
24 Hegel and Levinas: the possibility of forgiveness and
reconciliation 49
ROBERT BERNASCONI
25 The original traumatism: Levinas and psychoanalysis 69
SIMON CRITCHLEY
26 Difficult friendship 83
PAUL DAVIES
27 Sense and icon: the problem of Sinngehung in Levinas
and Marion 106
JOHN E. DRABINSKI
28 Autonomy and alterity: moral obligation in Sartre
and Levinas 123
STEVEN HENDLEY
29 The primacy of ethics: Hobbes and Levinas 145
CHERYL L. HUGHES
30 Reading Levinas reading Descartes’ Meditations 161
DENNIS KING KEENAN
v
CONTENTS
31 God and concept: on the love of the neighbour in Levinas
and Bergson 175
LEONARD LAWLOR
32 Tracework: myself and others in the moral phenomenology
of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas 195
DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN
33 Hermann Cohen and Emmanuel Lévinas 241
ZE’lìV LEVY
34 Levinas, Derrida, and others vis-à-vis 250
JOHN LLEWELYN
35 The listening eye: Nietzsche and Levinas 270
BRIAN SCHROEDER
36 Breaking the closed circle: Levinas and Platonic paideia 285
BRIAN SCHROEDER
37 Kant, Levinas, and the thought of the “other” 296
JERE PAUL SURBER
38 Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the theological task 325
MEROLD WESTPHAL
39 The moral self: Emmanuel Levinas and Hermann Cohen 347
EDITH WYSCHOGROD
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reprint
their material:
Jackson Publishing for permission to reprint Silvia Benso, ‘Levinas -
Another Ascetic Priest?’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology,
27, 2, 1996, pp. 137-56.
Archivo di Filosofia for permission to reprint Robert Bernasconi, ‘Hegel and
Levinas: The Possibility of Forgiveness and Reconciliation’, Archivio di
Filosofia, 54, 1986, pp. 325-46.
Verso Ltd for permission to reprint Simon Critchley, ‘The Original Traumat­
ism: Levinas and Psychoanalysis’, in Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on
Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999),
pp. 183-97.
Brill Academic Publishers for permission to reprint Paul Davies, ‘Difficult
Friendship’, Research in Phenomenology, 18, 1988, pp. 149-72.
DePaul University for permission to reprint John E. Drabinski, ‘Sense
and Icon: The Problem of Sinngebung in Levinas and Marion’, Philosophy
Today, 42, supplement, 1998, pp. 47-58.
Jackson Publishing for permission to reprint Steven Hendley, ‘Autonomy
and Alterity: Moral Obligation in Sartre and Levinas’, Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology, 27, 3, 1996, pp. 246-66.
Kluwer Academic Publishers for permission to reprint Cheryl L. Hughes,
‘The Primacy of Ethics: Hobbes and Levinas’, Continental Philosophy
Review, 31, 1998, pp. 79-94. With kind permission of Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
Jackson Publishing for permission to reprint Dennis King Keenan, ‘Read­
ing Levinas Reading Descartes’ Meditations’, Journal of the British Society
for Phenomenology, 29, 1, 1998, pp. 63-74.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Taylor & Francis for permission to reprint David Michael Levin, Tracework:
Myself and Others in the Moral Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and
Levinas’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 6, 3, 1998, pp. 345-
92. http://www.tandf.co.uk
Ze’ev Levy for permission to reprint Ze’ev Levy, ‘Hermann Cohen and
Emmanuel Lévinas’, in S. Moses and H. Wiedebach (eds), Hermann Cohen's
Philosophy of Religion (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1997), pp. 133-43.
Prometheus Books for permission to reprint John Llewelyn, ‘Levinas,
Derrida, and Others Vis-à-Vis’, in Beyond Metaphysics?: The Hermeneutic
Circle in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1985), pp. 185-206. Copyright © 1985 by
John Llewelyn. Reprinted with permission.
Brill Academic Publishers for permission to reprint Brian Schroeder, ‘The
Listening Eye: Nietzsche and Levinas’, Research in Phenomenology, 31, 2001,
pp. 188-202.
Dialogue and Universalism for permission to reprint Brian Schroeder,
‘Breaking the Closed Circle: Levinas and Platonic Paideia\ Dialogue and
Universalism, 8, 10, 1998, pp. 97-106.
DePaul University for permission to reprint Jere Paul Surber, ‘Kant, Levinas,
and the Thought of the “Other” \ Philosophy Today, 38, 3, Fall 1994,
pp. 294-316.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd for permission to reprint Merold Westphal,
‘Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task’, Modern Theology, 8, 3,
1992, pp. 241-61.
Bar-Ilan University for permission to reprint Edith Wyschogrod, ‘The Moral
Self: Emmanuel Levinas and Hermann Cohen’, Daat: A Journal of Jewish
Philosophy, 4, 1980, pp. 35 -58. Copyright Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan,
Israel.
Disclaimer
The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders
of works reprinted in Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments of Leading
Philosophers. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would
welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies whom we have
been unable to trace.
INTRODUCTION
Levinas, history and subjectivity
Although he is better known for his critique of Western philosophy,
Levinas’s thought takes the risk of translating Hebrew in ‘Greek’. In each of
his philosophical works, and even in those writings considered his ‘Jewish
writings’, Levinas engages figures in the history of philosophy from Plato
through to the contemporary period. His engagement with these figures
extends from a positive use of their ideas to elucidate and support his own
project, to a critique of central key concepts from dialectic to being, which,
he argues, motivates the history of philosophy in the twentieth century.
The Preface to Totality and Infinity opens with Levinas urging that it is of
the highest importance to know if we have not been ‘duped’ by morality.
History has shown itself to be a history of war, ‘a permanent possibility of
war’ According to Levinas, to predict and win wars is the essence of pol­
itics, and politics is thereby opposed to morality. On the one hand, whatever
morality has promised us cannot be realized in historical societies and, at the
very least, we must understand morality’s opposed logic to politics. On
the other hand, to the degree that morality is based on politics, the best we
can hope for is a morality based on reason with the immanent possibility of
wax. By morality Levinas means ‘the pursuit of happiness’, ‘the calculation
of pleasure’ or ‘the immanent moral law’ Not one of these can persevere
in the midst of politics as competition, duplicity and violence. Defined in
this way, morality will never advance us much beyond the calculation that
defines politics. For all that, Levinas’s conception of ethics cuts through this
relationship between ethics and politics. Ethics, he shows us, need not be
founded on politics; rather ethics will prove to be its interruption. Levinas’s
project, then, with Totality and Infinity offering his most sustained treat­
ment of the ethical relation, seeks the meaning of ethics and the possibility
of an ethics that is presupposed even by our traditional theories of morality.
Totality and Infinity introduces us to several new terms, and to terms that
are familiar but now reconceived. It is in Totality and Infinity that Levinas
launches his critique of the idea of totality, which, he shows, characterizes
most of the history of Western rationalism, culminating in Hegel’s Philo­
sophy of Spirit. And his critique of totality was drawn from another figure
in the history of philosophy, Franz Rosenzwcig, whose university thesis
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INTRODUCTION
explored politics in light of Hegel’s logic of totalization. It was Rosenzweig’s
The Star of Redemption - his positive philosophy of man, world and god -
that provided Levinas his insight into a logic of passage and proximity
without totalization. Finally, Levinas draws his idea of the ‘Good beyond
being’ from Platonic philosophy and from the idea of the infinite in me
developed in Descartes’s Mediations.
Levinas’s project shows that Spinoza’s conatus essendi - the drive to
persevere, the concern with one’s own being - is not the sole driving force of
the subject. Contrary to what Spinoza et al argued, the conatus can be
interrupted and the self may even sacrifice its own life for another. Levinas
concedes that Heidegger is correct: one cannot take away the death of the
other, even through the sacrifice of one’s own life in the place of the other.
But Levinas’s concern is not that we make the other immortal (keeping the
other from dying); instead, death is how we are bound together. The sacri­
fice the self makes for the other is not firstly an ontological one - the self
does not take away the other’s death. Rather, sacrifice is an ethical event. In
answering the other, in our original responsibility to the other, we break
through the limit of ontological desire and find ourselves for that other,
if momentarily, sometimes even into death. It demonstrates the approach
toward the other, the move outside my own ego.
We can thus interpret Levinas’s question regarding our being ‘duped by
morality’ as asking if morality - or rather ethics - is even possible. Is it
really possible to act for another, as Kant also wondered? If so, what should
an ethics look like? Is it not just another form of duty? Is it not just another
form of asceticism? Although Levinas rarely mentions Nietzsche directly,
unfolding the conversation between Nietzsche and Levinas promises a rich
terrain. The most obvious figure whom Levinas does engage regarding the
question of morality and the other that is, with regard to the conception of
and relationship to politics, is Kant. Kant was the quintessential philo­
sopher of the rationalist enlightenment who gave us morality based on
imperatives. For this reason, Levinas has Kant in mind when he shows
how ethics must precede reason. Although the case could be made that
Kant and Levinas are not as far apart as Levinas occasionally argued,
Levinas’s phenomenology of ethics as responsibility and his criticism of the
role of reason in ethics draws new attention to the flaws - metaphysical and
otherwise - in Kant’s ethical project.
As noted, most famous of Levinas’s ‘borrowings’ is Plato’s reference to
the ‘Good beyond being’, found in his Republic, Phaedo and so on. Interest­
ingly, this reference from the beginning of philosophy - which Levinas
concedes is always Greek, and literally from Greek philosophy - occurs in
Levinas’s last book, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. So it is ironic
that this final work shows Levinas moving closest toward the religious
language and scriptural references found in the Hebrew Bible. Levinas
argues that Plato glimpsed a unique way of conceiving the relationship
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INTRODUCTION
between ethics and ontology, one that puts the ethical outside of the realm of
ontology and reason. This thematic crosses through the history of philo­
sophy, occasionally inflecting it in Neoplatonic and religious directions;
but rationalism and empiricism found little use for it other than as a mere
postulate. Levinas returns to Plato’s conception of the Good in order to
illustrate what he means by ethics before ontology.
It is not simply these select themes of the history of philosophy - that
which precedes the twentieth century - that influenced Levinas’s work. He
also credits Bergson with his view of time and Husserlian phenomenology
dominates the method in Totality and Infinity and the search for an interpre­
tative phenomenology of sensibility in Otherwise than Being. Additionally,
Levinas was writing in France at a time when existentialism, including
Kojeve’s Hegel, and phenomenology overshadowed the earlier French con­
cerns with neo-Kantianism. Thus, it is not surprising that his work engaged
and influenced such figures as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Blanchot, Marion and
Derrida.
3