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| ISBN-13: | 9780804768702 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/03/2010 |
| Series: | Cultural Memory in the Present |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
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A COVENANT OF CREATURES
Levinas's Philosophy of JudaismBy Michael Fagenblat
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6870-2
Chapter One
Levinas's New CreationA PHILOSOPHY OF JUDAISM, WITHOUT AND OR BETWEEN
The Jew is split, and split first of all between the two dimensions of the letter: allegory and literality. -Jacques Derrida
A Philosophy of Judaism?
When asked, as he frequently was and, indeed, from the earliest occasions, Emmanuel Levinas rejected the notion that he was "a Jewish philosopher." His arguments and conclusions made claims independent of his particular confession of faith and religious affiliation. They are, he proposed, independent of all confessions of faith and religious affiliations; they are phenomenological analyses of "the thing itself," the thing of ethics. The Other-that thing of ethics-is not a Judaic or even a religious phenomenon. And if religion in general and Judaism in particular agree on the significance and manifestation of ethics, that is because they have caught sight of something in the thing itself rather than because philosophy is an apology for religion or doctrine. To avoid confusion, and in addition to protesting, Levinas chose different publishers for his philosophical writings from those he chose for his Jewish ones. Although several fascinating footnotes in Otherwise than Being hint at an unwritten commentary Levinas kept to himself, in the philosophical corpus he generally avoided discussion of Jewish sources, lest they be mistaken for "proof texts," as if a text could prove anything about ethics itself. In principle, even though Levinas was a practicing and learned Jew, he claimed to write as a philosopher and asked to be read as one.
It was Gabriel Marcel, as one of the examiners of Levinas's doctorat d'État, Totality and Infinity, who was perhaps the first to make the "alarming comment": "Why do you always say 'the other' when you know that the term exists in the biblical tradition as 'the neighbor'?" We do not know how Levinas responded to his Christian interlocutor; one imagines a slight wink or a wry smile, an unstated acknowledgment of a Judeo-Christian fidelity that philosophers, especially Parisian ones, ought to share only in secret. Ricoeur, another Christian philosopher, likewise thought Levinas was concealing his Judaism in his philosophical cloak.
There are no quotations from the Bible-except one or two maybe-in Totality and Infinity. It's Plato. It's Descartes. And when he reads in Plato that the idea of the Good is beyond Being, he is thinking of the unpronounceable name, and he makes a kind of short-circuit that is never named as such. That the unsayable and the Good of Plato are superimposed at a point that itself cannot be named, is something that I sense to be very deeply buried, something profoundly dissimulated and always said indirectly.
Two of France's leading Christian thinkers, then, suggested that Levinas secretes his Judaism amid his philosophy. Other Christian thinkers outside France, along with Jewish thinkers in the united states and Israel, agree that Levinas's philosophy is intimately if not entirely bound to his Judaism. And while these commentators regard Levinas's secret Judaism as making an important contribution to contemporary philosophy, several notable philosophers regard the religious element as a fatal flaw or even a bluff, behind which stands an antiphilosophical rhetoric of blind faith, dogmatism, and piety.
Neither Philosophy
Sometimes such critics protest at the generally religious thrust to Levinas's thought; at other times they imply the problem lies in its specifically Judaic character. Almost always the argument has the following form: Levinas's ethics is based on a metadivision between the categories of the other and the Same. He himself locates ethics, Judaism, and revelation in the category of the Other, while he places reason, history, and ontology in the realm of the Same. By his own lights, then, there is an alienation or a "diremption," as Gillian rose calls it, between the spirit of ethics and the world of reflective, deliberative action in which this so-called "ethics" is determined as action, politics, and law. Where Levinas sees ethics as the blind spot of philosophy, a point at which philosophy cannot see itself seeing the world, these philosophers contend that his version of ethics actually blinds philosophy by imposing the sense of an exteriority invisible to the light of consciousness and reason. In Judith Butler's estimation, Levinas's account of ethics involves "a demand that is not open to interpretation" and is therefore no more or less "uncritical and unthinking than an acquiescence to an ungrounded authoritarian law." On the basis of a similar appraisal Dominique Janicaud concluded that "such a dogmatism could only be religious." What Levinas calls "ethics" would belong to the realm of faith, indeed, to a particular type of faith set apart from reason or thought. Alain Badiou concurs:
Lévinas's enterprise ... is entirely bound up with a religious axiom; to believe that we can separate what Lévinas's thought unites is to betray the intimate movement of this thought, its subjective rigor. In truth, Lévinas has no philosophy-not even philosophy as the "servant" of theology. Rather, this is philosophy (in the Greek sense of the word) annulled by theology, itself no longer theology (the terminology is still too Greek, and presumes proximity to the divine via the identity and predicates of God) but, precisely, an ethics.... to put it crudely: Lévinas's enterprise serves to remind us, with extraordinary insistence, that every effort to turn ethics into the principle of thought and action is essentially religious. We might say that Lévinas is the coherent and inventive thinker of an assumption that no academic exercise of veiling or abstraction can obscure: distanced from its Greek usage (according to which it is clearly subordinated to the theoretical), and taken in general, ethics is a category of pious discourse.
While this condemnation of the "essentially religious" element in Levinas's ethics is indeterminately labeled, within the context of modern European philosophy in general and of Badiou's work in particular it is evidently aimed at a specific religion in which theory is allegedly subordinated to Law-namely, Judaism. Beginning with Benedict Spinoza, a formidable tradition argues for the incompatibility between Judaism, as Law, and the philosophical task of formulating a universal ethics. Spinoza was the first to cast Judaism as Law devoid of reason, a view wholeheartedly adopted by Immanuel Kant, who went so far as to declare that "Judaism is really not a religion at all" but "a collection of mere statutory laws." In this view Judaism makes no rational or even moral demands. On the contrary, the positivism of Jewish Law is "directed to absolutely nothing but outer observance" and animated by purely instrumental concerns, namely, the preservation of the political association of its members. To achieve this merely instrumental, political goal-what might today be called the identitarian function of Jewish Law-Judaism, in this view, established a theocracy and made use of coercive techniques, especially earthly rewards and punishments, rather than determining its laws according to the rationality of conscience and notions of rational morality. The claim, as made by Badiou, Butler, Janicaud, and rose, that Levinas's thought amounts to a pious and dogmatic assertion of nonrational Law recapitulates the modern philosophical critique, instituted by Spinoza and adopted by Kant, of the nonphilosophical character of Judaism as such.
It is Spinoza's canonizing interpretation of Judaism, then, that needs to be questioned. The case he made for Judaism's alleged disparagement of philosophical reasoning was largely based on an interpretation of Moses Maimonides. Spinoza attributed to Maimonides the view that a person who adopts universal religious and moral laws (which the rabbinic tradition knows as the seven Noahide Laws) because of his own rational convictions rather than his obedience to revelation is not counted among the righteous or even among the sages of the nations. Without acquiescing to revealed, nonrational Law, not only righteousness but also wisdom would count for nothing. What counts in Judaism, according to this view, is only obedience. Even Maimonides, the greatest representative of philosophical Judaism, would have regarded Judaism as essentially opposed to morality and the exercise of unfettered reason. Judaism would accommodate ethics only by subordinating it to the suprarational transcendence of revealed divine Law. The status and legitimacy of ethics within Judaism would therefore in principle be not only heteronomous but, indeed, antirational. Such is the image of Judaism that spinoza introduced into modern philosophy.
In addition to the prevalence of this antiphilosophical image of Judaism among eminent modern philosophers, such a view has been defended by leading Jewish thinkers, usually by interpreting Maimonides in the way Spinoza did. Employing the exact same schema but reversing the values, neo-orthodox Jewish thinkers such as Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Marvin fox, and Benny Levy laud the value of heteronomous, revealed law over the pretensions of philosophical reasoning. Prominent detractors and leading exponents of Judaism are thus in accord: where there is Judaism there can be no philosophy proper since Judaism subordinates the autonomous capacity of reasoning to the dictates of the nonrationally given Law (Badiou's critique of Levinas in nuce). that the Law has been given is understood by neo-orthodox Jewish thinkers as a sign of its priority over philosophy, whereas modern philosophers, adopting the same schema, dismiss it as but metaphysical posturing or historico-juridical positivism that carries no philosophical weight and therefore makes no moral claim whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, from the point of view of this Protestant-cum-Jewish tradition the only truly philosophical Jew is "a non-Jewish Jew" such as Spinoza, be he the heretic who prized reason over revelation or the hero who anticipates the solution to the Jewish Question: Jews without Judaism.
Ironically, this tradition was given its illustrious philosophical life because of what is likely a corrupt text. Whereas the printed edition of the text of Maimonides that spinoza cites says that a person who acts ethically on account of reason alone "is neither a foreign resident nor one of the righteous gentiles nor [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], ve'lo] one of their wise men," other manuscripts have it that such a person "is [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII, ela] one of their wise men." the implications of this minor maculation are significant, for on the corrected reading Maimonides would in fact be legitimating and even honoring the independent wisdom inherent in moral reasoning. Such an interpretation would also cohere much better with his overall approach, as several scholars have argued. On the basis of an uncertain text and an unconvincing interpretation of Maimonides, spinoza thereby installed in the heart of modern philosophy the view that Judaism holds only heteronomous law in esteem and is thus essentially opposed to moral philosophy.
Unfortunately Levinas himself, especially in his early period, was prone to characterize Judaism in opposition to philosophy and to that extent gave himself over to this tradition, as if Judaism has reasons that reason itself cannot know. This much seems to follow from the metadivision he posits between the Same and the Other and all that falls under their respective signs. Truth and goodness, knowledge and peace, philosophy and prophecy, "totality" and "infinity" are all conjunctively associated without any dialectical or conceptual passage that would allow for their effective synthesis or deployment. Rose lamented this "broken middle" that leaves postmodern philosophy "rended not mended." In her view, this diremption between morality and political law leaves the postmodern thinker with an impotent, broken heart filled with pure intentions. Levinas's Judaic invocation of the transcendence of ethics would not merely assent to an oppositional contrast between reason and revelation but would amplify it to hitherto untold extremes, since the ethical revelation is opposed to phenomenology as such, outside every datum of consciousness, every adventure of the mind, and every experience, including religious experience. The task for philosophy would be merely to yield to the ethical burden of "the Other"; reason would be nothing but the instrumental technique for administering the revelation of ethics and the just society would be the one that knows how to use reason to enforce the heteronomous authority of ethics. No wonder philosophers like Badiou, Butler, Janicaud, and rose have discerned a radically antiphilosophical gesture in Levinas's work, with all the implications this entails: authoritarianism, piety, dogmatism, recourse to traditionalism, positivism, and communitarian, identitarian politics.
I would add that the image of Levinas as a postmodern 'oseh nefashot (Gen. 12:5), a maker of poststructuralist souls, and a ba'al teshuva, a master of post-Holocaust return and repentance, confirms this estimation. In the wake of the failure of Christian and philosophical enlightenments to realize universality without exterminating difference, it became a matter of affirming brute difference as a mode of resistance. The tremendous emphasis Levinas gives to the ethical value of difference and otherness contributed in no small measure to a positive affirmation of Judaism as the other of philosophy. In an incisive analysis, Jeffrey Kosky took issue with those commentators who sought to lay claim to Levinas as a Jewish thinker somehow speaking from outside philosophy. As he correctly observes, the Judaizing interpretation of Levinas would "confirm a reading which forms the basis of what others count as an objection," namely, that Levinas is imposing religious dogma in place of phenomenological openness to ethics itself. Judaizing Levinas in this way "plays into the hands of his critics by giving them more on which to base the accusation of a theological hijacking of phenomenology." Moreover, since this interpretation of Levinas affirms the religiously determined character of his work by calling it "Jewish," it leads to an impasse. Levinas's philosophy could be affirmed only within a tradition of faith and should therefore rightly be rejected by anyone who stands outside that tradition. Kosky is entirely correct to point to a mirroring of these two interpretative camps, the one affirming the religious element of Levinas's thought as a Judaic alternative to philosophy, the other denouncing it as recourse to revelation, piety, and dogmatism. In my view this mirroring goes back to spinoza and Kant and the covert alliance we find between their views about Judaism and the views of neoorthodox Jewish thinkers. Reading Levinas's account of ethics Judaically would risk repeating and radicalizing the antiphilosophical image of both Levinas and Judaism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A COVENANT OF CREATURES by Michael Fagenblat Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface: Judaism as a Philosophical Way of Life....................xiAcknowledgments....................xxvii
1 Levinas's New Creation: A Philosophy of Judaism, Without and or between....................1
2 From Chaos to Creation: The Genesis of Ethics....................33
3 Ethics in the Image of God: Anthropology ex Nihilo....................67
INTERLUDE: From Moral Creators to Ethical Creatures: Levinas's Kehre....................97
4 Ethical Negative Theology....................111
5 Secularizing the Covenant: the Ethics of Faith....................140
6 The Ambivalence of Fraternity: Ethical Political Theology....................171
Conclusion....................195
Notes....................199
Bibliography....................251
Index....................273