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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253021106 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/09/2016 |
| Series: | The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies |
| Pages: | 426 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Levinas's Ethical Politics
By Michael L. Morgan
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Michael L. MorganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02106-9
CHAPTER 1
TEARS THE CIVIL SERVANT CANNOT SEE
Ethics and Politics
THE PROBLEM
How does Emmanuel Levinas understand the relationship between the domain of responsibility or the ethical, on the one hand, and the domain of justice or the political, on the other? Broadly speaking, many commentators have argued that Levinas has a story to tell about this relationship that is informative, serious, and compelling; critics, however, claim that whatever Levinas has to say about the matter is unclear and unhelpful. It betrays a weakness in Levinas's thinking and its implausibility or its irrelevance or both.
In his paper "The Possibility of an Ethical Politics: From Peace to Liturgy," John Drabinski begins his account by noticing that at least some criticism of Levinas is leveled against the primacy of the biblical tradition and his Hebraism. This is tantamount to claiming that what prevents Levinas from developing his political thought is a one-sided attention to the primacy of the ethical for our lives and too great a dependence on the Bible, religion, and Judaism. Drabinski identifies Gillian Rose as one among several critics of this kind, and he notices too a host of passages in Levinas's own writings that seem to take the face-to-face and responsibility as a disturbance of the political and as opposed to it. But, at the same time, Drabinski is surely right to point out that this criticism fails to take seriously Levinas's frequent claims that Europe is both "the Bible and the Greeks," ethics and politics. Any one-sided reading of Levinas that leads to anarchism or asceticism is surely mistaken. What Drabinski stakes out is a position between dismissing the political as secondary or derivative and privileging the political at the same level as the ethical. As he puts it, the singularity of the face and the universality of law open up a gap between the two; politics is necessary and yet opposes the ethical. The face signifies without context; the face as citizen is the political, which contextualizes the face.
By the ethical or the domain of responsibility or the regime of charity, Levinas is referring to the normative character of the particular face-to-face relationships that underlie and ground all of human social experience. This ethically normative claim for acknowledgment, acceptance, and care for the other person is a dimension of all human experience, and it is both determinative of how we ought to live and a transcendental condition for every aspect of our lives. Alternatively, by the political or the domain of justice, Levinas sometimes intends to pick out all of our everyday experience, from the most ordinary perceptual experience to the most organized, institutionalized behavior, from the most individual conduct to the most general or abstract thinking and action. At other times, however, Levinas has in mind by the political the narrower domain of those institutions, laws, policies, and practices that organize our everyday lives as citizens of a state or as subjects of a particular government. This narrower conception of the political is clearly a subdivision of the larger, more embracing conception, so that the problem for Levinas of understanding how the ethical is related to governmental policies and conduct or legal and juridical practices is not independent of how we understand more broadly what special role or roles the transcendental structure of interpersonal encounter plays in our everyday lives. As a result, there are going to be similarities between what the ethical means for the political in the narrow sense and what it means for religious institutions, culture and art, and other modes of everyday life, as well as for everyday life in general.
Another distinction useful to make at the outset is that between political life and political theory. On the one hand, for Levinas, by and large, the issue that he takes to be raised by worrying about how the ethical, as he understands it, or the order of charity is related to the political domain or the order of justice is a matter of concrete experience. How do our fundamental responsibilities to other persons have an impact on our political lives — on our institutions, our policies, our laws, and our political conduct, as individuals or as a society? On the other hand, there is another question that might be asked, certainly by philosophers: does Levinas have a political philosophy? Does Levinas think that we can derive particular guidance about how we understand the authority, role, and character of political institutions from the belief that human existence is determined fundamentally by our infinite responsibilities one to another or that it is grounded in concern for the other person? Does his central insight about human social existence help us to understand what the political order is and how it ought to be organized? I will say something about what Levinas's conception of the ethical means for both — political life and political theory.
As I proceed, I will be drawing on what Levinas himself says and what he chooses to discuss. Therefore, at times I will be discussing political conduct and institutions, and at times political theory; I will simply follow Levinas's lead. Moreover, I will at times use the analogy between political life and institutions and non-political ones, based on the thought that politics in the narrow sense is one of a number of different domains within our everyday lives, all of which have a similar relationship to the ethical foundation of all human experience, as Levinas sees it.
To begin, let us consider two questions that Levinas will have to answer: One is the question, what grounds the normative authority of those duties and ideals that constitute our moral lives? The other is, how is the ethical domain of our lives related to the authority and forms of our political lives? These are Platonic questions. In Western philosophy and in Western culture, since antiquity, there have been a variety of answers to both questions. Some have argued that the authority, form, and goals of our moral lives are dictated by divine will, others that they are shaped by their foundation in human nature or human rationality and agency. Some have believed that political life is natural and continuous with moral considerations and obligations, while others have sought to make political life independent of any particular conception of what it is to live a good life. Levinas, in the end, takes our human condition to be a continuous one. Religious, moral, and cultural experience are not utterly separated one from the other, and both are related to our political lives, and all are somehow responsive to the ethical core of our existence.
As Sam Fleischacker has reminded me, modern philosophers, from Hobbes to Rawls and beyond, have sought to segregate our conceptions of political authority and forms of political life from our orienting religious and moral conceptions of life, for theoretical and historical reasons. But this tendency failed to impress Levinas. In a sense, modern political philosophy has attempted to ground political philosophy in human nature or rationality and to make it impartial or neutral with respect to substantive, deep conceptions of what is valuable and worthwhile about human life. With this strategy comes a marked separation between the public and the private and much else. Justifying the state in this fashion is an attempt to free the state from partisan — religious, moral, nationalist — advocacy and to avoid the risk of "wars of religion," as it were. For Levinas, however, although such efforts do have benefits, they also free political life from an incontrovertible grounding in our ethical sensibility and leave open options that can easily — as history has shown us — decline into horrific results, totalitarianisms and fascisms. The challenge he must meet, then, is to expose our unqualified opposition to such horrors and at the same time to show how arguing for the continuity between normative foundations and political life, for their interrelationship, does not simply land us back in a situation that risks intolerance and conflict, social and political. To do this, he finds the multiplicity of moral, religious, and other comprehensive views to be grounded ultimately in something single and common, a structure that we all share as part of all of our interpersonal lives. But does Levinas's strategy succeed? Is the ethical dimension he identifies substantial enough and yet not too substantial? How does it determine but not distort the political? And what are the benefits and the disadvantages of his efforts to meet this challenge? In the end what kind of relationship does exist between our fundamentally ethical existence and political life?
THE SOLUTION
Often, in the 1980s, in interviews and elsewhere, when the topic of the ethical and the political arose, Levinas was fond of referring to a Talmudic text to clarify their relationship. It can serve as a kind of emblem of their interrelation, and examining it will facilitate our effort at clarifying how he conceived of the ethical-political relationship. The passage occurs in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Rosh Ha-Shanah, at 17b–18a; let me begin with my own account. A question is addressed to Rabban Gamaliel about an apparent contradiction between two biblical verses, Deuteronomy 10:17, "who does not lift up [His] countenance," and Numbers 6:26, "The Lord shall lift up His countenance unto you." The text then records a story or parable that is intended to clarify the situation: Two men arranged a loan before the king, the recipient swearing on the king's life to repay the loan. But when the time came to make the repayment and the borrower did not pay, he sought to excuse himself before the king. The king said, "I accept your excuse, but go and obtain forgiveness from your neighbor." The Talmud takes this distinction between offenses against God and those against one's neighbor to apply to the original conflict between the two verses. With regard to offenses against Him, God may show favor and forgive or excuse the misconduct, but not with regard to offenses against one's fellow human being. But in fact, Levinas ignores this explanation and focuses solely on what the Talmud says next: that this explanation was generally accepted until Rabbi Akiba taught, "One text refers to God's attitude before the final sentence, the other to His attitude after the final sentence." And Levinas takes Akiba to have meant that we should distinguish the application of the principles of justice impartially, with no attention to the particularity of the claimant, from the act of mercy, which comes after the judgment is given and attends to the particularity of the claimant and his petition, his request for forgiveness.
As I read the text and in particular the way in which the parable is intended to dissolve the apparent contradiction, the traditional explanation appears to be relying on a customary distinction between sins committed against God and sins committed against other persons; this distinction calls to mind its use in Tractate Yoma regarding repentance and what sins require the prior request for forgiveness from others whom one has wronged. This is one framework in which the parable is understood. But, on the other hand, Akiba is relying on a different distinction, that between divine justice (middat ha-din) and divine mercy (middat ha-rahamim). Levinas's own reading follows Akiba but in a very distinctive way.
It is clear from the four occasions on which Levinas introduces the text — and there may very well have been more — that he takes the text, the point of the story or parable, to apply to or to exemplify in some way his own understanding of ethics and politics, the order of responsibility and the order of justice, as he calls them. On his reading, the central theme of this Talmudic passage is captured in Akiba's alternative account of the meaning of the story about the sinner's appeal to the king for forgiveness. It is clear that Levinas takes this account to refer not to divine action literally but rather to the judgment of the court, both its verdict and the sentencing that follows that verdict. Moreover, Levinas takes the guilty verdict to be got by the strict application of principles of justice, and the judgment that follows, the merciful forgiveness that weakens or lightens the sentence on the guilty borrower, to be the result of responding with very particular sensitivity and compassion to the sinner's appeal for forgiveness. In short, justice must not forgive the borrower's having failed to pay the debt, but mercy can lighten the sentence on him, given his appeal for forgiveness. As Levinas himself puts it, "Do not look at the face before the verdict. Once the verdict has been given, look at the face." This is how Levinas reads the "before" and "after" of Akiba's interpretation, that is, before and after the court's judgment about his actual guilt or culpability. To generalize, the state's responsibility is to apply laws fairly and uniformly, with generality, but even then, once the verdict is issued, there is still room for "humanity," or what Levinas calls the "possibility of or appeal to something that will reconsider the rigor of always rigorous justice." This he calls a "surplus of charity or of mercy." "This," he says, "is how the necessity of the State is able not to exclude charity." The distinctive circumstances concerning the borrower do not matter to the judgment against him; if he failed to repay the debt, he is culpable. But when it comes to the sentence to be exacted of him, various features of the situation become relevant. These all apply to him distinctively and include, in particular, the fact that he sought the forgiveness of the court and perhaps the unique financial and personal circumstances that prevented him from repaying the loan and led him to tender his excuse. At this stage, the court can take these distinguishing factors into consideration; it can, that is, "look at [the borrower's] face."
Moreover, this reading suggests that the regime of justice recognizes its own imperfection, and so in allowing for mitigation or mercy, it already acknowledges its own incompleteness and hence is "already questioning the State." It is in this sense that acknowledging the repentant sinner and his appeal for forgiveness and then lightening the sentence in response to this appeal constitute an act of mercy within justice and not outside of it. As Levinas puts it, "This after-verdict, with its possibilities of mercy, still belongs — with full legitimacy — to the work of justice." In broader terms, the political, mediated by an appreciation of responsibility, is self-critical, or the ethic of responsibility does not simply criticize the state ab extra, or from the outside; rather its role within the domain of justice or the political leads justice to appreciate its own limitations. Levinas calls this "justice with a bad conscience."
Why have I taken so long with Levinas's references to this Talmudic passage? The standard approach to Levinas's understanding of the political and its relation to the ethical is by way of his notion of the third party and the way in which he argues that the "entrance" or inclusion of the third party into our social lives requires forms of classification, distinction, comparison, and measurement that constitute justice and lead to the development of general principles, practices, and institutions. We will get to this in a moment. The reason I have begun with this Talmudic comment, however, is that it allows us to see, before we turn to Levinas's more systematic discussion, what he is aiming at and what that theoretical or systematic account is intended to accomplish. To be sure, the Talmudic discussion does not express a doctrine; it points to an illuminating case, one intended to be suggestive and instructive. So let us ask: what do Levinas's references and his interpretation of this text tell us about the relation between charity or mercy, as he calls it, and justice and the state?
First, we learn that for Levinas justice involves applying general principles fairly and impartially, regardless of who the particular agents are. And justice involves laws, the courts, and the other institutions of the state whose goal is to organize social life with an attention to this sort of just treatment. Second, justice and the state are necessary. We cannot live without them. Human existence involves both everyday experience and a transcendental dimension of responsibility for other persons; each depends upon and limits the other. Third, justice is, however, limited and imperfect; not attending to the particularity of individuals is a strength of the principles and institutions of justice, but it is also a weakness. Although justice must not pay attention to individuals, it can easily lead us to forget that the reason to order social life is to help us to deal with each other as individuals, as particular persons. Fourth, even within the regime of justice there are opportunities for such responsiveness, moments or occasions when we can, within just practices, turn to and respond to individuals as individuals. We can call this "mercy" or "charity" or generosity or concern or sensitivity; it is a way that our fundamental responsibility to other persons is expressed in the midst of our public, everyday lives. Finally, we can develop a critique of political practices and institutions from the point of view of charity or responsibility to others, but we can also develop a critique from the point of view of justice. Justice can recognize its own weaknesses, imperfections, or limitations and criticize itself, so to speak. In short, one can engage in political critique both from outside of the state and from within it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Levinas's Ethical Politics by Michael L. Morgan. Copyright © 2016 Michael L. Morgan. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefacePart I. Overview1. Tears the Civil Servant Cannot See: Ethics and Politics2. Judaism, Zionism, and the State of IsraelPart II. Philosophical Articulation3. The Third Party: Transcendental Ethics and Realistic Politics4. Ethics as Critique5. Responsibility for Others and the Discourse of Rights6. Liberalism and DemocracyPart III. Ethics, Politics, and Zionism7. Teaching Prophetic Politics: Ethics and Politics in Levinas's Talmudic Lessons8. Zionism and the Justification of a Jewish State9. Ethics, Politics, and Messianism10. Levinas's Notorious InterviewPart IV. Defense11. Levinas and His CriticsConclusionNotesIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Against the prevailing consensus that Levinas's political theory is at best irrelevant and at worst hypocritical, Michael L. Morgan vigorously defends its abiding power. Through a painstaking analysis of Levinas's oeuvre, including his controversial interview after the massacres at Sabra and Chatila, he allows us to appreciate the potential an ethics of infinite responsibility may still have to temper a politics of agonistic struggle and impersonal proceduralism."
Michael L. Morgan provides an intriguing alternative to much current thinking in political philosophy. His reading of Levinas amounts to a rigorous but flexible vision of the simultaneous indispensability of political justice and its necessary vulnerability to ethical critique.
Against the prevailing consensus that Levinas's political theory is at best irrelevant and at worst hypocritical, Michael L. Morgan vigorously defends its abiding power. Through a painstaking analysis of Levinas's oeuvre, including his controversial interview after the massacres at Sabra and Chatila, he allows us to appreciate the potential an ethics of infinite responsibility may still have to temper a politics of agonistic struggle and impersonal proceduralism.
Michael L. Morgan provides an intriguing alternative to much current thinking in political philosophy. His reading of Levinas amounts to a rigorous but flexible vision of the simultaneous indispensability of political justice and its necessary vulnerability to ethical critique.
Against the prevailing consensus that Levinas's political theory is at best irrelevant and at worst hypocritical, Michael L. Morgan vigorously defends its abiding power. Through a painstaking analysis of Levinas's oeuvre, including his controversial interview after the massacres at Sabra and Chatila, he allows us to appreciate the potential an ethics of infinite responsibility may still have to temper a politics of agonistic struggle and impersonal proceduralism.
With his usual talent for clear prose and for putting Levinas in helpful conversations (including, here, with Michael Walzer, Avishai Margalit and Ruth Gavison), Michael Morgan warns his readers not to confuse Levinas's ethics with Levinas's politics. For while a political program can be more or less ethical than another, Levinas's distinction between ethics and politics means that all political acts will always fall short of any ethics that animates them. In defending his reading of Levinas, Morgan teaches us to see hope where others might see only tragedy.