Is There a "Correlation" between Rosenzweig and Levinas?

How often has it been said, fairly, that the "German-Jewish" experience carried its hyphen, until recently at least, largely for German Jews? This hyphen—which has opened a decade of debate about what symbolic conjunctions like this are, culturally and politically speaking—continued, despite its wartime "interruption," in the thought of Levinas, Derrida, and other contemporaries. It is a fair claim that the terms of the hyphen (if they were ever simply "German" or simply "Jewish," which would destroy the complex rapprochement created by the hyphen) have changed position since the end of World War II; but really, this history is more complex than a simple reversal. In the case of Levinas, we can say that, more than for Rosenzweig, interest in and knowledge of Heidegger's thought (between 1927 and 1930) was formative, especially but not only in the late 1920s. We see this clearly in Levinas's doctoral thesis on Husserl:

Only M. Heidegger dares to confront deliberately this problem [of existence and transcendence], considered impossible by all of traditional philosophy, the problem that has for its object the meaning of the existence of Being . . . and we believe we are entitled to take our inspiration from him.¹

Levinas would later write, "We were impressed by the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig's Stern der Erlösung, a work too often present in this book to be cited."²

I will show momentarily why Levinas took distance from Heidegger's thought. I believe it may explain why Rosenzweig would also have done so. For now, let us look briefly at this presence of Rosenzweig, this "continuation" of what has been called the German-Jewish "hyphen,"³ in Levinas. It may elucidate certain aspects of Rosenzweig's greatest work, The Star of Redemption. Bernhard Casper has argued compellingly that Rosenzweig's conception of the "metaethical man," that "lord of his ethos," gives rise to Levinas's conception of the responsible human being—thus responsibility and revelation prove to be interrelated. He writes:

The second book of the second part of The Star develops the thesis that [revelation], in which the orientation of the . . . metaethical man takes place, that orientation through which the "lord of his ethos" becomes the responsible human being, is nothing less than the happening [itself] of revelation. For Rosenzweig the word revelation has so broad a meaning that it takes place in all serious speech in which a man really says something of his own.⁴

Casper makes this claim on the basis of Rosenzweig's interpretation of the meaning of the Psalms and the Song of Songs. "Under the love of God, the mute self came of age as eloquent soul. This occurrence we had recognized as revelation. If language is more than only an analogy . . . then that which we hear as a living word in our I and which resounds toward us out of our Thou must also be . . . in that . . . historical testament of revelation [which thus grounds the ethical significance of the everyday word of man]."⁵ For Levinas, serious speech arises from everyday sincerity, what he calls "Saying" to differentiate it from words said. Revelation and Saying are modes of worldly transcendence for two reasons: transcendence for Rosenzweig is worldly and bi-directional. Simply, it is worldly the way language is human. God's "transcendence" toward us is unknowable, but the fact of creation, as love, assures the unity of lived time as meaningful.⁶ Our transcendence is worldly because what we transcend is ourselves, toward the world (or the other person). But we do so in freedom, relationally, and from a position of entire separateness from both "God" and "world."⁷ Levinas's 1961 descriptions of "love of life," and the contemporaneous notions of conversation and teaching, in Totality and Infinity, appear to me to be his effort to work out Rosenzweig's transcendence in phenomenological terms.

For Levinas, transcendence is an interruption...