A Wandering Dog as the “Last Kantian in Nazi Germany”: Revisiting the Debate on Levinas’s Supposed Antinaturalistic Humanism

Levinas has time and again been accused of advertising an anthropocentric and antinaturalistic form of humanism. Levinas’s critics see a troubling ethical blind spot in Levinas’s savage characterization of the natural, which allegedly leads Levinas to misconstrue the relation between the human and animal realms as a radical incommensurability. Further, his critics doubt that Levinas’s move against Heidegger makes sense, namely to take ethics as first philosophy and to set it against ontology.

In this essay, I will revisit the debate about Levinas’s supposed antinaturalistic humanism. For this purpose, I will first outline the counter-arguments put forward against Levinas and then analyze one of his essays, which has been interpreted in line with the critique of his position, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights.” On the basis of this analysis, I will present some problems with a naturalistic understanding of human nature and clarify in what respect Levinas’s humanism is antinaturalistic. Thereafter, Levinas’s reception and modification of Kant’s heritage will come into focus. Finally, I will point to problems with Levinas’s account and, in a critical appraisal of it, I will explore the ethical dilemmas of which the hyperbolic formulations in Levinas’s later writings are symptomatic.

The Critique against Levinas

The critique directed against Levinas leads to an alternative proposal that has been unfolded by Bob Plant in his book on Wittgenstein and Levinas.¹ Plant asks, would it not be more adequate to understand ethics as an extension of primitive, natural reactions—rather than opposing ethics and ontology and understanding one’s being-for-others as rupturing the natural drive for self-preservation? The counterarguments put forward against Levinas can be summarized as follows: (1) On matters pertaining to birth, sex, suffering and death, the animal’s form of life is not radically different from the human; (2) Levinas reiterates traditional philosophical prejudices concerning the dignity of man as zóon lógon échon—but there is no reason to attribute any more ethical weight to rationality and language-use than to those behaviors upon which the latter are founded; (3) Levinas’s assumption that the realm of the natural is saturated with an egoistic instinct of life is wrong, since it is also a natural reaction to tend and treat the part that hurts when someone else is in pain. Thus, the natural itself proves appropriate to the ethical task.

This critical conclusion, which is turned against Levinas, comes much closer to Levinas’s own position than the above-mentioned criticism wants to make us believe. This can be demonstrated with reference to Levinas’s essay on “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights” in Difficult Freedom (DF 151–53).

Levinas’s Essay on “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights”

In this essay, Levinas connects an exegesis of two Bible verses with memories of his internment in a Nazi POW camp where he and other French prisoners were graced with regular visits from a wandering dog. The other human beings, those who were free, the men who had dealings with the prisoners, and the children and women passing by, viewed the prisoners as subhuman. Levinas felt that the prisoners were being stripped of their human skin: “we were no longer part of the world. . . . We were beings entrapped in their species; despite all their vocabulary, beings without language.” (DF 153) For the prisoners, the question was how they could deliver a message about their humanity that “will come across as anything other than monkey talk.” And then, about halfway through their long captivity, for a few short weeks, before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered their lives. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for them as they returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. The prisoners called him Bobby. For this “cherished dog,” there was no doubt that they were men. According to Levinas, this dog was “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed...