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1 The Many Faces of Levinas as a Reader of Kierkegaard Merold Westphal Face 1 Levinas is not always a good reader of Kierkegaard. For example, he credits Kierkegaard with bringing to European philosophy “the possibility of attaining truth through the ever-recurrent inner rending of doubt” (PN, 77). In light of the polemic against modern philosophy’s preoccupation with doubt by Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, one is left flabbergasted.1 Again, Levinas tells us that“in protesting against the absorption of subjectivity by Hegel’s universality , [Kierkegaard] bequeathed to the history of philosophy an exhibitionistic , immodest subjectivity” (PN, 76). In the light of the emphasis by Johannes de Silentio and Johannes Climacus on the secret hiddenness of faith, one is once again reduced to bewilderment. Or again, Levinas distinguishes his critique of the state (and by implication the whole social order that Hegel calls ethical life or Sittlichkeit and Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms call the ethical stage or existence sphere) from Kierkegaard’s because his is not to be based on “all the worries that an individual may have in a State. That would be to return to the egoism against which Reason is right” (TH, 23). Are we to believe that the polemic against the ultimacy of the state in Fear and Trembling is based on Abraham’s egoistic desire not to be hemmed in by society’s oppressive rules? Perhaps Levinas’ most sustained misreading of Kierkegaard concerns the meaning of the ethical. Sometimes he is clear that by the ethical stage which is to be teleologically suspended in faith, Kierkegaard (whom he doesn’t distinguish from his pseudonyms) does not mean pure practical reason in either its Platonic sense as the recollection of eternal truth or the Kantian sense of the self-legislation of universal norms, as timeless and as socially unsituated as Plato’s forms; he rather means the laws and customs of one’s people, what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit. Thus he describes the ethical stage as one “at which the inner life is translated in terms of legal order, carried out in society, in loyalty to institutions and principles and in communication with mankind” (PN, 67). But he wonders whether“the true ethical stage is correctly described by Kierkegaard as generality and equivalence of the inner and the outer”(PN, 69; cf. 76). The faith in which Sittlichkeit is teleologically suspended “does not open man to other men but to God, in solitude,” and for this reason “carries within it an irrespon- 22 Merold Westphal sibility, a ferment of disintegration”(PN, 70). The transition from the ethical to the religious“begins the disdain for the ethical basis of being, the somehow secondary nature of all ethical phenomena that, through Nietzsche, has led us to the amoralism of the most recent philosophers” (PN, 72). Yes, friends, Kierkegaard is to blame for Nietzsche and his followers! Of course, Levinas shares Kierkegaard’s critique of the ultimacy of the laws and customs of one’s people, which he calls war, politics, history, and reason (TI, 21–22) and is just as eager to see it teleologically suspended in something higher. But for him this higher is the individual’s responsibility for the human Other, which he calls diacony (PN, 73–74). In a glorious non sequitur, Levinas concludes that since Kierkegaard wants to transcend the ethical stage (which the two agree as identifying as Sittlichkeit), he “seems not to have experienced” the uniquely individual responsibility for the Other which exceeds what my society asks of me. In other words, Kierkegaard has no other notion of the ethical than the Hegelian ethics portrayed in Either/Or II and suspended in Fear and Trembling. Levinas writes as if he had never even heard of Works of Love, much less read it.2 But he does seem aware of the Climacus writings, to which he makes apparent reference. If he had read Postscript more carefully, he would have found in the midst of a crucial text about the religious stage a different notion of the ethical. There the theory of the three stages becomes at once twofold (objectivity and subjectivity) and fourfold (aesthetic and speculative objectivity over against ethical and religious subjectivity). Here the ethical is not left behind by the religious but stands in closest relation to it. The critique of the system, especially in its world-historical dimensions, is designed to keep open the space of the ethical (CUP, 133–59). This is not Levinas’ ethics of diacony, and Climacus...

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