Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism

3. The Crisis of Humanism

3 The Crisis of Humanism I love him whose soul is overfull so that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his downfall. —Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra In his 1933 essay “Biblical Humanism,” Martin Buber outlines the distinction between Western humanism and what he calls biblical humanism.1 Similar to the kind of argument that we will see Levinas make, Buber argues that just as Western humanism has drawn from its respective literary sources, so too should Judaism draw from the sources that inform it, thus leading to a humanism that would be distinctly biblical. He maintains that there is a difference between a Hebrew man and a biblical man where “only a man worthy of the Bible is a Hebrew man.”2 He continues, “Only that man is a Hebrew man who lets himself be addressed by the voice that speaks to him in the Hebrew Bible and who responds to it with his life . . . This is the meaning of biblical humanism.”3 Levinas offers a similar definition of humanism in 1946 when he returns to the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in order to assume the Directorship of the École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO), the branch of the AIU that provides Jewish education to French youth and trained the male students to become teachers. Less than a year into his service in this position, Levinas pens a short essay on the reopening of the ENIO, whose operation had been suspended for the previous six years. He writes the following: Our martyrdom, since 1933, gives us a more acute awareness of our solidarity across space but also across time, the need to find in the sources of our being our reason for being and the mystery of our destiny, the meaning of our hardships . Whether as a return to the land of their ancestors, or in a more general and perhaps more profound form, the recovery of mystical experiences and ethics on which Judaism is based and from which it could never be banished— there exists in Israel the need for a Jewish humanism. The ENIO must also take that into account. There must be open access to this Jewish humanism . . . A long-term undertaking, certainly, and full of difficulties, but we must attempt a future worthy of the ENIO of the past, creating in the old building on Rue d’Auteuil4 a center of Jewish Western spirituality [spiritualité juive occidentale] which will once again bring something new to the Judaism of the Orient.5 We can see from this citation that even as early as 1946, having just returned from the war and barely having begun his time as director of the school, Levinas The Crisis of Humanism 59 already identifies the need for a Jewish humanism, which by implication is different from the humanism to which Western culture currently subscribes. Additionally , his reference to Israel, in 1946, is two years prior to the formation of Israel as an independent state. His reference to Israel signifies the community of Israel, those who identify as part of the Jewish community. Situated between Levinas’s 1934 essay on the philosophy of Hitlerism and his three essays collected in Humanism of the Other, the philosophical writings in which he identifies the crisis of humanism, this essay calls for a new humanism, a Jewish humanism .6 This humanism will provide the solution to the problem he describes in those essays from the 1930s. The essays written in the 1960s describe how that new humanism will look, and his essays on Jewish education tell us how to achieve it. Using these two points as bookends, this chapter examines how Levinas ties the classical philosophical views we explored in the previous chapter to the “philosophy ” of Hitlerism presented in his astonishingly prescient 1934 essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” I first trace Levinas’s concerns motivated by the trajectory of ideas in the history of Western philosophy that he believes leads to a philosophical discourse that justified Hitlerism. I then turn to his essay “On Escape,” published just one year later, in which he continues his exploration of the bodily needs and the myth of solitude as deployed in Western philosophy. In this 1934 essay, Levinas diagnoses a crisis in intellectual thought that emerges from an inability to negotiate the tension between transcendence and immanence.7 As a result of this crisis, he predicts, our humanity hangs in the balance. In his 1935 essay, he inaugurates...