Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism

2. Solitary Men

2 Solitary Men No man is an island, entire of itself . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. —John Donne, Meditation XVII “No one is more self-sufficient than Rousseau,” Levinas proclaims in his 1935 book, On Escape, a statement that could be easily dismissed as a passing swipe at the eighteenth-century thinker.1 No doubt, Levinas would have ambivalent feelings about Rousseau, whose philosophy is often cited as influential in the French Revolution and the development of the French Republic. Yet, Levinas’s stab at Rousseau’s emphasis on self-sufficiency is not simply a throwaway line; self-sufficiency lies at the heart of a humanism that would develop out of modernity and to which Levinas offers a sustained response. In short, “self-sufficiency” sums up everything that Levinas believed went wrong with modernity. Thirty years later, Levinas opens his 1968 essay, “Humanism and An-Archy,” with the following assertion: The crisis of humanism in our times undoubtedly originates in an experience of human inefficacy accentuated by the very abundance of our means of action and the scope of our ambitions . . . The unburied dead of wars and death camps accredit the idea of a death with no future, making tragic-comic the care for one’s self and illusory the pretensions of the rational animal to a privileged place in the cosmos, capable of dominating and integrating the totality of being into a consciousness of self.2 Put simply, the death camps and all that they signified, e.g., not being able to do the most banal of tasks like burying the dead, put to rest any illusion we had that we are in control, masters of our own destiny. This counter to self-sufficiency appears in Levinas’s writing as early as the mid-1930s before he could have understood the full impact of Hitler’s reign, the death camps, and the relationship they have to a particular view of the human. Nonetheless, it is a concern that pervades his thought from beginning to end. This chapter focuses on the educational philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche in light of their respective models of education, both of which emphasize a form of self-sufficiency. Chapter 3 will then trace Levinas’s response to this view of self-sufficiency, beginning with his 1934 essay on Hitlerism and ending with Solitary Men 41 three important essays from the 1960s that were collected under the title Humanism of the Other. I realize it is certainly odd to pair Rousseau with Nietzsche. The former is a late Enlightenment figure often held up as the influence for the French Revolution and the development of the Universal Rights of Man, what Levinas frequently refers to as “the Principles of 1789.” The latter is often characterized as precisely hostile to universal rights, indeed, he promotes a philosophy that is not only antagonistic to a liberal democracy but which is also fundamentally elitist. I pair them because they are both astonishingly acute in their diagnosis of what ails political life, yet in spite of their brilliance, they are both unable to deliver a satisfactory cure for the disease they each detect. The Solitary Child Influenced directly by Montaigne, and Aristotle indirectly, Rousseau inaugurates two major trends in contemporary education—the Montessori movement and Deweyan pragmatism. Both are considered “child-centered” approaches to education, but each method comes with its own philosophical foundation and respective concerns about what is real, what is truth, and how learning best occurs. Although both find their origins in Rousseau’s child-centered approach, Montessori emphasizes individual learning while Dewey’s pragmatism, though it fosters individual flourishing, also encourages that learning happen within a community. In spite of this difference in emphasis, both focus on the individual growth of the child through the child’s expression of his or her own interests. Although both philosophers can trace their roots back to Rousseau, the political concerns that motivated Rousseau’s thinking with regard to education have long been forgotten. Additionally, both educational models developed in the wake of the Enlightenment and are part of liberalism’s legacy, which focuses on the growth of the individual. In particular, Dewey’s pragmatism emphasized the child as a growing and dynamic individual. He championed an educational model that would complement this view. However, his emphasis on democracy in education and experiential learning, which...