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7. Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas: An Ethical Query
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116 Maurice Friedman 116 SEVEN MartinBuberandEmmanuelLevinas An Ethical Query MauriceFriedman Juxtaposing Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas is irresistible. Both are solidly rooted in Judaism. Both are philosophers who have broken with the central thrust of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger in favor of a radical relation to otherness, alterity. Both are centrally concerned with ethics. Both link the relationship with God with the relationship with our fellow human beings. Both are thinkers who lived, wrote and acted in the present century. Beyond that, important differences begin to emerge. Although Buber is as much of a Maskil (a person concerned with enlightenment ) as he is a Hasid, he was open to mysticism and myth in their many forms, and espoused a teaching of Hasidism and Judaism that might be called a concrete mysticism of hallowing the everyday. Levinas, in contrast, is a mitnagid, the traditional opponent of the Hasidim. He rejected both mysticism and myth as pagan and polytheistic. Levinas was rooted in the Bible, as he saw it, with the emphasis on its moral injunctions and its laws, and in the Talmud. Buber was rooted in the Hebrew Bible as a covenant between a people and God to make real the kingship of God in history by establishing communities and societies of righteousness, justice and loving-kindness. From this we turn to the differences in their philosophies. Levinas was a philosopher’s philosopher. He constructed a fullscale philosophy and, despite his turning away from both Husserl and Heidegger, many aspects of a phenomenology. At the core of Buber’s thought, in Buber and Levinas: An Ethical Query 117 contrast, were philosophical insights that he elaborated and illustrated with philosophical consistency. Yet Buber did not construct a systematic philosophy, much less a phenomenology. As Andrew Tallon has put it, Buber initiated a revolution in philosophy in the twentieth century but he did not carry through. In his last commentary on Buber, Levinas wrote: That valuation of the dia-logical relation and its phenomenological irreducibility, its fitness to constitute a meaningful order that is auto– nomous and as legitimate as the traditional and privileged subjectobject correlation in the operation of knowledge — that will remain the unforgettable contribution of Martin Buber’s philosophical labors. . . . Nothing could limit the homage due him. Any reflection on the alterity of the other in his or her irreducibility to the objectivity of objects and the being of beings must recognize the new perspective Buber opened — and find encouragement in it (OS, 41–42). Once after I gave a paper on Franz Rosenzweig’s critique of Buber’s Ich und Du at the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion, a distinguished scholar of the history of religion asked me why it was that people now seemed to have turned from Buber to Rosenzweig. My own response to this question is that Rosenzweig offers us a systematic philosophy, whereas Buber does not. The same, I believe, explains in part the recent popularity of Levinas in comparison to Buber, especially among philosophers. If I am right, then it is worth our while to look at what Buber himself said about this in the “Philosophical Accounting” section of his “Replies to My Critics.” Since I matured to a life from my own experience . . . I have stood under the duty to insert the framework of the decisive experiences that I had . . . into the human inheritance of thought, but not as “my” experiences, rather as an insight valid and important for others and even for other kinds of men. Since, however, I have received no message which might be passed on in such a manner, but have only had the experiences and attained the insights, my communication had to be a philosophical one. It had to relate the unique and particular to the “general,” to what is discoverable by every man in his own existence. It had to express what is by its nature incomprehensible in concepts that could be used and communicated (even if at times with difficulties). [52.90.50.252] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:44 GMT) 118 Maurice Friedman More precisely, I had to make an It out of that which was experienced in I-Thou and as I-Thou. I am convinced that it happened not otherwise with all the philosophers loved and honored by me. Only that after they had completed the transformation, they devoted themselves to the philosophy more deeply and fully than I was able or it was granted to...