Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion

FOUR: Buber and Levinas - and Heidegger

80 FOUR Buber and Levinas—and Heidegger The Levinas-Buber relation is a deep and instructive relationship.1 Martin Buber is senior and far better known. His book, I and Thou, first published in 1923, was immediately and widely recognized as an important spiritual work and quickly translated into many languages . Buber is himself a recognizable figure, the bearded Jewish sage said to resemble a biblical prophet (even though, as Levinas once remarked, we have no photographs of the biblical prophets). Emmanuel Levinas, on the other hand, while a philosopher of the first rank, is never likely to be popular or well known. Although his many books and collections of articles have been translated into English, his name still often draws a blank—and this is almost as true within the academic community and the Jewish community as it is for the public at large. What makes grasping the differences dividing Levinas and Buber of special importance, beyond the intrinsic value of gaining a sharp understanding of their thought separately and in conjunction, is the fundamental role that the ontological thought of Martin Heidegger plays for both of them. Both Buber and Levinas are critics of Heidegger. In an interesting twist of thought, however, their respective critiques of Heidegger serve, at the same time, as their critiques of one another. Buber accuses Levinas of being Heideggerian, and Levinas accuses Buber of the very same allegiance. Because for both thinkers these accusations are damning, their critiques of one another hinge in an important sense on the validity and depth of their respective critiques of Heidegger. The central thesis of the present essay is Buber and Levinas 81 that it is Levinas—and not Buber—who fully critiques Heidegger. Levinas’s critique of Heidegger is thus also a critique of Buber for unwittingly remaining within the orbit of Heidegger’s thought. BUBER ON LEVINAS AND ON HEIDEGGER 1957 Afterword to I and Thou Although Buber wrote hardly anything directly about Levinas’s thought, at a conceptual level, beyond explicit texts with proper names, he did respond rather directly to at least one of Levinas’s central criticisms. He did this in the short Afterword of 1957 that he appended to the second edition of I and Thou. There Buber defended and focused on the topic—the reciprocity of the I-Thou relation—that is perhaps the central bone of contention in Levinas’s 1958 article, “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge.” Several Shorter Works In this 1957 Afterword, Buber also indicates that “several shorter works” published after I and Thou function “to clarify the crucial vision by means of examples, to elaborate it by refuting objections, and to criticize views to which I owed something important but which had missed the central significance of the close association of the relation to God with the relation to one’s fellow-men, which is my most essential concern.”2 These shorter writings are found in Between Man and Man. Here, as we shall see, the role of Heidegger becomes central. The “several shorter writings” of Buber are important , because they further develop and defend the central theses of I and Thou and because Levinas refers to them in his criticisms of Buber. But they are important also because in them Buber invokes and criticizes certain Heideggerian conceptions that play a key role not only in his own philosophy but also in his debate with Levinas. Opposition to Heidegger is important to Levinas’s 1958 article on Buber and to all of Levinas’s philosophy, and it is important as well, from Buber’s perspective, in understanding Buber’s short 1963 and 1967 responses to Levinas. 82 Ethics as First Philosophy “What Is Man?” One of Buber’s most important criticisms of Heidegger, one to which Levinas often refers in his 1958 article on Buber, is contained in Buber’s 1938 inaugural course of lectures as Professor of Social Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. These lectures were delivered shortly after Buber fled a hostile Nazi Germany. Among his many distinctions as a thinker, Buber has the honor of being one of the earliest and most trenchant critics of Heidegger. Buber’s 1938 lecture on Heidegger appeared in English translation in 1965, in a monograph entitled “What฀Is฀Man?”3 “Religion and Modern Thinking” The second and briefer of Buber’s criticisms of Heidegger came shortly after the war, that is...