Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion

SEVEN: Choosing and the Chosen

128 SEVEN Choosing and the Chosen Levinas and Sartre INTRODUCTION Let us straightaway acknowledge that the vision and intentions of Sartre the man seem at times to exceed the confines of Sartre the philosopher, whose philosophy is articulated most precisely in Being and Nothingness and in several books and articles preceding and following this magnum opus. Nonetheless, we are with good conscience bound to the philosophy of Sartre. It is this philosophy, after all, for which Sartre is famous. And it is to this philosophy, it seems to me, that he remained essentially faithful throughout his intellectual career, even if sometimes seemingly despite himself, as one senses in the intellectual convolutions of his (unfinished) Critique of Dialectical Reason.1 Although the subtitle of Being and Nothingness calls the book an “Essay of Phenomenological Ontology,”2 the name by which its philosophy became famous—and in some quarters infamous —was “existentialism,” a label Sartre more than any other socalled “existentialist” accepted and used. It is a philosophy centered on and determined throughout by the Archimedean opposition between “being for itself,” (l’être pour soi), by which Sartre means human freedom as an objectifying negativity, and “being in itself” (l’être en soi), massive inert impenetrable being, the Nothingness and Being of the book’s title.3 One should not mistake Levinas’s professed admiration for Sartre “at a personal level,”4 and also at a certain philosophical level, as no more than the good manners of fellow philosophers or, later, with Choosing and the Chosen: Levinas and Sartre 129 Sartre’s death, an obligatory eulogizing kindness. Levinas genuinely admired Sartre, and repeatedly said so, and said why. It is certainly not simply a matter of the gratitude he felt because it was Sartre—world famous in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, when Levinas was relatively unknown5 —“who,” as Levinas says, “guaranteed my place in eternity,” because Sartre’s introduction to phenomenology came through reading Levinas’s prize winning book, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology.6 No, the affinities that bring these two thinkers together are not merely sentimental or personal—contemporaries , known to one another, living in the same city, writing in the same language, engaged by the same intellectual milieu, reading one another’s writings, and experiencing the same historical events.7 There are philosophical affinities. And these similarities occur not merely at a level of generality that make them seem forced or charitable rather than genuine and illuminating . It is true, however, the similarities that bring their respective philosophies close to one another do occur at a higher level of generality , and are expressed in broader strokes, than the differences, to which Levinas devotes precise analyses. Levinas, as we shall see, is a severe critic, indeed a fundamental and profound critic of Sartre. But for all that, there is nothing ingenuous when in 1947, for instance, responding to Sartre’s book Anti-Semite and Jew, Levinas writes: “The overall philosophy of Sartre is simply an attempt to think man, encompassing his social, economic, and historical situation within his spirituality, without making him a simple object of thought. It recognizes commitments for the mind that are not knowledge. Commitments that are not thoughts—that’s existentialism!” He continues: “[T]he existence of an existentialist humanism—that is, where all scholastic dogma, even a modern one, is set aside—a humanism that integrates the fundamental experiments of the modern world...this is Sartre’s essential contribution to our cause, the cause of humanity” (UH 74–75).8 Or, even more glowingly, in an article on Sartre written in 1980, Levinas’s first sentence reads: The idea that human freedom could be retrieved in the midst of everything that is imposed on man came from Sartre like a message of hope for a whole generation that grew up under fatalities through all the expectation of our century and for which the humanism of eloquence, 130 Ethics as First Philosophy however much it glorified human rights, was totally unconvincing. (UH 91) There can be no doubt that Levinas respected Sartre. But there can be no doubt, either, that Levinas opposed Sartre’s philosophy of freedom, and that he opposed it frequently and fundamentally (In this, of course, in its own way, there is also respect: Sartre is worthy of criticism.). Perhaps the most trenchant, detailed and sustained criticisms appear in Totality and Infinity, but Sartre is also criticized...