Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion

EIGHT: Some Reflections on Levinas on Shakespeare

150 EIGHT Some Reflections on Levinas on Shakespeare A MEDITATION OF SHAKESPEARE To link Emmanuel Levinas, twentieth century Jewish French philosopher of ethics, and William Shakespeare, sixteenth century Elizabethan dramatist and poet, is neither an idle fancy nor an arbitrary academic exercise. Even beyond a natural curiosity that wants to understand the links that bring together all spirits who are of the first rank, regardless of whatever differences in epoch, culture, station, langauge , and genre may separate them, there is in this case a special reason for making this conjunction. It is the unforgettable claim made by Levinas at the start of his own career in 1947, in Time and the Other: “[I]t sometimes seems to me,” he declared, “that the whole of philosophy is but a meditation of Shakespeare” (TO 72).1 Then, too, there is the no less memorable but more general claim made by Shakespeare, or rather, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, (after being told by his “father’s spirit” that his father did not die a natural death but was murdered) to his friend Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” While Hamlet’s claim is congruent with Levinas’s, since both deny the usual self-proclaimed comprehensiveness and finality of philosophy, the claims are nevertheless asymmetrical. Hamlet’s claim declares that philosophy is limited, a view oft expressed, especially in Western religious thought, while Levinas’s claim, in contrast, determines the limit of philosophy as one that Shakespeare surpasses. Let us add that we have no doubt that for Levinas, Shakespeare is but one instance, and not the exclusive instance, of the surpassing of philosophy. Some Reflections on Levinas and Shakespeare 151 What is striking about Levinas’s assertion is the combination of its universal quantification of philosophy, its grand reference to “the whole of philosophy,” and its use of the possessive “of” to link philosophy to Shakespeare. What this means is not that all of philosophy is a meditation about Shakespeare, which by itself would already be a remarkable and thoughtworthy possibility, but rather that the whole of philosophy is a meditation by Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s meditation . What Levinas is suggesting, then, is that Shakeseare—whatever is meant by “Shakespeare,” and this is what we will have to investigate —subsumes philosophy, and not, as one might ordinarily suppose , that philosophy, which has always held itself out to be an account of the whole, and ideally as the whole account of the whole—subsumes Shakespeare. If by Shakespeare, he means, minimally, “great literature,” and I think this is so, then what follows is that instead of philosophy being the truth of the art of literature, the art of literature would be the [...] the what?—this is our question—of philosophy . In any event, we must ask what is the meaning of this reversal of the personal and the impersonal? Not philosophy meditating on Shakespeare, but Shakespeare meditating on philosophy. What can it mean for philosophy to be conceived as a Shakespearean meditation?ShakespearelivedanddiedbeforethebirthofKant,Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Bergson, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. Does Levinas’s statement mean, then, that philosophy ended before these thinkers? Levinas, who in the 1930s and 1940s introduced Husserl and Heidegger to twentieth century French thought, can hardly mean this. Does it not mean, more broadly and more decisively, that discursive or conceptual thought, contrary to the self-proclamations of philosophy, is subsumed by a more concrete dimension or element beyond discursive or conceptual thought, a dimension or element manifest in the world of Shakespearean drama and poetry. I think here lies the key to Levinas’s statement. Philosophy lives in thought, in concepts, in knowledge, in “making the unequal equal,” in the “life of the mind,” while Shakespeare presents a world, an artistic rendition of the life-world in its unfinished, temporal, and dialogical character. It is a matter of closeness to the unique. A literary world, in contrast to a philosophical concept, does not simply refer but replicates— highlights—such characterizations as the one way directionality of time and history, or, more importantly, the exigencies of morality and justice. Truth lies in neither mute particularity nor abstract 152 Ethics as First Philosophy universality but in singularity, where particular and universal meet. In a word, Shakespeare’s dramatic world is more concrete than philosophy ’s discursive universe. Merleau-Ponty correctly taught that philosophy does not surpass the world when it abstracts...