Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion

ELEVEN: Emmanuel Levinas

226 ELEVEN Emmanuel Levinas Philosopher and Jew Religion is the excellence proper to sociality with the Absolute, or, if you will, in the positive sense of the expression, Peace with the other....This seems to me fundamental to the Judaic faith, in which the relation to God is inseparable from the Torah; that is, inseparable from the recognition of the other person. The relation to God is already ethics; or, as Isaiah 58 would have it, the proximity to God, devotion itself, is devotion to the other man. — Emmanuel Levinas, In the Time of the Nations For the philosopher and Jewish thinker, Emmanuel Levinas, there is no divorce between philosophy and religion. “There is a communication between faith and philosophy,” he writes, “and not the notorious conflict. Communication in both directions” (ITN 170). No doubt the continuity between the two derives from the fact that Judaism is obligated to no “theology,” to no logos, or dogma in conflict with philosophy. Judaism is rather a way of life in covenant with God, and such covenantal life includes knowledge, reflection and questioning—the mentalities traditionally associated with philosophy . But the relationship is deeper. Philosophy and religion are not simply united by life, two of the many activities—like sports, art, or humor—of a human life. For Levinas monotheism provides the ultimate justification for philosophy, satisfying philosophy’s innermost demand for justification, but in a way that a philosophy detached from religion is unable. How is this possible? Emmanuel Levinas: Philosopher and Jew 227 Like many Jewish thinkers before him, Levinas’s basic message is that religion (institutionally endorsed relationships with God) and ethics (morality at the interpersonal level and justice at the social level) are inextricably united. Indeed, before they are separate and reunited, they form an integral union. The elevation of genuine piety can neither discard religion for ethics (secular humanism) nor sacrifices ethics for religion (Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”). Rather, one is the expression and fulfillment of the other, and both require obedience to Law. “The justice rendered to the Other, my neighbor,” Levinas writes, “gives me an unsurpassable proximity to God....The pious person is the just person. Justice is the term Judaism prefers to terms more evocative of sentiment” (DF 18). Speaking even more broadly of the social or covenantal character of the human in relation to the divine, Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity: “Everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation represents not the superior form but the forever primitive form of religion” (TI 79).The origin of theory is not simply praxis, as Marx thought; nor is the origin of both theory and praxis a more primordial aesthetics of sensation or worldliness, as Locke and Heidegger respectively thought. Rather they begin and are permeated by the imperatives of social life as ethics. Prayer and ritual, moral care and juridical structures, as well as knowledge and scientific inquiry, are all ventures in a human sociality driven not by myths and fantasies but by respect for others. The primacy of ethics—metaphysics as ethics—was also the position taken in mid-nineteenth century Germany by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, who wrote: “The Sanctuary of the Law in particular and the Law of God in general, strive solely for moral objectives.” 1 The primacy of ethics, then, is not the invention of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment or of Reformed and Liberal branches of religion , nor is it merely a defensive or polemical position within faithful orthodoxy. To obey mitzvot, the divine commandments (all of which are also “good deeds”), like the compulsory annual reading of Torah and a lifelong Talmud study, requires a constant renewal in the present. Only in this way are the commandments “living,” the word of a “living God,” operative in the created world that God declares “good” right from the start. In this way eternity and time intersect, require and elicit one another. 228 Religion for Adults One special and important characteristic of Levinas’s thought is that it takes the dialectic of tradition—preservation through renewal—seriously in relation to the most important historical and intellectual events of the twentieth century. Such engagement does not date his thought, however, making it outdated in the twentyfirst century. Rather it shows the path of genuine thinking, which becomes increasingly profound throughout its historical unfolding, without, for all that, losing its perennial bases and relevance. Levinas responded insightfully to such...