Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion

FOURTEEN: Levinas and Roesenweig

273 FOURTEEN Levinas and Rosenzweig Proximities and Distances INTRODUCTION “We were impressed by the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlosung, a work too often present in this book to be cited” (TI 28), Levinas wrote in the preface to Totality and Infinity. It is an extraordinary acknowledgment, made the more so because the title of Levinas’s book announces and its contents show that the critical object of Levinas’s entire endeavor is precisely an “opposition to the idea of totality.” “But,” Levinas continues in the next sentence, “the presentation and the development of the notions employed owe everything to the phenomenological method” (28).1 With this qualification Levinas indicates that his method, phenomenology , following Husserl and Heidegger, is what decisively separates his thought from The Star of Redemption, whose method, in contrast and according to Rosenzweig’s own words, is a “system of philosophy,”2 a system following and indebted to the later Schelling. I have elsewhere examined the core inspiration which guides the thought of both Rosenzweig and Levinas: the primacy of “non-indifference ,” the peculiar proximity of one person both in and out of relation to another, the nonindifference of the self in its first person singularity to the other person who faces in his or her singularity. It is an inspiration enabling both thinkers to oppose totality in the name of irreducible transcendence, even if from the side of the surplus of that transcendence they oppose totality quite differently.3 274 Religion for Adults The aim of the present essay is more specific. Its first part sketches out several of the original and positive ideas in Rosenzweig’s Star that also appear in Levinas. Despite their methodological differences, Levinas has indeed appropriated much from Rosenzweig. The second part sketches out several key ways in which Levinas differs from Rosenzweig. I admit readily that the treatment in both parts is too brief. I aim nevertheless not only to indicate fundamental similarities and differences, but also to open up possible lines of further research. ROSENZWEIG: TEACHER OF LEVINAS Let us say right away that “influence” is often obscure and hard to trace, even when an author admits to it or when the ideas of two thinkers are nearly the same. Certain “original” ideas are at any time “in the air,” as it were. Thus Rosenzweig and Levinas join all their contemporaries in taking seriously — as primary rather than derivative structures — time, change, worldliness, language, and subjectivity. To be sure, each thinker will understand these and other phenomena in his or her own distinctive way. Accordingly, the work here is not that of a detective seeking confessions, but rather that of a scholar uncovering linkages and divergences. One must keep in mind, too, that Levinas’s concordances with Rosenzweig come at varying levels of generality, so that agreement at one level will not preclude disagreement over the “same idea” at another. Temporality Bergson’s notion of “duration” was a turning point in Western thought, inaugurating contemporary philosophical discourse: it solved Zeno’s paradoxes and justified human freedom by making the flow or passage of time primary instead of its measurement based on stoppages which would henceforth be conceived as practical or theoretical derivatives. Following Bergson, Husserl formally and Heidegger existentially elaborated the “ecstatic” structure of temporality, the extensive presence of the present as a synthesizing of past and future. What Rosenzweig emphasizes, and what we find also in Levinas, are two additional elements of time: (1) its “sequence” (Reihe),4 Levinas and Rosenzweig 275 irreversible and uni-directional, which Levinas will later call its “oneway ” movement from past to present to future, experienced in the aging5 of a subjectivity independent of history; and (2) the nonsynthesizable transcendence of time’s dimensions relative to one another: the irreducible“pastness”ofthepast,observedinRosenzweig’s“Creation” and Levinas’s “immemorial past which was never present,” and the ungraspable “futurity” of the future, Rosenzweig’s “Redemption” or “Truth” of Part Three of The Star and Levinas’s “messianic” time of justice, rupturing the self-presence of ecstatic temporality. These are profound and revolutionary advances in our understanding of time. Given their different methodological starting points, for Rosenzweig the transcendence of time’s dimensions is that which exceeds and is unknown to the reductive identity sought by idealist representation and its specious present of simultaneity for which the sequence of real time has no place. For...