Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983-1994: 1983-1994

4. Otherwise than Thinking: A Philosophy of the Breach

91 4 OtherwisethanThinking: A Philosophy of the Breach WHAT IS THAT —THINKING? To this initial question let us add the question that opens Heidegger’s book What Is That—Philosophy? On the first page of the book, it will be remembered, the German philosopher recalls Gide’s words that “it is with beautiful feelings, that bad literature is made.”1 “Feelings,” Heidegger continues, “even the most beautiful feelings, do not belong in philosophy. Feelings, people say, are something irrational. Philosophy, on the other hand, is not only something rational but is the true end and proper administration of ratio.”2 Following which, Heidegger poses a whole series of questions, including this one: “Has ratio constituted herself the mistress of 1. Cited by Heidegger, What Is That—Philosophy?, 4–5. 2. Ibid., 5. 92 Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas philosophy? If the answer is ‘yes,’ by what right? If ‘no,’ whence does she receive her charge and her role?”3 We all know that the word “philosophy” comes from the ancient Greek φιλοσοφια, made up of φιλειν, “to love” and σοφια, “wisdom, knowledge,” in other words, literally, “the love of wisdom.” But how often do we reflect on the entire amphibology the word “philosophy” contains, as soon as it is pronounced, on the problematic inherent in and constituted by its etymology? The “love of wisdom” disappeared early on for so many didactic philosophers who were quick to replace it with the “love of knowing” or the “quest for wisdom” or the “quest for knowledge,” as if to signify that the wisdom of love was not on a level with true philosophy. But let us look at the differences in reading in more detail, since philosophia can signify in contradictory fashion “love of wisdom” (Liebe zur Weisheit) as well as “love of knowledge” (Liebe zum Wissen) or “desire for knowledge” in an Aristotelian optic. In this respect, Levinas breaks with Aristotle, Plato, and the majority voice of an entire panoply of Western philosophers, right up to Heidegger, of course, but also Adorno, who privileged the love of knowledge over the “wisdom of love,” thus revolutionizing in a sense the image we have of philosophy . If σοφια is indeed wisdom, possibly also “knowledge ,” then φιλειν, which qualifies sophia, becomes so to speak its attribute: the essence of wisdom is to elicit love, according to Levinas’s teaching. Let us start by noting that philosophy is neither Chinese nor Indian, Jewish nor Arabic, even if later there was above all an extremely potent Jewish and Arab 3. Ibid., 5. Otherwise Than Thinking 93 philosophy in the Middle Ages, as well as brilliant schools of thought in India and China. The twentieth century saw an efflorescence of philosophers on the soil of Old Europe where two world wars were to be perpetrated, with their millions of deaths and one of the greatest tragedies of humanity: the Holocaust or Shoah, the extermination of six million European Jews, so linked was the Polish Jewish community to Poland’s own tragedy. To this one can add other nameless tragedies such as the Armenian and Cambodian genocides, the genocide of the Tutsis at the close of the century, or the great Stalinist purges as well as those ordered by Mao and his Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. Emmanuel Levinas was 22 years old when in 1928– 1929 at the University of Freiburg he attended Edmund Husserl’s last lectures and discovered the phenomenology that would mark his entire thought. For Levinas, Husserl’s words and his work opened up a nontheoretical intentionality that could not be reduced to knowledge; his last two classes in particular dealt with the notion of phenomenological psychology and the constitution of intersubjectivity. But it was his discovery of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit that transfigured his philosophical life and his life as such, even if he would become increasingly critical of Heidegger from the latter’s Nazi profession of faith onward. Nonetheless, he very soon placed Being and Time among the five masterpieces of Western philosophy, on a par with Plato’s Phaedrus, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, and Bergson’s Time and Free Will. After this discovery of the idea of intentionality of consciousness, the young phenomenologist understood that “being commands the access to being. The access to being belongs to the description of being” 94 Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas (EI 31). After this, the consciousness...