Judaism and Philosophy: Each Other's Other in Levinas

Levinas's work consists of two types of writing: one confessional and Jewish and one professional and philosophical. In this article, I argue that the two styles of writing are intimately interconnected. Philosophy is enriched by the inclusion of something that was forgotten and repressed within the limits of an immanent, self-enclosed method of thinking; in conflating the two approaches, Levinas in some manner Judaizes philosophy. His "love of wisdom" is inspired by the Biblical and Talmudic "wisdom of love," a concept which should not be excluded from the wisdom that is strived for in philosophy. At the same time, Levinas opens up dialogical Jewish thought to its other: to logical Greek thinking. Put succinctly and in a more colorful, biblical metaphor: he welcomes Shem into the tents of Yafet, but also invites Yafet into the dwellings of Shem.

Levinas's Jewish and philosophical writings are therefore interdependent—they clarify each other. It is not by accident that the same concepts and terms appear in both writings, for in each he interprets anew traditional concepts such as God, election, holiness, creation, and revelation, and imparts to them radically new meaning. Yet the same "religious" words function differently in Levinas's different modes of thought.

In Levinas's oeuvre, Judaism has its other in philosophy and philosophy has its other in Judaism; ethical metaphysics and Jewish life as described in the sources are not able to absorb one another. Philosophy as logical thought cannot exhaustively express the higher rationality of the ethical praxis, which is present in the best of the Jewish tradition; the higher rationality of ethics is not adequately expressed in a philosophical "said." Notwithstanding the difference between the "Saying" of the ethical praxis to which Jewish sources bear testimony and the "said" of Levinas's philosophy, there is an overlap between the two ways of thinking in which Levinas fully participates with a type of double loyalty. His ethical metaphysics is close to his discussion of Judaism, which he sees as "an essential event of being," as "a category of being."¹ I maintain that the parallels between Levinas's ethical metaphysics and the Jewish tradition as interpreted by him are numerous, and that scholars have not paid enough attention to this phenomenon. In the following, I offer examples of correspondences between what is articulated in Levinas's philosophy and in his Jewish essays.

Hillel and Levinas

Edith Wyschogrod, one of the finer readers of Levinas, has provided us with a good example of the overlap between Levinas's philosophy and his radically ethical interpretation of Jewish tradition. Her successful reading of Levinas's work has both a Greek and a Hebrew aspect. I follow in her footsteps and provide additional evidence for an inclusive reading of Levinas that takes into account the French-Jewish philosopher's interweaving of Jewish and Greek thought.

Wyschogrod convincingly demonstrates how the structural articulation of Levinas's masterpiece Totality and Infinity reflects Hillel's questions in Pirkei Avot: "He [Hillel] used to say: If I am not for myself, who is for me? And when I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" (Pirkei Avot 1:14) She considers Hillel's adage as a kind of miniature that runs parallel to Levinas's philosophical insights.² It is well known that in Levinas's metaphysics, Autrui, the other person, disrupts ontology as understood by Heidegger. In Totality and Infinity as a "section-by-section dissection of Being and Time," egology is thus interrupted by alterity, the I is called into question by the Other. This calling into question, however, presupposes an egology, a separate self, one who reduces otherness to the same and who enjoys life and affirms himself in his home and at work. The Other, however, is not containable in the totalizing self. One may thus read Hillel's questions as correlative to Levinas's philosophical thought.

Hillel's first question, "If I am not for myself, who is for me?" prefigures Levinas's depiction of the I whose primordial relationship to the world is one of enjoyment. In the...