Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue

7. The ‘‘Logic’’ of Solidarity

115 seven The ‘‘Logic’’ of Solidarity What human beings strive for in general is cognition of the world; we strive to appropriate it and to conquer it. To this end the reality of the world must be crushed as it were; i.e., it must be made ideal.1 It is because he thinks that Hegel lets the cat out of the bag with words such as these that Levinas’s own philosophy is an attempt to accomplish ‘‘the radical reversal, from cognition to solidarity’’ (OB 119, emphasis added). The nature of this reversal as spelled out by Levinas and Kierkegaard is the theme of our final two chapters. It presupposes the divine breakthrough into human life discussed in the previous chapters. In spite of the different theologies (chapters 3 and 4) there is the structural convergence expressed in the themes that articulate divine transcendence: the immediacy of revelation as a voice not our own, either individually or collectively (chapters 1 and 2) and the traumatic heteronomy in which the responsible self is born with an essentially intersubjective (non)identity (chapters 5 and 6). If there is a ‘logic’ of solidarity, we will have to speak of it in scare quotes because of the sustained assault Levinas (and in due course, Kierkegaard)2 makes on the dominant understanding of the logos in western philosophy, an understanding he would find nicely expressed in the epigraph from Hegel’s Lesser Logic. Since that assault is fundamental to his being unashamed, after Nietzsche and even after Auschwitz, to speak of peace and love and justice,3 it Reversal 116 is appropriate to inquire whether there is another ‘logic’ that guides the journey he maps out ‘‘from cognition to solidarity.’’ What ‘argument,’ what ‘evidence ’ will emerge from his critique of the logocentrism that has prevailed from Plato to Husserl, and even to Heidegger and Derrida, that might sustain, if not optimism, at least hope for our life together? Even Heidegger and Derrida? Is not their destruction and deconstruction of the history of ontology the decisive break with the logos of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, and Husserl? Well, no. Each takes up a negative stance toward the tradition, to be sure, but Levinas does not see either as the decisive rupture, the ‘‘radical reversal’’ that is needed. ‘‘It is true that philosophy, in its traditional forms of ontotheology and logocentrism—to use Heidegger’s and Derrida’s terms—has come to an end . . . [but] . . . The speculative practice of philosophy is by no means near its end. Indeed, the whole contemporary discourse of overcoming and deconstructing metaphysics is far more speculative in many respects than is metaphysics itself. Reason is never so versatile as when it puts itself in question’’ (DEL 33). How is it, then, that these two remain within the speculative horizon of the discourses they seek to undermine? Following leads in Husserl, Heidegger stands in ‘‘opposition to classical intellectualism’’ and its search for a ‘‘reason liberated from temporal contingencies, a soul, co-eternal with the Ideas’’ (Si 177–79). For him ontology does not occur ‘‘in the triumph of human beings over their condition, but in the very tension whereby this condition is assumed. . . . To think is no longer to contemplate, but to commit oneself. It is to be engulfed by that which one thinks, to be involved’’ (IOF 3–4).4 In this way Heidegger runs the risk of ‘‘drowning ontology in existence. . . . And yet the philosophy of existence is immediately effaced by ontology . . . [because] this existence is interpreted as comprehension.’’ Being is inseparable from ‘‘openness,’’ from ‘‘understanding,’’ and from ‘‘truth’’ (Si 122–23). By interpreting being-in-the-world as disclosure (TI 28, 65, 67, 71, 75; TrO 346– 47), Heidegger shows that he has revised without really disrupting the western scene ‘‘where spirit is taken to be coextensive with knowing’’ (GP 155; cf. OB 99 and BI 100–101). Derrida makes essentially the same critique of Heidegger, whose preoccupation with proximity, light, and unveiling he sees as a nostalgic clinging to the metaphysics of presence that renders his analysis of human temporality far tamer than its press releases suggest.5 Derrida would be a left-Heideggerian, giving the name deconstruction to Heidegger’s destruction once it is freed from the romanticism and mysticism that keep appearing as its ‘‘on-theother -hand.’’ Accordingly, Levinas has a different kind of problem with Derrida, whom he associates with the Kant of the First Critique (WO 3, 5–6) and thereby with the skeptical dimension...