Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein

4 Levinas on What Is Demanded of Us

Levinas survived the Second World War under difficult and humiliating circumstances,1 while his family, with the exception of his wife and daughter, perished. These experiences may well have shaped Levinas’s sense that what is demanded of us is an “infinite” willingness to be available to and for the other’s suffering. “The Other’s hunger—be it of the flesh, or of bread—is sacred; only the hunger of the third party limits its rights,” Levinas states in the preface to Difficult Freedom. To understand fully what Levinas means here would be to understand his whole philosophy. I want to attempt a beginning at such an understanding. Levinas’s Mission to the Gentiles Levinas’s audience is typically a gentile audience; he celebrates Jewish particularity in essays addressed to Christians and to modern people generally. Levinas is fully aware of this. Thus he writes (in “A Religion for Adults,” 13), “Lest the union between men of goodwill which I de4 Levinas on What Is Demanded of Us Levinas on What Is Demanded of Us 69 sire to see be brought about only in a vague and abstract mode, I wish to insist here on the particular routes open to Jewish monotheism.” A few pages later, he writes: A truth is universal when it applies to every reasonable being. A religion is universal when it is open to all. In this sense the Judaism that links the Divine to the moral has always aspired to be universal. But the revelation of morality, which discovers a human society, also discovers the place of election, which in this universal society, returns to the person who receives this revelation. This election is made up not of privileges but of responsibilities . It is a nobility based not on author’s rights [droit d’auteur] or on a birthright [droit d’aînesse] conferred by a divine caprice, but on the position of each human I [moi] . . . The basic intuition of moral growing-up perhaps consists in perceiving that I am not the equal of the Other. This applies in a very strict sense: I see myself obligated with respect to the Other; consequently I am infinitely more demanding of myself than of others . . . This “position outside nations” of which the Pentateuch speaks is realized in the concept of Israel and its particularism. It is a particularism that conditions universality, and it is a moral category rather than a historical fact to do with Israel [my emphasis—HP]. (21–22) In this passage Levinas reinterprets the doctrine of the election of Israel in terms of his own ethics–phenomenology, so that it becomes a “particularism that conditions universality ”—becomes, that is, the asymmetry that Levinas everywhere insists on between what I require of myself and what I am entitled to require of anyone else; and he tells us that so reinterpreted, election “is a universal moral category rather than a historical fact to do with Israel.” Here and elsewhere, Levinas universalizes Judaism. To understand him, one has to understand the paradoxical claim implicit in his writing that, in essence, all human beings are Jews. In one place, we see this universalization of the cate- 70 Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life gory of Jew connected with Levinas’s own losses in the Holocaust. The dedication page to Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence bears two dedications. The upper one is in French and reads (in translation), “To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions and millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same antisemitism.” The other dedication is in Hebrew, and using traditional phraseology, it dedicates the volume to the memories of his father, mother, brother, father-in-law, and mother-in-law. What is most striking about this page is the way in which Levinas dedicates the book to the memory of “those closest ” (to himself), and simultaneously identifies all victims of the same “hatred of the other man,” regardless of their nation and religious affiliation, as victims of antisemitism. Ethics as First Philosophy Levinas is famous for the claim that ethics is first philosophy2 —by which he means not only that ethics must not be derived from any metaphysics, not even an “ontic” metaphysics (i.e., an “antiontological” antimetaphysics) like Heidegger ’s, but also that all...