Abstract
According to Emmanuel Levinas, the individual bears an infinite obligation to the other person. In the Talmudic reading “Judaism and revolution,” Levinas suggests that we move from the ethical encounter (and infinite obligation) to social relationships (with limited obligations) using contracts—both particular contracts and the social contract. So social relationships are created by limiting obligation, and as a result these relationships can only be practically acceptable, not ethical. Jewish religious practice for Levinas should also be understood as a set of negotiated limits to our infinite obligation.
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Notes
I follow Levinas’s practice of capitalizing ‘Other’ when it refers to the other person.
The qualification in the main text—“(purportedly) secular work”—is meant to indicate my own view, namely that there is an important theological dimension to the work Levinas presents as secular, in particular Time and the Other (1987) and Totality and Infinity (1969). See cohen (2014). Michael Fagenblat (2010) explores the close and interesting relationship between Levinas’s religiously oriented and secular texts in a systematic way. Further references to Levinas’s central works use the following (customary) abbreviations: Nine Talmudic Readings (NTR), Time and the Other (TO), Totality and Infinity (TI), and Otherwise Than Being and Beyond Essence (OB).
The term ‘justice’ is ambiguous in Levinas’s work. In a late interview, Levinas notes that the terms ‘justice’ and ‘ethics’ are used as synonyms in Totality and Infinity (Wright et al. 1989, p. 171). But at the time of the interview, after the publication of Otherwise Than Being, Levinas explained that he wanted to restrict ‘justice’ to having meaning in the political context, where it is a matter of calculation. But the two terms remain confused: even in Otherwise Than Being Levinas suggests that justice is a matter of ethics—for example, in this passage: “Justice remains justice only in a society… in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest” (OB, p. 159). This “impossibility” is a matter of ethics, not calculated responsibilities in a social or political context, so Levinas’s comment in the interview seems at least in part inconsistent with his own text in Otherwise Than Being.
This reading is not idiosyncratic: with Roger Burggraeve, “The hunger of the Other, we have seen, is an absolute demand which permits no exception, no qualification and no calculation, but orders an immediate and total commitment of my resources” (2002, p. 136, see also p. 110, and see Burggraeve 1981, p. 30). Katz makes the same point (2006, p. 91).
Levinas’s further comment here is worth noting. He suggests that freedom can be lost without violence, meaning that freedom can be lost due to economic pressure or economic power: “This position [of being a hired worker] is dangerous to his freedom because he runs the risk of losing his liberty without undergoing any violence; to be sure, the person is still acting willingly since he engages himself and stays within the interpersonal commerce of an exchange; but commerce is at the border line of alienation, and freedom easily turns into non-freedom” (NTR, p. 97).
In the passage in the main text, Johanan instructs his son, “As long as they have not begun to work, go and specify: you are only entitled to bread and dry vegetables.” The Talmud takes the conjunction here—bread and dry vegetables—to indicate that the meal offered goes beyond mere subsistence; see NTR, p. 100.
One might be able to read John Rawls’ Theory of Justice in something like Levinas’s terms: for Rawls, parties to the social contract are committed to persons being free and equal, and they are committed to society being a fair system of social cooperation, and given these commitments they enter into the contractual setting to determine what, exactly, those commitments require.
The phrase “moral commander” is from Morgan (2007, p. 179). The material in the present paper focuses on Levinas’s account in Totality and Infinity (1969). Levinas’s later work, including Otherwise Than Being (1981), introduces a new set of terms and concepts connected with God, in particular the term “illeity.” Discussion of that shift in Levinas’s work is outside the scope of the present paper, but Morgan argues that the account in Otherwise Than Being is consistent with the one in Totality and Infinity on the particular point in the main text: even in the later work we are not to understand references to “God” as a Being who commands us to care for others. See especially Morgan’s discussion at 188–189.
Morgan’s description of the face in transcendental terms is part of a larger debate in the literature—the question is whether the face is to be understood in concrete, empirical terms, as an experience, or in transcendental terms. See his chapters three and four.
Note also: any attempt at formulating and/or articulating our obligation necessarily limits it, so the very attempt at formulating/articulating our obligations in Talmud is already at odds with Levinas’s account of our obligations being infinite. Talmud already betrays our infinite obligation.
The Talmud’s discussion here concerns the length of the work day, and derives limits from Psalm 104, verses 22–23: “When the sun rises, they [the beasts of the forest—wild animals] leave and go hide in their lairs; man then goes on to his work, to his labor until evening.” Levinas comments: “As little as I have ever understood the exact meaning of the expression ‘the opening up of the soul in its love of God,’ I ask myself, nonetheless, whether there isn’t a certain connection between the establishment of working hours and the love of God, with or without the opening up of the soul. I am even inclined to believe that there are not many other ways to love God than to establish these working hours correctly, no way that is more urgent. A psalm is after all not such a bad text on which to found justice for the toiling man.” See NTR, p. 103.
We could note a further parallel: Talmud reports debate about the requirements of religious practice, most often without settling those requirements, so Talmud is—in that sense—the recording of a dialogical process, as well as an invitation to participate in the ongoing dialogue, which in the religious context serves the function of negotiated contractual agreement among persons.
Further passages from Levinas’s work support this approach; for example, “our relations with men… give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of. The establishing of this primacy of the ethical, that is, of the relationship of man to man… a primacy of an irreducible structure upon which all the other structures rest…, is one of the objectives of the present work” (TI, p. 79, my emphasis). For a further defense of this line of thought see (Cohen 2014).
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Acknowledgments
Revisions to this paper were made while in residence at National Sun Yat-sen University; the author thanks the Department of Business Management there for generous support. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Daniel A. Cord, z’’l.
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Cohen, M.A. The movement from ethics to social relationships for Levinas, and why decency obscures obligation. Int J Philos Relig 79, 89–100 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9522-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9522-5