Abstract
For Levinas, the moment of real meaning is in the relation sustained with alterity. This relation is difficult or impossible to characterize philosophically, however, because to render it in comprehensive or objective terms would reduce the relation to one of comprehension and make it commensurate with the ego. Thus philosophy has an ambivalent status with respect to transcendence and ethics; but Levinas is convinced of the essentially transcendent or ethical meaning of Judaic practice: Talmudic exegesis, but also Jewish ritual and the keeping of the sabbath; and these elements are included within a conception of Jewish educational practices. Thus to what extent transcendent meaning can be discussed in philosophical terms and evinced in philosophical work (theoretical and practical)—or rather, to what extent transcendent meaning is possible at all—may be clarified by a sketch of Levinas’ broad approach to Jewish practice, particularly in terms of education. This essay shows how Jewish education is essential for transcendence and ethics for Levinas. Reference is made to several untranslated texts that Levinas published for intellectual but nonacademic French-Jewish journals, in which he explains his own pedagogical vocation. This offers an invaluable perspective on his philosophical and Judaic writings; and above all it gives an indication of his vision of the quotidian and life-long educational practices through which ethics and the transcendent relation between human beings are possible. Finally it raises the question of whether a secular or philosophical education could offer this as well.
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Notes
On the necessity of correlation, manifestation, philosophy, and justice, see Levinas (2006, pp. 6, 7, 157, 193, n. 33). Already in Totality and Infinity he claims his own fidelity to intellectualism and says that ethics or transcendence is the proper fulfillment of the desire for truth and a real exteriority. See Levinas (1969, p. 109). At the same time intellectualism cannot be reduced to formal, theoretical tendencies.
As Derrida misleading calls it. See especially Derrida (1991). Derrida thus ignores Levinas’ many references in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (which is the subject of Derrida’s essay), to a responsibility “which, to knowing, appears as an uncertainty, [but which is] however […] transcendence itself, before certainty and uncertainty.” Levinas (2006, p. 167).
This undecidability is the basis of many critiques. See for example Franck (2008). This also informs the conclusion of Jeffrey Kosky’s Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion (2001). Catherine Chalier says, “It of course remains difficult, indeed impossible, above all for exterior observers, and frequently for the person him or herself, to distinguish the response granted to the other from the [self’s] psychic passivity in the trace of the immemorial, thus by election, from that which is given out of fear for self.” Chalier (2002 p. 207).
Franck (2008, p. 17). Translations of French texts are my own unless another translator is mentioned.
This can be seen in his veritable demonization of philosophy contrasted with his own demonstrative and explicit championing of philosophy. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas says both that, “[t]he history of Western philosophy [… has been] the refutation of transcendence” (2006, p. 169); and that philosophy, “at its highest, exceptional hours stated the beyond of being and the one” (ibid., p. 178). Elsewhere he admits that, “we have to say that the tradition of the other is not necessarily religious, [but] that it is philosophical.” Levinas (1996a, p. 53).
Levinas (1997, p. 265). See Levinas (1996b, p. 10): “Religion (or, more precisely, Judaism) would be the way in which a de-substantiation of being is of itself produced [se produit], of itself is possible.” Fabio Ciaramelli claims that “[t]he role of Judaism in the work of Levinas […] is fundamental and culminates in the only authentic modality of a relation with the truth in itself that is not reduced to the unveiling of being to consciousness” (1983, pp. 591–2).
Levinas (1969, p. 70).
The former cannot be treated here. See Glass (2016).
Levinas (1997, p. 11). Of course he concludes here, as always, that “[e]thics is not the corollary of the vision of God, it is that very vision” (ibid., 17).
Levinas (1969, p. 241).
There are a number of works on Levinas on education that I treat elsewhere. See Todd (2003); Strhan (2012); Joldersma (2014); and see the essays collected in Levinas and Education: At the Intersection of Faith and Reason (ed. Egéa-Kuehne, 2008). None of these seriously take into consideration what education means for Levinas apart from some loose extrapolations from his brief comments in Totality and Infinity on the relation with the other as a teaching relation. (Strhan discusses religious education, but again without focusing on what this signifies for Levinas himself.) Claire Katz discusses Levinas’ approach to Judaic education in different terms than those posed in this article, in Levinas the Crisis of Humanism (2013). Autobiographical details on Levinas can be found in the two biographies published on Levinas; and two extremely interesting (if only anecdotal) accounts of his pedagogy from the perspective of his students can be found in Bouganim (1998); and Dahan (2013).
Levinas (1994a, p. 6).
Ibid., p. 6–7.
Levinas (1997, p. 267).
Levinas (2007, p. 206). See also Levinas’ discussion of the positive and pernicious forms that an adherence to universality can have in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” (1990). The more directly political aspects of Levinas’ writings on Jewish education—concerning the effects of the enlightenment and secularization and so on—are reviewed in Aronowicz (1999).
Levinas (2007, p. 210). In fact, Levinas names in particular Sartre. He refers to Sartre’s Reflexions sur la question juive (translated into English as Anti-Semite and Jew). See “Existentialism and Antisemitism,” and “When Sartre Discovers Holy History,” in Levinas (2004). This critique of Sartre is repeated in many places with respect to others, including Spinoza. See for example “Spinoza’s Background,” in Levinas (1994c).
Levinas (1994c, p. xiii).
Ibid., p. 133. Midrash, or a midrash, is essentially an exegesis or commentary. This essay, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” is from 1977. Levinas’ descriptions of “the break in substantial identity,” and of the “reader […as] in his own fashion […] a scribe,” foreshadow Derrida’s exposition of 1980 in “At this very moment in this work here I am.”
Levinas (1997, p. 274). This is an eventuality being avoided here as well as much as possible. The emphasis on the importance of the engagement of particular individuals can also be seen in the fact that contributors are named in the Talmud; and the Talmud contains stories and accounts of the persons and communities that contributed to it and who lived from it. See Levinas (1994c. p. 84), and Levinas (1997, p. 87). In 1935, in “The Contemporary Relevance of Maimonides,” Levinas writes: “The value of true philosophy does not situate itself in an impersonal eternity. Its luminous face is turned toward the temporal beings that we are. Its regard for our anxieties is a part of its divine essence. The truly philosophical aspect of a philosophy measures itself by its contemporary relevance” (2008, p. 91). This suggests that, at the time, Levinas was at least open to the possibility that philosophy could be a living tradition in some analogous way; though this comment predates his extended critiques of the philosophical tradition as an ontological tradition.
Levinas (1994a, p. 14). David Banon identifies four “modalities” of Levinas’ talmudic readings (which, nevertheless, do not reduce to a “science of commentary.” Banon (1998, p. 35). See Cohen (2001, pp. 237–63) for his own characterization of exegesis in which he distinguishes it from plain criticism.
This is a perennial part of Levinas’ critique of maieutics and anamnesis. Because the truth and that which is fundamentally meaningful is already written in the soul from time immemorial, the embodied self has nothing to learn from particulars, nor from human interlocutors. The human other in this case serves an instrumental purpose for knowledge, truth, and meaning; whereas for Levinas, the relation with the other is the basis of meaningfulness itself. See Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” (1987, pp. 49–50). Levinas thinks that a similar orientation is at the heart of most philosophies; and even if there are exceptional moments in the history of philosophy, for Levinas they seem to prove the rule.
Levinas and Mosel (1962, p. 23).
Levinas (1994c, p. 49).
Ibid., p. 135. And Levinas admits, “perhaps there are crucial reasons why a certain risk of subjectivism, in the pejorative sense of the term, must be run by the truth” (ibid., p. 134). By contrast, the rational-philosophical tradition affirms the solipsistic dimension of truth. One of Descartes’ claims to fame is the fact that ultimately he discovers the truth by himself, building the foundations of his knowledge in isolation, claiming to have cut himself free from all tradition. See Discourse on Method, Descartes (1988).
Levinas (1957, p. 20). Levinas also discusses here the bare material requirements of educational institutions.
Levinas (1958, p. 14).
Levinas (1960, p. 14): “The Jewish school will be a school of small number. The families, for the vast majority, will not renounce the excellence of the public school. Anyway this would be undesirable.”
Levinas (1997, p. 15). Elsewhere he says, “Judaism is situated at the crossroads of faith and logic” (ibid., p. 274). Levinas’ fidelity to intellectualism is thus seen equally in his approach to Judaism, even if Judaism is not in turn reducible to a theory or philosophy.
See “The Translation of the Scripture,” especially the conclusion. Levinas (1994b, pp., 53-4).
Levinas (1994a, p. 92). See Levinas and Mosel (1962, p. 24), where, against the opinion of Mosel, Levinas denies that Greek conceptuality is inherently a threat to Jewish life, philosophy, and education—as long as the means for Jewish traditions and education are assured. See Levinas (1994b, p. 173): “What I mean by ‘to say in Greek’ is the way of expressing ideas in accordance with our customary mode of presentation and interpretation in the university. It owes much to the Greeks.”
See also Levinas (1994a, p. 9–10).
Levinas (1994a, p. 5). Translation modified. See Levinas (1997, p. 21): “[t]he role played by ethics in the religious relation allows us to understand the meaning of Jewish universalism. A truth is universal when it applies to every reasonable being. A religion is universal when it is open to everyone.” And the fact that one is responsible for and before others implies “a particularism that conditions universality” (ibid., p. 22).
Franck (2008) appears to miss the difference between these two notions of universality in his critique in L’un-pour-l’autre. For Franck, one-for-all-others means one-for-the-totality, whereas for Levinas one-for-all-others means one-for-each-other, each relation being unique and incomparable.
Levinas (1997, p. 64). Some arguments against the ethical quality of Talmudic discourse are presented in Oona Eisenstadt’s response to Katz’s Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism. Among the points that she relays are Daniel Boyarin’s claim that the Talmudic indulgence of all views in fact vitiates real debate and concentrates authority in the hands of various institutions. On the other hand, Judith Butler and others are (successfully, perhaps?) introducing a Talmudic form into philosophical discourse, abstracted from explicitly Jewish concerns; and moreover, shame and other moral categories or phenomena important to Levinas have correlates in Socrates or existentialism. These debates cannot be entered into here. The scope of the present article is restricted to deciphering Levinas’ claims about education, Judaism, and ethics. However, it should be noted that, posed in the way one would for a short article or review, the question can hardly be broached at all. Einsenstadt warns “against the idea of Talmud as a repository of otherness on the basis of its inclusion of dissenting opinions.” Einsenstadt (2017). The warning is fair; but Levinas’ whole point is that the Talmud cannot be a ‘repository’ of anything, and viewing ‘ethical knowledge’ as something that can be deposited somewhere is precisely the philosophical bent that obviates the possibility of an ethical-intellectual tradition. Treated as a book with such and such form and content, the Talmud would already be a ‘dead’ work, or what Levinas pejoratively calls elsewhere a ‘document.’ It is only in taking up an oral tradition and the religious or cultural rituals and observances that go along with it that one can imbibe its wisdom. A deeper discussion of this, beyond the scope of Levinas’ work, will be for another place. In this article, the aim is only to arrive at a position from which one can adequately pose the question: Given Levinas’ manifold critiques of ontology and philosophy, and given the ethical sources he finds in Judaism, what would a genuinely ethical philosophy, tradition, and education look like?
Levinas (1997, p. 64). In one way or another, this tendency is found perhaps in all philosophy. Étienne Feron’s analysis, which takes as its goal to keep our eyes open to both the Saying and the Said (the ethical and ontological dimensions of Levinas’ thought), concludes with the claim that they are no different. See Feron (1992, p. 184): “The only coherent [interpretation] for understanding the internal trajectory of Otherwise than Being,” is that according to which “the Saying of transcendence and the Saying of being or manifestation are the same Saying, are the Same.” See Levinas (1994b, p. 43), where he refers to “the importance of the possibility even of differing opinions of doctors at the heart of monotheistic Revelation. ‘Both these and those speak the words of the Living God,’ according to the Talmud’s customary expression.”
On the use of texts without reducing meaning to the flat, formalized content of texts, see Trigano (2002, p. 168). Quoting Rosenzweig’s The New Thinking [Neues Denken], Levinas says: “The book is not a definitive goal, or even a provisional one. It must be justified, rather than put itself forward or be supported by other books. This justification is won in everyday life.” Levinas (1997, p. 185). See Rosenzweig (1995, pp. 55–59) on books.
Levinas (1997, p. 6).
Levinas (1994a, p. 15).
This is why, for example, an ‘epistemic humility’ and ‘postmodern’ acceptance of multiple narratives by itself does nothing to suggest ethical responsibility. It is not just a question of recognizing one’s finitude, but of recognizing the infinitude of the other. See Levinas (1987, p. 52). Traditionally this marks a non-philosophical moment, even if such a moment does play an important role in Plato, Descartes and others.
Levinas (1987, p. 132). Levinas himself radically separates religion and theology. See “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Levinas (1996a, p. 8). See Levinas’ Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (2006, p. 196, n. 19), where he says that his claims “do not lead to any theological thesis.” See ibid., p. 197, n. 25: “theological language destroys the religious situation of transcendence.”
Levinas (1994c, p. 120).
Levinas (1987, p. 133).
Ibid., p. 135.
Ibid.
Levinas (2006, p. 209).
Levinas (1994a, p. 34).
Ibid., p. 35.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 40.
Ibid., p. 43. Richard Cohen refers to this as a “specific incomprehension that lies at the root of monotheism […]. This otherwise-than-rationality, does not mean, however, that monotheism is irrational […]. [T]he sense of monotheism—whether in thought, feeling or action, or somehow otherwise—depends on seeing as precisely as possible how the monotheist religions concretely express the extra-logical ‘relation’ between God and creation.” Cohen (2010, pp. 212–213).
Levinas (1994a, p. 48). See Levinas (1994c, p. 79): “Without the theoretical activity of study, without the obligation of listening and reading […] nothing can enter us.” It is for this reason that Ciaramelli considers the reception of the Torah, for Levinas, as the development of an “intrigue between knowing and doing, the theory of knowledge and morality, ontology and ethics.” Ciaramelli (1983, p. 587). Wyschogrod points out that at least within his philosophical works, Levinas seems to claim “the upsurge of alterity as the prerequisite for religion, both as its necessary and sufficient condition,” making “difficult to understand his stress upon the necessity for ritual praxis.” Wyschogrod (2000, p. 183). This is the question to be addressed here. Perhaps Wyschogrod’s question should be reversed: is philosophical-ethical practice possible without the religious order that generally demands ritual praxis?
Levinas (1994c, p. 7).
Moses Mendelssohn describes the oral law and Jewish education in similar terms. See Mendelssohn (1983, pp. 102-3).
Levinas (1994a, p. 49).
Ibid., p. 38.
See Levinas (1994b, p. 58), where he describes the Talmud as “foreign to any blind commitment.”
As Levinas points out, concerning Talmudic exegesis, the literal meaning is only one of four; and it is furthermore not clear that the ‘literal’ meaning can be discerned until the other meanings have been drawn out. But it is not certain that this simplifies the task of adapting some Talmudic lessons to a more general context.
Levinas (1997, p. 218).
Without naming Levinas, Adriaan Peperzak grafts this Levinasian-Jewish attitude toward texts onto philosophy, and suggests that one could read, for example, the work of Kant in this way, allowing Kant’s writing to speak to one’s singular self. Peperzak (2012, p. 69). Could Kant concede that the rationally-incompatible but singular interpretations of his work are all legitimate? And if Kant and his most well-recognized interpreters would deny this, in what way could the Kantian-philosophical tradition be said to sustain the same kind of relations as the Judaic intellectual tradition? In any case, it is not a question simply of intellectual attitudes, but of whether a whole culture and intellectual tradition understands the intellect to be in the service of something transcendent to the self, and sees real wisdom as dependent on ethically responsible action. Referring to Levinas’ work, Bloechl says: “What we have [… is] a withdrawal of ethics wholly into the domain of religion. There is no relation to the other person—no aspect of any such relation—which does not have a meaning that is not, in the final analysis, religious.” Bloechl (2000, p. 222). In Être juif, Lévy claims that, indeed, already in 1935 with On Escape, Levinas describes being riveted to one’s being in the same terms he describes the Jew as being riveted to his or her existence. Levinas thus offers “Sinaitic revelation converted into philosophical proposition, into a notion,” save for one difference: Referring to an annotation by Jacques Rolland, Lévy explains, “in the conversion one loses the positivity of Jewish facticity: election.” Lévy (2003, p. 42; see Levinas, 2003, p. 75). Cohen characterizes philosophy without the religious dimensions invoked by Levinas as “tiresome ‘academic’ readings,” as “[s]limly based, lacking the commitment of a deliberate choice, forever taking refuge in hypotheses, conjectures, possibilities […]. [T]he alleged open-mindedness of such approaches is in truth but a more sophisticated form of close-mindedness.” Cohen (2001, p. 225). More simply, Chalier claims that the thought of alterity sustains philosophical thought and does not contradict it; but it “lives from what is not it [i.e., not philosophy].” Chalier (1982, p. 18).
Levinas (1997, p. 265).
Ibid., p. 213. See ibid., p. 18: “No intrinsic power is accorded to the ritual gesture, but without it the soul cannot be raised up to God.”
Ibid., p. 214. See ibid., p. 6: “One must desire good with all one’s heart and, at the same time, not simply desire it on the basis of a naive impulse of the heart.”
Levinas (1997, p. 96).
Levinas often expresses his distrust of institutions and their tendency to obscure transcendence in various ways. See Levinas (1997, p. 213) and Levinas (2006, p. 170). However, Levinas does not deny that institutions are important. They are required for politics and justice; and a Jewish institution—at least in the form of certain kinds of schooling—would seem to be necessary for Jewish education.
Aronowicz (1999, p. 72).
Ibid., 84. ‘Religion,’ ‘ethics,’ and Levinas’ other articulations of transcendence do not rely on the authority of Judaism, as Kosky rightly claims. See Kosky (2001, pp. 157-8). But Judaism was perhaps the real historical enactment that brought about such a meaning (ibid., 164). “[W]hile phenomenology alone can access the responsibility of the self as such, it can do so only insofar as it has received the notion of responsibility and the terms by which it will articulate it from the fact of Judaism, its documents and their reading” (ibid., 170). Does this imply that Judaism already has some phenomenological aspect to its intellectual practices? In any case, it seems that Judaism, or some analogous practice and tradition, is required for transcendence and ethics.
Aronowicz (1999, pp. 85–6).
Ibid,. 94. See Levinas’ “Écrit et sacré,” in which he tries to show the religious nature of all language, of which the Bible would be only the superlative example. Levinas (1989). See also Levinas (1994b, p. 112): “Is not the prophetic gift latent in all inspiration, and is not inspiration the sublime ambiguity of human language?”
Levinas (1997, pp. 17–18).
Ibid., p. 225. This is of course a claim he makes in his ‘Judaic’ work and not in his more ‘philosophical’ work. His philosophical writings would, obviously, imply as a fundamental principle that a non-Jewish ethical responsibility is also possible. The question here is how, for Levinas, this would work. What is a philosophical ethics that differs from an ontology?
Ibid., pp. 250–251.
Ibid., p. 248.
Ibid., p. 251.
Ibid., p. 159. See ibid., p. 275.
Ibid., p. 251.
Levinas (1957, p. 20).
See Katz (2013, p. xii).
Levinas (1994, p. 80): “There is no justice if the judges do not have virtue in the flatly moral sense of the term. There cannot be a separation between the private life and the public life of the judge.”
Least of all does being ‘born Jewish’ alone say anything of one’s embodying ethical responsibility. Levinas is critical of Israel insofar as it fails to embody the Jewish values that ought to have been its foundation. See Levinas (1997, pp. 5, 218). Note also that Rosenzweig abandons the secular university system, but also sustains a reproach against the contemporaneous Judaic communities and their educational norms, which he sees as also having become out of touch with a living tradition. See Rosenzweig (1955). See also Hanus (2011a).
In a Talmudic lecture Levinas recounts a story in which “Le Rav” slights his teacher in a seemingly trivial, forgettable way, but is yet never forgiven because his minor insult is motivated by the unconscious ambition of acceding to the academic position of his master. See Levinas (1994a, 25). That is, even a lifetime spent devoted to Jewish education does not prevent one’s ethical failing; and in some way this conceit was wrapped up in erudition and education itself. See a similar story of academic egoism in what concerned the Rabbi Zera in Levinas’, “Old as the World” (ibid., p. 86).
Levinas (1997, p. 14).
Ibid., p. 281. Translation modified. The English translation seems to be missing a phrase contained in the original.
See Levinas (1994b, p. 203). Levinas admits that the Jew sometimes uses this language to speak against this tradition, just as he uses philosophical language to articulate an escape from philosophy.
Levinas (1984, p. 320).
Levinas (1997, p. 282). From an article entitled, “Antihumanism and Education,” originally published in 1973.
Levinas (1960, p. 12).
Levinas (Levinas 1994c, p. 78. See ibid., p. 77).
Ibid., p. 98.
Ibid., p. 200. But he says: “Up until now we have attempted only an apologetics which, without great difficulty, was limited to modeling the truths of the Torah on the noble models of the West. The Torah requires something more” (ibid., p. 199).
Ibid., p. 118. See ibid., p. 144: “[T]he entire Revelation is bound up around daily ritual conduct. This ritualism suspends the immediacy of the relations with Nature’s given and determines, against the blinding spontaneity of Desires, the ethical relation with the other man. To the extent that this ritualism does this, it confirms the conception of God in which He is welcomed in the face-to-face with the other and in the obligation towards the other.”
Katz (2013) offers a vision for the humanities, adopted or adapted from Levinas’ writing, according to which a secular tradition might be made to take on some of the qualities of Judaic ethics. Katz’s intention is surely to bring the particularity of an important teaching to a more public domain, or to a platform more easily accessible to a general audience—a goal that would seem to be part of ethics itself. However it is not clear to what extent this is possible, as this article tries to show.
Levinas (1997, p. 279).
Ibid., p. 51. See Hanus (2011b, p. 52): the question of the Jewish being [être Juif] and the “universal language” of the university, “is the question of assimilation.” Hanus maintains “it is incumbent that Levinas be saved from his university institutionalization, as these texts themselves invite to be done” (ibid., p. 67). The Cahiers d’études lévinassiennes, for its part, claims that it “is not a university institution but […that it] has not renounced being a space of study and thought.” See Brenner and Hanus (2011, p. 7). Derrida (1991, p. 31) claims that Levinas’ way of speaking “mimics the thesis and the code of the university community; it is ironic.”
Levinas (1958, p. 14).
Levinas (1997, p. 252).
See Chrétien (2000).
Levinas (1997, p. 162). Translation modified.
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Glass, J. Education as ethics: Emmanuel Levinas on Jewish schooling. Cont Philos Rev 51, 481–505 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9440-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9440-1