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Heidegger, Buber and Levinas: Must We Give Priority to Authenticity or Mutuality or Holiness?

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Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference

Part of the book series: Contributions To Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 86))

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Abstract

After considering Buber’s and Levinas’s critiques of Heidegger and of each other, I propose that we should acknowledge authenticity (Heidegger), “essential relations” of love and friendship (Buber), and holiness (Levinas) as aspects of a good life, though they pull in different directions. We should resist the temptation to take sides in a battle between different approaches to the complex nature of our social being.

Thanks to Prof. Dermot Moran for inviting this essay as a keynote address to the Dublin conference, “Discovering the ‘We’: the Phenomenology of Sociality” sponsored by the Irish Research Council (May, 2013). I delivered a later version at Vassar College in honor of the retirement of my beloved professor, Mitchell Miller (September, 2013).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Jewish Co-Existentialism: Being with the Other,” in Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Situating Existentialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

  2. 2.

    Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism,” Outside the Subject (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 18.

  3. 3.

    Martin Buber, “What is Man?,” Chapter 5 in Between Man and Man (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

  4. 4.

    Buber, “What is Man?,” 186–188.

  5. 5.

    Buber, “What is Man?,” 150.

  6. 6.

    Buber, “What is Man?,” 168.

  7. 7.

    Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 163–168.

  8. 8.

    Heidegger, Being and Time, 328.

  9. 9.

    Martin Buber, “Elements of the Interhuman” in The Knowledge of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 69.

  10. 10.

    Buber, “Elements of the Interhuman,” 81.

  11. 11.

    Heidegger, Being and Time, 309.

  12. 12.

    Heidegger, Being and Time, 211.

  13. 13.

    Buber, “Dialogue” in Between Man and Man,” 35.

  14. 14.

    Buber, “What is Man?,” 169.

  15. 15.

    Buber, “What is Man?,” 170.

  16. 16.

    Maurice Natanson, The Journeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1970), 64.

  17. 17.

    Buber, “What is Man?,” 202 and 207.

  18. 18.

    Heidegger, Being and Time, 298.

  19. 19.

    Jesse Kalin, The Films of Ingmar Bergman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 80–81.

  20. 20.

    Kalin, The Films of Ingmar Bergman, 71–72.

  21. 21.

    Buber, “What is Man?,” 208.

  22. 22.

    Buber, “What is Man?,” 210.

  23. 23.

    Michael McConnell, “Don’t Neglect the Little Platoons” in Martha Nussbaum, ed., For Love of Country? (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), 82.

  24. 24.

    “Interrogation of Martin Buber” in Sydney and Beatrice Rome, eds., Philosophical Interrogations (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 23.

  25. 25.

    Emmanuel Levinas, “The Other, Utopia and Justice” in Is It Righteous to Be?,”(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 203.

  26. 26.

    Levinas, “Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism,” 16–17.

  27. 27.

    Levinas, “The Other, Utopia and Justice” 108.

  28. 28.

    Levinas, “The Proximity of the Other” in Is It Righteous to Be?,”(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 213.

  29. 29.

    Levinas,“Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism,” 18.

  30. 30.

    Levinas, “The Proximity of the Other” in Is It Righteous to Be?,”(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 213.

  31. 31.

    Levinas, “The Proximity of the Other,” 218.

  32. 32.

    Levinas,“Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism,” 18–19.

  33. 33.

    For Heidegger’s distinction between “leaping in” (or “dominating solicitude”) and “leaping ahead” (or “liberating solicitude”), see Being and Time, 158.

  34. 34.

    Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice and Love” in Is It Righteous to Be?,” 177.

  35. 35.

    Levinas, “The Philosopher and Death,” in Is It Righteous to Be?, 126.

  36. 36.

    Levinas, “The Philosopher and Death,” 125–126.

  37. 37.

    Levinas, “The Other, Utopia and Justice,” 205.

  38. 38.

    “Interview with Emmanuel Levinas” in Richard Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Levinas (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), 24 and 26.

  39. 39.

    Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press, 1956), 40–42.

  40. 40.

    Levinas, “The Proximity of the Other,” 218.

  41. 41.

    Levinas, “Dialogue with Martin Buber,” Proper Names (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 37.

  42. 42.

    Levinas, “Dialogue with Martin Buber,” 38.

  43. 43.

    See Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

  44. 44.

    Martin Luther King, Jr., “On Being a Good Neighbor,” in Introduction to Ethics, ed. Gary Perspece (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995).

  45. 45.

    CBS Sunday Morning: May 5, 2013.

  46. 46.

    Michael Ignatieff, “The Scandal of Martyrs” The New Republic, 9/22/97.

  47. 47.

    Zygmunt Bauman, “Quality and Inequality,” The Guardian, 12/28/2001.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Connecticut College, New London, CT, USA

    Lawrence Vogel

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  1. Lawrence Vogel
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Correspondence to Lawrence Vogel .

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  1. Philosophical Studies, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    Lisa Foran

  2. Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Rozemund Uljée

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Vogel, L. (2016). Heidegger, Buber and Levinas: Must We Give Priority to Authenticity or Mutuality or Holiness?. In: Foran, L., Uljée, R. (eds) Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 86. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39232-5_15

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