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Log In Sign Up. Download Free PDF. Claire Katz. Download PDF. A short summary of this paper. Assimilation failed because it did not placate the non-Jews, or put an end to anti-Semitism; on certain points, it stirred up heated reactions and arguments once more. Anguish and anxiety still surreptitiously alter apparently free behavior and every Jew remains, in the largest sense of the word, a Marrano. If Zarathustra is successful in teaching the Overman, the Overman will be he whose soul is so full that he is open to all others and that self- preservation is no longer his highest priority.
This capacity to open himself to the world is both superlative and self-destructive. He allows all influences to touch him—thus, he lets everything come into him.
This view, like the one Levinas promotes, runs counter to the prevailing themes promoted by social Darwinists, who believe that self-preservation is the highest priority. I open this essay with a reference to Nietzsche and Rousseau precisely because they have provided educational models that continue to influence our current educational system with regard to its understanding of teaching and learning as well as the goals of education.
My aim in this essay is not to demonstrate that this reading of Nietzsche is correct. My argument does not depend on whether the reception of Nietzsche has remained faithful to what Nietzsche intended, but only that this happens to be a model for understanding the process of education. I have argued elsewhere that while both Nietzsche and Rousseau were able diagnosticians, they both failed in their respective attempts to cure the disease they found.
These inhumanities, Levinas would say, signify a violence toward the other that is of a wholly different order from those that preceded them. Like his predecessors, he offers an educational model as a solution, but here the model—Jewish education—is uniquely different from those offered by Rousseau and Nietzsche. Judaism is not a religion of individuals—for example, synagogue membership does not count individuals, but families. The liturgy in a synagogue is the same on any given day in synagogues around the world.
For Levinas, then, the question is not simply whether some people continue to call themselves Jews; the question is whether Judaism has lost something central to it. The discussion of the separation between church and state that Levinas takes up in this essay could not be more pressing than it is today, here in the United States and elsewhere.
It is to the Jew who resists, who tries to swim against this current, that the secular is revealed as religious. Thus, the Jew must make a decision, a decision that includes a return to Hebrew. And again, as he does in every other essay on Jewish education, he reminds his readers that this return, this reclaiming of Judaism, does not refute the principles achieved through the French Revolution and the development of the French Republic.
Do we still believe in the excellence of Judaism? I want to emphasize the biographical point that Levinas returned to France after World War II and remained in France for the duration of his life—the next 50 years. The very same principles that guaranteed these opportunities also enabled the Republic to disregard or marginalize the particular groups within it. This ambivalence runs throughout his work. I am still mindful and proud of it today. Each in its own way reveals Levinas as a teacher and a philosopher of the highest order.
But one statement in particular stands out in its unique character. Chouchani, it is true, entered the soul of the Talmud! How indeed is one able to understand the Torah without the light of the oral law! Although this fable is presented as a hypothetical meeting between Levinas and the Heavenly Throne, one cannot help but wonder if Steg is voicing his own sentiments as the president of the AIU and the ENIO, organizations that identify education as central to their respective missions.
When Levinas stands before the heavenly throne and must recount his accomplishments, the Eternal One is impressed by his intellectual accomplishments. The range of negative attitudes creates a powerful force pushing against education, hindering any possibility of real reform: no one believes that education produces anything positive; only those who are not good at anything else would go into teaching; and teaching is so easy that teachers should not be compensated adequately for doing such a job.
In contrast to this view of education and teaching, Levinas saw both as salvific, not only for the Jewish people but also for humankind in the larger sweep of history. But it is not lost on any of his students from the ENIO; nor is it lost on those who read his essays on Jewish education that his view of education is not just a side hobby in which he engaged. It was fundamental to his philosophical project. However, Levinas spent the greatest part of his days on administrative tasks as a school director, melding a real interest in pedagogy with his research in philosophy.
He proudly states that the ENIO was one of the rare places where one could reflect on Jewish education. That is, his essays in Jewish education mirror the same suspicion he has of Western or European man—even that which he calls the philosopher—found in his other writings, both Jewish and philosophical. The political structure that appears secular in fact masks the Christianity that pervades it. Although he sees a fraternal relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and although he credits individual Christians whose courage during the Nazi occupation is to be noted and commended, he nonetheless sees Christianity as the origin of the Western subjectivity that allows for an ego- centric ethics and a subjectivity that values freedom above all.
As Levinas warns us in these essays, the Jew who pushes against the mask cannot help but see behind it; the Jew who does not resist the status quo continues to believe that he is following a secular, universal state. Yet, the latter believes this only because he is not versed enough in either Judaism or Christianity to know otherwise.
Read together, they ask us to consider both the peculiar nature of Judaism and its potential for a universal application. There is a dimension of Judaism, Levinas argues, that is universal and this dimension is also what makes Judaism uniquely Jewish. On the one hand, law is necessary to safeguard our freedoms—to maintain peace among the nations, with other states.
Humanism worships the principles for which it stands. Levinas reveals his distaste for this kind of humanism when he notes that the focus on the beautiful transmission of these ideals led to a focus on the beautiful language in which these ideals are expressed.
The attachment to books is also fundamental to Judaism, which is tethered to the Torah, the Talmud, and other sacred writings. Judaism too is vulnerable to degenerating into ideology. Have the rights of man and of the citizen and the new spirit that conquered in the eighteenth century not fulfilled in our minds the promises of the prophets? It severed the particular link it had to the prophets, in particular, to the rabbinic tradition through which the voices of the prophets reverberate.
This forgetting, however, enabled a Judeo-Christian friendship, a noble friendship secured by noble and courageous actions during World War II.
But this friendship masks their fundamental differences at the level of doctrine and belief. As a result, rabbinic exegesis, which is the hallmark of a Jewish reading of scriptural writings, has not simply been lost or forgotten; it has been rendered inappropriate.
With the move toward liberal humanism, an idiosyncratic religion no longer served any purpose. For Levinas, however, it is the move away from Judaism that leads down an unreflective and dangerous path. Religious instruction has become reduced to a few hours a week and to a bar or bat mitzvah where the student recites basic elements of reading and a few quickly forgotten gestures; it becomes separated from the very humanism that informed it in the first place.
Levinas tracks this loss to the Emancipation, to the principles of that gave Jews their citizenship even as it asked them to give up their particularity as Jews. It is not that Levinas wants to give up the privileges—rights—that accompanied this emancipation. Rather, he recognizes that insofar as Emancipation was grounded on a Christian structure, which the secularists ignored, Jews were increasingly encouraged to become more like Christians.
In order for Jewish education to mean something other than religious instruction narrowly construed, Levinas claims that we needed a crisis of humanism such as we have seen in the inhumanities of the 20th century: World War I, the Russian Revolution refuting itself in Stalinism, fascism, Hitlerism, World War II, atomic bombings, genocide, and most certainly the philosophical discourse of Heidegger, which subordinates the human to the anonymous gains of Being.
While the former expresses totality, the latter belongs to singularity. He emancipates from totality and objectivity, looking for his principles in relation to God, to Infinity. The criticism of Hegelian thought is strong both in Levinas and Kierkegaard, thus leading to singularity and to a responsibility which cannot be transferred to anyone else. The philosophers both contest the absorption of the Other in the Same and state the necessity of an individual ethical answer.
Accusing the latter of violence and amoralism seems really unjustified. Anyway, Levinas is not always severe with his predecessor. Actually, in the Postscript, Climacus points out the limits of disciplines as mathematics or history, which are inevitably incomplete and make the subject accidental.
Becoming an observer 13 deprives the latter of its individuality, whose existence is wholly indifferent. It implies a separation from universal knowledge and, furthermore, a relation to absolute alterity. Kierkegaard states that subjective truth involves a passion of the infinite.
What really matters is not the correspondence between the thought and the object, that is the idea of God and God Himself. Subjective thought is focused on inwardness, on the relation between God and the ego. Subjective truth15is nothing else than faith. Objectively, it is a paradox and implies uncertainty.
However, Kierkegaard gives it the highest value and Levinas clearly appreciates it. Thus Kierkegaard brings something absolutely new to European philosophy: the possibility of attaining truth through the ever-recurrent inner rending of doubt, which is not only an invitation to verify evidence, but a part of evidence itself.
Belief is not, for him, an 16 imperfect knowledge of truth, a truth without certainty, a degradation of knowledge. Doubt implies a continuous retreat from certainty, presumed by the right sciences and historical knowledge. It pushes toward the pursuit of something else, whose existence is not proved.
Doubt is inseparable from belief, from subjective truth. Objectively, it is an expression of an imperfect knowledge, while, subjectively, it is the expression17 of truth itself. The uncertainty of the latter implies justification, or even silence. Subjective truth is an individual experience, requiring a relation with an absolute and unknowable alterity. The uncertainty of faith does not imply either degradation or negativity. In Totality and Infinity, the Infinite in the finite causes a breach in theoretic intentionality, overflowing every concept.
Human thought is imperfect, because it is incapable of containing God. It does not mean that the perfect infinite is a negation of the imperfect finite , but that Nordicum-Mediterraneum [nome.
The idea of Infinity 18 is then positive: it is not a lack of relation, but a relation to the absolutely distant. This relation, according to both Kierkegaard and Levinas, cannot be expressed with an objective knowledge. Turning to transcendence means separating from universal thought and becoming a subject. Even if the philosophers agree on this general statement, there are some differences separating them. While Kierkegaard is more concerned for the subject, Levinas gives priority to the other.
The irreducibility of the subject is the condition of the irreducibility of the other. The author of Totality and Infinity thinks in the opposite way: the irreducibility of the other is prior to the individuation of the self. While Kierkegaard focuses only on the separation of the ego from totality, Levinas has two concerns: the individuation of the subject and the irreducibility of the other to the violence of the ego.
Thinking through intentionality and acting through free will are means of power on the other person. This21is why Levinas puts responsibility before freedom and the other before the self. The subject, in Kierkegaard, follows its own will: the leap of faith is an act of freedom. It does not mean that life involves egoism, since the other person is important. The 22 relation to God does not make sense without a commitment to the neighbour.
Levinas does not say that the subject is not free, but that responsibility precedes will. The priority of the other on the self is what differentiates Levinas from Kierkegaard.
They also assert the relation to Infinity as a modality of subjective uniqueness, that leads to recognize the irreducibility of the other person. The irreducibility of the Infinite Another point in common between Levinas and Kierkegaard is the view of Infinity itself. It coincides with God, who is absolutely Other and distant from the subject.
Precisely because there is the absolute difference between God and man, man24 expresses himself most perfectly when he absolutely expresses the difference. This sentence places him in the middle of Christian tradition and contemporary philosophy. The author of Fear and Trembling never hides his protestant culture and concern for the life of faith. Anyway, his thought is not strictly theological, but primarily existential.
The relation to Infinity, apart from its religious meaning, gives the highest sense to individual life. It does not matter if God exists or not, if He is a supreme being or something else.
This is a concern of observers, of objective thinkers. What is really important is the relation between the subject and the divine, the finite and the infinite. Turning to transcendence, to the absolutely Other, is the only way for the individual to be itself. This secret cannot be communicated, only justified or expressed with silence. Saying the difference means exactly this: going beyond thought and language, thus facing incomprehension.
The only way to express difference is manifesting Infinity in a finite existence. Becoming subjective means becoming an extraordinary 25 being, in the middle of worldly immanence and divine transcendence.
The individual is called by God to follow a vocation in everyday life, to be a witness of His will. It implies going against the universal systems of thought and ethics, against an established order, to affirm individuality and follow what is asked to inwardness. Notwithstanding the impossibility to grasp Infinity, the finite being answers to its call. The relation between the two goes beyond ontology and leads to ethics not the universal one, but the one following religion.
Infinity manifests itself through the evidence of a singular existence, so that the latter is, 26 at the same time, the object of transcendence and the condition for its incarnation. There is a sort of exchange between Infinity and a finite being: the latter gives space to the former through transfiguration, 27 while the former knows itself through the gaze of absolute alterity. Transfiguration Forklarelse is not an explanation Forklaring , but an expression without words, recalled by the witness of faith.
When Abraham raises the knife over Isaac, he is answering to the divine call, even if he does not understand it. Abraham expresses Infinity through a finite action. And, when his hand is drawn back by a new command, he rejoices. He has obeyed and, at the same time, his son is alive. The passion for divinity, that pushes the individual toward an incomprehensible choice, leads to transfiguration. Infinity is expressed through the existence of a finite being.
The subject is separated from God and lives an independent life. It does not need anything else, but feels a tension inside. The relation between the finite and the infinite is Desire, which is not directed to fulfilment, but to absolute alterity. Desire is absolute if the desiring being is mortal and the Desired invisible. Invisibility does not denote an absence in relation; it implies relations with what is not given, of which there is no idea.
Vision is an adequation of the idea with the thing, a comprehension that encompasses. Non-adequation does not denote a simple negation or an obscurity of the idea, but — beyond the light and the night, beyond the knowledge measuring 28 beings — the inordinateness of Desire. Desire is desire for the absolutely other. This tension towards the absolutely Other is primarily affective. It goes beyond the limits of thought and the adequation of the object to its idea.
The Desire of Infinity originally belongs to subjectivity, which is affected by transcendence in an exceptional way. It is the trace of absence, of otherwise than being. It cannot be grasped by thought, because it goes beyond ontology and does not imply the existence of the creator.
It is a semantic ambiguity, what unsays itself without negating. The trace of Infinity cannot thus 29be represented, since there is nothing in common between the subject and God. The affective relation to an absolute alterity, paradoxical and impossible to be explained in words, thus unites both Levinas and Kierkegaard. However, the former does not agree with the latter, when he describes the nature of the metaphysical desire.
First of all, it has nothing to do with need or passion. The subject feels a tension to Infinity when its separation is complete: the ego is wholly Nordicum-Mediterraneum [nome. The Desire of God is not looking for fulfilment, but pushes the subject to ethics. The command of Infinity indicates the other 31person as the addressee of moral action and establishes freedom on responsibility.
First of all, the latter has its root in anxiety, the former in responsibility. Even if they are both sources of morality, the former is based on freedom, the latter on responsibility, which precedes freedom itself. Shortly, the infinite is, according to both the thinkers, absolutely different from the finite. The latter is moved by the desire of the former, even if the authors do not agree on its nature: the tension is active and passionate for Kierkegaard, passive and responsible for Levinas.
From the absolute Other to the singular other Nordicum-Mediterraneum [nome. However, according to Levinas and Kierkegaard, it is not enough for the fulfilment of individual existence.
The relation to the absolute Other thus leads to the relation to the singular other. Levinas accuses Kierkegaard of transcending 32 the ethical stage and ignoring the other person for the sake of religion. Stating the irreducibility of the subject and of the other person is not enough for Kierkegaard.
It could lead to an egoistic life, where the relation to Infinity would be purely ascetical. The love towards the other person, instead, is a commitment that cannot be avoided. Levinas is the philosopher of alterity par excellence, since the relation to the other, both singular and absolute, is constitutive of the subject. And this relation implies a radical view, that is the impossibility for the I to exercise its power on the other person.
Even if the latter can be partially reduced to phenomenality or submitted to freedom, there is something escaping the grasp of the ego. When the subject is wholly constituted as separated, the other person reveals, through the Face, the command of Infinity. Freedom is then inhibited, not as countered by a resistance, but as arbitrary, guilty, and timid; but in its guilt it rises to responsibility.
The violence of thought and freedom are nothing but expressions of the tyranny of the Same. The encounter with the other person makes the subject aware not only of its own individuality already discovered in the atheistic separation , but even of its own uniqueness. The transcendence of the Face is a transfiguration, not an incarnation, of the transcendence of God.
The call of Infinity indicates the other person as the addressee of ethics, pushing the subject to responsibility. The latter cannot be assumed by anybody else, it is the sign of a uniqueness in election. The 35 transcendence undoes the deepest core of the ego with an unavoidable assignation. Ethico-religious life is then directed by the divine call to the other person. Both Levinas and Kierkegaard see absolute alterity as directed towards singular alterity.
It is a threefold relation, whose terms are the subject, God and the other person. However, the two thinkers have different views about its modality. Love God is above36 all else; then you also love the neighbor and in the neighbor every human being. Paradoxically, the mediation is between the finite ego and the finite other. The relation to Infinity is then primary, the real condition of the encounter with the other person. Levinas thinks exactly in the opposite way. Even if the infinite is in the finite as a trace of creation, one has to meet the other37to be aware of illeity.
The middle term is, in this case, not God, but the other person. Singular alterity is the place where absolute alterity reveals itself. The call to responsibility happens simultaneously to the encounter of the Face. The phenomenal dimension of the other man refers to what transcends phenomenon itself.
The paradox is that, without seeing the finite, it is impossible to relate to Infinity. Kierkegaard and Levinas describe the threefold relation among the subject, God and the other in two opposite, but equally paradoxical ways: according to the former, the finite needs the infinite to relate to the finite, according to the latter, the finite needs the finite to relate to the infinite.
Other differences between the two philosophers concern their general view on the subject and on the other. These poles are both important, but, as it was stated before, Kierkegaard gives priority to the former, Levinas to the latter. The author of Totality and Infinity takes the risk of alienating the subject, while his predecessor Nordicum-Mediterraneum [nome. In Fear and Trembling, for instance, subjectivity experiences its vocation without being understood.
Abraham, going against the ethics of his people, feels a tension between his behaviour and the external judgement. His behaviour leads him to detach himself from the system of needs of his community, in order to follow his vocation. He is extraordinary and, for this reason, runs the risk of being misunderstood. And, since the former is always there and the latter does not need him, the individual is always on the verge of falling into the abyss of nothing.
What has been said about ethico-religious behaviour is valid also for subjective thinking, well described in the Postscript. In thinking, he thinks the universal, but as existing in this thinking, as assimilating 39 this in his inwardness, he becomes more and more subjectively isolated.
The risk of solitude is then unavoidable. Even if the individual thinks to universality, he is not an abstract entity. He is a singular and concrete being, whose thought cannot be separated from his existence. It does not imply subjectivism, because the truth of an object does not depend from the belief of the subject. It is possible to have a general concept of how a human being thinks, since it is a matter of observation.
However, subjective truth is more important than objective one. Levinas, on his side, is worried about the violence of subjective thought and freedom.
This is why he develops an asymmetrical ethics and puts the other above the I. The latter is called by the Infinite to a pre-original and unavoidable responsibility. This election makes the subject wholly unique, but is connected to a risk of alienation. The subject in responsibility is alienated in the depths of its identity with an alienation that does not empty the same of its identity, but constrains it to it, with an unimpeachable 41 assignation, constrains it to it as no one else, where no one could replace it.
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