Lévinas Emmanuel - Discovering Levinas

About six years ago, I began to study Emmanuel Levinass works seriously. I had tried several times before to read Totality and Infinity , unsuccessfully. The work seemed impenetrable, and each time I set out I managed only a few pages before I put the book aside. But in 2000, after Paul Franks and I had finished our translations and editorial work on Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings and we had agreed to teach a course on Rosenzweig and Levinas, I began to immerse myself in Levinass works and the secondary literature on him. Paul then left Bloomington to take a position at Notre Dame, and I was scheduled to teach the course on my own. It was quite an experience, an enormous challenge but an exciting one. I found that the students, undergraduates and graduates alike, found something about Levinas gripping, and as I struggled to make sense of him for myself and for them, I also fell under his spell. This book is one outcome of that attempt to explore and decipher Levinas.

I mention these events in part to clarify something about the book. As I have worked on it, I have had several goals in mind, but one persisting reason for writing the book is, in all honesty, to find a way to make clear to myself what Levinas is saying and why it is important. The fact that this book is my extended attempt to say what Levinas means has had a significant effect, I believe, on how it is written. As I study and think about him, my questions about his thinking and his writings continue to increase exponentially, as one might expect, but the ones I have selected to examine and answer here, and how I set out to do so, were very much determined by my own interests, my background as a philosopher, and my personal angle of vision. I have tried to consider many others as the books audience and to take their needs into consideration, but to a great degree I always remain the books first reader.

I believe that the great philosophical question of the twentieth century for our culture perhaps for all cultures concerns the objectivity of values, in particular moral values. In this respect, the century began in the nineteenth

This great question and the crisis that has been associated with it crystallized in the Nazi genocide, the death camps, and the events that encircled them, horrific satellites of a totally dark spectacle: World War I, Stalinism, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. It was a century, and it is now a time of cruelty and atrocity beyond our worst nightmares, and there is every reason to see these events as the historical and political expressions of this crisis of objectivity. Facing up to this problem and to these events is a challenge that none of us, philosophers included, can escape. What can be done is a question that has its own abstract and global dimension, but its declension begins with each one of us: What can I do? And for a philosopher, it begins with How do I understand the human condition, and how do I live?

Levinas, once the point and purpose of his thinking began to disclose themselves to me, seemed to speak directly and urgently, dare I say passionately, to these issues. His intellectual world is one that I have some familiarity with, the world of Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, and Marcel. Others whom he discusses and responds to Rosenzweig and Buber, for example I have lived with for years. But, as I came to believe, Levinass thinking has an importance beyond these confines. He is part of a larger conversation. Reading Levinas, I brought with me the tradition of Anglo-American philosophy, as well as my own understanding of the history of Western philosophy. Thinking about Levinas, I also thought about Wittgenstein and readers of him, especially Stanley Cavell, and other philosophers as well: Hilary Putnam, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and John McDowell. Most indeed, virtually all of the secondary literature on Levinas and it is vast focuses on the continental partners in his conversation, and I have not completely neglected them. But I found it important and revealing to bring these other partners to the table, so to speak.

This feature of my own reading has had a special impact on the present book. If I have written it to become clear myself about what Levinas wrote and thought, I also have written it to introduce others to the Levinas I have come to understand. And this is a Levinas who talks with Cavell, Putnam, Taylor, and McDowell, as well as Heidegger and Derrida. At one point in time, this goal of placing Levinas on the map of Anglo-American philosophy seemed paramount to me. Now I realize that it was always important but subsidiary. I realize that if I really wanted to carry out such a task, there might be other ways to do it, ones that pay more systematic and detailed attention to the venue of Anglo-American philosophy and to the categories of work in that territory. In part, that is not my style. I could not simply lay out, in survey fashion, various options, say, in meta-ethics moral realism, moral particularism, noncognitivism, projectivism, and so forth and then go about asking how well Levinas fits one category or the other. If that seems like an intriguing enterprise, I invite others to carry it out. Personally, I would find it as difficult to do that and perhaps as unprofitable for me as I would to carry out such a regimented set of comparisons for someone like Cavell.