Abstract
Opposed to the “formalism” of classical rationality, here exemplified by Kant’s ethics, both thinkers ground their philosophies in phenomenology: Lukács from Hegel via Marx, Levinas from Husserl. Criticizing Kantian ethics for its abstractness, self-division, ineffectuality, and ideological “eternalizing” of the bourgeois status quo, Lukács defends an alternative philosophy of totality as dialectical-historical class struggle. Rejecting Lukács’s alternative as “totalitarian,” Levinas defends a post-Kantian ethical alternative: the primacy of an asymmetrical-ahistorical intersubjective moral responsibility, and the just politics—social democracy—built upon it. Levinas begins with detailed phenomenological studies of the constitution of embodied and vulnerable subjectivity, and then, driven by “the things themselves” beyond the epistemological boundaries of Husserlian phenomenology, he elaborates the source of these significations in the “infinity,” “saying,” “proximity” or transcendence which gives rise to responsibility for others.
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Notes
- 1.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Model of the West,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 18.
- 2.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21 (Henceforth, “TI.”).
- 3.
I say nothing of the fact that both were born of Jewish parents into Jewish homes because Lukács, to my knowledge, never defines or even thinks of himself in such terms.
- 4.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983) (Henceforth, “HCC.”). Contesting the many commentators who see Lukács shifting positions throughout his long career, Frederic Jameson, in “The Case for Georg Lukács,” published in 1970, and found in Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 160–205, makes a convincing case for its overall continuity and hence the enduring value, for Lukács himself, of his magnum opus.
- 5.
Given the prominence of Heidegger as a philosopher and as Levinas’s primary protagonist, it would not have been surprising if Levinas had called his magnum opus Being and Infinity. Nor, given the then prominence of Jean-Paul Sartre, and Levinas’s disagreements with his existentialism, would it have been surprising had the book been named Finitude and Infinity. The actual title, however, Totality and Infinity, with the first of its four sections entirely devoted to political philosophy, to the question of justice, can hardly not call to mind Lukács, and behind Lukács Marx and Hegel. For further reflections on the significance of the title of Levinas’s masterpiece, see chapter 6, “Some Notes on the Title of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity and its First Sentence,” in my book, Levinasian Meditations: Ethics , Philosophy, and Religion (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 107–127.
- 6.
In an interview with Francois Poirie conducted in 1986, Levinas says the following: “The end of socialism, in the horror of Stalinism, is the greatest spiritual crisis in modern Europe. Marxism represented a generosity, whatever the way in which one understands the materialist doctrine which is its basis. There is in Marxism the recognition of the other; there is certainly the idea that the other must himself struggle for this recognition, that the other must become egoist. But the noble hope, consists in healing everything, in installing, beyond the chance of individual charity, a regime without evil.” “Interview with Francois Poirie,” trans. Jill Robbins and Marcus Coelen, in Is it Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 81. To be sure, Levinas denounced “the horror of Stalinism,” and the horrors of all totalitarianism. To be sure, Lukács, living in Moscow, was compromised in this regard.
- 7.
The magnitude of Kant’s accomplishment can only be compared to that of Socrates, who by turning philosophy from natural science to questions of ethics and politics, made all prior philosophy seem “pre-Socratic”; likewise, since Kant philosophy is either “pre-Kantian” or “post-Kantian.”
- 8.
Hegel sees history as the working out, the “phenomenology,” of truth revealing itself to itself, moving from partiality or one-sidedness to universality, and Lukács sees it, following Marx, as the development of a conflict of classes working from partiality to universality, ending with the universal humanity of Communism, but Heidegger, too, though rejecting the logic of Hegel, Marx, and Lukács, does “periodize” Western thought in terms of the ancient, the medieval, and the modern epochs, in terms of the primacy of being, of God, and of humanity respectively, and all of it as dispensations of the Seinsfrage.
- 9.
See Emmanuel Levinas, “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason ” (1971), trans. Blake Billings, in Man and World, Vol. 27 (1994): 445–453.
- 10.
No doubt Lukács’s rebuttal would be to paint Levinas’s ethics as merely bourgeois. The argument is not easily ended, if it can be or even ought to be ended at all.
- 11.
MHL, 27.
- 12.
Ibid., 32.
- 13.
Ibid., 36.
- 14.
HCC, 141.
- 15.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Ego and the Totality ,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 44 (Henceforth, “CPP.”).
- 16.
HCC, 124.
- 17.
Ibid., 124.
- 18.
Ibid., 124.
- 19.
Ibid., 124.
- 20.
Ibid., 124.
- 21.
HCC, 124–125.
- 22.
Ibid., 125.
- 23.
Ibid., 125.
- 24.
Ibid., 160.
- 25.
Ibid., 160.
- 26.
Ibid., 161.
- 27.
Ibid., 161.
- 28.
Ibid., 161.
- 29.
Ibid., 161.
- 30.
Ibid., 162.
- 31.
Ibid., 165.
- 32.
This abstract dualistic metaphysics may have originated in India, and came to the Greeks, and to the Western tradition thereafter, via Persia. Such origins are obscure. When Nietzsche speaks of Christianity as “Platonism for the masses,” he is referring to this gnostic dualism, but in the masses determined through passion, emotion, feeling (“faith”) rather than reasoning , the mind, ideas (“truth”).
- 33.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Philosophy,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 31 (Henceforth, “OS.”). Levinas often discusses Marxist thought in relation to Martin Buber, who was of course an active Socialist.
- 34.
TI, 79 (my translation).
- 35.
1949; 2nd rev. ed., 1967.
- 36.
See, “Bergson and the Emergence of an Ecological Age,” in my book, Ethics , Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation After Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 27–52.
- 37.
Martin Buber makes a similar criticism of Hegel (and Marx), decrying their lack of concreteness, their intellectualist abstraction from “real man,” i.e., charging Hegel (and Marx) with “a radical alienation from the anthropological setting”: “the dispossessing of the concrete human person and the concrete human community in favor of universal reason , its dialectical processes and its objective structures.” Martin Buber, “What is Man?” (1938), in Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald G. Smith (Great Britain: Collins, 1963), 170. “Thought confirms it [“the Hegelian house of the universe”] and the word glorified it; but the real man does not set foot in it” (ibid., 173). There seems to be a battle over who can be more concrete. To be sure, Marx intends to be more concrete than Hegel in the sense that he sees Hegel’s philosophical conceptions “realized” in—and appropriately transformed by and through—concrete history, especially economic history. Buber and Levinas, in contrast, argue that precisely an inattention to the concrete, and an excess of rationalization, undermines the entire Hegelian and Marxists dialectics as abstract and hence arbitrary (from the viewpoint of the concrete) constructs imposed upon the real, despite—and indeed because of—all their talk of “dialectics”. Unfortunately for Buber, so it seems to me, his legitimate criticism rests positively upon the unfortunately all too vague grounds of his “dialogical” philosophy of “meeting,” and not, as with Levinas, upon rigorously scientific investigations conducted according to the phenomenological method.
- 38.
See chapter 12, “Absolute Positivity and Ultrapositivity: Beyond Husserl,” in my book, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 274–286.
- 39.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Ego and the Totality ,” 43.
- 40.
For a comprehensive exposition of Levinas’s relation to phenomenology, including his relation to Heidegger as well as Husserl, see my article, “Emmanuel Levinas,” in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, ed. S. Luft and S. Overgaard (New York: Routledge, 2012), 71–81.
- 41.
TI, 75.
- 42.
CPP (“The Ego and the Totality ”), 43.
- 43.
OS (“The String and the Wood”), 130.
- 44.
TI, 59.
- 45.
It is remarkable that already in his early philosophical work, Time and the Other (1947), Levinas recognizes the relation between the deepening of selfhood via embodiment and the deepening of transcendence via inter-subjectivity: “it will be necessary, on the one hand, to deepen the notion of solitude and, on the other, to consider the opportunities that time offers to solitude” (The transcendence of time, in contrast to Heidegger’s notion of Dasein ’s temporality, is opened up by the transcendence of the other person). Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, ed. and trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 39.
- 46.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Dialectics and the Sino-Soviet Quarrel” (1960), in Emmanuel Levinas, Unforeseen History, trans. Niddra Poller (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 107.
- 47.
TI, 35.
- 48.
Emmanuel Levinas, “‘As Old as the World?,’” in Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 85.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 159.
- 51.
HCC, 204.
- 52.
OS (“The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other”), 123.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 194. See, also, 51–52 (“liberal State”), and 185–186 (“Western democracies,” “liberal society,” “the force of liberalism in Europe”).
- 55.
Plato, in his Statesman (294b), perhaps in contrast to the Republic on this score, also comes to recognize the need for a politics open to change: “Men and actions change so continually that it is impossible for any science to make a single rule that will fit every case once and for all.”
- 56.
“I believe in the force of liberalism in Europe. But I also have too many memories to be certain in my answer.” Emmanuel Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be, 186.
- 57.
Ibid., 194.
- 58.
OS (“The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other”), 123.
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Cohen, R.A. (2016). Levinas and Lukács: Totality and Infinity. In: Jung, H., Embree, L. (eds) Political Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 84. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27775-2_12
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