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Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber -- considered by many the most important Jewish philosophers since the 12th century sage Maimonides -- knew each other as associates and friends. Yet although their dialogue was instructive at times, and demonstrated the esteem in which Levinas held Buber, in particular, their relationship just as often exhibited a failure to communicate. This volume of essays is intended to resume the important dialogue between the two. Thirteen essays by a wide range of scholars do not attempt to assimilate the two philosopher's respective views to each other. Rather, these discussions provide an occasion to examine their genuine differences -- difference that both Levinas and Buber agreed were required for genuine dialogue to begin.
- Sales Rank: #3122029 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Duquesne Univ Pr
- Published on: 2004-12-03
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 6.25" w x 1.25" l, 1.32 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 335 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“Valuable, helpful, and informative. . . . There is a good deal to be learned from the essays, especially for someone coming to the comparison between Buber and Levinas for the first time.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
About the Author
PETER ATTERTON is associate professor of philosophy at San Diego State University. He is the editor of Levinas Studies, Volume 5. MATTHEW CALARCO is assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. He has published widely on leading figures in contemporary continental thought, including Agamben, Derrida, Levinas, and Heidegger. MAURICE FRIEDMAN is professor emertius of religious studies, philosophy and comparative literature at San Diego State Univeristy, and codirector of the Institute of Dialogical Psychotherapy in San Diego. His Martin Buber's Life and Work won the National Jewish Book Award.
Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Long Overdue
By Denise J. Mcpherson
A volume such as this is long overdue and welcome to those of us who feel near to Buber and Levinas. In the introduction, the editors announce the intent of the volume as "not to assimilate their respective views to each other, but to point out their differences - differences that both Levinas and Buber agreed were required to begin." (2) While the question of rapprochement is always in the not too distant background, this work eminently achieves its intentions, even in those essays that modestly gesture toward rapprochement.
As I read, I was struck by the pathos, the energy produced in drawing Levinas and Buber into proximity. In each essay, one feels the preference of each contributor, a nearness beyond intellectual specificity, a proximity that resembles filial obligation. Levinas and Buber inspire commitment in us. The import of their excurses reach through yet beyond formal questions to the vitality of flesh and breath. In reading I found myself drawn into this drama. Thus, my own filiality might be manifest in this review.
The book is organized into four parts. Part one, "Dialogue," presents a short essay by Buber entitled, "Samuel and Agag," and an essay by Levinas, "On Buber," responding to it. These selections are well made in that the "little disagreement" they illustrate is enceinte, in all the multivalence of the term, signaling the divergent trajectories each take in their respective accounts of inter-subjectivity.
Part two, "Ethics," queries the differences and similarities in Levinas's and Buber's ethical thinking. Stephan Strasser's "Buber and Levinas: Philosophical Reflections on an Opposition" delicately traces the philosophical tensions that emerge in their proximity. As he critically presents both thinkers, he allows the oppositions to meet without, admirably, seeking to resolve them. Robert Bernasconi, in "`Failure of Communication' as Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue between Buber and Levinas," brings Levinas and Buber into a contact that allows their respective insights to operate without utterly assimilating one to the other. I recognized, however, that this contact has a quintessentially Levinasian flavor. In my view, Bernasconi models the most viable strategy for a rapprochement between them. Andrew Tallon's essay, "Affection and the Transcendental Dialogical Personalism of Buber and Levinas," seeks to invite Levinas into Tallon's own Buberesque project. This essay is especially intriguing to those of us interested in pre-deconstructive phenomenological analysis and the situatedness of these thinkers with respect to tradition. Neve Gordon in "Ethics and the Place of the Other," and Maurice Friedman in "Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas: An Ethical Query," are refreshing in their forthright criticisms of Levinas. Gordon convincingly suggests that Levinas's ethical inter-subjectivity cannot be teased out of, or integrated within, the I-Thou without damaging Buber's central theses.
Part three, "Religion," discusses Buber's and Levinas's embeddness in the Jewish tradition and their different locations within this locale. These essays are especially interesting. The authors seem more comfortable with the tensions produced in the dialogue. They imply, it seems to me, that the tautness between communion and concern for justice, evolution and tradition, consolation and responsibility, reciprocity and height, may be necessary for religion to authentically operate. The tension is none other than that space familiar to us, that space where the pastoral and prophetic meet (or perhaps we might say the dialogical and the ethical). Ephraim Meir, in "Buber's and Levinas's Attitudes toward Judaism" masterfully presents these differences, such that I was touched by the vitality. He is valiantly even-handed though he hints at a Levinasian leaning. Michael Fagenblat and Nathan Wolski, in "Revelation Here and Beyond: Buber and Levinas on the Bible," tackle the problematic of revelation in Levinas and Buber. Robert Gibbs's "Reading Torah: The Discontinuity of Tradition," presents Buber's and Levinas's respective approaches to the reading of the Torah with special attention to the (non) mediation of tradition. Tamra Wright, in "Beyond The `Eclipse of God': The Shoah in the Jewish though of Buber and Levinas," compares their different trajectories in the wake of the Holocaust. The one exception to the aforementioned comfort is Andrew Kelley's essay, "Reciprocity and the Height of God: A Defense of Buber against Levinas." Kelly's "defense" is unconvincing as I will show below.
In Part four, "Heidegger, Humanism, and the Other Animal," the culminating essays draw Levinas and Buber into current debates on these issues. Richard Cohen's important essay, "Buber and Levinas - and Heidegger," traces Buber's and Levinas's respective relation to Heideggerian ontology. Cohen successfully discloses how this relation structures their own meeting. Matthew Calarco, in "The Retrieval of Humanism in Buber and Levinas," convincingly argues that Levinas, passing through yet beyond Buber, provides a pregnant site from which to address the contemporary problematic of humanism. Peter Atterton's essay, "Face-to-Face with the Other Animal," is an interesting attempt to extend Levinas's thought beyond its explicit specifications, integrating Buber's concern for a non-human I-Thou relation. Passionately argued in the best sense, Atterton highlights an ambiguity in the application of Levinas's thought. Though he raises some complex questions, unfortunately, he may only be convincing to those who share his sentiments. Atterton confronts Levinas's (alleged) anthropocentrism with his own, implicit, anthropocentrism (or more precisely, anthropomorphisms).
The Promethean thread strung throughout this volume suggests that the questions of reciprocity and formalism posed to Buber by Levinas are the decisive points of contention. The essays that most decidedly side with Buber suggest that these criticisms are not well founded when giving Buber a close reading. Gordon, Friedman, and Kelley aim at answering Levinas's challenge on these grounds while critiquing his positions. Gordon (elsewhere) writes, "I believe that it is more becoming to begin reading Buber's ideas without assimilating him to Levinas" (119). While this may be so, it may be equally "becoming" to read Levinas in the same vein. For example, Friedman writes: "Levinas's...most insistent critiques of Buber's philosophy are tied up with his own assertion that the relation to the Other must be asymmetrical, and correspondingly, I must place the Other at a height above me..." (119). Kelley makes similar moves when he writes: "For Levinas, there is something about the other - the person opposite - that I cannot grasp" (227). These simple statements, meant to convey Levinas's position in relation to Buber, betray an ignorance of Levinas's point and the implications of his challenge. While it is true that the question of asymmetry and alterity are decisive, Friedman and Kelley seem to miss why they are decisive. In other words, the other is not placed at a height by the I, but is always already a height, and as such, the other person is never initially "the person opposite." I want to dwell on the why of these criticisms because I do not believe the above are mere `slips of the pen,' but expressions of a deep fissure irrupting between Buber and Levinas.
Cohen's essay explicitly draws out the why behind Levinas's criticisms of Buber, a why not adequately addressed by Gordon, Friedman or Kelley: what has priority, ontology or ethics? Cohen writes, "Buber's critique of Heidegger is not based on a critique of ontology as such, but rather on a different version of ontology" (241). This is Levinas's qualm with Buber and the reason he raises questions of reciprocity and height. As such, no amount of amendments or qualifications to Buber's ideas can ameliorate the tension; it resembles analytic opposition. The question is not: can ontology (in this case Buber's) have an ethics? The Levinasian question is more basic: is Being adequate to Goodness? For Levinas, the answer is no and if one answers in the affirmative one must philosophically and ethically account for the horrors of human history, one must become an apologist for Being. As our contemporary milieu demonstrates, nihilism and fanaticism seem preferable to such an apology, or perhaps, proceed from it.
Numerous statements throughout specific essays, as the examples above hint, miss this basic point. Tallon's essay attempts to extend Buber's insights while "...comparing and contrasting...by circling several times..." the challenge of Levinas (49). Tallon constructs epistemological categories in seeking to make Buber's ontology more rigorous. While he is successful at integrating some of Levinas's broad concerns in his dialogical perspective, his recourse to "co-constitution," "broadened intentionality," "intimate co-presence," and the construction of a "dialogical transcendental," would draw ethics back into ontology, rendering it derivative. Kelley writes elucidating the I-Thou: "I allow the other person to be who he or she is. It is in this way that speaking...does not destroy the height of the other" (230). And: "The word `Thou' merely indicates the initiative on the part of an I of turning toward and addressing that which confronts the I" (232). It is hard to see how the relation is not determined by the I's own comportment, that is, the I determines the relation in "allowing," in its "turning toward," the other to "be who he or she is." Being is still the underlining term. It seems to require sheer heroism to keep the "-" from subsuming the "I" and "Thou." The issue is not that we should not efface the other's height, but that we absolutely and utterly can not. The height of the other is inviolable, and this is precisely what traces the rupture of Being by ethics. Kelley, and Friedman quoted above, already presuppose reciprocity. Such a position already reduces the "ungraspable alterity" to a derivative status, (i.e. the other is different from me) setting the relation into an economy, the play of polarities, and so on. For Levinas, the other's height marks a (pre) originary alterity, an alterity before all presence and reciprocity. Before any question of economy or reciprocity can be raised, the command-the height of the other-elects the subject to an infinite responsibility. In ethics, the I is elected to an orientation before any choice of how and whether I comport myself in such and such a manner.
I do not wish to be uncharitable in these criticisms. Yet in order "not to assimilate their respective views to each other, but to point out their differences - differences that both Levinas and Buber agreed were required to begin," (2) the question of the priority of ethics to being must be addressed. If it were a question of assimilation, it seems to me that Levinas would fare far worse in that he essentially evaporates in Buber, as ethics always does when subordinate to an ontological relation. Buber fares better than Levinas, in that Levinas ruptures the process of assimilation as such. Buber's deep insights can operate in Levinas's orbit without being obliterated. It would be interesting and important to elaborate what Buberian intimacy would look like while taking Levinas's criticisms seriously, that is, while maintaining the primacy of ethics over ontology. For instance, what would "communion" mean when it no longer means diffusement in a totality? I'm not sure that Levinas's descriptions in his phenomenology of eros are exhaustive, or even, perhaps, adequate. For instance, what happens in an intimate and personal friendship taking the priority of ethics seriously?
As I intimated earlier, Gordon convincingly suggests that Levinas's ethical inter-subjectivity can not be teased out of, or integrated within, the I-Thou without damaging Buber's central theses. In that these theses assume an ontological basis he is absolutely correct. It must be stressed that the issue is not Buber's "nominal" use of the language of Being, but rather, that the very structure of inter-subjectivity he elaborates requires Being, and in such a way that can allow the I its hegemony. Bernasconi successfully argues that it is not the case that Levinas "fails" to give Buber a close reading. Given the basic opposition in their founding orientation, Levinas is as charitable as he can be in his evaluation of Buber. At the close of his fine essay, Bernasconi writes: "For our model of dialogue should also recognize the alterity of the other which shows itself in `the restlessness of the same disturbed by the other'...and in the failure to communicate" (97). To modify my opening comments, this exhilarating volume repeats previous communicative failures, in that the dialogue is yet to adequately address the question of priority between ethics and ontology. As things stand, the dialogue can not help but fail, unless Buber's concerns are elaborated on an ethical rather than ontological basis. So the failure of this book is precisely its success, in that the challenge is now more explicitly and directly presented. With Bernasconi and Cohen, we must admit Buber's ontological rather than ethical bias, that is, the very structure of Buber's intersubjectivity is at issue and no amount of qualifications really address Levinas's basic challenge. The task, it seems, is to set ourselves to articulate what the intimacy of the I-Thou would look like on an ethical rather than ontological basis.
A quick note on form: though the cover art leaves something to be desired, the publisher is to be commended for the attractive and reader friendly layout and font selection. The substantive index will be welcome to students and researchers. Taking into account the few critical exceptions noted, this volume is, I think, an eminent success. As I intimated earlier, reading Levinas and Buber in close proximity generates pathos. The essays in this book are sure to inform and inspire, even those that offer perspectives one rejects. This volume will no doubt set off some intense dialogue as we continue to engage these questions.
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