Idolatry Secularization Philosophy (Jerusalem, 2006)

IDOLATRY, SECULARIZATION, PHILOSOPHY*

Michael Maidan

In his preface to Entre nous – On thinking of the Other, a

collection of essays written between 1951 and 1988 which recap

the development of his thought, Levinas states that:

What motivates these pages is not some urgent need to return to ethics for the purpose of developing ab ovo acode in which the structures and rules for good privateconduct, public policy, and peace between nations wouldbe set forth, however fundamental the ethical values implied in these chapters appear to be. The main intenthere is to try to see ethics in relation to the rationality of the knowledge that is immanent in being,and that is primordial in the philosophical tradition of the West; even if ethics - ultimately going beyond the forms and determinations of ontology, but without rejecting the peace of reason - could achieve a different form of intelligibility and a different way of loving wisdom and perhaps even - but I will not go that far - the way of Psalm 111:10.1

Levinas’s use of the present tense (“what motivates”), to refer

to a collection of papers and interviews which span more than

thirty years, seems to stress that it is an not antiquarian

interest that led him to republish these texts. What motivated

* Paper presented at the international conference "A Century with Levinas: Resonances of a Philosophy", Jerusalem, 16 – 20 January, 2006

these texts and motivated the author to publish them again seems

to be the connection between “ethics” and the “rationality of

knowledge that is immanent in being.” This may not sound

controversial until we recall that Levinas is known for having

reversed the traditional relationship between practical and

theoretical reason, even using the phrase: “ethics as first

philosophy” as the title of one of his lectures. To compound the

problem, Levinas concludes the paragraph hinting at a verse of

the Psalms. Only the reference is given in the text, not the

actual verse, which reads: “the beginning of wisdom is the fear

of the LORD; all who practice it gain sound understanding.” On

its face, this verse seems to be pointing to a higher standard

than reason. But let us not forget that Levinas also said that

even if “ethics could achieve a higher degree of

intelligibility,” still ethics would be dependent on the form of

rationality developed in the philosophical tradition of the West.

The work of Levinas addresses itself to two domains, whose

relationship is not clear.2 Levinas is careful to distinguish

between philosophical discourse and his more theologically

oriented writings and preaching. Nevertheless, some critics have

questioned whether or not Levinas was not moving surreptitiously

between these domains.3 The text just considered shows that

Levinas’s claim about the coherence between the contents of a

Michael Maidan - IDOLATRY, SECULARIZATION, PHILOSOPHY

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specific religion (Judaism in this case) and the basic intuitions

of moral life, requires a commitment to what Levinas named “the

philosophical tradition of the West.” and what I would prefer to

call the philosophical project of modernity.

Levinas strongly believed that the shared ground between

monotheistic religion, ethics and philosophy is the de-

sacralization and de-mystification of the world and social life.

He did not believe such developments endangered the authentic and

profound teachings of the main spiritual traditions of the West

and of Judaism in particular but rather saw these developments as

enablers. This said, he may have been a little too optimistic in

disregarding the institutional and ideological aspects of

religions, and their potential to become entangled in power

struggles. He was, however, more aware of the limits of

philosophy and the need to reactivate its original destination by

drawing inspiration from the sources of religion and morality.

In what follows, I will address three aspects of Levinas’s work.

I will first deal with his criticism of idolatry, a concept not

usually found in modern philosophical discourse, although both

Bacon and Marx took over concepts developed by the monotheistic

criticism of pagan religion to elaborate basic concepts in their

thought. I will then discuss briefly Levinas’s thoughts on


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monotheism and secularization, both in terms of the

disenchantment of the world and of social life. Finally, I will

review Levinas’s criticism of Heidegger’s philosophy.

II

The concept of idolatry belongs to the vocabulary of monotheistic

religion, and functions basically as to distinguish between those

that practice the right cult and those who are mistaken and

practice the wrong cult. As Margalit and Halbertal pointed out,

idolatry may mean that the wrong God is being offered the right

cult, or that the right God is being offered a wrong cult.4 In

any case, idolatry presupposes a cognitive error as much as a

moral one. For the biblical text, the idolater is either ignorant

or pretends to be ignorant about the materiality and finiteness

of the gods he celebrates. This is not a trivial error, because

such an error in cognition leads to the commission of immoral

acts. For the biblical world there is a direct relationship

between ontology and idolatry, and between idolatry and

immorality.

This relationship between ontology and practice is used by

Levinas repeatedly in his work. We may not find a systematic

study of the concept of idolatry in his work, but the notion

appears in several texts. One of the more elaborate can be found


4

in his lecture and Talmudic lesson presented at the 1985 meeting

of “Annual Colloquium of French-speaking Jewish Intellectuals”

devoted that year to the subject of the idol.

Levinas’s paper was entitled “Contempt for the Torah as

Idolatry,” and is a commentary of page 99a-b of the Talmudic

treatise Sanhedrin. Levinas begins his conference introducing a

difference between idolatry as an historical phenomenon from a

past that no longer challenges us, and a form of idolatry that is

closer to ideologies, fashion and trends whose demystification

still has a practical value for the present. Levinas rejects the

idea that idolatry is an elementary form of religious life, that

is a stage in the evolution of religious feeling and practice.

For Levinas, idolatry is the opposite of religion, with which no

synthesis or dialogue is possible. There is idolatry or religion,

not both says Levinas.5 And because there seems to be no

positivity in idolatry. Levinas prefers to speak about religion

and about Judaism, or more to the point, of Judaism as a religion

which is based in the teachings of a book, whose practice is the

study of a book (as a force warding off idolatry). The question

of idolatry becomes in this analysis a question of the ethics of

reading.


5

Levinas’s point of view involves certainly a plethora of issues,

regarding the relationship between “reading” and practice, and

between practice as ritual behavior and practice as morality. In

the context of our present discussion, our interest is limited to

try to understand how his particular concept of idolatry emerges

from the current discussion.

Levinas focuses on a Talmudic discussion of the claim that those

that deny the divine origin of the Torah will lose their place in

the Olam ha-ba, in the world to come or afterlife. Idolatry is

identified with the denial of the divine origin of the Torah.

This assertion appears to be an injunction, a discussion about

punishments and rewards. Because the apikoros, the sceptic,

denies God’s revelation of the Torah, he is to be punished and

his promised share in the world to come is to be taken from him.

Levinas prefers to read this injunction as a comment on the

nature of the Torah. He interprets this in terms of

transcendence, command, moral imperative, and of opposition to

the fundamental ontological law (which is but another name for

the principles of egoism and the conatus, the effort of each

being to persist in his state). It is not in terms of its form

that the Torah is transcendent, not in terms of its presumed

authorship, but in terms of its content. Therefore, the notion


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of a world to come is to be interpreted in moral terms, not in

terms of after-life, but in terms of a reconciled life. Instead

of a literalist reading of the injunction, which would leave us

indifferent, if not scandalized, Levinas calls attention to “the

danger of a form of idolatry that worships visible certainty”

which he identifies with “the stability of the world –of all

those regimes ““of a thousand years’.” built on “unswerving”

physical, political and economical laws.” “A premonition of our

crises—our wars, totalitarianisms and unemployment. All idolatry

is not always harmless.6”

Idolatries are not innocent; they are not playful things, as his

generation learned so painfully.7 In this context at least,

idolatry refers to an ideology, to a repetition, to a discourse

that reinforces our natural condition of being immersed in a

world in which our needs are not satisfied in an immediate form,

in a world in which the satisfaction of our conatus can

contradict the vital needs of other human beings. Against this,

Levinas opposed monotheism. Monotheism does not deny our

ontological dependence, does not oppose a series of voluntaristic

prescriptions to the harsh realities of life, but at the same

time does not exaggerate the strength of that necessity. Natural

necessity is a reality to be taken into consideration both by

morality and by the active transformation of our natural


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environment. What monotheism condemns in idolatry, particularly

in the modern forms of idolatry, is its tendency to close us in

an ironclad necessity and to reject as vain every attempt to

overcome it.

1Notes:? Emmanuel Levinas, Entre nous – On thinking of the Other, translated from the French by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, p. xi

2 The correlation between ethics, religion and philosophy is far from being restricted to the classical problem of faith and reason. It is not clear that contemporary ethical thinking is compatible with many of the traditional precepts of religion. Those can certainly be explained away or re-interpreted in allegorical language. From another angle, the interdiction to draw moral prescriptions from factual descriptions (“Is/Ought problem”) universally accepted by modern philosophy limits the role of reason in ethics either to a procedural or to a merely negative one.

3

? This is the thesis originally developed by Derrida in his “Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur Emmanuel Levinas,” L’ écriture et la différence, Paris, 1967, pp. 117-228.

4 Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994

5 Emmanuel Levinas, Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry, In the Time of the Nations, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994, p. 58.


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If Jewish monotheism rejects myth, if it demands a humanity

without myth is not because monotheism is not sensible to beauty

but because the myth, even when sublime, introduces in the spirit

a problematic element, the impure element of magic and sorcery

and “that drunkenness of the Sacred and of war that prolong the

animal within the civilized.”8

6 Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry, p. 64

7 The following comments are eloquent enough and need no commentary: “The Renewal of mythology, the elevation of myth to the rank of superior thought by secular thinkers, the struggle inthe domain of religion with what has recently been called the spiritualizing of dogma and morality, conveys not a broadening ofreason, but a reversion to primitive mentality pure and simple. This is a nostalgia which is perhaps explained by the insufficiency of technical reason and the catastrophes it has unleashed. But is monotheistic civilization incapable of responding to this crisis by an orientation liberated from the horrors of myths, the confusion of thought they produce, and the acts of cruelty they perpetuate in social customs?” Emmanuel Levinas, “Lévy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy”, Entre Nous, p.51 [published originally in 1957]

8 Emmanuel Levinas, “Being a Westerner”, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1990, p. 48; Compare with the more conventional understanding of Idolatry advocated by J.-L. Marion: “what does the worshipper worship in the idol?...What man, in the city or community, experiences as divine, as the divinity that precedes any image” The Idol and Distance, New York, 2001, p. 5


9

In their common rejection of the sacrality that impregnates the

ancient world, in the opening of a space to morality and the

logos, Levinas finds a perfect agreement between monotheism and

secularization. The sort of monotheism that Levinas opposed to

idolatry has nothing to do with a divine arithmetic but with the

unity of mankind. The unity of mankind, that partially achieved

aim, the solidarity between peoples and societies, will not be as

Kant thought the result of an immanent process of development but

the legacy of monotheism.

There is more than one indication that the kind of idolatry that

Levinas is fighting is not the historic idolatry of the

Canaanites and Greeks and Romans, not even the remnants of such

cults in our modern cultures, but first and foremost the

totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. From that point of

view Levinas’s work belongs to a constellation of great authors

of the past century such as Adorno, Luckacs and Popper that from

different perspectives pondered the relationship between crisis

of reason and the historic crisis.

III. Desacralization and Secularization


10

Sociology identifies two related phenomena that characterize the

emergence of modernity: on the one hand, the development of a

scientific understanding of nature, and on the other, the

development of a secular understanding of social life. Both

phenomena can be designated in shorthand secularization. Both

represent a progressive diminution of the authority of

traditional organized religion and morality.9

For Levinas there is no contradiction between monotheism and

secularization. On the contrary, Levinas sees in secularization

the application and the continuation of the struggle of

monotheism against the empire of myth, and a practical

application of the basic principle of monotheism, i.e., the

responsibility for the other. This responsibility is taken over

by secularization by way of the techniques, which on the one hand

destroy the remnants of the mythical world, and simultaneously

create the tools that allow us in a concrete way to put into

practice the moral assignation that the other directs to me. In

his “Secularization and Hunger” conference, Levinas clearly

rejects a simplistic criticism of technology, which tries to

evaluate advantages and disadvantages. The idea that technology

9 For a sociological analysis of secularization, see Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, New York, 1990, particularly chapters 5-7


11

may have brought us some comfort at the expense of many

inconvenients is summarily rejected by Levinas, not only because

of the enormous advantages that technology produces, and which

allow, among others, the diffusion of this criticism of

technology, but primarily because of the spiritual advantages of

technology. For Levinas, technology completes the process of

disenchantment of the world initiated by monotheism.10

Secularization does not only refer to what Max Weber called the

disenchantment of nature, but also to a process in which politics

develops into a domain separated from religious authority and

moral consciousness of the individuals. To the disenchantment of

nature corresponds a disenchantment that is more difficult, more

fragile, the disenchantment of social life. Levinas does not see

a contradiction between the development of politics, understood

as a synthesis between the Greek concept of polis and

monotheistic concept, originally developed in the Jewish

tradition, of the planetarian dimensions of human society. It is

through this complement that we can free ourselves of the

inevitability of war. 11 Monotheism and secularism are not

10 “Sécularisation et faim” dans: Catherine Chalier et Miguel Abensour, Cahier de l’Herne: Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, 1991, p. 25. The same line of reasoning is presented in the chapter “Trascendence, Idolatrie et Sécularisation” of his lectures Dieu,la mort et le temps, Grasset, Paris 1993, pp. 190-194.


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opposites, but to a certain extent, we can say of secularism that

it is a necessary if not sufficient condition for the emergence

of holiness, as we learn from the text Desacralizacion y

Disenchantment (1971):

I have always asked myself if holiness, that is, separation or purity, the essence without admixture that can be called Spirit… and…to which the Jewish tradition aspires – can dwell in a world that has not been desacralized…The sacred is in fact that half light…the “other side,” the reverse or obverse of the Real, Nothingness condensed to Mystery, bubbles of nothing in things —the “as if nothing is happening” look of daily objects…Revelation refuses this bad secrets …12

IV. Philosophy:

It is possible to see Levinas as one of the predecessors of post-

modernism. Martin Jay (in his study of the criticism of vision in

contemporary French philosophy) explains the role of Levinas:

11 Levinas discusses the relationship between Judaism and Politics in classical Judaism in his essay “Secularism and the Thought of Israel”, republished in Unforeseen History, Universityof Chicago Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2004, pp. 113-124

12 Emmanuel Levinas, Desacralization and Disenchantment, Nine Talmudic Readings, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indiana, 1990, p. 141


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For if, as it is often argued, postmodernism’s critiqueof the modernist project was in large measure also a rejection of the Enlightenment, it should be no surprise that the unabashedly counter-Enlightenment philosophy of Levinas would find a congenial reading. And a fortiori it is not mystery that his powerful critique of the ocularcentric premises of the siècle des lumières would also find an appreciative audience. By 1984, the French popular press could thus justly claim that Levinas was “à la mode” with Lyotard as one of the main celebrants.13

It is easy to propose an anti-enlightenment reading of Levinas.

His emphasis on the moral and religious dimensions seems to point

into that direction. The criticism of idolatry, particularly the

interdiction of the iconic representation of the divinity, a

traditional theme of Jewish monotheism, seems to constitute a

background from which emerge the tendencies that Jay condemns.

Other readings of Levinas are possible though, in which the

criticism of the privilege of vision in occidental culture -

ocularcentrism - present in modern culture is in fact a criticism

of romantic irrationalism and of anti-illuminism. Levinas does

not criticize vision, but idolatry, the degeneration of vision

into awe. 14

13 Martin Jay, Donwcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, University of California Press,Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, p. 560.


14

We may in this context refer to Lyotard’s definition in his

classical The Postmodern Condition:

I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse…making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth15

Levinas’s position cannot be easily reduced to one of the

opposites. His philosophy rejects some of the aspects of

modernism, but does not endorse an anti-foundationalist position.

And certainly he sees himself as a participant of some of great

narratives of our civilization, at least of two of them. He is

certainly a participant in the great narrative of Judaism and the

drama of fight against idolatry (but he seems to be less

14 Levinas develops a phenomenological reconstruction of the origin of the sacred (idolatry) at the basis of which we have a vision with becomes independent of its relationship with practical activity. Impossible vision, vision of that that we cannot touch is the basis of the sacred: ‘L’intouchable est le nom d’une impossibilite avant d’être celui d’un interdit’ Emmanuel Lévinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps, p. 191

15 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1991, xxiii


15

attracted by the drama of exile and redemption, in spite of

unflinching support for the State of Israel) and the great

narrative which originated in Greece and become the philosophical

project of modernity. These nuances are also reflected in his

relationship to the history of philosophy. Levinas is critical of

Spinoza and Hegel, but a strong partisan of Descartes.

In the prologue to the German translation of Totality and

Infinity Levinas presents his criticism of traditional philosophy

in terms of deficit:

This book challenges the synthesis of knowledge, the totality of being that is embraced by the trascendentalego, presence grasped in the representation with the concept, and questioning on the semantics of the verbalform of to be —inevitable stations of Reason— as the ultimate authorities in deciding what is meaningful. Dothey restore or lead to the ability to vouchsafe the harmony of a world and thus to manifest reason to the end? Reason to the end or peace between men…The problemof peace and reason is approached in Totality and Infinity in terms of a different and no doubt older conjuncture.16

The philosophical stations that Levinas mentions, and we can

guess the names of Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, do not

16 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Inifinity: Preface to the German Edition, Entre nous - On thinking of the other, p. 198)


16

seem to be able to achieve on their own either the old dream of

peace among men or to complete the development of reason. In

order for that to happen, philosophy seems to require an external

supplement. But, as we know Levinas rejects the temptation to

complete with theology the shortcoming of philosophy. Beyond his

personal engagement with Judaism, his philosophical work pretends

to stick strictly to the traditional form of philosophical

discourse.

The reinterpretation of philosophy in terms of a messianic (but

not eschatological) project has two aspects. The first one is a

criticism of contemporary philosophy; in particular of the

philosophy that Levinas identifies as the most challenging and at

the same time the most questionable of contemporary philosophies,

that is, the philosophy of Heidegger. Nevertheless, the criticism

of Heidegger, and to lesser extent, of other philosophers, is not

presented as an introduction to Levinas’s philosophy. Levinas

prefers to keep criticism and analysis separate. In what follows,

nevertheless, we will only deal with the first aspect, and not

with the question as to what extent Levinas in the positive

exposition of his thought fulfills the promises he makes.

This settlement of debts with philosophy is primarily a critical

engagement with Heidegger. Levinas did not take a major part in


17

the various polemics around the work of Heidegger and his

relationship with Nazism, but his position on this issue is

presented clearly in his philosophical work. Levinas acknowledges

both the importance of the work of Heidegger and his influence in

his own work. Levinas is also deeply convinced that Heidegger’s

becoming a member of the NSPD in 1933, his acts while Rector of

17 There is an abundant literature dealing with Levinas’ criticismof Heidegger. In some accounts Levinas was primarily a student ofHusserl and was only marginally influenced by Heidegger. (Cf. Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas, Chicago, 1994, p. 234-240). In other accounts, Heidegger had a major influence on Levinas, and he underwent a major intellectual crisis in the late 30’s because ofHeidegger engagement and active support of the Nazi regime. (Cf. Samuel Moyn, Judaism against Paganism: Emmannuel Levinas’s Response to Heidegger and Nazism in the 30s, History and Memory, 10, No. 1, 1998, pp. 25-58.) Levinas himself refers to his debt to Heidegger in the following words: “Heidegger’s philosophy was a shock for me and for most of my contemporaries in the late twenties and thirties. It completely altered the course and character of European philosophy. I think that one cannot seriously philosophize today without traversing the Heideggerian path in some form or other. Being and Time, which is much more significant and profound that any of Heidegger’s later works, represents the fruition and flowering of Husserlian phenomenology”. Cf. Richard Kearny, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989, p. 51; In his lecture ‘Mourir pour…’ given in 1987 he reminisces about his yearlong study in Freiburg “où je vécus sousl’impression d’assister au Jugement dernièr de l’histoire de la philosophie en présence de Husserl et de Heidegger” Emmanuel Levinas, Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre, p. 220. One of the rare occasions in which Levinas takes issue with


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the University of Freiburg and his refusal after the war to take

a public position against Nazism and his own behavior can not be

easily discounted as simply mistakes, but in fact must accord

with fundamental aspects of his philosophy.17

One of the most interesting texts which addresses Levinas’s

criticism of Heidegger dates from 1961, and is contemporary with

Totality and Infinity. This article, was written on the occasion

of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned trip to space. The occasion chosen

shows clearly the terms of the confrontation, in which what is at

play is the relationship nature/technology, or more broadly,

nature and human action.

Levinas begins summarizing Heidegger’s argument using terms that

can be easily recognized by the reader, such as Place, the path

that winds its way through fields, the bridge that links two

river banks, the presence of the tree, the mystery of a jug or of

the worn-down shoes of a peasant girl and other similar

experiences in which Being itself is disclosed.

Heidegger’s wartime Nazism was published in 1987 in Le Nouvel Observateur (November 15, 1987) and translated into English as “As If Consenting to Horror”, Critical Inquiry, Special Feature on Heidegger and Nazism, edited and introduced by Arnold I. Davidson, vol. 15, Nr. 2,Winter 1989, pp. 485-488.


19

Levinas chooses his examples carefully, all of which are typical

of Heidegger’s prose. The objects evoked by Heidegger have a

patina of naturalness that is in reality sedimentations of past

actions that hide their origin in man’s manipulation of nature.

In Levinas’s own words, “Everything that, for centuries, seemed

to us added to nature by man, was already shining forth in the

splendors of the world”.18 Furthermore, Heidegger, Levinas

claims, interprets language as disclosure of Being, therefore

neither as logical thought nor as system of knowledge, and

neither as form nor as content of knowledge. This obsession with

Being, does not seem to be an innocent and bucolic fantasy after

all:

One’s implantation in a landscape, one’s attachment to Place, without which the universe would become insignificant and would scarcely exist, is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. And in this light technology is less dangerous that the

18 Heidegger, Gagarin and Us, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1990, p. 232; Heidegger develops his most clearly worded analysis of technology in “The Question Concerning Technology”, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York and London, 1977, pp. 3-35. See the following revealing comment: “In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let’s us ponder for a moment the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, “The Rhine” as dammed up into the power works,and “The Rhine” as uttered out…in Höderlin’s hymn by that name” p. 16.


20

spirits [genies] of the Place.19

In contrast to this attitude that laments and mourns the

disappearance of the pre-industrial landscape, and in which

Levinas detects a relationship to other people colored by the

exclusion of the other, the other who is there but should not be,

Levinas describes a Gagarin who breaks the ties that binds us to

a place and completes symbolically the desacralization process

which began simultaneously in Judea and Greece. 20 The importance

of the trip to space is not the competitive side, the fact that

Gagarin reached a higher altitude than his American competitors,

but the possibility of new discoveries and newer technical

possibilities. It was not only Gagarin personal courage and his

dedication that are applauded by Levinas, but first and foremost,

the break of the ties that binds us to location. It may be a

forgotten fact, but Gagarin was famous for his claim that we went

into space and did not find any God there. I believe that it is

characteristic of Levinas’s approach to casually dismiss this

positivistic boast and to dwell on the real import of Gagarin’s

space travel. Levinas also spoke on another occasion in positive

tones of Khrushchev’s visit to France, emphasizing not the actual

content of Khrushchev’s speech but the mere fact of dialogue in

19 Heidegger, Gagarin and Us, p. 232. Translation slightly modified (MM).


21

spite of ideological differences. Levinas oftentimes subtle

political positions on different issues merit a more elaborate

discussion. At least in this two occasions, he favored dialogue

and what will later be known as détente, and opposed

confrontation. 21

What the romantic view mourns, the loss of a supposedly intimate

relationship with nature, either never existed, or insofar as it

existed, was not a source of salvation but of danger. It does not

represent harmony, but man’s submission to a hard and brutal

natural necessity. This is precisely the danger and peril that

monotheism and rational thought seek to fight. Technology frees

us from the superstitions surrounding Place and opens up the

opportunity “to perceive man outside the situation in which they

are placed and let the human face shine in all its nudity”.22

Despite his remarks about Heidegger present in his major works,

Levinas does not undertake a systematic confrontation with

Heidegger’s philosophy until late in his life. It is remarkable

that even if he in general avoided explicit attacks of other

philosophers, and was not the kind of thinker that used an

adversary to sharpen the presentation of his own positions, he

choose to devote two courses —the last ones he taught just before

retirement— to focus on issues that were at the core of

Heidegger’s thought.23 It is revealing that both courses have Michael Maidan - IDOLATRY, SECULARIZATION, PHILOSOPHY

22

chapters titled : “un passage oblige” and “commencer par

Heidegger”, meaning starting point and required rite de passage,

but certainly neither end nor conclusion.

Of the two set of lectures, the one with the greatest symbolic

value is the one that discusses Heidegger’s concept of death and

time. Here Levinas is not dealing with some marginal aspect of

Heidegger’s philosophy but with one of his central pillars. Death

is what allows Heidegger to break away from and to present an

alternative to the traditional philosophical way of conceiving

the relationship between humankind and reality. Death, or more

precisely, the realization that man is a finite being, a “being-

towards-death” in Heidegger’s terminology, allows him to claim to20 Cf., the opposite interpretation to Gagarin’s trip given by Hannah Arendt: “Should the emancipation and secularization of themodern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily of God, but from a god who was the Father of man in heaven, end withan even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd Edition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago,1998, p. 2

21 E. Levinas, “Principes et visages”, in: Emmanuel Levinas, Les imprévus de l’histoire, Paris, Fata Morgana, 1994, pp. 166-169. Cf. Angel Garrido Maturano, La amenaza de la prehistoria (unpublished mss). I owe this reference to Prof. Maturano’s paper. 22 Heidegger, Gagarin and Us ,p. 233


23

have discovered an analysis of time which is more fundamental

than the time of physics.

From Levinas’s point of view, there are serious problems with the

way in which Heidegger understands death. Death is reduced in

Heidegger to “being-towards-death.” which is always “to be-to-my

-death’. Therefore, the most profound desire is the desire to be,

and death is always premature. Heidegger rejoins Hobbes: in the

formalism of pure conatus, existence is the supreme prize. Being

becomes the absolute prize, and therefore there is no room in

this philosophy for other values. Everything is reduced to the

pure formal value of being.24

Presented in this way, Heidegger’s thought loses some of his

luster, but this is not to say to Heidegger’s position is not

right. Levinas claims that Heidegger’s position is an

impoverished understanding of death. Heidegger’s position reaches

an aporia because he continues a tradition of thinking about

23 Emmanuel Levinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps, Grasset, Paris 1993, English translation: God, death, and time, translated by Bettina Bergo, Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2000. Tina Chanter, Traumatic Response: Levinas Legacy, Philosophy Today, vol. 41, 1997, pp. 19-27 24 Dieu, la mort et le temps, p.107-108; God, Death and Time, 92-93.


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death in terms of ontology, i.e., in terms of the opposition of

being and nothingness, being and non-being. Turning the tables on

this tradition, Levinas proposes to leave behind the study of

death as a moment of ontology, and its correlate, a temporality

based on the anxiety of nothingness, “to come to a thought in

which meaning would certainly still be attached to the world but

in which the meaning of the world is profoundly tied to other

men”25.

According to Levinas, this new point of view is exemplified in

religious or in social thinking. Death, while still signifying

the end and the destruction of the individual, an unavoidable

natural necessity, is far from being the sole source for meaning.

There is another source for meaning, and there is another

understanding of time possible. What is startling is not

Levinas’s claim, but the fact that he appeals to the philosophy

of Ernst Bloch to develop a different discourse on death and on

time. Why turn to Bloch in search of inspiration?

In the history of philosophy, time is a sign of non-being and

non-value. Time is the opposite of eternity. In Heidegger there

is no eternity, but even so time does not have any other meaning

that “being for death’. It is only in what Levinas calls “social 25 Dieu, la Mort et le temps, p. 108; God, Death and Time, 93.


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philosophy.” that temporality acquires a meaning different from

Nothingness, as shown in the idea of progress. What seems to

appeal Levinas is not the idea of progress as an abstraction, but

its human content. He quotes Bloch’s Prinzip Hoffnung:

Marxism well practiced, stripped of its dangerous cousins, is humanity in action. It constitutes the ineluctable march of humanity toward his…homeland, where being is rejoined in the human being-at-home. This march is ineluctable insofar as it is the march ofbeing, and insofar as it is inscribed in the essence ofbeing, which is here thought in his human finality.26

And Levinas asks: what is it that inspires the movement that

Bloch describes?

What incites this revolutionary movement is the meaningof human misery…Thus, for Bloch, the spectacle of misery, the frustration of the neighbor, and the rigorously ethical discourse engendered thereby rejoin the ontological discourse. The fulfillment of man is the fulfillment of being in its truth. 27

What seems to Levinas to be the essential contribution of Marxism

(at least in the tradition represented by Bloch) is the

development of a new understanding of being. This understanding 26 Dieu, la mort et le temps, p.109;God, Death and Time, 94 ; Levinas is here quoting Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt 1959, p. 1608

27 Dieu, la mort et le temps, p. 109; God, Death and Time, p. 94


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is the real contribution of Marx This understanding consists in

the discovery that “the intelligibility of being would coincide

with its completion as uncompleted.”28 Being is potential, and

that potential is Humankind. The passage from potential to act is

mediated by labor. Nothing is directly accessible; nothing

discloses itself unless it is determined by the intervention of

the corporal labor of humanity. But because labor is not

finished, the world is not finished, and labor is alienated. Man

is opposed to the world until being will become Heimat

(homeland).

In Bloch’s view, time is pure hope, hope in a world accomplished

and reconciled, a world were labor will not be alienated labor.

Time is hope and utopia, without which humankind could not carry

its long patient effort. Time is thus taken seriously, writes

approvingly Levinas.29

Levinas does not clarify in this text the relationship between a

“social” and a “religious” philosophy. There seems to be a

significant shared ground between these two, and Levinas’s

philosophy influenced the development of a politically engaged

28 Dieu, la mort et le temps, p. 110; God, Death and Time, p. 95

29 Dieu, la mort et le temps, p. 111, God, Death and Time p. 96


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theology with an important following in progressive Christian

circles in Latin America and elsewhere. Levinas was not

indifferent to this development. However, in this text, his

embracing of Bloch’s philosophy of utopia is limited to

developing an alternative to Heidegger’s position:

We come to the same challenge to the subordination of time to being-toward-death in recalling Bloch’s audacity in interpreting otherwise than an anxiety for my being the affectivity in which death is announced. In Heidegger, death is signaled in the consciousness ofthe end of my being. It is in relation to my being, which is having-to-be, that anxiety would be understood. For his part, Bloch tends to find in the anxiety over dying a threat other than that which concerns being… The event of being is for Heidegger theultimate event. Here [i.e., in Bloch] the event of being is subordinated to a completion in which man finds his home. Being, in a certain sense, contains more or better or something other than being; for Blochthis is the completion of the world, its quality as a home, which is attained in the perfected world.30

The lesson drawn from Bloch is primarily to think of death

starting with time, and not of time starting with death. Bloch’s

own interpretation of death as melancholic reaction to an

incomplete lifework31 seems too abstract to Levinas. Levinas

prefers to relate death and time to responsibility: to try to

30 Dieu, la mort et le temps, p. 120 ; God, Death and Time, p. 105Michael Maidan - IDOLATRY, SECULARIZATION, PHILOSOPHY

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understand death from my responsibility for the death of the

Other.

Such elucidation belongs to the positive exposition of Levinas’s

philosophy. It will be beyond the scope of this presentation to

address the question of how Levinas reworks the phenomenological

analysis of time to tie together time and responsibility. But

this brief foray into some of the issues raised by Levinas

confrontation with the heritage of Heidegger’s philosophy should

at least point out in broad strokes the way in which Levinas

understood his own philosophical project as a continuation and at

the same time in rupture with the traditional themes of Greek,

i.e., Western philosophy.

V. Conclusion:

Levinas’s philosophy presents us with the challenge to think

about the unity of the monotheist tradition, our ethical

intuitions and the project of modernity as a rational philosophy

without allegorizing and without infantilizing them.

31

? Dieu, la mort et le temps, p. 114; God, Death and Time, p. 100


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His answer is clear. Not only it is possible, but these three

cannot be thought about in isolation. Only a post-secular

thinking can recover the sense of the monotheist traditions, and

only by putting to use the richness of experiences and vocabulary

stored in these traditions are we able to complete and pursue the

unfinished project of modernity.

Furthermore, without them, we may not even know that this project

is unfinished and we could easily fall into the fetishism of

natural necessity and the given.


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Idolatry Secularization Philosophy (Jerusalem, 2006)

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