An Unforeseen Encounter

On first consideration, it seems understandable that, despite a handful of passing remarks, Levinas and Leibowitz never engaged each other's work, and likewise that the great standing each enjoyed in his respective community nevertheless only recently led commentators to compare their thought.³

Indeed, on the face of it there seems an obvious and formidable obstacle to any dialogue that might be staged between these two great modern Jewish thinkers. While Levinas maintained that between religion and ethics there is not only interdependence but even identity, Leibowitz insisted on the no less extreme claim that religion and ethics are antithetical and irreconcilable with one another. An initial and straightforward reading of each thus seems naturally to lead to the view that they are fundamentally incompatible thinkers, as commentators have indeed concluded. Leibowitz's classic 1953 essay, “Religious Praxis: The Meaning of Halakhah,” expresses his view of the incompatibility between Judaism and ethics in his typically caustic manner: And again: Just four years later, in Levinas's important essay, “A Religion for Adults,” we find the exact opposite view expressed: “everything I know of God and everything I can hear of His word and reasonably say to Him must find an ethical expression”; and later: “Ethics is not simply the corollary of the religious but is, of itself, the element in which religious transcendence receives its original meaning.”⁶ This view of the dependence of religion on ethics, indeed of the reduction of religion to ethics, is elaborated in Levinas's great and beautiful work, Totality and Infinity: Nothing could be starker than the contrast this makes with Leibowitz's claim that “Halakhah as a religious institution cannot admit the category of the ethical.” There are of course many further examples of the ostensible antithesis between Leibowitz and Levinas, the former arguing for the amoralism of Jewish faith and the latter arguing that religion, and especially the Jewish religion, is ethics.⁸ I shall not enlist further citations to support the idea that when it comes to the relation between religion and ethics, Leibowitz and Levinas hold opposing views, for I take it for granted that this view will make sense, if not seem obvious, to anyone who has read some of their work. Let us now turn, however, to what is interesting about this comparison between Levinas and Leibowitz: namely, the extensive similarity and indeed the profound convergence in their thought.

The Experience of Atheism and the Idea of the Holy

The chief point of convergence between Levinas and Leibowitz is each one's commitment to the absolute transcendence of God. Both thinkers are at pains to argue for the nonconceptual, nonrepresentable, and nonexperienceable exaltedness of God. For each one, God is stationed beyond the empirical or phenomenological world. This commitment to transcendence derives from their joint affirmation that the modern world, the world we live in, has become intelligible or explainable without reference to God's plan, intervention, or causal power.

⁹

Whether one speaks in terms of empiricism or phenomenology, positivism or constructivism, the idea of God has become unnecessary for explaining the world and human experience. This idea that God is not necessary for explaining the world is in no way a denial of God; but it is an admission that our descriptions and explanations of what happens in the world do not depend on metaphysical or theistic assumptions. It follows that atheism and secularism are entirely legitimate and sufficient ways of accounting for the world. Levinas and Leibowitz begin with a religious commitment that not only denies proof for the existence of God but in fact respects the atheistic denial of positive theology. As Levinas says, “faith purged of myth, the monotheist faith, itself implies metaphysical atheism.”¹⁰

This is because Levinas, to this extent a religious philosopher in the tradition of Moses Maimonides, stakes his faith on the idea of God being categorically different from all ideas pertaining to the world. In this light human experience appears for all intents and purposes to fall on the side of atheism—but this is the only way, somewhat paradoxically, to testify to the true idea of God: “Atheism conditions a veritable relationship with a God καθ'

.”

¹¹

The true idea of God, according to Levinas, depends on our atheistic condition as human beings categorically separated from God: Self and world are separate phenomena that make sense in their own terms, without reference to God, and so there is no need to resort to the idea of God. But this atheistic independence is precisely what allows us to relate to the proper transcendence of God, to practice a “religion for adults” that needs and seeks nothing of God.¹³

Leibowitz holds what amounts to the same view: “Man's consciousness of standing before God has nothing to do with his knowledge of the world, which is understood scientifically.”¹⁴

For Levinas and Leibowitz the idea of God is entirely separate from all that we know and could know of the world, and therefore atheism is the proper religious attitude to worldly events and causal explanations. Of course, this affirmation of an atheistic epistemology in no way mitigates Leibowitz's or Levinas's commitment to religious life, and in truth both Levinas and Leibowitz privilege the idea of God as a way of giving normative significance to human experience. But the normative register is distinct from that of knowledge and consequently goes hand in hand with an experience of atheism and an atheistic epistemology, for one can have no knowledge of God outside normative life. Indeed, this experience of atheism even makes way for their religious faith, that is, for their practical commitment to God.

Let us confirm the point, however, by taking their united rejection of theodicy as an example of how both Levinas and Leibowitz dissociate all explanations of worldly events from their understanding of religion. Both of these defenders of religion categorically refuse to ascribe theological significance to personal suffering or historical events (including the two “epoch-making” events in modern Jewish history, the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel). For both Levinas and Leibowitz, no “will of God” hides behind the events that befall the world, including those that affect us most severely. As Levinas says, suffering is “useless,” meaning that it performs no function in making sense of what happens. He thinks that the conceptual horizons of modernity and the unspeakable horrors of modern history, such as the Holocaust, render even the “shadow of a consoling theodicy” impossible and indeed reprehensible.¹⁵

“It renders impossible and odious every proposal and every thought that would explain it by the sins of those who have suffered or who are dead.”¹⁶ Levinas views history and suffering as essentially irreconcilable with a theology of God's immanence and efficacy in the world. This view is but one expression of his repudiation of all attempts to wed theology with epistemology, for nothing that we could ever know of God could vindicate the evils and injustices of historical life.¹⁷

In saying this, however, I do not mean to suggest that history, and in particular the history of suffering and the events of the Holocaust, are not significant for Levinas's thought. On the contrary, the Holocaust is perhaps the single most significant event that led him to reject and reverse the classical privilege that philosophy accords to epistemology and ontology over ethics. It is from the Holocaust that Levinas derives his somewhat diabolical view of the nature of being and the will to know, and it is in relation to the Holocaust that he formulates his nonreductionist account of human subjectivity and its desire for the good. It is precisely on account of the near-pervasive consequence that Levinas sees in the evils, injustices, and sufferings of history, exemplified by the Holocaust, that he renounces every correlation between actual, historical events and the order of God's holiness. No longer can faith abide the idea of God's presence in history, at least not phenomenal history; today it remains to live with the idea of “Holy History,” “in a faith more difficult than before, in a faith without theodicy.”¹⁸

Leibowitz likewise rejects every hint of theodicy, but not only for the moral reason that holds suffering to be theologically “non-integratable.”¹⁹

It is not suffering per se that Leibowitz wishes to dissociate from God but all events that are not intentionally directed toward the service or sanctification of God. For Leibowitz, nothing save the intention of the person who undergoes the event turns it into one of religious significance. This means that there is no external, observable criterion for determining the religious import of what befalls a person, much less an objective or even defensible rationale of how a particular event accords with God's will: On this reckoning, theodicy, which seeks to defend God against the charge that what happens in the world is unjust or evil, is a premodern (preKantian) conflation of categories that attempts to give religious meaning to empirical occurrences. Instead, Leibowitz leaves worldly occurrences to science and reserves religion for intentional and prescriptive life, both of which, he claims, remain beyond the bounds of scientific explanation. It is, according to Leibowitz, a categorical mistake to view religious life with a scientific gaze, for religion is essentially concerned with intentional states and normative conduct, about which science has nothing to say.²¹

Both philosophers, then, agree that there is no point in invoking God to explain the suffering that results from natural and historical events.²²

Theodicy is in effect bad science (for Leibowitz) or bad phenomenology (for Levinas). The suffering that takes place in the natural and historical world cannot contribute at all to anything one might say about God's relation to this world. The correlate to this severing of theology from epistemology is a view of God as radically transcendent, outside our horizons of knowledge as they apply to science, history, psychology and all other objective (or “intersubjective”) fields of knowledge. God as absolutely transcendent is the positive reformulation of the idea that we learn nothing of God's ways by interpreting what happens in the world.²³

On this basis, we might say that both Levinas and Leibowitz divide meaning into two grand categories: the profane and the holy, or the “Same” and the “Other,” corresponding to the classical distinction between fact and value. They both affirm modernity's reduction of ideas and essences to immanent forces, such as nature, history or being, while contending that the idea of God is incommensurable with these registers. Accordingly they share a strong commitment to a certain ahistoricism, since the idea of God bears its full significance regardless of what happens in the natural and historical world. And since God is entirely separated from epistemology, the force of God's significance is wholly normative or prescriptive, that is, practical. The distinction between the profane and the holy allows Levinas and Leibowitz to affirm the autonomy, validity, and relevance of naturalistic or phenomenological explanations while that distinction at the same time provides an external, evaluative perspective. In fact, each one takes this logic to the negative extreme, concluding that of the Holy Blessed One whom they serve all naturalistic, immanent, or phenomenological claims must be denied, to the point that it need not even be said that God is the Creator (according to Leibowitz) or that God exists (according to Levinas), at least not in the functional way we ordinarily make sense of these theological predicates.²⁴

This otherness or irreducibility of the holy leads them both to assign it a unique significance which, since it is of a different order than that of facts, phenomena, and all objects of knowledge, carries a radically “negative” theological charge that is felt only in the practice of law and obligation.²⁵

Religion within the Limits of Practice Alone

This aversion for theology, though it undoubtedly reflects a response to a religious crisis precipitated by modernity, at the same time offers Leibowitz and Levinas a way of purifying religious practice. Separating God from the explanatory order makes holiness a noninstrumental and in that sense unconditioned value, unlike all other values that can be reduced to one function or another. This religious intuition sees theology as such as pandering to anthropocentric impulses. By holding fast to a God radically outside the categories of human understanding, Leibowitz and Levinas seek to break anthropocentric projections and fantasies so as to enable genuine appreciation and service of God.

Interestingly, this commitment to transcendence accommodates the vehement rejection of metaphysics by nearly all modern thought, which can perhaps be characterized by nothing as much as by its commitment to reductionism. From positivism to contructivism, from empiricism to the linguistic turn, from structuralism to materialism, the one common feature of modern thought is its rejection of transcendence. Levinas and Leibowitz at once accept such reductionism with respect to epistemology and therefore theology, but posit religious practice as a means of elevating human action and thus avoiding a pervasive reductionism that would crush human agency and value. For them, therefore, our lack of knowledge of God is a positive if somewhat perilous event for religion, since religious practice must now rise to a purer level of service where it gives itself wholly to God without asking for anything in return, not even the consolations of knowledge. The atheistic outlook is thus not only a crisis for traditional religious dependencies but also a way of purifying religious practice in the modern world.

Another way of seeing how this rejection of theology becomes a commitment to religious practice is by considering the critique Leibowitz and Levinas make of idolatry. “Anyone who denies idolatry is called a Jew,” says the Talmud.²⁶

Both Levinas and Leibowitz cash out this apothegm by arguing that Jewish religious life stakes itself on the insufficiency of our finite capacities to speak about God or even to relate to God in any way besides practical obligation. Nature and being; our religious and our everyday language; cognition, intuition, and description: all these fall on the side of idolatry when they profess to relate to God, though they may do well for relating to the experience of self and world. As Levinas puts it, idolatry is the “supreme criterion” that institutes a radical disjuncture into spiritual life: “idolatry or religion.”²⁷ For Leibowitz, the disjuncture is no less radical: “Faith in the ‘holy God’ ought to prevent man from ascribing intrinsic holiness to anything in the world.”²⁸ Epistemological atheism thus has theocentricism as its correlate, while idolatry is expanded to include any self-satisfying reduction of service of God to service of oneself or one's worldly needs.

It seems to me that this position combines the two classical and usually contrasted Jewish views of idolatry, those of Moses Maimonides and Judah Halevi. Though in the case of Levinas I do not want to claim a conscious influence, he and Leibowitz agree with Maimonides that all representation of God is inadequate and even idolatrous and that one can only avoid such idolatry by negating theological language.²⁹

But they also agree with Halevi in holding that idolatry can only be overcome by responding to God according to the revealed practical way.³⁰ Thus, the two classical medieval views on idolatry are merged by Levinas and Leibowitz, who argue that acquaintance with total otherness (Maimonides' alternative to idolatry) can only be had by heteronomous action (Halevi's alternative to idolatry).³¹ This critique of idolatry transforms theology into a negative discourse for Levinas and Leibowitz, just as it was for Maimonides before them, and even goes so far as to negate theological cognition altogether by making practice the only legitimate product and final arbiter of faith. Practice is the only way of responding to transcendence without burdening religion with excessive epistemological commitment. God becomes incomprehensible, unexperienceable, infinite, perfect, transcendent, beyond, wholly other—in a word, holy; but these negations result neither in the “intellectual apprehension” nor the “silent contemplation” promoted by the Guide of the Perplexed but in a pure practice of religion.

Rather than this unusual combination of Maimonides' theory of negative attributes with Halevi's insistence on heteronomous practice of revealed law, however, it is perhaps more likely Immanuel Kant's critical and practical philosophy that stands behind this modern view of Jewish religious life. That would not be surprising, since both Leibowitz and Levinas are manifestly indebted to Kant's eschewal of speculative theology and, in particular, to his referral of questions that lie beyond the bounds of reason to the practical. Moreover, in an important essay on Maimonides, the acclaimed late Israeli scholar, Shlomo Pines, argued that the author of the Guide was himself committed to a proto-Kantian position, and Leibowitz's reading of Maimonides confirms that interpretative possibility.³²

Pines suggests that the best way of making sense of the recourse that Maimonides's negative theology makes to contemplation is, in the final analysis, by seeing cognition as defining the limits of human knowledge of God and by affirming practice as the only way beyond the cognitive impasse.³³ Instead of accessing divine truth, the contemplative work of the negative theologian performs a critique of theological reasoning avant la lettre, a critique that ends with an entirely practical theology without any knowledge of God. In any case, whether it is a proto-Kantian Maimonides or Kant himself that presages the turn from theology to practice, we shall best clarify Levinas's and Leibowitz's position by examining the Kantian legacy directly.³⁴

Heteronomous Freedom

To see how Levinas and Leibowitz make the Kantian gesture of moving from a philosophical rejection of theology to an affirmation of practical religion, we might consider the crucial role each assigns to human freedom, as indeed Kant did before them. Examining the idea of freedom in both their works should further support my contention that there is much more in common between Levinas and Leibowitz than first meets the eye. Initially, the question of freedom seems to reflect a disagreement between them, since Leibowitz views religious life as the realization of human freedom and autonomy while Levinas seems to advocate a heteronomous response to the other. Yet this apparent discrepancy is readily resolved when it is seen that by referring to the halakhic way as the sole means of living an autonomous life, Leibowitz does not mean that halakhah allows one to pursue one's own ends, but that it is the only way of acting freely in a world that is otherwise entirely governed by the deterministic forces of nature. As he says:

Leibowitz's notion of freedom is thus the ability or the decision to accept the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, to accept an externally imposed law; it is the heteronomy of religious law that makes Leibowitzian freedom possible. This is equally the case for Levinas, for when he extols the heteronomous character of the relation with the other, the last thing he is doing is making deterministic claims about human relationships. On the contrary, he is claiming that only responsibility to an externally obeyed commandment enables genuine moral action. Like Kant and Leibowitz, for Levinas the primacy of the fact of obligation is what enables a human being to transcend the immanent forces of being and thus act responsibly. Levinas's responsibility, like Kant's duty and Leibowitz's decision to accept the “yoke of the law,” is thus a way of realizing a certain freedom with respect to the immanent forces that act on human agency. But unlike Kant, Levinas sees religious practice as a way of realizing freedom, and in this he comes to the same position as Leibowitz: We can therefore understand why it is that Levinas places a gloss of the very same Tannaitic adage cited by Leibowitz—“freedom on tablets of stone”—as the epigraph to his first collection of essays on Judaism.³⁷ The title of that collection, Difficult Freedom, is emblematic of the fact that Levinas's language of heteronomy is in the final analysis a commitment to human freedom. As was the point for Leibowitz, it is the externality of the law that alone enables the subject to defy the natural, or in Levinas's case, the ontological order. As he puts it in Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, “Substitution frees the subject from ennui, that is, from the enchainment to itself.”³⁸ And in the essay “Ethics as First Philosophy,” Levinas makes the uncharacteristic but telling point of emphasizing that subjectivity trades on an “immemorial freedom” that is the condition for the ethical break from the natural or ontological order of self-interest.³⁹ That Levinas sees this freedom as a religious possibility as much as an ethical one is likewise evident from his characterization of revelation as an “inversion” or “reversal” that interrupts the ontological interests of the world. “To obey the Most-High is to be free.”⁴⁰

All this seems to me sufficient to establish that Leibowitzian autonomy and Levinasian heteronomy are in point of fact aiming at the same idea, and that this idea derives from Kant. Levinas's notion of heteronomous responsibility and Leibowitz's notion of autonomous halakhic praxis repeat the strategy Kant employed in the face of the theoretical antinomy of freedom.⁴¹

Call it “ethics” or “religious praxis,” the point is that deontological action—action based on what one ought to do, on one's duty rather than any benefit one might accrue, whether directly or indirectly—is the only way of realizing human freedom, as was the case for Kant. Behind the apparent difference between Levinasian heteronomy and Leibowitzian autonomy is a consensus about the liberating effect of acts of obligation. As Levinas says in the same central chapter of Otherwise than Being, “the self liberates itself ethically from every other and from itself.”⁴² Only the primacy of obligation over nature, being, history, or any other reductive ground allows for the realization of human freedom.⁴³

At stake, then, is a paradoxical repetition of Kant, since the practice of freedom is based on the heteronomous fact of obligation rather than the autonomy of the moral, rational agent. The paradox stems from Levinas's and Leibowitz's rejection of the Kantian idea that reason is unconditionally given to human experience. For Kant, it is the primacy and unconditionality of reason that allows for the construction of the moral law and the practice of human freedom. Only because the fact of reason is not conditioned on any other fact does it become possible to say that a human will formed in accordance with reason is likewise unconditioned and thus free. Following Heidegger, however, Levinas rejects this view of reason as unconditioned and sees the fact of reason as contingent on the more fundamental horizon of being-in-the-world, which is a prerational, entirely practical mode of existing. Leibowitz also denies that reason is unconditional because he conceives of human psychology in behavioristic terms that see rationality as a function of instinct. By denying the unconditioned primacy of Kant's “fact of reason,” they both, then, view rational morality as a set of conditioned imperatives founded on more basic ontological or empirical foundations. Conceiving reason as a fact conditioned on history or biology leads Levinas and Leibowitz to view rational imperatives as hypothetical imperatives. On this view, aligning one's will with the pure form of reason fails to realize freedom precisely because it results in action contingent on the biological or historical conditions that give rise to reason.

Far from leaving Kant behind, however, it is here that the paradoxical repetition takes effect, for the Kantian ambition to realize human freedom through deontological practice turns Levinas and Leibowitz from the primacy of reason to the primacy of obligation itself. They are united in seeking an account of unconditioned or categorical obligation in the wake of a reduction of reason to more basic conditions. They agree that only an unconditioned obligation can allow freedom and responsibility to be realized, and they agree that such an obligation cannot be found in purely rational morality.

But if the rational ground of categorical action has fallen into the metaphysical past, how can obligation be in any way unconditioned or categorical? How can the reduction of obligation to amoral interests, such as culture, nature, or history, be avoided? According to Jean-François Lyotard, something like the questions I have just formulated frame Levinas's entire agenda.⁴⁴

That is to say, Levinas is striving to formulate an unconditional sense of obligation within the climate of reductionism that characterizes modern philosophy. His ingenious response to this challenge is to break with philosophy's traditional subordination of obligations to “value-neutral” registers, such as ontology or epistemology. After all, even Kant subordinates the moral law to the fact of reason, even as the value of a human being as an end-in-itself is contingent on its rationality. “Rational nature exists as an end in itself,” says Kant, but human nature is therefore valued as an end only qua rational nature.⁴⁵ The great innovation of Levinas's approach is in seeing obligation as not dependent on any prior (ontological or epistemological) conditions. On the contrary, ethics—the obligatory relations that bind us to each other—is the very condition and ground for society, history, the “meaning of being,” and, of course, philosophical inquiry. For Levinas there is nothing prior to obligation that might further ground or justify it; the prescriptive precedes every descriptive account of human nature. Obligation is the first “fact,” what Lyotard calls a “quasi-fact” on account of it being given without rational or empirical evidence.⁴⁶ Lyotard asserts that “Levinas' wager is … to succeed in placing the deontic genre at the heart of philosophical discourse.”⁴⁷ Hilary Putnam makes a similar point. For him too, Levinas's innovation is to have the question of obligation refer to no prior set of justifications (cultural, psychological, or whatever). When ethics is justified on account of natural human sympathy—because the other is like me—or on account of human rationality—because the dignity of reason inheres in us all—the way is open for an abuse of ethics. For in these cases one can always define such nonethical conditions that supposedly ground ethics in a way that excludes particular people or beings: for example, by denying the dignity of reason to some or by failing to have sympathy with others. “What he [Levinas] rejects is any formula of the form ‘Behave in such and such a way because …,’” to which Putnam adds the observation that Levinas offers us “ethical reasons for refusing to base ethics on either a metaphysical or a psychological ‘because.’”⁴⁸ If one asks, “On what, then, is ethics based?” the answer is not some transcendental account of reason or some contingent account of nature or psychology, but rather the intransigent fact of the obligation itself. Here is the pragmatic bottomlessness of Levinas's ethics, insofar as they are grounded in nothing but the proximity of the other (and the ambiguity of the term “other” adds to the bottomlessness). The basic givenness of obligations cannot be justified or explained by any nonmoral account of how things are. If this makes Levinas's argument sound circular, that is because for Levinas human beings never live outside the circle of obligation. Like Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and many other philosophers in the generation succeeding them, Levinas situates the work of philosophy within life as it is lived, within history and language, though he gives special emphasis to the fact that lived life is normatively oriented from the outset.⁴⁹ For this reason, Levinas's work is best understood as a post-Heideggerian Kantianism: that is, as an attempt to articulate or expose the irreducible and unconditioned character of obligation without relying on a foundational account of human nature or a rational determination of existence. In particular, I would like to emphasize that this move leads Levinas to a classical Kantian affirmation of human freedom, though it is one based on the priority of heteronomous obligations given in the face of the other rather than the priority of autonomously constructed obligations given by the fact of reason. This commitment to human freedom on the basis of ethical heteronomy leads Levinas to shift the traditional Kantian emphasis from autonomy to responsibility, and indeed to cast responsibility in terms of heteronomy, for which he is better known.

Now Leibowitz makes a strikingly similar gesture. He too denies that obligation is based on any further fact of nature or Reason, on anything but the very givenness of the commandment itself. No theology, no Book, no history can account for the practice of obligation as it has been lived by communities of Jews for hundreds of years. All cognitive, theoretical, and historical explanations fall short of explaining the Jewish practice of religious obligation. In fact, for Leibowitz the very opposite is the case. That is, the practice of religious obligation is the very ground of the cognitive and spiritual aspects of Jewish faith; practice is not derived from belief but constitutes belief; belief is derived from practice. Not only that, but the practice of obligation is a self-justifying ground, a primary given of what constitutes being-Jewish.

Whatever influences contributed to Leibowitz's arrival at this philosophy of religion as praxis, its conclusion is decidedly Kantian, and it clearly resonates with Levinas's project. The primacy of religious law, of the fact of religious obligation, leads Leibowitz to affirm the possibility of human freedom in a world that would otherwise be entirely determined by empirical facts of nature. Freedom would be impossible were it not for religious obligation and it is therefore “a postulate of faith”; it is “miraculous” in the sense that it is given to the religious practitioner despite its cognitive groundlessness.⁵⁰

Now this is exactly how Kant postulated freedom: “I am justified only in making a practical use” of freedom while from the point of view of theory or cognition—from any epistemological perspective—freedom remains “inconceivable.”⁵¹ But as was the case for Levinas, for Leibowitz the moral law that gave Kant the Archimedean point of factuality to get freedom off the ground is likewise lacking; it is replaced by the givenness of the religious commandment. Only the fact of the institution of religious law triumphs over the causality of the world and the ruses of self-interest.⁵² It is worth noting the radical conclusion to this position: for Leibowitz it is the institution of Jewish law that is significant before any account of revelation, so much so that the authority of the Torah rests on its institutional canonization and legal status, and not the other way round.⁵³

With Leibowitz, then, as with Levinas, we have a formulation of an unconditional obligation that constitutes the very discourse that would pretend to explain it. Such obligation is characterized above all by its resistance to reduction and its rejection of instrumentalization. Religious obligation does not reduce to or depend on any more basic insight than the fact of being commanded. This basicality of the fact of being commanded, is, therefore, fundamentally betrayed when it is converted into a means to serve the happiness of the community or to benefit, let alone save, the individual. On the contrary, for Leibowitz, as for Kant, it is precisely the dissonance between one's will and the fact of being commanded that attests to the true intention of the practice. As was the case with Levinas, it is precisely the heteronomy of the law that ensures its unconditionality, for everything that is autonomously produced can only have come from the empirical conditions of the agent. The primacy of obligation can thus be seen to have the educative function of edifying and exalting religious life, as both Levinas and Leibowitz attest, but this is quite distinct from rewarding or consoling the faithful.

Two further points of agreement might now be briefly mentioned. First, Levinas and Leibowitz agree that concrete acts of obligation alone merit being called “love,” and both see this love in daily service rather than inner experience or unio mystica. Levinas calls this love “without eros” and “without concupiscence,” love practiced in ordinary acts of everyday obligation that alone justify using this otherwise “wornout and ambiguous word.”⁵⁴

In Leibowitz's terms, “The acceptance of the yoke of Torah and Mitzvoth is the love of God, and it is this that constitutes faith in God. Man's faith in a God who eludes all predication of attributes and the love he bears for a God who cannot be imagined can only mean the readiness of man to serve God by observing his Torah and his precepts.”⁵⁵ From this understanding follows each one's acknowledgement of the endless and indeed thankless task of such practices, which Levinas calls an “infinite responsibility” and Leibowitz calls “the task eternally to strive toward holiness”; or again: “Performance of the Mitzvoth is man's path to God, an infinite path, the end of which is never attained and is, in effect, unattainable.”⁵⁶ This is surely what Levinas is getting at when he writes of “a growth of obligation in proportion to my obedience to it.”⁵⁷

Religion, then, for Levinas as much as for Leibowitz, is praxis through and through, and questions of theology are secondary to the fact and practice of imperatives. This explains Levinas's negation or unsaying of theological language (the religious “said”) and his rejection of the thematic questions usually associated with theology—his naming God “without evoking creation, omnipotence, rewards, and promises.”⁵⁸

As Leibowitz concisely puts it: “the purpose of the Mitzvoth is to educate man to recognize that knowing God and cleaving to him consist in the practice of these very precepts.”⁵⁹

This leaves us with the key to the thought of both Levinas and Leibowitz, namely, the (Kantian) idea of service rendered “disinterestedly,” as Levinas often says, or “lishmah,” as Leibowitz puts it.⁶⁰

This view of disinterested or lishmah service is the way each one's rejection of instrumental and functional reductions of religious practice is given positive expression. It thus not only characterizes religious action (and in Levinas's case ethical action as well) as the very manifestation of freedom but also conveys the full sense of each one's “faith,” which is a wholly practical commitment to serving God.

Prophecy, Prayer, Providence

It should be stressed that such a critique of religious reasoning is obviously not the result of a general, modern theology that sees Judaism as its supreme instantiation but is, on the contrary, an interpretation of Judaism internal to the praxis of Jewish religious observance. It is only in that sense that one can understand how the primacy of the religious act admits and even produces positive postulates of faith: that is, not only freedom, as we have seen, but so too the postulates of prayer and ritual which, as religious acts grounded in the primacy of practical obligation, produce articles of faith or dogmatic theology. Even theosophical postulates about the nature of God can thus be admitted, so long as this is done within the confines of the primacy of prayer and ritual as practical obligation and the authority of Scripture as deriving from its canonized, and thus legal and practical, status.

It is on this basis that we can draw a final set of correspondences that make the unlikely correlation between Leibowitz and Levinas all the more compelling. Readers of Levinas have long noted the centrality of the term “prophecy” in his thought.⁶¹

Like his medieval predecessors in Jewish philosophy, Levinas conceives of prophecy not only as an irruption of the divine word into the lives of select, once-upon-a-time biblical characters but also as a general possibility for each person who responds to transcendence.⁶² For Levinas, prophecy is a way of rising above historical circumstances in order to judge history from the outside and act morally without capitulating to the immanent forces of context. “History is worked over by the ruptures in history, in which a judgement is borne upon it. When man truly approaches the Other he is uprooted from history.”⁶³ Prophecy is Levinas's trope for describing this uprooting from history that alone allows one to attain an ahistorical, transcendent, and unconditioned perspective on human experience. The move once again follows, or at least parallels, Kant, for whom the fact of reason, precisely on account of its ahistoricality, produces a morality that is able to judge the hypothetical imperatives of instinct and impulse. As we have seen, however, because Levinas follows Heidegger's reduction of reason to historicity, the fact of reason fails to transcend history. He therefore turns to religious language, in this case the term “prophecy,” in order to find words that express such irreducible acts.⁶⁴

Leibowitz also makes use of the notion of prophecy to develop his account of genuine practical faith. In his words, prophecy is “not a miraculous invasion from the higher world into the lower” but is “an ascent of man from the lower to the upper world of the knowledge of God.”⁶⁵

Here too, following Maimonides, prophecy is a general possibility for the service of God and is not restricted to biblical epiphanies. But the similarity to Levinas (and to Maimonides) extends further. For here too prophecy is the work of the religious agent rather than an infusion from above. Like Levinas, Leibowitz views the idea of prophecy as a cleaving to God through practice that breaks with the immanence of nature and history: “[T]he prophets do not present specific historical conceptions as essential to faith and to religion. They convey only the absolute demand to serve God.”⁶⁶ Leibowitz's “absolute demand” has the precise sense of the unconditional imperative that both Kant and Levinas seek. Indeed, the correspondence extends further, for here too prophecy is radically demythologized by being purified of all cognitive or imaginative content. What of that cognitive and imaginative content that the biblical prophets so vividly express? This, for Leibowitz, is a purely instrumental way of correcting errant religious praxis and says nothing essential or substantial about God whatsoever. The aim of all prophecy, for Leibowitz, is not knowledge of God but inspiration to serve God through the practice of religious law. For both Levinas and Leibowitz, then, prophecy is a category of practical worship that expresses the task and responsibility of each person to serve God disinterestedly.⁶⁷

When it comes to prayer we find a similar move. For Leibowitz, prayer repeats the act of “accepting the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven” and in no way affects any mystical or magical transformation of either God or nature. “To pray as one who has faith in God, not as one who worships an idol, one must recognize that … prayer is not the silly and impudent demand that God change the world's regularity for the benefit of the person praying, but is rather a token of man's cleaving to God by serving Him, no matter what occurs in his natural environment.”⁶⁸

These austere and perhaps unfashionable views are likewise found in Levinas's reflections on prayer: “Prayer never asks for anything for oneself; strictly speaking, it makes no demands at all, but is an elevation of the soul.”⁶⁹

I would like to mention one last, and doubtless more oblique, point of convergence between Levinas and Leibowitz, namely, their use of the religious concept of providence. Leibowitz, relying again on Maimonides's bold position, urges us to think of providence not as an external divine fiat imposed upon communities or private individuals. That primitive if prevalent notion of providence both contradicts the principle that “the world proceeds according to its own order” and promotes the misleading idea that God's role is to serve us. Rather, says Leibowitz, there simply is no general or collective providence but only individual providence, which is, as we might by now expect, an accomplishment of practical faith. In serving God under all circumstances, the individual produces providence, for in that case God really will have been with such a person—for the person really will have been with God—throughout all that befalls him or her. In other words, providence is not a reward but accompanies or even analytically defines proper worship.⁷⁰

The performance of religious action in difficult times is the very cleaving to God, and this cleaving is what it means for God to be there with someone in times of duress. Leibowitz might even have quoted Ps 119:19, of which Levinas is so fond: “I am a stranger on earth; hide not thy commandments from me.”⁷¹ Only in answering to the commandments does one overcome religious alienation and the vicissitudes of life and thereby live providentially. Moreover, for religious practice to be true service of God and not merely self-service, providence must provide no reward, for rewarding religious service would reinscribe it in an instrumental economy. Only the absence of a reward that would provide providential confirmation allows for genuine religious service, for the giving of reward would belie the very possibility of genuinely disinterested service. The measure of religious desire is thus marked by the withdrawal of providential signs.

A similar notion of providence can be discerned in Levinas. For him, genuine work “requires an ingratitude of the other; gratitude would be the return of the movement to its origin.”⁷²

The problem of ethical providence might be put thus: How can I know that the action I perform for the sake of the other meets with the approval of the other? Like his Israeli counterpart, Levinas suggests that I alone must take responsibility for producing this confirmation between my responsibility and the desire of the other, and indeed that it is only the absence of the other's confirmation, approval and gratitude that enables genuinely disinterested service.⁷³ This is how I read Levinas's idea that “I find the order in my response itself, … [it is an order] which I hear in my own saying. It is an august command, but one that does not constrain or dominate and leaves me outside of any correlation with its source.”⁷⁴ I see this in terms of providence because it suggests that my proximity to the other is entirely in my hands and not at all a function of the other's intervention; indeed, I can have no empirical or phenomenological evidence for any correlation between my responsibility and the will of the other. Like Leibowitz's idea of providence, Levinas suggests that all is for the sake of the other and yet there can be no confirmation of my work besides proximity to the other, for which I alone am responsible.

Just Reading

I would like to conclude by unpacking the hermeneutic that has guided this comparative study. When it comes to the relation between religion and ethics, Levinas and Leibowitz apparently hold opposing positions. Leibowitz is clearly interested in purifying practical faith by expunging self-serving (what he calls “idolatrous”) impulses from religious life, and he counts all human values and moral constructs as stemming from such impulses. He seems, then, to be concerned above all with the relationship between the worshipper and God (

). Morality, for Leibowitz, either reduces to religious commandment or, if it retains its status as an autonomous discipline, is aligned with self-service and thus with idolatry. Levinas almost never addresses the direct relationship between a person and God without rejecting it as senseless, amoral, or even “violent.”

⁷⁵

He is clearly interested in religion as it manifests itself between one person and another (

). and invariably refers solitary religious experience to interpersonal life. Indeed, Levinas seems to think not only that true religion is realized in ethical relationships but that ethics enjoys a certain independence and priority with respect to religion. One might think, as many of his early readers did, that Levinas holds religion to depend on ethics but ethics to be independent of religion. If that were the case, however, we ought to be all the more surprised or even perplexed at the correlation between Levinas's ethics and Leibowitz's manifestly antiethical account of religion.

I have endeavored to show that Levinas's apparent subordination of religion to ethics is far from evident. While it is true that Levinas goes out of his way to reject theology, especially the epistemological thrust to theology, the same cannot be said for his account of religion considered as a system of unconditional praxis. From his earliest original essays through to his major works and including his several books on Judaism, every renunciation of theology brings with it a recovery of religion: “We have recourse to the notion of a horizontal religion, remaining on the earth of human beings, which is intended to replace the vertical one that mounts toward Heaven.”⁷⁶

In 1951, he introduces the term “religion” to describe the ethical relation as one that seeks neither to know nor to possess but only to meet and address the other.⁷⁷ In Totality and Infinity (1963), we find the term “religion” invoked again to describe “the bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting a totality.”⁷⁸ While continuing to deny theology to the point of contesting every possible way of laying claim to divine presence, Otherwise than Being nevertheless once again calls upon “religion”—“exceeding the psychology of faith and of the loss of faith” —to name the fact of obligation.⁷⁹ In other words, Levinas draws on religion throughout his work—with the “ethical resonance of the word and all those Kantian reverberations” —in support of his argument even as he rejects theology.⁸⁰ One might even see him as articulating a religious critique of theology, which at one point at least he makes explicit: The result of this religious critique of theology is a philosophy of religion as pure practice based on the recurring if not constant suspension of metaphysical and classical theistic concepts. It is thus an account of religion within the limits of modern, critical philosophy. It is a philosophy of religion that does not depend on the belief in the existence of God as much as on one's response to the obligations of everyday life.⁸² My final claim will be that for Levinas, everyday religious life articulates the primacy of given obligations as much as does everyday ethical life.

Beyond the Other: Toward a Rereading of Levinas

Now if Levinas recuperates religion even as he rejects theology, then this only high-lights another problem, for as Leibowitz persistently reminds us, even if religion is ultimately about service and praxis, it is service of God that is at stake. Leibowitz's thought is based on the centrality of God as the regulative Idea that orients the entirety of religious life through the commandments, and for all the affinity between him and Levinas, the attempt to cut God out of the picture would, for Leibowitz, be the greatest apostasy and idolatry. Here, however, I also think there is more in common between Leibowitz and Levinas than meets the eye, for there is reason to offer a second way of reading Levinas, to which I have also made recourse. On this reading, Levinas is counted not only as a philosopher of religion as a system of unconditioned imperatives but also as a philosopher in search of le sens de la transcendance, the meaning and the direction of transcendence. As a philosopher of transcendence, and not merely a philosopher of religion as praxis, Levinas might also be counted as a radically theocentric thinker and indeed as one of the most daringly “negative” theologians in the history of Western religion.

This development is expressed by Levinas's increasingly vivid move from the face of the other person to the sense of transcendence. This was already the case, as Derrida noted, in the necessary passage “Beyond the Face” that marks the final section of Totality and Infinity.⁸³

Responsibility to the other must pass beyond the face lest it lapse into eros or concupiscence and not only fail to do justice but in fact affect violence upon other others. Though Levinas insists on the concreteness of the face-to-face relation, his thought must move beyond the concrete other and refer to the abstract and only thereby wholly other. How else to justify the necessary distinction between the other as destitute and the other as perpetrator?⁸⁴ How else to justify saying “no” to this particular other in the name of another to whom one must say “yes”? How to avoid a pathological obsession with the other that disregards all questions of right and wrong?⁸⁵ If Levinas's thought is to be situated in the concrete world of multiple others, there must be from the very outset a distinction between the concrete other of moral experience and the abstract Other as an authority who commands.⁸⁶ Only the latter bears ethical authority, whereas the former enables that authority to be given. In other words, the sense of ethical commandedness supposes the transcendence of the other even as it refers practice to concrete acts of obligation. Therefore Levinas comes to speak of the other as “disincarnate,” “abstract,” “beyond”;⁸⁷ therefore he acknowledges that the relation with the other is not in fact an experience but in the structure of selfhood;⁸⁸ therefore he says, most poignantly, that to notice the color of the eyes is to miss the face of the other.⁸⁹ Again and again, then, the rhetoric of concrete encounter gives way to an acknowledgement that the person facing me can in principle not be the authority of my responsibility even as he is included in my responsibility. Though it is to particular persons that I must direct my ethical response, the obligation will necessarily have come from beyond the other. It is to a sense of transcendence—the trace of phenomenality—that one must answer, even if one's response can only be to the person facing me.

Incidentally, here too an exact parallel can be drawn to Leibowitz, for he thinks that it is not the detail of this or that mitzvah that explains the obligation but that every mitzvah is explained by the one commandment to accept the yoke of the kingdom of heaven. In other words, Levinas's conception of the “face” parallels Leibowitz conception of the mitzvah. Just as for Levinas every face refers to the normative authority of the absolutely singular Other, so too for Leibowitz every mitzvah only has one reason (

). In both cases the particularities—be they the circumstances of the other person, or the various reasons and functions of each mitzvah, such as aiding the poor through charity or celebrating creation through the Sabbath—are not the final end of the act but are subordinate to the one ultimate end, which is disinterested service of the transcendent One.

⁹⁰

Once again, then, Levinas's ethics pass through the face only in order to surpass it. But to put the face, the very phenomenality of the other, in question is to challenge the way Levinas is often understood, namely, as reading ethical authority directly off the experience of the face of the other. It is usually thought that the ethical transcendence Levinas achieves without the aid of the moral law is realized by a phenomenology of the face that describes the source and unconditional character of moral authority. This is true inasmuch as the formalism and the binding nature of Kant's moral law are indeed replaced by the ethical singularity of the face. That is why I have suggested that Levinas offers a post-Heideggerian Kan-tianism, meaning that within a philosophical climate which reduces the moral law and the fact of reason to the contingencies of being in the world, Levinas manages to preserve a sense of unconditioned obligation through the singular givenness of the face. Nevertheless, the face itself commands an unconditional obligation only insofar as it belongs to the transcendence of the other. It is the phenomenological absence of the face—its withdrawal to infinity and transcendence—that alone legitimates its authority. Levinas's “ethics” is consequently ethical only to the extent that a certain distance intervenes between the face and the unconditionality of the obligation. To do justice to what nowadays so easily gets called “ethics” we must account for a fact which Levinas has taught us to consider, that obligation precedes interpretation, self-consciousness, and even moral experience. There would then be no nondogmatic way of restricting Levinas's “ethics” to, or even of grounding it solely in, interpersonal relations. At this point Levinas's philosophy of transcendence exceeds and even strikes back at the privilege he seems to accord to the ethical experience of the other person. What is at stake in Levinas's thought is the obligation given through the concept of the absolutely singular other, not through the concrete singularity of the actual face. Rather than reading Levinas as describing the ethical project of a human life only in terms of responsibilities for other human beings, one should conclude that obligations expose me to diverse and perhaps incompatible beginnings. It is only on account of this move from the concrete singularity of the face to the abstract singularity of the Other that Levinas's “ethics” at once maintains itself as such, avoids collapsing into concupiscence, violence, or pathology, and thereby involves itself in the essential ambiguities of a philosophy of transcendence.

In this manner, Levinas's ethics of transcendence becomes indistinguishable from a theology of radical otherness.⁹¹

The neologism “illeity” expresses this sense of ultimate answerability not to the concrete other but to an Other that is, as Levinas tells us, “perhaps also expressed by the word God.”⁹² And in a note to “God and Philosophy,” he states, “It is the meaning of the beyond, of transcendence, and not of ethics that our study seeks.”⁹³ Of course he adds that his study “finds its meaning in ethics.” But why “the meaning of the beyond” should be found exclusively in one's concrete relations with other persons is difficult to see. In point of fact Levinas moves in the opposite direction. Indeed, in one of the central passages of his later work he himself asks why this way of orienting desire toward a singular sense of transcendence is called “ethics” at all: “in the transcendence of the infinite, what is it that dictates to us the word Good?” Levinas's answer goes even further than this surprising question in highlighting the difficulty of distinguishing between a radically negative theology and an ethics of the absolutely other:

The claim is that for God to be the terminus ad quem of practical desire is to reduce God to a conceptual or at least volitional object and thus give the lie to the disinterestedness of desire. For desire to remain disinterested and to avoid the conceptualization or reduction of its “object,” it must be referred to a nondesirable alternative. Without this insertion of undesirability between the desired transcendence and the desire itself, the relation would collapse into yet another ruse of self-interest and immanence. Levinas's claim is that disinterested desire is attested far better by the ethical relation than by the religious relation with God. The latter, he thinks, degrades all too easily into various modes of self-interest, such as knowledge, consolation, salvation, or reward. But this again merits comparison with Leibowitz, for the latter rejects theology precisely on account of its degradation into self-interest. Now, for Leibowitz this means that it is the givenness of religious law rather than an unmediated relation with God that enables the disinterestedness of religious praxis. One must therefore ask of Levinas: Is the human other the only nondesirable? Is the other person really the undesirable “par excellence”? Agreeing in principle with Levinas's formula, Leibowitz would have us believe that it is the halakhic law and not the imperative of the face that is the sole way of acting disinterestedly. After all, the halakhic law, like commandments issuing from the other, is exceedingly, incessantly nondesirable.

For all the evocative use of “ethical language,” then, Levinas's philosophy has recourse less to the experience of the other than to the givenness of obligation in its everyday singularity. It is not the face that commands in order to ensure the ethical character of obligation but the singular fact of obligation that enables the moral experience of the face:

Obligation cannot be derived, deduced, or intuited from the experience of the other; one finds oneself and one encounters the other only in light of its anterior givenness.⁹⁶ I should therefore like to say that there is an intrinsic but not an exclusive connection between an unconditioned obligation and responsibility for another person. This openness that I suggest we preserve within the idea of the other and within the givenness of obligation allows us to understand why the distinction between ethics, religion, and even art is so tenuous throughout Levinas's work, despite the considerable effort he makes to privilege ethics. The other person is not the one from whom obligation issues, not the only one at any rate, but one to whom I am obliged, one among others. The key to Otherwise than Being is this move from an experience of the other to a description of obliged selfhood, for the obliged self is constituted as such on account of its immemorial exposure to given, mundane, multifarious obligations. Now this exposure, since it is passive, cannot ensure that it will have been exposed exclusively to the human “other,” much less to “the face.” Levinas's notion of the obliged self that is not a subject because it is elected and exposed can only be as such by having been given over to every one that calls it forth. To be sure, other people play a crucial role in providing a means through which or through whom the elected self receives its first calling, especially insofar as they expose the self to language, but the elected self can never trace itself back exclusively to them. There is, rather, a gap between the origin of obligation and the experience of responsibility for other persons; the former is lost, immemorial, unnameable. Levinas thus comes to abandon every name we might give to the source of our obligations—abandons naming it “face,” “trace,” or “Other” —in order to consider the obligations themselves in their unconditioned givenness. But since the facticity of obligation displaces every genetic account of its origin, it follows that the name “ethics” says too much; that “ethics” requires its own unsaying. Religion, or at least Leibowitz's deontological account of halakhic life, is one way of unsaying “ethics” within the fundamental givenness of obligation in everyday life.

Let me spell out my conclusions. Levinas and Leibowitz appear utterly opposed in their basic views of the relation between ethics and religion. And yet several ideas that are central to each one are strikingly reflected in the work of the other. I have mentioned a critique of religious epistemology, a rejection of theodicy, and a convergence in their accounts of prophecy, prayer, and perhaps providence. All this centers on a radically negative theocentricism in which God is named in nonempirical, nonontological, wholly normative terms. It is this practice of unconditional obligation that each identifies with holiness and thus with the only concrete relation one can have with God. For Levinas the way toward this is through the face, for Leibowitz through the mitzvah, but each one has a concept of holiness, albeit negative and if not absolutely singular, which is the sole end and value of normative practices. They likewise share a deep, if differently slanted, post-Kantianism that provides each with an ahistorical, unconditioned, deontological account of obligation that is not based on the fact of reason but on the primacy of a more basic imperative. For Levinas, this comes from taking on board Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, in particular his critique of the Kantian transcendental subject and the primacy that Kant accords to the fact of reason, while nevertheless pursuing an account of obligation that does not reduce to context but on the contrary raises the self above its historical and social conditions. For Leibowitz too, it comes from rejecting the moral law as a metaphysical postulate that cannot withstand the reductions of empiricism but then investing halakhic obligation with the very status Kant saw in the moral law. In both cases it is crucial that human freedom and dignity are derived from the possibility of genuine obligation which involves action done without, if not against, one's own interests.

These convergences lead me to conclude that Levinas's account of obligation cannot be contained by what he and his readers usually call “ethics,” by interpersonal normative relations. Levinas must be read as describing the self in its original exposure to the givenness of obligation, which by every right belongs to no one, not even “the other.” This points to an essential ambiguity that accompanies Levinas's thought and renders it at bottom an account of the primacy of obligation in general rather than a purely ethical account of obligation for the other person. Levinas's philosophical anthropology thus suffers the rich ambiguities of its subject matter. Such is hardly the case for Leibowitz. He simply defines obligation on the basis of halakhic life, and so there is no surprise that only halakhic praxis attests to unconditional normative action. This has the strength of an internal explanation of halakhic life that explains its intrinsic value to those who already practice it. But there is no way for someone outside the system of halakhah to accept Leibowitz's position without undermining his or her own integrity. For if it is the practical system of the law that has the sole privilege of producing genuine freedom and genuine service, then anyone coming from outside the system is a priori barred from every means of acting disinterestedly.

Comparing Levinas to Leibowitz allows us to see with renewed clarity how the richness of Levinas's thought as an account of human obligation as such demands that we abandon a narrowly ethical reading of it. Having drawn extensive and somewhat surprising comparisons between these two great thinkers, we were then able to turn to Levinas's work itself in order to find internal support for understanding his “ethics” in terms that include religious and other everyday practical obligations. By Levinas's own light, obligations in general are given prior to the distinction between religion and ethics. Precisely because of the manifold modes and names of such obligations, the obliged self itself assumes diverse and at times antithetical forms.