I was invited to speak on Jewish philosophy and, as my title suggests, I have chosen to focus on 20^th century Jewish thinkers. Rather than attempting a survey of 20^th century Jewish philosophy, I will narrow the focus to three of the period's most significant thinkers: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. These three are part of what Robert Gibbs has called a ‘family’ of Jewish thinkers which also includes their predecessor, the Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen.Footnote ² I will focus on three books – Buber's I and Thou, Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption, and Levinas's Totality and Infinity – and on one philosophical question – the relationship between self and other, or ‘inter-subjectivity’. In other words, I want to ask, with each of these three authors, ‘Who is the other?’ In exploring this theme, we will also need to consider their different understandings of authentic selfhood and ask what role, if any, God plays in the relationship with the other.

Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas were all thinkers who wrote for a general philosophical audience and leading educators in their respective Jewish communities. In each case, there are some parts of their corpus which are specifically concerned with Jewish texts, practices, and questions and which were written primarily for a Jewish audience. Although, for the most part, we will ignore those writings today and focus on the three books I have mentioned, my primary interest is in understanding each thinker's contribution to Jewish thought rather than to philosophy per se.

One of the key family resemblances that Gibbs identifies in the three thinkers is their development, following Cohen, of an other-centred ethics. Additionally, in Rosenzweig and Levinas there is a sweeping critique of the totalizing and reductive tendencies of western philosophy, and its inability to acknowledge genuine transcendence or otherness. According to Levinas, the dominant approach in western philosophy is to see the relationship between self and other in negative terms. In Levinas's phrase, western philosophy presents the relationship between self and other as an ‘allergic relation’.Footnote ³ This approach is perhaps best epitomized by Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's philosophical works argue that ‘social relations are bound to fail’ and portray the other person as an ontological thief, someone who steals the world away from me;Footnote ⁴and his play No Exit gave us the memorable exclamation ‘L'enfer, c'est les autres’, usually translated as ‘Hell is other people!’Footnote ⁵

For the three Jewish thinkers we are looking at today, hell is most certainly not the other(s). On the contrary, for each of them a positive and responsible relationship with the other is indispensable for authentic selfhood, a meaningful life, and a genuine relationship with God.

These three themes are clearly manifested in Buber's famous 1923 work Ich und Du,Footnote ⁶ normally translated as I and Thou, in which Buber claims that there are two fundamentally different ways of relating to the world, namely the mode of ‘I-thou’ and the mode of ‘I-it’. The opening passage of I and Thou sets out Buber's basic premise:

Before looking at the distinction between I-it and I-thou in more detail, I should mention that I am quoting from Walter Kauffman's 1970 translation, but with a significant change. Unlike his predecessor Ronald Gregor Smith, who published the first English translation of Ich und Du in 1937, Kauffman chose to translate ‘du’ as ‘you’ rather than ‘thou’; the only exception he made was in the title. He felt that for a contemporary readership ‘thou’ sounds both archaic and formal. I understand his concern, but disagree with his decision. I think that our inability in modern English to distinguish between the singular and the plural second person pronouns, and especially between the intimate and the formal, is a major weakness of the language. I also suspect that if Buber had been writing in English he might have chosen different terminology altogether, or even have chosen to revive the word ‘thou’. More importantly, I perhaps have more faith in the intelligence and flexibility of educated readers than Kaufmann did. A quick reminder of their high school French, and some judicious quoting of Shakespeare, should do the trick. In Shakespearean English, as is well known, ‘thou’ and ‘you were used, respectively, as the singular and plural second person pronouns. ‘You’ was also used as a formal second person singular. This usage parallels the use of ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ in French and ‘du’ and ‘sie’ in German. Remember Juliet:

By using ‘du’/ ‘thou’, Buber is conveying that the one who is addressed is a) the singular other and b) someone with whom I have a close relationship – if only in the moment of the address. I have therefore altered the translation of ‘du’ to ‘thou’ rather than ‘you’.

What does Buber mean by ‘I-it’ and ‘I-thou’? I-it refers to our ordinary mode of engaging with things in the world. We treat them as means to our own ends; we engage with them only on a superficial level; and our knowledge of them is mediated by concepts and categories. There is nothing inherently wrong with this way of relating to objects, and even human beings must often be related to in the mode of I-it rather than that of I-thou. Indeed, Buber acknowledges the absolute necessity of I-it. However, it is of paramount importance for Buber that when I relate to an object or person in the mode of I-it, I am not fully engaged in the world. The self that engages in I-it relations is the ‘limited I’.

Buber contrasts this mode of being with the I-thou relation, in which I relate to the other with my whole being. In this encounter, I open myself to the other. I relinquish any thought of objectives or desired outcomes; and the limited, indirect knowledge of the I-it mode of experience is replaced with a deeper, unmediated knowledge. Most importantly for Buber, I emerge from the encounter with a sense of confirmation of my being and an affirmation that existence itself is meaningful.

It is important to recognize that for Buber, certainly in the realm of inter-human relationships, the I-thou is a reciprocal relationship; the other whom I address as my thou similarly says ‘thou’ to me. This may be one of the reasons that he tells us that there is an element of ‘grace’ involved in the I-thou; although I can try to be open to I-thou encounter, I cannot make it happen by my own efforts. To understand this, it is helpful to consider the contemporary psychological concept of ‘flow’. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a state in which the person is completely focused, experiencing no distracting thoughts or irrelevant feelings. Self-consciousness disappears and one's sense of time is distorted.Footnote ⁹ Csikszentmihalyi gives numerous examples of activities that may produce flow for different people, including various sports, reading, singing, playing a game, or programming a computer. He also points out that the state of flow may occur during a social interaction, such as a conversation between good friends or a mother playing with her baby.Footnote ¹⁰

I would suggest that being in such a state of ‘flow’ is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of I-thou encounters. To take the example of a conversation, if I am not completely immersed in conversing with the other, if I have a distracting thought or a moment of self-consciousness when I wonder whether I'm talking too much or boring the other person, then not only am I not experiencing flow at that moment, I am also not in the midst of an I-thou encounter.Footnote ¹¹ But even if I am in this flow state throughout, fully engrossed in the moment, if the other person is not similarly fully engaged in the encounter and in the flow state, then, according to Buber's analysis, no genuine I-thou encounter takes place.

The brief summary I have just given is based largely on Part I of I and Thou. It has skipped over some of the major difficulties in the text by focusing only on the relationship with the human other. Buber himself, however, presented I-thou encounter as a possibility in three spheres of relation: our life with nature; our engagement with fellow human beings; and our connection with ‘forms of spirit’,Footnote ¹² by which Buber means artistic inspiration and other experiences in which ‘we hear no Thou but feel addressed; we answer – creating, thinking, acting.’Footnote ¹³

Buber's explicit aim in writing I and Thou was to help overcome the ‘sickness of the age’,Footnote ¹⁴ in which I-thou relations are eclipsed by the predominance of the ‘it-world’, by awakening his readers to the potential for I-thou relation. He believed that the dominance of the I-it mode of being in modern life had nearly destroyed individuals' awareness of, and therefore their capacity for, I-thou encounter. The book is divided into three parts. The first part, with its highly poetic descriptions of I-thou, is designed to invoke the reader's recollection of their own experience of encounter, and to awaken a desire for future I-thou relations. In the third part, Buber introduces a concept which is central to his dialogical philosophy, but only alluded to briefly earlier on – the idea of the Eternal Thou. Part I states simply that in each thou ‘we address the eternal Thou’.Footnote ¹⁵ In Part III Buber makes it clear that this is not an added extra of I-thou relationships, but is constitutive of them. ‘The mediatorship of the Thou of all beings accounts for the fullness of our relationships to them.’Footnote ¹⁶ In other words, to overcome the ‘sickness of the age’, we need not only to open ourselves to mutually affirming encounters with others; we must also at the same time be prepared to address, and be addressed by, the Eternal Thou.

According to Buber, God cannot be deduced from either nature or history. Rather, God or the Eternal Thou is ‘what confronts us immediately and first and always.’Footnote ¹⁷As such, even a self-proclaimed atheist can be in relation with the Eternal Thou: ‘whoever abhors the name and fancies that he is godless – when he addresses with his whole devoted being the Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God.’Footnote ¹⁸

In the concluding pages of I and Thou Buber elaborates his vision of a fully actualized person and society. The ideal would not be to refrain from I-it relations, which is impossible in any case, but to allow the relation with the Eternal Thou to imbue all of life with meaning. Each person's life should be so permeated with true I-thou relation that moments of encounter are not transient, like ‘flashes of lightning in the dark’; rather, they should be like ‘a rising moon in a clear starry night.’Footnote ¹⁹

For Buber, then, authentic selfhood, the intersubjective relation, and the relationship with God are all intimately connected with one another. It is only when I engage with the other as my thou that my authentic self, or whole being, comes into play; to encounter the other as my thou is at the same time to be in relation with the Eternal Thou; and it is only through I-thou relations that my existence becomes meaningful.

Both Rosenzweig and Levinas had significant reservations about the main thesis of I and Thou. Rosenzweig, who was a friend and colleague of Buber, commented on the manuscript before publication. His main criticism was that the binary categorization of all modes of relation as either I-thou or I-it was a vast over-simplification of the complexities of interhuman relations and relations between God and human beings.Footnote ²⁰

Before we look at Rosenzweig's own magnum opus, a warning: The Star of Redemption is one of the strangest books of philosophy one is likely to encounter. As Peter Eli Gordon has pointed out, reading it requires great patience:

The opening passage illustrates Gordon's observations about the absence of some customary features of philosophical writings. In what is probably the most famous passage of the book, Rosenzweig writes:

This focus on the fear of death is, of course, reminiscent of Heidegger's philosophy, and the similarities between the two thinkers have been explored by Gordon and other scholars. On a slightly less highbrow note, Rosenzweig's claim that the self refuses the sham immortality of philosophy and wants, instead, to remain living in the ordinary sense of the word reminds me of Woody Allen's quip that he doesn't want to achieve immortality through his films, he wants to attain it by not dying.

According to Rosenzweig, western philosophy has sold us a bill of goods. It offers us an escape from human finitude via the intellect; a philosophical idea of immortality. But for Rosenzweig, as Gordon explains,

As well as criticizing philosophy for this great metaphysical hoax, Rosenzweig critiques western philosophy's reductive approach to reality, its claim to be able to think ‘the All’. It should be noted here that Rosenzweig views the history of philosophy through the lens of German Idealism. In a sweeping overview of the history of philosophy, he argues that every philosophy, from the ancient Greeks to Hegel, has tried to ‘reduce the manifold into the one, the sensible into the intelligible, in short, the real into the one’.Footnote ²³

As Stefan Moses explains, Rosenzweig thinks that:

Rosenzweig's system, on the other hand, refuses unity and insists on plurality. As mentioned earlier, there are three independent ‘elements’ that are irreducible to one another: namely God, World, and Man.

The Star is divided into three parts, each of which Rosenzweig originally wanted to publish as a separate volume. Each part contains an introduction, three books, and a concluding section which also serves as the ‘transition’ or ‘threshold’ to the next book, or in the case of Part Three, a concluding ‘Gate’. Most famously, the cover of the book and title pages of each Part feature a geometric shape. Part One and Part Two feature equilateral triangles, one pointing upwards and the other downwards. The first represents the ‘elements’ of Rosenzweig's philosophical system: God, World, and Humanity. The second triangle represents the relationships between the elements: Creation (God to the World), Revelation (God to Humanity), and Redemption (Humanity to the World). The two triangles represent a key theme of his critique of western philosophy: whereas philosophy, ‘from Parmenides to Hegel’, claims to think of the ‘totality of being’ (SR 12) and in so doing, unifies the world, divine spirit, and humanity, Rosenzweig insists on the irreducible separation of God, world, and humanity, and this is symbolized by the points of the first triangle. Although God, world, and humanity remain separate, they are in relation to one another, and this is represented by the lines of the second triangle. The title page of Part III presents the six-pointed Star of David (magen david) formed by superimposing the second triangle onto the first. The six-pointed star was also embossed upon the cover of the first German edition of the Star. At the heart of the star is the eternal fire of revelation, internalized by the eternal people, the Jews. The rays of the star ‘go forth only from this fire’Footnote ²⁵ and Christianity, which is evangelical at its core, spreads the light of revelation.

Rosenzweig's magnum opus weaves together philosophy and theology in an original way and has given rise to a range of different interpretations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given all of the challenges the Star presents, the book did not easily find an audience of careful readers. Rosenzweig himself expressed shock at how little its purported readers knew it – ‘everyone’, he wrote to his cousin Hans Ehrenberg, ‘thinks it is an admonition to kosher eating’.Footnote ²⁶ Although existentialist readings of Rosenzweig have been dominant for several decades, more recent scholars have presented a range of readings, including approaches that emphasize Rosenzweig's own description of the Star as a ‘system of philosophy’, despite his scathing critique of idealist philosophy and particularly Hegel's system.Footnote ²⁷

Part II of the Star, which describes how revelation transforms each of the three ‘elements’ and brings them into contact with the others, will be our main focus, because it is here that Rosenzweig presents the relationship between the self and the human other. Significantly, he discusses this and other themes in Part II via an extended commentary on biblical texts. Although Rosenzweig's approach to these texts has been called ‘midrashic’, Mara Benjamin has argued that his methodology is more akin to the literary genre of the ‘re-written Bible’.Footnote ²⁸ Rosenzweig employs four significant features of this genre of writing: he produces an interpretive reading of scripture via an indirect commentary; he follows the Bible serially, in proper order, but is highly selective in quoting and otherwise representing texts; he imposes a single interpretation on the original; and, finally, he does not state the exegetical reasoning that guides this interpretation.Footnote ²⁹ Rather, as Benjamin explains, ‘The biblical texts that occupy the heart of Star anchor the text and, at the same time, are reconstituted in a strong misreading that gives them new shape and meaning.’ Rosenzweig uses two broadly defined strategies to integrate the biblical text into the Star: ‘the explicit use of biblical texts and the subtle weaving of “unmarked” references into his own prose.’ This way of working with the biblical text has caused some confusion among readers. However, as Benjamin explains, Rosenzweig's ‘citations of, allusions to, and wholesale reworking of scripture attest to [his] vision of scripture as fulfilling a unique and irreplaceable purpose within his own philosophical tome’.Footnote ³⁰ Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption is, to a large extent, a biblical commentary that needs to be read alongside the biblical text.

For example, in Book 2 of Part II, which has been described as both the literal and spiritual centre of the book,Footnote ³¹ Rosenzweig weaves together a number of biblical texts with his own philosophical thought: we move from Adam after the sin to a composite portrayal of the prophetic response to God's call – hineini, ‘here I am’.

Bearing in mind Benjamin's observations on the similarity of Rosenzweig's approach to the genre of the ‘re-written Bible’, we can avoid Hilary Putnam's conclusion that Rosenzweig's text is ‘playing a trick on the reader’ of this passage.Footnote ³³ The unmarked transitions from the story of Adam after the sin to the story of Abraham being called by God, and the allusions to other prophets who respond ‘hineini, here I am’ to God's call, are not an attempt to confuse the reader but to articulate Rosenzweig's own thought using biblical language and allusions. In Book Two of Part II, the Star presents an understanding of revelation as divine love. According to this account, the human being is transformed from an enclosed self to a soul when it hears God's voice, responds to His call by saying ‘here I am’, and becomes aware of divine love. This love is not a universal attribute of God, but is radically particular:Footnote ³⁴ To receive the revelation is to become aware of God's love for me. Rosenzweig uses the figures of Adam and Abraham respectively to represent the generic human being (in Hebrew, ‘adam’ is both a proper name and the generic noun for ‘man’ or ‘human being’)Footnote ³⁵ and a specific, named individual who is loved by God qua individual. (Abraham is named by God in Genesis 17:5 and called by his name, twice, in Genesis 22:11).Footnote ³⁶ Whereas for Buber, the authentic self or whole being emerges in any I-thou encounter, in Rosenzweig's narrative it is hearing and responding to the particularist divine call that transforms the self into soul.

This love is revealed in the form of an imperative, namely: love me! Continuing in the same ‘re-written bible’ genre, Rosenzweig writes:

How is the soul to love God? Rosenzweig insists that simply returning God's love is not what is required. To do so would be to embrace the path of the mystic, seeking seclusion with God. Instead, the appropriate response to God's love is to fulfil the commandment of loving the neighbour, who is in God's image: ‘All commandments which derive from that primeval “love me!” ultimately merge in the all-inclusive “love thy neighbour!”’.Footnote ³⁸

Although we have only considered a few aspects of Rosenzweig's thought, we are now in a position to sketch preliminary answers to our three questions: authentic selfhood arises as a response to the call of God; the other is the neighbour whom I am commanded to love; and love for the neighbour is grounded in the prior revelation of God's love for me.

Rosenzweig's thought had a profound influence on a number of Jewish thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas, who states somewhat paradoxically in the preface to Totality and Infinity that the Star of Redemption ‘is too often present in this book to be cited’.Footnote ³⁹ The comment is made in the context of Levinas acknowledging the powerful influence of Rosenzweig's critique of the reductive and totalizing impulses of western philosophy. In what follows I will give a brief introduction to Levinas's account of the self-other relation and then consider how it compares with Rosenzweig's account.

Totality and Infinity appeared in 1961, forty years after Rosenzweig's magnum opus. Its opening paragraph consists of one sentence: ‘Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.’Footnote ⁴⁰ In a late interview, referring explicitly to the Holocaust, Levinas again asks whether morality is still meaningful – but this time he adds the phrase ‘after the failure of morality’.Footnote ⁴¹ We will explore the significance of the historical context later, but I don't want to keep you in suspense – from Totality and Infinity onwards Levinas will answer the question about the meaningfulness of morality in the affirmative, even if his account of ethics becomes increasingly difficult to understand.

Levinas is able to affirm the meaningfulness of morality through his account of the relationship between self and other. Although Levinas's methodology is grounded in the phenomenology he learnt from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Totality and Infinity can also be read as a narrative. Indeed, as Diane Perpich has pointed out,

This is, of course, a vast over-simplification; and, as Perpich emphasizes, the narrative structure of the tale is ‘importantly at odds with the most original impulses of the work’. Nevertheless, I will begin by fleshing out the story, partly to enable a comparison with the accounts offered by Buber and Rosenzweig, and partly because the question of the ego's responsibility is central to Totality and Infinity; ‘it drives the work forward chronologically, logically, and dramatically, governing in almost every respect the relationship between its component parts.’Footnote ⁴³

Levinas presents a phenomenological analysis of the self's relationship with the natural world. In this analysis, prior to the encounter with another human being, the ego views itself as the centre of existence. Everything in the natural world is subject to the self's powers: through labour, possession, cognition, and so forth, the self is always able to overcome the alterity or otherness of objects.

Levinas's account of embodied human existence is different in important ways from the phenomenologies of both Husserl and Heidegger. One of Levinas's critiques of Husserl was that Husserlian phenomenology focused too much on intellectual operations, looking at intentionality primarily in terms of representation. Levinas's intentional analysis of embodiment focuses on a relation of ‘living from’ the natural world: ‘“Good soup”, air, light, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep, etc. [… ] These are not objects of representations. We live from them.’Footnote ⁴⁵

Levinas also distances himself from a Heideggerian focus on implements, the ‘ready to hand’. For Levinas, human life equates with ‘love of life’:

Levinas acknowledges that the relationship with nature is challenging. The body is needy; it suffers from hunger, thirst, and so forth. Yet, Levinas says, the self is ‘happy in its needs’. Rejecting the Platonic interpretation of need as a simple lack, Levinas argues that even meeting the most basic needs of life is experienced as accomplishment: ‘enjoyment is made of the memory of its thirst; it is a quenching.’ Although the self is dependent on the world to provide the raw materials with which to meet its needs, it is also independent insofar as the subject is able to plan and take action to meet those needs.Footnote ⁴⁷

When another human being appears in my world, however, my mastery and enjoyment are called into question. Levinas emphasizes the radical alterity of the other: ‘The Other escapes my grasp by an essential dimension, even if I have him at my disposal. He is not wholly in my site.’Footnote ⁴⁸

Levinas employs the image of the ‘face’ to describe autrui, the absolutely other human being. Although the term ‘face’ evokes a concrete image, Levinas clearly has something much less tangible in mind. He defines ‘face’ as ‘the way in which the other presents himself, ‘exceeding the idea of the other in me’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Unlike the alterity of objects, the otherness of autrui cannot be overcome through possession, comprehension, or any of the ego's other powers. It is important to emphasize that ‘alterity’ here should not be understood as difference. Levinas writes:

What happens when the ego meets the absolutely other, the Stranger who cannot be grasped? How does the ego react to this other? Levinas says that there is an ‘epiphany’ in the face of the other.Footnote ⁵² Using the biblical idiom of commandment, Levinas writes that the ‘primordial expression’ of the face is ‘“you shall not commit murder.”’Footnote ⁵³ The self experiences the Other not as a threat, but as both vulnerable and commanding.

Levinas is not a naïve altruist – he knows all too well that murder is common. In the same paragraph in which he speaks of the ethical impossibility of murder, he acknowledges that ‘the face threatens the eventuality of a struggle’. However, he says: ‘War presupposes peace, the antecedent and non-allergic presence of the Other; it does not represent the first event of the encounter.’Footnote ⁵⁵

In addition to the ethical obligation of refraining from murder, the encounter with the face of the other leads the self to awareness of its responsibility to care for the other. The expression of the face conveys its ‘destitution and hunger’, and does so in such a way, Levinas says, that I am unable to be ‘deaf to its appeal’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Through the encounter with the face of the other, the self comes to critique and question its own brutal spontaneity and appropriation of the natural world. It learns to judge itself, and in so doing becomes aware of its responsibility, which Levinas describes as ‘infinite’, not in the numerical sense, but in that it is a responsibility that increases in the measure that it is assumed. ‘The better I accomplish my duty the fewer rights I have; the more I am just the more guilty I am.’Footnote ⁵⁷

Levinas also insists that this sense of the self as infinitely responsible is not generalizable. To be aware of one's own responsibility is not to perceive infinite responsibility as a general rule for everyone. On the contrary, Levinas insists that the relationship with the other is asymmetrical. ‘The I is not a contingent formation by which the same and the other, as logical determinations of being, can in addition be reflected within a thought. […] Alterity is possible only starting from me.’Footnote ⁵⁸ He expresses a similar idea in a slightly more accessible way when he says that the other's responsibilities are ‘his affair’.Footnote ⁵⁹

This brief exposition of Levinas's drama will suffice for beginning to consider how his account of the relation with the other compares with those of Buber and Rosenzweig. Levinas published a few essays on Buber and made some critical remarks in Totality and Infinity itself. He insisted that in the ethical relationship the other is not ‘thou’ but ‘Vous’;Footnote ⁶⁰ he therefore questioned the reciprocity or mutuality that Buber emphasizes, repeating his own insistence that the ethical relationship is asymmetrical. He also charged Buber's philosophy with ‘formalism’, with failing to distinguish between the I-thou that puts us in relation with human beings and the I-thou that can relate a person to things.Footnote ⁶¹ Most significantly, in his discussion of the ‘third party’ in Totality and Infinity, Levinas informs us that:

In this context, Levinas emphasizes the difference between the ethical relation of the face-to-face and the‘self-sufficient “I-Thou”’ in which the happy pair tend to forget about the rest of the world. In contrast to a cosy I-thou relationship, Levinas emphasizes that the face to face ‘refuses the clandestinity of love, [where the relationship] loses its frankness and meaning and turns into laugher or cooing’.Footnote ⁶³

Apart from these specific differences that Levinas highlights, there is a more general difference between Levinas's face-to-face, on the one hand, and the accounts of both Buber and Rosenzweig on the other. In both of the earlier thinkers, the relationship with the other is ultimately grounded in the relationship with God or, in Buber's phrase, the ‘Eternal Thou’. The difference between Rosenzweig and Levinas is particularly striking, given Levinas's acknowledgement of the importance of Rosenzweig's influence.Footnote ⁶⁴ Unlike Rosenzweig's love of the neighbour, Levinas's ethical relation is neither founded on the prior revelation of divine love, nor inscribed within an over-arching narrative of redemption.

As I noted earlier, Rosenzweig's account of divine love is central to The Star of Redemption. Samuel Moyn argues that the experience of divine love is ‘the core of [Rosenzweig's] thought, the major alternative he offered to the European traditions of philosophy and theology that he inherited, and the element of his “new thinking” that decisively distinguishes it from Heidegger's secular view.’Footnote ⁶⁵ However, as we have seen, the self's experience of divine love does not form part of Levinas's account of ethics in Totality and Infinity. On Levinas's account, the self is indeed called upon to ‘love’ or, in his words, take responsibility for, the neighbour or the other, and to this extent, Levinas's account is similar to Rosenzweig's. However, despite the occasional use of religious language and even of the word ‘God’ in Totality and Infinity, Levinas's account of the ethical relation does not rely either on either the premise of God's existence or on any sort of existential account of an experience of relationship with God. It is possible to give a consistent secular reading of Totality and Infinity but the same cannot be said of either The Star of Redemption or I and Thou. Regarding the comparison with Rosenzweig, Moyn argues that ‘Levinas radicalized, secularized, and moralized’ Rosenzweig's thought.Footnote ⁶⁶

One might think that Levinas's intention of writing philosophy rather than theology would suffice as an explanation for why he doesn't borrow Rosenzweig's notion of divine love as the foundation for ethics. However, I think there is more to say. Firstly, Levinas does use the word ‘God’ and other theological language in Totality and Infinity – although, as I have argued elsewhere, most of what he says about God in this book forms part of his critique of ‘positive religions’.Footnote ⁶⁷ More significantly, if we look to Levinas's larger corpus of writings, we will see that this refusal of the language of ‘divine love’ is characteristic of his confessional writings and not just of his strictly philosophical work.

I would like to suggest that this significant difference between Levinas and Rosenzweig can be better understood by considering Levinas's corpus within the broader field of post-Holocaust Jewish thought. Emil Fackenheim, perhaps the most famous thinker in this field, has argued that Judaism, along with Christianity and western philosophy itself, is ruptured by the Holocaust.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet Fackenheim himself only came to this realization relatively late in his career. As Zachary Braiterman has pointed out, the leading Jewish thinkers who were writing in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s – including Buber – did not seem to acknowledge the radical challenge posed by the Shoah. On the contrary, despite occasional references to the Holocaust, the work of Buber, as well as that of Kaplan, Heschel and Soloveitchik,Footnote ⁶⁹ exhibited a surprising continuity with their pre-war writings. Braiterman also notes that, as a general rule, writers, artists, and film-makers tackle the subject well before the theologians and philosophers, and that when discursive post-Holocaust thought does emerge, from the late 1960s onwards, it is marked by a new emphasis on anti-theodic texts, motifs, and ideas, even in the case of Orthodox thinkers such as Eliezer Berkovits.

Where does Levinas's work fit within this schema? Although there are only a few texts where he explicitly engages with the significance of the Holocaust at any length, it is not difficult to make the case that the Shoah is central to his thought. Indeed, in his autobiographical essay ‘Signature’, Levinas writes that his intellectual biography has been ‘dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror’.Footnote ⁷⁰

I have argued elsewhere that Levinas's ‘confessional writings’ show an evolution of his thought that fits well with Braiterman's observations.Footnote ⁷¹ Essays from the 1950s, such as ‘Loving the Torah more than God’, which is itself a commentary on a work of fiction, present contemporary Judaism not as ‘ruptured’ but as continuous with rabbinic Judaism; and while Levinas does not embrace theodicy, neither does he engage in much critique of it. Later writings, including the 1982 essay ‘Useless Suffering’ and the 1986 interview cited earlier, however, are strongly anti-theodic. Indeed, in ‘Useless Suffering’ Levinas completely rejects theodicy and its secular analogues as ‘morally scandalous’. Like Fackenheim, at this stage he acknowledges not only that theology is ruptured, but that philosophy – at least moral philosophy – also faces a radical challenge. The question that he poses at the beginning of Totality and Infinity – ‘are we not duped by morality?’ – becomes more radical in the context of the Holocaust: ‘Is morality meaningful after the failure of morality?’ And although he continues to affirm the meaningfulness of morality, through his account of the ethical relation with the other, Levinas tells us that we need new modalities of both religious faith and moral certainties.

Between the publication of Totality and Infinity and that of the essays I have just quoted, Levinas published his magnum opus, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. In this 1974 work, the voice of the moral sceptic is much powerful and persistent than it is in Totality and Infinity, where it is largely confined to the preface. Given Braiterman's insights, it is also interesting to note that it was only in 1974 that Levinas dedicated a major work of philosophy to the memory of his parents, siblings, and in-laws who had been murdered by the Nazis. That is the dedication to Otherwise than Being which appears in Hebrew, at the bottom of the page. The French dedication at the top of the page reads:

‘To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism.’Footnote ⁷²

In 1961, when he published Totality and Infinity, Levinas was enough of a post-Holocaust thinker to sense the urgency of the question about the meaningfulness of morality and to avoid any hint of a justifying theodicy or talk of ‘divine love’ – but not yet so radically post-Holocaust a thinker that he couldn't confidently present an affirmative answer to the question.