Soloveitchik and Levinas: pathways to the other - Biography

Judaism, Fall, 2002 by Seymour Kessler

Levinas became a French citizen and during W.W.II served as an officer in the French army. He was captured and sent to a labor camp by the Nazis. His wife and daughter in France were sheltered by Catholic nuns--an act for which he was grateful all his life (9)--whereas his entire family back in Lithuania was murdered in the Shoah.

Following the war he returned to Paris to become the director of L'Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale and resumed his philosophical writing. In 1947 he published Time and the Other and Existence and Existents, both of which advance his preliminary ideas on ethics. In 1947 he also undertook intense Talmudic studies with an itinerant scholar, M. Shoushani, whom Levinas described as the "prestigious--and merciless--teacher of exegesis and Talmud," and he introduced such studies into the curriculum of the Ecole Normale. Beginning in 1960, he gave an annual series of Talmudic commentaries, some of which have been translated and published in his Nine Talmudic Readings and in other essays. In 1949, he published the French version of Difficult Freedom, a compilation of essays on Jewish themes, followed in 1961 by Totality and Infinity, a book that established him as a major Continental philosopher. In 1974 he published what many regard as his magnum opus, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. In 1982 another collection of essays was published (in French), Of God Who Comes to Mind. He received several academic appointments and eventually in 1973 was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne. He died in 1995.

When we turn to Levinas's writings, some fresh insights emerge concerning Soloveitchik's approach to philosophy and religion. In this essay I explore some of the points of intellectual contact in the works of the two men and highlight issues where concepts articulated by Levinas shed new light on Soloveitchik's philosophical work. First a brief overview of Levinas's project is necessary.

Levinas's Project

Levinas's essential critique concerns ontology, the study of being, and its tendency to totalization, the quest "to reduce the universe to an originary and ultimate unity by way of panoramic overviews and dialectical syntheses." (10) In particular, Levinas takes aim at Sein und Zeit, Heidegger's classic study of ontology, the study of beings and being. In Hegelian thought, reality is conceived "as a [rational] march toward the concrete universal" in which the totality of the whole presupposes "a certain affinity of the parts among themselves, an organization," "a cosmos, a system history. It would leave nothing else outside itself." (11) This "totalitarianism"--Levinas's carefully chosen word--of being extends to transcendence and even to the written and spoken word. These arguments have a direct bearing on Soloveitchik's philsophical approach, raising questions about his tendency to rely heavily on dialectical typologies in delineating different approaches to religion and faith. (12) A typology, by its nature, is an essence and hence bound to the world of being. How Soloveitchik attempts to deal with this problem will be discussed below.