Soloveitchik and Levinas: pathways to the other - Biography

Judaism, Fall, 2002 by Seymour Kessler

Ethics, for Levinas, is "the very possibility of the beyond." In his thought, God is associated with the Infinite, the Desirable, the Good, the Holy: separate and "transcendent to the point of absence." He designates the desire (20) for God with a movement in which the desire is inclined away from God to other human beings. (21) This maintains the transcendence of God and simultaneously increases human responsibility for other human beings.

Soloveitchik and Totalization

After reading Levinas, Soloveitchik's philosophical views seem antiquated, as if his philosophical interests and concerns ended by the early twentieth century. Granted that Soloveitchik's philosophical oeuvre is grounded in a nineteenth-century epistemology which, by the mid-twentieth century, had been engulfed and incorporated into ontology, semiotics, structuralism, and other sources of postmodern thought. (22) Nevertheless, a careful reading of his texts and their elucidating footnotes makes it clear that he was not uninformed about the implications of ontological and existentialist problems within the broader field of philosophy. (23) And he, as did Levinas, understood full well the implications of Heideggerian thought and its compatibility with Nazi ideology.

Like Levinas, Soloveitchik also understood the implications of the totalizing aspect of Heidegger's concept of Being for transcendence and religious faith. The privilege given by Soloveitchik to the individual as opposed to the sociopolitical collective could be read as his attempt to overcome the totalizing tendencies of Hegel and Heidegger and as a way of protecting subjectivity. (24) Also, he attempted to deal with being by underscoring the maintenance of a dialectic tension between the contradictory drives and tendencies in the human being, a dialectic which, in his mind, could not be resolved. "Judaic dialectic, unlike the Hegelian, is irreconcilable and hence interminable. Judaism accepted a dialectic, consisting only of thesis and antithesis. The third Hegelian stage, that of reconciliation, is missing." (25)

Thus, Soloveitchik resisted the concept of philosophical totalization, but his strategy falls short of a philosophical solution. Whenever he addresses the question of what exists beyond being, he no longer does so as Soloveitchik the philosopher but rather as Rabbi Soloveitchik, the man of faith. (26) His philosophical perspective is founded on a system of ontological duality in which religiosity was a special case of being. For example, in Halakhic Man Soloveitchik writes: "The mysterious relationship in effect between the cognizing subject and the object that is comprehended ... results ... in man deeming himself lord and master with respect to the thing that is about to be comprehended. The subject rules over the object, the person over the thing. Knowledge, by definition, is the subjugation of the object and the domination of the subject." (27)

He immediately amends this statement in a footnote (28) in which he says: "The one exception to this rule is the cognition of God. On the contrary, when man cognizes the Creator of the cosmos, he submits himself more and more to His infinite will. It is from thence that there arises the aura of mystery that surrounds the cognition of God, which the doctrine of negative attributes discerned." Soloveitchik seems to be using the term "cognition" in two different ways: in one sense, to describe the noesis/noema correlation that typifies ontological thought; and secondly, to describe a rupture in this correlation in relation to transcendence. The enigma or "aura of mystery" to which he refers is not elaborated here, but there is an allusion to negative theology. (29)