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Levinas's Concept of Religion and its

Relation to Judaism

In the following considerations on Emmanuel Levinas's concept of religion, I will in

the first part of my paper, speak about religion as a concept. Religion can be a
category of human activity, a field of study, etc., but am using the word concept here
in its strictly philosophical sense.

One further word about the status of the nature of the remarks contained in this first
part. They are not intended to be theological, as they are not meant to apply to one
particular religion more than to another. The question of exactly how Levinas's
concept of religion has been affected by, is tributary to, or otherwise related to,
Judaism, will be taken up in the second part of the paper. A third and concluding part
resumes philosophical discourse in order to comment on dialogue as the realization of
a transcendental movement toward the outside.

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas formulates his concept of religion in the following
way. "For the relation between the being here below and the transcendent being that
results in no community of concept or totality - a relation without relation - we reserve
the term religion".1 Two terms of this formulation invite comment: relation, and
religion.

1. Relation. No sooner has religion been defined as a relation, than that relation is
declared to be a relation in which there is no relation. There is no relation because we
normally think of a relation as forming some sort of a whole, precisely by means of
the vinculum or tie between the terms of the relation. This question, or problem, is the
theme of Totality and Infinity, since the infinity referred to in the title is precisely
what is not part of any totality, including its own. Hence Levinas's linguistic scruple
with respect to the word relation reflects his careful avoidance of any implication that
the transcendence of his Infinity could somehow be included in a totality, which
would thereby draw it into the ambit of immanence, or being. To relate, to compare,
to bring the unknown within the domain of the known by means of relation or
comparison (similitude or contrast), would be to transform, in the act of cognition, the
other into the same.

One might question Levinas's rejection of the word relation here. Is there in the term
relation as much imperialism as he gives it? After all, a relation implies difference as
much as similarity, since there must be two entities to relate. Nevertheless, when what
is at stake is the differentiation between immanence and transcendence - and that
seems to be at the root of Levinas's rejection of relation - the fact that its viscosity so
to speak, like that of being itself, draws everything into itself - when that distinction is
what is at stake, it makes Levinas's linguistic scruple at least comprehensible, and in
my opinion justified.

2. Religion. It would be a mistake, I believe, to look upon this term as a

philosophically sifted or distilled meaning of the traditional use of the term. At least it
is to be held apart from the usage in which religion is thought of as the relation
between man and God only in the vague sense of being the residue of the attempts of
man to attain or have some sort of communication or communion with God. Religion
in this sense is, as I said at the beginning of my remarks, a category of activity, not the
non-relational relation that Levinas attaches to the term religion. In order to
distinguish his new meaning from the traditional one, Levinas uses the term "religions
positives," positive religions, for the latter. It is instructive to examine Levinas's
precise wording in his remarks on the positive religions. He writes:

La transcendence se distingue d'une union avec le transcendant, par participation. La

relation métaphysique - l'idée de l'infini - relie au noumène qui n'est pas un numen. Ce
noumène se distingue du concept de Dieu que possèdent les croyants des religions
positives, mal dégagés des liens de la participation et qui s'acceptent comme plongés à
leur insu, dans un mythe. L'idée de l'infini, la relation métaphysique est l'aube d'une
humanité sans mythes.2

Transcendence is to be distinguished from a union with the transcendent by

participation. The metaphysical relation, the idea of infinity, connects with
the noumenon which is not a numen. This noumenon is to be distinguished for the
concept of God possessed by the believers in the positive religions, who are ill
disengaged from the bonds of participation, who accept being immersed in a myth
unbeknownst to themselves. 3
What does it mean to emphasize the difference between the numen and the noumenon,
two words that in fact are related only phonetically? The "numen" is a divinity thought
of as indwelling in a place, a spirit haunting a locale or a physical object. This is what
Levinas has in mind when contrasting the ßacred" to the ßaintly" or "holy." See, in
this regard, Levinas's volume of Talmudic readings, titled Du sacré au saint (1977),
included in Annette Aronowicz's Nine Talmudic Readings. The sacred is a divine
power that crushes humanity. The saintly, or holy, is the realization, promotion or
apotheosis of the human. The "noumenon" as used here by Levinas is of course an
appeal to Kantian language, which opposes noumenon and phenomenon. It is because
the sacred is not, like the saintly or holy, related to the human, or more precisely the
interhuman, that Levinas rejects it. « Tout ce qui ne peut se ramener à une relation
interhumaine représente, non pas la forme supérieure, mais à jamais primitive de la
religion, » he writes. Ëverything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation
represents not the superior form but the forever primitive form of religion." 4

I have retraced the distinction between Levinas's concept of religion and his notion of
the "positive" religions. Religion is interhuman, and it is a relation between self and
other. In saying that it is the relation between self and other, however, it has been
necessary to transpose what is essentially first-personal to the third person. It has,
until fairly recently, been thought in philosophical circles that no significant loss is
involved in transposing first or second personal expressions to third person ones. For
example, Ï" become "the ego," "the self." It would seem to defeat the purposes of
objectivity to attribute philosophical significance to direct discourse. The
philosophical mode forgets that it is addressed to someone who is listening in the
wings, namely ÿou." As Levinas points out in the early pages of his last major
philosophical treatise, Otherwise than Being, there is always a listener presupposed
even in the most apparently disembodied and abstract discourse. As I am speaking
here before you, I am mainly speaking of something, but I am also speaking to you.
This is certainly not the personal and exclusive Buberian "Thou" that I am addressing.
Buber - but also the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel and many other existential
phenomenologists - has rightly thematized the special nature of direct address as a
privileged use of language. Levinas himself, while fully cognizant of the psychic
significance of the vocative (e.g. in his essay on Paul Celan in Proper Names5 ), is also
wary of the labyrinthine dialogue of linguistic attitudinizing, and the covert violence
of eloquence, and has often expressed his admiration for the abrupt
straightforwardness of the Talmudists. In any case, in the early pages of Otherwise
than Being it is the presence of the other - and the others - as listeners that is
paramount.

Discourse is not merely one among the other human institutions, nor is it an accident
that takes place within the essentially silent world of nature. Language is the relation
of the same to the other. Thanks to language, the same, as I, goes out from, and out of,
itself, toward the other, while remaining itself. It thus realizes the conditions of what
Levinas calls the metaphysical relation, transcendence.

The metaphors for the interhuman are spatial: but it is clear that the spatiality is not of
the Cartesian variety. The notions of distance, of approach, of inside and outside, are
essentially metaphysical. They may be reflected in the Cartesian world of the res
extensa, but in fact the world of the res extensa is a continuum of externality,
or partes extra partes. These ßpatial relations" are only later spatial relations: they
begin by being something more akin to human relations. Without insisting on a
rigorous parallelism, let me suggest that Levinas's "human relations" bear the same
relation to the world of nature as Plato's essences to the visible world. Neither derived
nor abstracted, they are an absolutely anterior source. If we cannot develop a sense of
the anteriority of these relations, Levinas's texts that use such terms as proximity and
approach must seem singularly gauche and inadequate. Similarly, the temporal
notions of anteriority, of past, present and future, are to be reconceived in their
essentiality, before chronology, after the manner of Franz Rosenzweig.

Just as the transposition of the first and second person to the third betrays the essence
of communication, which is a vocative, however attenuated and ignored - similarly the
transposition of the relation of the face-à-face, the face-to-face, to the side by side, is a
betrayal. And the reason for the inadequacy is the same. In both cases a detached third
party is silently stipulated. The cosmo-theros, the view from nowhere, is a seemingly
solid basis that in fact hangs from a thread - the thread of the discursive I-thou
relation. If the I-other relation is not a relation, and if it is not a relation because it
does not form a whole, one reason it does not form a whole is because I am anchored
in it.

But I am anchored in the whole in a curious way. I make the world my home. The
extraordinary pages Levinas devotes in Totality and Infinity to the ëconomy" of the
self in the world, with its themes of separation, autonomy, and the metaphysical
significance of the home, describe our relation to the world, possessions and the other
person in terms that might best be described as those of a moral vision. Not morality
in the sense of what one should or must do and refrain from doing, but in a proto-
ethical sense. It is not, as Levinas points out in the introduction to that work, that
morality flows from that vision - it consummates that vision: Ëthics is an optics."

Another reason why the I-other relation does not form a whole is because the other is
totally other, not merely an älter ego." It is not the uniqueness of the self, the
discovery of Kiekegaard and of so many other 19th-century philosophers (and poets
as well), that is the ultimate epistemological challenge, but the absolute otherness of
the other.
 II

It is clear that there is a connection between the two modalities of Levinas's work: the
philosophical and the Judaic or "confessional." But the connection is a complex one,
and Levinas did much to downplay the relationship between them. Was this because
he believed that his philosophical work might be seen as compromised by being
intertwined with his religious thought? Was it that he himself saw philosophy as
"Greek" and essentially atheistic as a modality, so that the procedures employed by
Talmudic scholarship would compromise the purity of the former? Was it because the
spirit of philosophy is that of problem solving, and of being done with it (a
"philosophical impatience"), whereas the Talmudic spirit is more attentive to the
injunction (laassok bedivré torah to be engrossed in the words of Torah), and more
inclined to remain ïn solution" than to find ä" solution that would obviate the
necessity for further reflection. Perhaps there is more historical contingency than
necessity involved in Levinas's policy of using different publishers for the two genres,
since his academic career unfolded perforce within the dichotomy of "the underlying
rift of a world attached to both philosophers and prophets."6

In my view, there is much to be gained in our understanding of Levinas's work to read

it as a whole, and to be aware of the overlapping shoots and branches between the
Talmudic readings and the philosophical works. Not only does such a reading enable
us to see the genesis and development of his thinking more clearly: these two aspects
of his thought are mutually validating. I will have more to say on this subject at the
end of this paper; but now it is time to consider what it was that constituted for
Levinas the essential elements of Judaism.

First, Levinas's Judaism is Hebraic: that is to say, the study of Judaic texts in
Hebrew is an essential element of Judaism. The texts need constant interpretation and
commentary. They are the ardent coals upon which we must blow in order to kindle
new meaning. It should be mentioned that as a Lithuanian Jew in the tradition of the
Gaon of Vilna and of Rabbi Haim of Volozhin, as a Mitnagdim (the group that
opposed the Hassidim in 18th and 19th centuries), Levinas stressed the importance of
the study of the Talmud, and of the scholarly and intellectualist approach to Judaism
in general. This approach provides a medium not only not hostile to philosophy, but
the very medium required to carry out the task Levinas foresaw for this Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, namely "to translate the wisdom of the Talmud into modern
terms, to have it face the problems of our own times."7
Second, just as I have shown the importance of the moral sphere in Levinas's
philosophical consideration, so it can easily be shown that ethics is the essential
meaning of Judaism. The emphasis takes the form of an insistence on actions, with
much less emphasis on "belief" or a sense of the nuministic and the sacred.

Third, Levinas's more polemic writings, particularly those written in the Fifties and
contained in the collection titled Difficult Freedom, contain a critique of Christianity,
which is contrasted with the teachings of Judaism. It is particularly the experience of
the Holocaust, and the fact that two thousand years of Christianity did not prevent
Europe from ending ßix million defenseless lives"8 six million innocent lives in the
cruelest manner imaginable, that informs Levinas's critique. It is the gap between
doctrine and practice, but also a more nuanced critique that involves curious antimony
within Christian life. Christianity "both overestimates and underestimates the weight
of the reality it wishes to ameliorate."9 As a result, it has been quite conservative,
politically, making concessions in one realm, the earthly, that it has not always
considered of decisive importance. But by rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, it
reassures Caesar, while setting its sights on a utopia.

What emerges from our brief examination of the relationship between the
philosophical and the Judaic in Levinas is a complex interdependence. Levinas's
philosophy (only one aspect of which we have considered here, the religious) is
nourished and sustained by ideas emerging from a background of Judaic thought,
specifically that of the Mitnagdim; at the same time, his Judaism is galvanized by
certain ideas that have been more fully worked out in his metaphysical writings.
Consider the implications of the following statement.

I do not know whether Judaism has expressed its metaphysics of the spirit in the terms
I have just outlined, but I do know that it has chosen action, and that the divine word
moves it only as Law.10

Levinas's relation to Judaism is thus critical, interior, faithful and partisan - and his
metaphysics gives expression to what the philosopher takes to behis Judaism. As a
Jewish educator himself (director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale beginning
in 1945) Levinas believed the younger generation of Jews was turning away from
Judaism in order to embrace forms of the sacred that seemed more picturesque and
exotic. The source of Levinas's devaluation of the sacred in relation to the saintly or
holy is probably bound up with his critique of the anthropologists Lévi-Bruhl and
Lévi-Strauss, who introduced the notions of "participation" and placed primitive
thought on a plane equal to or even higher than that of the modern European.

The incomprehension that greets the ethical essence of the spirit - due in large part to
forgetting Hebrew, reading a Bible frozen in translation, being unable to go back to
the Talmud, which boldly unfolds the Bible in a way that reveals the whole spectrum
of the human drama it assumes - today propels a whole young generation who wish to
be faithful to notions that are totally foreign to Judaism. The Sacred - together with
the fear and trembling, as well as the ecstasy, aroused by its luminous presence -
becomes the key word, if not the grand concept, of a whole religious revival. What
contemporary sociology discovered in the prelogical mentality of Australia and Africa
assumes the status of a privileged religious experience. It is triumphantly set against
the dry and mind-deadening moralism of the nineteenth century, the abomination of
abominations. Do these young men suspect the existence of the relentless war
declared by the Bible and the Talmud against the Sacred and sacraments?11

In other words, neglect of the study of Hebrew and a lack of knowledge of the Bible
(in this case the allusion is probably to Micah 6:7,8, or some similar passage)12 has
caused the younger generation of Jews to seek enlightenment elsewhere.

III

The interrelation of Levinas's philosophical and his Judaic writings have a common
denominator, whether it be expressed as the approach, proximity, the face-to-face, the
for-the-other, or the interhuman: the notion of dialog as a movement from self to
other. It is an overstatement, I believe, to posit language itself as the foundation,
precondition and ultimate limitation of transcendence in Levinas, as one excellent
study by Etienne Feron tends to do.13 Language is still a modality of that approach,
that proximity within which the movement of dialog in the face-to- face takes place.
As Merleau-Ponty might have put it, language traces preordained ways to the other, in
a silence already pregnant with meaning. I prefer to thematize (and thus immobilize
and thereby destroy, but hopefully also preserve or aufheben") that movement from
self to other. It is a movement toward the outside, hahoutsa i.e. toward the outside
though never ending in a mystic merger that would end its infinite transcendence.

In that movement the self, no longer riveted to itself, attains to its true vocation: that
dialogual or dialogical modality that leads to an encounter without intrusion or
annexation.

Notes:
1
Totalité et infini (The Hague : Nijhoff, [1961] 1984), 52. Henceforth abbreviated as
TeI Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, n.d.
[1969]), 80. Henceforth abbreviated as TI.
2
TeI 49-50.
3
TI 77.
4
TeI 52, and TI 79, resp.
5
Emmanuel Levinas, "Paul Celan: From Being to the Other," in Proper
Names (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 40-46, passim.
6
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
n.d. [1969]), p. 25, translation slightly modified. This quote appears appropriately at
the beginning of Catherine Chalier's work on Levinas and the relationship between
philosophy and prophecy:L'inspiration du philosophe (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996).
7
Emmanuel Levinas, Quatre Lectures talmudiques (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit,
1968), 24. My translation.
8
Difficile liberté (Paris : Albin Michel, 3e éd., Livre de poche : 1976), p. 143.
Available in English, in the very unreliable translation by Seán Hand, in Difficult
Freedom, henceforth abbreviated as DF (London: Athlone Press: 1990), p. 99.
9
Ibid., p. 144. This and the following quotations are from short piece originally
published in Évidences in 1950, titled Le lieu et l'utopie.
10
Ibid., p. 145. DF, 100.
11
Ibid., 145-146. DF, 100-10.
12
7 "Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, With ten thousands of rivers of
oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, The fruit of my body for the sin of
my soul? 8. It hath been told thee, O man, what is good, And what the Lord doth
require of thee: Only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy
God."
13
De l'idée de transcendance à la question du langage, L'itinéraire philosophique
d'Emmanuel Levinas (Grenoble, Éditions Jérôme Million : 1992).
File translated from TEX by TTH, version 2.64.
On 31 July 2002, 16:59.