Volume 11, Tome II: Kierkegaard's Influence on Philosophy

Francophone Philosophy

Jon Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409446385
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351875325
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Kierkegaard's relation to the field of philosophy is a particularly complex and disputed one. He rejected the model of philosophical inquiry that was mainstream in his day and was careful to have his pseudonymous authors repeatedly disassociate themselves from philosophy. But although it seems clear that Kierkegaard never regarded himself as a philosopher, there can be no doubt that his writings contain philosophical ideas and insights and have been profoundly influential in a number of different philosophical traditions. The tomes in this volume seek to document the different traditions of the philosophical reception of Kierkegaard's thought and the articles demonstrate the reach of Kierkegaard's writings in philosophical contexts that were often different from his own. The present volume attempts to document these different traditions of the philosophical reception of Kierkegaard's thought. The articles featured here aim to demonstrate the vast reach of Kierkegaard's writings in philosophical contexts that were often quite different from his own. Tome II is dedicated to exploring Kierkegaard's influence on Francophone philosophy. The French intellectual tradition squares well with Kierkegaard's eclectic profile since its leading figures are often difficult to classify unambiguously as philosophers, theologians, literary critics or simply writers. Kierkegaard's thinking was highly influential for many generations of French philosophers right up to the present. It was not just existentialism that tried to co-opt Kierkegaard for its own purposes; he has also been influential in the context of almost every modern school of French thought: phenomenology, feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction.

Emmanuel Levinas:
An Ambivalent but Decisive Reception

Jeffrey Hanson

The widely influential ethical thinker Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95) was placed by circumstance in the midst of Kierkegaard's reception in the interwar French philosophical scene. A key inheritor of the phenomenological tradition as practiced by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and an important transmitter of their thought to a French-speaking audience, Levinas was also influenced by Kierkegaard, though to a degree that is a matter of debate. While he clearly knew something of Kierkegaard's works (and again there is some debate as to exactly how familiar he was with the whole sweep of Kierkegaard's corpus,¹ though he responds directly to Fear and Trembling, and there is some textual evidence that he was at least acquainted with some of the non-pseudonymous writings),² his reaction to Kierkegaard was notoriously ambivalent. Recent English-language scholarship has argued for greater affinities between the two than Levinas himself acknowledged and has fostered increased critical attention to the issues orbited by both thinkers.³

As for Levinas' own published reflections on Kierkegaard, they reveal a mix of tempered praise and criticism, sometimes quite harsh. While Levinas was enthusiastic about Kierkegaard's efforts to break with the speculative totalization represented primarily by Hegel's system, and he praised what he called Kierkegaard's theory of a "persecuted truth" as opposed to the "truth triumphant" upheld by imperialistic rationality, he feared that Kierkegaard was ultimately a thinker of egotism and that his version of subjectivity was violent and extra- (not to say anti-) philosophical. In particular, he had strong words of disapproval for the tone of Kierkegaard's polemicism and for what he took to be his granting to individual subjectivity the privilege of transcending or suspending ethics. Finally, it is clear from a number of writings that Levinas did not believe that Kierkegaard was an acceptable inspiration for Judaism or for the contemporary effort to revive Jewish spirituality and reflection. Nevertheless, while his own discussions of Kierkegaard were comparatively few in his enormous body of work, and rarely in-depth, Levinas' voice among the chorus of those contemporary French thinkers with whom he was a frequent conversation partner is an important and influential one in the way Kierkegaard was inherited by French philosophy.⁴

I. Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas was arguably one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century and certainly one of the most important ethical theorists. Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, Russian was the language of his early youth, though he also mastered German and was taught Hebrew as part of his religious education. He studied philosophy in Strasbourg, beginning in 1923. In Strasbourg he met Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), with whom he would share a lifelong friendship. He attended Husserl's final lectures at Freiburg in 1928 and 1929 and was introduced to Heidegger and his work. Through his reviews and early essays Levinas would later become one of the most important early transmitters of both men's philosophies to a French-speaking audience. He published his doctoral thesis as The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology in 1930,⁵ one of the first works in French to treat Husserl's phenomenology in any depth. The same year he was naturalized as a French citizen.

In 1939 he served in the French army as an interpreter of both Russian and German but was captured with his unit and sent to an officers' prisoner-of-war camp outside Hannover where he was subjected to forced labor. His wife, Raisa, and his daughter were concealed in a French monastery during the war until his release, an arrangement made possible by Blanchot, who also facilitated communication between Levinas and his family. His father, two brothers, and his mother- and father-in-law were murdered in the Holocaust. Levinas' distress at the events of the Holocaust precipitated a break with Heideggerean thinking and caused him to vow to never again return to Germany.

Levinas published "On Escape" in 1935⁶ and after the war presented a series of four lectures at a philosophical colloquium hosted by Jean Wahl that were published as "Time and the Other."⁷ Both were eventually reissued in book form. In 1947 he published Existence and Existents.⁸ During this time he was teaching at and eventually became director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale. He did not hold a university position until after the publication of Totality and Infinity, when he began teaching at Poitiers. His concerns with Jewish spirituality and education in the wake of the Holocaust are expressed in his collection of essays entitled Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism from 1963.⁹

Levinas' reputation as a philosopher was cemented with what is universally hailed as his first magnum opus, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority from 1961.¹⁰ A second great work, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence,¹¹ which in many ways traverses the same themes, did not appear until 1974. Levinas taught at Nanterre and finally at the Sorbonne. He continued to publish a variety of essays under the titles Proper Names (1976),¹² Of God Who Comes to Mind (1982),¹³ and Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other (1991),¹⁴ as well as a number of Talmudic studies collected in Quatre lectures Talmudiques (1968), Du sacré an saint (1977),¹⁵ and Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures (1982).¹⁶

We have called Levinas an ethical thinker, and that is so, but he is not so in the Aristotelian sense of a cultivator of the virtues or one who counsels the development of a certain land of character nor in the Kantian sense of a legislator of laws or prescriptive rules. The central theme for which Levinas is rightly famous is his continual meditation on the privileged place of the Other.¹⁷ Throughout his career Levinas subjected to critique the history of ontology,¹⁸ which he regarded as having suppressed with disastrous ethical consequences the place of the Other (Autrui in French, normally translated as "Other" with a capital "O" as opposed to "other," which refers only to autre; in keeping with standard French usage, Autrui denotes the other human being). "A calling into question of the same—which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same—is brought about by the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics."¹⁹ This conception of ethics is fundamental for Levinas, preceding ontology and every other discipline, and is equally not to be usurped by any other discipline.²⁰

According to Levinas, the ethical horrors of Western civilization, and perhaps especially those of the twentieth century, are rooted not merely in the vices of their perpetrators but in the philosophical and everyday conceptually of the Western tradition, which in its totalization and violence does not leave a place for the Other but aggressively attempts to reduce the Other to the same. "Thus Western thought," he wrote, "very often seemed to exclude the transcendent, encompass every other in the same, and proclaim the philosophical birthright of autonomy."²¹ The prize of thinking, truth, is thus not generally the result of disinterested curiosity but one of the spoils of war, gained at the price of "victory" and "integration,"²² so, for Levinas, "comprehension" is also usually "domestication" and "possession."²³ As such, "Philosophy is atheism, or rather unreligion, negation of a God that reveals himself and puts truths into us."²⁴

The atheism and "egology"²⁵ of philosophy can only be challenged, according to Levinas, by a genuine transcendence, a phenomenon that presents itself as wholly Other and thus a point of resistance to the ego's efforts to assimilate the other to itself. Such an encounter will expose the subject to itself as fundamentally unjust.²⁶ Counterexamples of such a moment occur in the philosophical tradition from time to time, most notably when Plato identifies the Good as beyond being and thus irreducible to confident and complacent comprehension and in Descartes' account of the idea of the Infinite.²⁷ Such figures, Levinas argues, provide the subject with "experience in the sole radical sense of the term: a relationship with the exterior, with the other, without this exteriority being able to be integrated into the same."²⁸

Such resistance is not merely an impassive pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Sylviane Agacinski: Reading Kierkegaard to Keep Intact the Secret
• Roland Barthes: Style, Language, Silence
• Georges Bataille: Kierkegaard and the Claim for the Sacred
• Maurice Blanchot: Spaces of Literature / Spaces of Religion
• Gilles Deleuze: Kierkegaard's Presence in his Writings
• Jacques Derrida: Faithful Heretics
• Jacques Ellul: Kierkegaard's Profound and Seldom Acknowledged Influence on Ellul's Writing
• Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Hadot and Kierkegaard's Socrates
• Emmanuel Levinas: An Ambivalent but Decisive Reception
• Jean-Luc Marion: The Paradoxical Givenness of Love
• Paul Ricoeur: On Kierkegaard, the Limits of Philosophy, and the Consolation of Hope
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects