| Chapter 1: | Why Is It Hard to Talk about Justice? |
|
|
For now, then, I just want to offer a sketch so we can appreciate why his critics have found it tempting to think that he cannot specify any normative ethics at all.
One of Levinas’s main goals was to assess Heidegger’s philosophy. Levinas was one of Heidegger’s students, and he felt throughout his life that Heidegger was one of the great minds in the history of philosophy. He concluded early on, though, that there had to be a flaw somewhere in Heidegger’s thought, and he came to think that Heidegger’s philosophy devolved into an objectionable form of monism.
His criticism on this point owes a great deal to critiques of Hegel by philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard and Franz Rosenzweig.16 Kierkegaard and Rosenzweig were troubled by Hegel’s conviction that all reality could be rendered wholly transparent to human reason. They were especially vexed by this view’s ontological assumptions. If all reality is transparent to reason, it follows that all reality is reducible to a series of rational processes. As Hegel put it, “The Real is rational, and the rational is real.”17 Philosophers like Kierkegaard and Rosenzweig found this view galling. One of their worries was that Hegel’s view leads us to disregard the richness, spontaneity, and utter particularity of human existence. Hegel invites us to regard all of reality as a kind of outward manifestation of an elaborate philosophic system, including our own lives. He invites us to perceive our lives not as unplanned, spontaneous, or utterly unique—things in which we are personally and passionately involved—but as akin to abstractions within a larger conceptual “totality.”
Levinas was struck by this critique of Hegel. He was intrigued by its claim that Hegel’s system is flawed because it reduces reality to nothing more than an outward manifestation of a single principle, Geist, or Mind. He came to think that Heidegger’s philosophy devolved into a similarly oppressive monism. One of Heidegger’s achievements in Being and Time, of course, was to stress the importance of prereflective life experiences, such as moods or habits, for philosophy. So, it may seem odd to fault him for espousing a monism that reduces all reality to a manifestation of Geist or Mind.