Abstract
Every reader acquainted with Levinas's philosophical writings will be struck by the fact that even as they appear to be works strictly in ‘pure phenomenology,’ there are often allusions to the Bible and references to the Jewish tradition. This has led some to accuse Levinas of smuggling in a dogmatic form of Judaism in a way that threatens and diminishes the integrity of his philosophy. To the contrary, Michael Fagenblat, in his rigorously analytical and elegantly written new book A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism, presents a novel and compelling case, which argues that the relationship between his philosophy and Judaism is at once creative and necessary. Fagenblat claims that Levinas is a hermeneutical thinker, and that the best way to understand his philosophy is to explore and grasp the deep Jewish intellectual heritage to which Levinas belongs and from which he appropriates.
To argue that Levinas is in fact a hermeneutical thinker—rather than the pure phenomenologist that he claims to be—is to align Levinas closer to Heidegger than Husserl. Fagenblat explicitly acknowledges his indebtedness to a Heideggerian insight regarding the interpretive character of thought itself, and this insight is the methodological basis for Fagenblat’s interpretation of Levinas's philosophy. Insofar as thought itself is an interpretative engagement with the intellectual heritage and historical situation of the thinker, Levinas does not offer a tradition-less phenomenology, but rather a tradition-bound philosophy that draws both implicitly and, at times, explicitly on the rich sources of Judaism. For Fagenblat then, Levinas's ethics of the other is not the mere description of the ‘purely given’ but rather it is interpretively constructed within the horizon of ‘always already’ embedded texts and tradition.
Fagenblat proceeds to try to prove this basic claim by focusing on the trope of creation. Even as the meaning of creation is radically altered between Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974) so that Fagenblat distinguishes between an early Levinas and a later Levinas, he traces these philosophical transformations against the backdrop of Levinas's interpretation of biblical, rabbinic, and medieval, especially Maimonidean, strands of Judaism. Totality and Infinity, Fagenblat argues, involves an implicit philosophical interpretation of the biblical creation narrative, one that moves from the primordial chaos of indeterminate existing—what Levinas calls il y a—through the progressive awakening of the moral subject and order. Moreover, Fagenblat argues that Levinas's ethics of the other is in fact an anthropological application of Maimonides's theology of creation. Maimonides's defense of the belief in divine creation ex nihilo based on the postulate of God’s freedom and transcendence against an Aristotelian view of the eternity of the world is the background, so goes the argument, to understanding Levinas's defense of anthropological creativity and the postulate of human freedom and transcendence against a Heideggerian view that supposes always already given determining ontological structures. Creation, in short, became a trope for Levinas for the human capacity to act freely within the world so as to create moral order out of chaos.
If Fagenblat finds in Totality and Infinity an implicit mythology and theology of creation that Levinas secularized into an account of human free creativity, he finds in Otherwise than Being an implicit theology of creatureliness that Levinas secularized into an account of a passive, ethical subject exposed and hostage to the other. Here, too, Fagenblat believes Maimonides is pivotal to grasping Levinas's ethics, though in a way that significantly differs from Levinas's appropriation. Levinas's Maimonides, according to Fagenblat, retrieves not his positive metaphysical theology, which affirms and defends the trope of creation ex nihilo, but rather a post-metaphysical negative theology that underlines the unknowability of God’s essence and the knowability only of God’s effects through traces in natural events. This particular interpretation of Maimonides, which engenders a sense of both the glory of God and the humility in human creatureliness, Fagenblat claims, is implicit in Levinas's ethics of the other.
Fagenblat’s analyses are rigorous, his prose is clear and exquisite, and his interpretation is compelling, but my deep admiration for his work is not without certain reservations. The explication of Jewish sources that are only implicit in Levinas's philosophical works makes Fagenblat’s project of historical reconstruction plausible, but also problematic. For instance, Maimonides, who lies at the center of much of Fagenblat’s interpretation of Levinas's implicit Judaism within his philosophical texts, never once explicitly appears in Totality and Infinity or in Otherwise than Being—a point which Fagenblat himself concedes. Moreover, the concept of creation itself appears rarely and the concept of covenant still more rarely in Levinas's philosophical writings, which calls into question Fagenblat’s basic claim that Levinas's philosophy and ethics is, as the title of the book suggests, an interpretation of a ‘covenant of creation.’ In short, one may wonder at times whether Fagenblat may be reading too much into texts, rather than reading out of them. Yet this suspicion is offset by the unusual depth and penetrating insight that Fagenblat provides into Levinas's philosophy by unfolding layers upon layers of interpretation that Levinas may have been adducing. In this respect, Fagenblat provides a fresh and thoughtful approach to understanding the relationship between philosophy and Judaism, that is, to understanding Levinas's phenomenology as midrash. This work will be essential reading not only for scholars in Levinas studies, but for all who share a broader interest in the ongoing reflection on the relationship between philosophy and religion.