Richard Wolin in The Nation on Heidegger and Levinas

Richard Wolin has a review of two books (on Heidegger's legacy in France and Levinas) in The Nation (hat tip enowning), with the remarkably stupid title "Heidegger Made Kosher."  It's very disappointing to see The Nation farming its reviews out to people with views like Wolin's, but not really surprising.  This kind of hostility toward non-Marxist strains of Continental philosophy (and especially toward anyone associated with "deconstruction") goes way back; The Nation published one of the first and worst of the "deconstruction = National Socialism" libels in the wake of the de Man affair, too, if I remember correctly.  I attribute this tendency to a certain, characteristically (but by no means universally) leftist confusion about the relationship of politics to philosophy in general and philosophical ethics in particular (a confusion that's evident throughout Wolin's review) -- that is, the belief that any political philosophy that that doesn't take as its major premise a politically committed (left) social-political stance and/or fails to issue in a left political-social agenda is necessarily ideological and obscurantist.  It's doubly disappointing that The Nation suffers from this disease, since its cultural sections are often its best.  Wouldn't it be great if we could get our intelligent left political commentary and intelligent left philosophical commentary in the same magazine? 

In any event, Wolin's review is bizarre as well as inaccurate and biased.  He believes that all of post-war French philosophy has been an Oedipal response to Sartre, including Levinas's:  "Although the two men were born within a year of each other, Levinas's anti-Sartrism bore a distinctively Oedipal character."  As if this rejection of the immortal  père Sartre weren't bad enough (the review is more paean to Sartre than anything else), in Wolin's psychologistic fantasy Levinas's philosophical development ultimately takes a turn for the even-worse:  "Thus did a Jewish academic from Kovno become the improbable savior of a tradition founded by a former Nazi."  Enough said, really.  (And I'm leaving out Wolin's discussion of Heidegger, which concludes that Heidegger's thought is "latently authoritarian" and "a warrant for human bondage.")

Wolin does, however, distill the confusion that I mentioned above, which is worthwhile in its own way I suppose.  Towards the end of the review, after extolling in typically Habermasian fashion the virtues of Enlightenment reason and its inherently "utopian aspirations" -- "[i]t promises a rectification of social injustice, a righting of wrongs" -- Wolin goes on to contrast the error of Levinas's ways:

Moral reasoning provides us with a strong incentive to act in the world and to remedy oppression. Levinas's quasi-mystical veneration of Otherness, conversely, resembles an "epiphany." But it is nearly impossible to translate an epiphany into meaningful political action. As an experience of transcendence, an epiphany cannot be made into an object of legislation. Moreover, with Levinas, indebtedness to the Other becomes a relationship of exclusivity to the extent that it becomes physically and emotionally impossible to assume loyalty to multiple others. For these reasons, it is next to impossible to derive a meaningful politics from his ethical doctrines.

Leaving aside his ignorance of the fact that Levinas himself addressed the problem of "the third" (i.e., the "multiple others" outside the ethcial relationship with the Other), Wolin is certainly correct that it's "nearly" (although not totally) impossible to "translate an epiphany into meaningful political action," and likewise that an epiphany "cannot be made into an object of legislation" (which is not the same thing as translation into political action, one hopes that Wolin recognizes).  And although "epiphany" is a little precious and (in this context) denigrating, I even think it's not entirely inaccurate as a description of what Levinas means by the ethical relationship to the Other.  And I'll even grant Wolin that "moral reasoning," depending on what he means by that, can (by contrast) determine the object of political action and legislation, at least given the proper conditions and inputs.  What it can't do, however, at least today, is "provide us with a strong incentive to  act in the world and to remedy oppression," which is an entirely different thing than "translation into political action" or determining the "object of legislation."  The day when reason was substantive and could pull itself up by its own bootstraps, if that day was ever more than an optimistic illusion, has long passed (Habermas himself acknowledges something like this at the end of his essay on Benjamin  in Philosophical Profiles).  What Levinas's "epiphany" -- the philosophical recognition of the existential priority of the Other to one's own existence, and in that sense of the priority of ethics to ontology -- provides is precisely the philosophical "incentive to act in the world and to remedy oppression" that reason in Wolin's sense can't provide, at least to the extent that that "reason" remains under the sign of fundamental ontology or of metaphysics (where, pace Wolin's misunderstanding of Heidegger, it still remains, either as metaphysical thought or in the form of Heidegger's own fundamental ontology).  So Levinas's contribution indeed can't -- and doesn't want to -- provide the kind of normative guides to action and law that Wolin complains it lacks.  What it provides instead is a meaning -- which is also to say, a motivation -- for political action that goes beyond the egoistic meanings (self-interest, rational choice, etc.) which are the only ones that reason is currently capable of endowing.  Were Wolin and the other self-righteous reason-mongers of the left able to grasp this distinction, they might begin to get a grip on the real practical-political problem of the day in the Western democracies, which is how to get people motivated by any political program -- of whatever type -- on the basis of a fundamental concern for others rather than simply themselves.   (And when and if they do get a grip on this question, by the way, they will no longer be disturbed or frightened by the fact that some types of theological, quasi-theological (as in Derrida's phrase, "religion without religion"), or "crypto-theological" (a term that Wolin borrows from one of the books under review) thinking can serve as one resource for this fundamental shift, as Wolin clearly is disturbed and frightened by this prospect ("Moyn's well-placed suspicion that Levinas never abandoned his original theological habitudes and longings raises some troubling questions about the uncritical veneration that has characterized the reception of his work").)   

Enowning also has a further post with comments on Wolin's review here.

Comments

[Jodi]

Thanks for this. Wolin is an absolutely insufferable moron (who, like many, thinks that he is a genius). Rumor has it that the big H himself wasn't (at least initially) particularly impressed with Wolin but that he and some others (who will go unnamed) wanted more counter Heideggerian/Derridean forces and pro Habermas forces and so helped him along (endorsements, recommendations, etc). It's like the wanted to corner the market on what counts as rational and just. I fully agree that the Nation shouldn't give credence to the likes of RW.

[Matt]

Not to leap to any unqualified defense of The Nation's historical record, but it does seem like they've made some amends in recent years, with regard to Derrida at least.

For these I mostly credit their recent intern, who happens to be a good friend.

[Adam Thurschwell]

Thanks, Matt (and to your friend the intern); I'm delighted to be corrected about that.