Philosopher Levinas and Jewish Culture

□ Lin Yi

The biography of Levinas, written by the French writer Solomon Marka, is poetic and dexterous, reasonable and emotional, and few biographies are written in such a way that Levinas is written in such a way that it is just right.

One of the feelings that this group of French intellectuals and philosophers gave me was that they were more absorbed in the creation of various concepts and terms, busy constructing theoretical systems, and did not pay much attention to the living wisdom that nourished the soul. And Levinas, I read in his philosophy a kind of emotion, an existential concern for real life.

The Biography of Levinas, by Solomon Marka, Guangxi Normal University Press, January 2022, 76.00 yuan.

In my mind, Levinas is like Paul Zellland in philosophy. There is a deep spiritual fit between Levinas's philosophy and Celan's efforts with poetry. They all sought to reconstruct the connection of man (especially the Jews) with the world, Celan's poetry constantly exploring the boundaries of the broken subject experience, and Levinas exploring the subjective presence consciousness of "time and the other.". It is a pity that this biography of Levinas does not talk about the connection between Levinas and Celan, after all, Levinas has written in-depth articles specifically about Celan, after all, they are all concerned with the ethical responsibilities of others and demand the breaking of the oppression of the other by the Western tradition, but because of Marka's excellent writing and exquisite interpretation, his works still arouse my association.

From the biographical account of the life of Levinas, we can also find similarities between the two: both grew up in Eastern Europe, both were deeply nurtured by German culture in their youth, absorbed the multicultural nutrition of Juda and Russia, Eastern Europe and Western Europe, German and French, all settled in France and became French nationals because of "World War II", and later experienced the difficult years of Auschwitz, and since then their lives have been entangled in history and memory, the difference is that Celan finally took the body as a sacrifice, and Levinas continued to urge himself and others to persist in pursuing justice and hope. Obviously, the common Jewishness is engraved in their souls.

This biography has worked hard to dig into the roots of Levinas's thought. For Levinas, books were the original way of creating his subject. The biography emphasizes Levinas' interest in reading. Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Lermontov... Levinas continued to read and quote works by Russian writers. From the age of 6, Levinas read the Bible and learned Hebrew simultaneously. Levinas's high school was spent in a Hebrew school, and the headmaster, Mr. Schwab, was an admirer of German culture and an avid lover of Goethe, who impressed Levinas. Levinas traveled to France to study at the University of Strasbourg and devoted himself to the phenomenological schools of Bergson and Husserl. This is the intellectual atmosphere in which the young Emmanuel Levinas grew up.

There was another philosopher who had a great influence on Levinas, and that was Heidegger. Like the young Celan, the young Levinas was once fascinated by Heidegger, and later they all experienced mental and mental tearing pain. The difference between Levinas and Celan is that Celan's sense of destruction and illusion is more thorough, Celan walks into the dark jungle and cannot find an exit, while levinas's strong Jewish cultural education as a child supports his spirit, allowing him to rebuild his belief system and continue to have an uncompromising dialogue with the world.

The Rahim curriculum and the Talmud occupy a large part of the biography. Makar described the lessons as a bit like the Big Mass, which focused on feedback and anchored in texts that the students involved at the time described as "letters from lovers from afar," embracing it with conviction, "and keeping our souls in rhythm with it since the Dark Ages." Reading the Holy Book together is like a new alliance, like a path that leads the Jews out of their troubled places, a path that emphasizes reason and freedom without the guidance of revelation, and the symbiosis of knowledge and action. On this basis, Levinas reasserted the position of the self. In his view, "my absolute freedom" is precisely the problem of modern Western philosophy, and the human condition is thus dominated by the "desire of desire", from which Levinas developed the basic ideas of his ethics: the loneliness of existence; enjoyment and transcendence in daily life; the absolute heterogeneity of death and its revealed relationship between time and others, and so on. In practice, Levinas supported the Jewish liberation movement and demanded that modern politics, based on liberal democracy, affirm the excellence of Jewish civilization.

Levinas's academic career was closely linked to the French intellectual community, and these connections also constituted an important part of the biography. Derrida's interactions with Levinas are vividly and humorously written, with Derrida describing Levinas's assessment of his work Violence and Metaphysics, "You anesthetized me in the first part, and then in the second part, you anesthetized me." What binds Levinas to Derrida is their common interest in Husserl's philosophy, the lively discussion of Levinas's masterpiece Totality and Infinity, and their position on the Israeli question. "To trace the journey of Levinas, it is also necessary to reconstruct the gaze of others, the rendezvous of different routes, the continuous meetings that have left their mark on his journey of existence, enriching his writings," Marka said. In this biography, we can also see Levinas and Branshaw's reflections on how the catastrophe was written after Auschwitz, a meeting with Paul Colley on the phenomenology of religion around the Bible, and so on. The biography does not end with the death of Levinas, but continues to talk a lot about the views of friends and relatives on Levinas afterwards, which are not simply emotional remembrances, but also present the continuation of ideas and scholarship. For example, Michael, the son of Levinas, said that his father was a philosopher with fêlure, a term used to describe the fragility of writing activity, the non-institutional nature of his work, the questioning he had been asking between the Jewish form of knowledge and the purely philosophical form, and Michael also said that his father told him: "Sometimes it is enough to keep things unfinished." In the ruins of the 20th century, Levinas returned to ethics again and again.

Levinas objected to the label of "Jewish philosopher," but, as Marka argues, philosophy and Judaism are intertwined in Levinas's life and this intersection must be carefully considered. This entanglement still persists today in levinas's work, where much of his teaching career was among Jews, and the most important parts of his work deal with Jewish subjects. We must realize that it is the endless dialogue between philosophy and Judaism that gives levinas the work and gives it the power of universality.