Buber or Levinas? A Response to Maurice Friedman

Abstract

Maurice Friedman has written defending Buber against Levinas (Philosophy Today, spring 2001), or trying to establish that at least when it comes to moral philosophy Levinas has not rendered Buber aufgehoben. Many of his points are well taken. Certainly, for instance, we look to Levinas in vain for discussion of some relation to the non-human creation we can bend over with fervor, and Friedman is not the first to wish that Levinas had granted significant otherness to rocks and vegetables and animals.' One looks in vain in Levinas for a full-fledged and nuanced ethics of the sort Friedman wants and finds to some extent in Buber. In fact, since one looks in vain to Levinas for so many insights and topics we can find in Buber, it may puzzle us that Friedman contrasts Buber's piecemeal philosophizing with the construction, by Levinas, of a full-scale philosophy.2It might seem more to the point to contrast the two on the basis of the relative completeness of Buber's as Friedman himself does at one point: [Buber] had, as Levinas did not, a fully formed and philosophy-a federalistic communal socialism and an important distinction between the political principle and the social principle such as could never have been envisaged in Levinas' abstract and undeveloped formulations.3 While of course what Buber did and what Levinas did is all in a broad sense, it seems to me that in the usual connotation of constructing a philosophy, Levinas not only did not do it, he did not think it was the thing to do at this point-although he is in a sense a philosophers' philosopher, as Buber was not. He sides with those who think that traditional philosophy is over, or, more accurately, that we can do philosophy now, in relation to the whole of the Western tradition, only in an analogical sense. Yet Friedman is right to see Levinas as somehow more of a real philosopher than Buber. Levinas is a post-modern thinker, immersed in the discussions and postures of academic philosophy in the late twentieth century. It is precisely Levinas' total involvement with the concerns of contemporary philosophy that makes for the important difference between himself and Buber. Levinas is from this point of view a foundational thinker. It is this foundational character of Levinas' thought that we must not miss, including, and especially, its implications in the moral or ethico-religious sphere. Friedman points out that Levinas seems inconsistent in his appraisal of Buber, sometimes assimilating him too facilely, sometimes dismissing him too simplistically.4 This all makes sense if we understand that Levinas is not against Buber, only impatient with interpretations of his own philosophy that, by conflating it with Buber's, miss its radicality. Buber did not get quite to the heart of the matter. Buber is to be credited, according to Levinas, with registering the fact that any objectifying rational maps we draw find their place only within an always/already occurring I-Thou event. However, from Levinas' point of view, Buber continually drifted toward thinking of this relationship from the standpoint of objectifying intentionality; that is, to think of it precisely as a relationship, thus softening both the epistemological significance and the ethical implications of the discovery. The discovery in question is that there is something going on before we even get started, theoretically and practically. The ethical implications in question have to do with the risk to dwell in that pre-theoretical, non-intentional consciousness. First the discovery. We can talk about a metaphysical component to Levinas' thought, not only because he uses that word in the early statements of his thesis,5 but because, even after he has discarded the word, he joins the traditional disputes undertaken by classic authors, albeit in a new key. I am referring to the question of the One and the Many, or (not quite the same thing), Same and Other. …