Ethics as First Philosophy and the Other’s Ambiguity in the Dialogue of Buber and Levinas

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On Emmanuel Levinas' instructive readings, Martin Buber's writings sketch ambiguity of other whose approach presses for an ethics as first philosophy. They concur that other, approaching on horizon of a world I experience, amidst objects I use, breaks through world's horizon with a differential force that alters same. Yet Levinas writes of Buber that although his thought prompted me to engage in a phenomenology of sociality which uncovers in face of a given other an infinite command to answer for its life, this logic demonstrates where all ambiguity of to other lies.1 Simply put, alter denotes at once a finite difference and infinitely differentiated, an interruption of self and a reconfiguration of same. Due to such ambiguity a call of ethics induces work of philosophy, or so, I show, runs a theme Buber and Levinas purport to adopt from Jewish tradition and adapt to European thought. I contend that Levinas plumbs a Buberian line at crux of other who gives self its responsibility, as though an ethically Jewish difference would incite a philosophically Greek, or, modern identity. More, other breaking apart identity of signifies an irreducible distance from self that in turn elicits a mediated reconnection in network of signified relations with many others who cannot be experienced or used but only answered and supplicated. So an ethics as first philosophy that proceeds from a finite other and its infinite otherness ambivalently implies interruption of sameness and instigation of selfhood, a situation evident in how seems Jewish religion opposes but needs a Greek, or modern, wisdom. Not surprisingly, decades of references and allusions to Buber in Levinas' Jewish and Greek writings often achieve a distance from Buber's theses only to relate to them closely elsewhere. I suspect contortions are less likely to result from Levinas' incautiousness, or Buber's inconsistencies, than very ethics of alterity for which other at once destroys and deploys identity of a first philosophy. The ambiguity appears in Buber's 1923 opus / and Thou which begins with a self who may adopt two stances towards [same] world-I-It, relation and IThou, interpersonal relation-and reaches a conclusion of these stances' supposed reunification in another other, Thou. In Buberian terms question is how other, in breaking apart unified subject-object relation, bears not just any meaning, a negativity broaching nihilism, but command to bear an ethical responsibility for or, rather, Thou, indeed, Thou who makes It possible, i.e. God.2 Buber, fretting over a distance separating selves, what he calls Vergegnung or mismeeting, treats as a lack which gets filled by fullness of meeting (Begegnung)', Levinas worries that relations filled as plenitude with content-full items of experience and use (totality), could absorb distinction of separation (infinity), so he looks to an absence which exposes but does not remedy self's lacking connection. For each author, one's self immersed in essence, interest, commerce, and war would aspire to cross over, transcend with other into responsibility, glory, substitution, and peace. How, then, may one move beyond essence while remaining nevertheless essential? Where history of philosophy brims over with efforts to reconcile a contradiction, Levinas, following Buber, suggests one's passing over to being's otherwise... does not resist [one's] interest but ironically works through it. They claim a finite, relative differentiation of one from another (Levinas' autrui, Buber's thou) makes concrete infinite, absolute difference of sameness from otherness (Levinas' the most high, Buber's eternal thou). As to Levinas the other is not reducible to same but commands it, so to Buber the Eternal Thou can never become it but conditions it. …