The Kabbalistic Heart of Levinas

Abstract

The question Levinas called ‘useless suffering’ and the sense of universal responsibility he advocated go together ethically and need to be understood in terms of one another. These two terms of Levinas's philosophy show him not to be an ethical philosopher – a commonly held appropriation – but a cosmological philosopher, like a Kabbalist of the school of Vilna. Like such a Kabbalist, what Levinas called ‘a faith without theodicy’ goes along with his ‘new modality in the faith of today’. This new modality is characterised by responsibility, on the grounds that we all share one life that is infinite. Monotheism is not a theism (theology) or a panentheism (Spinoza) but a humanism. But it is a ‘messianic’ humanism of responsibility for the other, for the meaning of history, and most of all, the meaning of reason in which the Law of the world to come is inscribed.