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Discovering Levinas, by Michael L. Morgan
Free PDF Discovering Levinas, by Michael L. Morgan
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Emmanuel Levinas is well known to students of twentieth-century continental philosophy, especially French philosophy. But he is largely unknown within the circles of Anglo- American philosophy. In Discovering Levinas, Michael L. Morgan shows how this thinker faces in novel and provocative ways central philosophical problems of twentieth-century philosophy and religious thought. He tackles this task by placing Levinas in conversation with philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Onora O'Neill, Charles Taylor, and Cora Diamond. He also seeks to understand Levinas within philosophical, religious, and political developments in the history of twentieth-century intellectual culture. Morgan demystifies Levinas by examining his unfamiliar and surprising vocabulary, interpreting texts with an eye to clarity, and arguing that Levinas can be understood as a philosopher of the everyday. Morgan also shows that Levinas's ethics is not morally and politically irrelevant nor is it excessively narrow and demanding in unacceptable ways. Neither glib dismissal nor fawning acceptance, this book provides a sympathetic reading that can form a foundation for a responsible critique.
- Sales Rank: #8476948 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cambridge University Press
- Published on: 2007-05-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x 1.30" w x 5.98" l, 1.84 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 528 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Michael Morgan's Discovering Levinas offers a fresh and distinctive approach to the task of introducting Levinas to the dominant philosophical audience in the United States. Although there is a growing awareness of Levinas among mainstream philosophers, there is very little available to them that offers an introduction. Discovering Levinas fills this gap. It is a first rate book." -Robert Bernasconi, University of Memphis
"This book fills a clear need and will be welcomed by anyone who takes Levinas seriously. I have no doubt it will leave its mark on the field and change the way that Levinas is discussed." -Kenneth Seeskin, Northwestern University
"This clear, fascinating, and outstandingly learned study is remarkable for, among other things, bringing Levinas into fruitful conversation with notable Anglo-American philosophers. Morgan continually compares what Levinas has to say on a wide range of philosophical topics with the views of, e.g., Donald Davidson, John McDowell, Christine Korsgaard, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, and Charles Taylor. The result is an exemplary model of how to write across the so-called analytic/continental divide. It is obvious that Morgan has thought both hard and originally about how to teach Levinas, about how to introduce a figure whose writings are apt to come across as impenetrable. The result is stunning-a work of impressive depth and wonderful accessibility." --David Finkelstein, University of Chicago
About the Author
Michael L. Morgan has been a professor at Indiana University for 31 years and, in 2004, was named a Chancellor's Professor. He has published articles in a variety of journals, edited several collections, and authored four books, most recently Interim Judaism (2001). He is the coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
peerless
By Denise J. Mcpherson
To come right out with it: this book is a work of love. In the Preface, Morgan frankly admits that this work is a response to the `crisis of values' inaugurated by the genocidal events of the 20th century, a crisis that shows no signs of subsiding. Indeed, `Facing up to this problem and to these events is a challenge that none of us, philosophers included, can escape.' (xii). Morgan's book is no mere exercise in intellectual curiosity, but rather an exercise in understanding with an eye toward judgment and action. In `discovering' Levinas, Morgan discovers a pertinent and passionate response to the crisis.
Morgan's very appropriate motives are met by an equally compelling relevance: this book addresses a severe lacuna in contemporary Levinas scholarship. To my knowledge, there has been no serious research published treating Levinas alongside Anglo-American moral theory. Morgan writes: *If I have written [this book] to become clear myself about what Levinas wrote and thought, I also have written it to introduce others to the Levinas I have come to understand. And this is a Levinas who talks to Cavell, Putnam, Taylor, and McDowell, as well as Heidegger and Derrida. (xiii)*
One should not draw any premature conclusions in reading Morgan's honest and unassuming intent. This book is no mere introduction to Levinas, though it certainly performs this function. This book is no mere dialogue between Morgan's Levinas and contemporary analytic moral theory, though it eminently enacts such interactions. This book amounts to an intervention in the contemporary debate over the `objectivity' of values. Whether one finds one's stylistic home on the Continent or Commonwealth (with its North American progeny), one will not walk away from this book without being provoked. Morgan's provocation is all the more acute in that his tone and analyses are as humble as they are sophisticated, readable as they are rigorous, nuanced as they are distinct. Morgan exhibits a deep understanding of Levinas's corpus, of both its complex technical architecture and the general significance of its élan. His personal quest to understand Levinas has been eminently successful, and his nuanced interaction with analytic moral theory is a prime indicator of this success. At no time does he simply reduce Levinas to another theoretical topos, or for that matter, reduce his Anglophone interlocutor to the Levinasian élan. Morgan is elegantly just in his impeccable interpretations of the figures and themes that he treats.
The pertinence and passion I noted above is even exhibited in Morgan's graceful style. His writing is as disarmingly personal as it is analytically rigorous, no small feet in these turgid times. His humility, sincerity, and exactitude had an almost hypnotic effect on me, drawing me into the world of Morgan's Levinas, almost as if I were encountering Levinas for the first time. Whether interacting with Derrida or Davidson, Morgan is a joy to read. His prose paint with both the broad strokes of a storyteller and the discrete minutia of the analyst, gliding back and forth with honesty and ease. He is not merely effective in helping us `discover' Levinas; he has produced what effectively amounts to the most comprehensive and substantive `introduction' to Levinas in the English language. One must, however, place `introduction' in quotations here, insofar as the scope of this book is attended by a depth of engagement that rivals most other treatments of Levinas this reviewer has read (and that, needless to say, is many).
In the first chapter, Morgan opens his search for Levinas through a reading of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, a favorite literary reference for Levinas toward the end of his life. Grossman's apocalyptic vignettes "offer a complete spectacle of desolation and dehumanization" (8). Narrating the horrific landscape during and after the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman discloses the true nature of 20th century totalitarianisms. Yet even in a situation of total devastation, Grossman bears witness to discrete acts of "senseless, irrational kindness" (3). Morgan quotes Levinas: *[T]oward the book's end, when Stalingrad has already been rescued, the German prisoners, including an officer, are cleaning out a basement and removing the decomposing bodies. The officer suffers particularly from this misery. In the crowd, a woman who hates Germans is delighted to see this man more miserable than the others. Then she gives him the last piece of bread she has. This is extraordinary. Even in hatred there exists a mercy stronger than hatred (6).*
No reviewer's gloss can do justice to Morgan here. His introduction to Levinas through Grossman is the most clear, effective, and compelling pictures of the overall significance of Levinas's ethics yet written: he gives us Levinas in a nutshell. In the next three chapters Morgan builds on this initial portrait, solidly elaborating the basic structure of Levinas's thought. The final seven chapters and appendix is a virtual cornucopia of Levinasian engagement. Morgan substantially interacts with the large body of secondary literature, touching on virtually every craggy nook in the Levinasian landscape; everything from Derrida to diachrony, Judaism to jouissance, Heidegger to holiness, and Korsgaard to Kabala.
In chapter nine and the appendix, Morgan enacts a tightly syncopated conversation between his Levinas and contemporary analytic moral theory. One will notice curious ambiguities as Morgan explicates Levinas's position next to his Anglophone interlocutor. These ambiguities are not a consequence of an eccentricity on Morgan's part - his interpretations of Levinas are impeccable - but rather necessary ambiguities that emerge in attempting the type of translation Morgan undertakes. Given analytic philosophy's basic tenor qua propositional, linguistic, and tightly woven formal coherence, any translation one might venture is bound to be uneven; uneven by virtue of a basic discontinuity between the two sides in both methodology and content. For example, Morgan finds the closest analytic analogue to Levinas in Korsgaard and Darwell, who argue that `agent-neutral' - a neutrality that is equivalent to Levinasian disinterestedness - moral values are grounded intersubjectively. The proximity Morgan demonstrates here is rather compelling: all `neutral' or disinterested reasons arise from the category of the interpersonal, of interpersonal relations rather than the free agent of desire and interest (439). Yet Morgan also notes the gap that separates them: Korsgaard's `primal scene' suggests that at the "deepest level, ethics is grounded in the rational and free humanity of the individual. Ethical norms...arise...in a situation where persons deliberate together about what norms and reasons to share" (444-445). This gap and the uneven slippage it effects also manifests when Morgan suggests answers to Anglophone questions, in specifying the function of the face-to-face in an analytic idiom. In contrasting Korsgaard's `primal scene' with the face-to-face, Morgan writes: "The sheer presence of the other makes a claim on me, calls me into question, puts me on the spot" (445). Such a statement is not an interpretive slip on Morgan's part. His explication of Levinasian diachrony and trace in chapter eight is impeccable. Morgan is responding here to the analytic imperative of formal coherence, an imperative that informs Korsgaard's construction of the `primal scene.' In the above statement, Morgan is emphasizing that it is not the other's rationality or humanity - or any other property or capacity we putatively share - that lends force to the ethical, but rather the other herself, in her very immediacy, demands, supplicates, and obliges. To allay the fears of vigilant Kantians, these demands are not even a species of force, to which one might oppose some other kind of force. The other herself, in her sheer alterity, "is" demand, "is" inscribed in my very flesh, and constitutes me as responsible. Yet this immediacy is not a positivity, and thus the other is not even present. The trace of the other irrupting in the face is immediate but absent, the ambiguous non-presence that appears as withdrawal, as enigma, as a past that has never been present. Morgan is sensitive to this paradoxical situation in his many just qualifications when relating Levinas to other moral theorists. Elsewhere he refers to the face as a kind of `quasi-ground' and `quasi-reason.' This `quasi-' is necessary because as I hinted above, and as Morgan reminds us through out this book, the other is not a presence, the anarchic trace is groundless, an opaque glimmer trembling through the constitutive crack in the Said.
Whether or not the analytic moral theorist buys Levinas's testimony to the anarchic quality of pre-theoretical ethical sensibility, he or she will not walk away from Morgan's book uneducated or unedified. Whether or not the continental ethicist buys analytic moral theory's priority of logical imperatives, he or she will not walk away from Morgan's book uneducated or unedified. Morgan's urgent motives and irenic manner make this long book worth every second of attention. One could almost criticize Morgan for doing too much in this book. But each essay retains enough autonomy and depth to allow the reader to come back again and again. Surely, given the scope of the book one will find something to argue with Morgan about; but the excellence, rigor, and indeed, filiality swimming throughout these pages will not be the bone of contention. By all rights, this book should become a classic text of English speaking Levinas scholarship. Whether one is a new to Levinas or a seasoned scholar, one will not fail to enjoy this book. We hope it finds the wide reading it deserves.
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