To link Emmanuel Levinas, twentieth century Jewish French philosopher of ethics, and William Shakespeare, sixteenth century Elizabethan dramatist and poet, is neither an idle fancy nor an arbitrary academic exercise. Even beyond a natural curiosity that wants to understand the links that bring together all spirits who are of the first rank, regardless of whatever differences in epoch, culture, station, language, and genre may separate them, there is in this case a special reason for making this conjunction. It is the unforgettable claim made by Levinas at the start of his own career in 1947, in Time and the Other: “[I]t sometimes seems to me,” he declared, “that the whole of philosophy is but a meditation of Shakespeare” (TO 72).1 Then, too, there is the no less memorable but more general claim by Shakespeare, or rather, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, (after being told by his “father’s spirit” that his father did not die a natural death but was murdered) to his friend Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” While Hamlet’s claim is congruent with Levinas’s, since both deny the usual self-proclaimed comprehensiveness and finality of philosophy, the claims are nevertheless asymmetrical. Hamlet’s claim declares that philosophy is limited, a view oft expressed, especially in Western religious thought, while Levinas’s claim, in contrast, determines the limit of philosophy as one that Shakespeare surpasses. Let us add that we have no doubts that for Levinas, Shakespeare is but one instance, and not the exclusive instance, of the surpassing of philosophy.
What is striking about Levinas’s assertion is the combination of its universal quantification of philosophy, its grand reference to “the whole of philosophy,” and its use of the possessive “of” to link philosophy to Shakespeare. What this means is not that all of philosophy is a meditation about Shakespeare, which by itself would already be a remarkable and thoughtworthy possibility, but rather that the whole of philosophy is a meditation by Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s meditation. What Levinas is suggesting, then, is that Shakespeare—whatever is meant by “Shakespeare,” and this is what we will have to investigate—subsumes philosophy, and not, as one might ordinarily suppose, that philosophy, which has always held itself out to be an account of the whole, and ideally as the whole account of the whole—subsumes Shakespeare. If by Shakespeare, he means, minimally, “great literature,” and I think this is so, then what follows is that instead of philosophy being the truth of the art of literature, the art of literature would be the […] the what?—this is our question—of philosophy. In any event, we must ask what is the meaning of this reversal of the personal and the impersonal? Not philosophy meditating on Shakespeare, but Shakespeare meditating on philosophy.
What can it mean for philosophy to be conceived as a Shakespearean meditation? Shakespeare lived and died before the birth of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Bergson, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. Does Levinas’s statement mean, then, that philosophy ended before these thinkers? Levinas, who in the 1930s and 1940s introduced Husserl and Heidegger to twentieth century French thought, can hardly mean this. Does it not mean, more broadly and more decisively, that discursive or conceptual thought, contrary to the self-proclamations of philosophy, is subsumed by a more concrete dimension or element beyond discursive or conceptual thought, a dimension or element manifest in the world of Shakespearean drama and poetry? I think here lies the key to Levinas’s statement. Philosophy lives in thought, in concepts, in knowledge, in “making the unequal equal,” in the “life of the mind,” while Shakespeare presents a world, an artistic rendition of the life-world in its unfinished, temporal, and dialogical character. It is a matter of closeness to the unique. A literary world, in contrast to a philosophical concept, does not simply refer but replicates—highlights—such characterizations as the one way directionality of time and history, or, more importantly, the exigencies of morality and justice. Truth lies in neither mute particularity nor abstract universality but in singularity, where particular and universal meet. In a word, Shakespeare’s dramatic world is more concrete than philosophy’s discursive universe. Merleau-Ponty correctly taught that philosophy does not surpass the world when it abstracts its truth, rather it reduces and eviscerates “the flesh of the world,” the ambiguities of an always unfinished and always already ongoing discovery and construction of meaning.2
Let us remember, too, that in its French context Levinas’s use of the term “meditation” in a personal possessive construction has a specific resonance. To anyone versed in French culture, it directly calls to mind the famous Meditations on First Philosophy of René Descartes. And as a matter of historical fact, Shakespeare and Descartes were contemporaries. Descartes was twenty years old when Shakespeare died in 1616. Had he wanted, he could have attended the openings of The Tempest or Henry VIII in England. And yet, beyond an accident of chronology and geography, to link Shakespeare and Descartes is to juxtapose nearly opposite sensibilities: the rich humanist morality, the divine comedy of the dramatist and poet; the clear and distinct analytical epistemology, the geometrical method of the philosopher of science. In the estimation of French thought, and in numerous histories of European philosophy, Descartes is considered the greatest of French philosophers, the first modern philosopher, and sometimes even the greatest of all philosophers tout court. Whatever the appraisal of his reputation and status, Descartes is acknowledged to be the first modern philosopher, the first philosopher, that is to say, committed fundamentally to the calculus of a thoroughly mathematical science. In its intention, Descartes’s meditation and method are “first philosophy” in the most profound modern sense. Descartes’s philosophy would be a self-contained cogitation, truth thought from the ground up without any dependence external to intellect, autonomy, and absolute freedom in the strictest most rational sense (even if in certain respects Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel would more consistently carry out elements of Descartes’s own intention). This digression from Shakespeare to Descartes is intended to indicate that Levinas’s use of the phrase “meditation of Shakespeare” carries enormous philosophical weight, even more than might be imagined at first glance. Thus Levinas’s claim that “the whole of philosophy is but a meditation of Shakespeare” gives incalculable philosophical prestige to Shakespeare and literature, and perhaps more broadly still to poesis.
Would philosophy then be a subset of art? Would truth, then, be a special case of lie, as Plato warns in the Republic and Nietzsche celebrates? Is Levinas’s praise for Shakespeare the sign of his adherence to a long Western tradition of aesthetics, whether Bergsonian, Nietzschean, Heideggerian, or Deleuzean, to name only recent avatars of this tradition? No one can in good faith think that this is so. All of Levinas’s thought stands against it. Which is to say all of Levinas’s thought is a prolonged and profound defense of ethics as first philosophy. Indeed, Time and the Other, wherein Levinas articulates his extravagant claim regarding Shakespeare and philosophy, is already a work of ethical metaphysics. It is already a work that grounds labor, mortality, meaning, and time in social relations, and hence in morality, and ultimately in justice. Throughout his long philosophical career, Levinas, with great subtlety and penetration, criticizes the irresponsibility of philosophies and worldviews devoted to the manifestation of being, in all its semantic and semiotic sophistication. Nevertheless, in the pursuit of this ethical task he will freely invoke literary works such as Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Paul Celan’s poems, not to mention an entire book—On Maurice Blanchot (cf. PN 127-170, 183-187)—on the novels of Maurice Blanchot. Philosophy, for Levinas, is certainly not a subset of art. And yet Levinas will find in literature, even more than in epistemological (including theology) or aesthetic theories and philosophies, the expression of the transcendence he insists must be approached under the sign of ethics.
Levinas’s recognition of the dangers of aestheticism occurred early and decisively in his intellectual career. In 1948, shortly after the publication of his first two original philosophical works, Time and the Other and Existence and Existents, where Levinas refers to Shakespeare more often than any other time in his career, Levinas published his most sustained reflection on the meaning of art, an essay entitled “Reality and Its Shadow” (LR 129-143).3 In that essay Levinas attacks the artwork as the mere shadow of reality, as a temporally frozen and semantically closed world unto itself. In a certain sense, then, art would be guilty of the same abstraction for which one might fault philosophy—abstraction from life, from ethical life. As if utilizing Bergson’s philosophy au rebours, Levinas finds in art not an open, dynamic, fluid world but a closed, static, frozen one instead. Detached from the morality and justice that for Levinas make life and history serious, and hence, irresponsible to its core, the telos of the artwork requires—for its own redemption—the supplement of recontextualization, the work of criticism. And every reader is a critic, a commentator, and an exegete, in a word, an interpreter. Rather than becoming lost in the warp and woof of its internal relations, the critic reweaves the isolated artwork into what Levinas will later call “sacred history,” the world historical work—whether seen or unseen, known or unknown, recorded or unrecorded—of morality and justice. To read is to translate. But to translate is not to betray but to redeem. The reader must outwit the essential betrayal of the work of art, the silence and impersonality about which Socrates warned in the Phaedrus.
True, in this early essay Levinas may have reduced all art to a mythic dimension, and hence to that morally regressive manner of being—participation in being—which he will later criticize, and see in Judaism, in particular, a religion against myth and mythic consciousness. In this case one might think contra Levinas that myth is not co-extensive with the whole of art. But then again, maybe it is. Maybe there is a way of approaching or understanding art whereby art takes the role, the place otherwise occupied by myth. Perhaps, that is to say, without the work of criticism, without a critical reinsertion of the artwork within the exegesis of morality, art becomes myth, idolatry, return to animality. A critic as sensitive as Nietzsche, in any event, was explicit on this point, writing about the irrepressible theories of “art for art’s sake,” he declares (in his usual clever manner): “The struggle against purpose in art is always a struggle against the moralizing tendency in art, against the subordination of art to morality. L’art pour l’art means: ‘the devil take morality.’”4 Lionel Trilling makes this point more positively: “Literature doesn’t easily submit to the category of aesthetic contemplative disinterestedness—so much of it insists ‘De te fabula—this means you,’ and often goes on to say, ‘And you’d better do something about it quick.’”5
In the expansion of the artwork beyond itself effected by criticism, Levinas—already in his early essay of 1948—is pointing to a process whereby art and philosophy are joined together and uplifted through what I have elsewhere called “ethical exegesis.”6 The idea of a self-contained artwork, like the apparently opposite idea of a literal meaning, are illusory, mythic. The literary work and the work of commentary are inseparable. Of course, one can distinguish literature from criticism, just as one can distinguish both from scientific treatises, but all signification relies ultimately on the larger context of an interhumanity whose significance is not merely a matter of signs referring to things or to other signs. The literary-interpretive enterprise, in other words, is inseparable from the human. Inseparable from the human, it is inseparable from the humanity—humaneness, humanism—of the human. Like all significations, then, literature is inseparable from an ethical context.
This suggests the answer to our question: In what sense is “the whole of philosophy” a “meditation of Shakespeare”? Or to rephrase the question in light of our reflection above: In what sense is the truth philosophy claims to love—wisdom—found in Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, Celan, and others? Answer: literature is closer to the humanity of the human, to the transcendence constitutive of the ethical category of the human, than are the abstract reflections of philosophy. What is the difference? Not that every novel is moral and every philosophy is immoral. Not at all. Levinas’s ethical metaphysics is not reducible to a moralism. It is not at all driven by an omniscient and hence pretentious self-righteousness as was, for example, the officially approved “socialist realism” of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century under and after Stalin. Rather, it is the texture of literature, its “life”—excepting those instances when art slavishly apes the theoretical perspective of a philosophy, such as the “new French novel” of the 1960s7—that is thicker, closer, “truer,” to the ethical exigencies, to the obligations and responsibilities, the imperatives of social life, than is philosophy. What Levinas says of the world of talmudic disputation is no less true of the world of Shakespearean drama: “faithful to the Real, refractory to the System” (OS 130).
I want to emphasize the moral dimension in Shakespeare. Shakespeare is not a moralist, in the sense that like Aesop each tale must have its lesson, or that crime is always punished and virtue always rewarded (Hamlet belies any such notions). Rather, because in his literature one finds at play the tension, the drama of good and evil, their contention, the play of conscience, dastardly betrayal, noble self-sacrifice, moral ambivalence, and the like. It is important to emphasize this point, because the thickness, the vividness, the reality of Shakespeare’s world has long been remarked. “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare could as soon be called The Book of Reality,”8 is how Harold Bloom has recently put this point. What I want to emphasize in contrast to the admiration expressed by Bloom and many other Shakespeare scholars before him for the concretude or reality of Shakespeare’s world,9 is the even deeper link that binds the true to the good. What makes for the much-admired concretude or reality or “understanding” of Shakespeare’s world, what brings his characters to life beyond caricature, is, Levinas would say, the moral dynamic that drives intersubjectivity, the worldliness of the world, and any account, scientific or otherwise, of these. Here, then, the Shakespearean scholar Alfred Harbage was right to link the vividness of Shakespeare’s characters not only to the detail or accuracy of their descriptive portraits or contexts, but more specifically to the concretude of their ideality. It is not an abstract moral sentimentality Harbage and Levinas find and honor in Shakespeare, but the drama of men and women with concrete moral (or immoral) aspirations, achievements, and failings.10 And it is precisely this that Levinas values in all the great literatures of the world, and what permits him to speak of such literature in terms of the “religious” category of prophecy: “Can one not read Plato as a Bible, or other great texts where humanity has acknowledged a testimony to the Infinite? … There is a participation in Holy Scripture in the national literatures, in Homer and Plato, in Racine and Victor Hugo, as in Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, or Goethe, as of course in Tolstoy or in Agnon” (EI 116-117).11 And as of course, “there is participation in Holy Scripture”—“testimony to the Infinite”—in Shakespeare too.
Though appreciative of certain insights based in creativity as understood by Bergson and Heidegger, Levinas is not suggesting that philosophy, the search for truth, or reality, its “object,” is in a fundamental sense a form of art, a creative production. He is not proposing, therefore, that the basic task of philosophy, whether symbolic or conceptual, is epistemological or ontological, to expose or uncover [Heidegger’s entdecken, aufdecken, unverdect] what is hidden in the manifestation of manifestation. Nor is Levinas endorsing the slightly more modest claim of Hegel, that philosophy and art, though distinct in kind, each in its own way says the same thing, the absolute, which art expresses in images and philosophy in concepts. Levinas’s objection to aesthetics derives not simply from an opposition to the frozen shadow world of representational art, but more profoundly from his appreciation for what the frozen world of art leaves out. To be swept away in an enthusiasm for the aesthetic, for the manifestation of the manifest, for the show of what is, is at the same time to evade the exigencies of moral obligations and responsibilities. Levinas opposes what he understands to be the downward movement of an aesthetic worldview because it is irresponsible or is conducive to irresponsibility. Thus Levinas opposes what he sees to be the necessarily sentimental and escapist dimension of the aesthetic, its artful illusions. For art can just as easily serve evil as good. And if it serves only itself—“art for art’s sake”—it sooner or later serves evil. The beautiful—like nature, like being—is indifferent to the good.12 The great verisimilitude of Shakespeare, as of all the great literatures, making them all prophecy and revelation, “biblical” in this sense, is not that they present philosophies, quests for the truth of being, but rather, and more broadly, because they present human worlds, that they depict and animate “characters” with character—the humanity of the human—driven by the higher and more pressing imperatives of morality and justice.
We must take seriously, still, Levinas’s opposition to the fascist inclination—whether avowed or, as is more usual and ordinary, hidden—of all aestheticism. There is a certain “devil may care” attitude of indifference built into the self-circuits of all art. It is precisely the imitative—or referential—connection of art’s artificial world to the real world, fortified by the critic that is severed by the telos or work of the artwork itself. Picasso’s “Guernica” is perhaps intended to remind us of the horrors of war, but it is also a painting with its own internal values, its own color scales, its own formal relationships. From an alleged reference to horror one easily shifts into a purely aesthetic mode of appreciation for the artwork itself. Good and evil are defused by purely formal qualities of art appreciation. It is certainly something like this that in 1934 Levinas included and denounced in “the philosophy of Hitlerism,” about which he warned: “More than a contagion or a madness, Hitlerism is an awakening of elementary sentiments.”13 Levinas’s opposition to the moral vagaries and temptations of a purely sentimental sociality, permits us to better appreciate what is at stake in his own thought: its ethical height. The “more than philosophy” found in Shakespeare is a dimension of the human irreducible to any theory of “art for art’s sake,” to aestheticism, to an “attunement” (again we think of Heidegger: Befindlichkeit, Gestimmheit, Gellasenheit) to the manifestation of manifestation. What Levinas is saying is that in Shakespeare, in the world of Shakespeare, as in the work of other great writers, in other great literatures—the world of Plato, the “ocean” of the Talmud—one finds depicted that fundamental moral exigency that constitutes the very humanity of the human.
Beneath the artificial identities, the constructed identities of reason and aesthetics, lies the fundamentally moral “non-identity” of morality: the one-for-the-other before being for-itself. If we name “wisdom” that worldview that is greater than knowledge—whether scientific or sentimental—then it is wisdom to recognize that what is most significant in the concrete significations of the real, the very “signification of signification,” is in the first instance an ethical rather than an ontological imperative. What is most real “is” paradoxically what exceeds the real, what “is” more pressing than the real.14 But this excess is not ontological but ethical, and as such “otherwise than being or beyond essence.” It is no “is” at all, but an “ought.” It is the surplus of moral exigency above and beyond all the masks of being, whether the latter be conceived in terms of an essentially conservative conatus essendi or alternatively in terms of an expanding wille zur macht. “‘To be or not to be,’” Levinas once wrote, “is that the question?” No, he answers: the genuine question is not contained in the alternative of being and nonbeing, but in the deeper, more profound, more troubling question of one’s right to be—rectitude, righteousness, justice. What Levinas seeks, then, and finds in great literature—as the very greatness of a literature—is a world whose veritable concretude comes neither from epistemological nor ontological considerations alone, but from the greater exigencies of moral responsibility, of one’s obligations to another and to all others. These are the exigencies and this is the world—what Coleridge, in his 1818 Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare, called “Keeping at all times in the high road of life”15—that drive Shakespeare’s drama, making his characters lifelike and large at the same time, and enabling his world to challenge our own to this very day.
While the whole of philosophy may be Shakespeare’s meditation, to the extent that what Shakespeare animates are the moral pressures of a life world, meditating on Shakespeare is nevertheless not the whole of Levinas’s philosophy. It is not even a large or sustained part of it. Very little of Levinas’s philosophical reflections concern Shakespeare, or, for that matter, any other literary figure. This contrasts sharply with the focus of many of his contemporaries, for instance Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, though recognized as the author of many abstract conceptual works, was certainly no less well known as the author of numerous novels, stories, and plays, lengthy critical volumes on such literary figures as Genet and Flaubert, not to mention his own extensive autobiography. The same can hardly be said of Levinas’s oeuvre: no novels, plays, or poems, and only a five page intellectual autobiography. While in his philosophical works Levinas never entirely neglects literary figures, he refers or alludes to them far less than to other philosophers—and almost every sentence Levinas writes contains a reference or an allusion to one or more figures from Western spiritual history. Fragments taken from Shakespeare’s plays appear and are analyzed only in Levinas’s earliest philosophical writings. Levinas uses these exegetical opportunities, as we have seen, to bring to life certain “phenomenological” insights.16 Shakespeare is hardly visible, however, in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. This does not, however, prevent Levinas in 1981 from summing up his critique of ontology in relation to his defense of justice in the following way: “To be or not to be—this is probably not the question par excellence.”17
True to his precise word, then, it is only “sometimes” (parfois) that Levinas chooses to explicate his own thought by means of lessons derived from the dramatic universe of Shakespeare. But the limited number of references made specifically to Shakespeare does not undermine the broader and deeper point of Levinas’s claim. An artwork—like the face of the other which signifies as a “signification without context” (EI 86)—stands by itself, and hence is “exotic, without a world” (OB 41). But it must be awakened from its own slumber, awakened by criticism, interpretation, exegesis. Indeed, the artwork, for Levinas, is at its best nothing less than a “call for exegesis” (41). The “success” of its call—the “greatness” of a great literature—comes both from the integrity and insight of the exegete, to be sure, but no less from the “thickness,” the amplitude, the “life,” of the artwork’s artificial world. One can comment on a comic book or a can of Campbell’s soup, but the weight of such commentary lies nearly transparently on the shoulders of the exegete, and hence the “accusation” of subjectivism. To comment on Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or the Bible, in contrast, requires that the exegete listen as much as speak—it is like breathing on hot embers (Levinas invokes this talmudic image of rabbinic hermeneutics) to bring out their potential heat and light (not just light, but heat also—it can burn!). Shakespeare’s world—like the world of Dostoyevsky, Plato, or the Bible—is a very rich world indeed.
The concrete “literary” world to which Levinas’s ethical exegesis is primarily dedicated, however, is not that of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or even the Bible. Rather it is the Talmud, the “Oral” Torah (Torah she-b’al peh), given, according to Jewish tradition, to Moses and the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, the Jewish “new testament” which to this day continually renews the Jewish people. The world of talmudic Judaism, began in the conversations, discussions, arguments, explanations, tales and anecdotes of the rabbis of the Mishna and Gemara (the “classic” Talmud, circa 200 B.C.E. to 500 C.E.), but also, and no less, in the long and unbroken tradition of learned commentary that followed from these early texts and continues to this day.18 It is in this “world,” a world of relentless but committed interrogation, “not an obedience but a hermeneutic” (EI 116), where, for Levinas, “God is real and concrete” (DF 145). For Levinas—“for me” he would say—it is in the drama and dialogue of the Talmud, its narrative or aggadic dimension (rather than its legal or halachic dimension), far more than in the works of Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, that he finds and enters into an engaged reflection on the nuances of moral life. The world of the Talmud, the discourse—the “oral Torah”—of Judaism, is a world not because it reveals the being of beings, the truth of being, but more profoundly, and with greater urgency, because it is permeated and elevated by a extremely subtle reflection on the innermost workings of ethical imperatives as humans understand and live them—and not merely cogitate them—in order to rise to their proper humanity. The Talmud is a world because its element is not simply knowledge, the world as object, but wisdom, and its correlate, an inspired world. Levinas’s thought is also such a wisdom and like the Talmud itself it engages critically with the discourse of its times, including the long history of philosophical discourse.
Levinas’s thought is not simply imbued with a vague “rabbinical” or “talmudic” flavor, the sort of thing that secondary scholarship often thoughtlessly attributes to thinkers who happen to be born Jewish, especially when such thinkers happen to treat Jewish themes.19 There is nothing, after all, exclusively Jewish about ethics. No doubt it is true that Levinas’s thought is true to Jewish tradition and Jewish sources, and this says a great deal. But what is incontestably true is that Levinas has commented profoundly, and commented sympathetically and not merely “critically,” in talmudic texts. In close commentaries on specific passages taken from the various tractates of the Talmud, Levinas renews an ancient but perennial wisdom by bringing it to bear upon the profound questions—of technology, education, youth, urbanization, secularization, and so on—of our day. These textual treatments now appear in several volumes in English translation.20
Elsewhere in his “Jewish” or “confessional” writings Levinas freely cites and comments on other biblical and talmudic passages. He will not hesitate to reach into the depths of Jewish “sacred” writings—into the yeshiva, into Jewish learning—to comment on certain statements and texts by such “authoritative” figures in Jewish religious tradition as Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (“Maimonides”) or Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin. But unlike Paul Ricoeur, for instance, who explicitly divorces his confessional Christian writings from his universal philosophical writings, for Levinas no such divorce can be true either to religion or to philosophy as a love of wisdom. There is a strict coherence and continuity between the exegetical writings of Levinas primarily focused on Jewish sources and the philosophical writings of Levinas primarily oriented by the language of philosophy and Western culture. This does not, however, and this is the important point, diminish the universal import of Levinas’s thought. It neither compromises the conceptual rigor of knowledge for the sake of a partisan and parochial particularity, nor does it compromise the concrete traditions of religion for the sake of an abstract and detached universality. To the contrary, Levinas’s philosophy—ethical metaphysics—forces us to rethink the nature of universality. It forces us to rethink the nature of universality by reminding us of the inextricable link joining the universal to the particular in the singularizing imperatives of the ethical. To grasp this point is to understand why and how philosophy, for Levinas, can be no less a meditation of (and on) Shakespeare, or a meditation of (and on) the talmudic rabbis, than a meditation of (and on) Plato. Here, perhaps, lies the greatest originality of Levinas’s new conception of philosophy.
As I have indicated, Levinas’s talmudic readings do not present theses at variance with those found elaborated in his philosophical books proper. Levinas’s thought, though it has developed in its elaboration over time, is a seamless unity. Not the artificial and forced unity of a System, to be sure, but the unity of the priority of the appeal of the good over the true and the beautiful. Even Levinas’s method—phenomenological to the point of ethical rupture21—remains basically the same in his Talmudic readings in relation to his philosophical works, though perhaps their emphasis is more directly ethical. He certainly nowhere relies on “proof texts” or “religious experience” to establish the validity of his thought. His work neither begins nor ends in blind faith or dogmatic adherence. Rather, it operates by breaking through the origin of thinking to the more radical beginning of moral obligation and responsibility. It ends through and above the morality of the face-to-face in the “utopian” social call of justice, a call that is no less, for Levinas, than the witness to God’s “presence” on earth, “and does not rest on any positive theology” (OB 147). Indeed, all of Levinas’s writings—from his philosophy books and philosophy articles to essays on Judaism and talmudic readings—express an “ethical metaphysics,” an ethical exegesis, that is to say, “a difficult wisdom concerned with truths that correlate to virtues” (DF 275). It is this difficult wisdom—this call of the Infinite—that Levinas finds in all the great literatures of the world.
Shakespearean Readings
Before concluding with a few schematized observations regarding the broad issue of the relation of universality to particularity from an ethical point of view, let us first (all too) briefly review the specific insights Levinas finds in his early philosophical writings—Time and the Other and Existence and Existents—in Shakespeare.
In Time and the Other scenes from Shakespeare’s plays are introduced three times. In the first of its four parts (TO 50), and first in order of appearance, Levinas invokes specific scenes and lines from Macbeth, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet, to support two of his positions regarding the meaning of death. Contesting the opinion Albert Camus expressed in The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942,22 and then again, later and more fully in 1951 in The Rebel,23 which celebrates the power given to the individual by virtue of the possibility of suicide, Levinas will argue that the oblivion and hence the power allegedly promised by suicide are in fact uncertain. The second point of Levinas’s account of death, this time contesting Heidegger’s well known notion of “being-toward-death” [Sein zum Tode], as found in Being and Time, is the claim—reminiscent of the Stoics and Epicureans—that the approach of death is, until its final arrival, forever only an approach. Thus, far from being the principle of individuation it is for Heidegger, the living, in relation to a death that never arrives, live in a time of “postponement,” always leaving room, however desperate, for more life. Death, as one old American blues song has it, is always “too quick.”24
The second appearance of Shakespeare, at the beginning of the second part of Time and the Other, is more general. Levinas invokes “[t]he buffoon, the fool of Shakespearean tragedy” (TO 59), to distinguish madness, as one limited response to life’s existential anxieties, from the more common and more practical responses to the same existential anxieties. Again, as with his earlier interpretation of the meaning of suicide and death, Levinas invokes Shakespeare as part of his challenge to certain well known, but rather extreme positions regarding the significance of anxiety that were trumpeted in Parisian intellectual circles in the 1940s.
Third and finally, Levinas returns to an analysis of Macbeth, to the scene of Macbeth’s imminent death at the hands of Macduff, to again find support for his earlier thesis—contra Heidegger—regarding the ever impending yet never arriving character of death for the living. (TO 72-73).
In all three instances, let us note straightaway, Shakespeare is not invoked as a “proof text.” The authority of Shakespeare does not prove or cinch an argument. Rather, it lends credibility—owing to the depth and verisimilitude of Shakespeare’s world—to Levinas’s account of the meaning of such “things” as suicide, death, and anxiety. Nor, then, do these invocations of Shakespeare simply illustrate or serve as examples of an argument whose force could otherwise be completely independent of the sort of existential situations—the drama—found in a writer such as Shakespeare. Other “literary” works could have been invoked. By now we should be clear on this point: for Levinas, the prophetic dimension of speech is not confined to the Bible or to any favored literature, national or otherwise (gender, class, etc.). Shakespeare’s dramatic situations serve Levinas as both existential illustrations and confirmations of the theses for which Levinas “argues” in his phenomenological-ethical philosophy. In his prize-winning book, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, Levinas recalls a “paradoxical” thought Husserl enunciated in paragraph seventy of the first book of Ideas. “‘Fiction is the vital element of phenomenology as well as all other eidetic sciences’” (TTI 141). Levinas’s truth claims are at no point detachable from the context of their validation, the human situation and conditions that are part and parcel of their meaning. Meaning is ideal in this sense, that it must remain open to reconfirmation or disconfirmation by continual referral to the intuitive context that originally confirmed its meaning. And thus, too, philosophical truths—essences—are found exhibited in writings that also capture—depict, represent, show—the central and revealing conditions and situations of our humanity, as do the dramas of Shakespeare. This in no way reduces phenomenology-ethics (“ethical metaphysics,” according to Edith Wyschogrod’s felicitous title)25—and therefore philosophy—to a literary enterprise. Neither does it suggest that truth is fiction, hence merely relative. These extreme formulations are merely the irrepressible claims of a sophism forever seduced by intellectual abstraction. Rather, Levinas here underlies the fact that the concretude and creativity involved in imagination—the domain of literature—is also and inextricably linked to philosophy’s task of achieving truth and conceptual clarity.26 In other words, concepts, ideas, truth, essences, are all made clearer when they stand in relation to the context of concrete significations that do not obscure but are part of and give rise to their very significance. “Here,” says Levinas, continuing the above citation, “is one of the most laborious tasks of phenomenology” (141).
Turning to Levinas’s second early philosophical work, Existence and Existents, Shakespeare appears in a two-page discussion of death and nothingness (EE 61-62). Levinas invokes, first, the “spectors, ghosts, sorceresses,” the darkness of night, and death, in both Hamlet and Macbeth (62). From the latter tragedy, he recalls, more specifically, the famous scene with the three witches wherein Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth (4.1), to speak about what Levinas calls “the fatality of irremissible being” (61). This latter is a crucial dimension of signification (or nonsignification) that Levinas labels the “there is” (il y a), a fundamental stratum and manner of prepredicative being that Levinas finds defended by Bergson, but not recognized by Hegel or Sartre (61-63). Characterizing the “there is” as “a decisive experience of the ‘no exit’ from existence” (62), Levinas is clearly alluding to the wartime play of the same name by Sartre, whose philosophy of absolute freedom (néant) and absolute being (l’être) Levinas always criticized for its abstraction. Levinas cites several lines of Macbeth including one that specifically includes the word “shadow”—“Hence horrible Shadow, unreal mockery hence”—a term central to Levinas’s 1948 article on art, “Reality and Its Shadow” (M 3.4.105-106). At the conclusion of his two-page commentary on Shakespeare, in a footnote Levinas writes: “Thomas l’Obscure, by Maurice Blanchot, opens with the description of the there is” (63). Levinas’s use of literature and his references to literary works could hardly be more in evidence. Even the Greek tragedians appear, again with regard to the “there is”: “This return of presence in negation, this impossibility of escaping from an anonymous and incorruptible existence, constitutes the final depths of Shakespearean tragedy. The fatality of the tragedy of antiquity becomes the fatality of irremissible being” (61). It is clear that literature, for Levinas, is capable of far more than the presentation of a parallel but slightly deficient version of an absolute truth that can only be found in its purity and glory in the “pure” Concept, as it is for Hegel. Rather literature—in its concretude, its verisimilitude, its moral drama—provides the always necessary “shadow” or preface of truth, the impact of the transcendence of an exigency—the humanity of the human—that wisdom keeps continually on the alert, in a wakefulness, a vigilance, whose very animation comes by way of philosophical commentary. In these two pages devoted to Shakespeare in Existence and Existents, in any event, we find Levinas discovering the “there is” already in Shakespeare. Thus Shakespeare has already grasped and presented in his own way what Levinas grasps and presents philosophically as the foundation—or the nonfoundation—of signification.
Levinas invokes Shakespeare with marked less frequency subsequent to these first two books published shortly after WWII. He occasionally refers to Shakespeare, to figures in his plays, even to certain well known Shakespearean lines, but the references are for the most part made in passing or repeat ideas already elaborated in relation to Shakespeare in Time and the Other and Existence and Existents. For instance, to take a relatively late reference, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas invokes Macbeth, but as in Time and the Other, it is in order to understand the meaning of the limitations of suicide and the exteriority of death (TI 231). In 1972, the apothem Levinas selects to precede the preface to his collection entitled Humanism of the Other is taken from Shakespeare’s King Lear (4.7): “I should e’en die with pity to see another thus” (HO 3). This citation recalls a central theme of Levinas’s ethics, namely, “substitution,” the exigency of moral agency whereby one’s suffering becomes suffering for the suffering of others. But beyond this apothem, there is no mention or discussion of Shakespeare in the text of this collection. To take an early reference, indeed perhaps the earliest: Shakespeare’s name appears as one possible existentialist (along with Kierkegaard, Pascal, and Socrates), in passing, in 1937, in a published letter on Jean Wahl’s Short History of Existentialism.27 In the introduction to his first collection of talmudic readings, published in 1968, Levinas distinguishes his own sympathetic or committed exegetical approach from the objectifying and externalizing discourse of critical science as follows:
Our first task is therefore to read it [the talmudic text] in a way that respects its givens and its conventions, without mixing in the questions arising for a philologist or historian to the meaning that derives from its juxtapositions. Did audiences in Shakespeare’s theatre spend their time showing off their critical sense by pointing out that there were only wooden boards where the stage sign indicated a palace or a forest? (NT 5)
But most of Levinas’s other references to Shakespeare occur in the same general time period as Time and the Other and Existence and Existents. Shakespeare is mentioned once in an article of 1947 on the writings of Marcel Proust, entitled “The Other in Proust.” There, Levinas characterizes Proust as
the analyst of a world of preciosity and artificiality, a world frozen in history, caught up in conventions more concrete than reality itself; a world that (remarkably) offers its inhabitants, by its very abstractions, those dramatic and profound situations that, in a Shakespeare or a Dostoyevsky, probed the humanity of man. (PN 99-100)
More important, Shakespeare is twice mentioned in Levinas’s most extended discussion of art, “Reality and Its Shadow.”28
Finally, and perhaps only to round out this account, Levinas mentions Shakespeare in one of his very few autobiographical remarks, in this case made on French radio in early 1981. When asked about “the first great books encountered, Bible or the philosophers?” Levinas concluded his response by going between the horns of his question:
But between the Bible [encountered as a child] and the philosophers [encountered at university], the Russian classics—Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and also the great writers of Western Europe, notably Shakespeare, much admired in Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. (EI 22)
What are we to conclude from these various invocations found throughout Levinas’s writings—from Levinas’s remarkable statement regarding philosophy as a meditation of Shakespeare, from the several general and specific references to Shakespeare in Time and the Other and Existence and Existents, as well as from the various shorter references and allusions to Shakespeare in other of Levinas’s writings, including his autobiographical testimony? At the very least it is clear that in the mid to late 1940s, when he was first formulating his own original philosophy of ethical metaphysics, Levinas recognized and was impressed by the profundity—at once philosophical and ethical—of Shakespeare’s “literary” world, most especially Hamlet and Macbeth. More broadly, however, Levinas’s comments and his short commentaries manifest the truth of his claim that the ethical elevation of humanity and hence of discourse itself—its prophetic or revelatory dimension, the height of the good that is the ultimate significance of signification—are not exclusively limited to a canonized “sacred text” such as the Bible (whether Christian, Jewish, or the Koran). This means, too, that the ethical height which defines the human—which Levinas will in the end call the “holy”—is not limited exclusively to the Talmud or to philosophy, which are clearly the two sorts of endeavor which together constitute Levinas’s preferred world of discourse. But, and this is the conclusion we draw, even more broadly, the elevating exigencies of an ethical metaphysics find their full expression in a Shakespeare as they can find their proper articulation in all the world’s great literatures.
Only slightly less formally, we can also conclude that what permits Levinas’s appreciation for Shakespeare, as for Don Quixote, Plato, the Talmud, et cetera, is his conception of a universality based not in epistemology or ontology but in singularizing exigencies of morality and justice. The “unique” is not the particular that escapes the grasp of the universal, but the singular called to respond to the suffering of the other, and out of this appeal and response to rise to the call of justice and hence to engage in redemptive history. Such universality rooted in the unique singularity of each moral agent at the same time cannot be reduced to its historical situation. The morally singularized individual—me, I, “here I am” (me voici, hineni)—is both engaged in the concrete exigencies of the moment, the suffering of the other, and driven by these same moral obligations by a justice that demands that even history must be judged.
Careful to avoid the abstract and hence depersonalizing universality of modern Rationalist or Enlightenment thought, neither is Levinas’s conception of a universality bound to singularity, growing out of singularity, the “concrete universality” of Hegel, whose notion of “historic” individuality remains in the final analysis that of being a node or locus of abstract universals heedless of the particular. Nor, finally, is the singular universality of Levinas’s ethical metaphysics—the face-to-face, the call of justice—another version of all those pretended universalisms—those One Churches and Final States—that at bottom are but militant particularisms heedless of the rights of all other particularities. Singular universality—one responding to the other—stands in opposition to the pretended universality achieved at the high price of an exclusivity, of a parochialism masking its own finitude through a more or less ruthless totalitarian magnification and obliteration of difference.
Rather, the manner in which philosophy is a meditation of Shakespeare is precisely philosophy beholden to the higher exigencies of an ethical “way” that finds its concrete expression in the non-substitutable responsibilities and obligations of the one-for-the-other, in the infinite responsibility of each for each and for all. Or, as Levinas often expresses this point, invoking the words of Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: “We are all guilty of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others” (cf. EI 98, 101).
Notes
Reprinted courtesy of Duquesne University Press and UPNE, originally appearing in Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion (2010).
1 In French, the quotation reads, “[I]l me semble parfois que toute la philosphie n’est qu’une méditation de Shakespeare.”
2 Merleau Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 144.
3 “Reality and Its Shadow,” published in French as “La réalité et son ombre,” appeared in 1948 in the fourth number (November) of volume 38 of Les Temps Modernes. Levinas was invited to make this contribution to Les temps modernes by Jean-Paul Sartre, who was the principal editor of Les Temps Modernes at that time.
Levinas’s thoughts on art are at one level a response to and criticism of Sartre’s reflections on art. But to fully understand Levinas’s philosophy of art as found in “Reality and Its Shadow,” however, one must go beyond the more immediate conversation with Sartre to the deeper reflections on art by another philosophical interlocutor, Martin Heidegger. While Levinas is certainly a radical and trenchant critic of Sartre, because Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of be-ing (Sein) and beings (Seindes) is deeper than Sartre’s somewhat schematic existentialism of being (être) and nothingness (néant), Levinas’s deeper protagonist, and hence his more profound criticism, is directed against Heidegger. Heidegger’s most important article on art is entitled “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Der Ursprung des Kuntswerkes”). It had first been given in a short form as a public lecture in Freiburg in 1935, and again in Zurich in early 1936. In its final and longer form it was given as a series of three lectures at the end of 1936 in Frankfurt. It first appeared in print, however, only in 1950, in Heidegger’s collection entitled Holzwege (1950), so Levinas could not have known the text, though he may well have been indirectly familiar with the lectures. Also chronologically prior to Levinas’s article of 1948, is Heidegger’s lecture entitled “What are Poets For?” (“Wozu Dicther?”), which was delivered in 1946, on the twentieth anniversary of Rilke’s death. But it was delivered only “to a very small group,” and appeared in print long after Levinas’s article. Nonetheless, two of Heidegger’s important shorter works on art had been published prior to Levinas’s article. Heidegger’s “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” appeared in print in 1937, and the more important article entitled “On the Essence of Truth” (first delivered in 1930) had been published in 1943. Given these last two publication dates, there is every reason to believe that Levinas was familiar with these two pieces. But more broadly, it is safe to say that Levinas was familiar with Heidegger’s thoughts on the nature and significance of art and its relation to truth. In any event, whatever the bibliographical connections, it is clear that in “Reality and Its Shadow,” and in his subsequent criticisms of aesthetic philosophy, Levinas is critically responding less to the “existentialism” of Sartre than to the “fundamental ontology” of Heidegger.
4 Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, 81.
5 Lionel Trilling, A Gathering of Fugitives, 136.
6 See Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy.
7 Again it is enlightening to cite Nietzsche—who has in mind Wagner’s appropriation of Schopenhauer (including the latter’s anti-Semitism)—who denounces artists lack of independence: “They have at all times been valets of some morality, philosophy, or religion.… They always need at the very least protection, a prop, an established authority; artists never stand apart; standing alone is contrary to their deepest instincts” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 102).
8 Bloom, Shakespeare, 17.
9 For his basic perspective and his high appreciation of Shakespeare, Bloom cites Thomas Carlyle’s assessment: “If called to define Shakespeare’s faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that’” (Bloom, Shakespeare, 1). Bloom distinguishes “the self as moral agent” (4), from personality: “Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness” (4). Influenced by Leo Strauss’s stark opposition between Athens and Jerusalem, what Bloom does not realize—if one can say that a critic of Bloom’s great breadth and stature does not realize something—is that at the bottom of “personality,” making it truly interesting—from Falstaff to Hamlet—is precisely the drama of moral agency. For Levinas, Athens and Jerusalem cannot be separated; hence, again, philosophy as a meditation of Shakespeare.
10 See Harbage, Conceptions of Shakespeare, 120-137. “[W]e are sometimes uneasily aware of a basking in the emotion of benevolence, detached from its practical effects [Levinas calls this detachment “the temptation of temptation.”].… One thing that sends us back to Shakespeare for strength and refreshment is that his good people are incorrupt. They do not luxuriate in impulses of goodness, but act upon them within their limited sphere. The emphasis is upon achievement” (136).
11 It is interesting that in this list of 1981, while certainly making room for him in the highest order of literature, Levinas overlooks mentioning the proper name of Shakespeare.
12 The indifference of nature to moral values, hence the immorality of its amorality, is perhaps the deepest philosophical point of the writings of the Marquis de Sade; the same indifference is true of art for art’s sake.
13 Levinas, “Quelques Réflexions,” 27.
14 One can argue, as did my teacher Justus Buchler, that the real, from an ontological point of view, does not admit of degree. For more on “ontological parity,” see, e.g., Justus Buchler, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). If Buchler is right, and I think he is, then the priorities that philosophers and theologians claimed for levels of being were in truth priorities deriving from ethical rather than purely ontological imperatives.
15 Cited in Halliday, Shakespeare and His Critics, 86.
16 I put “phenomenological” in scare quotes because even in his early works Levinas’s ethical metaphysics exceeds his phenomenological “physics.”
17 Levinas, “Bad Conscience,” in Face to Face, ed. and trans. Cohen, 40. Cf. GCM 172-177; EN 123-132).
18 Discussing the Jewish notion of Revelation, Levinas recalls the words of an (unidentified) eighteenth century Jewish scholar for whom “the slightest question put by a novice pupil to his schoolmaster constitutes an ineluctable articulation of the Revelation, which was heard at Sinai” (BV 134).
19 Perhaps the most celebrated case is that of Spinoza, where, despite the considerable counter evidence of his own philosophy, not to mention his probable lack of advanced Talmudic study, at least a serious argument can be made, and was made, by Harry Austryn Wolfson, in favor of his familiarity with Jewish sources. Probably the most recent case of this projection of vague Jewish values is the case of Jacques Derrida, where despite many attempts (perhaps beginning with Susan Handelman), I know of no serious argument that can be mounted in favor of his familiarity with—or even acquaintance with—Jewish sources.
20 Commentaries on Sanhedrin 99a (1960) and Sanhedrin 98b-99a (1961), appear in DF; commentaries on Yoma 87a (1963), Shabbat 99a-b (1964), Sotah 34b-35a (1965), Sanhedrin 36b-37a (1966), Baba Metsia 83a-b (1969), Nazir 66a-b (1970), Sanhedrin 67a-68b (1971), Berakhot 61a (1972), and Baba Kama 60a-b (1975), appear in NT; commentaries on Makkot 23a-24b (1974), Tamid 31a-32b (1988), and Chullin 88b-89a (1989), appear in NTR; commentaries on Menahot 99b-110a (1976), Makkot 10a (1978), Yoma 10a (1979), Sotah 37a-37b (1980), Berakhot 33b (1980), Makkot 23b (1979), Shevuot 35a / Temurah 4a / Sukkah 53b (1969), appear in BV; commentaries on Megillah 7a (1983), Sanhedrin 99a-b (1984), Berakhot 12b-13a (1984), Pesachim 118b (1986), appear in ITN. Gibbs, in Correlations, 175, provides a list of the addresses and talmudic readings Levinas delivered at the annual Colloquia of French-speaking Jewish Intellectuals.
21 Theodore de Boer, one of the great Levinas scholars of our time, calls this method “ethical transcendental philosophy.” See, de Boer, The Rationality of Transcendence. Also, see the articles on Levinas’s “method” by Steven G. Smith, Charles William Reed, Jean-François Lyotard, Jan de Greef, and Robert Bernasconi, collected in Face to Face, ed. Cohen.
22 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
23 Camus, The Rebel.
24 “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” written by Reverend Gary Davis, made famous by the Grateful Dead.
25 Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas.
26 For an extended discussion of this idea in relation to Husserl and Spinoza, see my Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy, chapter two.
27 Levinas, Les imprévues, 110.
28 “The same man is indeed a comic poet and a tragic poet, an ambiguity which constitutes the particular magic of poets like Gogol, Dickens, Chekov—and Molière, Cervantes, and above all, Shakespeare” (LR 138). And, “Modern literature, disparaged for its intellectualism (which, nonetheless goes back to Shakespeare, the Moliere of Don Juan, Goethe, Dostoyevsky) certainly manifests a more and more clear awareness of this fundamental insufficiency of artistic idolatry” (143).