LEVINAS AND BUBER: TRANSCENDENCE AND SOCIETY   Originally published in Sophia, 38, 2. (Sept-Oct, 1999) 69 - 92.

A number of articles have been written in recent years, discussing the relationship between Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. According to Robert Bernasconi; "The proximity between Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas which is so striking to the external observer was not always so apparent to Buber and Levinas themselves."1 Bernasconi describes the relationship between these two great thinkers as one more appropriately characterised by misunderstanding than disparity, but which, nevertheless, exhibits the characteristics of the ideal model of dialogue expounded by both Buber and Levinas in their recognition of the alterity of the other. In a more recent essay, Andrew Kelly, defending Buber against Levinas' criticisms states that "both thinkers stress the social or ethical aspect of religion."2 And yet, as I hope to show in this paper, it is precisely in their respective understandings of the social or ethical aspects of religion that Buber and Levinas part company. This divergence hinges upon the role and status of the Other. It will be my argument, that it is one's approach to the question of the other -whether in terms of equality or of difference - that is determinative of one's understanding of the social and ethical aspects or religion. Levinas was fully aware of this and it was for this reason that Levinas remained preoccupied with distancing himself from Buber, whom he otherwise held in great respect and whose influence on Levinas was pervasive.3 Levinas, inspired by the philosophers of dialogue, has in his turn been extremely influential for the philosophers of difference, because what is at stake for the philosophers of difference is precisely the asymmetry of relation that Levinas seeks to establish. Levinas' ethics is primarily an ethics of difference that challenges the alleged egalitarianism of the universal subject of the Enlightenment.

I begin my comparison by situating Buber and Levinas in relation to Feuerbach, as it was Feuerbach who provided the initial impetus for Buber's elaboration of the "I-Thou" relation. I will then explore some of Levinas' criticisms of Buber, considering Levinas' distance from Buber to be best illustrated by Levinas' concept of illeity - the divine Other as the "third" - which brings us to the heart of the relation between ethics, justice, the divine, and community, and which I find to be the most interesting aspect of Levinas' thought. After exploring Levinas' concept of illeity at length, I will then test the distance between Levinas and Buber on the matter by comparison with the thought of Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi is another thinker to whom Levinas has been compared, and who on the issue of the relation between religion and society, also had cause for disagreement with Buber. I turn now the passage by Feuerbach.

The essence of man 4

The single man in isolation possesses in himself the essence of man neither as a moral nor as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man and man - a unity which rests upon the reality of the difference between "I" and "thou".5

According to Buber, "in those words Feuerbach, passing beyond Marx, introduced that the discovery of the Thou, which has been called `the Copernican revolution' of modern thought."6 Nonetheless, the encounter with the other remains for Feuerbach, in many important respects, an encounter with the self. Despite the role of the other in the constitution of subjectivity, Feuerbach - like Hegel - still considers the separation that the other represents as something to be overcome and appropriated to the subject. As a result, the other can only be acknowledged as an alter ego; an other, like me. So, despite the discovery of the "thou", the universal subject of the Enlightenment remains substantially unchallenged. The same approach to the other is taken by Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, which provides the foundations for Levinas' approach to the other. According to both approaches the "thou" does have a certain priority, but only as the mirror of consciousness, as the other of the same. The "thou" mediates self-knowledge as knowledge of oneself as a species. The other remains, the other of the same. The self discovers you, as like me, and as such, is reassuring to the same.

In contrast, both Buber and Levinas attempt to establish the priority to the other as not appropriable to the subject. But if we take Feuerbach's formula as our axis, we find that Buber, like Feuerbach, seeks the essence of man in the "the unity of man and man" to the extent that Buber also privileges a mutuality of relation that will eventually elide the difference between the I and thou. Levinas, on the other hand, while agreeing - even insisting - that such unity is founded upon "difference" remains suspicious of any such reciprocity in the relation to the extent that Levinas considers it to be ultimately destructive of the difference that he seeks to preserve and elevate. The reciprocity of the relation, Levinas fears, will ultimately only serve re-establish the other as an alter ego. To preserve the "reality of the difference between the `I' and `thou'," Levinas conceives dialogue as a radical asymmetry. It could be said that in order to achieve this, Levinas describes a "thou-me" rather than an "I-thou" relation. Consequently, one could wonder whether Levinas is really talking about dialogue at all, to the extent that what he describes is more like a reversal of the monologue of the autarchic universal subject. In short, I suggest that Levinas would consider Feuerbach's axiom to be fundamentally correct if it were not for the emphasis on "the essence of man" that elides the difference between the I and thou. Levinas, in contrast, posits that man's origin lies beyond essence.

A question of orientation

When in I and Thou Martin Buber posits that "in the beginning is the relation,"7 Levinas reads Buber to be proclaiming the priority of the relation over the relata. In his 1958 essay, "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge," Levinas objects to what he considers to be the formal symmetry of the relation which `may therefore be read indifferently from either side.'8 One might initially suspect that for Levinas the problem is the eclipse of the priority of the other in favour of the relation or space of the encounter. But Levinas places his own parallel emphasis upon orientation "toward `the Other'." In fact, Levinas considers that "the priority of this orientation over the terms that are placed in it" encapsulates the theses of his first magnum opus; Totality and Infinity.9 Given the importance of Husserl for Levinas, his emphasis on orientation owes much to Husserlian intentionality, but transformed by Levinas' own ethical exigencies. Where Levinas goes beyond Husserl is in the refusal of the moment of return to the subject. The other puts me into question but I can not of myself quell this solicitude. It can only be resolved by the entry of a third party, which subsequently establishes the subject in community.

However, Levinas' emphasis on orientation does not seem that far from Buber's position when considered in the light of the observation that Buber's original relation refers not to the "I-Thou" but to longing for relation.10 Both Buber and Levinas are concerned with the priority of sociality. Buber locates the basis for sociality within the "I-thou" relation itself, where for Levinas it has yet to be established. For Levinas, the symmetry of sociality is founded upon the asymmetry of the "face to face", the reciprocity of equality upon the prior establishment of difference.
For Buber, the privileged moment that is the "I-Thou" encounter will inevitably collapses into the "it" world where thou becomes he or she and thus an object for consciousness characterised by the third person. Levinas, however, already considers the thou to be at the disposal of the subject. Furthermore, Levinas considers the subsequent movement to the third person, assuming that it is founded upon the prior asymmetry of the relation with the other, not to be a collapse of the ethical relation, but rather a second step, an expansion towards justice, established by the third person par excellence that Levinas calls illeity. Consequently, the realm of the third person is not the "it" world of objects ready to hand for the subject, but rather the objective world of subjects in community and society.

The sociality that for Buber finds its truest expression in the "I-Thou" leads Buber to think of that basic relation in terms of an intimacy that Levinas will not consider appropriate. The "I-Thou", for Levinas is not a relation with the interlocutor but a relation with a feminine or maternal alterity that is pre-ethical.11 The relation is characterised by access to the other rather than the excess of the other. In that this relation withdraws from society it is not an adequate model for the founding of sociality. One may be naked before the face of the other but this nakedness does not allow us to make the claim of intimacy with the other. "The interlocutor is not a Thou, he is a You [. . . pas un Toi, il est un Vous.]; he reveals himself in his lordship."12

Other than the Other

Jacques Derrida notes that Levinas reproaches the "I-Thou" relationship for its preference for the `private relationship,' whose nature is clandestine, `self-sufficient' and `forgetful of the universe,'13 and that it is only the `summoning of the third party, the universal witness, the face of the world which keeps us from the "disdainful spiritualism" of the I-Thou.'14 Derrida also notes that Buber seems to have foreseen these objections by arguing that the "I-Thou" was neither "referential nor exclusive."15 Such qualifications, however, are not enough for Levinas. Perhaps this is because Levinas came to detect a similar weakness in his own work with the realisation that the other does not have in and of itself the resources to guarantee the radical asymmetry that Levinas wants to ascribe to it. Whatever the status of the encounter with the other, it needs to pass beyond itself, towards what for Levinas is signified by `the third'.

For Buber, this is achieved by the eternal Thou who is invoked in every authentic relation with the "thou". Levinas makes a similar move, though once again, the difference between Buber and Levinas is best characterised by the status accorded to difference

Levinas' original aim in Totality and Infinity was to establish the priority of ethics over and against ontology and the play of immanence, to establish the priority - or at least a space for - infinity over totality. It's critical intention . . . leads beyond theory and ontology: critique does not reduce the other to the same as does ontology, but calls into question the exercise of the same. A calling into question of the same - which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same - is brought about by the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics.16

Levinas is here concerned to establish a site of radical exteriority and transcendence in order to rupture what he considers to be the play of immanence within western culture which Levinas considers primarily as an "egology". To do this Levinas turns to the question of the other. Traditional philosophical approaches to the question of the other have failed to the extent that they both presuppose the pre-existence of the self and reduce the question to a matter of knowledge. Consequently the other is an other at the disposal of the self. Initially, Levinas situated this exteriority phenomenally, in the "face" of the other that "resists my powers", 17 that "introduces into me what was not in me."18 However, Levinas came to realise that his project as conceived in Totality and Inifinity was still too caught up within the language of ontology in which the transcendence of the other was not considered on its own terms but as a means of overcoming the play of immanence in interiority and totality. As Derrida expressed, "Levinas is resigned to betraying his own intentions in his philosophical discourse." 19

One way in which Levinas addresses this concern in his second great work - Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence - is by the distinction that he makes between the "saying" and the "said". The saying is the space where my exposure to the other takes place prior to its thematisation in the said. Levinas considers that "the saying involved in dialogue would not be one of the possible forms of transcendence but its original mode."20 In other words, the other always precedes the existence of the self. The condition of dialogue is the original situation of the subject who is constituted through the encounter with - or proximity to - the other. Subjectivity is first and foremost a response to the other. Consequently, dialogue, is not so much a meeting of equals as it is a call to responsibility.

Rather than seeking to rupture an immanent subjectivity through the phenomenon of the face, Levinas now brings exteriority to bear upon the very constitution of subjectivity itself. It is because the encounter with the other is constitutive of subjectivity that the subject is not "for-itself" but always for-the-other, and responsible for the other. The increased emphasis on the priority of the other and its role in the constitution of subjectivity is also accompanied by an intensification in the role of God who "is the very nonphenomenal force of the other . . . God `exists' in his voice which speaks the ethical imperative."21 God is the absent condition of the encounter with the other.

Initially, it would seem that Levinas has moved closer to the position espoused by Buber who asserts that in "every You we address the eternal You".22 But although Buber says that, "The Thou encounters me by grace"23 and that "grace concerns us insofar as we proceed toward it and await its presence; it is not our object,"24 Buber, nonetheless, maintains a reciprocity in the relation by proceeding to declare that the relationship is both active and passive.25 Levinas, on the other hand, insists on the absolute passivity of the subject. He insists that God is not addressed in the other so much as God commands through the other. Even my response does not have its source in me. This means that my responses cannot be considered active. "The word I means here I am."26

Illeity

The divine incondition and guarantee of the alterity of the other introduces a transcendence into the heart of immanence that immanence is unable to invert. Furthermore, Levinas' introduction of the divine into the face-to-face guards against the possibility of exclusivity and narcissism in which the "face-to-face" collapses into a relation with the same.27 What requires an explanation is why Levinas should designate this divine illumination of the face to face in terms of thirdness. As the trace of the divine in the social relation the designation of God as illeity - or thirdness - seems appropriate, but to use this same term in relation to the face to face seems initially to betray or contradict Levinas' description of the ethical relation. Levinas, however, does not understand the situation in this manner. It is illeity that imparts its character to the relation and not visa versa. Illeity as conceived by Levinas finds its originary expression in the encounter with the other.

Illeity lies outside the "thou" and the thematization of objects. A neologism formed with il (he) or ille, it indicates a way of concerning me without entering into conjunction with me. To be sure, we have to indicate the element in which this concerning occurs. If the relationship with illeity were a relationship of consciousness, "he" would designate a theme, as the "thou" in Buber's I-thou relation does, probably - for Buber has never brought out in a positive way the spiritual element in which the I-thou relationship is produced. The illeity in the beyond-being is the fact that its coming toward me is a departure which lets me accomplish a movement toward my neighbour. . . . Or, one may say, it is the fact that the others show themselves in their face. There is a paradox in responsibility, in that I am obliged without this obligation having begun in me.28

To the extent that the other stands in the trace of illeity, he or she is unable to be reduced to a "thou". Levinas clearly seems to ascribe to the "thou" the status that Buber ascribes to the "it". Levinas objects to the formal symmetry between the "I" and the "thou" which he considers to constitute the "thou" to an alter ego. Reduced to the parameters of the same, the "thou" is unable to disturb the complacency of the "I". What is important for Levinas is that the relation with the other is maintained in its asymmetry. Furthermore, by bringing this third to bear upon the face to face, Levinas also establishes the asymmetry of the face to face as the foundation of community and society. "This means that nothing is outside of the control of the responsibility of the one for the other."29 Ethics is consequently established as the appropriate foundation for justice that prevents the State from "integrating him into a we, which congeals both me and the neighbour."30

The term illeity can do all this because `illeity . . .makes the word God be pronounced, without letting "divinity" be said, 31 without letting divinity be reduced to a theme in the play of being in which immanence always triumphs or by turning God into an ideological construct and champion of egoism. "The relation which goes from the face to the Absent is outside every relation and dissimulation, a third way excluded by these contradictories."32 It is a third way representing neither individualism nor collectivism. "The personal `order' to which the face obliges us is beyond being. Beyond being is a Third Person that is not definable by the Self."33 As third person, God cannot be appropriated in exclusivity but is somehow constitutive of sociality. The beyond being signifies the irreducibility of the divine other that is beyond any possible synthesis and which is not merely other, but which remains "other than the otherness of others,"34 allowing God to remain equidistant from both the other and the same.

Justice can now be provided with a firm foundation, in which the entry of the human third person standing in the trace of illeity brings something new to the relationship. Between those who have traditionally been identified with the dominant "one" and those, who at the service of the identity of this one have been cast as "other," Levinas posits a reciprocal "othering" that is guaranteed by the other than the other. Unless there is other than the other, no transcendence is possible to the extent that the relation of the two finds itself caught within relations of either opposition or identity. With the entry of the third I also become other for the other and my responsibility for the other now comes to include care of myself. It is with the entry of the third that I am established therefore in community. The third is also the face of the world, language and culture, in whose womb I am formed as a social being. Echoing Heidegger, one might say that it appropriates us "by the command of difference."35 We speak, in so far as we respond.36 The relationship with language therefore resembles the responsibility for the other signified by the "here I am."

There is a betrayal of my anarchic relation with illeity, but also a new relationship with it; it is only thanks to God that, as a subject incomparable with the other, I am approached as an other by the others, that is, "for myself". . . God is not involved as an alleged interlocutor: the reciprocal relationship binds me to the other man in the trace of transcendence, in illeity. The passing of God, of whom I can speak only by reference to this aid or this grace, is precisely the reverting of the incomparable subject into a member of society.37

It is not the reversibility of the relationship with alterity that establishes myself also as other, the care of whom is also my responsibility but "its multiplication to the second power."38 The community has a double structure; it is a commonality among equals which is at the same time based on the asymmetrical and inegalitarian moment of the ethical relation. Without founding justice on the prior ethical relation we would have "a justification of the State delivered over to its own necessities."39 With the other who is like me, an alter ego sharing a common essence, I cannot establish community, only a bland collectivity of the same. As a species, neither I nor you are established in our uniqueness. A non-violent justice then cannot be established upon equality. But in approaching the other, the face of the other signifies the more, the irreducible. God is signified in the face of the other only as "an order signified to me."40 Calling the same "to responsibility, it founds it and justifies it."41 Without reducing divinity to a theme, we are sent back instead to our sisters and brothers. "A God invisible", Levinas argues, "means not only a God unimaginable, but a God accessible in justice."42 It is the "illeity of God who sends me to serve my neighbour, to responsibility for him. God is personal insofar as He brings about interpersonal relations between myself and my neighbours."43

Although Levinas considers that God is only ever found in community, amongst and between us, God is never a Thou. God is not a partner in dialogue but the ground or condition of possibility of dialogue. The third term is not something to be established in clearing or creating a common ground but the condition of possibility of the encounter itself. "The relationship with man in which contact with the Divine is established is not a kind of spiritual friendship but the sort that is manifested, tested and accomplished in a just economy and for which each man is fully responsible."44 Consciousness of self coincides with the consciousness of justice and injustice.45 Consciousness, for Levinas, has not yet arisen with the dawning of the thou but "is born as the presence of a third party."46 Thirdness itself, however, remains ambiguous, referring to the neighbour of my neighbour, as well as invoking the divine as illeity. The third comes to express that for Levinas the question of the transcendence of God and of subjectivity, go together. According to Levinas, "The fact that the relationship with the Divine crosses the relationship with men and coincides with social justice is therefore what epitomizes the entire spirit of the Jewish Bible."47

In attempting to safeguard the transcendence of God, Levinas also seeks a space in which justice may be established without violence. Such justice is only accessible through the trace or withdrawal of the divine. Luce Irigaray - herself profoundly influenced by Levinas - considers the paradigmatic ethical relation to be characterised by withdrawal. It is a relation whose exemplary gesture is the caress.48 In my withdrawal, I allow a space for the other to become. The nature of love, Irigaray argues, is not just to give love but to create a space for its reception.49 The exigencies of non-violent justice require that the divine be freed from what Jean-Luc Marion describes as conceptual idolatry. The idol settles the gaze, the icon unsettles it, and provokes the gaze to contemplate its own inadequacy and look beyond itself. In Levinasian terms the icon could be considered to stand in the trace of the divine. In this sense, the face of the other in Levinas' thought functions as an icon.

In attempting to find a feasible concept of the divine that resists the fall into the anthropomorphic same, Jean-Luc Marion following tradition proposes God as Love. Love escapes idolatry in that it never rests content in its achievement. "Love does not suffer from the unthinkable or from the absence of conditions, but is reinforced by them."50 In trinitarian theology, the third person of the trinity is conventionally designated by love; proceeding from the mutual regard of the first and second person; proceeding as it were from the face to face and at the same time founding it. Some liberation theologians, on the other hand, prefer "justice" as the most suitable name for God. Their reasons for doing so are pragmatic. The problem is rhetorical. Justice places us under obligation. But when love is equated with supererogation, the field of obligation is narrowed. Levinas would agree. Accordingly, he argues that "the concern for justice . . . is the spirit in society. . . The foundation of consciousness is justice."51

Facing the Political Other

Returning more directly to the debate between Levinas and Buber, how does their difference manifest itself when it comes to the question of justice? It could be argued that for Buber the eternal thou functions in much the same way as Levinas' illeity as that which constitutes the truly ethical relation with the other, guaranteeing the dignity of the other. Walter Kaufmann considers that for Buber "the central commandment [is] to make the secular sacred."52 God for Buber is both totally same and totally other guaranteeing both otherness and the possibility of relation. As Buber explains, "I have always guarded myself against the simplification practiced by `dialectical theology' that God is Wholly Other. One may only so name Him when in the same breath one knows and confesses that He is the not-other, the here, the now, the mine."53 For Levinas, however, God remains totally other to the extent that it is only as the guarantor of alterity that God is able to provide the grounds of reciprocity.

What might be the implication of these difference of emphasis within the social relation? For Levinas, as we have seen, "a God invisible means not only a God unimaginable, but a God accessible in justice."54 We might presume therefore that a visible God, reduced to being, becomes an idol and the protector of egoisms. In so far as Buber's God is more accessible than Levinas', what then might be the relation between Buber's eternal thou and justice? Buber begins from a presumption of commensurability, that Levinas refuses. Whereas Buber considers the intimacy of the "I-Thou" relation to be paradigmatic of ethics and religion, Levinas considers such intimacy inappropriate. In that intimacy precedes the separation that constitutes the social relation in the face of the world, Buber will situate the religious sensibility prior to this separation, whereas for Levinas, the religious sensibility is constituted by the separation. It is this separation that is constitutive of their respective understandings of the relation between religion and politics.

Buber's understanding of the relation between religion and politics is most clearly elaborated in his dialogue with Mohandas K. Gandhi. Buber and Gandhi shared a mutual respect and common emphasis on spiritual and religious community but differed substantially on its relation to the political. The comparison is relevant to our discussion in that Gandhi's position closely resembles Levinas'.55 In Ethics and Infinity Levinas states that "the term `transcendence' signifies precisely the fact that one cannot think God and being together. So too in the interpersonal relationship it is not a matter of thinking the ego and the other together, but to be facing." 56 Gandhi seemed to consider that it was in the act of facing the other in political conflict, that the possibility for genuine transcendence arose. Buber, on the other hand, considered the political to be a threat to transcendence.

Levinas echoes Gandhi when he suggests that "communication with the other can be transcendent only as a dangerous life, a fine risk to be run."57 Genuine openness to the other involves the risk of death. To practice Satyagraha is also to be responsible for the other, a responsibility that mere opposition denies. Non-violence, Levinas states, "instead of offending my freedom, calls it to responsibility and founds it. As non-violence it nonetheless maintains the plurality of the same and the other."58 The Satyagrahi could be considered to hold himself as hostage for another. For Levinas, "to be oneself, the state of being a hostage, is always to have one degree of responsibility more, the responsibility for the responsibility of the other."59

Gandhi's thought arose out of the field of conflict in which he tried to preserve a basic dignity and even priority of the other without compromising his own position. Gandhi considered that to "hold on to the truth" entailed putting oneself in question. Likewise, Levinas asks: "can the Same welcome the Other, not by giving the Other to itself as a theme . . . but by putting itself in question?"60 Both Levinas and Gandhi shared an anxiety in the face of the other which they considered to be an ethical necessity. It is this anxiety that Buber criticises in Levinas.

Levinas, in opposition to me, praises solicitude as the access to the otherness of the other. The truth of the experience seems to me to be that he who has this access apart from solicitude will also find it in the solicitude practiced by him - but he who does not have it without this, he may clothe the naked and feed the hungry all day and it will remain difficult for him to say a true Thou.61

The epiphany of the other need not cause anxiety for Buber. "If will and grace are joined," any object can be revealed as a Thou, even a tree.62 Even in the "severest conflict," Buber presupposes a common situation, even if that situation is one of opposition. If Buber considers that the essence of "man" consists in the "unity of man and man," then it follows that his hermeneutic will be one that presupposes understanding rather than misunderstanding. As a result, Buber's Thou need not necessarily put me into question. Perhaps Levinas would reply that to presume a common field of conflict is still to reduce the encounter to a single theme. Michael Theunissen expresses a similar suspicion with regards to Buber when he states that: "the world, however, no matter whether It-world or Thou-world, surrounds the actual I in concentric circles. Thereby, however, the I - despite all Buber's assurances to the contrary - assumes precedence over the Thou."63 If, as Michael Theunissen argues, in Buber's work "speaking to never flows into being spoken to,"64 Buber's other remains but an alter ego, whose presence remains reassuring to the same.

This judgement would seem to be justified if one considers Buber's position on the importance of ethical purity; a position that Hegel considered to be symptomatic of a "failure of recognition" of the other. Hegel argued that the person of action makes compromises that are, of necessity, impure.65 The so called "beautiful soul" on the other hand is too fine to commit himself to anything. For action is always particular, and so actions inevitably fall short when measured against their corresponding universal. However, the subject in confessing his or her compromises as impure seeks a vision of itself in the eyes of the other. The subject seeks recognition. In the act of reconciliation and forgiveness that follows there is "a reciprocal recognition which is absolute Spirit."66 It is in the acknowledgment of the gap between particularity and universality that Geist manifests itself. In as far as Geist is "a unity of the particular and the universal,"67 it is a mediated unity and not an immediate presence of one to the other. The ethical purist on the other hand, refuses such a confession. In seeking to maintain the self certainty and self containment of his alleged "universal" moral purity, the purist disdains the universality which the other represents and shows himself to be a stubborn particular. The moralist's hypocritical condemnation of action turns out to be "a failure of recognition."68 Consequently, the ethical subject is one that stands open to correction from the other. He or she forgoes the claim to immediacy and consents to mediation. Such a subject stands under the authority of an other that is not reducible to the self. The ethical subject is primarily a social subject who finds his or herself outside of oneself. Such a subject recognises themself in the other and knows that the other precedes him or her. What obscures this apparent precedence of the other in Hegel is both his presumption of mutuality that reduces the other to the same and his sublation of difference in the synthesis.

Like the ethical purist, Buber thinks that "religion never enters into historical consummation." Buber argues that where religion appears to succeed, in worldly terms, it is no longer religion that prevails but "the politics of religion." When politics becomes a part of religion, religion is corrupted. "Religion means goal and way, politics implies ends and means."69 They belong to distinct spheres that cannot be reconciled so easily. Gandhi's blend of religion and political activism fascinated Buber, but he was suspicious of the apparent contradiction that it involved and warned Gandhi of self deception. It was, in Buber's view, a "contradiction between the unconditionality of a spirit and the conditionality of a situation."70 Buber is adamant; "that one cannot serve God and Mammon is an entirely true saying."71 Is one to assume, therefore, following Buber, that "the unconditionality of the spirit" occurs in no situation, due to its nature as pure spirit? Does Buber secretly yearn to be numbered amongst the angels?72 Levinas also has good reason to be suspicious of the political, but his suspicion leads him to insist upon responsibility for the other as its only satisfactory foundation.

Conclusion

I am now in a position to conclude that Levinas' consistent criticism of Buber that the "I-Thou" is too spiritual would seem to be correct. The distinctions that Buber makes between religion and politics rely on the priority and privacy of the subject and the intimacy in which the divine other is encountered. It would follow from such a position that politics would contaminate intimacy. Justice then is condemned to the "it" world of objects "ready-to-hand," where God at the service of justice becomes the "protector of all the egoisms."73 Levinas, like Gandhi, refuses to quarantine the political from the spiritual. "Justice, society, the State and its institutions, exchanges and work are comprehensible out of proximity. This means that nothing is outside of the control of the responsibility of the one for the other."74 Responding directly to Buber, Levinas suggests that "it may be conjectured that clothing those who are naked and nourishing those who go hungry is a more authentic way of finding access to the other than the rarefied ether of a spiritual friendship."75 In making intimacy paradigmatic, justice is pushed to the margins. Religion considered as a private affair, has an inherent difficulty with difference. The model for justice becomes the same, not the other. The personal and the political are separated.

Buber betrays a privileging of a private experience in which love, friendship and intimacy are paradigmatic of the encounter with the other. But, the other who is like me, met in the "unity of man and man," is the other of the same and not truly welcoming of the other precisely as other. Jacques Derrida warns that, "the privilege granted to unity, to totality, to organic ensembles, to community as a homogenised whole - this is a danger for responsibility, for decision, for ethics, for politics."76 This means that an ethical society will not be founded upon what is held in common but upon a multiplicity of irreducible subjects. Justice should not look for its justification in universal principles applied equally to all but upon the priority of the other in their incommensurability and for whom I am responsible.77 It is for them that I demand justice. Levinas, in giving priority to the other, privileges difference as the condition of possibility for the non-violent relation with the other. The other who is met in their difference cannot be easily appropriated as a mirror of the ego. In signifying beyond the same, Levinas' other signifies beyond the relation, towards the divine Other, who establishes us in difference, community and justice. Just as the Biblical accounts of creation describe divine creativity in terms of differentiation, Levinas' emphasis on the difference of the other leads us back to the source of difference and unity itself.




ENDNOTES

strange mission that orders the approach to the other (autrui), God is drawn out of objectivity, presence, and being. He is neither an object nor an interlocutor. His absolute remoteness, his transcendence, turns into my responsibility . . . for the other (autrui). And this analysis implies that God is not simply the `first other (autrui),' the other (autrui) par excellence, or the `absolutely other (autrui),' but other than the other (autre qu'autrui), other otherwise, other with an otherness prior to the otherness of the other (autrui) and different from every neighbour, transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of a possible confusion with the stirring of the there is.

"God and Philosophy," Basic Philosophical Writings, 141.
35 Heidegger, Martin. `Language,' Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 209.
36 Ibid., 210.
37 Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 158.
38 Lingis, "Translator's Introduction" in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, xxxv.
39 Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 159
40 Levinas, Outside the Subject, tr. Michael Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 47. Michael Smith notes that, "Levinas is playing on the two sense of the French verb signifier, which means (usually) `to mean,' but also `to command.' " Ibid., 164. n.3.
41 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197.
42 Ibid., 78.
43 Levinas, "Apropos of Buber: Some Notes" in Outside the Subject. tr. Michael B. Smith. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) 47.
44 Levinas, "A religion for adults" in Difficult Freedom, tr. Sean Hand (London: The Athlone Press, 1990) 20.
45 Ibid., 16.
46 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 160.
47 Ibid., 19.
48 See Irigaray, "The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas' Totality and Infinity, `Phenomenology of Eros'," An Ethics of Sexual Difference, tr. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) 185- 217.
49 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 55.
50 Marion, Jean-Luc. God Without Being, tr. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 47.
51 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 160.
52 Kaufmann, Walter, "Prologue" in I and Thou, 23
53 Martin Buber, "Replies to my critics" in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, eds. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 712.
54 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78.
55 In the discussion at the end of Levinas' "Transcendence and Height," Filliozat observes that Levinas' paper "links up, in a certain sense, with the doctrine of Gandhi, which admits that the I must give way to the Other; but the foundation of the ideas are completely different." One significant difference being the less elevated status of the "I" in Indian philosophy. Basic Philosophical Writings. 24.
56 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo, tr. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 77.
57 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 120.
58 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 203
59 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 117.
60 Levinas, "Transcendence and Height," in Basic Philosophical Writings, 16.
61 Buber, "Reply to My Critics" in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, 723.
62 Buber, I and Thou, 58.
63 Theunissen, Michael. The Other. Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, tr. Christopher Macann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1886), 294.
64 Ibid. 339
65 Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), paragraph 659, ff. 400, ff, paragraph 659, ff.
66 Hegel, Phenomenology, 408, paragraph 670.
67 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, tr. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). 261.
68 As Pascal has noted: "Man is neither angel nor beast, and the pity is that who seeks to play the angel, plays the beast." Pensees, 358.
69 Buber, "Gandhi, Politics and Us" in Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, tr, and ed. Maurice Friedman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), quoted by Robert Weltsch "Buber's Political Philosophy" in The Philosophy of Martin Buber. 440-1.
70 Buber, "Gandhi, Politics, and Us," 129.
71 Buber, "Validity and Limitation of the Political Principle" in Pointing the Way, 217.
72 Levinas concludes his essay, "Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Philosophy" with a Talmudic apologue about the protests of the angels "when the divine Torah was going to leave Heaven to be given to men." and asks whether the angels caught "a brief glimpse of the superiority of earthly beings capable of giving and of being-for-one-another?" Outside the Subject, 39.
73 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 161.
74 Ibid., 159.
75 Levinas, "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge," 73.
76 Derrida, Jacques. "The Villanova Roundtable: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida" in Deconstruction in a Nutshell. A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John D. Caputo, (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997). 13.
77 One need only think of Pauline Hanson's rhetoric in the lead up to the 1998 Australian Federal election to see how the rhetoric of equality and equal treatment can play into the hands of a racist and discriminatory politics.