Fagenblat - Levinas and Maimonides JJTP Article

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 JJTP 16.1 Also available online – www.brill.nl

LEVINAS AND MAIMONIDES:FROM METAPHYSICS TO ETHICAL NEGATIVE THEOLOGY

Michael FagenblatMonash University

Abstract

After an initially sympathetic reading of Maimonides, Levinas develops an ambiva-lent attitude toward the Great Eagle, whom he views as a champion of intellectu-alist Judaism. Nevertheless, insights from the early engagement with Maimonidesare carried forth into the central claims of Totality and Infinity regarding freedom,creation, particularity and transcendence. Levinas’ arguments are directed at Heideggerbut can also be seen as a phenomenological repetition of the medieval dispute aboutthe eternity of the world. Later, Levinas continues this engagement with Maimonidesby transforming the latter’s negative theology into what I call ethical negativetheology.

1. Levinas and Maimonides on Creation as Freedom, or Escape from Being

In 1935 the young Emmanuel Levinas wrote a brief column for Paixet Droit, the journal of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, in which hedecried the demagoguery besieging Europe and defended, in its place,what he characterized as an explicitly Jewish (or Judeo-Christian)opposition to the political and ideological hegemony of his time.Levinas argued that contemporary politics had degenerated on accountof what he regarded as a pagan consciousness in which solid moraldistinctions had collapsed. By contrast, the young Levinas argued thatthe Jewish faith stood for moral possibilities that transcend the polit-ical order and therefore could not be dissolved into the immanent andpurely instrumental goals of contemporary politics. This three pageexercise in philosophical journalism must be seen in the context ofthe young Levinas’ work. In the previous year, 1934, he publishedone of his first pieces of philosophy engagé, “Reflections on the Philosophyof Hitlerism,” while in 1935 he published “De l’évasion,” his earliestoriginal philosophical essay. It is not surprising that these early thoughts

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1 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2003), 49.

2 On Escape, 71. It seems to me that these two essays are strictly correlative. Thelast sentence of the philosophical essay could easily be a “translation into Greek”of the exhortation to “the folly or the faith of Israel” with which the confessionalpiece concludes. It reads: “It is a matter of getting out of being by a new path, atthe risk of overturning certain notions that to common sense and the wisdom ofthe nations seemed the most evident” (73). For an excellent account of this formativeperiod in Levinas’ work see Samuel Moyn, “Judaism against Paganism: EmmanuelLevinas’s response to Heidegger and Nazism in the 30’s,” History and Memory, vol. 10,no. 2 (March 1998), 25–58; and, more generally, his Origins of the Other: EmmanuelLevinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). However,Maimonides only features incidentally in Moyn’s account.

3 “Some Thoughts on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” in Unforeseen History, trans.Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 13–14. Albertini and Chalier,cited in the following note, both address this motif.

coalesce around similar themes, even though they are addressed toquite different readerships, namely, philosophers and Jewish educators.The most noticeable overlap in these works appears in the defense offreedom which the young Levinas endeavors to make against what inhis philosophical essay he calls “the brutal fact of being that assaultsthis freedom.”1 As is often the case, Levinas’ Jewish-journalistic essaymakes explicit the political stakes of his phenomenological argument.The same “escape” which Levinas the young philosopher sought fromthe “the fatality” of being is referred to by Levinas the young Jewishthinker as “the folly or the faith of Israel.”2 In both cases Levinas isreferring to what at that time he called “man’s absolute freedom withrespect to the world and to the possibilities which invite his action”which the philosophy of Hitlerism was reducing to the “concept ofhuman destiny.”3 This theme of the transcendence of freedom will bea constant feature of Levinas’ Jewish and general philosophy; a clearpath arcs from his 1935 publications through De l’existence à l’existent(1947) to Totality and Infinity (1961), just as there is a consistent tra-jectory from these early thoughts on Jewish faith to the essays col-lected in Difficult Freedom (1963). Indeed, as we shall see, the questionof freedom, the very condition for ethics and religious action, is thekeystone to all of Levinas’ early thinking. However the three-page arti-cle in Paix et Droit is especially notable since, as its title indicates,here—and almost nowhere else for the remaining sixty years of hislife—Levinas explicitly draws inspiration from “the contemporary rel-evance [l’actualité ] of Maimonides.”

That itself is surprising. If at the age of 28 Levinas recognized inMaimonides an abiding source of moral and religious inspiration,

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4 The exceptions include Franscesca Albertini, “Emmanuel Levinas’ Theological-Political Interpretation of Moses Maimonides,” in Moses Maimonides (1138–1204):His Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical “Wirkungsgeschichte” in Different Cultural Contexts,ed. Görge K. Hasselhoff and Otfried Fraisse (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2004),573–585; Henri Bacry, Emmanuel Levinas, philosophie et judaïsme (Paris: COLLECTIF.Press Editions, 2002), 13–19; Catherine Chalier, La trace de l’infini, esp. 29ff, 59f.,97ff.,145f; Shmuel Trigano, “Levinas and the Project of Jewish Philosophy,” JewishStudies Quartely 8: 3 (2001), 279–301; Elliot R. Wolfson, “Secrecy, Modesty, and theFeminine: Kabbalistic Traces in the Thought of Levinas,” JJTP 14:1–2 (2006), 196and Edith Wyschogrod, Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’sOthers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 30–33 and 41–42. SalomonMalka provides some fascinating anecdotal evidence suggesting that Levinas waskeenly interested in Maimonides throughout his life, frequently relying on the MishnahTorah in order to select his Talmudic commentary and, most significantly, that “agood number” of his unpublished texts that are still unavailable are devoted toMaimonides; see his Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy (Pittsburgh: DuquesneUniversity Press, 2006), 132, 284.

why do we all but lose sight of the Great Eagle in his corpus? Onewould have thought that Levinas would have returned time andagain to the greatest, most revered and most influential of all Jewishphilosophers if indeed, as was already the case in 1935, the lattercould prove compatible with his own moral and theological vision.Did Levinas change his mind and come to view the thought ofMaimonides less favorably? It is notable too that despite the flourishingof scholarship devoted to Levinas and to Maimonides—probably thetwo most studied Jewish philosophers in the academy today—therelation between them, which goes back to Levinas’ formative period,has not received much attention.4 And while Levinas’ early reflectionson Maimonides are doubtless more edifying than scholarly, as theiropening sentence declares, they nevertheless evince an acute appre-ciation of many of the major philosophical issues of the Guide.

In particular, the brief column shows Levinas understood Maimo-nides’ lengthy discussion of whether the world was created or eternalas one of the major contributions of the Guide of the Perplexed sinceit bears the burden of philosophically articulating the possibility offreedom—first of all God’s freedom but also, by imitation, the pos-sibility of human freedom too. As Levinas observed, for Maimonidesbelief in creation over eternity is tantamount to an acknowledgmentof freedom within the limits of human knowledge of the structuresand laws of nature. Citing and commenting on Guide II.17 whereMaimonides defends creation, or rather the possibility of a creativeact prior to the establishment of the laws of nature, Levinas writes:

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5 Levinas, “The Contemporary Relevance of Maimonides,” JJTP 16.1, pp. 91–94.6 Aviezer Ravitzky, “Samuel Ibn Tibbon and the Esoteric Character of the Guide

of the Perplexed,” Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) Review Vol.6 (1981) 87–123. Iplace the issue of creation or eternity as an example because in fact the debatebetween the earliest esoteric radicals and the exoteric moderates centered on thequestions of providence, intellectual union with the Active Intellect, immortality,and allegory; that is to say, not explicitly on the question of creation. HoweverRavitzky observes that “Ibn Tibbon’s theory of creation . . . takes place against thebackground of eternal beings and is limited to the process of generation of the indi-vidual beings of the sublunar world,” (119). In a subsequent, related article Ravitzkyadduced further evidence, based on Ibn Tibbon’s otherwise inexplicable interest inAristotle’s Meteorology, in support of the view that Ibn Tibbon—the first commen-tator of the Guide, its canonical translator and a crucial figure in its reception his-tory—believed the world was eternal and that Maimonides himself secretly believedthe world was eternal; see Aviezer Ravitzky, “The Secrets of the Guide to thePerplexed: Between the Thirteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Studies in MaimonidesI. Twersky, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies,1990), pp. 184–86 and notes 86 and 88 for additional references. Herbert A.Davidson denies that Ibn Tibbon believed in the eternity of the world in his“Maimonides on Metaphysical Knowledge,” Maimonidean Studies 3 (1992/93): 50n.3.However Moshe Halbertal agrees with Ravitzky and makes a strong case that IbnTibbon interpreted Maimonides as secretly believing in the eternity of the world;see Halbertal, Between Torah and Wisdom: Rabbi Menachem ha-Meiri and the MaimonideanHalakhists in Provence [Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 2000), 20, 63, 75ff,118–25, 132, 138, 187. Halbertal applies the model of radical and moderateMaimonideans to extensive use in his book.

The solution proposed by Maimonides is perhaps the essence of hiswork. It consists in distinguishing between the universe that is alreadycreated, submitting it to the irrefutable logic of Aristotle, and the verycreation of that universe, which eludes him . . . The conditions for theworld as a whole should not be confounded with the laws regulatingthings inside the world. The worker needs matter. But God does notwork. He is a creator. Let us be liberated from our intellectual habitsimprisoned in a world already made and we shall understand creation.5

Levinas’ first interpretation of the Guide is in accord with its domi-nant reception by Jewish and Christian philosophers. As AviezerRazitsky has shown, ever since the thirteenth century, JewishMaimonideans have divided into exoteric moderates and esotericradicals. The radicals argue that Maimonides concealed his trueAristotelian beliefs, for example that the world has existed eternallyaccording to the perfect and unchanging laws of nature.6 This rad-ical interpretation of Maimonides was usually inspired by an Averroisticunderstanding of Aristotle. In contrast, the moderates contend thatMaimonides rejected Aristotle, for example by believing the worldwas created ex nihilo at a moment when the laws of nature do not

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7 Davidson provides a third and very plausible interpretation of Maimonideswhich is neither the view of eternity or ex nihilo but a Platonic reading of Maimonides’cosmogony; see Herbert A. Davidson, “Maimonides Secret Position on Creation,”in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. I. Twersky (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1979), 16–40. For a recent argument that Maimonides’ in factbelieved in creation ex nihilo see Kenneth Seeskin, Maimonides on the Origin of theWorld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

8 “The Contemporary Relevance of Maimonides,” JJTP 16.1, pp. 91–94.9 Richard C. Dales, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World (Leiden: E.J.

Brill, 1990), 45, 97–102, 116, 132–140, 153. For a more recent survey of the Latin

yet apply.7 Samuel Ibn Tibbon and those who followed him espousedthe radical, esoteric, Aristotelian view, revived in the twentieth centuryby Leo Strauss (who gave it an atheistic-Nietzschean spin), while hisson Moshe Ibn Tibbon advocated the moderate and dominant view,which Levinas also espouses. “The conditions for the world as awhole should not be confounded with the laws regulating things insidethe world.”8

This moderate interpretation of the Guide of the Perplexed was ofgreat consequence for Christian theology too. During the heatedmedieval disputes regarding the eternity of the world that blazedthrough the University of Paris in the 1270s, Maimonides’ view thatthere is a limit which reason cannot cross between the science ofnature and the science of theology enjoyed a central and typicallycontradictory fate. At first it was embraced by Franciscans, mostnotably Bonaventure, who wished to defend the Christian faith againstthe natural philosophy of Aristotle and relied on Maimonides inorder to argue for the superiority of faith over reason. However, fol-lowing the condemnation of 1270 issued by the bishop of Paris,Maimonides’ view became a mainstay of the opposing side, wherebymembers of the arts faculty, notably Siger of Brabant and Boethiusof Dacia, now relied on the distinction proposed by the venerableRabbi Moyses in order to argue that their Averroistic interpretationof Aristotle was no threat to Christian belief. Drawing on Maimonides,they distinguished between the disciplines of scientiae naturalis and chris-tianae fidei in order to argue that though philosophy held sway withinthe arts faculty it posed no risk to theology, which was, they con-tended, a separate discipline. Thomas Aquinas occupied a positionbetween these two groups, though closer to the philosophers. Relyingon the very passages from Maimonides’ Dux dubitantium that impressedLevinas, Aquinas defended the use of philosophy against the Franciscanswhile at the same time denounced its abuse by the more radical artists.9

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reception of the Guide see Yossef Schwartz, “‘To Thee is Silence Praise’: Meister Eckhart’sReading in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed [Hebrew] (Am Oved: Tel Aviv, 2002),38–64 and Görge K. Hasselhoff, “Maimonides in the Latin Middle Ages: AnIntroductory Survey,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, vol. 9 (2002): 1–20.

10 On this, see Moshe Halbertal, Between Torah and Wisdom, 76–78 and 187, andchapters 2 and 4 generally.

11 See Shlomo Pines, “Maïmonide et la philosophie latine,” 228f. and “St. Thomaset la pensée juive,” 123f., both Rpd in his Studies in the History of Jewish Thought, eds.Warren Zev Harvey and Moshe Idel ( Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1997). Withoutexplicitly mentioning Kant, Richard C. Dales provides an analysis of the “Doctrineof the Double Truth,” truths of faith and truths of reason, which supports thisproto-Kantian interpretation; see his Medieval Discussions about the Eternity of the World,and idem., “The Origin of the Doctrine of the Double Truth,” Viator 15 (1984):169–179 and “Maimonides and Boethius of Dacia on the Eternity of the World,”New Scholasticism 56 (1982): 306–19. In truth Maimonides does not refrain fromoffering several proofs for creation. However he constructs his argument in such away that allows us to think that he might have while still maintaining a coherentposition. It is notable in this regard that Maimonides specifies that he will usethe belief in eternity to argue his point (Guide I.71, referring to the opening of the Mishnah Torah) and thus that there is nothing positively false about the viewat all.

12 “The Contemporary Relevance of Maimonides,” pp. 91–94. In 1966 Levinasbriefly extended his moderate reading of the Guide according to which philosophyis neither handmaid nor master to revelation. Dismissing Leo Strauss’ interpreta-tion as “detective fiction” according to which “Reason fights against religion,”Levinas reiterated his moderate and quite classical interpretation of Maimonides asharmonizing revelation with reason; Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. SeánHand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 111. More rigorous cri-tiques of Strauss have confirmed this dismissal. My reading differs from LeoraBatnitzky who has recently portrayed Levinas’ deference to philosophy as a capit-ulation of revelation to reason. It seems to me that quite the opposite is the case,

Aquinas thus stands where Maimonides was positioned by his mod-erate Jewish interpreters, where philosophy is given free and equalstanding with revelation but does not sovereignly determine truth.10

Some scholars have argued that Maimonides and Aquinas providea proto-Kantian position, since their view neither subordinates phi-losophy to faith nor reduces faith to philosophy but marks the boundsof philosophical reasoning in order to make room for faith. Accordingto Shlomo Pines, there is a direct line from Maimonides throughAquinas to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason inasmuch as the antinomiesof pure reason recapitulate what might be called “the antinomy ofcreation and eternity” and thus makes way for faith.11 The youngLevinas certainly saw it this way. In defending the possibility of cre-ation without claiming to philosophically demonstrate the position,he said that Maimonides “glimpsed what one calls, six centuries later,the critique of pure reason.”12 For early Levinas, then, the decisive

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since Levinas’ view of ethics is entirely based on the noncorrelation of ethics withepistemology, theoretical consciousness or even rationality; in short, on the tran-scendence of ethics with respect to philosophy; see her Leo Strauss and EmmanuelLevinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (New York: Cambridge University Press,2006), e.g.: “his [Levinas’] philosophy actually reasserts the modern domination ofphilosophy over revelation” (67).

merit of the Guide of the Perplexed consists in its exoteric defense ofthe belief in creation based on the postulate, not the proof, of God’sfreedom and transcendence with respect to the already existing lawsand structures of nature. In his first reflections on Maimonides,Levinas thus draws out the proto-Kantian position proposed byMaimonides, as other thinkers have also done (especially HermannCohen). However this defense of theological freedom is adapted, alreadyin 1935 and, I want to suggest, in all of Levinas’ work up to Totalityand Infinity, to provide an anthropological defense of freedom. The mod-ern argument for human freedom thereby imitates the medieval argu-ment for divine freedom.

2. Creation or the Eternullity of the World: Levinas and Maimonides versus Heidegger and Aristotle

In an important but insufficiently appreciated way, when Levinasadopts the moderate Maimonidean defense of creation against thelogic of eternity he is arguing against Heidegger in a way that parallelshis forebear’s disputes against Aristotelian interpretations of the Torahand Maimonides. This admittedly unobvious claim is central to myargument. Let me spell it out. The major moral and theologicalchallenge of Being and Time can be understood as a revival of theargument for the eternity of the world, while Levinas’ critique ofHeidegger should be seen as a Maimonidean revival of the defenseof creation. Most of the medieval oppositions—of necessity versusfreedom, moral conventionalism versus absolutism, justice versustruth—are repeated in the dispute between Levinas and Heidegger,the latter playing the radical Aristotelian and the former the mod-erate Maimonidean. To see this more clearly it will help if we bringinto focus a reading of Heidegger as an Aristotelian. My claim isthat Levinas’ critique of Heidegger’s account of the ontological primacyof the everyday world imitates the critique made by Maimonides ofAristotle’s view of the eternity of the world.

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13 Despite widespread reporting of it by Gadamer who said that “We in Marburgwere at that time so fascinated by Heidegger that he appeared to us an Aristotleredivivus,” it was only in the 1980’s that scholars discovered the crucial influence ofAristotle on early Heidegger. However there is now a large body of literaturespawned by the publication in 1992 of the most important of these lectures, Plato’sSophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1997). Here I follow John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the HiddenKing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1994), 220–34; Franco Volpi, “Beingand Time: A ‘Translation’ of the Nicomachean Ethics?” in Reading Heidegger From theStart: Essays in His Earliest Thought, Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren, eds. (Albany:State University of New York Press, 1994), 195–211; idem, “Dasein as praxis: TheHeideggerian Assimilation and the Radicalization of the Practical Philosophy ofAristotle” in Critical Heidegger Christopher Macann, ed. (London: Routledge, 1996),27–66; Jacques Taminiaux, “The Reappropriation of the Nicomachean Ethics: Poesisand Praxis in the Articulation of Fundamental Ontology,” in idem, Heidegger and theProject of Fundamental Ontology, trans. and ed. by Michael Gendre (Albany, N.Y.: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1991), 111–37 and especially Theodore Kisiel, TheGenesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),Part II. Ted Sadler offers a deflationary account in Heidegger and Aristotle: The Questionof Being (London: The Athlone Press, 1996).

14 Stanley Rosen, The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 120–21. A more charitable and pro-ductive reading of the relationship between authentic resoluteness and phronesis issuggested by Hubert L. Dreyfus throughout his various pragmatic readings ofHeidegger; see, e.g., Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L.Dreyfus, volume 1, eds. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, MA: The MITPress, 2000), 318 and esp. his Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being andTime, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

Heidegger’s profound debt to Aristotle goes back to the periodculminating in Being and Time (1927), during which Heidegger deliveredseveral seminars on Aristotle (1922–25). Recent scholarship has demon-strated that Aristotle’s work is the main source behind Heidegger’sgreatest insights of this period, such as his disengagement of the phe-nomenon of truth from the structure of the proposition and his ontol-ogizing of human action as the ground of understanding in general.13

Another crucial, if twisted line leading from the Nicomachean Ethics toBeing and Time involves the transposition of phronesis, Aristotle’s accountof practical wisdom, into the circumspect practices of everyday lifewhich Heidegger regarded as constitutive of the meaning of being.However the Aristotelian key to the philosophical breakthrough ofBeing and Time should not blind us to the desiccation which Aristotelianethics suffers in Heidegger’s hands. As Stanley Rosen has recentlyargued, “The transformation of phronesis into fundamental ontologyis based on the transformation of Aristotelian ethical virtue intoauthenticity and the transformation of happiness into anxiety in theface of death.”14 The reduction of phronesis to the ontological hori-

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15 Rosen and Volpi argue that phronesis has become conscience (Gewissen) in Beingand Time, while Taminiaux suggests a slightly different transposition of phronesis intoresoluteness (Entschlossenheit). Robert Bernasconi, “Heidegger’s Destruction of Phronesis,”Southern Journal of Philosophy 28 supp. (1989), 142, argues that for Heidegger phrone-sis remains the general ontological praxis of circumspection (Umsicht) rather than aspecifically ethical one. I tend to agree with Bernasconi, though I do not think theinterpretations are as incompatible as he suggests. For a dissenting view see TedSadler, Heidegger and Aristotle, 141–58. Rosen’s conclusion is that “Heidegger replacesthe Aristotelian variability of practical affairs with their uncertainty, and he replacesthe correctness of judgment, that is, its accord with orthos logos, with resoluteness.One is tempted to say that stubbornness replaces reasonableness” (134). This isinsupportable, for Entschlossenheit “simply cannot become rigid as regards the Situation,but must understand that the resolution, in accordance with its own meaning as adisclosure, must be held open and free for the current factical possibility. The cer-tainty of the resolution signifies that one holds oneself free for the possibility of taking itback” (BT, H307, all emphases in original). Resoluteness is a responsiveness to thesituation, not a stubbornness that rides roughshod over it. Such misinterpretationsof Heidegger are almost always collateral damage accrued from reactions to his vilepolitics. Even if they make us feel better, they get us nowhere philosophically.

zon of everyday life empties it of all ethical content by consigningits public and deliberative character to the realm of inauthentic idletalk and reducing its teleological concern for happiness to the anxietyof finitude disclosed in the “blink of an eye” (Augenblick).15 To thisformidable list of Heidegger’s “translations” of Aristotle—his phe-nomenological reduction of truth to non-propositional disclosure, ofphronesis to everyday praxis, and of virtue to authenticity—I want toadd a Heideggerian transposition of the belief in the eternity of theworld. I suggest that the ontology of everydayness, of “being alwaysalready in-the-world,” can be viewed from the perspective of moraltheology as a phenomenological account of the eternity of the world.From this perspective Levinas’ response to Heidegger appears as atransposition of the medieval defense of creation against belief in theeternity of the world. There are two principle aspects to this trans-lation of the medieval dispute.

(i) Freedom in Everyday Life. According to Heidegger, the everydayworld always precedes and conditions everything that takes placewithin it. Just as Aristotle assumed we cannot philosophize about theworld prior to the given structures that determine it, so too Heideggerdenied that there is any meaning to being outside its “always already”given structures. In On the Generation and Corruption (I.3, II.1–3) Aristotlerejects the idea of an absolute genesis of the elements and endorsesthe famous principle that “nothing can come to be out of not-being.”Aristotelian cosmology, both in its own terms and as it was understood

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16 See, for example, Maimonides’ discussion at the end of Guide II.6, p. 264–65.For a classical view that accords with this interpretation, see Friedrich Solmsen,Aristole’s System of the Physical World: A Comparison with his Predecessors (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1960), 222ff., 288f., 310, 385ff., 451 which discussesAristotle, Physics VIII and other passages from On Generation and Corruption, On theHeaven and On Meteorology.

17 Guide II.13, p. 284.18 Maimonides on the Origins of the World, 71.19 Jürgen Habermas, “Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy

from a German Perspective,” trans. John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2

by Maimonides, proposes that the elements, structures and laws ofnature are ungenerated and are to be explained by principles of pri-vation inherent in the continuum of matter and the eternal structuresthat organize it.16 According to Maimonides, Aristotle’s view is that:

first matter is not subject in its essence to generation and passing-away,but that various forms succeed each other in it in such a way that itdivests itself of one form and assumes another. He [Aristotle] thinksfurthermore that this whole higher and lower order cannot be cor-rupted and abolished, that no innovation can take place in it that isnot according to its nature, . . . and that all that exists has been broughtinto existence, in the state in which it is at present. . . .17

One should of course not overlook the enormous gulf between Heideggerand Aristotle. Where Aristotle regards the structures of nature or theCosmos as given, Heidegger sees nature as a contingent determina-tion made within the givens of the historicity of being. The Cosmosis mondialized by Heidegger, historicized within the horizons of every-dayness. The upshot of Heidegger’s view is precisely that there isno eternal structure of nature, which is exactly what Aristotle asserts.However this difference masks a more general agreement, which isthat whatever the given structures of ontology are they are alwaysalready given as such. As Kenneth Seeskin says of Aristotle, “all thatexists has been brought into existence in the form in which it is as pre-sent.”18 It matters less that for Aristotle these structures form thematerial substratum and the heavenly spheres, just the sort of extra-mundane ontology Heidegger rejects, whereas for the latter suchgivens exist within the world in the mode of everydayness. The pointI am making is that even though Heidegger regards being as essen-tially temporal, he follows Aristotle in thinking of the structures ofbeing as universal categories that are given prior to any causal, geneticor historical explanation of their origin. As Jürgen Habermas said,“with his steady focus on the invariant structures of Dasein, Heideggerfrom the start cuts off the road from historicity to real history.”19 In

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(Winter, 1989), 438–39 (my emphasis). Or again: “Heidegger rigidly maintained theabstraction of historicity (as the condition of historical existence itself ) from actualhistorical processes” (437). I do not agree with much of Habermas’ interpretation,though here I think he points to an important feature of the transcendental logicof Being and Time.

20 Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UniversityPress, 1987), 45.

21 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption 336a–338a4, De caelo 283b–284a, Physics203b29 and 250b–252b, Metaphysics 1050b8–15. In addition to the argument juststated, Aristotle derived his belief in eternity on account of the idea that everymoment or now by definition refers to a prior and subsequent moment; that pri-mary matter is ungenerated; and that everything which is possible must have a sub-stratum. For a lucid summary of these views, see Seeskin, Maimonides on the Originof the World, 63–70 and Dales, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World, 39–42.

a paradoxical way, the “historicity of being” is, for Heidegger, anahistorical given manifest in the existential structures of the every-day world. It took thinkers like Kuhn and Foucault to overcome thisgreat flaw in Heidegger’s philosophy by augmenting historicity withhistory. Others, especially Jean-Luc Nancy, have responded to thesame problem from another angle by redescribing Heidegger’s ahis-torical givens in terms of their coming into presence. These emphaseson birth and genealogy are, in part, responses to the fact that Beingand Time takes historicity and everydayness as simply given; we are“thrown” into them and they, it would seem, are simply there readyto provide us with the horizon of our possibilities. This has the effectof treating the everyday world, or the horizon of everydayness, asthe eternal given which nothing precedes and which no possibilityexceeds. From very early on, Levinas was highly critical of the notionof “thrownness” in Heidegger because it circumscribes moral agencywith a priori limits and reduces freedom to the givenness of a situ-ation that cannot be transcended.20

Aristotle had also argued for the eternal givenness of the world,though from an entirely different perspective. For our purposes, the most relevant of his several arguments for the eternity of theworld is the argument based on the perfect circular motion of theheavens. Belief in the perfectly circular rotation of the heavens ledhim to think that the world must be eternal. Since perfection lacksnothing, is self-sufficient, and not subject to external causal influence,it follows that the movement of the heavens, if indeed perfect,must be eternal.21 As Friedrich Solmsen comments, this “newmathematical concept of perfection” introduced a “new religious feel-ing for the divinity of the Cosmos” based on “the one eternal circular

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22 Solmsen, Aristotle’s System of the Physical World, 225.23 Guide, II.25, 327–28.24 Guide, II.25, 327–28.

movement.”22 It was this eternal unmoved mover that Maimonideschallenged in the Guide of the Perplexed. Notably, Maimonides’ rejec-tion of the doctrine of eternity stems neither from philosophy norScripture. In his view, belief in creation is justified neither by philo-sophical demonstration nor by fundamentalist literalism.23 Rather, hisdefense of creation is motivated by an ethico-political view that with-out freedom the very ground of political and religious authority isundermined:

the belief in eternity the way Aristotle sees it—that is, the belief accord-ing to which the world exists in virtue of necessity, that no naturechanges at all, and that the customary course of events cannot bemodified with regard to anything—destroys the Law in its principle,necessarily gives the lie to every miracle, and reduces to inanity allthe hopes and threatens that the Law has held out.24

Since belief in eternity stands for a deity who is immobile and aCosmos regulated by necessary laws and structures it undermines thevery idea of God’s free will and therefore the possibility of divineintervention, be it for deliverance or retribution. Maimonides defenseof creation has less to do with “theoretical” reasoning, as Kant mighthave said, and more to do with practical reasoning. Creation, forMaimonides, is above all an ethico-political doctrine. Creation is apostulate of practical reasoning, of the theologico-political kind. InMaimonides’ view belief in creation is intrinsic to the transcendenceof freedom and thereby underpins the whole project of politicaltheology.

Levinas joins Maimonides, and Kant, in arguing that the only wayto talk in a thick moral language, for example by talking about cul-pability, responsibility, guilt, forgiveness, cruelty, kindness, and conscience, is by assuming the freedom of moral agents with respectto the world in which they are constituted. In Heidegger’s ontologyof everydayness the theological problem of creation has been trans-posed to the plane of transcendental anthropology where it becomesthe problem of Dasein’s freedom, agency, culpability, and conscience.Levinas’ close friend, Maurice Blanchot, expressed this perfectly in

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25 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 245.

26 Being and Time, 345.

his unmistakably Heideggerian review of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique dela vie quotidienne:

The idea of creation is inadmissible when it is a matter of account-ing for existence as it is borne by the everyday. . . . The everyday isour portion of eternity: the eternullity of which Laforgue speaks. TheLord’s prayer, in this way, would be secretly impious: give us our dailybread, give us to live according to the daily existence that leaves noplace for a relation between Creator and creature. Everyday man isthe most atheist of men. He is such that no God whatsoever couldstand in relation to him. And thus one understands how the man inthe street escapes all authority, be it political, moral, or religious.25

Blanchot’s point is that the dailyness of existence, the daily bread ofwhich the Lord’s Prayer speaks, has become a form of life bornewithout reference to origins or transcendence and is thus severedfrom the idea of a Creator. The primacy of the everyday in the ontologyof Being and Time raises the specter of eternity and recalls the Judeo-Christian Averroist Aristotelians who denied the doctrine of creation.Levinas, like Maimonides before him, followed “the philosopher”only to the point where he undermines the very possibility of free-dom and thereby “destroys the Law in its principle.” In 1935, whenLevinas implored that we “be liberated from our intellectual habitsimprisoned in a world already made [his emphasis] and we shall under-stand creation,” he was alluding as much to the freedom of an escapefrom the “always already” existing eternull world of everydayness asto Maimonides’ critique of eternity in the name of transcendenceand freedom. To be sure, the perfection of eternity must be con-trasted with the permanent drone of eternull everydayness, as Blanchot’sevocative reflection reminds us. For while Aristotle’s view introduceda new religious conception of divine perfection, Heidegger’s disclosedbeing not as it rotated eternally around a divine centre but “in the pallid lack of mood which dominates the ‘grey everyday’.”26 Yetfrom the perspective of moral theology, the problem of divine free-dom with respect to the eternally rotating spheres is isomorphic tothe problem of human freedom with respect to the always alreadyexisting horizons of everydayness, i.e. the eternullity of the world.Neither eternity nor eternullity is ever initiated or created. They both

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27 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1958), 9.

28 Maimonides on the Origins of the World, ch. 5.29 David Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre

Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992) 81.

lack what Hannah Arendt called “natality,” which in her view definesthe human political condition as “the capacity of beginning some-thing anew, that is, of acting.”27 Levinas is similarly motivated in hisargument against Heidegger. Creation is a trope for the humancapacity to act freely within a worldly context and thus to preservea margin of transcendence within the immanence of being.

(ii) Particularity in Everyday Life. For medieval Aristotelian cosmology,belief in the eternity of the world provided an explanation of thenecessity of laws governing species, but it could not explain why thisparticular event took place or that particular detail was as it is.Kenneth Seeskin compellingly shows how the problem of particular-ization was grasped by Maimonides as the great flaw in Aristote’seternal cosmology.28 The problem came to a head for medievalAristotelians when its cosmology failed to explain the particular motionsof the heavenly bodies as successfully as the Ptolemaic system did.The point may seem somewhat incidental for us, except thatMaimonides’ argument for the transcendence of divine free will wasleveraged by his regard for the significance of particular entities,which Aristotle’s general principles, precisely those that implied thebelief in eternity, could not explain. The question for Maimonideswas not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Whyis there this thing rather than that thing?” And this question, heargued, cannot be answered without invoking a principle of freedomat work in nature. Belief in creation is thus a response to the factof contingency, the fact that existence is not wholly determined byinvariant structures but involves the particulars of desire. David Burrellexplains Maimonides’ position: “to know what really exists will beto know it in its individuality and not as instantiating a species.”29

Levinas, I think, is similarly concerned with the problem of partic-ularization as it emerges within the “undifferentiated” or “indifferent”givenness of everyday life, as Heidegger cast it. Heidegger’s crucialmove determines the entire ontological problematic from the begin-ning of Being and Time:

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30 Being and Time, H43. For insightful analyses of this feature of Heidegger’s work,see Robert J. Dostal, “The Problem of ‘Indifferenz’ in Sein und Zeit,” Philosophy andPhenomenological Research, Vol. XLIII no. 1 (Sept. 1982): 43–58 and Michel Haar,“The Enigma of Everydayness,” in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, John Sallis, ed.,(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 20–28.

31 Being and Time, H278.32 Being and Time, H273; H289.

At the outset of our analysis it is particularly important that Daseinshould not be Interpreted with the differentiated character [Differenz]of some definite way of existing, but that it should be uncovered[aufgedeckt] in the undifferentiated character which it has proximallyand for the most part [zunächt und zumeist]. This undifferentiatedcharacter of Dasein’s everydayness is not nothing, but a positive phe-nomenal characteristic of this entity. Out of this kind of Being—andback into it again—is all existing, such as it is. We call this everydayundifferentiated character of Dasein “averageness” [Durchschnittlichkeit].30

It is this undifferentiated character of everydayness that is the objectof Levinas’ critique of Heidegger. He argues that everyday ethicallife responds to the concrete particularity of the other. The pointrequires some further elaboration. The result will show, I think, thatwe have all the more reason to see Levinas’ critique of Heideggeras a repetition of Maimonides’ critique of Aristotle.

Heidegger argued that the undifferentiated character of everydaylife implied that human existence was fundamentally inauthenticbecause it was, from the outset, disindividuated and homogenizedby the public structures of being. Even the private pangs of moralconscience were, in his view, not properly (or “ontologically”), one’sown: “this ‘public conscience’—what else is it than the voice of the“they”?”31 Moral conscience properly disclosed thus reveals its own“nullity,” though in Heidegger’s view this is not such a bad thingbecause moral conscience is “ontologically suspect” anyhow.32 Bycontrast, in true conscience, where one hears the true call of being,“the ‘they’ collapses” and one is left without the noisy clamor of pub-lic moral platitudes. Guilt and conscience are thus eviscerated of allmoral significance, and this is entirely because from the outsetHeidegger decided, as Kierkegaard did before him, that ethics belongsto the realm of the undifferentiated and inauthentic modes of every-day life. Moreover the damning depiction of moral conscious givenin §59 of Being and Time strongly suggests that Heidegger regardedthe malaise of morality as a particularly Jewish sickness. For a start,moral conscience is a “tranquillizing” mode of self-assurance involving

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33 Being and Time, H293.

mental “balancing” acts that are nothing more than “warning” bellsrung by the internalized “they”; moral conscience therefore tells onenothing about one’s true situation. We are then offered a Judaizinginterpretation of this malaise, since this tranquilization of conscienceis a form of self-righteous “Pharisaism.” It objectifies conscience anddoes no justice to its character as care for the situation. Heideggerthen adds “the idea of moral law” to the list of misinterpretationsof moral conscience and thus explicitly likens Kant to a Phariseewho mistakenly conceives of Dasein as a subject with rules, values,and norms that stand as objects to it regardless of the fluidity of itssituation. Before moving on to the positive disclosure of the call ofconscience, Heidegger adds one final barb, once again urging us toget rid of our “Pharisaism” which mistakes Dasein for a “ ‘house-hold’ whose indebtedness simply needs to be balanced off in anorderly manner so that the Self may stand ‘by’ as a disinterestedspectator while these Experiences run their course.”33 From this vig-orous strike at moral conscience we learn a great deal, not least thatHeidegger has a Judeo-Christian morality in mind when he attacksthe legal calculus of conscience and associates Kantianism withPharisaism. It is this regard for conscience as undifferentiated, disin-dividuating and thus inauthentic that Levinas came to challenge whenhe began to think of “the Other” as a locus of ethical authority towhich one responds according to the situation and through the utmostparticularities of one’s self.

Levinas’ argument is that Heidegger overlooked something thatbelongs to the “primordial” level of conscience whose moral contentcannot be reduced or eviscerated, namely, its concern for the par-ticularity of the other. Heidegger’s account of the morality of every-dayness claims to map conscience completely onto the averaged out,leveled down, undifferentiated, and inauthentic norms of everyday-ness without any ethical remainder. He simply assumes that every-dayness is “proximally and for the most part” “indifferent” and thatmoral conscience simply repeats the undifferentiated rules it haspicked up from the “one” (das Man). But Levinas’ point is that thesocial ontology is always from the outset characterized by singularvoices and particular characteristics of other people. To reduce theseparticularities to the glib conventions of public morality is to miss

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the fact that conscience aims not at the undifferentiated mass of peo-ple or at impersonal conventions to which “one” is obliged, but thatit responds to the particularities of the other. From this perspectiveLevinas’ critique of Heidegger again resembles Maimonides’ critiqueof Aristotle. Like Maimonides, Levinas’ challenge to the philosopheris based on his vigilant regard for particularities that escape thephilosopher’s understanding. Just as Maimonides protests againstabstracting from creation to philosophy by declaring that “everythingin real existence is an individual object,” so too Levinas refuses toabstract from ethical life where others are given in their particularity.From Levinas’ perspective, only blindness or cruelty allows Heideggerto regard moral conscience as a ruse of the common mind; in truth,conscience is a relation to the particularities of the other, to facesand circumstances that are not covered by rules or social conventions.

Aristotle’s eternal unchanging God posed a threat to Maimonides’political theology because it imagined a God whose perfection andtruth excluded the very notions of free will and moral agency andleft unexplained the particular contingencies of existence. Heidegger’sdescription of the everyday world posed an even greater threat toLevinas, for it imagined a human being without the freedom to takea moral stand against the tides of history and without a consciencethat responds to the ethical contingencies of life. For this reason, asBlanchot put it, Dasein “escapes all authority, be it political, moral,or religious.” In defending creation against the eternullity of theworld described by Heidegger, Levinas repeats the two most impor-tant features of Maimonides’ defense of creation. First, he defendsthe possibility of moral and political agency, and second, he arguesthat conscience individuates a person in relation to the particularitiesof the other. Both these critiques of Heidegger are made by draw-ing on Maimonides’ moral theology of creation. Levinas thus repeatson the plane of anthropology the defense of creation which Maimonideshad formerly waged against belief in the eternity of the world.

3. The Metaphysics of Creation in Totality and Infinity

Even though there is no mention of Maimonides in Totality and Infinity,I want to argue that the critique of Heidegger in that magnificentbook is continuous with the Maimonidean axiology of creation pro-posed in 1935. This continuity can be seen in Conclusion 4 to Totality

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34 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 293. That these thoughts go back to 1935 is clearfrom the conclusion of On Escape, 71. It is worth mentioning that other accountsof creation coexist with this dominant one in Totality and Infinity. As I show in aforthcoming book.

and Infinity, called quite simply “Creation.” Levinas returns to theproblem of creation versus eternity and again defends the notion ofcreatio ex nihilo for the reasons we have considered, namely, todefend the transcendence of freedom and the desire for human par-ticularity that make our lives irrevocably ethical.

To affirm origin from nothing by creation is to contest the prior com-munity of all things within eternity, from which philosophical thought,guided by ontology, makes things arise as from a common matrix. Theabsolute gap of separation which transcendence implies could not bebetter expressed than by the term creation, in which the kinship ofbeings among themselves is affirmed, but at the same time their rad-ical heterogeneity also, their reciprocal exteriority coming from noth-ingness. One may speak of creation to characterize entities situated inthe transcendence that does not close over into a totality.34

Levinas is clearly harnessing the logic of Maimonides’ defense of cre-ation which in his youth he made explicit. Creation accounts forethical particularities and details that are, from the perspective ofeternull everydayness, regarded as matters of indifference, average-ness, and inauthenticity. Levinas adopts and adapts Maimonides’view that contingency is a sign of the limits of philosophy, pointingto the idea of creation. Ethics is the place where contingency mat-ters most, where philosophy reaches the limits of understanding and,therefore, where freedom and transcendence become possible. Hishyperbolic idea of an “absolute gap of separation” or a “radical het-erogeneity” within social life is just the simple observation that whatmatters most to us about other people, and what matter morallyabout them, are the contingent details that differentiate them fromoneself and from every other being, and it is precisely this thatHeidegger’s “undifferentiated” social ontology of everydayness disre-gards. Moreover, and again like Maimonides, for Levinas the factof particularity or contingency implies a certain freedom from allthat can be predicted of the other, or a transcendence which shebears with respect to what I might have thought about her. As Totalityand Infinity puts it:

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35 Totality and Infinity, 104; or again: “the idea of creation ex nihilo expresses amultiplicity not united into a totality” (Totality and Infinity, 63).

36 It is worth noting that David Hartman, an influential contemporary and mod-erate Maimonidean, commences his “covenantal anthropology” in exactly this way.He too finds Maimonides’ belief in God’s “independence and freedom” embeddedin his belief in creation ex nihilo and proceeds to argue, like Levinas, that the ideaof humanity in the image of God therefore implies “the unique ontological status ofthe human being as one who can transcend necessity and act within a context offreedom” (A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism ( Jewish Lights,1998), 22–23). Further correspondences between Levinas and Hartman could read-ily be established. Compare, for example, Levinas’ oft-cited remark that “It is cer-tainly a great glory for the creator to have set up a being capable of atheism, abeing which, without having been causa sui, has an independent view and word andis at home with itself,” (Totality and Infinity, 28–59) with Hartman’s uncannily simi-lar view: “The creation of a being capable of saying no to divine commands is thesupreme expression of divine love, insofar as God makes room for humans as inde-pendent, free creatures” (A Living Covenant, 24). Hartman and Levinas also share aphilosophical approach to the Talmud, even if they display quite different tem-peraments in so doing. See too Jonathan Cohen, “Educating for Spiritual Maturity:Hartman’s Interpretation of Judaism as a ‘Religion for Adults,’” in Judaism andModernity: The Religious Philosophy of David Hartman, Jonathan W. Malino, ed., ( Jerusalem:Shalom Hartman Institute, 2001), 123–26.

the idea of creation ex nihilo expresses a multiplicity not united into atotality; the creature is an existence which indeed does depend on another, but not as a part that is separated from it. Creation ex nihilobreaks with system, posits a being outside of every system, that is,there where its freedom is possible.35

Levinas privileges the freedom of the other to express her particu-lar differences; elsewhere he argues that one is obliged to respondto the particularities of the other and thereby assume a “difficultfreedom” of one’s own. Both as the freedom of the other (“expres-sion”) and as the freedom of the self (“responsibility”), creation exnihilo renders Maimonidean theology in terms of modern philo-sophical anthropology by refiguring freedom, transcendence, agency,and particularity.36 Even though Levinas makes no mention ofMaimonides in Totality and Infinity, there is reason to think that theMaimonideanism he defended in his youth is woven throughout hisgreat philosophical work. From “The Contemporary Relevance ofMaimonides” in 1935, through to Totality and Infinity in 1961, hisargument for human freedom and for the unique value of eachhuman being is advanced by prizing creation over eternity. To besure, for Maimonides the point was theological and not just anthro-pological: his belief in creation defends divine free will against Alfarabi’sand Avicenna’s view of the emanation of the material cosmos as a

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37 Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies,Theories of the Active Intellect and Theories of Human Intellect (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992), 206.

38 Book of Judges, Laws of Kings, 11.3.39 Book of Judges, Laws of Kings, 12.1.40 Book of Judges, Laws of Kings, 12.1.

necessary process.37 Whereas for Levinas the defense of freedom wasinspired by anthropological rather than the theological implicationsof the doctrine of creation.

4. Messianic Naturalism

In addition to his defense of creation, Levinas also greatly admiredMaimonides’ messianism according to which the natural and ratio-nal structure of the world is in no way breached by the approachand vision of messianic days. For Maimonides, the days of the mes-siah involve no supernatural interruptions to the causal structure ofthe world or transformation in the order of things. There is noth-ing mystical or miraculous in Maimonides’ vision of the messianicage, which is historically and ontologically continuous with ours: “Donot think that King Messiah will have to perform signs and won-ders, bring anything new into being, revive the dead, or do similarthings. It is not so.”38 “Let no one think that in the days of theMessiah any of the laws of nature will be set aside, or any innova-tion be introduced into creation. The world will follow its normalcourse [olam keminhagoh noheg].”39 With this, Levinas is fully in accordand he would entirely endorse Maimonides’ memorable remark thatthe difference between the messianic age and all previous history is“only” that in messianic times each person will “earn a comfortableliving in a legitimate way.”40

Moreover, for Levinas the naturalistic messianism expounded byMaimonides also provided a valuable model for thinking the histor-ical relation between the people of Israel and the nations of theworld. In Chapter 11 of the Laws of Kings, Maimonides considers thepossibility that the metaphysical truth of Judaism might be dissemi-nated historically by a wily divine plan that employs Christianity andIslam in order to propagate the metaphysical knowledge of Godrevealed to Moses. Overcoming Maimonides’ hesitation, Levinas

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41 Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1990), 163; cf. In the Time of the Nations, trans. Michael B. Smith(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 182.

42 In the Time of the Nations, 5943 Beyond the Verse, 181.44 Beyond the Verse, 181.45 Difficult Freedom, 296. Levinas is referring here both to Maimonides and to

Gershom Scholem, whose “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea inJudaism” (1959) was published a year before Levinas delivered his reading of BTSandhedrin 99a which occasions his reflections on rabbinic messianism. See alsoLevinas’ important eschatological reflections in “Meaning and Sense” (1964), BPW, 50.

heartily endorses the “missionary role of Christianity in the serviceof monotheism.”41

And yet, as we would expect, Levinas’ regard for this “eschatol-ogy of truth” is characteristically ambivalent.42 Whereas Maimonideanmessianism is oriented to “bringing about the happiness of contem-plation,” Levinas argues against a messianic vision in which knowl-edge is the end rather than a means for serving peace and justice.43

This Maimonidean messianic naturalism leads Levinas to affirmthat “the Messianic City is not beyond politics,” but unlike Maimonides,he thinks that such messianic politics is not only concerned with therational ordering of society for the purpose of attaining wisdom. Themessianic idea refers to the intrinsic value of an ethical society.Accordingly, even as Levinas appreciates Maimonides’ naturalizedpolitical eschatology he insists that such a messianism “certainly doesnot absorb all that waiting for the Messiah means for Jewish sensi-bility.”44 While Maimonidean rationalism and naturalism are applauded,they are credited with “only the negation of the miraculous,” whereasLevinas advocates a messianic vision in which knowledge is attainedfor the sake of other people.45

Yet even as Levinas’ ethical eschatology sharply diverges from theintellectualist messianism of Maimonides, it strangely resembles thelatter’s well known view about “the world to come” (olam hahbah). Inother words, what Levinas calls “messianism” and what Maimonidescalls “messianism” contrast; but this masks a more important affinitybetween what Levinas calls “messianism” or “eschatology” and whatMaimonides calls “the world to come.” For Maimonides, the impor-tant distinction is between finite goods attainable on the linear planeof history (including the messianic age) and the infinite good whichoperates vertically and which he calls “the world to come”—it toocannot be realized in history though it is the term of our ultimate

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46 Maimonides view is of course heavily indebted to the tension in Aristotelianethics between the moral and contemplative purposes of life, as is pointedly evi-dent at the very end of the Nicomachean Ethics. On the latter, see the illuminatinganalysis of Jonathan Lear in Happiness, Death, and the Remainder which could usefullybe applied to the Maimonidean picture.

47 Levinas has been criticized for figuring the messianic future in terms of “theson.” The criticism is warranted, though there is no philosophical reason for “thefecundity of time” to desire and produce a masculine image of the other-to-come(“the son,” rather than the child). It has perhaps not been sufficiently noticed thatthe messianic idea in Totality and Infinity not only attests to Levinas’ conservativegender politics but also to a Christologically informed eschatological imagination,though of course for Levinas the messianic other, the son, is always still to come.

48 In the Time of the Nations, 59.49 In the Time of the Nations, 172.50 In the Time of the Nations, 169.

desire.46 In Maimonides’ view “the world to come” is always still tocome because there is an infinity of knowledge that can never be real-ized in actu by a human mind. Levinas also thinks that the escha-ton is always to come, though for him this is because infinity ispresented ethically in the face of a person still to come.47 His ambiva-lent attitude to Maimonides’ eschatology is thus an extension of hisambivalence to the latter’s intellectualist anthropology. Just as Levinasrejects the idea that to be created in the image of God is to actu-alize the intellect, so too is he at variance with Maimonides’ viewthat the purpose of creation is to actualize the intellect through theattainment of knowledge.48

5. Metaphysics: Knowledge or Ethics?

Here we touch on Levinas’ deep ambivalence towards Maimonides.This ambivalence is spelled out at the far end of Levinas’ career,50 years after his first reflections on Maimonides, in an interviewhe conducted with Françoise Armengaud in 1985. This is the onlyother substantive discussion of Maimonides we find in Levinas work,beside which we have but desultory and brief comments. WhileLevinas acknowledges the monumental status of Maimonides in theJewish tradition—“Who in their right mind would question the exis-tence of Mont Blanc?”49—he hesitates considerably since Maimonidesbelongs to “the great philosophical tradition that finds intelligibility,rationality and meaning in knowledge. In Maimonides, spirituality isessentially knowledge.”50 This explains Levinas’ faltering attitude toMaimonides. For Levinas, the purpose of creation is to bring forth

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51 In my forthcoming book, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’ Jewish Philosophy, Iexplore this more fully.

52 Guide I.18, p. 44.53 Chalier brings out this point nicely in La trace de l’infini, 59f.54 In the Time of the Nations, 170. The correspondence between the Hebrew terms

Levinas cites from Halevi (who of course wrote them in Arabic) and his own ethicalvocabulary suggests a complex and still insufficiently unexplored project of trans-lating Levinas’ Greek/French back into Hebrew, term by term. Many of Levinaskey philosophical terms are evidently translations of terms from classical Jewishliterature and liturgy. Steven Schwarzchild was the first to see this.

55 Guide, I.7, p. 33 (my emphasis).56 Guide, III.18, p. 475. For an illuminating discussion of this see Yair Lorberbaum,

“Maimonides on Imago Dei: Philosophy and Law—the Crime of Murder, theCriminal Procedure and Capital Punishment” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 68, no. 4 (1999),533–56.

goodness in the form of ethical action for the other, whereas forMaimonides the ultimate purpose of creation is to perfect the intel-lect.51 Two examples will suffice to explain how Maimonides’ intel-lectualism led Levinas to distance himself from the medieval master,despite the extremely productive rapport he established with him atthe outset of his career. The nub of the contention is that Maimonidesregards metaphysical knowledge as the highest state of religious con-sciousness, whereas Levinas regards knowledge as serving an ulti-mately ethical purpose. Whereas Maimonides understood the ultimateunion a human might attain with God in terms of “knowledge anddrawing near through apprehension,”52 Levinas favored the view ofYehuda Halevi, according to which proximity to transcendence wasless an intellectual than a social accomplishment.53 On this view,knowledge is inferior to “terms like ‘association’ (hithabrut) and ‘prox-imity’ (hitqarvut). It is as if these social meanings of ‘the relation’ didnot indicate a deficiency in knowledge, some least bad approxima-tions of knowledge, but were, rather, possessed of their own, sover-eign positivity.”54 Or to take another, more telling example: WhereasLevinas affirms a Maimonidean account of creation in order to expli-cate a related view of human dignity in terms of freedom and par-ticularity, Maimonides himself thought that a human being lackingactual metaphysical knowledge is in fact not in the image of God but“is, as it were, a thing resembling man or imitating him.”55 Later in theGuide, Maimonides says that such individuals who have failed to actu-alize their intellects “have been relegated to the rank of the indi-viduals of all the other species of animals: ‘He is like the beasts thatspeak not’ [Ps. 49:13, 21]. For this reason it is a light thing to killthem, and has been even enjoined because of its utility.”56

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57 In the Time of the Nations, 169f., and similarly in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readingsand Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 138 and 145; cf.Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed., Jill Robbins (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2001), 283.

One can, therefore, understand why Levinas desisted from explic-itly appropriating Maimonides, despite his initially productive effortsand the continuity of the themes of freedom, particularity, and cre-ation. Precisely because Levinas accepted the standard interpretationof Maimonides as a metaphysician, as we saw earlier, he was bothdrawn to the logic of transcendence and repelled by its epistemo-logical cast. In “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” delivered in1977, Maimonides is twice mentioned, on both occasions for importingcontemplative ideals into Judaism. Levinas even censures Maimonidesfor subordinating the ethical purpose of revelation to the goal ofacquiring rational knowledge. “In Maimonides, spirituality is essen-tially knowledge: knowledge in which being is present to the mind,in which that presence of being to the mind is the truth of being, . . .assimilation by thought and immanence, in which the transcendenceof God can signify only negatively.”57 Levinas could therefore hardlyturn to Maimonides in order to advance his post-metaphysical andanti-epistemological Jewish theology.

However Levinas’ critique of the intellectualism and the meta-physics of Maimonides does not lead the two Jewish philosophers topart company. For in seeking a relation with transcendence that isnot limited to knowledge, Levinas turns to skeptical and typicallynegative formulations. And these intimately recall a profound ten-sion in Maimonides’ work between metaphysical and negative the-ology. Both Maimonides and Levinas seek not so much to apprehendtranscendence but to release it from the limits of the concept. WhileLevinas continues to call this way of thinking “ethics,” there is nodenying that he owes an enormous debt to radical forms of nega-tive theology for whom the truth of God lies outside conceptualknowledge. Maimonides is of course the outstanding Jewish exam-ple of this tradition. There is, then, a gap between the metaphysi-cal Maimonides who seeks to understand God as intellect by meansof the human intellect and the Maimonides of negative theology forwhom God’s transcendence exceeds the categories of the intellect.To appreciate the proper intimacy between Levinas and Maimonideswe must therefore explore this gap.

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58 Difficult Freedom, 1759 Pines, “The Limitations of Human Knowledge According to Al-Farabi, ibn

Bajja, and Maimonides,” Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. I. Twersky(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 100.

60 Pines himself diffidently admits that “there are passages in the Guide whichappear to disprove” his view (100). He has been roundly taken to task on philo-logical and interpretative grounds by Herbert A. Davidson, “Maimonides onMetaphysical Knowledge,” Maimonidean Studies 3 (1992/93): 49–103. For an equallysound conceptual refutation of Pines’ view which demonstrates the polarity ratherthan the compatibility between Kant and the standard metaphysical reading ofMaimonides, see R. Z. Friedman, “Maimonides and Kant on Metaphysics andPiety,” Review of Metaphysics 45 ( June 1992): 773–801.

6. Ethical Negative Theology

Despite the undeniable intellectualist orientation of Maimonides’thought as a whole, already in 1935 Levinas opened a different anglefor approaching the Great Eagle’s notoriously pliable text. Maimonides,he said, had “glimpsed” Kant’s insight that metaphysical knowledgecould not in fact be attained but could only be postulated on thebasis of practical obligations. This interpretation is extended in “AReligion for Adults” (1957):

The knowledge of God which we can have and which is expressed,according to Maimonides, in the form of negative attributes, receivesa positive meaning from the moral “God is merciful,” which means:“Be merciful like Him.” The attributes of God are not given in theindicative but in the imperative. The knowledge of God comes to uslike a commandment, like a Mitzvah. To know God is to know whatmust be done.58

Like Shlomo Pines’ controversial interpretation, Levinas proposes thatMaimonidean negative theology provides a proto-Kantian critique ofmetaphysical theology resulting in an avowal of the supremacy ofethico-political life over and above intellectual speculations aboutGod’s essence and true reality.59 Pines’ interpretation has been sub-ject to devastating critiques,60 but these do not apply to Levinasbecause his interest in the history of philosophy was from the outsetconstructive rather than historical. This much he made clear in hisopening reflections on Maimonides: “Along with scholarly research thatsituates a great thinker at the crossroads of those influences to whichhe was subject and those that he exerted there remains room for amodest but important question: who is he for us? . . . The truly philo-sophical aspect of a philosophy measures itself by its contemporary

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61 “The Contemporary Relevance of Maimonides,” JJTP 16.1, pp. 91–94. Levinaslearned this from Heidegger. John Caputo lucidly explains Heidegger’s philosoph-ical hermeneutic in his Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (NewYork: Fordham University Press, 1982) and deploys it in order to overcome Heidegger’sdismissal of Aquinas. Caputo’s book, like Jean-Luc Marion’s more recent “retrieval”of Aquinas, provides the methodological precedent for the following interpretation ofMaimonidean negative theology. I have been particularly stimulated by the workof Marion; on this question in particular see his God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans.Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991) and “Thomas Aquinasand Onto-theo-logy,” in Mystics: Presence and Aporia, eds. Michael Kessler and ChristianSheppard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 38–74 and his Introductionto that collection, “What do we mean by ‘mystic’?” 1–7.

62 Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1994), 14.

63 In the Time of the Nations, 172. The allusion at the end is to Leo Strauss, per-haps to Shlomo Pines too. Levinas and Strauss were both students of Heidegger,though not at the same time, and Levinas knew of Strauss’ esoteric exegeses. I donot know if Levinas met Shlomo Pines or read any of his work, but it would hardlybe surprising since Pines was of both of Levinas’ vintage and of French origin.

relevance. The purest homage that can be given to it consists inblending it with current concerns.”61 With this in mind, we mightventure to reread Maimonides as a contemporary guide for thoseperplexed not by the contradictions between Scripture and meta-physics but by metaphysics itself. Indeed, Levinas elliptically revis-ited this possibility of reading Maimonides without metaphysics. “Weknow since Maimonides that all that is said of God in Judaism signifiesthrough human praxis.”62 Without elaborating, he nevertheless pointsquite clearly to the practical implications of Maimonidean negativetheology that come to the fore when the latter’s intellectualism isovercome by negation. Fifty year after his first reflections onMaimonides, Levinas thus notes how his ethical project rejoinsMaimonides’ practical negative theology:

in Maimonides himself, to whom rational knowledge of God, meta-physical knowledge, is the supreme good of the human person (and,precisely, an inalienable good, exalting the self in its own happiness,a good that “profits yourself alone” [Guide, III.54], everything culmi-nates in the formulation of the negative attributes. But the possibilityof this knowledge is maintained as the ethical behavior of goodwill(hesed ), judgment (mishpat) and fairness (tsedeqah), as “for the other.” Theimitation of God! The love of one’s neighbor is at the summit of alife devoted to supreme knowledge. This is a remarkable reversal, unlesswe are to question the sincerity of this teacher, suggesting that he mayhave spoken otherwise than he thought, to avoid unsettling piousminds.63

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64 Diana Lobel, “‘Silence is Praise to You’: Maimonides on Negative Theology,Looseness of Expression, and Religious Experience,” American Catholic PhilosophicalQuarterly, vol. 76, no. 1 (2002): 25–49.

65 Pines, “The Limitations of Human Knowledge”.66 Ehud Z. Benor, “Meaning and Reference in Maimonides’ Negative Theology,”

The Harvard Theological Review, 88, no. 3 (1995): 339–360.67 E.g. Guide, I.68, I.72, III.51.

If Levinas is generally critical of Maimonidean metaphysics, here hesuggests that negative theology might provide a critique of meta-physical knowledge and thereby open a passage from intellectualismto ethics. This is exactly the task he saw for himself with respect tothe history of western philosophy, which he regarded as overly con-cerned with epistemological matters at the expense of ethics. Thepossibility of reading Maimonides without metaphysics thus curiouslyconverges with Levinas’ lifelong project of critiquing philosophicalintellectualism in order to advocate for the primacy and ultimacy ofthe ethical life.

However in order to test this hermeneutical possibility, we mustunderstand how negative theology might lead to ethics. After all, thevia negativa is a cognitive exercise aimed at purifying the mind oftheological errors. Indeed, on other readings, Maimonidean negativetheology leads to intuitive knowledge of the divine that cannot beformulated linguistically,64 or to skepticism,65 or to a construction ofrational symbols pointing the unfathomable perfection of God.66 Isthere, then, an ethical significance to negative theology? I want tosuggest that Levinas and Maimonides point in the same direction intheir affirmative answers to this decisive question. Three theses onthe ethical significance of negative theology can be formulated.

(1) Negative Theology Works in Practice but Not in Theory. Levinas providesus with an important answer to the difficult question of why nega-tive theology leads to ethics rather than, say, to silence or skepticism.It is the “remarkable reversal” he rightly detects at the end of theGuide that suggests a way beyond quietism. For Maimonidean neg-ative theology, without the turn to ethical or political action theacquired intellect would correlate with its divine object, and the lat-ter would thereby lose its sense of radical transcendence. This is whyeven though Maimonides frequently posits an isomorphism betweenthe acquired intellect (or the metaphysical self, identified as the imageof God) and the Active Intellect (or the metaphysical Deity),67 his

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68 E.g. Guide, I.59, III.20–21.69 Totality and Infinity, 53.70 Guide, I.54 and III.54.71 Guide, I.54 and III.54. This is also Pines’ view in “The Limitations of Knowledge.”

A distinction between ethics and politics is maintained by both Levinas andMaimonides in different ways, though my point that negative theology is practicalcuts across it.

72 Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2000), 223–24. The elided sentences, where this idea is given further boldand marvelous formulations, should be studied in more detail. I return to one pointthey raise at the very end of this article. Note also that the theme of non-eroticlove is also central to both Levinas and Maimonides, and for similar reasons.

negative theology contests this correlation.68 The otherness of Godthus exceeds the apprehension of “God” by the intellect, just as forLevinas the otherness of the Other does not correlate with episte-mological evidence. “Correlation does not suffice as a category for transcen-dence,” Levinas emphasizes.69 According to Maimonides, even Mosescannot have knowledge of God’s essence and can therefore knowonly the trace of God, His effects, actions or expressions but notHis true reality. In order to know God, then, Moses must turn awayfrom God’s face to His trace.70 For Maimonides, as for Levinas, thistrace is found in practical life, in ethics and politics. The negationat work in negative theology thus leads both thinkers from meta-physics to ethics or politics.71 Negative theology surpasses metaphysicalknowledge of God by going beyond the limits of the intellect inmoral and political action. In the Guide, this movement from meta-physics to ethics is called the imitation of God. In Levinas’ view,the approach to ethical transcendence requires precisely the samesort of “reversal” which Maimonidean metaphysics undergoes.

In order that disinterestedness be possible in desire, in order that thedesire beyond being not be an absorption, the desirable (or God) mustremain separated within desire: near, yet different—which is, more-over, the very meaning of the word “holy.” This is possible only ifthe desirable commands me to what is undesirable, only if he com-mands me to the undesirable par excellence: to the other person . . . Herewe find the notion of a love without eros . . . In this reversal and thisreferral of the desirable to the nondesirable, in this strange missioncommanding the approach of the other person, God is torn out of theobjectivity of presence and out of being. He is no longer an object oran interlocutor in a dialogue. His distancing or his transcendence turnsinto my responsibility: the nonerotic par excellence.72

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73 Otherwise than Being, 152. In these thoughts Levinas joins the neoplatonic tra-dition, where Maimonidean negative theology also belongs.

74 “Meaning and Sense,” BPW, 64; the French sens of course means both “mean-ing” and “direction.”

75 Guide I. 58, 135.76 For example, see Joseph A. Bujis, “The Negative Theology of Maimonides

and Aquinas,” Review of Metaphysics 41 ( June 1988): 723–738.

In order for the love of transcendence to be practiced, the love mustrelease the object from the grasp of knowledge, release it even fromthe concept of an object. “Transcendence owes it to itself to inter-rupt its own demonstration.”73 In order to keep transcendence inplay, theology must turn away from the object of its desire. Onlyby an interruption of the desire for God can God’s transcendencebe maintained. Ethics accomplishes this interruption. It breaks thehomology between the acquired intellect and the Active Intellect.The desire for God thus passed passes beyond the limits of knowl-edge in order to practice its love. It thereby becomes ethical nega-tive theology. In his famous interpretation of Exodus 33, Maimonidesdescribes the Attributes of Action as the ethical traces or moral effectsof God which we are enjoined to imitate in the absence of anyknowledge of God’s true reality. So too for Levinas transcendenceis not given in any positive sense, not even in the immediate appear-ance of a face, but refers to the moral trace we attribute to “Il,”the pronom toward which knowledge is oriented through ethical action.“He shows himself only by his trace, as is said in Exodus 33. . . . Itis through this illeity . . . that being has a sense [sens]. A sense whichis not a finality. For there is no end, no term.”74 Transcendence isnever given, never positive, neither when the intellect actualizes itselfin cognition nor when the face is presented to intuition.

(2) Negative Theology is Always a Practice of Humility. Levinas’ Maimonidesmoves from the desire to approach God through knowledge to theexperience of God as non-knowledge—or the acknowledgement ofGod as the experience of not knowing. Negative theology tells onenothing about God: “the attributes of negation do not give us knowl-edge in any respect whatever” but “conduct the mind toward theutmost reach that man may attain in the apprehension of Him.”75

It is well known that for Maimonides “the utmost reach” implies nopartial or analogical knowledge of God’s essence.76 Negation is cat-egorical, as when “we say of a wall that it is not endowed with

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77 Respectively, Guide I. 58, 136; I. 56, 130. The traditional contrast here is withAquinas. Maimonidean negative theology is once again closer to Neoplatonic tra-ditions than Aristotelianism.

78 Guide I.50–52, I. 58.79 “God and Philosophy,” CPP, 166.80 Guide I. 58; 137. On another occasion I hope to take up the function of praise

and its poetic character in the Guide.

sight” rather than the analogical relation implied between “a mus-tard grain and the sphere of the fixed stars.”77 Knowledge of Godis a category mistake, for the structure of knowledge—based ondefinitions, essential attributes, accidental attributes, predicates, andrelations—fails when it comes to the absolutely simple, unique, andincomparable unity of God.78 There is no comparison or analogicalrelation between us and God; we are separated by God’s unique-ness. What then can be learned from negative theology? As is notuncommon, at this point radical negative theology borders on a typeof weak or agnostic atheism—“transcendence to the point of absence,to the point of a possible confusion with the stirring of the there is.”79

Let us only point to the common response Maimonides and Levinasmake to the absence of knowledge of transcendence. For both, the unknowing we experience when our capacity to understand falls short of God’s uniqueness leads to, and obliges us to, humility.In Maimonides’ words:

Glory then to Him who is such that when the intellects contemplateHis essence, their apprehension turns into incapacity; and when theycontemplate the proceeding of His actions from His will, their knowl-edge turns into ignorance; and when the tongues aspire to magnifyHim by means of attributive qualifications, all eloquence turns intoweariness and incapacity!80

Negative theology provides no knowledge, only the acknowledgmentof one’s limits. It gives us the sense of our limits and the partialityof our knowledge. This humility is the starting point for every post-metaphysical ethic, since such an ethic forgoes the moral certaintiesattained by pure reason and universal principles. In demanding weaccept our own partiality and finitude and acknowledge that we haveno access to the absolute, negative theology leads directly to an ethicsof humility.

This explains why humility is the most conspicuous deviationMaimonides makes from the Aristotelian doctrine of the intermedi-ate virtues. Unlike Aristotle, for whom humility simply reflects social

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81 Maimonides, Commentary to Avot, IV:4, Hilchot De’ot 2:3; cf. Shemonah Perakim, ch. IV, which the Commentary to Avot radicalizes. On this, see Steven S. Schwarzschild,“Moral Radicalism and ‘Middlingness’ in the Ethics of Maimonides,” in idem, ThePursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild, ed. Menachem Kellner (Albany:State University of New York Press, 1990), 137–60 and Herbert A. Davidson innote 82.

82 Herbert A. Davidson, “The Middle Way in Maimonides’ Ethics,” Proceedingsof the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 54, (1987), 72.

status, Maimonides takes the view that humility is a particularlyimportant religious and philosophical virtue for all people and, more-over, one that ought to be practiced in extremis. Whereas the inter-mediate virtues cultivate moral character, humility ought to bepracticed “to the extreme point . . . to utter humility of spirit” andwithout regard for finding the correct mean.81 Humility is the neg-ative theological virtue par excellence. This ethical position is difficultto reconcile with the metaphysical interpretation of Maimonides, foron that account the human intellect is at least in some measure ade-quate to divine reality. Maimonides intellectualism elevates humanbeings, whereas humility is literally a call to be “lowly of spirit,”shf hl ruhach. The privilege Maimonides accords to the virtue of humil-ity, and the departure this reflects from the Aristotelianism he oth-erwise imbibes, makes best sense when one sees it as the positiveethical expression of the negation of the metaphysical intellectualismcorrelating the human intellect, as the actualized imago, with God.

The point is brought out in an important shift in Maimonideanethics which turns on the increasing significance of negative theologyin his thought. In his earlier legal corpus, moral character is regardedas the desideratum of the process of imitatio dei. However, in theGuide, which was written later, Maimonides argues that God doesnot truly have moral attributes and does not really have a moralcharacter. His via negativa services this argument. We are only to actas if God had a character, while we know that in truth God can-not have a character lest he be subject to all the fallacies of posi-tive theology. To imitate God is therefore no longer to cultivateone’s character but, on the contrary, to negate the attributes of per-sonality. As Herbert Davidson has shown, the ethics of the Guide“demands the extirpation of all psychological characteristics, extremeas well as intermediate.”82 The anthropological ideal has dramati-cally shifted. Whereas formerly the virtuous personality cultivatedmoral habits by imitating God and following the middle way, now

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83 Davidson, “The Middle Way in Maimonides’ Ethics,” 66–67.84 Davidson, “The Middle Way in Maimonides’ Ethics,” 65.85 Guide, I. 59, p. 139.86 Davidson almost concedes this. He admits that the issue can be framed in

terms of a shift from an Aristotelian ethic to a Neoplatonic one (p. 61) but thenrejects this interpretation for reasons I find far less persuasive than his own admit-tedly “vague and illusive” postulate: “The change was rooted in a change inMaimonides’ personality” (62). For an account that would support my reading, seeDiana Lobel, “‘Silence is Praise to You.’” It was Meister Eckhart who was per-haps the first thinker to appreciate and apply the ethical implications of Maimonidesradical negative theology; for a lucid elaboration, see Yossef Schwartz (above, note 9),141–238.

the very idea that God has a moral character is negated. Imitationof God is therefore no longer a matter of cultivating one’s moralcharacter but of negating the very idea of self. As Davidson says,“Just as God does not act from intermediate characteristics or anyother psychological characteristics, man should perform acts thatspring from no psychological characteristics, intermediate or other-wise. . . . Man will walk in God’s ways by performing acts as Goddoes, not through intermediate, or any other psychological charac-teristics, but wholly dispassionately.”83 Instead of cultivating a moralpsychology, the idea now is to negate the self, for moral character-istics are in no way imitations of the attributes of God. Lurkingwithin Maimonides’ anthropology is a mystical account of the nega-tion of self, a negative anthropology whereby the pursuit of theextremity of non-knowledge contests all that has been accomplishedin the form of the virtuous self. What is left is only the trace of one-self imagined in relation to an unknowable God. Davidson thinksthis shift from cultivating character to total negation of the moralself is based on Maimonides radicalized view in the Guide that Godis “pure intellect and consequently has neither intermediate, nor anyother, psychological characteristics.”84 However, in my view, it is notthe radicalized intellectualism but the radicalized negative theologythat drives Maimonides from an ethics that imitates God’s ways toan ethics that imitates God’s transcendence with respect to all actionand virtue. It is because imitation has become radical negation thatthe theological significance of character disappears. It is not the pureintellect that overwhelms the moral self but the dazzling beauty ofthe unknowable intensity with which God becomes manifest throughnegation.85 Here again, I would emphasize the Neoplatonism at workin Maimonides’ most radical thinking.86 On account of negative the-

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87 Totality and Infinity, 299. In Derrida’s words, “Totality and Infinity bequeaths tous an immense treatise of hospitality”; “A Word of Welcome,” in Adieu: To EmmanuelLevinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1999), 21. See also that entire essay as well as his “Hospitality,” trans. GilAnidjar, in his Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 358–420.

88 Otherwise than Being, 112.

ology, moral character is plunged into the dazzling darkness ofunknowing rather than the light of the intellect. Imitation of Godnow yields a negative anthropology. The imperative to become likeGod amounts to an endless task of becoming unlike, of denying allessential attributes and of contesting the very idea of an essence tothe self. It is by imitating a God beyond being, intellect and attrib-utes that one strives to become wholly dispassionate, disinterested,and thereby humble “to the utmost possibility”.

For Levinas there are also two stages to the ethics of humility,and these correspond in a non-trivial way to Maimonides’ view. Forearly Levinas, ethics requires the cultivation of a moral self that isable to reach out, open itself, and welcome the other. As Levinasput it, “The subject is a host.”87 This position should also be regardedas an ethics of humility, since hospitality requires one to make spacefor the other within one’s home or one’s borders. However, likeMaimonides’ view in his legal corpus, at this stage ethics is verymuch based on the integrity of the moral subject. Hospitality takesplace at a point where the self experiences its own limits, but theselimits also constitute the self ’s own identity. One can only play thehost and welcome the other into one’s domain when the bounds ofthat domain are fairly well established. Ethics is an act of makingspace for the other and in that sense it is like the virtue of humil-ity, but at this stage humility and hospitability preserve the integrity,identity and separation of the moral subject.

In Otherwise than Being, Levinas radicalized his argument, just asMaimonides did in his later philosophical work. The subject nowsheds the vestiges of self-identity because she incorporates the Otherinto her self. There never was a moment of selfhood untouched bythe other, not even in “sensibility,” where the self is already boundto the other. Whereas earlier Levinas regarded the subject as a host,identical to itself and on that basis able to welcome the other, henow says that the “subject is a hostage.”88 No longer does the selfpreserve its separate identity, as the earlier work suggested, but thevery notion of a separate self is humbled, exposed to the other at

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89 Otherwise than Being, 141.90 Otherwise than Being, 142 n. 5. See Maimonides, Laws of Teshuva 10:3 and cf.

Guide III.51 (p. 627–28).91 Otherwise than Being, 82–83. See too the relevant analysis by Oliver Davies,

“Beyond the Language of Being: A Comparative Study of Meister Eckhart andEmmanuel Levinas,” Eckhart Review 9 (Spring, 2000), 38.

92 Otherwise than Being, 192n.24. The footnotes to OBBE hint at a Jewish com-mentary Levinas must have had in mind throughout the magnificent chapter on“The Glory of the Infinite” at the end of Otherwise than Being.

every level of “subjectivity,” regardless of what sort of actions, com-mitments, or even attitudes one has toward others. The shift is froma metaphysical account of humility to the humbling of metaphysics,from the subject as a host to the subject as a hostage. Humility isno longer a matter of opening oneself to the other but of acknowl-edging that one is only a self by way of the other. That is why thestructure of subjectivity is now called “substitution.” “It is an undo-ing of the substantial nucleus of the ego . . . which does not leaveany place of refuge, any chance to slip away.”89

As was the case for Maimonides, Levinas’ later work is a quiteradical exercise in negative anthropology. Like Maimonides, Levinascalls it a “folly,” a “sickness,” and an “obsession,” and he too, likeMaimonides, finds it expressed in the verse “I am sick with love.”90

Both want us to think of ourselves as literally unselfish, un-self-ish.Humility has become a way of overcoming the pride of separation,even at the level of flesh, and thus a radical disinterest with regardto all that seems to benefit me alone.91 A footnote to Otherwise thanBeing refers to Rashi’s commentary to Numbers 12:12, itself basedon Sifre, which relates that Moses felt his own flesh was being con-sumed by the plague inflicted on the body of Miriam for the wrongshe caused Moses, for the other is of one’s own flesh.92 Unselfishness,then, but also an acknowledgement of my implication in the sufferingand wrongdoing of the other, for neither of us have anything of ourown besides each other.

(3) Only Ethical Negative Theology by Name. If negative theology aban-dons theory in order to turn to praxes of un-self-ishness, what allowsus to use the name “theology” or even “ethics” to describe this pro-ject? Since it abandons the pretence of knowing anything about God,should this practice not be regarded as un-theistic, perhaps evenatheistic? By the same token, since the structure of un-self-ishness,of “substitution” as the “one-for-the-other,” arises “before the bipo-

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93 Otherwise than Being, 122; cf. Nine Talmudic Readings, 135.94 This concern was first raised by Maurice Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 63 and

then again with respect to Levinas’ later work in The Writing of the Disaster, trans.Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 18–25.

95 Otherwise than Being, 120; see also 193n.35 and, for a sound discussion, PaulDavies, “On Resorting to an Ethical Language,” in Adriaan T. Peperzak, ed., Ethicsas First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion(New York: Routledge, 1995), 95–104. While Levinas distanced himself from thelanguage of positive theology, his reliance on apophatic techniques throughout OBBEsuggests that the language of negative theology is quite indispensable for his pro-ject; perhaps even more so than the language of “ethics.”

96 Otherwise than Being, 150.97 Guide, I. 56.

larity of good and evil presented to choice”93 and is thus prior toordinary moral language, why should this exposure be called “ethics”?94

Unlike some of his followers, Levinas at least admitted that “the eth-ical language” to which he resorts “does not arise out of a specialmoral experience.”95 In place of moral phenomenology Levinas appliesthe tropes of negative theology. “It is not only outside all intuition,but outside of all thematization, even that of symbolism.”96 Howevereven without resorting to a special ethical experience or a dogmaticmetaphysics of morals, Levinas still has a way of justifying the namehe gives to his apophatic project. Once again Maimonides is ourbest guide to Levinas” strategy of naming the unrepresentable hecalls “ethics.” For when faced with the problem of naming withina discourse that contests essence, attribution and descriptions gener-ally, both Levinas and Maimonides concentrate on the way theproper name acts as a “rigid designator” (to borrow Kripke’s wellknown term) or an anchor into the real of what would otherwise bea misleading vocabulary of positive theology or ethics. Ethical neg-ative theology thus culminates in a reduction to the proper name.

For Maimonides, the proper name of God, the Tetragrammaton,YHWH, is the unique occurrence of divine reality in the world.Everything said of God is subject to negation or else must be rein-terpreted as an attribute of action. And while much has been madeof the way the attributes of action provide us with a mode of imi-tating God, for the Maimonides of the Guide that is not at all thecase, since the attributes tell us nothing about God’s essence and infact we are proscribed from positing any actual relation between theactions we observe in nature and God’s true reality.97 All the actionsascribed to God are just metaphysical constructs that relate only to“God,” in other words to our limited concept of God rather than

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98 Guide, I.63.99 Guide, I.63, p. 156.

100 This is the famous Millian account of proper names which Saul Kripke appliedto natural kinds in general in Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1980).

to God’s true reality. They are, then, nothing but metaphysical idolsin our minds that should not be taken to refer to anything. Eventhe other names of God—Shekhinah, Shaddai, Makom, Elohim,etc.—must be understood as descriptors which should only be attrib-uted “as if ” to God; in other words, as descriptions relating only to“God” and in no way whatsoever as describing God’s true reality.98

As Maimonides puts it:

all names are derivative or are used equivocally, as Rock and otherssimilar to it. He, may He be exalted, has no name [shem] that is notderivative except the name having four letter [shem ben harba otihot], whichis the articulated name [shem hahmeforash]. This name is not indicative ofan attribute but of simple existence and nothing else. Now absoluteexistence implies that He shall always be, I mean He who is neces-sarily existent. Understand the point at which this discourse has finallyarrived.99

Only YHWH has a real meaning (or signifiance, to use Levinas’ idiom).The reason is clear. Every other name is in fact a covert descrip-tion, a metaphysical analogy “indicative of an attribute” which doesnot befit the “simple existence” and “absolute existence” of God,which is designated exclusively by the proper name, YHWH. Sincethe proper name refers only to itself, tautologically, it designates thething named, in this case God, without describing the object in anyway, neither by way of the imagination nor by way of the intellect.As a proper name, YHWH designates or refers to its “object” with-out describing “God” at all. It means as much as any proper name,precisely nothing, for proper names are not exchangeable for anyset of descriptions, no matter how precise.100 Rather, every attributeand description refers back to the proper name, which thereafterfunctions as an anchor for everything subsequently said about thesubject. A proper name establishes reference without imputing senseor semantic content to the object. In order, then, to negate everydescription of “God” without forfeiting the right to refer to him, oneneeds a proper name. It alone enables the derivative and even erro-neous descriptions to refer successfully to their object. It is not because

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101 Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum(Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 157–58; and see 152–59 for amore detailed and lucid analysis of this problem which is also indebted to Kripke.I do not see why Hilary Putnam objects to the application of the theory of directreference in his “On Negative Theology,” Faith and Philosophy, vol.. 14, no. 4 (1997):407–422, when he says, “However, in the case of the word ‘God,’ or of any ofthe Names of God that Maimonides discusses (e.g. YHWH), there was never a pointat which some human speaker was able to indicate to Whom he or she was refer-ring by using a literally correct definite description (17).” Putnam mentions Mosesin the footnote to this sentence, but refuses to allow that he or anyone else couldbe the anchor for the name of God because “it is not the semantic of their words thatenables us to do this, but something else, something that is beyond language alto-gether (n. 31).” But that is precisely the point. According to this reading of Maimonides,only Moses has direct, non-semantic referential acquaintance with YHWH.

“God” is compassionate and gracious that one can say “YHWH iscompassionate and gracious” but because the adjectives refer to YHWH,whatever the true nature of YHWH really is, that we can use suchdescriptions loosely. Without the primacy of the proper name nodescription would suffice. But the fact that God has a proper name,for Maimonides, means that everything said about “God”—that Heis “great,” “good,” “wise,” “living,” and “existing”—is actually saidabout God. Descriptions of “God” thereby attain legitimacy. This isnot because such metaphysical descriptions accurately correspond toGod’s true essence, for they do not, indeed they are pure homonymswith respect to God. The point is that even if such descriptions arecategorically mistaken, they are mistaken about the right thing,namely, YHWH. Without the proper name one would have onlyfalse descriptions that could not even be said to refer to anything.The unique function of the proper name ensures that renouncingmistaken metaphysical descriptions about “God” nevertheless bringsus closer to God because the negations all point to the non-semanticmoment when the name of YHWH is given. Everything thereforedepends on the original giving of the Name. Moshe Halbertal andAvishai Margalit have made this important point:

The crucial question here is what guarantees the reference of the tetra-grammaton in the first place, and the answer is Moses. He is the directlink in the sense that his knowledge was not mediated by descriptions.Moses’ relationship with God does not guarantee any supernaturalpropositional knowledge [i.e. metaphysics], but it guarantees that thename by which God “revealed” himself to Moses has a reference. Andfrom Moses the name was passed on by the chain of tradition.101

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102 Otherwise than Being, 197n.25.103 Otherwise than Being, 162 and 190n.38.104 In “The Name of God according to a few Talmudic Texts,” Beyond the Verse,

119, Levinas interprets the Talmud in this light: “the Hebrew terms of the OldTestament that we are led to translate by God, or Deus, or Theos, are proper namesaccording to the wishes of the Talmud. The name of God is always said to be aproper name in the Scriptures. The word God would be absent from the Hebrewlanguage! A fine consequence of monotheism in which there exists neither a divinespecies nor a generic word to designate it.” He then makes the Maimonideanismof this interpretation explicit, though not without a telling and ironic slip, by cit-ing the Mishnah Torah in a highly idiosyncratic manner: “The first book of thefamous Tractate in which Maimonides, in the twelfth century, summarizes and sys-tematizes the Talmud, begins in fact as follows: ‘The foundation of all foundationsand the pillar of wisdom consists in knowing that the Name exists and that it isthe first being.’ The word designating the divinity is precisely the word Name, ageneric term in relation to which the different names of God are individuals. . . .The term thus names—and this is quite remarkable—a mode of being or a beyondbeing rather than a quiddity.” Levinas thus reads shhm as meaning “Name,” whereasall other interpreters read Maimonides to be saying that “. . . the pillar of wisdomconsists in knowing that there is a being and that it is the first being;” that is, not asshem but as sham. Both Samuel Ibn Tibbon and Joseph Karo specified that thoughshhm should be vocalized openly, as sham, meaning “there,” it should not be takenliterally to mean that there is a “place” where God resides but that Maimonidesis importing a standard Arabic term for “existence” into Hebrew. In other words,Levinas reads the theology of the proper name of God into the opening of theMishneh Torah, a creative misreading I have not come across elsewhere which canbe explained by privileging negative theology over metaphysics in the thought ofMaimonides.

In Maimonides’ radical version of negative theology only the propername of God, YHWH, refers to anything real. Everything else saidof God depends for its legitimacy on belonging to the causal chainof transmission—the oral tradition—going back to Moses’ uniquereception of the proper Name. Like Maimonides, Levinas also regardsall theological language except for the proper name as incapable ofdescribing what it presumes to talk about: “Language about Godrings false or becomes myth, that is, can never be taken literally.”102

For Levinas no less than for Maimonides, the language of positivetheology, including words such as “divinity” and “transcendence,”or “good” and “exists,” are completely unrelated to the unique andinconceivable reality which they feign to describe—“as though Godwere an essence.”103 All we have, rather, is the Name, not anythingthat can be described or conceived. Even the word “God” wouldnot describe anything but our metaphysical idols unless it refers tothe non-semantic real of YHWH.104

The language of theology is thus only legitimate when it main-tains a causal connection to the act of naming witnessed by Moses,

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105 See Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah VIII–X and, for a more comprehensive discussionand further references, Moshe Halbertal, “Sefer Hamitzvoth lahrambam, hahar-chitechturah shel hahhalalakah vehhahtheoria hahparshanit shelah” [Hebrew], Tarbiz59 (2000), 462–64.

in other words when it is situated within the living tradition issuedby Moses. At this penultimate stage it is important to note the con-servative and exclusivist implications to the theology of the propername, since its proper functioning requires every use of the word“God” to refer to YHWH. All other theological language and allother names, including “God,” “Being,” “Love,” or “Deity,” areregarded as meaningless metaphysics if they do not intentionally referto YHWH. The causal account of God’s proper name implies thatevery other use of religious language—from fleeting “spiritual” expe-riences had by individuals to prolonged reflections in rational the-ology—fails to refer to its theological object when it denies theprimacy of the proper name YHWH originally given to Moses.Precisely because of the direct, non-semantic, non-descriptive, non-metaphysical acquaintance that only Moses has with YHWH are therest of us able to use religious language properly, even if in princi-ple we cannot determine how these descriptions correspond to YHWH.According to Maimonides, all prophetic authority derives from andrefers back to Moses’s unique acquaintance with God. It follows thatany prophecy breaking with Mosaic authority—which Maimonidesequates with the authority of the Law—ipso facto invalidates its ownlegitimacy, because Moses alone establishes the proper use of God’sname.105 It is because negative theology leads to the primacy of theproper name that Maimonides lays so much emphasis on the chainof tradition issuing from Moses. This is not merely a dogmatic claimabout the authority of tradition but a philosophical claim about theuniqueness of Moses’ acquaintance with YHWH. Without a tradi-tion going back to Moses the Maimonidean project of radical neg-ative theology would be entirely critical of conventional religiouslanguage and leave no room for its legitimization. However, on thebasis of such a tradition negative theology can simultaneously cri-tique the semantic value of religious language and its correspondenceto divine reality and at the same time legitimate its multiple uses inreligious life, law and liturgy. Since there is no substantial or meta-physical way of identifying YHWH, what is absolutely decisive is tomaintain a causal chain of transmission—a living tradition—goingback to the pragmatic occasion of the giving of the name. Metaphysics

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106 Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1996), 4–5.

gives way to the pragmatics of naming and thereby makes hermeneu-tical theology possible.

Levinas makes a strikingly similar move when in his later workhe rejects a metaphysical account of the other that he had adoptedin his earlier work. Whereas Totality and Infinity argued that the otherwas present metaphysically in the form of a face whose epiphanydemands an ethical response, Otherwise than Being eschews this meta-physical view of the other. In this work it is not the face but thename of the other that lays claim on us. Levinas’ later work is thusan ethics of the proper name of the other rather than an ethics ofthe metaphysical character of the other, as was the case formerly.Just as Maimonides says that “this name is not indicative of anattribute but of simple existence and nothing else,” so too Levinasregards the uniqueness of the other in terms of a proper namestripped of all attributes. In the Forward to a book he called ProperNames, Levinas says:

Perhaps the names of persons whose saying signifies a face—propernames, in the middle of all these common names and commonplaces—can resist the dissolution of meaning and help us to speak. Perhapsthey will enable us to divine, behind the downfall of discourse, theend of a certain intelligibility but the dawning of a new one. What iscoming to a close may be a rationality tied exclusively to the being thatis sustained by words, the Said of the Saying, the Said of conveyingfields of knowledge and truths in the form of unchanging identities . . .106

The ethical “saying,” Levinas tells us, resists the attribution of descrip-tions to the other by illuminating the indescribable and unrepre-sentable real to which the proper name refers. Ethics, like negativetheology, hollows out substantive nouns (noms) and the false identi-ties they institute in order to approach the uniqueness of propernames (noms). Levinas makes extensive (Maimonidean) use of thehomonym in French between name and noun in order to argue thathuman beings are not substances with fixed identities that can bedescribed like common nouns but are individuated by way of propernames. This shift from a descriptive account of the other to a say-ing of proper names determines the entire logic of Otherwise thanBeing. Its epigraph attests to this by “translating” a general descrip-tion of “victims of the same hatred of the other” into the proper

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107 Otherwise than Being, 185. I have modified Lingis’ translation which renders thefinal “nom” as “noun”; on my reading it should be translated as name. The homonymybetween “noun” and “name” in French must be accounted for every time Levinasused the word nom.

108 “When I talk about responsibility and obligation, and consequently about theperson with whom one is in a relationship through the face, this person does notappear as belonging to an order which can be ‘embraced’, or ‘grasped’. The other,in this relationship of responsibility, is, as it were, unique: ‘unique’ meaning with-out genre. In this sense he is absolutely other . . . The essence of responsibility liesin the uniqueness of the person for whom you are responsible. You are in love, alove without concupiscence”; “Emmanuel Levinas,” in Raoul Mortley, French Philosophersin Conversation (London: Routledge, 1990), 16.

names of the members of his family who perished in the Holocaust.What we have here is precisely an example of a “reduction to thesaying” which works by moving from a description of the otherbelonging to the order of moral discourse to proper names thatsilently say what is at stake. The closing of Otherwise than Being, anextraordinary feat of apophatic writing, confirms this interpretation:

In this work which does not seek to restore any ruined concept, thedestitution and the desituating of the subject do not remain withoutsignification: after the death of a certain god inhabiting the worldbehind the scenes, the substitution of the hostage discovers the trace,unpronounceable inscription, of what, always already past, always “he” does not enter into any present, to which are suited not thenouns designating beings, or the verbs in which their essence resounds,but that which, as a pronoun, marks with its seal all that a name canconvey.107

Like Maimonides, Levinas moves from nouns (or essences) to verbs(or actions) and finally to the proper name. Ethical negative theologyis a way of responding to the unspeakable singularity of the otherdesignated without description by the proper name. It is a process of sub-stituting one’s substantive identity as a subject or an ego for the rela-tion one has with the uniqueness of the other to which the propername attests. The very idea of “the Other” was always, for Levinas,a trope for the uniqueness of each person;108 early Levinas regardsthat uniqueness as constituted in the expression of the face, laterLevinas says that it lies in proper names. While there is no sense inwhich metaphysical transcendence is positively given, there remainsthe realism of a uniqueness borne by the proper name to which allessence is reduced. In both early Levinas and Maimonides, meta-physical positivism gives way to a pragmatic realism founded on theproper name.

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109 This citation and those that follow come from the Guide, I.64, pp. 156–57.Surprisingly, none of the modern authors who argue for the decisive significance

7. Glory to the Name

One final swerve must be taken. As we saw, one of the major impli-cations of the theology of the proper name is that it liberates Godfrom the concept only by restricting the proper use of the name toa specific hermeneutical tradition. In critiquing the descriptivist basisof theological language Maimonides turns to a theology of the propername as the only way of truly referring to the indescribable realityof God, because the proper name YHWH refers, by way of a chainof transmission, to that reality without positively describing it in anyway. By negating theological descriptivism, Maimonides thus liber-ates theology from metaphysics while chaining it to the Mosaic tra-dition. Levinas makes a similar move. His later philosophy rejectsthe descriptivist account of the other which he formerly relied on inorder to explain the sense of ethics. In Otherwise than Being the otheris no longer described in terms of the epiphany of the face, as themorally destitute orphan, stranger or widow, but apophatically reducedto the proper name without essence. And yet Levinas too, likeMaimonides, chains the proper name to a particular hermeneuticalframework, namely, those proper names referring to human beings.Levinas’ anthropocentricism thus functions in a similar way to theradical Orthodoxy of Maimonides theology of the proper name; itnegates the concept of transcendence by reduction to the proper nameand thereby overcomes metaphysics, but it rigidly insists that the ref-erents of proper names apply first and foremost to human beingsand thereby restricts the practical significance it seeks to prioritize.Like the reduction of God to the proper name YHWH, the reduc-tion of the metaphysical other to the proper name thus simultane-ously performs a radical critique of theology and stakes exclusiveclaim to the rights of the proper name. Maimonides and Levinashave thus correctly been associated with a profoundly radical con-servatism. And yet the texts of both philosophers burst through theboundaries circumscribed by the proper name.

In the chapter following the one in which Maimonides posits theuniqueness of the Tetragrammaton, he clarifies his position in a deci-sive way. In Guide I. 64 the uniqueness of YHWH, as the only propername referring to God’s essence, is supplemented, in a quite Derrideansense, by the name kavod, glory.109 Maimonides begins by reiterating

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of the proper name of God within the logic of Maimonides’ negative theology evenmentions this chapter, which follows immediately on the heals on the one con-cerning the uniqueness of the Tetragrammaton. These commentators move fromthe uniqueness of the Name back to the metaphysical God of moral and intellec-tual perfection, whereas Maimonides moves forward to a profound equivocationbetween YHWH and glory.

110 Guide, I.64, p. 156–57.111 Cf. Guide I.5, I.18, I. 25. This is the position defended by Menachem Kellner,

Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism (Oxford: The Littman Library of JewishCivilization, 2007), 179–215.

112 Glory thus functions much like love in the Christian tradition of negative

that the Name YHWH is “sometimes intended to signify His essenceand true reality.” As we have seen, unlike all the descriptive accountsof God (unlike metaphysical theology), the proper name is not ametaphorical, analogical, symbolic, or equivocal way of speakingabout God because it is not a description at all but a designationreferring through the chain of transmission to Moses’ direct acquain-tance with YHWH. However, Maimonides now adds a crucial detail:there is another name for the unspeakable “essence and true real-ity” of YHWH, namely, glory.

This expression [YHWH] is sometimes intended to signify His essenceand true reality, may He be exalted, as when he says, Show me, I prayThee, Thy glory [Exod. 33:18], and was answered: For man shall not seeme and live [Exod. 33:20]. This answer indicates that the glory that isspoken of here is His essence, and that [Moses’s] saying Thy glory isby way of honoring Him, in the same way as we have made clearwith regard to his saying: And they shall say to me: What is His name?[Exod. 3:13].110

Earlier in this chapter Maimonides had said that “the glory ofY.H.V.H. is sometimes intended to signify the created light,” whichsuggest that there is a clear distinction between the “essence andtrue reality” of YHWH and that of glory, since the latter refers tothe created light and not to YHWH itself.111 However, in the pas-sage cited above Maimonides says that glory sometimes refers notto the created light but to the “essence and true reality” of YHWH.When Moses asked to see the glory, he was not asking to see thecreated light but to see YHWH Himself. As Maimonides explains,“This answer indicates that the glory that is spoken of here is Hisessence.” Unlike every other description attributed to YHWH, gloryalone sometimes refers to the essence. Glory is not a metaphoricaldescription or an attribute of YHWH but another proper name forYHWH.112 While Maimonides gives pride of place to YHWH as

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theology, as another proper name and non-metaphysical referent for God, as Caputohas beautifully argued, e.g., in On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001). See alsoDerrida, “Sauf le nom (Post-scriptum),” trans. John P. Leavey, in On the Name(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 68–79.

“the true essence and reality” of God, he offers glory as anotherway of referring to that true essence and reality that is reached bynegating propositions, descriptions, attributes, and concepts of “God.”Just as Moses cannot distinguish between them, so too Maimonidesleaves it open as to whether glory is derived from YHWH or whetherit is another originary way of referring to the true essence and real-ity of God. Here a cleavage emerges within the referential languageof negative theology that makes way for an alternative to the claimto exclusively own the proper name. For while only Moses attainedacquaintance with YHWH, and therefore only those who refer tothe God of Moses can be regarded as using it properly, glory, whichsometimes also signifies “the essence and true reality” of God, ismanifest throughout the cosmos and can be experienced by anyone:

Glory is sometimes intended to signify the honoring of Him, may Hebe exalted, by all men. In fact all that is other than God, may He beexalted, honors Him, for the true way of honoring Him consists inapprehending His greatness. Thus everybody who apprehends Hisgreatness and His perfection, honors Him according to the extent ofhis apprehension. Man in particular honors Him by speeches so thathe indicates thereby that which he has apprehended by his intellectand communicates it to others. Those beings that have no apprehen-sion, as for instance the minerals, also as it were honor God throughthe fact that by their very nature they are indicative of the power andwisdom of Him who brought them into existence. For this induceshim who considers them to honor God, either by means of articulateutterance or without it if speech is not permitted him. The Hebrewlanguage gives itself latitude in that it applies to this notion the termsaying [amirah]. Accordingly it is said of that which is devoid of appre-hension that it praises God. Thus Scripture says: All my bones shall say,Lord, who is like unto Thee [Ps. 35:1]; whereby it conveys that the bonesnecessitate this belief, as though they put it into speech, for they toomake this known. It is in view of this notion being named glory thatit is said, The whole earth is full of His glory [Isa. 6:3], this being equiv-alent to the dictum, And the earth is full of His praise [Hab. 3:3], for praise is called glory. Thus it is said: Give glory to the Lord your God[ Jer. 13:16] and it is said: And in His temple all say: Glory [Ps. 29:9]This occurs frequently. Understand then likewise the equivocality with

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113 Guide, I. 64, p. 157. The Hebrew translators all render “minerals” as domemim.

reference to glory and interpret the latter in every passage in accor-dance with the context. You shall thus be saved from great difficulty.113

If the theology of the proper name established the direct referenceto God’s reality, the theology of glory makes it impossible to decideif this true reality is named by YHWH or said otherwise, for exam-ple, by bones and minerals. At the very origin of the giving of thename it was impossible to tell if the referent was YHWH or theglory; all subsequent usages of both terms cannot therefore decideif, to speak truly of God, one should refer to YVHV or the glorywhich fills the earth. If Maimonidean negative theology indeed cri-tiques the idea of a rationally and morally perfect “God” by reduc-ing metaphysics to the theology of the proper name, it neverthelessdoes not stop with a stable tradition that owns the Name—becausethat tradition itself, from the outset, could not decide between theName and the glory unleashed throughout the earth. Glory wouldbe the essence and true reality of God disseminated rather thanencapsulated in the Name. While both YHWH and glory refer tothe essence and true reality of God, they give rise to contrary tra-jectories. The one leads to a tradition with proprietary rights to theunspeakable Name that go back to Moses and the other entails rad-ical theological impropriety, since glory is the saying that all thingsproclaim. Not only Jews, not only philosophers, not only humans,Maimonidean negative theology makes minstrels of the mineralsattesting to the excess of glory on the earth.

This reading is at odds with the prevalent and well founded inter-pretation of Maimonides as a rationalist for whom God can only beknown through the intellectual faculty. I do not mean to dispute theincontestable privilege Maimonides generally accords the intellect. Ihave argued, rather, that there is a conflict of interest betweenMaimonides’ intellectualism and his negative theology. Following thevia negativa takes us beyond the capacity of the intellect to apprehendGod. It leads to the proper name YHWH, and this Name is notconvertible into metaphysical descriptions or rational symbols. Wheremetaphysics and intellectualism fail, the Name succeeds in referringto the reality of God, without knowing or describing it. However inGuide I.64, immediately following the reduction of metaphysics to theName, kavod is singled out as another way of saying the truth of

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114 Menachem Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism (Oxford: The LittmanLibrary of Jewish Civilization, 2007). In his view kavod functions like the Attributesof Action; it is the “divine wisdom as expressed in nature” which can be under-stood by the intellect but not by the senses (215, cf. 196, 198). Some of the evi-dence Kellner adduces supports this interpretation, especially Maimonides’ Commentaryto Mishnah Hagigah 2:1, though it is significant for my alternative interpretation thatthis text was written long before the radical negative theology of the Guide. In anycase, most of the evidence equivocates. Kellner himself admits that in Guide I. 54“kavod is made to mean God’s essence,” as is the case in I.64 and III.13, where“kavod can mean God’s essence” (195, 198). Kellner does not think much of this.His argument is wholly oriented toward defending the intellectualist interpretationof glory as what is known “to intellectual apprehension, not to sensual apprehen-sion” and what yields a “high understanding of the truth about God” (193, 197).Yet at the same time he acknowledges that “Kavod as understood here [in I. 54] isin principle beyond human understanding” (195). On the one hand, then, the kavodis what is known to the intellect when it apprehends the wisdom inherent in nature.This is categorically not God’s essence but the expression of that essence in nature.Yet on the other hand the kavod sometimes means God’s essence, which is why itis in principle beyond human understanding. Kellner simply affirms the first possi-bility without exploring the implications of the second. The reason for this is thatKellner, like many scholars, concentrates on the disjunction Maimonides establishesbetween the perceptual encounters with “God,” which he takes to be idolatrous,and the truths apprehended by the intellect. Everything hinges on the superiorityof the intellect over sense-perception. However my reading emphasizes the fact thatwhen Maimonides turns to the via negativa, he argues that the intellect is just aslimited as the senses in apprehending the truth of God. From the perspective ofnegative theology, the conceptual idol must be destroyed along with the perceptualidol. Kellner assumes that the governing disjunction in Maimonides is between theintellect and the senses, but the important contrast in negative theology is betweenon the one hand the intellect and the senses and on the other hand the reality ofGod attested by the Name and the Glory. Glory manifests this excess of divinereality; the intellect is dazzled by it even as the earth is saturated with it. Like theName, kavod is neither the object of perception nor intellection, though for oppo-site reasons. Whereas the Name attests to the true reality of God which cannot becognized or perceived but only received through tradition, kavod attests to the essenceof God which cannot be cognized or perceived because it overflows the categoriessense. As Name and Glory, the true reality of God is thus either perfectly emptyor superabundant, depending on how one receives.

115 Guide III.9, p. 437; cf. Kellner’s discussion, 197f.

God without claiming to have knowledge about God. Like the Name,glory is not a metaphysical concept and the intellect is not a privi-leged way of honoring it. In my view, Maimonidean glory is notreducible to the wisdom of nature, as Menachem Kellner has recentlyargued.114 In so far as it sometimes refers to the “true reality” ofGod, as Maimonides says, it cannot be ciphered into the humanintellect, for this reality is a “perpetual, dazzling light the overflowof which illumines all that is dark—in accordance with what is said in the prophetic parables: And the earth did shine with His glory[Ezel. 43:2].”115 Negative theology leads not to an apprehension of

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116 Guide, I.59, p. 139; for an excellent discussion, see Diana Lobel, “‘Silence isPraise to You.’” Note also that Spinoza concludes the Ethics, trans. R. H. M. Elwes(New York, Dover, n.d.), with a mystical turn to knowledge of the third kind whichis an ethical relation to particulars that he calls “love or blessedness” and which is,“in the Bible, called Glory, and not undeservedly. For whether this love be referredto God or to the mind, it may rightly be called acquiescence of spirit, which is not really distinguished from glory” (Part V, Prof. XXXVI, p. 265). Here too glory/respect (kavod ) indicates a way of honoring the particular which ordinary knowl-edge compromises. Indeed it is not surprising that in Jean-Luc Marion’s revival ofa phenomenological Neoplatonism, we find the “saturated phenomenon” explicitlyidentified with the glory: “The gaze cannot any longer sustain a light that bedaz-zles and burns . . . Thus the glory of the visible weighs down with all it has.” Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 203f.; see also 363n. 47, whereMarion explains that his emphasis is on the sense of weightiness in the Hebrewkavod, which he takes as an excess of phenomenality that cannot be borne by thegaze; see also Marion, God Without Being, 84–95.

117 “Levinas and the Project of Jewish Philosophy,” 292, which can be explainedby privileging negative theology, and especially the theology of the proper name,over metaphysics in the thought of Maimonides.

God but to an excess of glory that surprises and saturates the intel-lect. “Thus all the philosophers say: We are dazzled by His beauty,and He is hidden from us because of the intensity with which Hebecomes manifest, just as the sun is hidden to the eyes that are tooweak to apprehend it.”116

Taking Maimonides’ at his most negative therefore leads to a cri-tique of metaphysical intellectualism and to a reconsideration of thestatus of kavod as it figures in his text. Two points are worth empha-sizing. First, the “saying” of the glory is not a reversion to meta-physical theology but is as much a negation of metaphysics as thereduction of “God” to the proper Name. Glory is not to be con-fused with a metaphorical or analogical attribute of God. It is, rather,a term that equivocates with the true essence and reality of YHVH.Like the proper Name, glory is not objective, in the metaphysicalsense of standing over and against a subject or abiding permanentlythrough time. Neither is it known by the intellectual faculty or byrational and moral symbols. As Shmuel Trigano says, “it is as ifLevinas had reworked Saadya’s ‘glory,’ using Maimonides’ negativi-sation, for there is something affirmative in the other human beingbut there is no positivity.”117 As another proper name for YHWH,glory surpasses the metaphysical and metaphorical descriptions madeof it. Unlike all the other divine names, for Maimonides glory is nota derivative name referring back to YHWH but constitutes the orig-inal impropriety of God’s proper Name. It equivocates with “the

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thing itself,” YHWH. There is no causal or hermeneutical way ofdeciding between them, except by saying one or the other. The rad-ical orthodoxy which claims to own the proper Name can only bedistinguished from a pantheism which celebrates it in every bit ofmineral and celestial life by a decision that the Name itself does notauthorize. Reading Maimonides without metaphysics leads us to thethin line which never quite divides one mysticism from another.

Second, it follows that for all his celebrated subordination of theimagination to the objectivity of reason, the overcoming of meta-physics by negative theology requires a complete revision of this hier-archy. It is precisely the alleged superiority of the intellect thatMaimonides, like other negative theologians, puts in question. Justas reason fails every bit as much as the imagination in reaching thetruth to God’s proper name, so too does it lose its advantage in theface of the glory that fills the earth. Glory manifests an excess ofdivine reality which dazzles the intellect. Like the Name, kavod isneither the object of perception nor intellection, though for oppo-site reasons. Whereas the Name attests to the true reality of Godwhich can neither be cognized nor perceived but only receivedthrough tradition, kavod attests to the essence of God which can nei-ther be cognized nor perceived because it overflows the categoriessense. The Name and the Glory are privileged ways of indicatingthe truth of God beyond the limits of the imagination and reason.However they do so in opposite ways. Whereas the Name designatesthe true reality of God because it empties the idea of “God” of allsense, glory indicates it with an abundance of sense that neitherreason nor the imagination can contain. Hence glory, like the Name,is to be honored rather than known. Hence minerals, bones, andearth, evidently lacking the faculty of apprehension, honor the gloryno less than rational creatures. For no logos is required to honorthe glory of the true reality of God. Maimonidean negative theol-ogy thus harbors, amidst the standard interpretations, an alternativepath to the truth of God where neither the Mosaic tradition nor thehuman intellect are privileged.

In fact it could even be said that the imagination, or at least acertain aesthetics of negation and saturation (as we find for exam-ple in some modernist poetry and painting), is better equipped thanreason to honour the glory. Since art says more than what the silentcontemplation of reason will allow, it provides a way of honoringthe glory unavailable to reason. Note, however, that glory is a

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118 Elliot R. Wolfson has extensively argued that the Jewish mystical tradition hasalways sought to say in poetic and imaginative language what could only be poorlysaid by reason; see his Eros, Language, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination(New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), e.g. xiii, and Through a Speculum ThatShines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994), especially 125–88 for a detailed account of glory in medievalJewish mysticism.

119 The fact that Levinas and Eckhart have been fruitfully compared is thusentirely warranted and indeed merits further study; for beginnings, see Ian Almond,“Doing Violence upon God: Nonviolent Alterities and Their Medieval Precedents,”The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 92, No. 3. ( Jul., 1999): 325–347 and OliverDavies (cited in note 91 above); on Eckhart’s relation to Maimonides see YossefSchwartz (cited in note 9).

120 Elliot R. Wolfson, “Secrecy, Modesty, and the Feminine: Kabbalistic Tracesin the Thought of Levinas,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 14, no. 1–2(2006), 193–224; esp. 218ff. and the notes cited therein.

121 The mysticism one finds in Levinas emerges from a tradition of negativizedNeoplatonism, as we find in the Guide, rather than in the ontological mysticism ofmost Kabbalists, as Oona Ajzenstat proposes in Driven Back to the Text: The PremodernSources of Levinas’s Postmodernism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001).

decidedly non-anthropological name for YHWH—as was already thecase for the biblical priestly authors—and in that respect the mysti-cal aesthetic which aims at saying the glory is coordinate with thebasic Maimonidean impulse prized by the rationalists, namely, toavoid subjective fantasies about “God” and to overcome the self-centredness springing from indelible human fear and need. The anti-subjectivism so characteristic of modernist aesthetics thus extends thenegative anthropology of the poetics of glory.118 Indeed in some sensethe aesthetics of glory radicalizes the Maimonidean impulse. It seeksto overcome not only the anthropocentricism of moral theology butindeed the anthropocentricism of rational theology as well. In a sense,then, Levinas articulates the negative anthropology implied byMaimonides’ negative theology of the Name.119 This is a more mys-tical than rational interpretation of both philosophers. And of courseeach made his objections to mysticism well known. Yet in their rad-ically negativized thinking, Levinas and Maimonides tend toward atype of apophatic mysticism, even if such a mysticism is indeed atodds with the theosophic, symbolic and unitative mysticism theyreject. In a recent essay Elliot Wolfson makes a related claim, argu-ing that Levinas’ poetics extends the anti-theosophical Kabbalistictradition.120 Whereas the Kabbalistic tradition is positively ontological,Levinas’ mystical poetics does not take the horizon of ontology asits limit.121 On my reading, the reason for this is that Levinas performs

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122 Otherwise than Being, 145.123 The English translation has “a proper and unique noun.”

a reduction of the other to the proper name, whose uniqueness hasno ontological essence but is nevertheless real as a proper namereferring to the trace of the person.

It remains only to point out that an uncannily similar indetermi-nacy between the proper name and its glory works its way throughLevinas’ later work. As is the case for Maimonides, for Levinas thesaying—le dire (amirah)—bears witness to the truth of negative theologyas glory:

The saying prior to anything said bears witness to glory. This witnessis true, but a truth irreducible to the truth of disclosure, and does notnarrate anything that shows itself.122

Like Maimonides, Levinas regards descriptive truth as an insufficientcategory for bearing witness to the other because the significance ofthe other lies precisely in those particulars that make her uniqueand thereby elude the generalities of discourse. Like a proper name,the uniqueness of the other shows without telling and says withoutleaving anything said. The proper name refers to the real personwithout implying any positive notion of personhood. The uniquenessof the other cannot be measured according to objectivity, presenceor truth and for this reason it is “otherwise than being,” for beingis a general category or predicate which could never capture theuniqueness curled up in a name. The other is encountered by reduc-tion to the proper name and in Levinas’ view this reduction is coor-dinate with the manifestation of the glory of the other as that whichexceeds the categories of positive knowledge. In searching for an eth-ical language adequate to the singularity of the other, Levinas thusturns to glory as a way of saying what cannot be said in descrip-tive language. The glory of the other consists in this capacity tomanifest without yielding to cognition:

Its distance from a theme, its reclusion, its holiness, is not its way toeffect its being (since its past is anachronous and anarchic, leaving atrace which is not the trace of any presence), but is its glory, quitedifferent from being and knowing. It makes the word God be pro-nounced, without letting “divinity” be said. That would be absurd, asthough God were an essence . . . Does God, a proper and unique name[nom123 not entering into any grammatical category, enter without

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124 Otherwise than Being, 162.125 Otherwise than Being, 144, cf. CPP 169 and passim. See also Steven S.

Schwarzschild’s very early insights in “An Introduction to the Thought of R. IsaacHutner,” Modern Judaism 5, no. 3 (Oct. 1985), 249 and passim. My thanks to AriehBernstein for leading me to this important precedent.

126 I am using “realism” in contrast to “positivism” along the lines Hilary Putmanhas long argued. It is well known that Putnam and Kripke developed similar posi-tions in tandem by way of a pragmatic or causal account of naming. To apply thisreasoning to the Name of God is only natural. In his recent work, The Collapse ofthe Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,2002) and Ethics Without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004),Putnam prefers to speak of “objectivity without objects” rather than realism, but Ibelieve the arguments are congruent.

difficulties into the vocative? It [Il] it not thematizable, and even hereis a theme only because in a said everything is conveyed before us,even the ineffable, at the price of a betrayal which philosophy is calledupon to reduce.124

Levinas thus contends that glory is the response one makes to thereduction of the other from essence to his or her proper name. Glorywould be the language of negative theology, a language of singu-larity borne by the proper name of the other—kvod hahshem. Levinas’formulation alludes to two of the most important theophanies at the origin of the Jewish mystical tradition, those of Isaiah 6 and ofEzekiel 1 and 3, and these of course appear regularly in traditionalJewish liturgy. In this Levinasian-Maimonidean reading, which seemsclose to the movement of the text of Isaiah 6, the transcendence ofthe holy withdraws, leaving one to testify to its trace by saying ornaming the glory. “The glory of the Infinite is the anarchic identityof the subject flushed out without being able to slip away.”125 Gloryis thus what remains when the descriptive language of ontology andthe apprehensions of epistemology fail to correlate with the propername. It is an excess of negation, a realism about others without a positivism about subjects or selves.126 Moreover, just like theMaimonidean poetics of glory which expropriates the theology of theproper name, Levinas’ poetics of glory also expropriates its statedobject. While Levinas aims at a determinately ethical goal, onceessence is negated all the way to the glory of the name he acknowl-edges that “ethics” is a precarious and even derivative label for the results of his investigations. Glory is not the appearance of aphenomenon but the name one gives to the experience of answer-ing to something which has no essence, like a proper name, and yet

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127 Otherwise than Being, 156.128 Otherwise than Being, 150.129 Jean-Luc Marion, whose work is both indebted and close to Levinas’, calls

this the “anonymous a priori” which proliferates names (Being, the Other, God,etc.), since only the response determines it; “L’Interloqué,” trans. Eduardo Cadavaand Anne Tomiche, in Who Comes After the Subject? Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connorand Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1991), 244; Being Given, §28.

130 Cristian Ciocan and Georges Hansel’s extremely useful Levinas Concordance(Dordrecht: Springer, 2005) records 38 pages where Maïmonide is mentioned in28 books by Levinas. I have found a couple of additional references, though theonly significant ones consist of a telling misreading Levinas makes of Maimonideson the Fall of Adam and Eve in an interview with Raoul Mortley, French Philosophersin Conversation, 18, and see the interesting remarks on 20, and a “Préface” he wroteto Moïse Maimonide, Le Livre des Commandments, traduit, commenté et annoté parAnne-Marié Geller (Paris: L’age d’homme, 1987), 9–11. Notable as the Preface is,the substance of it suggests that Levinas never appreciated how close his own viewscan come to those of Maimonides.

constitutes identity. “Here there is an inversion of order: the reve-lation is made by him that receives it.”127 “It is an august command,but one which does not constrain or dominate and leaves me out-side of any correlation with its source. No structure is set up with acorrelate. Thus the saying that comes to me is my own word.”128

Ethical negative theology is a glorification—of the Name, of theOther, of the name of the other. But since glorification precedes theself, in effect constitutes the self as a response to it, it leads to anendless proliferation of names. The proper name is from the outsetexpropriated.129

8. Conclusion

In the course of this essay I have cited every major reference Levinasmakes Maimonides and noted all the remainder.130 It is clear thatin 1935 Levinas caught sight of the possibility of a reading ofMaimonides that suited his philosophical purposes. For thirty years,culminating in Totality and Infinity, Levinas consistently defended humanfreedom, responsibility, and the dignity of each person by virtue ofhis or her particularity (the face). This argument is rooted in ananthropological interpretation of Maimonidean metaphysical theol-ogy, which itself hinges on the notion of creation as freedom, par-ticularization, and escape from ontology. This repetition of themetaphysical Maimonides recapitulates the master’s assault on

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Aristotelian accounts of the eternity of the world by challengingHeidegger’s phenomenological description of an “eternull” world ofeverydayness characterized by “indifference” to the moral particu-larity of each person.

For most of Levinas’ career, however, the Great Eagle flew outof sight; he marked but the edge of one of Levinas’ many circles. Ihave argued that this disappearance is based on Levinas’ ambiva-lent regard for Maimonides’ intellectualist metaphysics. Unlike themedieval philosopher, Levinas does not regard the apprehension oftruth and the actualization of the intellect as ultimate goals and doesnot think that the soul is thus immortalized. This existentialist critiqueof the medieval metaphysical worldview of Maimonides is evidentlywarranted but not entirely necessary. As we now well know, the endof metaphysics opens new gates to the great medievals as much asit closes old ones. In their Jewish neoplatonic negative theology,Levinas and Maimonides venture together perhaps as far as it is pos-sible to go into some of them.

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