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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
Levinas survived the Second World War under difficult and humiliating circumstances, while his family, with the exception of his wife and daughter, perished. These experiences may well have shaped his sense that what is demanded of us is an 'infinite' willingness to be available to and for the other's suffering. 'The Other's hunger - be it of the flesh, or of bread - is sacred; only the hunger of the third party limits its rights', Levinas writes in the preface to Difficult Freedom. To understand fully what Levinas means here would be to understand his whole philosophy. I want to make a beginning at such an understanding.
LEVINAS’S MISSION TO THE GENTILES
Levinas’s audience is typically a gentile audience. He celebrates Jewish particularity in essays addressed to Christians and to modern people generally. He is fully aware of this. Thus he writes ‘Lest the union between men of goodwill which I desire to see be brought about only in a vague and abstract mode, I wish to insist here on the particular routes open to Jewish monotheism’ (df 21–2) – and again,
A truth is universal when it applies to every reasonable being. A religion is universal when it is open to all. In this sense the Judaism that links the Divine to the moral has always aspired to be universal. But the revelation of morality, which discovers a human society, also discovers the place of election, which in this universal society, returns to the person who receives this revelation. This election is made up not of privileges but of responsibilities. It is a nobility based not on an author’s rights [droit d’auteur] or on a birthright [droit d’aînesse] conferred by a divine caprice, but on the position of each human I [moi] . . . The basic intuition of moral growing-up perhaps consists in perceiving that I am not the equal of the Other. This applies in a very stict sense: I see myself obligated with respect to the Other; consequently I am infinitely more demanding of myself than of others . . . This ‘position outside nations’ of which the Pentateuch speaks is realized in the concept of Israel and its particularism. It is a particularism that conditions universality, and it is a moral category rather than a historical fact to do with Israel [my emphasis]. [df 21–2]
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