Levinas and Bergson

The biggest difference between the philosophers Henri Bergson and Emmanuel Levinas may well be situated in the cult status enjoyed by Bergson in his time as a philosopher. In Paris he invariably drew full houses, and in the US his books went by the hundreds of thousands over the counter when Bergson visited New York soon after 1900. That definitely can not be said about Levinas. He was listened to, but he was not a public philosopher.

As an outward feature the two have, whether partial or not, a Jewish descent in common. Levinas came from a Lithuanian Jewish family, Bergson was born of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother.

More substantively, there is – at least initially – quite some shared territory. Or rather, there  is common ground between Bergson and Edmund Husserl, who is considered the great teacher of Levinas. You can say that Bergson and Husserl had one great concern in common. And that, with both, their thinking can be seen as attempts to answer that concern. Their problem was the materialistic spirit of the second half of the 19th century, the period in which Bergson and Husserl grew up and started their careers.

Husserl formulated his objections as follows: science, including psychology, hardly values what things mean to people. It is only interested in the existence of things. That has to be researched, proven and measured. What they mean for a human being is disregarded.

Bergson’s objection to the spirit of the times was that something, in the eyes of the then serious scientists, qualified as ‘real’ if it was measurable. With them, things – literally –counted only when they were demarcated and cut up and could be made manageable.

He illustrated this thesis on the basis of our dealing with the phenomenon of time. It was according to Bergson no coincidence that in 1884 the International Standard Time was introduced, and that seconds, minutes and hours from now were the same all over the world. What is lost in it, he said, is the inner experience of time. Thereby he was referring  for example to the phenomenon that for us a minute may seem an hour and vice versa. In the words of Husserl Bergson’s point can be expressed as follows: the deepest sense of time escapes us.

Both Bergson and Husserl found that the hierarchy should be reversed: not the flat-materialistic world was to be considered the real world, but the territory of the subjective meanings was the real reality.

Now back to Levinas. He starts, as I said, as a student of Husserl and follows him first in his quest for meaning as something primarily to be found beyond the material, everyday life. But soon Levinas becomes impressed by another student of Husserl, namely Heidegger. His exhortation to precisely recognize our lived, material existence – with its everyday concerns, labor, tools – as a wellspring of meanings, hits Levinas full in the face.

In the same way as this idea marked for Heidegger the point at which he took distance from Husserl, so it did for Levinas. From about 1930 he left Husserl’s, late 19th century triggered, thinking behind. Therewith also Bergson and Levinas had driven apart in their orientations.

Also see Sartre, Levinas and the Café and Why Heidegger doesn't bring us any further

The West, Emptiness and Jihad

There are an awful lot of them lately. People who believe that our society suffers from emptiness and spiritual void. And quite a few of them who then make a connection between the societal dullness and young people who need a cause to fight for.

The latter would be, in that view, the explanation why, after the attacks in January in Paris, we see an increase in the number of conversions to Islam. And that is, however mysterious, the tenor of a recent tweet from Joyce Oates: “Although it is tragic that IS attracts young people, it is not inconceivable; it should bring society and parents to self-examination.”

Now criticism of society’s corruption and vacuous nature is, if not of all times, then certainly of the last century. Just think of the enthusiasm with which in 1914 the Great War was greeted by a cultural elite of avant-garde artists and writers. They experienced the war as a deliverance from a personal, existential crisis of meaning of which civil society, soulless and focused on consumption as it was, was held responsible. “This war is large and stunningly beautiful”, Max Weber wrote in elated fashion.

But at the time these feelings of emptiness and disorientation lived in relatively small groups of conservative believers or artistic individuals. That’s different now.

According to the diagnosis of the philosopher Joep Dohmen, our society in its entirety is disillusioned and directionless. That’s because for centuries we had fine ideals, namely Christian charity and sacrifice readiness, but that proved too ambitious for us. We can no longer believe in it. “We need a new shared moral anthropology, in which the strength ánd the weakness of man is pictured convincingly in such a way that we find the courage to move forward together”.

But there are also seasoned secularists, as the French writer Houellebecq, who believed until recently in the ethical space offered by our Enlightenment based societies. Now they ventilate their feelings that the very general language of anti-racism and solidarity has degenerated to a form of hypocrisy. Houellebecq doubts whether the Enlightenment is still tenable. In his new novel Submission France in the year 2022 is transformed into an Islamic country.

For the large group of Muslims who now live among us the perspective is not much better, according to the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud. “Neither the West nor the intellectuals of the Arab world have a sufficiently enticing offer that allows you to organize your life. When I was thirteen I was looking for for a purpose in my life, an alternative to jihad did not seem to exist. That still applies to many others. Outside Islamism for many young people in the world there is no alternative ideological offer. You’re seeking, you need something absolute”. That ‘something’ should, according to Arabist Maurice Blessing, distinguish itself from secular liberalism or Christianity in more than only its ritual, outward manifestations. Because otherwise, why did Allah not give us the Act of Parliament or the Constitution immediately?

The dramaturgists Arie de Mol and Johan Doesburg make similar claims. Mol finds that in Western society aspects of former belief, such as a purpose in life or the radicalism of Jesus, are sorely missed. Doesburg believes that all of us long for something greater than ourselves. And we all are, according to him, looking for alternative means to find that.

With these diagnoses of a great societal void come also also suggestions for an answer. But honestly, on most of them I have my doubts.

Across the void found by Joep Dohmen the philosopher Paul van Tongeren proposes a revaluation of the traditional Christian virtues of faith, hope and love. But that does not seem credible to me for the reason Joep Dohmen already gave: we have already tried that and it turned out to be too big for us. For the same reason De Mol sees no future for the radicalism of Jesus by which he actually is so much impressed. Nevertheless radical religious devotion keeps having an enchanting appeal to him, even in the guise of jihad fighters, “because at least they have one common goal”. Though De Mol rejects any extremism, I think such glorification of radicalism is not well thought out and downright dangerous.

A very different suggestion for a response comes from historian Beatrice de Graaf. “We have to tell stories to each other again, as a strategy. Because shared stories create connection, they help people to identify with each other. They force people through the presentation of a plot, and elaboration of some characters, to make a choice to do or not do something. That is more than an ‘ideology’, it is not bloodless, there is life, passion and drama. And at the moment, unfortunately, especially IS is  very good at that.

Compare that with our own story for a while. What is the holy triad of democracy yet? Choose Cameron, buy an iPhone, or else? It is therefore urgent that future teachers in the teacher training are again being taught in the old-fashioned storytelling, and that we start thinking by what stories we want to fascinate future generations. If only from a counter terrorist point of view”.

This plea by De Graaf for storytelling perhaps comes most close to what I think is necessary. What I like about it is that it corresponds to our desire for lived experience, because in this area we run dry. But there is something instrumental in her suggestion, and certainly something artificial. Indeed, do not stories and community in general stárt with experiences? Is it not rather shared experiences – which háppen to you – that you need? Instead of ideas abóut experiences and stories?

Nevertheless, her suggestion seems valuable to me, because there is always something to experience, also in instrumentally deployed stories. But to me it does not yet constitute the real thing, that which can truly fill emptiness. Stories keep being things in the second degree, derived from what you really want in the first degree: the experience of actual contact and commonality.

But if so, then my mood gets a bit less gloomy. Because I just read in the newspaper that some technical schools do not seek innovation and improvement primarily in the material offered or teaching techniques, but in personal relationships with and between students. Relationship before  achievement, they say. And at universities there seems to be a similar trend.

And what you can do about it in education, you can – whether or not handing in your iPhone – even at work, in the care, and not in the last place: at home, with each other. From this perspective the real thing is: first grade experience, namely of real contact, much closer to us than where everyone seems to be looking. Who is still speaking about emptiness?

Also see Alcoholism and Jihad, What happened in the West? and Taylor, Levinas and Emptiness

Measurability

The time that students rode through town in carriages is over, fortunately. True, in those days there always were a few of them that used the very same pool of money and time for thorough study of their subjects, in breadth and depth. Then quality could just spontaneously emerge: Bildung we can only dream of.

Because of the affluence on which that Bildung mostly rested, the latter had a decidedly elitist and exclusive character. I’m not sorry to see it gone, and I welcome the fact that large groups of other people now share in academic education.

So I also understand that a lot of public money goes to the universities. And that one wants to have some control over it. And that directors and managers should monitor that. And that inevitably some form of counting and measuring is always involved.

In the debate about the return on investment at the universities, I therefore disagree with the proposition that there is nothing to measure. Because immeasurability would make large-scale universities unmanageable. Then intellectual and cultural formation would again be accessible only to those of whom also the means are immeasurable.

In addition, there is another, more fundamental reason why I do not agree with the inmeasurability thesis. I think that measurability dóes exist in this field. However: not in the form of the brute performance indicators that managers and financials invent and apply nowadays. As if it were thém who provide the added value of education and research.

As to measurability in a realistic form, I rather think of the kind Ben Tiggelaar recently referred to in his NRC-column. People with serious ambitions, he wrote, also on the field of arts and sciences, often put themselves all sorts of standards – as countable and even rigid as imaginable. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright for example got up every day at four o’clock to work three hours in quiet. “Like the bureaucratic habit of many writers to count the number of words they daily produce and to impose themselves quotas. Hemingway: 500 words per day, Stephen King: 2000”.

The difference: these professionals know exactly what is needed for fruitful results. Tiggelaar’s advice to managers and financials would therefore be: go talk to the professionals and do not decide for thém what standards they must meet, but let them decide themselves. Let a professor describe his personal ideals and benchmark her own performance.

Because professors (and students) are no less keen on return than managers. But they have more sense of it.

Also see Grief

Wiping

Recently the book Isabella. The Warrior Queen appeared, written by Kirstin Downey, about Queen Isabella of Spain. She was the wife of King Ferdinand and together they at the end of the fifteenth century managed to expulse the Muslims and Jews from Spain.

The book was recently discussed by Nina Weijers. In doing so she made use of a certain cliché that gradually has become implausible, and which therefore I think it is better not to use any longer.

I refer to the following passage (about Isabella): “Although she was fond of the New Testament, her mentality was more Old Testament in nature. As Downey concludes: ‘She was always more inclined to claim an eye for an eye than to turn the other cheeck.’”.

I object to the misguided nature of a suchlike passage, including the presented quote. Because what happens in the passage is paradoxical:
- It starts uncritically from a specific cliché, namely, the association of the New Testament with love and rejection of the principle of an eye for an eye.
- Then it notes that a supporter of the New Testament simply employs the principle of an eye for an eye.
- In the last sentence it restores the association of the New Testament with  turning the other cheek.

I do object to this because - in spite of the factual reality - the labels of New Testament and Old Testament remain intact: Old Testament = violence, New Testament = love.

This is correct to the extent to which the New Testament is another book with a different content. But I think that, once a book has gone along for thousands of years, our associations must be determined not only by the content. The actual intercourse with it by authority figures and its cultural integration must weigh in the associations we attach to them. From that point of view Isabella’s performance would well be exemplary of the action of many other New Testament lovers. If so then that, in my opinion, should affect the automatic associations we attribute to the New Testament.

My suggestion would therefore be to permanently wipe from our minds those clichéd associations. Because the clichés continue to produce misunderstandings and subcutaneously keep playing their dark role. When erasing them we can let us help by recognizing the reality of nuclear deterrence strategy of the Christian West, which has been based for decades on the principle: if you’ll hit, I will hit you first. Or by the position taken by leaders from the New Testament Eastern European culture as Putin and Poroshenko. The latter recently told us: “Do not think that we turn the other cheek when we are attacked”.

Maybe there is not much difference between the Old and New Testament. And is the real difference where people start murdering or beheading out of the blue, rather than in people who use rules of equal retribution for their own defense. The latter may be quite human. Turning the other cheek seems to me rarely an option anyway.

Also see Holy fire and Landmarks

The pedantic novel

There is a number of things in our society that are surrounded with an aura of loftiness. I think of the prestige of getting to know other cultures, distant travel, and reading novels. In itself there is nothing wrong with that, because these are all venerable activities.

But there is one recurring aspect of that prestige that bothers me, and that’s the moral pretension that is (too) often linked to it. By traveling and reading you’d become a better human being, because you learn to enter into the world of others.

Let me premise: any insight into a different way of thinking is a broadening of the mind. Therefore, travel, cultural exchanges and novels certainly have an added value. What I object to is the pretentious claim that may go therewith.

Take reading novels. Recently Beatrice de Graaf said to believe that the novel is an irreplaceable source of knowledge, because it is the only way to get into someone else’s head. “Only the novel does justice to the complexity of feelings, thoughts and motives that guide our behavior”.

That’s simply not true, because there is at least one other way, which is that of the confronting real-life encounter with another human being, a phenomenon that in my workshops I extensively explore with participants. It indeed háppens that a person, in conversation with someone else, is convinced that his interlocutor will think so and so about a certain matter. And that then the sobering surprise appears that the interlocutor thinks totally differently. If that happens to you, you have for one moment been right in the other’s head.

So it is not true that reading novels would be the royal or even only way to that end. Therefore that pretension bothers me, but perhaps even more because of the underlying scheme leading to that pretension. Namely that the real life confrontations are ignored, in favor of a spectator’s confrontation. Priority is given to the situation in which you sit down into your armchair and have chosen a particular story; over the situation in which life itself, in the person of another human being, confronts you with another universe.

In the end, we intend to retain control. We draw back, decide when and how and how far to be confronted. That’s legitimate, and broadening of our horizons will certainly occur. But please let’s not pretend that it is the only way, nor that it enables you to know the world. In ordinary daily life, even of non-readers, often more world enlarging confrontations occur than we would like to have it.

Also see Sacred imagination and Levinas and Empathy

Professional philosophy's sad course

What do the philosophers Levinas and Nussbaum have in common except that they are Jewish?

What strikes me – and I don’t know to what extent that’s Jewish – is that they both started off with  similar good philosophical intentions. Ánd: that in both cases the trade somewhat has been spoiled.

Levinas’s good intention consisted in his wish to, while reasoning, escape the tyranny of reason. That was bound to fail, you might say, but nevertheless he díd it, a large part of his philosophical life. He showed, up to the very way he formulated and argued, how Western philosophy, at least from Plato onwards, can be called an exercise of equalization of diversity through the uniformity of reason. He called that equalization the ‘domination of the Same’, and opposed to that the Other.

Nussbaum formulated her good intention as: getting away from the Platonic abstractions to which our society and science in her eyes are still too much attached. By that she was referring to an unhealthy privileging of mind over body, of policymaking over implementation and of abstract ideals over concrete goals. To get rid of that, she sought to draw upon he thinking of Aristotle, because he would do more justice to the concreteness of human existence than Plato did.

But then the philosophical lifes of Levinas (1906-1995) and Nussbaum (1947) are quite different, as much as the areas and subjects they dwell upon diverge widely. Levinas worked until about sixty at a Jewish school, first as a teacher, then as director. Besides he published a lot in the fields of philosophy and judaïsm. 

Nussbaum, after graduating, taught at Harvard, Brown University and Chicago. In addition she – often in collaboration with development economist Amartya Sen – does research in the field of economic development, ethics and pedagogy, and publishes extensively on these subjects.

ut amidst all these differences I discover a parallel, and one that to me is pretty shocking. Namely that, as the philosophical careers of Levinas and Nussbaum develop, they seem to get further away from their original intentions as mentioned above.

In itself that needs not to be a wrong development. Indeed, advancing insights are always welcome. But it does not look like advancing insights. Because in that case the changes of direction should have taken place in an argued way, in the sense that Levinas and Nussbaum convinced us that Plato might have been more right than they first thought.

But that’s not what they do. It seems, rather, that they fall prey to the cunning suction to which philosophy is easily exposed and through which especially professional philosophers – by the absence of confrontation with compelling practical issues? – slip into the trap of universalizing reason.

So, I make the connection with Levinas’s and Nussbaum’s professional philosophical positions. In the case of Levinas, because I see the disappointing about-face displayed when, after a long life as a philosophical outsider, he in the sixties reached the academic position he so coveted. From this position he published the book Otherwise than Being, which – unlike the work of his early and middle period – abandons the anarchist, undecided openness between the Same and the Other in favor of a fundamental, foundational position for the Other. I tend to see in this philosophical hierarchy the reflection of the academic, in a sense Platonic, hierarchy into which Levinas then had entered.

Nussbaum from the outset sincerely sought the connection between her thinking and pedagogical and developmental work. But in the eyes of many commentators those efforts soon after her breakthrough with the book The Fragility of Goodness got stuck in excessively theoretical and abstract arguments. In the formulation of medical doctor/philosopher Bert Keizer: “The problem with people like Nussbaum is that they only deal with people like Nussbaum”.

So, the decline into an intellectual Platonic schema in her career occurred much earlier than in Levinas’s career. However, a parallel can be found in the idea that a position at the academy may have played a role: Nussbaum has from the outset been a professional philosopher.

Should we, therefore, better not mourn when independent philosophy faculties are threatened with closure, as in Rotterdam and Amsterdam?

Maybe not, as long as there continues to be philosophizing.

Also see Levinas and Spinoza

Numbers

Is it going to be a question of numbers?

I mean, are we witnessing a clash of civilizations à la Samuel Huntington? In the sense of a massive cultural conflict between Islam and the West, to be won by the largest and the strongest?

I don’t want to think along those lines. But sometimes – out of fear – I let myself be carried away by the idea. And for the duration of this piece I let that happen.

Because, what we experience, sometimes is quite similar to a battle of civilizations. Last week, in the News an imam was interviewed who made mention of the unbearable humiliations he and the entire Islamic community had to undergo. He was a gentle man, but he did not miss the opportunity to say that they together amount to 1.7 billion.

And Amsterdam Mayor Van der Laan repeated his legitimate message that we may well be afraid, but should not let ourselves be terrorized. There is no need for that, he added, because “we are with many more”, by which actually he was referring to a coalition of all those who are against terror.

But if numbers are that important, then prospectives for Jews are not so good. Because in that respect, we of course draw the short straw.

It’s true, we consider ourselves as part of the coalition against terror, and are usually considered by others to do so. You can even say that Israel - apart from the landgrabbing  Greater Israel supporters – is geographically in the frontline against barbarism.

However, It only takes something small to happen in the Middle East for the Western public opinion to believe that the Jews actually do nót belong in the partnership. For the Islamic public opinion this is already a foregone conclusion anyway, so then it’s going to be pretty cramped with those small Jewish numbers. You would be Greater Israel-fan because of it.

But that’s what I do not want to be.

Also see Incentives and Another Judaïsm?