Reviews

Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking-of-the-Other by Barbara Harshav, Michael B. Smith, Emmanuel Levinas

spncr_a's review against another edition

this book fucked me up when i read it, with the whole dying-for-the-other, heroic self-sacrifice thing as the ultimate ethical act, but, now, nearly two years after having read it, and, still thinking of the other, i see that the other is shit and not worth dying for, even though they want you to die because they are evil-yet-hypocritical savages who want only revenge

joeri's review against another edition

4.0

For Levinas, philosophy does not begin with wonder, as with the ancient Greeks or as according to other past or contemporary romantic views of philosophy, that often with this same romantic tone say that philosophy means wondering at things as if one were a child. For Levinas, philosophy begins with a shock. A philosophy that only starts out from wonder and sets out to understand things in their being, leading the philosopher to ask questions about this being - from which ever philosophical tradition this might be done - attributes a primacy to the ontological. And wrongly so, according to Levinas. What this namely leads to, he argues, is what he calls ‘a terrible neutrality of being’, meaning an indifferent, merely investigative attitude towards the world. Levinas exposes a violent tendency in this way of thinking. It thanks its existence to an absence of the Good.

What Levinas wants to give primacy to in ontology’s stead is Ethics. For him, philosophy begins not with wonder, but with a shock, with perturbation. The question then no longer is an ontological one about how being is in its being, but an ethical one: is it good, right or justified how being is?

For Levinas, this is not only a philosophical, theoretical matter of prioritizing one way of thinking over the other for pure intellectual reasons. For him much more is at stake. Due to the violent tendency in traditional Western philosophy, we have failed to ethically deal with the Other in a humane and responsible way. With his critique, Levinas exposes an egotistical way of thinking, which he calls ‘egology’ that has no place for the Other, because it even excludes and even annihilates him. The I, can only constitute itself and exist by virtue of exclusion of the Other. Time and again, cruelty in history repeats itself because we are unable to deal with the Other in an ethical responsible way. The most extreme outcome of this thinking was the Holocaust. This is why Levinas asks himself what kind of philosophy has made this possible? Or more specifically: what kind of subjectivity gave rise to such horror? And how come 2000 years of revelation has not prevented such a terrible thing from happening? It are these questions Levinas takes with him in his deconstruction and Critique of Western philosoph, of which one can attain a neat conception of by reading this book.