Bill Vallicella, over at the Maverick Philosopher has had a regular
feature the past few days on "the trouble with Continental Philosophy."
I had mentioned him in my post on
judging Continental
Philosophy as an example of a critic who has at least read the
literature. I don't think he read it right, but he has read it.
Previous posts of Vallicella discussed
Alain Badiou,
Deleuze,
Slavoj Zizek, and today
Levinas. Now I'm somewhat crippled in that none of the texts
he attempts to critique have I read. However in each case from the
quotation at hand it seemed that his reading was a bit questionable.
For instance it seemed to me that he misread a critique of
positivism as a critique of Analytic Philosophy as a whole. While
I could only guess, it sure seemed like strawmen were being attacked.
Further a lot of the stylistic criticisms seemed more about personal
aesthetics than a particularly strong point about communication.
Now to be clear, today's comments on Levinas were on a text I have not read. I do want to point out a few potential flaws in his critique though. First off, to those unfamiliar with him, Levinas is somewhat difficult at first to read. Many of his texts use the tradition of philosophical language found in the Jewish religious tradition. There are numerous allusions to Talmudic or Kabbalistic ideas and themes. I'd be the first to admit that it is initially off-putting, especially those unread in those traditions. (Fortunately I've read at least a reasonable amount of Jewish philosophy, especially within the medieval period. Still, I suspect I was still missing numerous allusions.) Having said all that though, I'm not sure criticisms about how Jews sometimes speak of God is anything more than a particular ethnocentric criticism. (i.e. "he's not speaking like a Protestant theologian") Perhaps that's unfair, but some sense of that comes out in Dr. Vallicella's comments. For instance,
(Levinas) The "invisible God" is not to be understood as God invisible to the senses, but as God non-thematizable in thought and nonetheless as non-indifferent to the thought which is not thematization, and probably not even an intentionality.
To be properly formulated, this first clause must contain a word like "merely" right after "understood." God is obviously invisible to the senses, and a formulation that suggests that he is not is inept. This sort of mistake is often made. For example, if what you want to say is that religion is not merely matter a matter of doctrine (because it is a matter of practice as well), then don't say: Religion is not a matter of doctrine. For if you say the latter, then you say something that is just plain stupid.
Now coming from a religion which does say God isn't essentially invisible to the senses, I tend to look somewhat askance at what Dr. Vallicella considers "obvious" or "inept." When one considers how Levinas takes the dialog of God as Other to other people as Other, I also think we have to be careful. Once again I don't know the context to the passage, but it seems to me that to add "merely" where he thinks it ought be added is simply to be incredulous that anyone might think what he find obvious anything but.
This whole line of thinking with "merely" that he traces out seems somewhat questionable. He can, of course, argue that "merely" is entailed due to his own beliefs. It seems odd to argue, without evidence, that they are entailed by Levinas' beliefs. Put more particularly, to use "merely" is to say that what follows is not all there is to the meaning. There is more to the meaning than what is stated. Without the merely, one says that what follows isn't part of the meaning at all. It isn't quite clear whether Vallicella means by "properly formulated" that he thinks Levinas merely wrote things down wrong or that Vallicella merely disagrees with Levinas' meaning. It's hard to say exactly what he means. However it seems based upon his example of religion and doctrine that he thinks Levinas merely misspoke. But I don't think he did. Consider the following passage from Totality and Infinity
Invisibility does not denote an absence of relation; it implies relations with what is not given, of which there is no idea. (34)
This seems to match, reasonably closely, the comments Levinas gave in the interview Vallicella quotes from. Levinas is simply suggesting that the words "invisible God" does not mean (at all) that God is simply invisible to the senses, but that God in this quote can't be treated as an idea. The reason I would reject the application of "merely" isn't just due to the signification of "invisible God" but because it seems God can appear and yet God qua God be unthinkable in terms of ideas. Levinas' point, as I take it, is that our relations are with something akin to the transcendent "thing-in-itself," to use Kantian terms. Now perhaps I'm misreading Levinas. I'll certainly leave open that possibility since I don't have the text in front of me and, to be honest, I've not read Levinas in years. But I suspect my reading is closer to what Levinas meant than Vallicella's reading.
Vallicella next suggests that God can't be a theme or topic. His argument is this is demonstrable false since we are talking about God. But this once again clearly misreads Levinas, missing those all so important quotation marks. What is discussed isn't God, but "invisible God." There is a difference. Indeed those familiar with Jewish thought will quickly pick up the allusion of Levinas to the En-Sof. Once again, without context, I can't be sure that is what Levinas is saying. But it does seem quite clear he isn't speaking about God in discourse which obviously (to use Vallicella's term) can occur.
The latter complaint Vallicella offers, regarding "non-indifferent" is a little more valid. It probably isn't the best choice of words were one merely to speak straightforwardly. However if one is trying to be careful with language, then it most certainly is a word choice designed to connect to the use of indifference in some other text. Indeed "non-indifferent" seems used a fair bit by Levinas. I believe that the concept he is after is "care" in the sense of Heidegger. (Once again, without rereading Levinas I may well be incorrect.) Indifferent is not to care. We want the opposite of this. By saying "non-indifferent" he means the negation of this indifference. I suspect he also wants to get at the unrelated nature of Other as the Absolute in Hegel or the unmoved mover of Aristotle.
I gave a quick glance to my Levinas reader and found a passage that might be useful. Here Levinas introduces "indifference" in a rather important way in the context of semiotics. While once again I can't be sure, the fact this is such an important text of Levinas' makes me suspect that Levinas intends a connotation within the interview to this text or related texts. i.e. indifference doesn't merely mean its usual English denotation but has with it an essential connotation to Levinas' use in his earlier texts.
The term objectivity (which, today, it is perhaps wrong to identify with the result of a process of reification, for it is in its place in every awareness, be it the awareness of becoming, of relation, of a norm, or of life and oneself) expresses this indifference, and thereby the very being of that which is. But this indifference - or this security, this objectivity - does not appear as an attribute that qualifies the disclosed realities, nor as a modality of relations among the terms that constitute the real, nor as the character of the configuration of all these terms in a system. Indifference signifies when being is referred to consciousness, the claim of which - to affect in any way whatsoever the order which, through consciousness, shows itself - being would, precisely, impugn. ("Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony", in Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, 98)
I've gone on long enough. Before I bore everyone to tears, I just want to mention that Vallicella says he isn't trying to refute Levinas, merely "the lack of time and energy spent on clarification, and on setting forth clearly the problems and questions implied by his ideas." I think this would be a valid criticism outside of an interview where he apparently is intending his comments to be taken in the context of his works. i.e. that the reader is familiar with his works. Now perhaps this is an incorrect assumption of Levinas. Not knowing the context of the interview I can't say. Yet were I to read an interview with say Lee Smolin, the noted theoretical physicist, I'd expect Smolin to speak as if his audience was already familiar with the basic terms within the discourse of quantum gravity. Now were the interview for some audience that were not physicists, this would be inappropriate of Smolin. My point though is that it doesn't seem intrinsically improper to assume that ones audience is familiar with a certain sort of jargon or terminology. If that is what Vallicella's argument reduces to - that Continental Philosophers write to people familiar with Continental Philosophy and not to readers used to Analytic Philosophy - then I think Vallicella is really barking up a weak tree.
After all, I caught the allusions fairly quickly and didn't have much trouble reading Levinas in a less than problematic way. Perhaps the problem is with the reader less than the passage?
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of philosophy texts that are hard to wade though. I think Kant is among the most difficult, truth be told. But having tried to read various medieval authors before, I know that jumping into an "alien" mode of discourse can be difficult. Even when one has read a lot of texts in the genre, one often wishes they wrote in a "more clear" form. Yet typically I think that philosophers choose the style they write in for good reasons. I think, for instance, there is a reason Plato wrote in dialogs rather than the style of a paper in modern Analytic Philosophy. I think Kierkegaard wrote the way he did for a reason as well. Even Nietzsche had an aim to his style. Put an other way, perhaps by demanding that all philosophy be done in a certain fashion one has created a blind spot in which something quite important has been missed...
Just to be clear, lest it seem like I'm heaping upon Dr. Vallicella, I do enjoy reading his blog a great deal. Especially the various quotes he manages to find. There is something enjoyable about someone who posts in between various put downs of French philosophy a 19th century journal putting down the French language.
Nice post. I dislike what Vallicella is doing with these "Continental Philosophy" posts. The only one in which he spends time with a text with which I'm not very familiar is the Zizek, post, and in each of the others there he has blatantly misrepresented/misunderstood the passages he has quoted. My suspicion is that this is because he has not read them in context, at least not recently. With each post, I've been reminded of Sokal's analysis of out-of-context quotations. Perhaps someone should suggest that he take passages from Derrida's Postcard, because they're all intentionally "out of context" already.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
Number of unique visitors:
Blogged by Clark Goble