Reviews for Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas

The average rating for Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-06 00:00:00 Patrick Gabriel Revision While I generally agree with the direction of the statements that Levinas puts out, I don't think he qualifies as a philosopher nor his thought as philosophy since so much of his work consists of oracular pronouncements that don't even attempt to give reasons, even in principle. Now, he might respond that, taking his start from phenomenology, he is trying to describe the fundamental basis of reality, and this can only be shown via a special phenomenological perception. This would be in a manner analogous to explaining the colour blue in that it can only be pointed to. Yet, many of his claims are obviously extravagant, and it is entirely open to anyone to contradict him merely by disagreeing that the world looks like the way he said. However, while rejecting his histrionic way of putting things, where with abandon the buzzwords of metaphysics and ontology are thrown about, lots of agreement will be found for his core position. This would be the general lesson from a lot of world religions and philosophies that the ego must be conquered and a life in service to others is to be enjoined. However, I think such injunctions could in truth be more adequately grounded in a better philosophical system, where reasons could be given and a better insight into things in general might be gained. He would reply, in response, that any philosophical system is a problem in that it belongs to the order of 'Being', and as such seeks to totalise social experience in such a way that personal existence gets force-fit into artificially sharp categories. Indeed, the relationship between the conceptual and the ethical would be the fight between 'Being' and 'beyond Being', and this would be the entire history of philosophy as but a series of differing methods to accomplish the same task of achieving this violent totality. However, with all this, I see no serious intellectual work that gives the detail to these big florid claims so as to justify the invocation of the grand concepts of Being, ontology, metaphysics, or totality involved in these claims. I understand that in his own weighty publications this is absent to the same extent also. In general then, and in this book of interviews definitely, not very much philosophical work is done at all in the job of understanding reality, which is of course the job of the philosopher to do. Now, in rejecting his stage setting of the fight between Being and what is beyond Being, as being just a dramatic metaphor, what then remains is his bald statements concerning personal and social experience. But this would not get him very far philosophically either. For even in Husserlian phenomenology, with its heavy emphasis on description, by philosophical work nonetheless Husserl tried to reduce the range of what can be described to simpler principles, such as to the transcendental ego. For ever since Thales the job of intellectual enquiry seems to have been to bring as much of the immense variety of experience under as simple a rule as is possible. In this way reduction would seem to be essential to philosophy and intellectual enquiry in general. Now it doesn't seem that Levinas provides any way in which superior insight is gained into experience by way of such a reduction. For while I and other people may agree with the headline statements, I can detect no work that justifies these statements existing in Levinas' writings. As such it cannot be enough to merely state experience and leave things hanging at that. Therefore, with the proviso that I haven't read any of Levinas' full books, and don't intend to, I still feel safe in saying that he is not a philosopher and his work not philosophy.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-17 00:00:00 Wang Ying This book was the most comprehensive statement of Levinas' philosophy that I have read so far.