Contribution to Book
Introduction
Levinas and Asian Thought
(2013)
Abstract
An important question of any comparative project concerns motivation and incentive. Why compare “philosophies” across cultures and, in our case, why choose Emmanuel Levinas as the central figure of the collection? Comparative philosophy, although typically associated with cross-cultural work, shares the same set of philosophical tasks as traditional philosophical discourse. In fact, traditional philosophical discourse already involves a great deal of comparison— anyone engaging multiple thinkers, terms, texts, historical periods, or philosophical movements is already doing comparative work. Such philosophical projects need to be sensitive to linguistic, cultural, and socio-historical contexts. This is as true of a scholar working across the continental-analytic divide as it is of a scholar working across Chinese and French philosophical traditions. At its best, comparative research opens up a space for creative contributions to larger philosophical conversations. This essay collection—which is located at the intersection of Asian philosophies and the contemporary continental tradition—is indebted to the seminal work of Graham Parkes in volumes such as Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987) and Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991). In the years following these publications, the popularity of comparative continental thought has continued to grow, as evidenced by recent publications such as Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (2011), Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought (2007), at least three collections devoted to Buddhism and postmodernism, as well as the new Journal of Comparative and Continental Philosophy. 2 Leah Kalmanson and Sarah Mattice In addition to Levinas’s increasing popularity within comparative continental circles, his work has become a standard subject of study in philosophy departments across Asia. For example, the 2008 special issue of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, “Levinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives,” draws together essays from a conference in China marking the centenary of Levinas’s birth and highlights his prominent place in contemporary Chinese scholarship. As with any philosopher who is critically situated with respect to the modernist European tradition, Levinas seems well suited to engage philosophical worldviews that have developed outside of the Western orbit. For example, the intrigue of comparing the Buddhist doctrine of no-self and postmodern critiques of subjectivity is not only due to the obvious conceptual parallels. Rather, what many scholars find compelling is that Buddhism, having never been “modern,” cannot properly be called “postmodern,” nor can its theory of the subject be in any way reduced to a reaction against modernism. As such, Buddhism offers a fresh perspective on the postmodern critique stemming from an alternative conceptual framework. Thus it seems quite tempting to draw on Asian sources to explore or even expand on the Levinasian ethical project. Although we as editors are excited by the prospect of such research, we remain mindful of potential problems. First, Levinas himself not only showed no interest in non- Western philosophical traditions, but he actively resisted challenges to his European-centered model. In an oft-quoted, if regrettable, passage he declares: “The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there does not filter any familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past” (UH 108 / IH 172). Considering the philosophical importance attributed to the weight of the past in shaping Levinas’s notion of alterity in Otherwise than Being, one wonders if a people without a past, as Levinas describes here, could even claim the status of ethical others. We find it difficult to read Levinas’s comments as anything other than Eurocentric, if not simply racist. However, his shortsightedness with respect to non-European philosophical—and cultural—models need not hinder other scholars’ creative appropriation of and engagement with his work in a multicultural context, as is evidenced by the many fruitful applications of the concept of alterity in postcolonial studies.1 Introduction 3 Second, beyond the issue of Levinas’s own engagement with non-Western philosophies, however, there are deep conceptual divides that separate the cosmological, ontological, and metaphysical underpinnings of his work from much of Asian philosophy. For example, it is difficult to understand Levinas’s ethics independently from his rejection of Heidegger’s notion of being, for alterity makes an intervention in Heideggerian ontology, which itself interrupts other Western philosophical discourses. Would Levinas’s intervention , then, be relevant to a tradition that shares neither the standard Western concept of existence nor Heidegger’s particular take on Sein? On the one hand, if answered...
Disciplines
- Philosophy and
- Religion
Publication Date
2013
Editor
Leah Kalmanson, Frank Garrett, Sarah Mattice
Publisher
Duquesne Press
ISBN
9780820705965
Citation Information
Leah Kalmanson and Sarah Mattice. "Introduction" PittsburghLevinas and Asian Thought (2013) p. 1 - 9 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sarah-mattice/14/