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A Protest against the Trauma

The traumatic character of death, according to the dialogical thinkers Rosenzweig and

Levinas, represents an irreducible breach within the world of being. In the interpretation of

both thinkers, the adventure of Western ontology leads to nothing. This nothingness is neither

a source of unconcealedness nor a locus where true being might emerge, but a deadly reality

that assaults man in the forms of meaninglessness or violence. The ultimate truth of the

Western quest for being is the inhumanity of the idealist conceptuality (Rosenzweig) and

the step from that thinking to the roar of cannons is only a small one 1or, war proves to be

the father of the cultural and intellectual world (Levinas). Rosenzweig is undeniably referring

to the idealist tradition stretching from Parmenides to Hegel (culminating in the historicism of

Meinecke and Treitschke), whereas Levinas alludes to Heraclitus, as the Heideggerian

philosophy of being understands him.2Western thinking on being exhibits itself as a violent

event, which disregards the metaphysical aspirations of the irreducible person. In it, the

particular experience of death is obscured by a veil of continuous progress.

Philosophy has the audacity to cast off the fear of the earthly, to remove from death its

poisonous sting, from Hades his pestilential breath. All that is mortal lives in this fear

of death; every new birth multiplies the fear for a new reason, for it multiplies that

which is mortal. The womb of the inexhaustible earth ceaselessly gives birth to what is

new, and each one is subject to death; each newly born waits with fear and trembling

for the day of its passage into the dark. But philosophy refutes these earthly fears. Itbreaks free above the grave that opens up under our feet before each step. It abandons

the body to the power of the abyss, but above it the free soul floats off in the wind.That the fear of death knows nothing of such a separation in body and soul, that it yells

I, I, I and wants to hear nothing about a deflection of the fear onto a mere body

matters little to philosophy. (Star, 9)

1Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk. I. Bd: Briefe und Tagebcher, edited by RachelRosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann in collaboration with Bernhard Casper (Den Haag:Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 92-93 [=BT].2Martin Heidegger, Einfhrung in die Metaphysik(Tbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953);AnIntroduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UniversityPress, 1959).

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This truth of ontology represents, for both authors, the starting point for a reflection that

breaks with violence and looks for a life on the thither side of being. Both authors want to

escape from the implicit morality of Western thinking that reduces man to one instance of an

all-encompassing odyssey. Levinas opens Totality and Infinity with the sentence: Everyone

will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by

morality.(TI, 21) In the first part of our argument, we will call that which threatens human

freedom infrahuman inhumanity. Next, we will show the way in which the primary form of

humanity arises. A confrontation between the ways in which Rosenzweig and Levinas let

similar notions function in their thinking forms the central point of interest.

1. Rosenzweig: The Threat of Meaninglessness and Inhumanity

In the lead sentence of The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig designates death as the starting

point of his thinking. Death represents not only a philosophical crux, but it is also the concrete

threat of man by the Nought. During the first decades of the past century Rosenzweig

experienced the world as an inaccessible fortress. To him, world history, including the

violence of the First World War, was an anonymous Moloch, unable to offer any sense of

perspective at all. Within the fear of death, man finds only himself. Even the gods seem to be

silent.

Rosenzweigs contemporary, the Jewish writer from Prague Franz Kafka, evoked the feeling

of inaccessibility quite poignantly in the first sentences of his third and last great novel, The

Castle:

It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle

hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to

show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the

village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.

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Franz Rosenzweig wrote on this literary masterpiece these words: I have never before read a

book that reminds me so strongly of the Bible as his novel The Castle.(BT 1152).

1.1. The Threefold Nought in the Philosophy of Kant

As metaphors of man, world and God, Kafkas imagery calls forth the basic elements of

experience. Philosophy, from the outset, devoted a great deal of attention to the study of the

reality- and truth-value of this metaphysical triad. At the turning point of modernity, one

gained the insight that God, world and man might be nothing more than empty ideas.

According to Rosenzweig, within Kantian philosophy this Nought became thoroughly

experienced as the threefold limit of thought.

Star, 19: They are the Noughts to which the critique of Kant, the dialectian, reduced

the objects of rational theology, cosmology, and psychology, the three rational

sciences of his time.

In his first great Critique, Kant examined the possibilities and limits of knowledge. Valid

knowledge results from the synthesis of the formal structures of the human mind with the

sensory perceptions. In order to discover some coherence in the multiplicity of reality, reason

necessarily postulates the existence of God, world and man. However, from these three ideas,

man cannot acquire valid knowledge. As regulative ideas, they are the inevitable end-terms of

thinking. However, since they are empty ideas that the knowing subject cannot perceive, no

knowledge of them is possible. Should reason nevertheless attempt to gain knowledge about

them, it would fall victim to transcendental illusion, the pre-eminent error of metaphysical

cognition. Thus, for knowing reason, these ideas are in fact Noughts. On the existence of

God, the reality of the world and the freedom of man, it is impossible for reason to say

anything meaningful. They constitute the limits of thinking. Rosenzweig summarizes his

critical reflection thus:

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We recognized the presuppositional nature of the idea that reasoning had as its

function to reason the All. Thereby the hitherto fundamentally simple content of

philosophy, the All of reasoning and being, unintentionally split up for us into three

discrete pieces which repelled each other in different but as yet not clearly

apprehensible fashion. These three pieces are God, world, and man we know

nothing of them in a strict sense. They are the Noughts(19)

1.2. The Existential Threat of the Nought

According to Rosenzweig, at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth

century, the limits of rationality were also experienced as a concrete, existential threat. This

coming to experience of the limits of modernity can be understood as one of the roots of

postmodernity.

Nietzsche and the Death of God

Nietzsche, in an unparalleled fashion, articulated the meaning of the cultural-historical death

of God. One of his strongest texts, which Rosenzweig often alludes to, is titled The Madman.3

Nietzsche features a character, a parody of Diogenes, the twisted lunatic who lived isolated

from the world in his barrel, deliberately mocking every common decency and searching for

God in the marketplace using a lantern in broad daylight. This blind search in mans bright

city provokes the laughter of the onlookers. Man finds himself confronted with the

nonexistence of God. The genuine challenge of atheism is to be situated on the axiological

plane of freedom. The value of human freedom is confronted with the freedom of God. The

reason for atheism lies in the possible oppression of human freedom by the existence of God.

3Nietzsche, Die frhliche Wissenschaft, in Smtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15Bnden, Bd. III, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzimo Montinari (Mnchen Berlin New York: Walterde Gruyter, 1980), 480-482. A fine review of this central text can be found in Eugen Biser, NiAntchrist ni la recherche de Dieu. Incursion de Nietzsche dans le no mans land par del de

Dieu, in Nietzsche aujourdhui?Vol. II: Passion(Paris: Union gnrale dditions, 1973), 255-283and Karl Lwith, Nietzsche et lachvement de lathisme, in Ibid., 255-278. Rosenzweigfrequently refers to Nietzsches text.

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However, when the latter freedom is discarded, man faces the dazzling abyss of nothingness.

The active denial of God is the continuation of the conviction that nothing can be known

about God. The conclusion is that Gods existence depends on man: We have murdered

him. There are determinate historical and cultural situations where it is possible for God to

die. This is strikingly evoked in an account on the camps, taken from Wiesels The Night:

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung

swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was

still aliveFor more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and

death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face.

He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were

not yet glazed. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now?And I

heard a voice within me answer him: Where is He? Here He is He is hanging hereon this gallows4

After radical atheism, it has become no longer possible to maintain God as the meaning of

life. If God is to be spoken of again, then he must be situated beyond the ethical distinctions

and truth schemes, but also beyond humanly given meaning. TheMadman is the man who

tears himself away from the world, closes in upon himself and finds himself facing the death

of God. The existential consequence is the Nought, the possibility of nihilism. 5 Nietzsche

calls forth the meaninglessness through three powerful metaphors. The emptying of the sea

refers to the inexhaustible power and the infinite capacities of God being transferred to man.

After the death of God, man disposes of the distinction between good and evil. The

effacement of the horizon refers to the disappearance of the background necessary for any

cognition. The condition for knowledge, the true/false distinction, is obliterated. The fact of

the earths disconnection from the sun, from the light of knowledge and the idea of the good,

summarizes both previous metaphors and designates the radical independence of human

4Elie Wiesel, Night, translated by Stella Rodway and introduced by Franois Mauriac (s.l., PenguinBooks: s.d.), 76-77.5Cf. Heidegger, Nietzsches Wort Gott ist tot, in Holzwege(Frankfurt am Main: VittorioKlostermann, 1950), 193-247; Off the Beaten Track, translated by Julian Young and KennethHaynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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freedom. The crisis of atheism, with its concomitant nihilism, means that human freedom

must be taken seriously before it becomes possible again to talk about God.

The history of philosophy had never yet seen an atheism like that of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche was the first thinker who not negates God but, in the really propertheological use of the word: refutes him. More precisely: he curses him. For it is a

curse as terrible as the curse with which Kierkegaards experience of God began,

clearly intimated by the famous remark: If God existed, how could I bear not to be

him?. Never yet had a philosopher held his own in this way, eye to eye, against the

linving God, so to speak.(25)

Historicism and the Meaninglessness of the World History

At the turn of the century, not only God, but also world history, left man behind in

helplessness. In the optimistic progressive thinking of the Enlightenment, man could

experience progressive world history as a medium of continual humanization. TheBildung of

history collides with the Bildungof man; history could even be regarded as the educator of

man (Lessing).6 In the nineteenth century this belief underwent a crisis, a consequence of

which is found in the advent of historicism.7

The Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) worked out a value-

philosophy and a reflection on the human sciences. He departed from any platonic heaven of

values and emphasized the value orientation of historical realities.

1. The main task of the historian as a human scientist consists in the study of historicalfacts in their uniqueness and individuality and in the study of the historical connection

with cultural history.

2. The individual historical fact or subject matter relates to a theoretical set of values fromwhich it derives its importance. The historian also investigates the nature of the values

6Gotthold E. Lessing, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts und andere Schriften, edited byHelmut Thielicke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1965).7See the important study of Paul Mendes-Flohr, Franz Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism,in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr (Hanover London: UniversityPress of New England, 1988), 138-161.

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and their relationship to historical objects. Because of this it is possible to distinguish

between the essential and the inessential. Values are not invented in a subjective way

by the historian, but present themselves as historical realities or cultural values. The

state, economy, art and religion are examples of this. The last task of the historian

consists in studying the value orientation and the value judgments themselves.

Rickert himself refused to confer a metaphysical pretension on this methodological option.8If

the methodology of the historian is a pretext for some metaphysics of timeless being, the

meaning of history is then denied. The historical task then consists in fully understanding all

the historical in its nullity and together with Schopenhauer in denying history any

meaning.

Schopenhauer was the first among the great thinkers to be concerned, not with the

essence, but with the value of the world. A highly unscientific concern, if he really

was inquiring into the objective value, the value of something, the meaning or the

purpose of the world- which after all, would only be another expression for inquiring

into the essencebut if the enquiry was about its value for man, and perhaps even for

the man Arthur Schopenhauer (14)

Despite this reticence, Rickert instigated the rise of ideological historicism. Ideological

historicism considered any event as being dependent on historical alteration. This implies that

there are no more fixed truths left, but rather that truth is a ongoing process. There is only

space left for as precise and objective knowledge of facts as possible. All facts however have

their place within a dynamical growth process. Knowledge is exclusively historical

knowledge. In the end, any historical event is a moment within the relative succession of

scenes set on the world stage.

Rosenzweig linked Rickerts historicism to the historicism of the Neo-Hegelian Friedrich

Meinecke, his teacher. In his book Weltbrgertum und Nationalstaat, Meinecke tried to link

8Heinrich Rickert, Geschichtsphilosophie, in Die Philosophie im Beginn des zwanzigstenJahrhunderts. Festschrift fr Kuno Fischer, edited by Wilhelm Windelband (Heidelberg: Winter,1904), 321-422.

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historical-political reflection to the history of ideas.9 He defended the position that the

realization of universal cosmopolitanism occurs in a dialectical way within the history of

modern nation states. In the Machtstaat, the synthesis between state and people is

accomplished. The universality is not realized through a formal perpetual peace like Kant

advocated10

, but through the emergence of a world-historical people that is the avatar of

universal spirit. In Meineckes view, this constitutes the foundation of theRealpolitik(Ranke,

Treitschke and Bismarck), which is the concrete synthesis between universality and

particularity. His conservative Hegel interpretation provided a legitimacy to Prussian politics.

Rosenzweig designed his doctoral dissertation Hegel und der Staat from this very chapter

on Hegels philosophy of law. For doing so, he was utterly appreciated by Meinecke.11

Yet, in

this writing, which was only published after the war, Rosenzweig did not yet explicitly link

metaphysics to the concrete political violence, a relation that he did make explicit in the

Star.12

Although the insight in the historical nature of man is a great virtue of modern times,

historicism raises inevitable questions. Rosenzweig denounced historicism for harboring a

deadly relativism unable to satisfy the need for an ultimate meaning of history. Rosenzweig

clearly recognized the relativism or indifference present in the violence of the First World

War that he considered to be the logical outcome of Western ontology.

Mysticism and Naturalism as the End of Human Freedom

9 Friedrich Meinecke, Weltbrgertum und Nationalstaat. Studien zur Genesis des deutschenNationalstaates, in Werke, Bd. V, edited by Hans Herzfeld (Mnchen: Oldenbourg, 1963).10Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf, in Werke, Bd. VI, 195-251.11 Meinecke, Strassburg, Freiburg, Berlin, 1901-1919 (Stuttgart, 1949), 97: Franz Rosenzweig,durch das Hegelkapittel in meinem Weltbrgertum angeregt, [hat] das subtile Buch ber Hegel und

der Staat geschrieben.12The chapter on the metaphysics of the state (Hegel und der Staat, II, 169-184) reveals a gooddeal in this respect. It can be regarded as a initial critical move vis--vis Hegel.

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Facing the lack of orientation of an atheistic universe and the ethical relativism and

indifference of world history, man can only find his reason for existence within himself. The

threat of indifference can invite escape routes to be taken and cancel human freedom. One can

hold on to the illusion of an almighty God and grasp human freedom as a derivative of divine

activity. However, human freedom is annihilated by placing it within the sphere of influence

of the divine (= idealism and mysticism). One can also deny freedom by subordinating it to

laws. Man is then regarded as a part of nature or history. Both solutions negate the meaning of

human freedom. If we do not want to yield to the escapism of mysticism and naturalism, we

must determine mans place in between God and the world. We face the task of depicting man

as he is, as an indivisible given: This indivisibility, this In-divid-uality is the firstthing that

we must understand (begreifen) entirely, seize hold of (be-greifen), take as real.13

2. Levinas: The There Isas Limit of Thinking

With the concept of the Nought, Rosenzweig accomplishes a threefold break with idealist

thought. It is by taking seriously the final point of Kantian philosophy and by attending to the

irreducible experience of the death of God, world and man, that Rosenzweig discovers a zero

point for thinking. In a subsequent move, he constructs the positive form of God, world and

man from this negative background. Human freedom then appears as the salvation of identity.

Parallel to Rosenzweigs threefold Nought, Levinas speaks about the there is, the anonymous

power of being which obliterates any identifying difference. In Levinass texts, the concept of

the there isundergoes an important semantic shift, linked to a renewed concept of identity.

a. The There Isin the Early Texts

13Rosenzweig, The Science of Man, 65.

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In the works of Levinas, a connection can be found between such early texts as Time and the

OtherandExistence and Existentson the one hand, and the important radio interview Ethics

and Infinityon the other hand. It was mainly Burggraeve who drew attention to this. 14In his

early works, Levinas offers a kind o f phenomenological dialectic of human subjectivity, in

which he departs from Husserl and still more obviously from Heidegger. He here depicts the

vicissitudes of human freedom. The there isserves as a starting point. The human opposition

to the anonymity of this neutral given occurs within hypostasis, enjoyment and intentionality.

The choice for the term hypostasis is very fundamental. This originally egoistic process is

completed by the relation of alterity, which is sketched as the confrontation with death, the

erotic, and fertility. The dialectically depicted exodus-movement out of inhuman being

resonates in such titles asDe Levasionand De lexistence lexistant. It is noteworthy that

these works were preceded by the remarkable text on Hitlersphilosophy.

In these early works, Levinas anticipates some of the insights of Totality and Infinity. In

the preface to the reissue of De lexistence lexistant in 1981, he rightly designated these

books as preparatory works. In fact we can find there, in a nutshell, the main topics of Totality

and Infinity. However, the structural of the thought pattern is quite different. The structure of

the line of thinking of the early texts is maintained inEthics and Infinityin a slightly modified

form. In this later text, the there is also forms the starting point for thinking. Levinas

explicitly states there that thinking starts from trauma: It probably begins through

traumatisms or groping to which one does not even know how to give a formal form: a

separation, a violent scene, a sudden consciousness of the monotony of time.(EI, 21)

Starting from this line of interpretation, it might be possible to draw a fair parallel between

the nothingness of the death experience in Rosenzweig and the there isin Levinas. With the

14This structure in Levinass thought facilitates the so-called salvation-interpretation as developedin Burggraeve, Mens en Medemens. Verantwoordelijkheid en God: De metafysische ethiek vanEmmanuel Levinas(Leuven Amersfoort: Acco, 1986).

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concept of the there is, Levinas comes remarkably close to the threefold Nought as

Rosenzweig develops it. The there is, as a trauma, constitutes the starting point of thinking.

Like Rosenzweig, the there isbears a resemblance to a determinate idea of God and a concept

of the world. The anonymous sea of being bears a resemblance to the apogee of Western

ontology. However, Levinas is thinking here not so much of Hegel but of Heidegger.

However, the there is of Levinas cannot be situated as rationally as it is in the case of

Rosenzweig. The there isis a limit-concept, a dark reality wherein subjectivity and objectivity

become lost. As an non-rational null-point, the there iscannot be understood or described; but

only discovered indirectly. Man only has ways of access to the there isthrough such things as

the experience of war, exotic art, participatory thinking on God Levinas radicalizes

Rosenzweigs Nought. Although Rosenzweig also stresses the non-rational character of the

Nought, Levinas explicitly refuses to conceptualize the there is.

b. The There Isin Totality and Infinity

In his major work, Levinas attributed another and more secondary place to the there is. The

there ishere appears as an inner limit-phenomenon when the elementalereveals its nocturnal

side. The there isno longer constitutes the limit experience as a starting point for a critique of

the reigning philosophy. This retreat of the there isin Totality and Infinityis accompanied by

an even stronger interpretation of subjectivity, as a separation or break rather than as

hypostasis. Levinass earlier concept of hypostasis was developed as a reaction to the there is.

In Totality and Infinity, the intentionality of the separation is emphasized. In a new reading of

desire, Levinas opposes the Hegelian concept of desire (by starting from the unity of the

feeling and the felt within sensation) and against the primacy of the theoretical intentionalism

of Husserlian phenomenology. No longer the there is, but desire, forms the heart of the

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critique. This double interpretative reserve with respect to the place of the there is, on the one

hand, and the reinterpretation of the concept of subjectivity in Totality and Infinity on the

other hand, should be taken into consideration when studying the similarity between

Rosenzweig and Levinas. Also, this is why we do not so much study the strict similarities as

much as pose the question of how Levinas sets the there isat work in Totality and Infinity.

The there isseems to be less a starting point for the deployment of hypostasis than the inner

limit of separation as enjoyment. A fundamental difference is inserted into the dynamics of

separation.

It therefore comes as no surprise that Levinas in Totality and Infinity bears more

resemblance to a pre-Socratic word to which he never attaches a positive significance in

contrast with Heidegger than to the outcomes of idealism. Anaximanders apeironseems to

provide the background of the indeterminate nothingness in which the separation can be

fragmented when the joyous life within the elemental fails.

The Inhumanity of the Anonymous World

Like Rosenzweig, Levinas relates the there isto the nothingness of the world as well as to that

of the gods and man. First of all, the there isappears as a suffocating quality of the elemental

world, which constitutes the environment of enjoyment. As Rosenzweig posits the tragic

modes of man as a dam against nothingness, Levinas unfolds separation as the action of man

as he takes up the burden of his own existence. The loneliness, into which this kind of

existence leads, is overcome in the enjoyment within the elemental. The separated man

introduces an indifference of the anonymous coordinates of existence, allowing for a selfish

existence conceived of as conatus essendi.15

15In NT, Rosenzweig outlines man as a Spinozistic substance, who in se est et per se concipitur.This interpretation is also important in Levinas,Autrement qutre ou Au-del de lessence(La

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In Totality and Infinity, separation, in contrast to the view of Rosenzweig, is marked by a

double limit or negativity. The uncertainty of the time to come implies that the separated man

can fall back into thethereis. It is possible for man to be engulfed in the elemental, which is

originally experienced as positive, and to lose himself within enjoyment. The intoxication of

enjoyment can turn into a depersonalization of enjoyment. Death lurks behind any enjoyment.

This implies that the there isis not only an external negativity that man wards off in a volitive

dynamism, but that the anonymity also constitutes the other side of mans existence.

Moreover, it is possible for man to bring the there is back for others through the

independent economic existence he deploys with an eye to overcoming the uncertainties of

enjoyment a sort of existence that appears concretely as the settlement into a home as a

place where work and thought are brought to rest. In the epiphany of the face, the central

challenge is formed by the phrase Am I not killing by the way I am living? For it is possible

for man to expand his life in such a way that he builds a deadly hell for the other. Here, the

there isshows not so much the characteristics of an anonymous power, but it also forms the

flip side of the separated existence of man. What for one person is a killing power, is for

another a consequence of his way of life. The impersonality of the there isis an aspect of the

personal evil people inflict upon one another because of their concrete ways of life. With Jos

Defoort, in his book Law and Violation, we can state that law, meant to bring violence to a

halt, institutes itself a kind of violence: For those who commit (legal) violence, concern is

with justification of this violence. For those suffering, any justification is irrelevant.16Law,

indeed, becomes effective only when it affects the bodies of those suffering. No one else

evokes this as tellingly as Kafka, in his remarkable narrative In the Penal Colony. With the

sentence being literally inscribed upon his body, man no longer even knows that he is

Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974); Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by AlphonsoLingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). However, Spinoza considered nature as a substance

and stated that there does not exist any other substance apart from nature or God (Deus sivenatura).16Jos Defoort, Wet en geweld: Over recht en gerechtigheid(Kapellen: Pelckmans, 1994), 142.

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sentenced. The border between law and violence is paper-thin. The convicted person

experiences the execution of the sentence as brutal violence. Levinas links the violent border

concept of the world with violence, and particularly with the violence of war. His allusions in

the preface of Totality and Infinity to the metaphors of war, as articulated by Heraclitus and

positively reiterated by Heidegger, can be understood from this.

The Inhumanity of the Mythical Gods

The there is appears not just as a quality of an anonymous world which is marked by

violence. As a limit or negativity, the there isshows itself in thinking God as well. In Totality

and Infinity, Levinas writes that the separation within the sphere of le mme indicates the

break with the totality. Totality seems to be very close to the there is. If one conceives of this

given as synchronous with the thought of a separated God as is the case in Rosenzweig

gods appear as mythical. The gods can be described as faceless gods, impersonal gods to

whom one does not speak.(TI, 142) In his system, Rosenzweig could develop the mythical

gods as a parallel to the tragic man. Levinas, by contrast, describes them in an asymmetrical

fashion as the nocturnal continuation of elementary enjoyment. The nocturnal prolongation

of the element is the reign of mythical gods. (Ibid) The gods are a dark future which

represents a continual menace to separated being: Enjoyment is without security. (Ibid) A

participatory religious thinking is a chaotic experience that annihilates human separation.

Infinity becomes a dimension of the finite existence. The same structure can be discovered in

the political and historical order of Nazism. Pollefeyt writes in a study of Fackenheim: This

internalizing process becomes dangerous when it, like in Nazism, is mixed up with the

passion of identifying literally finitude and infinity. TheFhreris no longer an external God,

but the embodiment of the People (das Volk). The People realizes its essence by being

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obedient up to full identification with the Fhrer. The breeding ground of the totalizing

circularity is the deathly fear of the difference.17

From this perspective, the restoration of mythical theology represents the exclusion of the

difference. This makes it possible for the deadly indifference of the there isto set in again in

the guise of a political structure.

Mans Disorientation

Finally, the there isalso bears resemblance to the disorientation of human existence that finds

co-ordinates solely in its own being. According to Rosenzweig, after God is murdered, within

a nihilistic universe, man could not find any foundation of meaning except inside of himself.

The tragic existence of man leads to an ontological pluralism, in which each appears to be a

wolf to the other.

In the preceding we found that Rosenzweig opposes nothingness and that Levinas drew

inspiration from this notion in developing the concept of the there is. Nevertheless, there are

some major points of difference. Along with the fundamental shift of the there is in the

different texts, and the new interpretation of identity, some additional aspects remain to be

mentioned. In Rosenzweig, the Nought is a threefold non-reality, whereas in Levinas it is a

quality of anonymity. In Rosenzweig, ontological pluralism, which is developed in reaction to

this Nought, is a ternary reality; in Levinas, by contrast, it is a humanistic pluralism. In the

17Anckaert and Pollefeyt, Tussen trauma en verwondering. Rosenzweig, Levinas en Fackenheim,in Gehelen en Fragmenten: De vele gezichten van de filosofie, edited by Bart Raymaekers (Leuven:Universitaire Pers, 1993), 162. This has been further elaborated in Pollefey t, Das jdische Denken

Emil L. Fackenheims oder die Begegnung von Athen und Jerusalem in Auschwitz, inJdischeTraditionen in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Joachim Valentin and Saskia Wendel(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), 196-213.

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next paragraph we must ask ourselves how Rosenzweig and Levinas view man as a being that

identifies itself with or against the Nought of inhumanity.