The Moral Relevance of Judaism to Modernity:

Levinas and Civil Society

Preface

My interest in this paper is to look to the work of Emmanuel Levinas, in particular his analysis of Judaism, for a model of what we could call an ethically viable sense of community. By an ethically viable sense of community I mean a community capable of fostering in its members an appreciation of why they should be just not only to one another but to outsiders, those who do not belong with them in the particular social- historical institutions and traditions which constitute their community. The sense of justice I have in mind, therefore, is one understood to be universal in scope and validity, a sense of justice which commands every human being to a sense of respect and consideration for every other human being, not just those who are in important ways like us or with us in some shared enterprise. Hence, it is a distinctively modern, deontological, liberal-democratic sense of justice I am presupposing here. And my concern is simply with asking what modes of community might be sufficient to foster and sustain this sense of justice in its members.

Thus, despite my assumption of a liberal-universalist sense of justice, my principal concern here might best be described as communitarian in that I take for granted what I believe is the central insight of modern communitarian political thought: that sustaining a sense of justice in a community requires a meaningful sense of community through which its members can come to realize their mutual importance to one another and, consequently, see the point of being just to one another, why they should value justice. This is the basic point, for example, of Michael Sandel's critique of John Rawls's liberalism, as I understand it..(1) Rawls conceives of justice in the distribution of social and economic goods in terms of what he dubs the difference principle: all goods are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution should be to everyone's advantage or, to put the same point somewhat differently, to the advantage of the least advantaged in society. But, Sandel asks, why should people without a strong sense of community and, hence, without a strong sense of their mutual importance to one another see the point of this sense of justice? This concern with community is put off the agenda by liberalism with its commitment to neutrality on the question of what concrete modes of life people ought to be pursuing. Liberating us to pursue our own good in our own way, liberalism, therefore, neglects the communitarian conditions necessary to sustain the sense of justice it advances.

The problem communitarians such as Sandel correctly identify with liberals such as Rawls is that they frequently work with a sense of justice which presupposes a particular sense of community which they then proceed to either neglect or to actually undermine. But the communitarian resolution of this problem typically seems to sacrifice our universalist aspirations with justice. Sandel's civic-republican ideal of community, grounded in the shared understandings of a self-governing republic as a common good, may be sufficient to foster a sense of justice in us toward our fellow citizens. But it is difficult to see why it would necessarily contribute to sustaining a similar sense of obligation toward strangers, those who do not share the common good of "our" republic with us. Aware of this problem, Sandel comments that "At their best, local solidarities gesture beyond themselves toward broader horizons of moral concern, including the horizon of our common humanity."But all he offers to support us in this hope is the observation that "In practice ... it is the savage in his poor hut who welcomes the stranger" before the cosmopolitan.(2) In fact, this may be true. But it leaves the grounds of this 'gesture beyond itself' mysterious and unexamined. Taken on its own, there seems to be no reason why local solidarities should not gesture only toward themselves, chauvinistically indifferent to the fate of the stranger.

Those of a more liberal stripe who have been wakened from their dogmatic slumbers, so to speak, by the communitarian critique have been more attentive to preserving our universalist concerns with justice. John Rawls's "overlapping consensus" and Ronald Dworkin's "ethical liberalism" have both, in their own ways attempted to respond to the communitarian challenge by articulating properly liberal models of community.(3) Both of these attempts appear to be variants of models of community which Jurgen Habermas characterizes as forms of "constitutional patriotism"(4) - communities which cultivate a shared conception of the good at the level of a political culture, patriotically attached to the constitutional principles which form the basis of that culture, but neutral, in classically liberal fashion, to all modes of community which would flourish outside that political domain. By anchoring universalist principles of justice in a community's shared political culture we can see how local solidarities can begin to gesture beyond themselves insofar as these local solidarities are formed precisely in terms of a shared appreciation of universal principles.

As promising and as insightful as these attempts have been they all seem, however, to respond to the communitarian challenge in a way that merely displaces it. Seeking to understand how a community might sustain a liberal-universalist sense of justice they answer that question by articulating a mode of constitutional patriotism that would be necessary for such a community. But why a community would sustain such a patriotic attachment to universal principles is left, once again, unexamined. Though we may have a shared attachment to constitutional principles just insofar as they are "ours", a vital part of our political heritage, it is unclear how, in particular, a liberal community which places such emphasis on the pursuit of personal happiness and liberty would see the point of continuing its embrace of such principles as its own. What would prevent it, for example, from developing, as we actually seem to be developing in liberal-democratic communities today, an increasingly instrumental understanding of the point of our political principles, important to us as means to secure "my" personal liberty and happiness but as, more or less, annoying encumbrances when they call me to support and aid the other in ways that demand some degree of personal sacrifice? Left only with principles we are not given adequate resources to see the point of those principles, why we ought to regard them as important in ways that go beyond their instrumental value to my personal liberty and happiness.(5) We fail to adequately examine what resources there could be in the life of a community to sustain that constitutional patriotism in the face of the increasingly individualistic tendencies of modern, commercially based culture which is all too happy to exploit the "rights of man" as a basis for the pursuit of personal gain but all too resistant to any hints of a sense of personal and/or collective responsibility to the other that would compromise that individualistic project.

I. Levinas's Judaism

It is in this context, in the light of such difficulties as these with constructing an ethically viable sense of community, that I come to my concerns with the work of Levinas. On the face of it, though, I know this may seem a somewhat peculiar move to make. Though Levinas's work is often read as an optimistic affirmation of our potential as moral agents, able to go beyond self-interest and the inevitable war of conflicting interests it brings in its wake to respond with real generosity to the appeals of the other, this optimism seems tempered by a deep-seated pessimism in his work toward social institutions which might adequately anchor this ethical potential. Levinas's critique of the state, for example, and its universalizing, totalizing sense of justice is well known. The state, though necessary for justice, ultimately comes to undermine it in the way its abstract impartiality, its concern with universal principles and the rule of law, eclipses the unique individual, the face of the other, which is the ground and telos of justice, for Levinas.(6) Instead of a relationship of responsibility for the other, the perspective of the state fosters a bureaucratic administration of justice which is always, to one degree or another, "a tyranny of the universal and the impersonal."(7) Our ethical potential as individuals uniquely responsible for the other as a singular being seems preserved only in the family, for Levinas, which he analyzes as a privileged context for such face to face encounters.(8) But this respite from Levinas's pessimism with regard to the state is only marginally comforting as it only seems to make room for a genuinely ethical mode of community in our private life, offering an ethical haven in an otherwise heartless world, but no public institutional basis for an ethical community.

It is considerations such as these which lead Robert Gibbs, for example, to conclude that Levinas finally lacks "a positive model for social institutions".(9) Caught up in the unsatisfactory dilemma posed by the abstract universality of the state and the concrete privacy of the family, Gibbs argues that Levinas misses the potential in the Jewish tradition itself for positive modes of ethical community. It is ironic, however, that Gibbs should emphasize the potential of the Jewish tradition in his criticism of Levinas. For it is precisely in Levinas's analysis of Jewish social life that he begins, or so I will argue here, to address our concerns about the sort of social institutions and modes of community which could adequately anchor without necessarily betraying our ethical sensibilities. Though never as developed as one would like, Levinas's understanding of what we could gloss as the moral relevance of Judaism to modernity contains the seeds for an understanding of ethical modes of social life capable of mediating the distance between the private life of the family and the public life of the state; a Levinasian contribution, in effect, to a theory of civil society understood as a context for the generation of social modes of life which, like Judaism, are capable of sheltering our responsibility for the other as a unique individual without forgetting the demands of justice in its universality.

To begin, we should consider Levinas's reflections on the question of the moral relevance of Judaism to modernity. As he puts it in Difficult Freedom, "Can the whole of Western humanism pass for a secularization of Judaeo-Christianity? Have the rights of man and of the citizen and the new spirit that conquered in the eighteenth century not fulfilled in our minds the promises of the prophets?"(10) From a certain vantage point it would appear that they have, especially given Levinas's understanding of the uniquely moral significance of the Jewish faith. For Levinas, the word of God is revealed only in the Law of God which orders us to an unconditional sense of responsibility for the other person. Our vision of God is thoroughly ethical, accessible only in the practical observance of the Law, the mundane, human tasks of caring for our neighbor. "The Bible...," as he emphasizes, "is a book that leads us not towards the mystery of God, but towards the human tasks of man."(11) But insofar as a modern, humanistic concern with human rights and the dignity of each individual seem to appropriate these moral concerns it is, at least, arguable that Judaism as a particular religious faith has outlived itself, surviving only as a sentimental attachment to personally or culturally meaningful memories, not as a unique shelter for the word of God.

If, however, modern humanism has been successful in appropriating something of the core idea of the Jewish Law, our unconditional sense of obligation to the other as a unique individual, it has been notoriously unsuccessful in realizing its vision of a humane society on that basis. Our memories of the flood of inhumanities witnessed this century is sufficient testimony, for Levinas, of a "crisis" of modern humanism(12), an apparent inability to foster and sustain a sense of responsibility for the other despite the increasingly widespread acceptance of the idea of the "rights of man". There are, of course, many reasons for this "crisis". But, from Levinas's perspective, the most salient factor lies in the ways in which modern humanism may be intrinsically unprepared to serve as a bulwark against such inhumanities by having failed to adequately appropriate important dimensions of a Jewish understanding of the Law.

In particular, there is modernity's abstraction of the Law from any distinctive social mode of life in which it would be embedded. Whereas for Judaism our obligations before the Law are not ultimately distinguishable from the matrix of tradition and ritual commanded of us as Jews, modern humanism seeks to present our duties as abstract matters of principle, incumbent on us not as a function of the particularities of our history but of our universal status as rational beings. And this is, no doubt, in many ways a gain inasmuch as it emphasizes the universality of our obligations to others, that we are responsible not merely to those close to us or like us but to any other, no matter how distant or different they may be. The potential for local modes of chauvinism, indifference to the concerns of outsiders, is always inherent in an understanding of morality closely intertwined with the cultivation of group loyalties and solidarities. Attempting to exorcize this particularly virulent form of inhumanity is surely justification enough for the modern attempt to abstract the Law from any particular social context.

It is considerations such as these which lead Levinas to be sympathetic with the aims and fate of modern humanism. Though it is always the face of the other as a unique individual which calls me to responsibility, for Levinas, the multiplicity of others, the presence of what Levinas dubs the "third party", calls me to a universal sense of responsibility before every unique individual, before humanity, in other words.(13) "The birth of morality," as Levinas understands it, lies "in the nakedness of the face," the face of the other as "abstract man, disengaged from all culture"(14) and so soliciting me to a sense of responsibility regardless of culture or history. But despite the important emphasis placed by modern humanism on the universality of our obligations it fails to appreciate the distinctively Jewish insight into the need to anchor our rational insights in a practical mode of life, the inability to ever adequately sever affairs of the spirit from the observance of the letter of the law, our inner life from its external trappings. "There is," Levinas observes,

a remarkable relation between the spiritual nature of ideas and the carnal nature of social habits, an element in which the final truths are preserved unaltered and from which they draw their power.... The bare intellect can scale great heights, but cannot endure there....Truth according to Judaism finds a faithful symbolism that preserves it from the imagination only in practical attitudes, in a Law.(15)

There are many reasons to stress this point with Levinas. It is not, for example, that far removed from contemporary communitarian critiques of liberal-universalism we have already touched on. Only insofar as I can see my relation to the other as an important aspect of my own identity as a member of some historical community, a community which the other, as a member, helps to sustain, can I see the point of my obligations to the other. It is our mutual solidarity in support of shared endeavors, the common good, which establishes the importance of the other for me as one who deserves my support. But, despite the parallels, Levinas's reasons for criticizing the universalistic ambitions of modern humanism diverge from communitarian ones in, at least, one important respect. In a word, communitarian accounts of the need to anchor moral principles in social modes of life are centripetal, hinging an appreciation of the importance of others onto an essentially conditional understanding of their importance to me, to projects I value but cannot pursue alone.(16) Apart from the other's involvement in such common projects with me it is unclear how the other can have importance to me.(17) Hence, the seemingly intractable difficulties in justifying a universal sense of justice and mutual responsibility from this communitarian perspective.

Levinas, on the other hand, gives what amounts to a centrifugal account of our appreciation of the moral importance of the other. I come to appreciate the other as deserving of my consideration not insofar as I can see his or her importance to me and my projects but insofar as I am "exposed" to what Levinas describes as the "height" of the other, his or her unconditional authority or right to command my consideration. "The very fact of being in a conversation," he writes, "consists in recognizing in the Other a right over this (my) egoism..."(18) To speak with another person, Levinas argues, is to be delivered to a perspective where the other is revealed to me as someone who merits my consideration. For I cannot converse with someone without relating to them as someone whose positions are worth hearing, not to be dismissed out of hand, as dismissing them out of hand is, precisely, no longer to be conversing with them. There are, no doubt, modes of speech which do not involve this exposure to the importance of my interlocutor. Perlocutionary uses of speech, in particular, whose primary intent is to effect some change in the world - insulting someone, for example, as a way to hurt someone with my words, not initiate a dialogue concerning my opinions of them - and, generally, communicative exchanges of a primarily instrumental character, where the point of my exchanges with the other are to marshal resources relevant to some project I am pursuing; these modes of communication seem not to fit Levinas's conception of language well. They are ways of using language as a tool rather than living language as an exposure to the concerns of the other. And so Levinas does not seem justified in making any sweeping claims about the ethical import of all modes of speech. But his point only gains in relevance to our concerns with ethical modes of community if we, as Levinas himself seems to do in practice, restrict his claim to genuinely conversational modes of speech, modes of speaking with another person rather than speaking at them. It is only in such non-instrumental communicative relations with the other, not just any face to face encounter, that we can see how the other can become important to me not centripetally or conditionally, in terms of his or her importance to my concerns, but centrifugally in terms of my appreciation of the other's unconditional importance as other, as interlocutor.

Hence, the importance of social modes of life which place me in habitual modes of intercourse with others of a non-instrumental nature, traditions and rituals which bring me into contact with others in a spirit of respect, deference and even veneration. In this regard we would do well to speak of the Jewish tradition of Talmudic study whose significance Levinas has taken great efforts to appreciate in his own work. Levinas emphasizes the way in which Talmudic study places me in a relation of deference to the text as inspired scripture, as the words of the other to whom I am obliged to attend. "My coordination with the other in language is the expression of commandments received: writing is always prescriptive and ethical, the Word of God which commands and vows me to the other, a holy writing before being sacred text."(19) Unlike the attitudes which dominate our sense of study today, centering in the emancipation of the student to appropriate a body of knowledge as so much potentially useful information for his or her own projects and interests, the attitude which informs Talmudic study is more in touch with the spirit of teaching which Levinas invokes in Totality and Infinity to describe our most fundamental relations with the other. There he emphasized a sense in which the other who teaches me is in a position of mastery in relation to me, bringing me to ideas I could not have produced on my own.(20) In contrast to the ways in which we encourage a sense of mastery in our students today, the mastery of information made available to them for their projects, Talmudic study fosters an attitude of submission on the part of the student to the mastery of the text, a veneration of a text able to teach us in a way we could not possibly foresee and would only miss in viewing it exclusively from the context of our own interests. In this way, a fundamentally non-instrumental relation is established with the text. The text is not a resource I can make use of, but an inspired word capable of inspiring me if only I submit to its teaching.

Implicit in this non-instrumental relation to the Talmud is a model of non-instrumental relations to others generally. The language of the Talmud is only exceptional in the way it brings out a way of reading and speaking implicit in language, per. se.: the ethical character of every word insofar as it is conveyed to me from the other who, by virtue of that discursive gesture, can emerge for me as one who commands my consideration. All language has this ethical potential within it, for Levinas, insofar as it opens me up, in the manner of a genuine conversation, to a non-instrumental consideration of the other. Hence, it is not surprising to see the dialogical character of Talmudic study stressed in Levinas's account as well. "The contribution of each person and period is confronted with the lessons from everyone else, and from the whole of the past. Hence the way that readings continually refer to origins across history going from pupil to master; hence the discussion in gatherings between colleagues questioning one another from century to century, the whole thing integrating itself as tradition into commented Scripture ..."(21) The Talmud, written in a style emphasizing complex deliberation of interpretive options from one generation of scholars to the next, intrinsically opens itself up to a contemporary deliberation with others in the present. It is sustained not as an object of personal study, but as a social tradition of questioning and debate across the generations into the present where my teacher is not just the text, but my fellow students with their own unique vantage point on the text. My attitude to my companions in this tradition of study cannot be different from the attitude I maintain toward the text itself, in which I am open to the intrinsic value of the others' perspective onto the text, their authority to command my attention to readings that may have little relevance to the aims that guide my own.

In this way, students of the Talmud are habitually drawn into a relation with others in which they are able to appreciate the importance of the other as someone who deserves the kind of deference and consideration to which the practice disposes them. And as a practice of reading and study which draws from an ethical potential inherent in every genuinely conversational use of language, it can serve as a model for other communicative contexts able to develop that ethical potential in a similar way. For whenever I am institutionally disposed to relate to others with this sense of deference, through a tradition of learned study or everyday ritual and observance of the Law, I am placed in contexts where I can habitually come to appreciate the non-instrumental significance of the other. And, on that basis, it becomes possible for me to understand myself as someone responsible, in a unique way, for the others whose importance I have come to appreciate in that institution. Here we touch on Levinas's understanding of "election", the way in which I gain a sense of myself as uniquely responsible for and to the other in my discursive relations with the other, a sense of responsibility for the other which constitutes the emergence of a morally charged sense of identity, a sense of identity that can only be fulfilled as I fulfill my obligations to the other. "To utter 'I'... means to possess a privileged place with regard to responsibilities for which no one can release me. To be unable to shirk: this is the I."(22)

For Levinas, this sense of election to a morally charged sense of identity is not limited to one's relations to others in social institutions. Whenever I relate to the other as a unique individual, as one who could address me in speech, whether it be a stranger who is suffering in the street or the televised image of a child in need I will certainly never come to know, I find myself elected to this sense of unique and unshirkable responsibility for the other. I may be able to do nothing for them but I sense myself as responsible anyway, as one who should help, if only I could. But taken in the context of institutional relations, such as the tradition of Talmudic study we have been examining, this account of election forms a bridge, so to speak, between what I referred to as Levinas's centrifugal approach to how we come to appreciate the importance of others and a centripetal approach more characteristic of communitarian thought, a way in which we can appropriate communitarian insights in a Levinasian context. A centripetal emphasis on seeing the importance of others relative to their importance to me, to my sense of who I am in relation to a common tradition or form of life we share, is not so much wrong as it is one-sided. It is, perhaps, the most common way in which people with whom we share a common institutional space come to matter to one another. And so one student of the Talmud must matter to another to the extent that they understand who they are as wrapped up in an important way with their engagement to a tradition they each support in their own way. They can no more be indifferent to one another than they can be indifferent to themselves inasmuch as their sense of self, by embracing their shared tradition, involves a reference to the others as members with them of that tradition. But in the context of Levinas's account of the sense of election I gain in my non-instrumental relations to the other, it is possible to recognize a centrifugal core to this otherwise centripetal account. For, to return to the example of the Talmudic student, what I gain in coming to appreciate the importance of my fellow students is not merely the way in which they matter to me, given who I am with my particular institutional commitments, but the way in which their importance as an other person, as my interlocutor who intrinsically merits my consideration and responsibility, matters to me, given who I am with my particular institutional commitments.

This way of speaking may appear needlessly awkward and repetitive. What do we add in speaking of the importance of the other coming to matter to me instead of simply speaking of the other coming to matter to me? Just Levinas's emphasis on the way in which the formation of a sense of who I am in such institutional contexts can involve, in the first place, an appreciation of the other as other, as one who merits my consideration not merely in terms of our shared institutional commitments, but simply by virtue of being my interlocutor, of soliciting my consideration in speech. If, as is only reasonable with others with whom we share a mutually valued institutional relation, I then come to appreciate how the other matters to me given my institutional commitments, this provides an opportunity to further internalize this prior sense of election, of responsibility to the other, in a personally relevant way - to see how my sense of the unconditional importance of the other can also matter to me in a conditional way, relative to my institutional engagements. In this way my appreciation of the importance of the other relative to my sense of who I am is given a deontological significance it lacks in what is otherwise a teleological account, an appraisal of the worth of the other solely in relation to their relevance for my own aims in life. From this Levinasian perspective it is possible, therefore, to appropriate communitarian insights regarding the need to anchor our moral responsibilities in a sense of self gained in relation to shared traditions and common projects without reducing those moral responsibilities to those who matter to me because of their relevance to projects I value. If this otherwise conditional appreciation of the worth of the other is gained in an institutional context informed by the kind of non-instrumental, communicative relations we see exemplified in the tradition of Talmudic study it will be an important way in which I internalize in terms of my own aims my unconditional sense of election to the other - a teleological anchoring, so to speak, of my deontological sensibilities, a way in which I can come to have a deeper personally relevant stake in my moral responsibilities.

It is with this anchoring of an unconditional sense of responsibility to the other in my conditional concerns for my socially circumscribed sense of identity, that we find, at least a part of the practical genius of Judaism as a social mode of life - "a way of living," as Levinas puts it so simply, "that is a ritual and a heartfelt generosity."(23) Together, ritual and heartfelt generosity secure a public, institutional character for a mode of unconditional consideration of the other foundationally at home in more private, face to face encounters. And it is with such hybrid institutions, combining the public, institutional character of the state with the more private, ethical generosity of the family, that we can begin to overcome the stark dichotomy between these two modes of social life as they are presented in Levinas's work, providing an adequate institutional basis for the demands of a universal sense of justice administered by the state. For it is only in relation to an appreciation of the unconditional importance of the other, cultivated in modes of social life that combine these dimensions of ritual and heartfelt generosity, that we can come to see the point of justice, why we should be just.(24) Abstracted from this substantive appreciation of the worth of the other the procedures which constitute a just social order can come to appear as so many pointless encumbrances insofar as they do not directly secure my own personal security and liberty. Insofar as they oblige me to consider the claims of the other their moral authority depends on my ability to discern the worth of the other to whom I am so obliged. Apart from that I cannot see why I should be just, what is important in being so. Hence, the problem which haunts Habermas's constitutional patriotism. Centering his account on our patriotic attachment to principles of justice, we are left without an account of the point of those principles, without an account as to how such a patriotic community would appreciate their unconditional importance. Though Habermas is right, I believe, concerning the need for a political culture based in a constitutional patriotism, his account is silent on the need to develop, as Levinas puts it, cultures of "ritual and heartfelt generosity" capable of fostering an appreciation of the unconditional worth of the other as a singular being who deserves the sort of justice our constitutional principles are designed to respect. In order to adequately think the sort of political culture envisioned by Habermas, sustained by members who are capable of seeing in a concrete way the point of their constitutional patriotism, we must enlarge the scope of our communitarian vision and begin to appreciate the ways in which such a political culture would be infused with a more substantive appreciation of the worth of the other as the point of our constitutional principles or would be formed on the basis of pre-political modes of community which are so infused (or, as is more likely, would be formed, in varying degrees, in both ways).

This concern with grounding our support of universal principles of justice in our substantive appreciation of the worth of the other is also at least a part of what is at stake in Levinas's concern with "the tyranny of the universal and the impersonal" inherent in justice administered by the state. Levinas's concern here is not with the way in which the state can fail to respect my uniqueness by imposing a range of impersonal restrictions to my personal liberties. The uniqueness of the individual which Levinas is concerned the state will come to eclipse is my uniqueness as a self elected to responsibility for the other. For it is the very perspective of equality, of impartiality inherent in a universal sense of justice which threatens to obliterate my appreciation of the other in his or her uniqueness, as my interlocutor, the one who speaks to me and in so doing commands my consideration. As all become equal as subjects under the Law, all become more or less anonymous, not unique interlocutors, but merely cases to which the law must be fairly applied. But this threat which justice poses to my sense of election is not a problem that can be resolved by dismissing the perspective of an impartial administration of justice. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, we cannot finally separate ethics and politics in Levinas's thought. For my relation to more than one other, to the "third party", demands the perspective of justice. A multiplicity of concrete others who all make moral claims on me demands an attitude of impartiality as I come to deal with their conflicting claims, a recognition of their equality as moral subjects.(25) This is why, as Levinas puts it, "justice summons me to go beyond the straight line of justice ..."(26) As grounded in the demands of my personal sense of election to the other, it demands more of me than an impartial respect for fair procedures. It demands a unique sense of responsibility to the other as a basis for appreciating why any other, like the other to whom I am uniquely responsible, should deserve the same. Without this anchoring in social modes of life which foster and habituate me to these forms of personal responsibility to the other, justice cuts itself off from its own indispensable moorings. As Levinas also quite aptly puts it, getting at this connection between the universal demands of justice and the ethical demands of my personal sense of election to the other in his or her uniqueness, "justice remains justice only, in a society where there is no distinction between those close and those far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest."(27) It is this "impossibility of passing by the closest" that a sense of justice abstracted from the mode of community we find in Judaism threatens to extinguish.

As we move increasingly in that direction, the Law becomes merely a means for each one of us to secure our personal liberties, our inalienable right to be indifferent to one another. The need for Law is presented, as it has been in so many social contractarian views(28), as a necessary limit on my freedom only in the service of better securing that freedom. And with this emphasis on personal liberty we are drawn increasingly into our own private lives, respecting the right of the other to his or her private life insofar as that seems instrumentally conducive to the success of my private life, but increasingly deprived of the sort of non-instrumental relations with others which can provide the grounds for coming to appreciate the other's non-instrumental significance as unconditionally deserving of my consideration and responsibility. Levinas's observations on what he calls a "society without solidarity"(29) emergent from this tendency converge quite easily with civic republican concerns with the unqualified expansion of increasingly individualistic attitudes which, as de Tocqueville originally phrased it, "disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself."(30) Levinas illustrates the extreme to which this individualistic withdrawal from society can lead in his image of the cafe, a place of "casual social intercourse" he presents as exemplary of modern society:

Here you are, each at your own little table with your cup or your glass. You relax completely to the point of not being obligated to anyone or anything; and it is because it is possible to go and relax in a cafe that one tolerates the horrors and injustices of a world without a soul. The world as a game from which everyone can pull out and exist only for himself, a place of forgetfulness - of the forgetfulness of the other - that is the cafe.(31)

Justice cannot survive in a world which has become a game.

But the modern world is still more than a mere game. The cafe has not overtaken all our social relations. There are still many social arenas in which in which non-instrumental, communicative relations with others are cultivated. But we still have reasons for concern in the way our dominant arenas of "generosity" with one another have been increasingly stripped of their public, institutional character - the element of "ritual" Jewish modes of life manage to combine with generosity. Our non-instrumental social relations are increasingly organized on a voluntaristic basis as the product of the free choices of the individuals who enter into them giving rise to what Jean Elshtain describes as the incoherent ideal of "nonbinding commitments"(32) - commitments which are only binding as long as they are satisfying to all concerned and so, to this end, provide for ease of exit as well as entry. Consequently, our non-instrumental social relations tend to be more casual, unstable and, in the final analysis, circumscribed by what amounts to an instrumental understanding of the point of these non-instrumental relations - their ability to enhance our personal satisfaction with our lives. It is, of course, possible to develop an appreciation of the unconditional importance of the other in such casual, voluntaristic contexts. Our friends, for example, still matter to us in a fundamentally non-instrumental way. But because of the unstable character of these contexts of interaction and the fundamentally instrumental context of concerns in which they are embedded, it is reasonable to suppose that the sense of election they foster will be 1) similarly unstable, a sense of responsibility more easily given up than in a context of institutionalized ritual and tradition where my sense of who I am is implicated in a more profound and inextricable way, and 2) ambivalent between the non-instrumental understandings they foster between people (I gain a sense of my friends as intrinsically important) and the instrumental understandings these same people can always fall back on to decide whether to remain in the relationships or exit (I decide to weather a burdensome time in my relationships with my friends, to some degree or another, in terms of whether 'its more trouble than its worth').

It is the unique combination of ritual and generosity in Levinas's conception of traditionally Jewish modes of life, of centripetal, communitarian modes of identity with a centrifugal, deontological sense of election, which provides the keys to a sense of social solidarity adequate to anchor a universal sense of justice. And yet, it could be objected, surely this Levinasian conception of an ethical viable sense of community still contains the seeds of group chauvinism and indifference to the outsider. Whenever others come to matter to me in terms of my social-institutional relations to them, the way they belong with me in a common project which matters to us both, the seeds of intolerance to those who do not belong are sewn. Levinas's emphasis on what I have been calling a centrifugal, deontological moment in this process does nothing to obviate this threat. For when I come to appreciate the unconditional importance of the other in these institutional contexts there is nothing to impel me to extend this sense of importance to outsiders. To appreciate the unconditional importance of my fellow students of the Talmud, for example, is not necessarily to generalize that recognition to anyone I might encounter regardless of the context. It could be an occasion to merely emphasize the importance of all those who, like myself, value the study of the Talmud to the disdain of those who do not share this concern.

This is an important objection to which Levinas is particularly vulnerable. For we must remember that the recognition of the worth of the other which occurs in my speaking with the other is nothing articulate. It is only what Levinas describes as "an orientation"(33) to my speech, my being for the other in my speaking. The signification of my saying is nothing said but, as Levinas puts it, the simple "Here I am" of my exposure to the claims of the other,(34) a sense of responsibility that Levinas describes as a sense of "urgency"(35) and I would describe as a sense of gravity to one's relation with the other which constitutes an implicit recognition of his or her worth. To speak is to find oneself impelled to take the other seriously, as if he or she mattered. But it is not to have an articulate idea of what Levinas describes as "the nakedness of the face", "abstract man, disengaged from all culture" which is the basis for that sense of importance.(36) This reference of the birth of morality to "abstract man" is an important point for him as it is what allows him to argue that the presence of many others, just insofar as they are human, capable, in principle, of becoming my interlocutor, entails an impartial sense of justice. It is because the other commands my consideration only in his or her abstract humanity, "disengaged from all culture", that I realize that I must extend the same consideration to all those who, like the other, embody this abstract humanity. But, without an articulate realization of this point, there is no reason why I should realize that I should extend that consideration. In fact, the predominant tendency with such group solidarities may be, contra Sandel's observation of the way the best local solidarities "gesture beyond themselves", not to extend it but to limit it on the basis of an understanding of the importance of the other as a function of his or her belonging to a context we both value.

This is particularly a problem for Levinas's account of the family. In Totality and Infinity Levinas attempts to anchor a conception of human fraternity in the institution of the family. In the family, Levinas argues, I gain a sense of election as the unique child of this father(37), subject to his command. But because I am, as Levinas puts it, both "unique in the world" and a "brother among brothers" my sense of who I am engendered in the family "remains turned ethically to the face of the other", by which he means the face of those others who are third parties in relation to my relationship with my father. Hence, Levinas concludes, a mode of human fraternity, of universal mutual responsibility, is engendered in the family. The problem with this analysis should, however, be obvious in the light of the above considerations. For Levinas's analysis only works if the implicit logic of my relation to others, to the third party, is made explicit and articulate. In the absence of an articulate understanding of the fundamental equality between my "brothers" and myself or between my "brothers" and my father with respect to their right, as human interlocutors, to command my consideration, there is no reason to suppose that I should be aware of myself as belonging to the human fraternity in the same way I am aware of myself as the unique child of this father, uniquely responsible to him. And, as far as I can see, there is nothing inherent to the institution of the family to engender such an articulate, reflective understanding of the implicit logic of my relation to the other and the others. Which is, no doubt, why families can breed a sense of indifference to the rest of the world, a place of individualistic retreat, as easily as a sense of responsibility, generalizable to humanity at large.

But this is not the case with Judaism as Levinas understands it. An articulate understanding of the worth of the abstract humanity of the other is a constitutive dimension of Jewish modes of life - a Jewish universalism that is not inconsistent with the particularism of its traditions and rituals.

That is our universalism. In the cave that represents the resting place of the patriarchs and our mothers, the Talmud also lays Adam and Eve to rest: it is for the whole of humanity that Judaism came into the world. We have the reputation of considering ourselves to be a chosen people, and this reputation greatly wrongs this universalism. The idea of a chosen people must not be taken as a sign of pride. It does not involve being aware of exceptional rights, but of exceptional duties....(38)

In particular, duties to "the stranger" which may decisively trump my loyalty to those close to me. Levinas emphasizes this point in a most dramatic way in his Talmudic commentary on the story of David's execution of seven of Saul's descendants. After three years of famine, God told David that Saul's persecution of the Gibeonites many years before was the major reason for the famine. After the Gibeonites demand seven of Saul's descendants to be nailed to the rock of the Mountain of Saul for retribution, David hands them over to a most brutal execution. Levinas comments: "Let passersby know this: in Israel, princes die a horrible death because strangers were injured by the sovereign. The respect for the stranger and the sanctification of the name of the Eternal are strangely equivalent. And all the rest is a dead letter."(39)

It is insufficient to overcome the threat of chauvinism inherent in centripetal, communitarian modes of appreciating the importance of the other to merely emphasize a centrifugal, deontological moment in that process. As long as my appreciation of the unconditional importance of the other in his or her abstract humanity remains inarticulate, a logic implicit in our non-instrumental, communicative relations, my more articulate solidarity with those close to me will be likely to trump that inarticulate sense of "urgency" or gravity in my relations with strangers that I am not prepared to make sense of. Only a reflective articulation of that implicit deontological logic in discourses and practices constitutive of our forms of life provides us with a sufficient basis, not to exorcise this threat of group chauvinism, but, at least, to combat it coherently - to understand why we should combat it.

This reflective articulation of the implicit logic of our responsibility to the other is, as Levinas would put it, a matter of making the significance of 'saying said', of sheltering and emphasizing the unconditional significance of the other implicit not in what is said in the form of articulate propositions but in the act of saying what is said to the other - of sheltering and emphasizing that significance in what is said.(40) As Levinas argues, the moral significance of our orientation to the other inherent in the act of saying can never be captured in what is said without betrayal. There is a transcendence to the moral significance of the other that can never be presented in a theme. This is, of course, merely to restate the major "metaphysical" theme of Levinas's work: the way in which the other, in his or her moral importance, can never be an object present to me but must be, as he puts it, "otherwise than being". We cannot, therefore, expect any reflective articulation of the logic implicit in our non-instrumental, communicative relations with the other to be "true" of that logic in any straightforward way. But we should not allow this metaphysical and epistemological difficulty to lead us to an unqualified scepticism about all attempts to articulate the moral significance of the other.(41) There must be some modes of articulating the moral significance of the other that are more faithful, shall we say, than others. For otherwise we could not make sense of Levinas's own torturous endeavors to say the significance of saying in his own work. And, in the light of Levinas's analysis of Jewish modes of community, we can appreciate the importance of the attempt in a non-philosophical enterprise - to shelter the implicit universalism of our responsibility to the other in particular modes of life which are important to us, to transform the particularity of those modes of life from breeding grounds for chauvinism and indifference to the stranger into self-conscious training grounds for a more unlimited sense of responsibility to all humanity.

This being said, however, there are important insights we should take from Levinas's understanding of the transcendence of the moral significance of the other for our understanding of the moral relevance of Judaism to modernity. In particular, our inability to ever finally articulate, with dogmatic and unyielding authority, the grounds of our responsibility to the other impel us to a distinctively critical and pluralistic model of an ethically viable community. It enables us to recognize how Levinas's account of Judaism avoids the sort of dogmatic, monolithic traditionalism that would, in the final analysis, have no place in a pluralistic, democratic culture. In this way we may finally be able to see how Levinas's account of Judaism is genuinely relevant to modernity as a model of an ethically viable sense of community consistent, both realistically and normatively, with the conditions and ideals of democratic pluralism.

To begin with, there is a critical sense of pluralism which is constitutive of the life of Judaism as Levinas understands it which gives to its traditions a distinctively non-dogmatic and open character. As the word of God is essentially revealed in the Law of God which orders us to an unconditional responsibility for the other, and as the grounds of this responsibility transcend any thematic account we might give of it, Levinas is logically drawn to stress the potentially unlimited ways in which the significance of God's word can be appropriated. There is a "pluralism of persons and generations" in the way the Holy Scriptures disseminate their meaning in terms of a multiplicity of different readers with different perspectives and concerns, none able to exhaust the depth of meaning posed in the Scriptures.(42) This pluralism quite reasonably gives rise to the way in which the tradition of Talmudic readings is maintained in an open spirit of debate and questioning in which the point of the debates seems not so much to reach any firm conclusions about a univocal meaning of the text which, as Levinas insists, does not exist anyway, but to open up a field of multiple interpretations which can, in an unpredictable way, correct and nourish one another. This way of maintaining tradition by putting it up for question seems to be a practical way in Judaism appropriates Levinas's philosophical strategy of "unsaying" the said in order to emphasize the way in which the moral significance of the other always transcends what can be said.(43) The debates themselves unsay each attempt to say univocally what the Scriptures mean in the way they draw one from one position to another without a conclusive resolution. In this way, a critical pluralism is maintained internal to the tradition antagonistic to both the dogmatism of some presumptively absolute vantage point on the truth or the subjectivism of the denial of truth and consequent rejection of argument and debate as pointless. This Jewish sense of pluralism goes a long way, I believe, to overcoming our otherwise quite justifiable concerns with the potentially oppressive character of tradition by establishing a sense of tradition which is genuinely critical and inclusive.

Beyond this sense of pluralism internal to Judaism as a tradition there is also another sense of pluralism implicit in Levinas's work which centers on the relation of Judaism to other modes of social life and expression. In relating the Holy Scriptures of Judaism to a potential of language itself to signify a sense of responsibility to the other beyond anything that can be explicitly said in its presentation, Levinas lays the ground for a recognition of the manifold discourses which may, in diverse ways, shelter this sense of responsibility. In this regard, Levinas speaks of "a religious essence of language, a place where prophecy will conjure up the Holy Scriptures, but which all literature awaits or commemorates, whether celebrating it or profaning it."(44) As with the pluralism internal to Judaism, this external pluralism does not culminate in an uncritical celebration of every mode of cultural expression. Levinas defends the distinctive insights of Judaism, for example, in relation to Christian and Humanistic discourses. It is not that every culture has articulated our sense of responsibility to the other equally well or with the same insights. As with the internal mode of pluralism, there are grounds for continuing debate and critical reflection on the value of various cultural contributions. And, in keeping with the principle of the inadequacy of every said to our sense of moral responsibility, there is no more reason to expect any univocal conclusions from this debate than from the one internal to Judaism. In this way the ground is laid for a critically informed pluralism which is open to the irreducibly distinctive insights of various cultures, forever anticipating the site of a universal culture that would appropriate the specific contributions of all, but aware that this universal site is always 'to come', that the only way to shelter a properly universal sense of responsibility is in the particularity of distinctive modes of life.

This is what is represented by the Jewish concept of Israel, and the sense that it is a chosen people. It is not 'still anterior' to the universalism of a homogenous society in which the differences between Jew, Greek and barbarian are abolished. It already includes this abolition, but remains, for a Jew, a condition that is at any moment still indispensable to such an abolition, which in turn at any moment is still about to commence.... a particularism. Like that of Abraham. The salvation of human universality perhaps once more requires paths that do not lead to a great metropolis."(45)

This second sense of pluralism invites modernity to learn from Judaism without necessarily seeking to become Jewish or to abandon its commitments to a pluralistic society. But unlike a liberal sense of neutrality which seeks to distance itself from any evaluative judgments concerning the contribution of various cultures and modes of life, neither supporting or inhibiting the efforts of individuals to maintain their traditions, this Jewish pluralism lives and thrives in such evaluative judgments. Critically attentive to the ways in which different cultures, in different and not altogether equal ways, may shelter this universal sense of responsibility, Levinas's Jewish pluralism is based in a recognition of our need to support every mode of life which, like Judaism, shelters our universal sense of responsibility to one another in distinctive ways while remaining critical of the limitations of those which, to one degree or another, foster indifference or, at the extreme, a hatred of the stranger. We are not, therefore, called to abandon our pluralism, but only to a critical appropriation of it maintained, as is the critical pluralism internal to Judaism, through the open debates and deliberations of what, at this level, would be a democratic political community. Concerned to give due respect and consideration to every distinctive contribution to the life of a multi-cultural society, such a community would also be concerned with fostering the social conditions supportive of that multi-cultural society, the modes of community which genuinely "gesture beyond themselves" toward a universal mode of solidarity with the other. And though the question of how this more centrifugal mode of social solidarity should be maintained must, in a democratic community, remain permanently up for question, it is not a question that can be coherently ignored out of a well-meaning, though ultimately misplaced concern with liberal neutrality.

In conclusion

I would like to conclude with a reference to Habermas. For I believe Habermas has quite aptly grasped the major political imperative of our time in his concerns with the renewal of conditions in civil society capable of strengthening our ties of solidarity with one another. As he notes, this solidarity was a presupposition of the socialist and social-democratic movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - a mode of working-class solidarity that would be formed in "the subcultural forms of life of industrial workers", intensified in the "cooperative relationships within the factory" and drawn on as a basis for the generation of a radically democratic, self-organized mode of social life. "But," as he continues, "since then these subcultures have largely disintegrated. And it is somewhat doubtful whether their power to create solidarity can be regenerated in the workplace. Be that as it may, what was previously a presupposition of a condition of the utopian idea of a laboring society has now become a theme for discussion."(46) The moral relevance of Judaism, as Levinas understands it, to modernity lies principally in the contribution it can make to that discussion, in helping us to clarify the structural conditions of an ethically viable sense of community capable of rebuilding the forms of social solidarity that we must presuppose in any pursuit of justice but which we, unlike our socialist and social-democratic predecessors, can no longer take for granted.

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It is the unique combination of ritual and generosity in Levinas's conception of traditionally Jewish modes of life, of centripetal, communitarian modes of identity with a centrifugal, deontological sense of election, which provides the keys to a sense of social solidarity adequate to anchor a universal sense of justice - a combination that has seemingly escaped much contemporary political theory. Increasingly sensitive to concerns with the importance of ethical communities, so many attempts to deal with this issue either altogether eclipse the deontological dimensions of community which could ground a universal sense of justice or finally fail to bridge the gulf between our loyalty to those with whom we share a common tradition and the universal principles that would extend that loyalty beyond them. As examples of both sorts of strategies, let us briefly consider the recent work of Michael Walzer, on the one hand, and Ronald Dworkin and Jurgen Habermas, on the other.

Walzer offers a multicultural vision of communities of solidarity as an antidote to the increasing individualism of the age. Forging links of mutual responsibility and common concern among liberal individuals who are otherwise constitutionally free to go their own way, the diverse traditions which populate our pluralistic landscape only appear to threaten the fragmentation of society the conservative critics of multiculturalism fear. Arguing primarily on the basis of historical record, Walzer makes a case for the integrative effects of ethnic, religious and racially based associations, particularly in the United States. "After all," he writes, "even if the aim is to sustain difference - to build walls against assimilation - difference has to be sustained, the walls have to be built under American conditions, and the effort makes for many points of contact with the larger society and requires active participation in American politics"(47) Pragmatic considerations such as these, however, only go so far in enabling us to understand how particular solidarities can anchor a universal sense of justice. For one, though the practical exigencies of a common American context may make it necessary for diverse groups to form something like a common political culture in which to negotiate their co-existence, the same problems of fragmentation and local modes of chauvenism reemerge at the level of the national political culture. In the absence of a genuinely moral basis for our support of others outside our shared traditions, the threat of indifference to outsiders cannot reasonably be expected to do anything more than wax and wane as our contexts of interaction impel us to build sometimes less and sometimes more encompassing networks of solidarity. The idea of an unconditional and universal support for the other can find no purchase here.

This is not to say that Walzer is not committed to a universal sense of justice in his work. Quite the contrary. But it emerges in mysterious ways, arbitrary intrusions into what remains an otherwise communitarian account of ethics formed in and through the shared experiences of a common culture or history. For example, Walzer refers to a "thin" sense of justice which has, more or less, universal validity, embracing largely "negative injunctions" such as "rules against murder, deceit, torture, oppression, and tyranny." But he rejects an appeal to anything like a universal basis of this thin morality, insisting that thin moralities are not "free-standing"but only designate "some reiterated features of particular thick or maximal moralities" based in the shared experiences of a particular culture. We are left, however, without even an attempt to explain why these particular features of our thick moralities are or must be reiterated.(48) Lacking an understanding of how an unconditional appreciation of the worth of the other could emerge within particular communities of solidarity, it makes sense that our thin morality would remain mysterious.

From a more liberal, universalist direction, Ronald Dworkin and Jurgen Habermas have both appreciated the insight of the communitarian critique of liberalism more than most and have recognized the need to anchor a liberal sense of justice in the culture of a community that would sustain it. Both strive to preserve the liberal ideal of neutrality toward particular modes of life by stressing the political character of this shared culture, a culture of patriotic attachment to shared political principles while also recognizing the ethical character of this political culture, the way in which it entails a particular conception of the good life unique to liberalism. But both finally fail to answer the most basic question raised by Dworkin concerning "what reason people have to be liberals".(49) Taking Dworkin's case first, he tries to show how a concern for liberal principles of justice flows naturally from a particular conception of the good life centered in the essentially Aristotelian notion of "meeting the challenge of living well".(50) Without going into the details of Dworkin's "challenge" model of the good life, it is fair to say that Dworkin makes a reasonably convincing case for it generally as well as his claim that liberal principles of justice should be endorsed by those persuaded of it. But he only makes that case by assuming that we will recognize considerations of justice as one of the appropriate parameters of meeting the challenge of living well in the first place. "Once we accept that the best life means a life responding well to the right circumstances, and that the right circumstances are circumstances of justice, we become aware of how difficult it is to lead anything like the right life when circumstances are far from just."(51) Though Dworkin may make a good case as to why those who are already committed to a basic sense of justice as a key constituent of a good life should be liberals (which is, of course, not an insignificant achievement) he fails to address the more fundamental question as to why one should be concerned with justice to begin with. Dworkin's liberal political culture provides an arena in which those who are already committed to justice can coherently pursue a particular conception of a good life within its parameters but not a cultural arena which would be formative for that sense of justice.

Habermas, for his part, sees the need for political culture with its own particular ethical vision in the way universal principles of justice must be interpreted in terms of the social-historical context of its appropriation.

The process of actualizing rights is indeed embedded in contexts that require ... discussions about a shared conception of the good and a desired form of life that is acknowledged to be authentic. In such discussions the participants clarify the way they want to understand themselves as citizens of a specific republic, as inhabitants of a specific region, as heirs to a specific culture ... Constitutional principles can neither take shape in social practices nor become the driving force for the dynamic project of creating an association of free and equal persons until they are situated in the historical context of a nation of citizens in such a way that they link up with those citizens' motives and attitudes.(52)

Principles of justice must, in other words, become embodied in the particular mode of life of a political community in terms of its ethical aspirations for itself in order to have any "driving force" in the life of that community. In this way justice gets interpreted with its own culturally distinctive orientation and emphasis - liberalism is not identical across its French, German and American instantiations, for example. But this cultural embodiment of justice need not require linguistic, ethnic or cultural homogeneity. "A liberal political culture is only the common denominator for a constitutional patriotism," Habermas insists, "that heightens an awareness of both the diversity and the integrity of the different forms of life coexisting in a multicultural society."(53)

But it is precisely the constitutional character of the patriotism in Habermas's account which raises problems for us. For it is true that a political community needs to be able to recognize its constitutional principles as its own in order to sustain the motivation necessary to support them and this means interpreting them in the particular context of its own history and ethical aspirations. As Americans we are not just committed to universal principles of justice, generally, but to "our" Bill of Rights, in particular, and the way they were initially hammered out and then later expanded to women and minorities previously excluded from their range of application through the historical struggles of our fellow citizens. It is our relation to this particular history of this particular interpretation of liberal rights that sustains our commitment to liberalism. But none of this clarifies why these constitutional principles should be so important to us. Granted, they are our principles but we are still in the dark as to why we should embrace them as our own. What would motivate liberals who are justly proud of the voluntary character of their relationships to culture and history to sustain their embrace of them rather than leaving that part of their history behind and turning to the increasingly individualistic pursuit of the good life feared by de Tocqueville, the culture of the cafe envisioned by Levinas? Though Habermas explains how constitutional principles can be sustained in and through their cultural appropriation as a distinctive aspect of a larger ethical historical vision which animates a political community he fails to explain why we would appropriate these principles as a part of that ethical vision, what good they bring to our aspirations for ourselves as unconditional, universal principles of justice. For it is clear that though liberal-democratic principles of justice are an important dimension of our aspirations for personal and collective-democratic autonomy, a failure to go beyond this understanding, as Habermas well knows, makes their value conditional and limited to the achievement of this good for us, not necessarily for everyone as justice understood unconditionally demands. It is for this reason, to secure their unconditional, deontological status, that Habermas attempts to ground these principles not only in the ethical aspirations of particular historical communities but in the formal-pragmatic conditions of communicative discourse itself.(54) But this only raises again the question of why we should recognize these formal conditions of communication as unconditionally important, as deserving an unconditional central place in our ethical vision of a good life? As an even more formal set of procedures than the historically interpreted constitutional principles they ground the question remains as to the point of the procedures, why we should prioritize these procedures, for instance, over the a-moral strategies which, though often inconsistent with just procedures, may still offer a better chance at realizing our personal or cultural ambitions for ourselves. Focusing his attentions on our attachment to procedures and constitutional principles of justice, Habermas fails to articulate a vision of community which fosters an appreciation of the unconditional worth of the other to whom these procedures and principles are in service.(55) And in this way he fails to provide an adequate understanding of how our support for them as unconditional could be anchored in the life of a community which fosters such an unconditional appreciation of the worth of the other.

Notes

1. See Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For a shorter version, see "The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self", Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 1, February 1984, pp. 81-96.

2. Michael Sandel, Democracy and its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 343. Democracy and its Discontents is the most fleshed out account of Sandel's civic-republican vision of community.

3. See, for example, John Rawls, "The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus," Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1987) and Ronald Dworkin, "Foundations of Liberal Equality" in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume XI (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990).

4. Jurgen Habermas, "Citizenship and National Identity" in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans., William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 500.

5. My appreciation of the importance of this question regarding our capacity to see the "point" of our principles of justice is indebted to the work of Charles Taylor who raises it in relation to Habermas and others who emphasize an exclusively procedural conception of justice. See Charles Taylor, "Language and Society" in Communicative Action: Essays on Jurgen Habermas's Theory of Communication, eds., Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), especially pp. 30-31 and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), especially p. 87. For more on Levinas's relation to this issue, see my "From Communicative Action to the Face of the Other: Habermas and Levinas on the Foundations of Moral Theory," Philosophy Today (Winter 1996). My suggestion that a community based on constitutional patriotism lacks the resources to sustain anything more than an instrumental appreciation of the importance of justice is also indebted to Charles Taylor, in particular, his essay, "Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate," in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed., Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) where he criticizes what he characterizes as a "holistic" liberalism that would understand our shared appreciation of liberal principles as a common good.

6. See Totality and Infinity, trans., Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 241-243 for a concise discussion of Levinas's critical appraisal of the state, the dimension of the political and the judgment of history.

7. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 242.

8. For Levinas's analysis of the family, see Totality and Infinity, pp. 267-269 and 274-285.

9. Robert Gibbs, "A Jewish Context for the Social Ethics of Marx and Levinas" in Autonomy and Judaism, ed., Daniel H. Frank (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 174. Though I believe Gibbs is mistaken in this assessment of Levinas's work I am very much indebted to his analysis of Levinas's understanding of social institutions and the possibilities for ethical modes of sociality.

10. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans., Sean Hand (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 278.

11. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 275. For more on Levinas's understanding of the moral character of religion that is not, as he puts it, "the forever primitive form of religion", see Totality and Infinity, pp. 77-79.

12. See Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 281.

13. This is a much too brief synopsis of Levinas's ideas concerning the "third party" and the way in which this complicates the original ground of morality in our face to face proximity to a singular other and opens us up to an impartial, universal sense of justice before humanity. For a fuller account, see Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 212-215 and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans., Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), pp. 157-161.

14. Emmanuel Levinas, "Meaning and Sense" in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans., Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publixhers, 1987), p. 101.

15. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 274.

16. This is not to say that communitarian accounts of the importance of the other reduce the importance of the other to an instrumental significance. I do not understand my fellow citizens as important and deserving of my respect and consideration merely because I need their cooperation to attain things I enjoy on my own independent of them, as I might value the cooperation of others in support of such things as our local police force which enable all of us to enjoy greater security in our private lives. The other is not a mere means to the end of my private satisfaction with life. Rather, as Taylor so clearly brings out with his distinction between common and convergent goods in "Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate", a common sense of the good is something that can only be enjoyed with others as, for example, I can only take pride in the achievements of my country as a citizen, with my fellow citizens. But this point still preserves what I am calling the centripetal character of the significance of the other to me.

17. Except, of course, in an indirect way as a function of the fact that it just happens to be important to "us" that those who are not a part of our community be treated as having the same or a similar sense of worth. For a good example of this approach to the problem of our relations with others who do not belong to our community, see Richard Rorty, "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism," The Journal of Philosophy (1983). The major problem with this approach is that it explains why we, in fact, value others outside our community, but fails to adequately justify why we should expect this of ourselves. For a more detailed examination and criticism of Rorty's strategy, see my "Putting Ourselves Up For Question: A Postmodern Critique of Richard Rorty's Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism," The Journal of Value Inquiry 29: 241-253, 1995.

18. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 40. Levinas uses the term "exposure" to indicate the passivity and affective character of my sense of responsibility to the other. See Otherwise than Being, for example, pp. 14-15. For Levinas's use of the term "height", see Totality and Infinity, pp. 75 & 200.

19. Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans., Gary D. Mole (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. xii.

20. See Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 69. In the passage cited the most fundamental teaching the other brings to me is an appreciation of the idea of the infinity of the other, his or her moral authority in relation to me.

21. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. xiii.

22. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 245.

23. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 212.

24. My appreciation of the importance of this question is indebted to the work of Charles Taylor who raises it in relation to Habermas and others who emphasize an exclusively procedural conception of justice. See Charles Taylor, "Language and Society" in Communicative Action: Essays on Jurgen Habermas's Theory of Communication, eds., Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), especially pp. 30-31 and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), especially p. 87. For more on Levinas's relation to this issue, see my "From Communicative Action to the Face of the Other: Habermas and Levinas on the Foundations of Moral Theory," Philosophy Today (forthcoming).

25. For a fuller account of Levinas's understanding of the connection between the universal imperatives of justice and the foundational moral situation of my face to face proximity with the other in his or her uniqueness, see Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 212-215 and, especially, Otherwise than Being, pp. 157-161.

26. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 245.

27. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 159.

28. "In particular, modern political theories since Hobbes deduce the social order from the legitimacy, the incontestable right, of freedom." Emmanuel Levinas, "Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity", p. 57.

29. See Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, p. 111.

30. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2 (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), p. 104.

31. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, p. 112.

32. Jean-Bethke Elshtain, "Feminism, Family, and Community," Dissent, Vol 29, Fall 1982, p.445.

33. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 98.

34. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 149.

35. See Levinas, "Language and Proximity" in Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 120.

36. See Levinas, "Meaning and Sense", p. 101 and above.

37. Or, I would add, mother. Levinas's preoccupation with paternity is unintelligible to me though the debate surrounding Levinas's sexism is not one I am either prepared or inclined to take on here. For the purposes of this paper, I believe a reference to "father and/or mother" could be substituted without distortion for Levinas's reference to "father".

38. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 176.

39. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, p. 27.

40. For Levinas's distinction between the "saying" and the "said", see, in particular, Otherwise than Being, pp. 5-7 & 45-51.

41. This is not to say, of course, that this difficulty does not deserve our attention. But the problems it raises cannot even be adequately approached, I believe, in this paper without unreasonably extending its length and blurring its focus.

42. See Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. xiii. Though Levinas does not relate this pluralism directly to his thesis regarding the saying and the said, it is reasonable to suppose a connection in the way I have elaborated it. Levinas's emphasis on the way the revelation of the Scriptures implicates each person in his or her uniqueness, as a distinctive reading posed from his or her perspective, is convergent with his claims regarding the moral significance of the Word of God and his account of how the moral significance in my speech with the other cannot be appropriated except in a mode of election, the assumption of a unique sense of responsibility.

43. See Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 181. Levinas's strategy of unsaying the said centers principally on the construction of paradoxes which call attention to the inherent limitations of the themes invoked. An example of such unsaying can be found in his description of "ethical resistance" as "the resistance of what has no resistance" (Totality and Infinity, p. 199) where the point is to stress the way the sense of resistance being invoked exceeds any sense of objective resistance to which the theme of resistance would be adequate.

44. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. xi.

45. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 177 & 288.

46. Jurgen Habermas, "The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies", in The New Conservativism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), pp. 67-68.

47. Michael Walzer, The Culture of Community: A Series of Public Conversations, Part One - Citizenship and Civil Society (New Brunswick, NJ: New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, 1992), p. 10. Also see his What it Means to be an American: Essays on the American Experience New York: Marsilio Publishers Corp., 1996), p. 11.

48. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Arguments at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 10-11.

49. Ronald Dworkin, "Foundations of Liberal Equality" in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume XI (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), p. 5.

50. Dworkin, "Foundations of Liberal Equality", p. 58.

51. Dworkin, "Foundations of Liberal Equality", p. 74.

52. Jurgen Habermas, "Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State", trans., Shierry Weber Nicholsen, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed., Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 125 and "Citizenship and National Identity" in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans., William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 499.

53. Habermas, "Citizenship and National Identity", p. 500.

54. See, in particular, Jurgen Habermas, "Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification" in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans., Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990).

55. For more on this last point, see my "From Communicative Action to the Face of the Other: Habermas and Levinas on the Foundations of Moral Theory," Philosophy Today