On Freedom and Responsibility Remarks on Sartre Levinas and Derrida

HeyJ XLI (2000), pp. 47–65

© The Editor/Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.

ON FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY:REMARKS ON SARTRE, LEVINAS

AND DERRIDAHOLGER ZABOROWSKI

Christ Church, Oxford, UK

I. RESPONSIBILITY AND FREEDOM IN MODERN THOUGHT

In On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche draws attention tothe links between responsibility, freedom and conscience in a way thatis still worth considering:

The proud realization of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the aware-ness of this rare freedom and power over himself and his destiny, has penetratedhim to the depths and become an instinct, his dominant instinct: – what will hecall this dominant instinct, assuming that he needs a word for it? No doubt aboutthe answer: this sovereign man calls it his conscience.1

Nietzsche speaks of the ‘extraordinary privilege of responsibility’. Heacknowledges the exceptional character of both freedom and respon-sibility. Responsibility is, one is frequently told, rather a ‘late-comer inWestern ethics’2 which refuses to be easily defined. It is, as KrystinaDanecka-Szopowa has stated,

a multi-dimensional, multivalent, cohesionless and independent notion,interwoven into the drama of man and the world, shifting its position in thehierarchy of values of perceiving man, a notion connected with the existence andfate of Man, his feelings, aspirations, actions, and destiny. For all these reasons,responsibility is a notion difficult to describe.3

Indeed, the issue of responsibility is arguably one of the most difficultquestions moral philosophy has to deal with. Therefore, what is to besaid on responsibility in modern thought in the following must neces-sarily be a rather sketchy overview. It is almost irresponsible, so to speak,to simplify Sartre’s, Levinas’s, and Derrida’s thought in the followingway; but it is perhaps permissible in that it can support a more elaboratenarrative of twentieth-century French philosophy and of two of thefundamental issues of moral philosophy as well. This article aims simply

at providing some initial thoughts towards a longer and more subtlydifferentiated study.

Responsibility, like freedom, is one of the key notions in ethics, acrisis of which inevitably leads to a crisis of ethics as well. The moremajor strands of modern thought concentrated upon such issues, themore, paradoxically, they seemed wholly to disappear. If the main para-digm of how to understand human action is that of mechanistic causality,freedom and responsibility become increasingly problematic notions.The traditional difference between theoretical and practical reason dis-appears once human action appears entirely explainable by reference topsychology, biology, physics, sociology, or history. The notion of actionalso loses its meaning, for human action cannot then be distinguishedfrom any purely natural phenomenon. Ethics, as one might have thought,was to be wholly replaced by deterministic sciences or was simply toprovide advice on how to live as comfortably as possible.

A mechanistic point of view and the modern preoccupation with sci-entific explanations do not exclusively lead to determinism. They canalso lead to an infinitation of freedom at the cost of the traditional under-standing of both nature and morality. For one’s own existence could beconceived of as a target of modern skills and techniques too. The modernoptimism about changing the world (and creating a new one) by the increas-ing success of sciences and other means of rational world-explanationand action could also be applied to one’s own existence. Nietzsche’s phil-osophy was in fact about how to create oneself as powerfully as possible.4

Kant aimed at solving the problem of determinism by laying stress onthe sharp distinction between theoretical and practical reason, betweenthe realm of causality and that of freedom. But he did not successfullydemonstrate a way of reconciling system and freedom. This not yetsatisfactorily solved issue was the starting-point of German idealism.Initially, all idealist philosophers aimed at footnoting the FrenchRevolution and its almost pathetic focus on freedom while neverthelessnot giving up the systematic claim of philosophy. Fichte, Schelling andHegel each tried to bridge the gap between the realm of theoreticalreason and that of practical reason. The enormous success of Hegel-ianism, though, cannot conceal the fact that idealist philosophy hasalways been the target of manifold criticism. The progressive success ofthe sciences in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,however, reinforced the on-going crisis of idealist thought. This gaverise to an even more substantial crisis of freedom and responsibility thanin previous centuries. Marxism, Darwinism, and Freudian psycho-analysis attempted to solve the problem of freedom and responsibility,roughly speaking, simply by abandoning these issues and replacingthem with deterministic and positivist ways of explanation. The historyof modern thought seems thus to be the history of the self-eradication ofethics as well. For medical, psychological, socio-historical, or genetical

48 HOLGER ZABOROWSKI

reasons, the notion ‘responsibility’ has increasingly become as question-able as the notion of freedom, or as that of subjectivity. In particular,reductionistic ideologies such as behaviourism (Skinner), structuralism(Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault) or functionalism (Luhmann) haveaimed at overcoming the notion of a responsible subject. The notion ofthe subject’s death has unquestionably made it more and more difficultto defend the traditional idea of responsibility and to uphold the differ-ence of theoretical and practical reason.

Still, responsibility has never ceased to be a major philosophicaltopic. It has been dealt with in particular by twentieth-century phe-nomenology. The Wertphänomenologie (‘value phenomenology’) of, forinstance, Nicolai Hartmann5 ought to be mentioned, and other ap-proaches which are indebted to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Thequestion of to what extent Heidegger’s thought itself contributes toethics has long been neglected, or has simply been answered in thenegative. There is indeed still much research to be done on this issue.6

From a superficial point of view, his Being and Time and his laterthought deal as little with the question of responsibility as Jean-PaulSartre’s Being and Nothingness.7 He rejects any kind of axiologicalphilosophy and makes it clear that Being and Time ought not to be readas a philosophical anthropology. Unquestionably, responsibility was nota major issue for his thought8 as, interestingly, the notion of conscienceundoubtedly was.9 In the Letter on Humanism, he stressed his scepticismabout Sartre, because Sartre, so Heidegger judged, was still a metaphys-ical thinker and therefore oblivious of Being and its truth,10 and becausehis evaluation was still beyond the letting-be. In fact, however, evenSartre’s early and seemingly purely ontological thought is to be situatedin the very heart of ethical questions. His interpretation of consciousnessas nothing and of human freedom as creating its very existence withoutany presupposed essence and without a priori values provide the ground-work for an ethics.11 Levinas and Derrida have also made important and influential French contributions to the field of phenomenology ofresponsibility. Worthy of mention are also the Polish phenomenologistRoman Ingarden with his Man and Value,12 Wilhelm Weischedel’s DasWesen der Verantwortung. Ein Versuch (The Essence of Responsibility.An Attempt),13 and the current Pope’s Love and Responsibility14 which ismuch indebted to Max Scheler’s phenomenology.15 Hans Jonas’s TheImperative of Responsibility16 also deals with responsibility, but from amore ontological point of view.17

The notions of responsibility and of freedom have an interestinghistory in twentieth-century thought. There is a dialectic of freedom and responsibility which starts off with the pathos of infinite freedom in Sartre’s existentialism. In what follows, I shall differentiate threedifferent, though not contradictory, kinds of responsibility through whatis mainly an analysis of twentieth-century French philosophy. I shall

ON FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 49

demonstrate that each notion of responsibility has its own right andvalue and that they aim at answering completely different questions.They indicate that responsibility can be looked at from at least threedifferent points of view. There is an anthropological point of view, anethical one, and a religious one, all of which are deeply interwoven withone another. My approach will be to look at twentieth-century Frenchphilosophy and its development. (A brief look at Walter S. Wurzburger’sethics of responsibility will shed light on what one might call atraditional Jewish understanding of responsibility. Wurzburger developsan ethical and religious understanding of responsibility, which refuses toderive religion from ethics. This view is meant to provide a contrast towhat will be said earlier on Levinas and Derrida.) I shall, finally, exam-ine the notion of hope in Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. This notion isto be understood against the background of what is, broadly speaking,the existentialist understanding of responsibility. A look at how theyunderstood hope can thus broaden our analysis of the existentialistunderstanding of responsibility and will mark one of the main differ-ences vis-à-vis traditional religious understandings of responsibility.

In this article I shall concentrate on Sartre, Levinas and Derrida. Ishall show how ‘responsibility’ was derived from a notion of infinitefreedom. This was to be limited, concretized and rooted in either ateleological point of view on history and human obligation, as developedby Sartre in his dialogue with Marxist philosophy, or a more original,an-archic, concrete, yet infinite responsibility which was to limit theinfinite freedom. This idea can be found in Levinas and Derrida, andpossibly in the later Sartre as well. This latter notion of infinite respon-sibility, moreover, did not remain a purely secular idea. It was surpassedtheologically. Thus, one can find both in Levinas and in Derrida a stressupon the link between absolute responsibility and God as the goal ofinfinite responsibility. This recalls a more traditional understanding ofresponsibility. Traditionally, responsibility had been understood againsta religious background. Responsibility’s etymological roots hint inmany European languages at a pre-existent commandment which wehave to respond to. Responsibility thus appears to be a wholly dialogicnotion.18 The idea of responsibility for oneself also presupposes this dia-logic character too, even if one does not allow for an explicitly theo-logical understanding of responsibility. For one can act towards oneselfand, for instance, overcome one’s drive and instinct.

A theological view of responsibility appears to be crucially importanttoo, for otherwise, one cannot properly justify why and to what extent one should be responsible.19 Kierkegaard would have agreed with this,while yet upholding that a theological view on responsibility is not aboutadvice for, so to speak, one’s bourgeois and conformist life. Levinas andDerrida would likely agree as well, though in their own ways. Sartremay have rejected a theological understanding of responsibility as he


rejected a religious point of view. By his apotheosis of freedom he elim-inated God as the absolute Other who can be experienced in the situationof responsibility. His philosophy might be seen as an important attemptto avoid the traditional notion of an objectified God and the self-apotheosis of humans. This view does not necessarily lead to atheism,20

for it might also entail another understanding of God and of humans asbeing in God’s image. In the following section I provide an analysis ofSartre’s understanding of freedom and responsibility.

II. BEYOND ORDINARY MORALITY: INFINITE FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

Sartre’s philosophy is to be situated in a rather ambivalent relation toreligion. The autobiographical writing Words makes clear why, some-how, the whole of his philosophy is a continuous wrestling with religion,or, to be more precise, with God. He writes: ‘In short, I did all I couldto stand aside from secular power: neither above nor below, but else-where. A cleric’s grandson, I was a cleric from childhood; I had theunctuousness of the princes of the Church and the hearty manner of the priesthood.’21 His being a ‘cleric from childhood’ also sheds light onhis preoccupation with ethics, with the issues of freedom and, in his laterwork, with responsibility.

In The Flies, we find a very dramatic expression of Sartre’sphilosophy of freedom. It shows the ambivalent character of freedom inSartre’s thought: ‘You are not the king of man. … [Y]ou should not havemade me free’, Orestes thus accuses Zeus of his own freedom. Orestesdesperately laments the sudden awareness of his unlimited freedom,which leads him to depair of any kind of security and orientation. Theway Sartre describes the disclosure of freedom brings to mind thePlatonic �ξα Ýϕνης .22 The revelation of freedom happens as suddenly asany mystical experience, and yet, it is a merely secular event: ‘Suddenly,out of the blue, freedom crashed down on me, and swept me off my feet … And there was nothing left in heaven, no Right or Wrong, noranyone to give me orders.’23 Orestes has just returned to Argos, city of his parents. It has become a hopeless hell on earth because of its guilt.‘This emptiness, the shimmering air, that fierce sun overhead’,24 is theTutor’s first characterization of this city crowded with flies, sent byZeus, god of flies and death. Suddenly, Orestes recognizes his infinitefreedom and also – though it is not explicitly mentioned in this context– his infinite responsibility.

Sartre’s purely philosophical works can be read as a commentary onhis novels and plays (and, no doubt, vice versa). He avoided the narrowboundaries of a purely philosophical discourse. The ethical dimension


of his plays confirms that his philosophy was mainly a moral phil-osophy, though he never finished the ethical book referred to in TheTranscendence of the Ego25 and in Being and Nothingness.26 Not even theCritique or Dialectical Reason27 fulfilled his promise. There are,however, some writings which might be read as notes and fragments ofhis ethics. There is his Notebooks for an Ethic,28 which he wrote in thelate 1940s. There are two lectures, one of which he delivered in Romein 1964, the other of which he intended to give at Cornell University, buteventually refused to deliver it as a mark of protest against the Vietnamwar. And there is, finally, the unfinished yet voluminous Power andFreedom.29

In examining Sartre’s ethics, we need to bear three things in mind:Firstly, that the fact that his thought appears to lack an ethical dimensionis not the result of a lack of interest, but rather of a sensitive knowledgeof the difficulties of moral philosophy and a deeply rooted scepticismabout what he saw as traditional bourgeois ethics; secondly, that there isa huge difference between Sartre’s own philosophy and any vulgar,trendy rehash of existentialism; and, thirdly, that Sartre’s thought under-went development, to the extent that the later Sartre was very close toLevinas’s radical ethics, which emphasized the role of generosity andlove;30 so that in the end he was perhaps justly deemed ‘a Jew honoriscausa’.31

In Being and Nothingness there are a few passages where the seem-ingly purely ontological discourse is interrupted by ethical considerations,one of which deals with freedom and responsibility. If humans arethrown inescapably into freedom and the duty to choose (for even not tochoose is a choice), as the early Sartre frequently argued, this entailshuge ethical implications. As Hazel E. Barnes, who elaborated an ethic based on Being and Nothingness, puts it: ‘The choice to liveunauthentically rests upon a refusal to recognize the existence anddemands of freedom; it seeks to hide from itself the very fact that it is achoice. The choice to be ethical embraces both the recognition that oneis free and the acceptance of the responsibility which freedom entails.’32

Sartre’s ethical considerations in Being and Nothingness go as follows:The human ‘carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders’;33

his responsibility is ‘overwhelming’34 and ‘absolute’35 as the ‘logical requirement of the consequences of our freedom’.36 Sartre thus givesOrestes’s accusation a philosophical expression: It is the very conditiohumana, ‘that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engagedin a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able,whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for aninstant’.37 He is ‘thrown into a responsibility, which extends to his very abandonment’.38 This responsibility must be read against thebackground of Kantian ethics and its universalism; according to Sartre,everyone should ask ‘what would happen if everyone did as one is


doing?’39 Far from offering a post-modern ‘anything goes’, a ‘quietismof despair’, ‘a contemplative philosophy’, a pessimistic ‘laissez faire’,an aesthetic morality or an individual subjectivism – even if some mighthave read Sartre in this quite fashionable way – Sartre himself stresses,that ‘our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern ofvalues in distinction from the material world’.40

To some extent, Existentialism and Humanism puts into question theemptiness of responsibility in Being and Nothingness. According toBeing and Nothingness, there cannot be any difference between gettingdrunk alone and leading a nation. There cannot be any substantiallymoral difference between different goals of human action; there can onlybe different degrees of consciousness of these goals.41 Existentialism andHumanism leads to the political (i.e., Marxist), concrete notion of respon-sibility which we find in Sartre’s later philosophy. In The Itinerary of aThought, an interview Sartre gave to the New Left Review, he drawsattention to how the focus of his philosophical interests changed: ‘Thuswhat I will write one day is a political testament. … What I would liketo show is how a man comes to politics, how he is caught by them, and how he is remade other by them; because you must remember that Iwas not made for politics, and yet I was remade by politics so that Ieventually had to enter them. It is this which is curious.’42

Sartre’s understanding of freedom presupposes many traditionalvalues. Furthermore, he does not give up the elementary distinctionbetween good and evil. For his often-cited example of the young stu-dent, who wanted him to advise him on whether he should stay with hismother or join the Free French, is a moral dilemma which presupposesthe idea that a human’s good cannot be grasped straightforwardly.Decisions must inevitably be taken – in this case either according to a‘morality of sympathy, of personal devotion’ or according to ‘a moralityof wider scope but of more debatable validity’.43 The young man’sdilemma is tantamount to that which Antigone and Abraham faced, andthere is no simple solution for it. To do good always means to have todecide between different goods. One could imagine someone leaving his mother in order to simply enjoy himself without being interested inhis own or in the other’s freedom. This, though, would be beyond therealization of freedom which Sartre would have agreed with, although‘every purpose, however individual it may be, is of universal value’.44

Despite the variability of moral contents, ‘a certain form of this moralityis universal’.45 Freedom for oneself and for others is the measure of ourdeeds and it is therefore possible to ‘judge a man by saying that hedeceives himself’.46


III. INFINITATION – AN ANNIHILATION?

From a critical point of view, I want to argue, that the purely abstractinfinitation of both freedom and responsibility is the abolition of both.If freedom were nothing but intrinsically infinite, it would destroy itselfand would not be freedom any more. The arbitrary domination of thisinfinity smacking of compulsion, would rule over humans who want tobe released and freed from their own infinite freedom: ‘You should nothave made me free’. The same destruction by infinitation can be seen inthe case of responsibility: the infinitation of responsibility lethargizes,and leads to the annihilation of responsibility. To be responsible foreverything means to be responsible for nothing. As J. R. Lucas has it: ‘Itmakes some people feel good to feel bad about things generally – itshows them to be moral without the inconveniences of actual action.’47

The Sartrean notion of responsibility includes the impossibility ofethical freedom and responsibility. But even blame and praise do notdisappear and do not seem to be useless conceptions within the logic ofinfinitation. They are themselves infinitated depending upon one’sperspective. Focusing on the freedom which humans are condemned to,every decision, on the one hand, will be an act of realizing, of actual-izing, of living, and of fearlessly accepting this freedom, and is to bepraised. From the point of view of responsibility, on the other hand,every decision to act is totally to be blamed, because to decide on onepossible option involves excluding all other options from being realizedand actualized. In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre deals with thisquestion of choice. Choice, he argues, is characteristic of any humanaction. The world we have to live is, according to Sartre, substantiallycharacterized by the tragedy of freedom. The infinitation of freedom andresponsibility is a radical abolition of these concepts. The notions offreedom and responsibility can only be saved and thus properly beunderstood if the account of the infinitation of both is understood as apre-ethical, anthropological narrative of the condition humaine. Thisought to be counterbalanced by an account of ethical, i.e., concrete,freedom and responsibility. Since an extended account of concrete moralduties is missing, particularly in Sartre’s earlier writings, DominicLaCapra has convincingly argued that in Being and Nothingness‘freedom seemed paradoxically to be both total and self-effacing or self-nugatory – nothing in effect, but the nothing that made a world of differ-ence in meaning and value.’48 Owing to this lack of concrete orientationand values in Sartre, which, to some extent, is also true of his later work,where he thinks about different values and obligations much more ex-plicitly, one can understand why Juliette Simont calls her attempt towrite an essay on Sartrean ethics a ‘philosophical wager’.49 The notionsof infinite freedom considered above do not form an ethics, althoughthey are of huge ethical importance. They constitute a tragic anthropology


rather than an ethics, as Thomas C. Anderson who speaks of Sartre’s twoethics,50 has argued, since they do not concern concrete ethical issuesand do not offer any answers to the question of how to live or what tohope for (except for freedom itself).

From a historical point of view, Sartre’s notion of infinite freedom,his ‘fundamental lesson of freedom’,51 and his understanding ofresponsibility which was closely bound up with it, was very influential.One can find these ideas in, for instance, Levinas, where admittedly thestress lies more on responsibility than on freedom. Levinas emphasizesmainly that we are infinitely and inescapably responsible. Therefore, our freedom is limited, as Levinas has put it, before we have agreed tolimit ourselves. This first notion of responsibility is therefore not to beabolished, but to be completed by a glance at concrete ethical situations.I shall argue that both Sartre and Levinas take this situation intoconsideration. In his emphasis on the utterly free and unlimited human,Sartre does not have very much in common with an enthusiastic, vulgarexistentialism desperately searching for its own self-fulfilment, but notconsidering Sartre’s idea of responsibility and his later thought. Thelater Sartre was himself fairly sceptical about his early thought. He sub-sequently decried it perhaps too readily as idealistic and did not see itsundoubtedly important role for philosophical ethics. While stressing thathis thought had always been concerned with ethics, he criticized hisearly attempts to think radically of human freedom and responsibility as ‘mystical’ or ‘idealistic’ – it is la grande moral which did not takeinto account the social reality, being a pure ‘ethics of character’ (Gesin-nungsethik). This was to be replaced mainly by Critique of DialectiqueReason and the Cornell and the Rome Lecture. The notion of infinitefreedom and the emphasis upon unlimited responsibility is thus notSartre’s last word on the question of freedom and responsibility.

If one takes the notion of infinite responsibility seriously, one cannotbut limit freedom. If responsibility is thought of as superior to freedom,the latter must be strictly limited. In what follows I shall be focusing onLevinas’s thought and his ‘phenomenology’ of responsibility, touchingalso upon Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which is intriguingly close toLevinas’s thought.

IV. INFINITE RESPONSIBILITY: THE LIMITS OF FREEDOM

In the 1960s Sartre revised his radical understanding of freedom bystressing the priority of political responsibility. Levinas,52 however, triedto accept, on the one hand, the supremacy of responsibility over free-dom, whilst on the other attempting to replace the priority of politics bythe priority of proximity.53 He recognized the intrinsic limits of a moralphilosophy primarily based on freedom: ‘My freedom does not have the


last word; I am not alone.’54 The ‘face to face’, the ethical experience inencountering the Other was thought of as the primary situation fromwhich politics and their universalizing discourse are derived. Accordingto Levinas’ philosophy of service and hospitability, this responsibility is an-archic. It is without comprehensible or graspable arché55 and beyond the intentionality of noesis and noema which is presupposed by bothHusserl’s56 and by Heidegger’s’57 analysis of intersubjectivity. More thanjust alter ego, the Other is a naked face, pure commandment, irreducibleand radically different. The Other forces one into a diachronically occur-ring responsibility. This responsibility is not subject to the danger ofinfinitation, as it is not an empty, abstract notion any more. The face of the Other is the most concrete way to experience responsibility. Here,of course, the difference between responsibility (for what one has done)and the commandment to love vanishes.58 The future of the Other, notthe past of what one has already done, becomes the main focus of re-sponsibility. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ freedom, beyond the solipsistic notionof radical freedom, I encounter the Other and experience that my freedomis put in question.59

But what about politics, the field, where responsibility must inevit-ably be concretized and rescued? Having mentioned Sartre’s politicalradicalization and ‘realization’ of his idea of freedom and responsibility,we must here ask whether Levinas’s philosophy can do justice to ourpolitical life. We are indeed, as Aristotle has it, intrinsically politicalbeings. Is not Levinas’s philosophy a ‘solipsism for two’ and thereforeincapable of properly understanding responsibility in that it leads to the– somewhat strange – possibility, that if one is to be praised because ofone’s response to the face of the Other, one is to be blamed because ofone’s neglect of all the other Others, the third parties? Or is the ‘place’where the Other and I, so to speak, intimately meet and feel infinitelyresponsible for the Other, all too cosy and comfortable? Derrida hasstrikingly emphasized this aporetic character of infinite responsibility:

How would you justify your presence here speaking one particular language,rather than there speaking to others in other languages? … There is no language,no reason, no generality or meditation to justify this ultimate responsibility whichleads me to absolute sacrifice; absolute sacrifice that is not the sacrifice of irre-sponsibility on the altar of responsibility, but the sacrifice of the most imperativeduty (that which binds me to the other as a singularity in general) in favour ofanother absolutely imperative duty binding me to the wholly other.60

This view would lead again to the annihilation of blame and praise,paradoxically, not primarily because of the realization of one’s freedom,but rather of one’s responsibility. Levinas’s thought is about thisaccusation, about the interruption and disturbance by the Other. And yet,the ‘face to face’ situation shows a way to solve the aporetic situation.When I encounter the Other, there is no other way but becoming aware


of one’s responsibility to this particular person. It is precisely the notionof responsibility concretized in the face of the Other that makes anannihilation of responsibility cynical, if not impossible. Derridastrangely does not see this dimension of the face-to-face encounter. Hisrather pathetic expression of the ‘sacrifice of responsibility’ fallsstrangely back into another understanding of responsibility – either intothat of the early Sartre or into a more traditional one that understandsresponsibility in terms of what is usually called justice and what is to berationally justified.

What does Levinas’s understanding of the Other mean for politics? Itis in the unique relation to the Other, according to Levinas, that the thirdpart and therefore political and legal questions arise. ‘But politics left toitself bears a tyranny within itself.’61 State and society can only work ifboth are not understood from a strictly universalizing point of view, asin Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,62 but from the relation to the Other ‘towhich the work of the state must be situated, and which it must take asa model’.63

It may be questioned whether Gillian Rose is right in her critique ofLevinas. She is in general quite critical about Levinas’s ‘BuddhistJudaism as the sublime other of Modernity’64 and in particular commentscritically on Levinas’s ‘complete lack of interest in political virtue’.65 Nodoubt there is in Levinas a lack of consideration as to how to apply his thought politically. And, indeed, it might have appeared that Levinasis not interested in politics at all, because he took the Third into hisconsideration relatively late. Levinas’s philosophy, though, ought to beread entirely as a reaction against twentieth-century totalitarianism andshould be interpreted in particular against the background of his ownbiography. It is thus an answer to what is essentially a political problemtoo, i.e., the relation to the Other. To say that he is not interested inpolitical virtue is far too simple. A notion of political responsibility whichis rooted in Levinas’s philosophy is admittedly still to be developed.How to cope with the pluralities of Others, so to speak, is one of thechallenging questions for any future philosophy which aims to takeLevinas seriously.

Levinas’s philosophy seemingly may stand for the priority of ethics inrelation to religion. It is open to discussion whether this understandingof Levinas is correct. He argues that ethics, as intrinsically bound upwith religion, is superior and prior to classical ontology and that Beingderives its meaning from the proximity between myself and the Other.Only further considerations about the understanding of religion both inhis philosophical and in his religious writings can illuminate therelationship between religion and ethics as he presupposes and explainsit. Whereas Kant’s philosophy leads to the postulates of freedom,immortality of the soul and God, i.e., his practical philosophy does notpresuppose God, Levinas’s ‘phenomenology’ of what is always beyond


the phenomenologically reachable horizon, of what is always past with-out having ever been present, neither presupposes nor postulates. This is indeed one of the crucial differences between Kant and Levinas.Phenomenology is a philosophical school of seeing attentively. Levinasdescribes phenomenologically what happens in the experience of theOther. One encounters, as he has it, the trace of what he calls illeité.66

This happens even if one, unintentionally or intentionally, overlooks orneglects it. ‘The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by hisface, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height inwhich God is revealed.’67

It is worth questioning, whether Levinas’s idea of an ‘eschatologywithout hope’ is conformable to traditional Christian orthodoxies.68

According to Levinas we must not hope for anything, although we areinfinitely responsible. He draws attention to an important issue, that ofthe intention of our action. Responsible action, however ethically appro-priate, can be utterly cold and calculating. Levinas is right to emphasizethat our ‘ethical’ behaviour – if, for instance, one helps a needy fellowhuman – must not be determined primarily by eschatological or profaneexpectations such as personal satisfaction. But this is not what Christianethics and eschatology are about. Traditional Christian ethics with its emphasis upon selfless love are in fact very close to Levinas’s philosophy while not giving up their eschatological dimension. There iseschatological hope, one might argue, because of the Other and hishappiness and therefore because of oneself too.

Derrida has developed another account of infinite responsibility inwhat is one of his most prominent ethical and religious writings, TheGift of Death. This must be read as a profound critique of Kant and hisgeneralizing ethics. Rereading Kirkegaard’s Fear and Trembling,69

Derrida looks at Abraham and his will to sacrifice his own son, and hisparticular – indirect70 – responsibility (or, indeed, irresponsibility). Tounderstand Abraham and the silence of his response to his commandingGod means to get to know a responsibility which is more than ethics,more than just doing one’s duty. The latter can be quite tempting71 andcomfortable: as long as one does not, for instance, commit murder,seemingly one can live comfortably and ethically self-satisfied andjustified. But there is a realm beyond ethics and its universality and gen-erality. This is the realm of absolute, infinite, lonely and unconceptualresponsibility where one must decide without there being any choice.One is not able to break the silence, nor to make understood one’sreasons and intentions, not even to oneself. Paradoxically, ‘the ethicalcan therefore end up making us irresponsible’.72 This ‘responsibility’beyond our traditional understanding of responsibility can only be fullyunderstood as religious responsibility. But it does not mean the dismissal of ethics as widely conceived, for ‘in betraying it (sc. ethicalduty as ordinarily understood) one belongs to it and at the same time


recognizes it’.73 Yet far from being an exceptional situation ‘the“sacrifice of Isaac” illustrates … the most common and everyday experi-ence of responsibility’.74

I merely mention one danger of this notion of irresponsible, incon-ceivable and unthinkable responsibility. It is the seemingly heroicdismissal of ethics in order to avoid justification of what cannot but beblamed. That is in fact irresponsible in the ordinary sense of the word.To understand responsibility as infinite does not by any means lead tothe dismissal of ‘everyday’ ethics.75 Furthermore, the tension betweeneveryday ethics and responsibility as understood by Levinas and Derridaremains. It is comparable to what has traditionally been conceived of asthe tension between justice and love.

V. RESPONSIBILITY AND LAW

Here I draw attention to another approach to responsibility, which isbuilt on rather anti-Kantian presuppositions and which is also meant tobe a critique of contemporary Jewish approaches to both ethics and re-ligion. I do not aim at critically discussing this approach, however worthdiscussing some of its presuppositions are. The Jewish philosopherWalter S. Wurzburger has presented a distinctively Jewish covenantal‘ethics of responsibility’ in opposition to ‘modern Jewish thinkers who,under Kant’s influence, contend that religion is a postulate of ethics’.76

This means that his target is an understanding of the relation betweenresponsibility and God, as is the case in Levinas and Derrida.Wurzburger’s ethics is rooted in an understanding of Halakhah ‘as thesupreme normative authority’,77 as a system both of supernaturally re-vealed teachings and divinely ordained canon of interpretations78 which‘represents the revealed will of God’.79 Wurzburger is deeply convincedthat ‘secular pluralistic systems of ethics … can provide no assurancethat their basic premises will not eventually lead to self-contradictoryconclusions’.80 Only a divine source can, according to Wurzburger,provide this assurance; or, as Dostojevski has put it, if there is no God,anything can be permitted. From this point of view, there also arisesanother understanding of responsibility and freedom. For freedom canonly be fully realized within the boundaries of divine law; responsibilityis understood essentially as responsibility to God. The religious aspectof responsibility is not built on the ethical one. So long as one focuseson divine law, either in the Jewish understanding of written and oral law or in the Stoic and Christian understanding of the natural law, a divine commandment can be encountered. Whether one decides to live according to those laws or not is, one might argue, a question ofabsolute responsibility which is not entirely a matter of rational


decision. Wurzburger stresses that Jewish ethics had ‘ample room toaccommodate concerns both of act-morality and agent-morality or whatnowadays is dubbed “virtue-ethics” ’.81 In Maimonides he discovers anoriginal type of virtue ethics which is not indebted to metaphysicalpresuppositions as, according to Wurzburger, Aristotle’s ethics is. It is a virtue-ethics ‘in response to the religious norm of “thou shalt walk inHis ways” ’.82 Virtue ethics, rooted in the responsibility to God’s command-ment and, as can be added, to one’s goal and telos. Then, responsibilityis also impossible without eschatological hope.

Joseph J. Kotva has stressed the link between virtue-ethics, ethicalperfectionism and the importance of every choice. Virtue-ethics ‘is per-fectionist in the sense of viewing all aspects of life as morally relevantand in calling everyone to continual growth in every area of life’.83 Thisunderstanding of virtue ethics recalls, to a certain extent, Sartre’s phil-osophy and his view that everything that one does (and even what onedoes not do) is morally relevant. Sartre’s view is, of course, based uponcompletely different presuppositions.

VI. RESPONSIBILITY AND HOPE

Quite the opposite to the theological interpretation of responsibility canbe found in Sartre, and also in Simone de Beauvoir: no eschatology at all(or, at most, only an entirely secularized one). In the Lévy interviews,84

Sartre emphasizes that the ‘idea of the value of hope came to meslowly’85 after Being and Nothingness, but that hope nevertheless wasnever absent for long in his life.86 Although he considers hope to bebound to an absolute goal, this remains a matter of an inner-worldlyfuture. He does not think of a divine goal of hope which transcends theinner-wordly realm. Death is an absolute limit which not even hope cantranscend. ‘Dying is indeed that event of my subjectivity that I cannotknow, and consequently has no truth for me. … Death entails theindetermination of my knowledge (connaissance); it plunges the totalityof my knowledge (savoir) into ignorance’, he stated in the posthumousTruth and Existence.87

Simone de Beauvoir gave a somewhat more radical expression to thisheroic secular hope: ‘You are in your little box; you will not come outof it and I shall not join you there. Even if I am buried next to you, therewill be no communication between your ashes and mine.’88 There is nofurther hope for de Beauvoir, but simply the heroic affirmation of timespast. For ‘it is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives inharmony for so long’.89


VII. CONCLUSION

This article has aimed at providing a narrative of different understand-ings of freedom and responsibility. It has drawn attention to significantdevelopments in the understanding of these notions and their relation,particularly in twentieth-century French thought. These different under-standings are by no means entirely irreconcilable. They shed light ondifferent dimensions of freedom and responsibility. One dimension is not to be simply replaced by another. The ‘multidimensional’ and‘multivalent’ notion of responsibility and of freedom alike can only beproperly understood and defended against any deterministic abolition ofthem when these different dimensions are taken into consideration. This,of course, questions also the gap that exists between different kinds ofcontemporary ethics, between, say, virtue ethics and some postmodernethics beyond ethics. These different ideas of responsibility and freedomconstitute complementary rather than alternative views on the ‘extra-ordinary privilege’ of responsibility and freedom.

Notes1 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol

Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 40.2 William Schweiker, Responsibility & Christian Ethics (New Studies in Christian Ethics)

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 65.3 Krystyna Danecka-Szopowa, ‘On Responsibility’ in A. T. Tynieniecka (ed.), Analecta

Husserliana, Vol. XXVI 1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1989), pp. 319–26 (here p. 319).

4 Cf. Karl Jaspers, ‘Man as His Own Creator’ in Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Nietzsche. A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Anchor Press 1973), pp. 131–55.

5 Cf. Nicolai Hartmann, Ethik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 41962).6 For the ethical in Heidegger’s thought and for ethical consideration for which Heidegger’s

philosophy serves as a starting-point, see Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics (London: Routledge,1995); Frederick A. Olafson, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics. A Study of Mitsein (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1998); (Olafson’s study is particularly important as Joanna Hodgsonoverlooks the ethical significance of Mitsein); Nancy J. Holland, The Madwoman’s Reason. TheConcept of the Appropriate in Ethical Thought (University Park, Pennsylvania: The PennsylvaniaState University Press, 1998).

7 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology,trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1972).

8 This character of Being and Time is illustrated by the fact that ‘responsible’ or‘responsibility’ appear only three times in two different contexts; cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein undZeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag 171993), pp. 127, 288 (= Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson [London: SCM Press Ltd, 1962], pp. 165 and 334); cf.also Rainer A. Bast and Heinrich P. Delfosse, Handbuch zum Textstudium von Martin Heideggers‘Sein und Zeit’, Band 1: Stellenindizes: Philologisch-kritischer Apparat (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt:frommann-holzboog, 1979), p. 285. The notion of ‘metontology’, which one finds infrequently inHeidegger, has also ethical implications.

9 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, pp. 270ff. (= Time and Being, pp. 315ff.).10 Cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’ in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. From

Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), revised and expanded edition, ed. DavidFarrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 213–65, here p. 232. It is to be asked whetherHeidegger can do justice to Sartre: Hans-Georg Gadamer reports that Heidegger gave him his owncopy of Being and Nothingness as a present and that Heidegger had cut only the first forty pages(‘Ich habe später die Erstausgabe von L’etre et le neant bekommen. Es war ein Geschenk von


Martin Heidegger an mich. Er hatte aus diesem Bande vierzig Seiten aufgeschnitten; weiter war ermit der Lektüre nicht gekommen, und das ist gar nicht so verwunderlich. Man muβ zunächst einmalsagen, daβ dieses Buch unglaublich schwer zu lesen ist …’); cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer ‘Das Seinund das Nichts’ in Traugott König (ed.), Sartre: Ein Kongress (Internationaler Sartre-Kongress ander Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, 9.–12. Juli 1987) (Reinbek beiHamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), pp. 37–52, here p. 37.

11 Hazel E. Barnes has developed an existentialist ethics based mainly on Sartre’s Being andNothingness: Hazel E. Barnes, Existentialist Ethics (Chicago and London: The University ofChicago Press, 1985) (reprint).

12 Roman Ingarden, ‘On Responsibility’ in Man and Value, trans. Arthur Szyiewicz (München,Wien: Philosophie Verlag, 1983), pp. 53–117.

13 Wilhelm Weischedel, Das Wesen der Verantwortung. Ein Versuch (Frankfurt am Main:Klostermann, 1972).

14 Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (London: Fount, 1982).15 Cf. Kevin P. Doran, Solidarity. A Synthesis of Personalism and Communalism in the Thought

of Karol Wojtyla (New York: Peter Lang, 1996).16 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the Technological

Age, trans. Hans Jonas with the collaboration of David Herr (Chicago, London: University ofChicago Press, 1984).

17 Cf. William Schweiker, Responsibility & Christian Ethics, pp. 189ff.18 J. R. Lucas (Responsibility, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993, pp. 5–12) explores this dialogic

character of responsibility. Responsibility means, as Lucas has it, that one can be asked ‘Why didyou do this?’

19 The debate about an ultimate rational justification of ethics with, say, Karl-Otto Apel does indicate the problematic justification of any purely secular ethics: cf. Karl-Otto Apel, ‘The a priori of the Communication Community and the Foundations of Ethics: The Problem of aRational Foundation of Ethics in the Scientific Age’ in Towards a Transformation of Philosophy,translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 225–300.For a critique of Apel’s thought see Hans Albert, Transzendentale Träumereien. Karl-Otto ApelsSprachspiele und sein hermeneutischer Gott (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1975).

20 Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism, translation and introduction by Philip Mairet [London:Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1963], p. 56) even concedes that his philosophy would be wholly the sameeven if God existed: ‘Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself indemonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that wouldmake no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think thatthe real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.’

21 Jean-Paul Sartre, Words, trans. lrene Clephane (London: Hainish Hamilton, 1964), p. 25.22 Cf. Plato, Epistle VII, 341 C.23 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Flies’ in Jean-Paul Sartre, Altona, Men Without Shadows, The Flies

(London: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 309ff.24 Ibid., p. 235.25 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego. An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness,

transl. and annotated with an Introduction by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York:Octagon Books, 1972), pp. 104–6.

26 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 628.27 Ibid.28 Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebook for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago and London:

University of Chicago Press, 1992).29 Cf. Juliette Simont, ‘Sartrean Ethics’ in Christina Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion

to Sartre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 178–210 and Gerhard Seel, ‘Wiehätte Sartres Moralphilosophie ausgesehen?’ in König (ed.), Sartre: Ein Kongress, pp. 276–93.

30 Anderson (Sartre’s Two Ethics. From Authenticity to Integral Humanity, op. cit., 193) statesthat ‘undoubtedly, Sartre’s statements about morality and the other person reflect some influence ofLevinas on him. Benny Lévy is a personal friend of Levinas, and he frequently referred to him inhis conversations with Sartre.’ On pp. 169ff., Anderson gives an overview on what might have beenthe content of Sartre’s third morality.

31 Cf. Steven Schwarzschild ‘Jean-Paul Sartre as Jew’, Modern Judaism 3 (1983), p. 59.32 Hazel E. Barnes, Existentialist Ethics, p. 19.


33 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 553, cf. also Existentialism and Humanism, p. 29: ‘Thus,the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and placesthe entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.’

34 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 553.35 Ibid., p. 554.36 Ibid.37 Ibid., pp. 556/7.38 Ibid.39 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 30. For the proximity to Kant see: Immanuel Kant,

Critique of Practical Reason And Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, translated and edited withan introduction by Lewis White Beck (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 80: ‘Actonly according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become auniversal law.’

40 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 45.41 Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 624.42 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Itinerary of a Thought’ in Between Existentialism and Marxism,

translated from the French by John Matthews (London: NLB, 1974), pp. 33–64, here pp. 63f.43 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 36.44 Ibid., p. 46.45 Ibid., p. 52.46 Ibid., p. 50.47 J. R. Lucas, Responsibility, p. 262.48 Dominic LaCapra, A Preface to Sartre (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1979), p. 148.49 Juliette Simont, ‘Sartrean Ethics’ in Christina Howells, The Cambridge Companion to Sartre,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 178–211 (here p. 178).50 Thomas C. Anderson, Sartre’s Two Ethics. From Authenticity to Integral Humanity (Chicago

and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1993). This book is an important amendment to Anderson’s TheFoundation and Structure of Sartrean Ethics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1979). It is tobe noted that there are in fact three Sartrean ethics: There is, firstly, what Sarte called the idealisticethics based upon the ontology of Being and Nothingness; there is, secondly, the materialistic ethicsof the Critique of Dialectical Reason and of the immediately subsequent writings; and there is,thirdly, what is called Power and Freedom. Anderson explains why it is extremely difficult to figureout what this third morality is like: ‘Because of his blinding stroke in the mid seventies, it [sc.Power and Freedom] consists almost entirely of tape-recorded interviews with an ex-Maoist, BennyLévy. Unfortunately, practically none of them have been made available, and now, almost twodecades after they were recorded, there is serious doubt whether the interviews will ever find theirway into print.’ (p. 2).

51 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘A Language Familiar to us’ in Telos 44 (1980), pp. 199–201 (here p. 200).52 Cf. Bernhard H. F. Taureck, ‘Ethik jenseits von Moral. Sartre, Lévinas, Baudrillard’ in

Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie. Monatszeitschrift der internationalen philosophischenForschung, 39/11 (1991), pp. 1212–30.

53 For Levinas’s ethics, see, e.g.: John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas. The Genealogy of Ethics(London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Seán Hand (ed.), Facing the Other. The Ethics ofEmmanuel Levinas (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996).

54 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 101.

55 Whereas, according to Levinas, the tradition almost entirely since the Pre-Socratics dealtwith the arché, the principles of being, Levinas claims to go further and beyond Being.

56 Cf. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans.Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 89–151 (particularly pp. 42–62).

57 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 153–63 (§ 26: The Dasein-with of Others, andeveryday Being-With).

58 J. R. Lucas (Responsibility, p. 258) does indeed have a different philosophical standpoint tothat of Levinas. Cf. what he says about the limits of responsibility and about love: ‘Responsibilityby itself carries no connotation of spontaneity or warmth. I can be utterly responsible, but veryboring and rather cold. … Responsibility is like justice, very necessary in its way, but not by itselfenough. … Altogether responsibility lacks charm, lacks the human touch.’

59 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 303.60 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago and London: The

University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 71.


61 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 300.62 Cf. Georg-Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, translated with notes by T. M.

Knox (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1967).63 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 300.64 Gillian Rose, ‘Athens and Jerusalem: a Tale of Three Cities’ in Gillian Rose, Mourning

becomes the Law. Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),pp. 15–39 (here p. 38). Her reading and critique of Levinas cannot fully be discussed here, butshould be subject to further investigations.

65 Gillian Rose, ‘O! untimely death./Death!’ in Gillian Rose, Mourning becomes the Law, pp. 125–46, here p. 135.

66 For the religious dimension of Levinas’s thought see, e.g., Bernhard Casper, ‘Illéité. Zueinem Schlüssel “Begriff” im Werk von Emmanuel Levinas’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch2/91 (1984), pp. 274–88; Bernhard Casper, ‘Der Zugang zur Religion im Denken von EmmanuelLevinas’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 2/95 (1988), pp. 268–77.

67 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 79.68 For a critique of Levinas’s ‘eschatology without hope’, see Jörg Splett, ‘Über Religion

nachdenken?’ in Denken vor Gott. Philosophie als Wahrheits-liebe (Frankfurt am Main: VerlagJosef Knecht, 1996), pp. 41ff.

69 A very precise analysis of Fear and Trembling against the background of Kierkegaard’sunderstanding of guilt and sin is to be found in: Anton Bösl, Unfreiheit und Selbstverfehlung. SørenKierkegaards existenzdialektische Bestimmung von Schuld und Sünde (Freiburg im Breisgau:Herder, 1997), pp. 295ff.

70 Cf. Jaques Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 59.71 Cf. Derrida, ibid., p. 61.72 Ibid.73 Ibid., p. 66.74 Ibid., p. 67.75 I can only briefly draw attention to another philosopher whose writings on responsibility

(and on natural law) prove most important: Robert Spaemann. Against the background of what onemight call a metaphysics of personhood, he has also offered an in-depth critique of the notion of in-finite responsibility. Cf., e.g., Robert Spaemann, ‘Verantwortung’ in Peter Geach, FernandoInciarte, Robert Spaemann, Persönliche Verantwortung (Köln: Adams Verlag, 1982), pp. 11–32;Robert Spaemann, Glück und Wohlwollen. Versuch über Ethik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989),pp. 222ff. A very good introduction into the main features of his philosophy is to be found in ArthurMadigan, ‘Robert Spaemann’s Philosophische Essays’ in The Review of Metaphysics 51 (1997),105–32.

76 Walter S. Wurzburger, Ethics of Responsibility. Pluralistic Approaches to Covenantal Ethics(Philadelphia/Cambridge: The Jewish Publication Society, 1994), pp. 4f.

77 Ibid., p. 5.78 Cf. ibid., p. 6.79 Ibid., p. 5.80 Ibid., p. 111.81 Ibid., p. 36. Cf. also Walter S. Wurzburger, ‘The Centrality of Virtue-Ethics in Maimonides’

in Ruth Link-Salinger (ed.), Of Scholars, Savants, and Their Texts: Studies in Philosophy andReligious Thought. Essays in Honor of Arthur Hyman (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 251–60.

82 Ibid., p. 71.83 Joseph J. Kotva, The Christian Case for Virtue-Ethics (Washington: Georgetown University

Press, 1996), p. 38.84 There was undoubtedly a very controversial discussion about the interpretation of these three

famous interviews which Sartre gave to his secretary and close friend Benny Lévy and which wereto be published in Le Nouvel Observateur. Simone de Beauvoir has denied that Sartre’s final thoughtis to be discovered in these interviews: cf. Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux. A Farewell to Sartre,translated by Patrick O’Brian (London: André Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984),pp. 118ff. On page 119, de Beauvoir writes, that ‘this vague, yielding philosophy that Victor attributedto him did not suit Sartre at all. He who had never been open to any influence whatsoever was nowsubjected to Victor’s.’ It must be said that, whether or not this is true, de Beauvoir’s relation toBenny Lévy was rather tensionfull. Emmanuel Levinas has stressed, that ‘we have no reason todoubt the exactness of the text’ (Levinas, ‘A Language Familiar to us’, p. 201). I follow Levinas, forin contrast with his physical health, Sartre’s mental and intellectual abilities were fairly good untilhis death.


85 Benny Lévy, ‘Today’s Hope: Conversations with Sartre’, Telos 44 (1980), pp. 155–81, here p. 155. But already in Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre argues in particular against Christianreproaches of his philosophy, that ‘it is only by self-deception, by confusing their own despair withours that Christians can describe us as without hope’ (p. 56).

86 Cf. Benny Lévy, ‘Today’s Hope’, p. 180.87 Jean-Paul Sartre, Truth and Existence, original text established and annotated by Arlette

Elkäim-Sartre, translated by Adrian von den Hoven, edited and with an introduction by RonalAronson (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 35

88 Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux, p. 3.89 Ibid., p. 127.


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