FROM ROSENZWEIG TO LEVINASontology. This is not a simple analogy. The world war and the crisis of the philosophy of
Being do not resemble one another; one is not the image of the other. Rosenzweig does
not conceive of the history of philosophy as a war between different systems, nor of the
war between nations as a confrontation between opposing metaphysical ideals. For him,
the history of political events and the history of philosophy obey two distinct logics, and
one cannot serve as an illustration for the other. But neither is this a causal link. Rosenz-
weig does not think that radical questioning of the metaphysics of Being waited for the
world war to begin, nor does he think the war was due, even indirectly, to philosophical
reasons. But beyond the empirical difference between the philosophical and the political,
between theory and praxis, knowledge and action, the Western metaphysical tradition has
always affirmed, according to Rosenzweig, the original identity of the rational and the
real. That, for him, is the great secret hidden beneath the whole philosophical adventure
‘‘from Ionia to Jena,’’ and that is what we must recall in a kind of anamnesis. There is,
behind the history of Western metaphysics, an implicit axiom: the identity of being and
totality. It is precisely that initial axiom that the preface of theStarsets out to question.
Does the idea of being necessarily coincide with that of the one? Does experience not
show us, on the contrary, that being reveals itself precisely in multiplicity and dispersion?
And inversely, does the idea of totality necessarily involve that of being? Should we not,
rather, see in this a purely conceptual synthesis of experiences that are on each occasion
singular—the gathering of a multiplicity of concrete events into a common category?
Moreover, is the being-one idea truly constitutive of human experience? Is it not, rather, a
utopian category that would designate the limit or ultimate horizon of all our experience?
These questions eventually converge in an original interrogation concerning the place
of man—qua person in each case unique—at the heart of the idea of totality. That idea
aims to grasp phenomena in their generality, understanding them by integrating them
into a network of rational explanations: in short, by enclosing them within one intelligible
system. Thus, the specificity of each individual, the singularity of his destiny, the unique-
ness of the events that make up his life, will be perceived as mirages of subjective
consciousness, behind which rational knowledge will decipher the play of various con-
straints—biological, psychological, and social—that determine him despite himself. The
uniqueness of the self is then dissolved in the totality of being, and the subject itself,
stripped of its illusory singularity, will henceforth appear as but a simple element of the
system enveloping it. That vision of being as absolute knowledge, the intelligible grouping
of all particular phenomena, underlies, according to Rosenzweig, the entire history of
Western philosophy, culminating in German idealism and finally triumphing in Hegel. In
Hegel’s system, the history of philosophy as ontology is at once concluded and realized
in the identity of being, reason, and totality. The fact that in such a system the diversity
of individual views is always unmasked as the illusions of a subjective conscience leads
necessarily to a conception of morality as the submission of subjective aspirations to a
more general system of laws. It is true that, in that subordination of particular interests
PAGE 223223.................16224$ $CH9 10-13-06 12:35:06 PS