From Rosenzweig to Levinas
Philosophy of WarSte ́phane Mose`s1
It seems that through the work of Franz Rosenzweig, and subsequently
that of Emmanuel Levinas, the twentieth century has seen the birth of
a radically new conception of ethics. It appeared against the horizon of
the two great historical catastrophes that left their mark upon that cen-
tury, the First World War, in the case of Rosenzweig, and in that of
Levinas, the Second World War and the massive extermination of the
Jews by Nazi Germany. Rosenzweig’s generation experienced the First
World War as the collapse of an age-old order bearing testimony to the
stability of a European civilization that, wars and revolutions notwith-
standing, had managed to guarantee a minimum of political equilib-
rium between nations and an appearance of civic tranquility in society,
in which mankind seemed to occupy its natural place in the general
harmony of the world. Rosenzweig’s thought was born of that collapse.
For him, the battlefields of 1914–18 marked not only the end of an old
political order but also the ruin of any civilization founded, since the
Greeks, on a belief in the capacity of theLogosto illuminate the ultimate
rationality of the real. In his view, the entire Western philosophical tra-
dition could be summed up in the affirmation that the world is intelligi-
ble, that it is ultimately transparent to reason, and that man himself
only achieves his dignity to the degree that he is a part of that rational
order. For Rosenzweig, it was precisely those two propositions that the
First World War denied forever. Faced with the spectacle of the mad
carnage to which the nations of Europe gave themselves over—the very
nations that had embodied the philosophical ideal of a world ordered
by the Logos—it was no longer possible to affirm that the real is rational
or that in the light of reason original chaos is necessarily transformed
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