Plurality and transcendence: Levinas with and after Marcel

ENThe relationship between Levinas and Gabriel Marcel appeared to be one of mutual respect based on a shared distrust of scientific and objective knowledge as a basis for understanding interpersonal relations. Jeffrey Bloechl clearly shows several points of convergence between Levinas’s and Marcel’s thinking while also showing important areas of divergence. Both Levinas and Marcel reject the immanence implied by objective knowledge in the name of a transcendent relation with the absolutely other or what Marcel calls the mystery. However, whereas for Marcel transcendence is made possible by recovering a sense of “the sacrality of nature,” for Levinas it implies the rejection of the sacred in the name of an ethics focused entirely on the face of the other human being who speaks to me from beyond the world and nature. Bloechl suggests that part of the tension between Marcel and Levinas may be attributable to different religious experiences - one Christian and the other post-Holocaust Jewish—raising the question of how far their respective philosophical viewpoints can ultimately be reconciled with each other.