Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas

by Richard A. Cohen

Elevations is a series of closely related essays on the ground-breaking philosophical and theological work of Emmanuel Levinas and Franz Rosenzweig, two of the twentieth century's most important Jewish philosophers. Focusing on the concept of transcendence, Richard A. Cohen shows that Rosenzweig and Levinas join the wisdom of revealed religions to the work of traditional philosophers to create a philosophy charged with the tasks of ethics and justice. He describes how they articulated a responsible humanism and a new enlightenment which would place moral obligation to the other above all other human concerns. This elevating pull of an ethics that can account for the relation of self and other without reducing either term is the central theme of these essays.

Cohen also explores the ethical philosophy of these two thinkers in relation to Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, Sartre, and Derrida. The result is one of the most wide-ranging and lucid studies yet written on these crucial figures in philosophy and Jewish thought.

Genres: Philosophy

364 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 1994

Reviews

[Keith]

Cohen is perhaps Levinas' most sympathetic, even pious, American reader. He offers here one of the more lucid and emphatically theological portraits of the thinker, of the sort now out of fashion (and important for just that reason).