Dependency and vulnerability: Jewish and feminist existentialist constructions of the human

Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy

Volumn , Issue , 2004, Pages 127-152

  Batnitzky, Leora ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63849206860     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (69)

1. Feminist literature on mothering is, of course, diverse and complex. For an alternative view of mothering and the institution of mothering, see Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995).
2. Levinas expresses his most extended disclaimer about his use of "the feminine" in his early work Time and the Other, published in 1947.
3. See in particular Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 86-87.
4. See in particular The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1974), xxxiii-xxxiv.
5. For more nuanced views of de Beauvoir, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1992).
6. See also Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, N. Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).
7. "Martin Buber in the Theory of Knowledge", in Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 19.
8. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 35.
9. "Every word must falsify; but look, these beings live around you, and no matter which one you approach you always reach Being" [die Wesen (creatures) leben um dich herum⋯ du kommst immer zum Wesen (essence)]", I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970), 67.
10. Buber's relationship to his own mother was quite complex as she left him before he was three. For Buber's account of this abandonment and its effect on his thought, see his autobiographical statement "My Mother" in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp and Maurice Friedman (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1967), 3.
11. See also Buber's early essay, "Das Zion der jüdischen Frau", Die Welt 5, no. 17(April 26, 1901):3-5
12. now translated in The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber, ed. and trans. Gilya G. Schmidt (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 112-18.
13. I and Thou, 154. The German actually uses the indefinite pronoun "wer" (whoever) and not, as the English translation indicates, "a man": "Wer ein Weib, ihr Leben im eigen vergegenwärtigend, liebt: das Du ihrer Augen läßt ihn in einen Strahl des ewigen Du schauen" (Ich und Du, p. 150, in Werke).
14. I and Thou, 67.
15. Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 170, translation altered.
16. Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 99.
17. "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge", pp. 33-34, translation altered slightly.
18. Caring, 28-29. Noddings defends Buber's view of reciprocity, maintaining that it is not a matter of consciousness but of receiving something back from the one who is cared for. Her point is well taken, but, as I will suggest briefly below, Levinas is right to recognize that there is an element of consciousness in Buber's notion of reciprocity. On this point, I believe Buber's is actually the stronger position (as opposed to both Levinas and Noddings).
19. Difficile liberté, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 53, trans. E. Wyschogrod;
20. "Judaism and the Feminine Element", Judaism 18, no. 1(1969):33.
21. Totalité et infini, 4th ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971).
22. Trans. Alphonso Lingis as Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 115.
23. Totality and Infinity, 267.
24. Carol Gilligan, "Women's Place in Man's Life Cycle", Harvard Educational Review 49(1979):440.
25. The Second Sex, xix; de Beauvoir maintains that Levinas disregards the consciousness of woman. She refers here not to Totality and Infinity but to Levinas's earlier Time and the Other. A consideration of this text is beyond the scope of this essay, but Levinas's arguments about "the feminine" are similar to the ones he makes in Totality and Infinity. De Beauvoir maintains that Levinas is incapable of understanding reciprocity between the sexes, a charge also leveled by Luce Irigaray
26. (see "Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love", in Re-Reading Levinas, 109-18).
27. "Feminism and Moral Theory", in Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), 119.
28. Caring, 4-5.
29. Autrement qu'être ou Au-delà de l'essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974);
30. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).
31. See Catherine Chalier, "Ethics and the Feminine", in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 119-29.
32. Otherwise than Being, 74.
33. Ethics and Infinity, 99.
34. Otherwise than Being, 117.
35. Maternal Thinking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 18.
36. See in particular Levinas's discussion of justice in Otherwise than Being, 158-59.
37. Caring, 5.
38. "Identity", in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers), 146-47.
39. See Annette Baier, Moral Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994);
40. Selya Benhabib, "The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Moral Theory", in Women and Moral Theory, 154-77;
41. and Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). These are all discussed below.
42. See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998);
43. Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca, N. Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1991);
44. and Marilyn Friedman, What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory (Ithaca, N. Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1993).
45. "The Generalized and the Concrete Other", 158.
46. "The Generalized and the Concrete Other", 160.
47. David Sorkin's The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)
48. and Marion Kaplan's The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) each describes the privatization of Judaism and, in Kaplan's study in particular, the role of women in this privatization.
49. Levinas's indebtedness to Rosenzweig has been remarked upon at length by both Robert Gibbs and Richard Cohen. See Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1992)
50. and Richard Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
51. Kohlberg himself privatizes the care orientation, claiming that it is a lower, if not immature, stage of moral reasoning ("Synopses and Detailed Replies to Critics", with Charles Levine and Alexandra Hewer, in L. Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, vol. II: The Psychology of Moral Development [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984], 360).
52. "The Generalized and The Concrete Other", 162-63.
53. der Stern der Erlösung (The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976).
54. Trans. William W. Hallo as The Star of Redemption (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 156.
55. Star, 169.
56. Otherwise than Being, 77-78.
57. Star, 397.
58. "Feminine and African Moralities", in Women and Moral Theory, particularly 299.
59. Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
60. Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time", Signs 7, no. 1(Autumn 1981):32
61. as cited in Marilyn Chapin Massey, The Feminine Soul (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 181.
62. The Feminine Soul, 181-83.
63. For example, while engaged in an effort to rethink the primacy of unchosen obligations for moral theory, Annette Baier nonetheless concludes "an obligation to love, in the strong sense needed, would be an embarrassment to the theorist, given most accepted versions of 'ought implies can. '" (Moral Prejudices, 5). From a Jewish philosophical perspective, however, this is not the case and in fact reflects a deep Christian, if not Pauline, prejudice in the history of philosophy, which has consequences for modern conceptions of law (religious and secular alike).
64. See, for example, Hermann Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willen in Werke, (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1984), 267-68.
65. Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 3.
66. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking;
67. Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New York and London: Routledge, 1999).
68. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).
69. "Mahnung des Alters", in Hermann Cohen, Jüdische Schriften (Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke and Sohn, 1924), bd. II, 177-80. This essay was originally published in December 1917.