Dogs and Fire

A Rooted Nature

The most explicit of Levinas’s statements against nature can arguably be found in “A Religion for Adults,” which appeared in 1957 and was republished in Difficult Freedom (1963). Like the other essays collected in Difficult Freedom, “A Religion for Adults” focuses on Judaism’s emergence from the trauma of the Holocaust. However, while purportedly offering a description of Judaism, in the essay Levinas in fact sketches the main points of his ethical philosophy, which will later be formulated in his major books, Totality and Infinity, Otherwise than Being, Of God Who Comes to Mind and the Talmudic Readings. In the last and most political part of the essay, called “Citizens of Modern States,” Levinas writes:

The Jewish man discovers man before discovering landscapes and towns. . . . He understands the world on the basis of the Other rather than the whole of being according to the earth. He is in a sense exiled on this earth, as the psalmist says, and he finds a meaning to the earth on the basis of a human society. This is not an analysis of the contemporary Jewish soul; it is the literal teaching of the Bible. . . . Freedom with regard to the sedentary forms of existence is, perhaps, the human way to be in the world. For Judaism, the world becomes intelligible before a human face and not, as for a great contemporary philosopher who sums up an important aspect of the West, through houses, temples and bridges. . . . [This freedom] reduces the importance of all values related to roots, and institutes other forms of fidelity and responsibility. Man, after all, is not a tree, and humanity is not a forest. (DL 40-41, DF 22-23, translation modified) ¹⁵

Levinas here contrasts himself with Heidegger, and Heidegger’s dwelling in his forest cabin, ¹⁶ to make the central claim of his philosophy: human beings have no roots. To express this more fully, human beings are human precisely because they can escape their being rooted into being: “What I want to emphasize is that the human breaks with pure being, which is always persistence in being. This is my principal thesis.” ¹⁷ Nature-ineluctably-connected-to-itself appears to be the non-human part of the world. Humanity is that which is able to cut its connection to nature—namely, to relinquish the satisfaction of being there, of being part of the there is, of ontological immanence. We are, and, by this very fact, we are connected to what is, to the world. But we are not trees, rooted in the soil; rather, our humanity can be found precisely in that we feel the need or obligation to break the chains of immanence. As early as in On Escape (1935), Levinas reflects on the situation of “being held fast” (être rivé) ¹⁸ and on the need to exit from being: “Escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I (moi) is oneself (soi-même)” (DE 98, OE 55). Much later, in Of God Who Comes to Mind, Levinas expresses the same idea in different words: “Everything is absorbed, sucked down and walled up in the Same” (DD 31, OG 12). Being consists of identification with oneself—of being “stuck to oneself.” This is the way of the world, the way of all natural beings. The world is in and for itself. But humanity—humankindness or human kindness, as it were—consists of cutting all roots and turning over to otherwise than being, to the other person.

The metaphysical or, as Levinas calls it, the ethical claim against rootedness is a normative social and political claim. Individuals are not trees and humanity is not a forest. People should not stand rooted in themselves and in their soil as a nationalist army or a self-satisfied mob sure of its rights and of its possession of the land. If being stuck to oneself and being rooted are one and the same thing, the “bondage” (enchaînement) to the body and to the “biological” goes hand in hand with the connection to the earth. From that point, it is a very short step to fascism and Nazism, explains Levinas in his early text, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” ¹⁹ Does this mean that all commitments to the natural and to nature lead to fascism or, perhaps, are fascism? This sounds preposterous and certainly raises a difficulty. Levinas contends that the “ego structure” always means “harm caused to the Other” (DL 32, DF 16). His ethics is intended to describe the opening that challenges the identifying and totalizing activity of being. However, in putting breathing and imperialism on the same spectrum of perseverance in being, is Levinas not generalizing being in a totalizing way? Does the fact that war is an expression of being (TI 6; TaI 21) imply that being manifests itself always and only as war? Does the fact that fascism includes a “bondage” to nature imply that all relations to nature are fascist?

It seems to me that distinctions must be made. As Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz note, “Levinas fervently rejects the fascists’ association of the body’s ‘adherence to the Self’ with the identification of the bodies of singular individuals as mere monads of a Generalized Body of the People.” ²⁰ Levinas also rejects the association of that identification with the identification of the “Bodies of the People” as monads of nature. From this it is clear that fascism includes a biological connection to nature but only through a nationalist (and racist) phase that is not inherent to all connections to nature. We must therefore emphasize that the fascist way to be connected to nature is a certain way to be connected to nature.

Levinas, however, does not make distinctions. He insists on warning us against the holistic continuum of human beings and nature that can be found in all connections to nature. So long as nature represents a rooted Same, a principle of renewed identification, a conatus, it cannot be redeemed, even if not all relations to nature concretely lead to fascism. By definition, nature is that which is blind to otherness. It cannot be awakened by transcendence. It is a Darwinian struggle that endlessly destroys for the sake of its own survival. Levinas’s position echoes that of the Russian writer, Vassili Grossman, whom he greatly admired: “This is the life of the forest—a constant struggle of everything against everything. Only the blind conceive of the kingdom of trees and grass as the world of good. . . . Is it that life itself is evil?” ²¹ Therefore, for Levinas what prevents humanity from collapsing into war, imperialism, and fascism is the rupture of the connection to nature. The openness to transcendence is lived and experienced in the solidarity between human beings beyond biological ties and natural roots.

For Levinas, therefore, trees and forests are unethical because they have roots. All human endeavors to connect to their rootedness, as well as all human efforts to be rooted like them, are unethical. However, trees are also unethical because they burn irrationally, without control. In the Talmudic Reading “Damages Caused by Fire,” published in 1977 in Du Sacré au saint, the Talmudic folio studied by Levinas is a piece of tort law, discussing liability in a case involving a spreading fire. What is important here is that the liability at issue is related to an event that is out of human control. Reflecting on the unexpected consequences of a fire, Levinas notes the “appearance here of a responsibility concerning that which escapes perception and consequently the precautions and powers of the one who has caused the harm” (DSS 159; NTR 184).

Fire personifies the loss of control not only of whoever has lit the fire but of all humankind. A raging fire respects neither human property nor human morality, nor any other component of the human order. It illustrates the laws of a nature which is totally indifferent to human misery, welfare or reason. In Levinas’s words, “Fire is an elementary force to which other elementary forces will add themselves, thereby multiplying damages beyond any rational conjecture! The wind adds its whims and violence to it” (DSS 161; NTR 185, Translation modified). An elementary force, a natural force, is characterized by its unreasonable violence and destructive capacity. Levinas continues: “But perhaps the elemental force of fire is already the intervention of the uncontrollable, of war. It does not annul responsibilities!” (DSS 161; NTR 185).

According to Levinas, elementary forces have something in common with human war. Like Camus who, in The Plague, used the metaphor of the bubonic plague to personify Nazism, Levinas associates a natural process with human calamity. Camus created the story of the epidemic to make a statement about evil and death. He implied that no matter the origin of suffering, it always provokes the same “absurd” questions. Suffering—of either natural or human origin—challenges our understanding of the meaning of life. Levinas’s thesis here is based on a similar approach. Levinas believes that we are responsible for uncontrollable, unreasonable evil—whether of natural or human origin. However, unlike Camus, who said nothing about the essence of evil, and only pointed to similarities in the consequences of its manifestations, Levinas uses his generalizing logic to underline its unique essence:

This page 60 of the tractate Baba Kama speaks of the damages caused by fire and of the liability they imply. It does not refer to war but to destructive fire and, later, to epidemics, to famine—all of this causing damages and death. These are also the effects of war. Is it possible to deduce the essence of war from this starting point? Or to deduce what is more war than war? (DSS 154; NTR 181-182).

Here is a text that describes, not war, but destruction which resembles the destruction of war. From this similarity of effects, Levinas deduces a similarity of causes. He alleges that the same effects must have the same causes or, more precisely, that the same effects result from the same essential cause. As a result, fire and war are regarded as having the same essence. Later in the text, it becomes clear that fire, epidemic, hunger, war and Auschwitz are expressions of the same principle, the absence of reason. “We are entering the realm of total disorder, of sheer Element, no longer in the service of any thought” (DSS 164; NTR 187). ²² The similarity between Auschwitz and uncontrolled fire is the problem of the “elemental,” or, in other words, of unreasonable nature.

This is surprising because Levinas never regards reason as the foundation of ethics. On the contrary, he argues that the ethical commandment revealed in the face of the Other ²³ is prior to reason and beyond reason. By reason we understand that which is “sought in the relationship between terms, between the one and the other showing themselves in a theme.” It is that which ensures “the coexistence of these terms, the coherence of the one and the other despite their difference” (AE, 256; OB 165). That reason which explains one thing by means of another, which establishes similarities and relations between things in order to comprehend them, misses the infinite uniqueness expressed in the face of another person. The reason of “representation, of knowledge through deduction, served by logic and synchronizing the successive” (AE 260; OB 167, translation modified) annihilates differences and otherness. It is part of the ontological, not of the ethical. Therefore, it is striking that in “Damages Caused by Fire” Levinas laments the disappearance of reason, which is characteristic, according to him, of “sheer element” [l’Elément pur]—namely, of a nature left to its violence. Nature is ontological. Reason, seen as “knowledge through deduction,” is ontological. But the violence of nature comes precisely from the absence of reason. As we shall see in the next section, this stems from the fact that there exists a non-ontological or non-wholly ontological reason, a reason opened to otherness, which alone can moderate the irrational violence of nature.

A Wandering Nature

“Damages Caused by Fire” describes situations in which the worst is always to come. In such situations, however, some creatures sense the ethical meaning of the events. Pursuing his exegesis of the Talmudic folio Baba Kama 60 a-b, Levinas writes:

If dogs howl, says the last quoted text, that is because the angel of death has entered the city; if mean dogs are happy, that points to Elijah, the precursor of the Messiah! But only if there are no bitches among them! The first statement is affirmed unconditionally: The dogs howl. Instinctive, irrational forebodings, dogs are the first to sense that the angel of death is here. But . . . let us not confuse eroticism and messianism! Those dogs, pleased by the presence of a bitch, point to one of the deceptive aspects of salvation through youth. For youth, animated by pure vital impulse, which is not always the equivalent of a pure impulse, messianic times are always near. Beware of the quality of joy! (DSS 175-6; NTR 193-4, translation modified)

Dogs are as irrational as fire, war or extermination, and they do not think, says Levinas, but they perceive the ethical reality. Their howls or happiness reflect situations of evil or redemption. However, it is different when they are in a situation of pure perseverance in being—when they are “animated by pure vital impulse.” When, due to the presence of females, they forget everything but themselves, their expressions of joy are no longer reliable. When they are animated by pure conatus, dogs cannot be trusted. As Levinas once said, “the being of animals is a struggle for life; a struggle for life without ethics. It is a question of might” (PM 172).

Levinas’s remarks on the dogs of folio 60 of the tractate Baba Kama echo his short essay of Difficult Freedom, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights.” Both texts focus on dogs’ reactions to war and suffering. In “The Name of a Dog . . .” Levinas comments on Exodus 22:31: “You shall be men consecrated to me; therefore you shall not eat any flesh that is torn by beast in the field; you shall cast it to the dogs.” He says:

This flesh torn by beasts in the field, and the remains of bloody struggles between wild animals that half-devour one another, from the strong species to the weak, will be sublimated by intelligence into hunting games. This spectacle suggesting the horrors of war, this devouring between species, will provide men with the artistic emotions of the Kriegspiel. . . . It is the dog mentioned at the end of the verse that I am especially interested in. . . . So who is this dog at the end of the verse? (DL 213-4; DF 151)

In a few humorous lines, he recalls the metaphoric uses of the word dog in French and their significations of misery, servility, fidelity but also violence. However, he says that the question raised in the Exodus verse deals not with allegories but with the real dog, an animal representing nothing but itself. In emphasizing this point, he raises the topic of a “pure nature leading to rights” (DL 214; DF 152). Nevertheless, contrary to what is implied by this phrase and the title of the essay, the text never becomes a discussion of natural rights and their application to animals. Instead, as in “Damages Caused by Fire,” it focuses on the absence of reason in animals and on their possible ethical behavior in spite of the absence of reason. ²⁴ In other words, what interests Levinas is not whether dogs could be regarded as “the Other,” but whether dogs have the capacity to recognize “the Other.”

This is an extremely important point for an understanding of Levinas’s ethics in general. Levinas rarely asks, “Who is my neighbor?” ²⁵ He does not deal with the definition of the Other, because the Other is precisely that which is exterior to all definitions. ²⁶ Hence, he does not consider the possibility that nature can be regarded as the Other. ²⁷ His focus is on subjectivity, on that which faces the Other. Put differently, the question raised by nature is not whether nature can be the object or recipient of human ethical behavior. It is not “Can a non-human other be ‘the Other’?” ²⁸ It is about nature and natural creatures as possible ethical subjects, leaving the Other undefined. ²⁹

In addition to the dogs of Exodus 22:31, allowed to eat “the flesh torn by beasts in the field,” two other examples of dogs appear. The first is the dogs of Exodus 11:7, which will not even snarl at the Israelites as God smites the first-born of Egypt. These dogs, who by their silence, respected the institution of freedom, had “neither ethics nor logos,” writes Levinas, yet “attest[ed] to the dignity of the individual. This is what the friend of man means: transcendence in the animal!” (DL 215; DF 152, translation modified). The second is the most famous of all Levinassian dogs, Bobby, who briefly comforted Levinas and his fellow-prisoners in the Nazi work camp where he was held during the war. While the human beings they encountered

stripped us of our human skin . . . for a few short weeks, before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered our lives. . . . He survived [vivotait] in some wild patch in the region of the camp. But we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him there was no doubt that we were men. . . . This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives. He was a descendant of the dogs of Egypt. (DL 215-6; DF 153)

Like the dogs of Baba Kama reacting to the coming of Elijah, Bobby and the dogs of Egypt lack intelligence, yet behave ethically. They are pure conatus, but in certain cases they sense or express “transcendence.” “Transcendence in the animal” means a disruption of the pure vital impulse—the rooted nature which endlessly struggles for growth and survival. Dogs, and perhaps other animals as well, can experience an interruption of their conatus which allows them to perceive the Other. If, as Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity, “The happiness of enjoyment is stronger than every disquietude, but disquietude can trouble it; here lies the gap between the animal and the human” (TI 159; TaI 149), there was no gap between Bobby and human beings. Or perhaps, Bobby was more human than the Nazis and their acolytes, who regarded the prisoners as “a gang of apes” (DL 215; DF 153).

What made the interruption of conatus in Bobby possible was his “wandering” nature, which broke the steadiness of being. As quoted above, ethics means “freedom with regard to the sedentary forms of existence.” For Levinas, homeless wandering is the figure of the opening of subjectivity toward infinity. When the ego functions ontologically, it aims at “staying home” and comes back to itself. When it functions in the ethical mode, it breaks away from itself for the sake of the Other. Levinas has illustrated these two levels of existence, the ontological and the ethical, by the myth of Ulysses and that of Abraham: “To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land, and forbids his servant even to bring back his son to the point of departure.” ³⁰ For Levinas, Ithaca represents ontology—the return to one’s identity, one’s property, one’s kingdom. The ego “is a dog that recognizes as its own Ulysses coming to take possession of his goods” (AE 127; OB 79-80). Ethics, however, occurs in a non-return and a nowhere. In the Nazi camp Bobby was on the side of Abraham, not Ulysses: “Perhaps the dog that recognized Ulysses beneath his disguise on his return from the Odyssey was a forebear of our own? But no, no! There, they were in Ithaca and the Fatherland. Here we were nowhere” (DL 216; DF 153, translation modified). ³¹ Bobby, homeless like the prisoners, reacted ethically in spite of his conatus. Like Abraham of Genesis 18 welcoming the three desert wayfarers, the dog greeted the prisoners each day when they returned from work, recognizing them as fellow-homeless and as human beings. And, says Levinas, “his friendly growling . . . was born from the silence of his forefathers on the banks of the Nile” (DL 216; DF 153). Bobby, like the dogs of Exodus 11:7, was able to recognize the Other.

Bobby is a specimen of a very unnatural nature, if by natural we mean perseverance in being. The homeless, wandering dog, which did not live but merely “survived” (vivotait, not vivait) until he was driven off, was nevertheless able to interrupt his survival impulse to greet the prisoners each day. ³² Without logos and ethics, he manifested ethical behavior. ³³ He was a Kantian without the intelligence to universalize maxims and drives. But why does Levinas here mention Kant? Since when does universalizing reason play any role in Levinassian ethics? Is ethics not that which precisely transcends universalized maxims and drives? ³⁴

Here we meet again the difficulty described above. On the one hand, we know that ethics does not involve ontological reason. On the other hand, Levinas claims that nature’s unethical violence arises from the absence of reason. Moreover, animals-with-no-reason sometimes (but not always) interrupt their blind vital impulse to behave ethically. Therefore, it appears that Levinas uses the word reason to mean two different things. The first is ontological reason—the cognitive faculty that establishes relationships of sameness: “the reason characteristic of justice, the State, thematization, synchronization, representation of logos and being . . . knowledge and deduction” (AE 260; OB 167). The second is what Levinas calls “pre-original” reason, which is open to otherness. Pre-original reason has two central and related expressions. The first consists of thinking beyond being, as emphasized in the “idea of infinity,” which

is exceptional in that its ideatum surpasses its idea . . . the alterity of the infinite is not cancelled, is not extinguished in the thought that thinks it. . . . The idea of infinity is then the only one that teaches what we are ignorant of. . . . It is experience in the sole radical sense of the term: a relationship with the exterior, with the other, without this exteriority being able to be integrated into the same. . . . Experience, the idea of infinity, occurs in the relationship with the other. The idea of infinity is the social relationship. ³⁵

The second consists of thinking beyond historical time. It is a “reason before the thematization of signification by a thinking subject, before the assembling of terms in a present, a pre-original reason that does not proceed from any initiative of the subject, an anarchic reason. . . . Reason that would be one-for-the-other!” (AE 259; OB 166-7, translation modified). It should be noted that by “before” Levinas does not mean an event that would historically precede ontological reason, but an “immemorial past” or other dimension of the past, that of eternity (TA 277, TO 358; AE 23, 141, OB 9, 88; TI 136, TAI 130). ³⁶

We now understand that rooted nature’s lack of ethics does not stem from a deficiency in ontological reason, but from the absence of the pre-original reason that would moderate its violence. On the other hand, with the prisoners Bobby had an experience beyond thematization and logical deduction: “If experience precisely means a relation with the absolutely other, that is, with what always overflows thought, the relation with infinity accomplishes experience in the fullest sense of the word” (TI 10; TAI 25). Without forming a hypothesis about the “idea of infinity” in dogs and their relation to eternity, we can assume, as Levinas seems to assume, that Bobby and his biblical and Talmudic forefathers lacked ontological reason but not pre-original reason. In some cases, therefore, nature can be ethical. More, in cases like that of the work camp, nature is ethics’ last refuge.

It would be tempting at this stage to understand Levinas’s position as a preference for animals over vegetal life. This would reflect his anthropocentrism—human beings are, after all, animals—and quite a simplistic hierarchy in the natural world. However, forests, dogs and people are equally part of being. Therefore, if ethics disturbs the human conatus, and sometimes that of dogs, one may wonder why it would not disturb the conatus of trees or stones. In the last section, I will show that Levinas uncovers the complicated relationship between the ontological and the ethical in all parts of nature. His criticism of natural perseverance in being is accompanied by an acknowledgment, only seldom expressed, of a beyond nature in nature.

The Amphibology of Nature

In “Beyond the State in the State,” Levinas reads a passage of Tractate Tamid of the Babylonian Talmud in which Alexander of Macedon tests the Elders of the Negev with ten questions. ³⁷ The first deals with a surprising geography: “He asked them if the distance is greater from heaven to earth than from east to west.” ³⁸ Interpreting these words, Levinas makes a distinction between the two “measures of the world . . . length and height” (NLT 52; NTR 85), or horizontal and vertical, which express two different aspects of the world.

The vertical, or distance from heaven to earth, may be understood as contemplation, “imagination, poetry or dream. Impotent and uncertain movement” (NLT 51; NTR 84). As expected however, Levinas proposes a second interpretation of the “elevation to the heavens.” This comprises the ethical dimension, pointing to an infinite exteriority, outside of nature. When understood that way, the “elevation” challenges the laws of nature and of geometry:

All this must be redressed, redeemed, pardoned, and returned to its just rectitude. Hence height is needed. The true height is that elevation in the goodness which reestablishes the disrupted peace in human relationships. The metaphor of this height has other meanings than that of geometry. It is here that one thinks about God [C’est là que Dieu se pense]. (NLT 52; NTR 85, translation modified)

Note that “C’est là que Dieu se pense” literally means, “it is there that God thinks himself.” Levinas plays with the two possible senses of the sentence, ³⁹ indicating that height induces or manifests another kind of reason. It is the reason of God himself, reflected in the pre-original reason mentioned above. Height, therefore, has nothing to do with the spatial relationship between earth and sky. “Height is not a geometrical measure. The astronomical sky is empty of gods. And our airplanes and rockets will come tomorrow to traverse and conquer it” (NLT 53; NTR 86 translation modified). In other words, the physical vertical dimension of nature is part of what he calls “the horizontal.”

The horizontal is made of “lengths” and “lines” that connect one point to another. It reveals distances within a presence. Lengths and lines reflect the synchrony of distinct positions. They manifest things that are there: “Priority of horizontal lines, those of efficiency, and, despite distances and obstacles, the whole marvel of paths, tracks, road-ways, and hence spirit” (NLT 50-1; NTR 84). The horizontal is “thematization.” Its lines are the geographic equivalent of politics and ontological reason. Aristotle’s disciple, who knows how to ask the question of being (NLT 54; NTR 86-87), is a statesman, a general, and a philosopher:

Wisdom was defined to Alexander only as deductive thought, as science which masters the future. Wisdom—reasonable thought, to be sure, the ideal of the West which does not like the unforeseen, admires strong characters and is capable of despising riches; but it also remains sensitive to the nobility of the conquering sword and will never have peace (NLT 60; NTR 92).

Politics and ontological reason take place in the same horizontal synchronic dimension. And so does everyday life:

Does one not hear [in Alexander’s question] the preoccupations of power as also the politics of the statesman, of the conqueror crossing or hollowing out the paths of the universe? Of a politics driven to imperialism, to couriers bearing far away the decisions of the commander in chief and the central administration? But, already [there is] all the importance of the horizontal in the daily march (démarches) of the human multitudes toward their place of work. Next to or behind the march (marche) of military columns. (NLT 50; NTR 83-4, translation modified)

The natural world is not simply the home, the context of ontological occupations. It is their substance. Nature is made of lines, and linear are army columns, subway lines and logical deduction, all of which are expressions of an expanding universe. Thus politics is natural and functions according to natural expansion: “Political power wants to expand; it wants to be an empire. Everything that limits it is already against it and provokes it” (NLT 71; NTR 102).

However, as suddenly appears in the Talmudic discussion quoted in the reading, mountains will stop the endless progression of the conquerors. Thus, Levinas notes:

The world is not a Euclidian space open to conquest, to the forward movement of a horizontal march. Places inhabited by men concealed under their dissimilarities, whose human look cannot manage to penetrate the night, multiplicity without synthesis, space without transition, without return, exotic worlds requiring, on their paths without destination, the irrational perspicacity of instinct and the guiding threads of the blind. (NLT 71; NTR 102)

The “irrational perspicacity of instinct” is here linked with the non-return, as if Levinas were acknowledging Bobby’s pre-original reason. His lyrical sentences are, however, clear. Something in this world—like mountains—at some point stops the conquest of the land, the spreading out of imperialist armies. The world is a horizontal expanding space, yet at the same time, ⁴⁰ it is not a Euclidian space open to conquest. It is, and it is not. Levinas is referring to the same world. Verticality beyond being is not detached from the natural world, but it is a modality of nature itself. Being and otherwise than being meet in this world, without synthesizing. The “elevation”—which is not part of the everyday being of people, trees, animals, sky, land and fire—nevertheless intervenes in their being, to limit their expanding conatus. In the lines from Tractate Tamid 31b-32b read by Levinas, Alexander’s imperialism is interrupted first by mountains, then by the flow of a spring that gives the feeling or intuition of the Garden of Eden—a garden that transforms a nature of conquest and the harsh struggle for survival into a haven of peace (NLT 74; NTR 104). Eden is a natural garden that challenges nature—a vertical garden, as it were.

The irruption of mountains and of Eden into horizontal nature echoes the ambiguity or amphibology of politics. Politics is at the same time the origin of all wrongs and, thanks to the ethical disruption, the cure of most. ⁴¹ The amphibology of nature and politics is expressed in slightly different language in “Judaism and Kenosis.” Levinas there reformulates in his own words a parable of the Tractate Hulin of the Babylonian Talmud. At the creation of the world, when sun and moon are still of the same size, the moon wonders if she or the former will be king. As a result, God makes her smaller. Following this is a dialogue in which the moon complains about her size and function. For the moon, according to Levinas, the sun represents universal history, scientific reason, and political triumph. The moon is hurt to be smaller and refuses all the “second best jobs” proposed by God. Her answers manifest a struggle inherent to nature, the struggle for supremacy. Conscious of this essential aspect of the world that He just created, and of the ineluctable despair originated by it, God does not answer but takes responsibility for the offence to the moon, whose dissatisfaction is

the residue of the stubborn contention of a nature persevering in its being, imperturbably affirming itself. To this there is no response, but for this, precisely, Holiness takes on the responsibility. Here is the humility of God assuming responsibility for this ambiguity. The greatness of humility is also in the humiliation of greatness. It is the sublime kenosis of a God who accepts the questioning of his holiness in a world incapable of restricting itself to the light of his Revelation. (AHN 137; ITN 118)

Hence, God plays a double function. On the one hand, He creates the world as an ontological nature struggling for perseverance; a world where kings as implacable as fire conquer lands and where the small, humble and poor inevitably lose the game. On the other hand, He acknowledges and takes responsibility for wrongs. He “accepts the questioning of his holiness.” Kenosis or humility—doubt as to the absolute justification of being—is a breach in the very creation of being.

If so, Levinas’s philosophy entails what we could call a prudent environmentalism. Obviously, his work pours cold water on all forms of uncritical enthusiasm for nature. The relationship between human beings and nature is an expression of being in which both sides necessarily seek predominance. Nature kills more than we do, and we kill and destroy because we are part of nature. Nature left to itself, like “politics left to itself” (TI 334-5; TaI 300), produces piles of dead. Why be enthusiastic for a conatus in a perpetual war of expansion? However, the ethical interruption of being is natural. As the story of Bobby shows in a paradigmatic way, the awakening to the cries of the victims and the frailty of the Other is an otherwise than nature in nature. Being/nature can be interrupted anywhere by the ethical face-to-face.

Nature is conatus. It is struggle and expansion indifferent to charity or kindness. But the ethical disquietude appears in nature—in the form of Bobby’s barking or of the spring that brings forth Eden. In this sudden and unexpected meeting between kenosis and essence, the world becomes livable, and the only place to live. It is in learning to see the suspension of nature in nature as described in Levinas’s ethical phenomenology that we can start to conceive of a behavior that will not destroy that suspension.