[Buddha-l] Levinas and Buddhism

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Richard P. Hayes schreef:

>He seems to be quite the rage in
>comparative philosophy and comparative religions circles, despite the
>fact (from what I have been told by those who have actually read him)
>that he was a deeply parochial man with almost no interest in anything
>outside a fairly narrow interpretation of Judaism. Any comments on why
>he has caught on? Was he on Oprah recently?
>
>  
>
You should check your sources, Richard. Levinas is one of the rare guys 
who lived through the German concentration camps without becoming bitter 
and cynical. He wrote on phenomenology, Husserl, criticized Heidegger, 
but admired his Being and Time. He placed the face of the other (as an 
antipode to Sartre) in the center of his philosophy, because he saw this 
as a primary source of inspiration for living and ethics. I think he 
tried to give religious experiences an existential foothold as being the 
core of sympathy. Beside his philosophical works he wrote also about the 
Talmud, but this he considered another genre and he never mixed both 
genres. I've read a few of his books and my experience is that it takes 
a lot of time, because his formulations can be rather complicated.

Erik