June 2013: Rony Klein, lecturer in the Department of Romance and Latin-American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied Philosophy in Paris and has completed his Ph. D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published articles on French contemporary thought and French-Jewish contemporary thought. He is currently preparing a book, in Hebrew, on "Letter, Body, and Community: Reflections on French-Jewish Contemporary Thought." 

Is there a compelling normative case for value pluralism? Would we be better off in a world of irreducibly diverse and sometimes tragically conflicting values rather than one in which our values fit harmoniously together? This article identifies, examines and evaluates a normative argument for value pluralism suggested in Isaiah Berlin’s sessays on the history of ideas and particularly on Russian writers – that is, that deep conflicts of identity bound up with conflicting values sometimes contribute critically to the creation of great works of art, philosophy, and politics. Berlin attributes such deep identity conflicts to a range of important European historical figures, from Marx and Disraeli to Tolstoy and Turgenev to Hamann and Mill, and argues that their works of creative genius were motivated in part by the need to transcend their internal conflicts. On his interpretation, value conflicts appear to have been a necessary condition for their great works. In so far as we value these great creative works, it would then appear that we have a reason for embracing the underlying plurality of values that made them possible. But Berlin never linked these insights to his case for value pluralism or political liberalism. This article ends by evaluating those potential linkages.  It concludes that there is a good reason that Berlin did not explicitly build a normative argument for value pluralism on these great works: on careful examination the argument reveals a paradoxical quality that at least partially undermines his critique of monism. By consequence, the argument from great works does not lend support to Berlin’s famous defense of pluralist liberalism, but rather to a form of creative liberalism that does not need to choose between pluralist sensibilities and monist aspirations.

The philosopher Berel Lang offers powerful arguments for the conclusion that there can be no useful fictional treatment of the Holocaust. However, he notes that three writers (Celan, Appelfeld, and Borowski) escape the force of these arguments. Lang is prepared to grant that, in such cases, “literary and moral genius” may enable a writer to “transcend” the “supposedly intrinsic” limitations suggested by abstract philosophical argument; but leaves open the question what such “genius” consists in. This essay is an attempt to provide an answer to that question for the specific case of Aharon Appelfeld. Appelfeld’s fictions introduce their readers into the fabric of Jewish life in Central Europe immediately prior to the catastrophe, to the extent of allowing them to feel in propria persona, and thus to attain knowledge-of, rather than merely knowledge-about, the tensions constituting the situational framework within which those lives were lived. Appelfeld’s fictions offer a way of recovering the individuality, as persons rather than numbers, of those whom the Shoah destroyed, because individuality displays itself, inter alia, in the varying of individual response to a common situation. Such recovery is relevant to our moral understanding of the Shoah, it is argued, because what is morally important about the representations of the Shoah is not merely the destruction, but also the nature of what was destroyed. The essay concludes with brief discussions of the relative merits, in this connection, of fiction and memoir, and of the criticisms levelled against Appelfeld’s work by M. A. Bernstein and others.

This essay contends that in his effort to develop a poetics, Joyce intuits in his writings Levinas’s ethical swerve from Heidegger. By making the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses “dramatic” according to his own terms, Joyce presents a relation that exists prior to, or sets the stage for, the ordinary representational plane of the novel. Although the limits of language necessitate a spatial show, Joyce makes the show “dumb,” altering the relation between knowledge and responsiveness by taking deferral, the usual condition for knowledge, out of the equation. Joyce’s effort is towards the creation of a certain messianic time, or time without space, and his presentation of a non-appearing, non-reciprocal relation delineates the passion, or responsiveness independent of the need for knowledge, by which the chapter moves. By effectively staging responsibility as an infinite desire for the other as such, Joyce begins in “Ithaca,” as in Levinas, are the sound without echo and the journey without return.

Is the society of the Houyhnhnms in Book IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels a utopia or a dystopia? Gulliver’s admiring account of Houyhnhnmland is shown to be systematically self-deconstructing in ways which embody a critique of what might be called “Rational Universalism,” a moral theory according to which the demands that lay the strongest obligations on a morally reflective person are those determined by the needs of the most extensive community to which a given person can be held to belong. In presenting the Houyhnhnms as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of such ideas, Swift discerned, and criticised, the first stirrings of intellectual impulses at the root of modern totalitarianism.

Is the society of the Houyhnhnms in Book IV of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels a utopia or a dystopia? Gulliver’s admiring account of Houyhnhnmland is shown to be systematically self-deconstructing in ways which embody a critique of what might be called “Rational Universalism,” a moral theory according to which the demands that lay the strongest obligations on a morally reflective person are those determined by the needs of the most extensive community to which a given person can be held to belong. In presenting the Houyhnhnms as, in effect, a reductio ad absurdum of such ideas, Swift discerned, and criticised, the first stirrings of intellectual impulses at the root of modern totalitarianism.