Adorno ve Levinas: Holokost sonrası felsefede etik

This dissertation intends to bring Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno in proximity as the main thinkers of a post-Holocaust philosophy. The motivation of this project is to provide a framework for a post-Holocaust philosophy by way of emphasizing the similarities that are found in the ways in which both of these thinkers respond to the Holocaust, which they both address as an urgent philosophical problem, and not merely a historical catastrophe or a political perversion. Although these thinkers follow very different paths in their philosophical careers, the purpose of this project is to establish a ground of conversation between these two thinkers. The ground on which they would stand side-by-side and shed light upon each other's work is undoubtedly the Holocaust. They both consider the Holocaust to be the ultimate challenge to the Western philosophical tradition which unmasks the violence inherent in the fundamental concepts and theories that are basic constituents of the tradition. Both of these thinkers are engaged in a post-Holocaust philosophy precisely because they are determined to lay bare the self-critique of Western philosophy in which it acknowledges the sad truth that its own conceptual tools, categories, terminological language and mechanisms of generalization and abstraction are indeed susceptible to committing extreme violence and destruction. Both Levinas and Adorno argue that violence caused by indifference that silences or justifies suffering is the central problem that lies at the root of the Western tradition that is revealed by a post-Holocaust philosophy whose purpose of existence is to challenge the very same tradition from within. In this dissertation, our aim is to provide a more precise context for this post-Holocaust philosophy by reading these two claims into each other: the first one is from Adorno, "to lend a voice to suffering is a condition for all truth," and the other is from Levinas, "justification of the neighbor's pain is certainly the source of all immorality." By keeping these two claims in proximity to each other, the similarities and the differences between Adorno's negative dialectics that resist against identity thinking and Levinas' ethics as first philosophy that resist against totalization will be discussed. However, the majority of the dissertation is devoted to Levinas, and Adorno is introduced at the final stage of the project. That is because, we believe that although Adorno's negative dialectics is an indispensable element in outlining a post-Holocaust philosophy, it remains unable to fully lay out the significance of morality by focusing its ethical task on its commitment to the self-critique of reason, thus becoming a never-ending questioning of the ethics of thinking. It should still be acknowledged as a tremendous effort to push philosophy to its limits, however as such Adorno's negative dialectics is at the verge of remaining an immobilized but ever deepening interrogation of the mechanism of thought. Nonetheless, Levinas with his view of ethics as first philosophy comes as a perfect counterpart that motivates and animates Adorno's critique precisely because Levinas takes up the question of subjectivity to understand the structure of ethical relation. Levinas' response to the Holocaust, then, is an urgent call to responding to the others, and thus to a rethinking of a new subjectivity. The ethical subjectivity shatters indifference, interrupts egoism by calling into question its spontaneous unjustified freedom; thus, the ethical subject is for-the-other. Levinas' duty for his readers of a post-Holocaust world is to remind them of the powerful response that uncovers the pre-cognitive, pre-reflective, sensible and sensitive ethical consciousness: "here I am." The project undertaken in this dissertation, then, is to give an account of how Levinas responds to the Holocaust by way of rethinking of the ethical subjectivity as responsibility and substitution.