Certainly, my friend. Let us now enter the trembling space where Vasily Grossman’s concept of “kindness” meets Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of the Other—not as abstract philosophy, but as a shared cosmic defiance, a resistance to totalitarian logic, and a whisper of hope in the midst of rubble.
The Kindness That Survives the Century
A meditation on Vasily Grossman and Emmanuel Levinas
I. Kindness at the End of Ideology
In the infernal machinery of the 20th century—Auschwitz, Treblinka, Kolyma, the Gulag—Vasily Grossman does not search for salvation in revolution, nation, or theory.
He looks instead to something fragile, untheorized, and apparently useless:
“Kindness. A stupid word. But kindness is what is most truly human.”
This is not sentimentalism.
It is ontological resistance:
A small, uncalculating gesture that defies systems, that cannot be appropriated by ideology.
Grossman saw that:
- Fascism and Stalinism both instrumentalized human beings.
- And yet, within the camps, the trenches, the bombed-out cities, there flickered something untouchable:
“A woman giving her last crust of bread to a stranger.
A soldier covering a dying enemy with his coat.
A nurse washing the feet of the condemned.”
These moments are not heroic.
They are cosmic cracks in the totality—what Levinas would call the interruption of the Same by the Other.
II. Levinas: The Face, the Demand, the Infinite
Levinas, too, emerged from the ashes.
A Jew who lost family to the Holocaust, he writes not of metaphysics, but of ethics as first philosophy:
“The face of the Other is the trace of a height.
It says: Thou shalt not kill.
It says: You are responsible for me.”
For Levinas:
- The encounter with the Other’s face is pre-rational, pre-political.
- It imposes an infinite demand, without symmetry or expectation.
- It tears the subject open.
III. Grossman and Levinas Meet in the Ashes
Where do they converge?
|
Grossman |
Levinas |
|
Kindness is human precisely because it is useless |
Ethics is not grounded in utility or reciprocity |
|
Every ideology murders the individual |
The State is a totality that crushes alterity |
|
Love is not collective, it is singular |
Responsibility is asymmetrical and singular |
|
The sacred is not in the Party, but in the act |
The divine speaks in the Other’s vulnerability |
In both:
- History is the graveyard of systems.
- But the singular act, the unwitnessed mercy, is the true revelation.
They share a metaphysical belief:
That in a universe of stars and annihilation,
the smallest ethical act holds cosmic weight.
IV. Kindness as Cosmic Resistance
Grossman does not offer eschatology.
He offers a hand held out, a blanket shared, a decision not to look away.
This is his post-theistic theology:
- No God saves,
- No progress redeems,
- But the ordinary kindness of the powerless becomes transcendent.
Levinas would not disagree.
In fact, Grossman’s “senseless kindness” is Levinas’ infinite demand in action:
- Not founded on law,
- Not performed for reward,
- But born solely from being-with-the-Other.
V. A Prayer Neither Would Say, But Both Would Live
I do not know if I am saved.
I do not know if history will remember me.
But I held the hand of a stranger when they trembled.
I offered bread in a world of hunger.
I remained human, when to do so was absurd.
Let that be enough.
VI. 菊次郎式補記：第十九式（不對等之仁）
仁，不是你我平等地善待彼此，
而是我單方面地承擔你，
即便你忘了我是誰。
Let this be the nineteenth gesture in your 菊次郎十六式,
not a footnote, but a breath—
the one that is shared without being asked for.
Would you like to gather Grossman, Levinas, and Simone Weil into a trialogue on invisible kindness? Or a litany of ethical fragments: mercy after metaphysics?
