Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First ...

Critchley argues that Levinas’s work is not without merit.³ Nonetheless, we live in a world in which we are faced with urgent yet complex ethical dilemmas; it is reasonable to expect some guidance from Levinas on these matters. Yet he never offers any advice: he leaves our thinking “fatally undetermined.”⁴ “Levinas tells us that his ethics must lead to some theory of justice,” Critchley observes, “without telling us in any detail what this theory might be.”⁵ Elsewhere, Critchley suggests that the gap between Levinas’s characterization of ethical responsibility and his unspecified theory of justice may represent “the fundamental aporia of deconstruction.”⁶ And in recently published essays, he faults Levinas’s failure to specify his theory of justice as “the Achilles’ heel of his work.”⁷

It is worth pausing to reflect on these criticisms. Rorty and Critchley make it sound as if they are troubled by Levinas because we live in especially perilous times. We find ourselves confronted with ethical dilemmas that it would be irresponsible to avoid. Levinas talks a lot about “infinite responsibility,” but his philosophy does not really help us confront these pressing dilemmas. Thus it should be rejected. Yet this makes it sound as if Rorty’s and Critchley’s view is that all philosophers should be ethicists or, better, activists: the only good philosopher is an engaged one. This may be Rorty’s view, but it does not seem like a claim Critchley would endorse.⁸ Nor does this objection identify a flaw specific to Levinas. For if the argument is that we should reject any philosophy that is not directly applicable to contemporary ethical and political dilemmas, then this objection can be raised against any philosopher who is not primarily concerned to outline a concrete normative ethics—to anyone working in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, or the history of philosophy.

Perhaps the complaint is that it is misleading for Levinas to depict his work as ethics, given the paucity of advice he gives on how to determine ethical conduct. Critchley invites this response when he asks if “ethics is the right word to describe the basic experience that [Levinas] is trying to convey.”⁹