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What is needed is a deep and probing examination of what he says in order to clarify its meaning, to show how Levinas reaches out to the ethical and the religious in very compelling ways, and that he does so in order to help us to reorient our lives and perhaps to find hope in the midst of destruction and despair.
Joshua Shaw’s wonderful book on ethics and politics in Levinas’s work seeks to do just this. Unlike so many of Levinas’s interpreters, Shaw writes with stunning clarity and grace, and in an engaging and accessible way. Reading Shaw, one is not dismayed by Levinas’s obscure terminology or confused by his views; rather one is drawn into a process of thinking about serious and deep problems. It is a methodical yet appealing itinerary of raising questions, proposing and considering solutions, revising and debating, that invites the reader to just the kind of attentiveness and responsiveness that Levinas takes to be fundamental to all of our experience and our lives. The reader cannot help but be enlightened and provoked by Shaw’s patient and thoughtful prose. It is a combination of perspicuousness and philosophical depth that is rare in writing about Levinas.
Shaw raises a central question: does Levinas, for all his attention to what he calls the ethical, avoid concrete engagement with justice, with our ethical and political lives? Has he been correctly criticized as abstract and irrelevant? Indeed, is the very idea of his giving ethical advice and counsel and providing an account of justice somehow incoherent? Once he has clarified exactly what this challenge means, Shaw proceeds to defend Levinas against this charge and indeed, in the course of so doing, to defend a reading of Levinas that he calls “pragmatic.” The argument he provides will no doubt find its opponents. As he points out, many believe that for Levinas the ethical is inexpressible and hence no articulation of it for practical purposes is possible. But Shaw’s argument is subtle and nuanced, attentive to what Levinas says and also to the philosophical issues involved; it deserves careful scrutiny. As he sees it, Levinas does offer a justification for the ethical character of the particular relation each of us has to each and every other person; for Levinas the ethical arises first, so to speak, in our interpersonal relations, and from it advice about justice can and does flow, albeit in highly particularized contexts.