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

The loves he had known prior to this episode were intensified by it as well. Here I find myself trying to imagine what it was like to wander at the base of that gorge. My father felt anxiety at the prospect of having to carry the news to the woman that her child was dead, but surely this anxiety was influenced by his awareness of how distraught he would be in that situation. The pity he felt for her led him to recognize something about the profundity of the love he felt in his own life, as well as its precariousness, how fragile it is, how easily threatened. Surely that is part of the reason why he embraced me and my sister so intensely, part of the meaning of this gesture. It was not that he was unaware of the fact that he loved us; one reason why he had been so content prior to the accident was because his children were home. However, his pity for the woman helped him to more fully realize what he already knew. In this regard, it was not unlike the pity Levinas associates with the first scene from Grossman. When Levinas visualizes Grossman’s description of the Lubyanka prison, he pictures each person staring into the craned neck of the person before her, each empathizing with the next’s misery, each gleaning, in turn, an insight into her own suffering and loves and, beyond them, into “all the anxiety in the world.”¹⁵

4. Sobriety and Amnesia

I dwell on this example because it helps me to say something about this book’s larger project. I said earlier that I am worried by the tendency in Levinas scholarship to overemphasize his epistemological claims.¹⁶ I also said that this focus make sense since he does not advance many norms for regulating conduct. Typically, he points out moments when philosophers have tried, unsuccessfully, to conceptualize what he calls “the absolute other” (l’absolument autre). Nonetheless, I differ in how I interpret this point. The tendency is to read him as identifying a series of cognitive failures in Western philosophy. The concept of the absolutely other presents philosophers with an impossible cognitive challenge, and Levinas shows how they have ignored this fact. He repeatedly claims that each “human other” bears a trace of infinitude, transcendence, or “the absolutely other.” The goal of philosophy, however, is to explain the totality of our experiences.