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

So, Levinas invites us, apropos of Plato’s Sophist, to think of “otherness” as a foundational ontological/epistemic category. It is his term for both the antithesis of haeceeity, for “not-this-ness,” and for what is conceptually unfamiliar, what is “other” than what is known or comprehensible. Thus he uses autre alongside such terms as “Wholly Other” (Tout Autre), “the absolutely other,” “the ungraspable,” “mystery,” “enigma,” “infinity,” and “the transcendent.”

Levinas proposes, then, that philosophic systems traffic in two basic categories—la Même and l’Autre, the Same and the Other, the familiar and the transcendent—and he refers to his own work as a “dualism” or “pluralism” that parses reality not into Mind and Matter, or Self and World, but into the familiar and the transcendent.²⁰ His corresponding worry is that most philosophies simply disregard the category of the transcendent altogether. Hegel is emblematic of this denial in his insistence that all reality can be rendered transparent to reason, but Levinas thinks most philosophic systems share this flaw. Philosophers are concerned, after all, to extend and refine our understanding of the world. So, the very enterprise of philosophy seems to be founded on the belief that the unfamiliar can always be made familiar. In Levinas’s terms, it is founded on the perpetual assimilation of the Other to the Same. Thus Levinas thinks most philosophic systems are “allergic” to the very idea of anything being genuinely transcendent or “absolutely other.”²¹ This inability to countenance the possibility of genuine transcendence condemns most philosophies to the monism found in Hegel and Heidegger. Most philosophies devolve into the “imperialism of the same.”²²

One further thesis in Levinas needs to be reviewed before I can explain why his critics have assumed that he cannot advance a normative ethics. Levinas worries that most philosophies devolve into a reductive monism premised on a denial of the category of the “absolutely other.” This would seem to suggest that he thinks that there are moments in our lives when we brush up against transcendence. That is, the problem with most philosophies is not simply that they are monistic, but that monism is, in fact, incorrect or reductive, and their acceptance blinds us to moments in our lives that defy comprehension. So, what does Levinas deem to constitute one of these transcendent experiences?