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

Both are interested in clarifying the nature of ethical responsibility and what a moral agent must be like for ethics to be possible. Kant simply indicates in greater detail what ethical rules are implied by his discussion of these topics. Moreover, why should we think that Levinas’s failure to specify a normative ethics itself constitutes grounds for dismissing his ideas? It may be disappointing that he gives little indication of how to put ideas into practice.¹⁵ However, why should we think that this reticence alone entails that his claims about “the face-to-face encounter” or “totalizing” philosophies must be wrong? Again, it seems like an odd criticism, as if we could dismiss, say, Kant’s claim that a “good will” is the only thing that deserves to be called “unqualifiedly good,” or Moore’s thesis that “good” is a simple, nonnatural, indefinable quality simply because they do not say enough in the Groundwork or in Principia Ethica about capital punishment or just-war theory.

I stress the ambiguity of the charge against Levinas because I think that it is misleadingly worded. The criticism sounds clear cut: it reflects poorly on Levinas that he only gestures at how to put his ideas into practice. However, the real criticism that philosophers like Rorty and Critchley intend to make is not that he does not say enough about how to put his ideas into practice but that, in principle, he cannot say anything at all. Indeed, it seems to me that Levinas’s critics and defenders agree on this point: both believe it would go against the drift of his thinking for him to advance any sort of normative ethics. To justify this claim, however, I need to review some of Levinas’s core theses. In particular, we need to know more about his ideas concerning the absolute transcendence of what he calls “the human other.”

3. A Brief Introduction to Levinas: Transcendence and Humanity

I do not want to delve too far at this point into the details of Levinas’s philosophy. Levinas’s prose is notoriously obscure, studded with quasi-technical terms and rhapsodic digressions that are evocative but hard to explicate, and I fear I will lose sight of my main thesis if I try to explain too much of his thought in one sitting.