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In such a situation, it is tempting to believe that what is required to renew our lives—individually and collectively—is a kind of perception or knowledge that we have somehow lost, or, alternatively, that we need to recover emotions and feelings that we no longer have. Indeed, it may be that we require both, that our problems arise from both cognitive and motivational or attitudinal deficiencies, and that we therefore need to acquire a vision or understanding and a set of feelings or attitudes that have been overwhelmed by views and emotions that threaten to destroy us and our civilization. On such a diagnosis, our plight requires therapy; we need to be cured of our ignorance and our emotional defects, and what this means is education and affective training.
As I see it, this is the human and historical situation with which Emmanuel Levinas sought to cope. The aftermath of World War One, the rise of fascism, the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, the incomparable threat of annihilation associated with Hiroshima, and all the atrocities and catastrophes that followed in their wake shaped Levinas’s world and engaged him as a philosopher and as a human being. In philosophy—which probably was conveyed to him by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy before he studied Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger—Levinas found a path to a response to a world plagued by violence and suffering. But it was a conception of philosophy not as doctrine or method, rather it was a conception of philosophy as a way of living that arises from a critical engagement with alternative philosophical approaches, both those of the past and those of the present. It is not philosophy as science or philosophy as doctrine; it is philosophy as conduct, as living with others in the world. It is philosophy as ethics.
Western philosophy, one might argue, has always had links with religion on the one hand and science on the other. Viewed in one way, Levinas’s work seeks to reestablish its connection with religion after a period, at least since logical positivism, when philosophy’s primary association has been with science and especially the natural sciences. Viewed in another way, Levinas can be seen as someone for whom philosophy’s most intimate association is with ethics, in the broad sense of all that is relevant to human character and social life, someone for whom ethics is more primary than either science or religion—or art, for that matter. However one understands Levinas’s central teaching, it is not sufficient to state it in such elliptical ways.