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

The other philosophy books on my desk seemed shallow. Not intellectually shallow. Many of them were, I still believe, far more intellectually rigorous than Totality and Infinity. It was just that they seemed complacent in their failure to address themselves to the world outside those windows. It was hard to return to them without feeling guilt. It was not that I felt like I was selling out in reading them, that the only proper response would be to put aside philosophy as elitist or self-indulgent and to become a full-time activist. It was more that the stakes of doing philosophy had been clarified. The fact was that the world beyond those windows would be there if I chose to recognize it or not, and it changed the moral stakes of studying those books. It changed everything. To borrow from Levinas, it “de-neutralized” the safe, insulated world of my apartment.¹ I was still free to read my books and to write essays on them, but there was a glaring question as to the value of this writing. Would it be a tool for producing indifference? Was I using it to distract myself from the world beyond those windows or to excuse myself for not doing more to intervene in it? Would it allow others to evade their responsibility? Or would it attempt to intervene in that world, if only by sharpening my own sensitivities to the suffering of others?

The Levinas I admire is the Levinas I intuited on that first night of reading him. This Levinas is defined by his insistence on the absolute need to help those who are vulnerable. He is concerned with sensitizing his readers to their calls for help, and the chief philosophic puzzle that obsesses him is how we manage to ignore these calls. Why aren’t we stopped in our tracks by statistics like those quoted above? What intellectual crutches do we rely on to convince ourselves that we are not responsible? In what ways have various philosophic systems been complicit in abetting such self-exculpation?

I think that many are drawn to this Levinas. My sense from talking with other Levinas scholars is that several had similar “conversion experiences” the first time they read him. I find, however, that this emphasis on the need to help others is oddly absent from the secondary literature, where there is a tendency, instead, to dwell on broadly epistemological debates over the limits of language, comprehension, and the consistency of Levinas’s critiques of other philosophers.