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

This shift in focus is somewhat understandable. Simon Critchley asks in the Cambridge Companion to Levinas whether “ethics [is] the right word to describe the experience that [Levinas] is trying to express?”² Critchley’s contention that Levinas does not have a true theory of justice is a target of criticism in this book, but it would be obtuse to deny that he has a point. For all his talk about ethics, Levinas does not say much about what norms should regulate conduct; he does spend a lot of time discussing language and comprehension. It makes sense that much of the literature should follow him in focusing on epistemological issues as well.

Yet it is difficult not to feel that something important has been lost. Here I find it useful to borrow a distinction from a colleague who told me that I was interested in the “spirit” and not the “letter” of Levinas’s philosophy. His own view was that Levinas makes the same antifoundationalist points about language and Western metaphysics as does Jacques Derrida, but that Derrida explores them with greater subtlety. He added that he knew a lot of people like me—people who admire Levinas because they perceive him as having something valuable to say about the need to help others. For his part, he did not see it. When he turned to Levinas’s writings, once he got past the rhetoric about ethics, all he found was a simplistic form of deconstruction. I suppose that one way to describe this book would be as an attempt to do justice to the “spirit” of Levinas’s philosophy by showing that it is present in its “letter” as well. Levinas does talk a lot about language, comprehension, and Western metaphysics, but the driving force behind his claims, I argue, is his conviction that we cannot help but acknowledge others as having an unconditional claim on our care and support.

I will have more to say about this thesis. For now, I just want to point out why my concerns about this book’s clarity troubled me. I found myself worrying as I wrote it that I may have replicated the sin I was railing against. At the foundation, my goal is to share a reading of Levinas that does justice to his claims about the priority of ethics. The Levinas I admire is the one who tells us that nothing matters more in this world than helping others.