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

I can think of moments in my life that match these descriptions. There have been moments when I have seen strangers suffering and have been moved to help them. There have been more dramatic moments, too, of witnessing horrific acts and feeling as if my life was held hostage by them, as if it would be libelous to let myself forget or return too easily to day-to-day life. I think of watching news reports in 1994 of the genocide in Rwanda, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or, most recently, watching documentaries on the genocide in Darfur and feeling shamed by my powerlessness and the world’s reluctance to do anything to stop it. There also have been small moments of everyday kindnesses. However, for me, in my own life, it is the story my father told on December 24, 1999, that stands out as the best example of a face-to-face encounter I have experienced. Why?

Levinas associates the encounter with the other in places with “awakening” and “sobering up.”¹³ Levinas was fascinated throughout his life with wakefulness. He repeatedly uses it and insomnia as metaphors for consciousness and for human life in general, and they play a complex role in his work. Nonetheless, it is possible to skirt some of these details and to offer rough suggestions as to what he has in mind in associating face-to-face encounters with sobriety.

Levinas claims at one point in Time and the Other that our relationship to the other tends to be obscured in our everyday lives. It is “veiled by decency.”¹⁴ Typically, I am not aware of others as others. I live in a kind of fog composed of my beliefs, my desires, my ambitions, my life projects. I interact with others in this fog, but do not relate to them as unique individuals in their own right; I relate to them as if they were actors and actresses, dramatis personae in the story I am living, the unfolding story of my world. These interactions are structured, finally, by the social rules and etiquette of my tribe, my community’s collective “veil of decency.” Levinas’s claim in Time and the Other is that there is something beyond these rules and this fog. His metaphor of a veil is crucial. Just as a face gives shape to a veil, so too the world of our everyday lives is shaped and given meaning by others. At the same time, this veil threatens to obscure this ground. There is a danger of getting lost in social rules and in our own personal life dramas, of forgetting what makes them meaningful.