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Thus, it looks as if philosophy cannot help but misrepresent what is involved in acknowledging another person. For each person is an embodiment of the infinite, and philosophy cannot help but suppress this fact since it seeks to encapsulate all experiences within the strictures of its theories.
My belief is that this approach oversimplifies Levinas’s worries about philosophy. Think again about my example of a face-to-face encounter. A face-to-face encounter is a moment that sobers me up, a moment when the responsibility I feel for another leads me to appreciate how there is something—the well-being of others—that is greater than my own personal window onto the world, and that invests this window with meaning. For my father, this sobering up occurred when his pity for the woman whose child seemed to have died led him to see something about the mundaneness of his dissatisfactions with life and the profundity of the loves he experienced in it. Yet these realizations fade. It took him days to recover. Yet a time came when his life’s frustrations seemed overwhelming again and when the love he felt for others took on a formal, perfunctory cast.
This process of returning to our old ways may seem natural enough, but if we reflect on it, it should strike us as surprising, terrifying even. For consider what happens when we are sobered up by a face-to-face encounter. We do not discover a trivial insight. There is typically an element of shock and shame at oneself. How could I not see how insignificant my life problems are? Why did these far greater injustices not move me? How did I forget to love the people I love with the intensity they deserve? How could I not see how much depends on even this small act of acknowledgment which I give to this stranger? Face-to-face encounters are ennobling because they reveal the depth of our capacity to care for others, but they are terrifying because they reveal how infrequently we live up to this potential. You are not the person, you suddenly realize, you know you should be. You have not been this person for some time.
My suggestion is that Levinas’s critique of philosophy is actually intended to address this crisis. He is typically read as pointing out some widespread cognitive failure in philosophy, but his true goal is to understand what I would call our amnesia of the good.