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He wants to clarify how we manage to lose sight of that sober perspective that opens up in face-to-face encounters.17 How do we forget to give to others the support they deserve, given that we experience its urgency as all but crushing in these encounters? We shall see, too, that Levinas thinks that we can learn a great deal about the foundations of our everyday Lebenswelt by reflecting on the relationship to the other as it is evinced in face-to-face encounters. The other is, he thinks, the source of all language, thought, and agency. Recognizing the other requires us to acknowledge, finally, a being whose authority over us is absolute. To recognize the other is to recognize that you are “infinitely responsible” for her. Yet somehow, despite all of this, most of us go back to our daily lives. Our world is riven and what matters most is clarified. Yet we return to sleep. How?
Levinas’s hunch is that there must be something about the concepts we use to reflect on our world that abets this amnesia. There must be something about the “veil of decency” that lets it be exploited in this way. As a philosopher, he turns to the ideas and concepts we inherit from the Western philosophic tradition to see where they permit us to falsify our relationship to the other. It seems to me that this is the real point of his critique of certain philosophies as “totalizing.” It oversimplifies too much to depict him as drawing attention to a series of cognitive errors. His goal must be understood as fundamentally ethical—not to identify the limits of philosophy but to identify the conceptual mechanisms by which we allow quietism to take root in the world by misrepresenting our relationship to one another. His goal is to deprive us of these crutches so that we can linger in that moment of sobriety.
5. What I Try to Do in This Book
My main targets of criticism in this book, as I explain in chapter 1, are critics who argue that Levinas, for all his talk about ethics, cannot give us anything like a useful, practical ethics. If you have read Levinas, this criticism may be familiar. It draws on an observation I have mentioned several times. Levinas seems to think that each person is an embodiment of the infinite or transcendent. Ethical theories try to identify norms, rules, or principles we can use to explain and regulate human behavior.