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

Here I should add as a warning that chapter 2 is not the only place where I draw on analytic philosophy to analyze Levinas. More than other commentators, I downplay Levinas’s connectedness to figures and movements in continental philosophy, such as his place in phenomenology, his ties to deconstruction, and more recent French- and English-language continental scholarship on him. My intent is not to ignore this material, and I discuss figures such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault in developing my defense of Levinas, as well as English-language commentators who have popularized interpretations of him that draw on these figures, such as Robert Bernasconi, Simon Critchley, and Jill Robbins. Nonetheless, I devote more attention to drawing Levinas into dialogue with trends and figures in analytic ethics—such as debates in analytic metaethics (chapter 2), Rawls’s theory of justice (chapter 4), and the revival of pragmatism (chapter 5). I choose this focus because it seems to me that more needs to be done to situate Levinas in this tradition. There is a massive secondary literature on Levinas’s place in continental philosophy, yet relatively few have sought to bring him into dialogue with debates in analytic philosophy.¹⁸ My hope is that reflecting on Levinas from this new vantage point—assessing his claims about ethics in light of, say, Rawls’s theory of justice or debates over moral realism—may shed light on features of his thinking that have gone underappreciated, if only because of the heavy focus in continental philosophy on issues of language, antifoundationalism, and the limits of expression.

Chapters 3 and 4 offer a more straightforward defense of Levinas. Levinas’s critics fault him for not offering anything like a practical ethics. I show that this criticism is misplaced by demonstrating that he does, in fact, indicate what norms should regulate conduct. Chapter 3 surveys political writings where Levinas endorses Kantian and liberal ideals. It also takes up the question of why he does not offer more explicit advice. Levinas is reluctant to advance a full normative ethics, I argue, because a pragmatic sensibility infuses his work.