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

My concluding chapter, chapter 5, takes stock of the overall approach to Levinas implied by my defense. I characterize this approach as pragmatic in that it reads Levinas as primarily troubled, like pragmatists, by our tendency to adopt detached, spectatorial perspectives on the world and our lives and as concerned to root out this tendency so that we will adhere to a standpoint of engaged agency. Chapter 5 reviews some of the basic interpretations of Levinas in the secondary literature and assesses how this pragmatic approach fairs against them. In particular, I make a case for it against more deconstructionist readings, arguing against them that Levinas does not deny that there can be legitimate theoretical descriptions of the world and our lives, but claims that we should assess their legitimacy based on how effective they are in helping us to balance our responsibilities, whether they express our most creative solutions to the particular moral crises that beset us.

Yet even in summarizing my approach as pragmatic, I worry that I am not doing justice to the point I wish to make about Levinas. For while it is one thing to say that he hopes to disabuse his readers of detached perspectives, it is another to convey in a tangible way what this means. Thinking about the moment in my father’s life when he embraced me, what was conveyed in his embrace, helps me to at least gesture at the larger point I hope to express through this book’s conclusion. This book sets out to show that Levinas can and does supply his readers with the rudiments of a practical ethics. At the same time, I do not find it contradictory to admit that outlining such an ethics was not his top priority. Nothing in his work prevents him, or should prevent us, from reflecting on which ethical theories best embody respect for the other. Yet his more urgent goal was, I think, to move his readers so that they experienced something like my father’s state of mind on the night he returned home from the accident. He hoped to inspire a kind of change in them, to wake them up. This book is an attempt to do so as well. It defends Levinas against a certain line of critique, and it uses this defense to root out various misunderstandings of him. However, rooting out these confusions is valuable only insofar as they currently serve to soften the practical demands that Levinas’s philosophy makes on us. At bottom, then, this book is perhaps best thought of as an attempt to let Levinas wake us up.