"...everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."
Levinas, Totality and Infinity
It is to this question, the most important question of his time, that Levinas addresses his main work, Totality and Infinity, published in France in 1961 and translated in English in 1969. In this work, Levinas attempts to lay a new foundation for the chief question of morality: why should we be good? What he offers us is a theory of Ethics as first philosophy.
Ethics As First Philosophy
As Bettina Bergo writes in her entry on Levinas in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Levinas doesn't offer us an ethics as previously understood:
“Levinas’s philosophy has been called ethics. If ethics means rationalist self-legislation and freedom (deontology), the calculation of happiness (utilitarianism), or the cultivation of virtues (virtue ethics), then Levinas's philosophy is not an ethics. Levinas claimed, in 1961, that he was developing a “first philosophy.” This first philosophy is neither traditional logic nor metaphysics, however.[1] It is an interpretive, phenomenological description of the rise and repetition of the face-to-face encounter, or the intersubjective relation at its precognitive core; viz., being called by another and responding to that other.”
We’ve discussed how, for Husserl, the question of the other is an epistemological question having to do with how we can know the Other and the world, in answer to the problematic solipsism of the Cartesian subject inherited from Descartes. Heidegger re-frames the question where he insists on ontology or the study of Being, of the who of Dasein, as prior to epistemology. It is the study of Being and being-in-the-world that gives us, in Heidegger, the answer to the question of the who of Dasein as a part of “the They.”
For Levinas, influenced by a section of Heidegger’s Being and Time that we have not yet looked at, on the call of conscience, it is neither essents (ontic beings) not existence (Being with a capital “B”) that frames our access to the world, but the relation to the Other that is inaugurated by the call of conscience. The Other calls on our ability to respond, on our response-ability towards the other. And this is the fundamental experience of being in the world.
Disagreeing fundamentally with Heidegger’s assessment of Being in “the They,” Levinas will make a claim for the priority of the encounter with a concrete (non-theoretical and not abstract) Other as the foundation for not only Being or existence, but for thinking and rationality are founded on ethics and politics, a reversal of the usual hierarchy that places normative areas of philosophy below epistemology and metaphysics or ontology.
“Metaphysics” Levinas writes, “is enacted in ethical relations."
In short, we are not duped by morality, if morality is based in an ethical relation to the Other that precedes not only knowledge and meaning, but our very being as human subjects. Morality is not based on principles, a calculus, or practices, but is, first and foremost, founded our absolute responsibility in the face-to-face relation with an Other.
Resources
To The Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas by Adriaan Peperzak (full text): This is the best introduction to Levinas’ thought, available for free download from Purdue University Press.
“Emmanuel Levinas” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Bettina Bergo: A very fine introduction to Levinas for beginners!
*An earlier version of this article can be found here: Are We Duped By Morality? Levinas' Ethics As First Philosophy
P.S. This article is Part 6 of the series The Other Who Troubles Philosophy. The previous post is here: Woman As Other: Beauvoir's Philosophical Frame. The series begins here: The Other Who Troubles Philosophy.