Note: this paper is the intellectual property of Dr. Michael Smith, and is therefore

provided for instructional use only; any contrary use is strictly prohibited.

” 2003 by Michael Smith

Emmanuel Levinas's Ethics of Responsibility

Dr. Michael Smith

Berry College

Having taught for many years in a Department of Religion and Philosophy, I

have often wondered about the appropriateness of cobbling together two domains, one of

which specializes in faith, the other in doubt. Aside from extraneous reasons, such as

school budgets, one defense for the practice might be that although the methods and

answers arrived at in the two disciplines differ, the questions often coincide. In the case

of ethics, specifically, we find that Philosophy includes ethics as a branch of inquiry

known as axiology, to which group belong ethics and aesthetics. This is the area in

which “values” are discussed. Thus one might meaningfully say that one painting,

concert, or action is better than another. And although it is proverbially idle to argue over

tastes (De gustibus non disputandum), there is a sense of an urgent need for consensus

about ethical or moral questions. This is even more true in the religious treatment of

ethics, and there have been times in history, and there are still places today (I am thinking

of the application of the sharia or Islamic law in parts of Africa, the Middle East and

Indonesia) in which morality extends beyond mores, taking on the force of law.

The topic I have chosen to speak to you about is the thought of Emmanual

Levinas on ethics. But from a religious, philosophical or mixed point of view?

Emmanual Levinas himself, a Lithuanian Jew (1906-1995) who was granted French

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citizenship at the age of 24, said he used different publishers for his philosophical and his

Judaic writings (or his “confessional” writings as he was amused to call them). And in

most cases it is not difficult to maintain the distinction. A very good study by the French

philosopher Etienne Feron, in an as yet untranslated work, “From the Idea of

Transcendence to the Question of Language: The Philosophical Itinerary of Emmanuel

Levinas,” frames the terms of his study in the following way:

One will perhaps be surprised not to find in my approach

any explicit reference to Judaism, although Levinas has

certainly contributed to the renewal of Jewish thought. I

have adopted the policy of reading Levinas in a strictly

philosophical way and of putting in parentheses the

Judaism that he openly professes and in which I confess I

have no competency, because his major works are truly

philosophical and emphatically not a simple transposition,

in pseudo-philosophical discourse, of any sort of Jewish

theology.

1

I would be tempted to ascribe a very French academic—a very Cartesian—clarity to this

policy, were it not for the fact that Descartes himself did not departmentalize his own

texts in this way, since God and infinity circulate freely in them. Feron’s approach may

be more understandable if we consider that Judaism does not enjoy the same seamless

1

Etienne Feron, De l’idée de transcendance à la question du langage : L’itinéraire philosophique de

Lévinas (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1992), 10.

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integration with French intellectual life that Catholicism does. It would probably not

have been possible, had Feron’s principle interest been not Levinas’s use of language but

his ethical thought, to maintain so neat a “cordon sanitaire” between the philosophical

and the Judaic in Levinas.

Before I leave Feron, let me emphasize my agreement that we do not find in

Levinas a pseudo-philosophical discourse that would dissimulate an occult importation of

Jewish theology. But if the thought of Levinas (to pick a neutral term) is to have any

integrity, there must surely be, underlying the treatment of Judaic versus philosophical

themes, an intellectual organism that has the gift of nourishing itself from two sources:

Judaism and Greek philosophy. To do one’s best to understand Levinas’s work, it is

improvident, in my view, to deprive oneself of any resource. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Any attempt to understand Levinas’s ethics that makes abstraction of his Judaism will be

at best a truncated version of this aspect of his work. I will now attempt to show, briefly

how the two are related in what I call Levinas’s ethics of responsibility.

First let me set the philosophical context as Levinas understood it. A prevalent

philosophical tradition identifies reality and goodness with being; illusion, mere

appearance, and evil with a lack of being. This is the situation as reflected by Augustine

in his Enchiridion, or handbook, written during the last decade of his life, between 420

and 430. Having earlier espoused Manichaeism, an understanding of the world as torn

between the battle of good and evil, Augustine replaces that heretical view with neo-

Platonism, in which evil is not only the equal opponent of good--it literally does not exist.

Evil is a lack of being. This philosophical view can be squared with scripture. The

Platonic equation of good with being, and a coordinated diminishment of both good and

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being as we move down the “divided line” from truth or episteme to doxa or mere

appearance--this system can be made to fit in with the Judeo-Christian notion of the

creation’s being characterized as “good” as it is progressively brought into existence by

the word of God in the Book of Genesis. Evil is safely viewed as parasitic on the Good

since it has no being of its own. And although Catholicism since Thomism, since the 13

th

century, has turned more frequently in the direction of Aristotle than Plato for the logos

of its theology, tradition associates good with being, falsehood with that which is not

(the case), and God with Supreme Being.

Let me comment in a preliminary way that this equation of good with being is a

particularly ill-chosen basis upon which to develop an ethics. Not only does it seem to

give an unfair advantage to the status quo. One could make the same objection to it that

Kierkegaard, the putative father of existentialism, made to Hegelianism. It is such a

perfect, and perfectly abstract, system, that we never need to make an “either/or”

decision. Manichaeism may have been more in keeping with the good and bad penchant

(or “yitzer”) of the Jewish Bible.

Hence it is with some surprise that and not unmitigated pleasure that European

philosophy received the work of Emmanuel Levinas, whose most important thesis, I will

argue, is that being is not only not synonymous with goodness: it may antithetic to ethics

altogether.

Levinas, following Heidegger’s example, takes being as a verb, and is thus able to

characterize it. Like Heidegger, he goes beyond a long philosophical tradition according

to which being is an empty abstraction, pure “subject” without predicates, or pure

“substance” without “accidents.” His description of being, not possible since the pre-

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Socratics, is a metaphysics that distinguishes three modes of being: the “life of the

living, the existence of human beings, the reality of things. He finds at all three levels a

kind of violence. I quote:

Origin of all violence, varying with the various modes of

being: the life of the living, the existence of human beings,

the reality of things. The life of the living in the struggle

for life; the natural history of human beings in the blood

and tears of wars between individuals, nations, and classes;

the matter of things, hard matter; solidity; the closed-in-

upon-self, all the way down to the level of the subatomic

particles of which physicists speak.

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Levinas’s being is thus characterized by its “inflection back upon itself” (“tension sur

soi”), which on the human level is easy enough to recognize as selfishness. But

selfishness is not, in this dispensation, a character defect: it is the separateness of the ego,

the cell that sets up its private economy, the secret of a self, a home. Where the

human—the possibility of the human—begins, is in responsibility for the other. Ethics,

then, is not layered onto the human being as we know him. Non-indifference to the

other, responsibility for the other, the possibility of dying for him or her, is the point at

which being is transcended. It is no longer being, but beyond or otherwise than being.

This Levinas terms “the perspective of holiness.”

2

Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other (New York: Columbia University Press), xii.

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In his essay, “Is Ontology Fundamental,” for example (1951), Levinas states that

“the relation to the other is not . . . ontology.”

3

There is a fundamental difference in the

way we apprehend a particular object, within the horizon of being, and the way we

approach the other (i.e. the other person). This is because we address the other, speak

and listen to her or him. Now there is, to be sure, a background of the thinking of both

Franz Rosenzweig here, and of Martin Buber--I have in mind particularly the I-Thou

relation in the meeting, or the encounter, that is elaborated by the latter. The essay “Is

Ontology Fundamental” develops its problematic against Heidegger’s Being and Time,

with its distinction between Sein and Seiendes (being and beings.. It is true that

Heidegger approaches an understanding of Being through a particular being, namely

Dasein, or a “being-there” sort of being, which is his existential term for what

corresponds more or less to what was formerly called a human being. But while both

philosophers begin with human being, rather than with the classical sort of being that, as

in Aristotle, makes no ontological distinction between the being of a rock or tree and a

man, Heidegger’s point of departure differs from that of Levinas in two important ways:

it is distinctive in that it is a being for whom its very being is an issue, i.e. it knows itself

to be and its life is a conscious orientation toward death (toward its own death--since we

cannot know the death of the other authentically); and secondly it is essentially a revised

version of the self. Aside from some considerations of a “Mitsein” or being with,

Heidegger’s main consideration of the other is in the negative, inauthentic and

impersonal guise of “Das Man,” which represents a betrayal of our ownness.

3

Ibid., p. 7.

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Levinas did find in the history of philosophy a few indications pointing in the

direction of a beyond being (in Plato’s Republic, 509b, and in Plotinus’s Enneads, but by

and large his attempt to develop a philosophical path towards ethics by characterizing

being as the domain of egotism and strife noted by Hobbes, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,

and then moving on to what he refers to in an early work as an escape from being is new.

The French Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s God without Being is a development

of one of the possible consequences of such a direction of thought.

One of the most surprising aspects of Levinas’s ethics—perhaps “meta-ethics,” or

better yet “proto-ethics,” would be a preferable term, since Levinas’s philosophical work

is really a revamping of philosophy that replaces ontology by ethics: his “ethics” is not

simply layered onto thinking-as-usual—one of the most surprising aspects of this proto-

ethics, then, is that there is no parity between my situation and yours from an ethical

standpoint. You are always better than me. I am responsible, not only for my

transgressions, but for yours as well!

There are two aspects or stages of Levinas’s ethical thought: my relation to you

(as if you were the only other person in the world) and my relation to you seen in relation

to the other of you, my other. Your other may have conflicting claims, so that I am put in

the position of comparing incomparables, to the extent that each person is a world. From

the relation of me to my other, you, love is enough. To realize the intention of love in a

broader sociality, justice is necessary. Justice, the harsh name of love, must realize love’s

intentions, and in doing so may lose sight of its original intent, become alienated into a

self-serving institution. This risk, in Levinas’s view, is one that must be taken.

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Here Levinas seldom develops his thought along the lines of strict reasoning. One

senses that the stays of being are relaxed and we would have no possible means of

directing our thought beyond this point without a certain “inspiration.” Knowledge is no

longer sought after: it is inescapable. We are the “hostage” of the other.

No discussion, even as brief a one as this, can be complete without some mention

of the face. This is a term that Levinas elevates to status of a philosopheme, a term

endowed with a specific philosophical role. The face does not refer to the plasticity of a

visual form in Levinas, nor is it just the look of the other, since the face speaks in

Levinas. It is perhaps the phenomenal basis, or as Levinas sometimes says, the “mise-en-

scène” or theatrical “production” of the appearance of the person, and it is the way in

which we may become aware of God. I quote: “The face puts into question the

sufficiency of my identity as an I, it compels me to an infinite responsibility.”

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It is by

substitution for the other, or by taking on the fate of the other, that I embrace a

responsibility for which I never signed up. Here Levinas diverges from the usual notion

of responsibility, since the ethical meaning of responsibility is bound up with the notion

of freedom. We are not to imagine that Levinas is involved in some sort of Skinnerian

“beyond freedom,” but Levinas does enter a realm that is distinct from the dialectic of

promise and promise-keeping and freedom such as we find in the thinking of Jean-Paul

Sartre, for example. This taking up of responsibility is not a virtue (virtue in the sense of

strength), nor is it a weakness (as suggested by the late Michel de Certeau), but precisely

the carrying out of the mitzvah, or commandment of God. We should not expect

gratitude, for this would entangle us in an endless dialectic of quid pro quos. (It is

interesting to note in passing that Levinas praises the institution of money, despite its

4

Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 133.

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possible abuses, because if frees us from having to have a personal relation with each

person with whom we deal in life. We can carry on without this burden.) If we should

expect anything, it is rather ingratitude. There is an impersonal—transpersonal?—sense

in which action, good conduct, is nothing more nor less than a going beyond the bog of

being. What is ethical behavior? It is (I quote) “the original goodness of man toward the

other in which, in an ethical dis-inter-estedness—word of God—the inter-ested effort of

brute being persevering in its being is interrupted.”

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This “ethics of ethics,” as it has been termed (by Jacques Derrida in his critical

essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics” in 1964), is not only so called because it

does not prescribe any specific acts, but also because Levinas’s ethics of responsibility

cannot, as the philosopher himself states, be preached. Is it because humility (which is

not listed among the virtues by Aristotle) permeates Levinas’s manner? No doubt, but it

is also the case for what could be called a technical reason. We noted that the I-Thou

relation in Levinas is not symmetrical. The other is always greater than I, and my

responsibility cannot be transferred to anyone else. This responsibility extends to and

includes responsibility for the evil perpetrated against me!

In commenting on Philippe Nemo’s book Job and the Excess of Evil, Levinas

ventures a surprising interpretation of a well-known biblical verse of the book of Job (Job

38: 4). “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” The usual

interpretation is that God is reprimanding the creature for questioning His ways, and

perhaps also implying that if man knew the whole story a theodicy would be

5

Is it righteous to be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2001), 19. From the interview “The Other, Utopia, and Justice.”

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possible—and this would be seen as being the best of all possible worlds after all.

Levinas:

Can one not hear in this “Where were you?” a statement of

deficiency (constat de carence) that cannot have meaning

unless the humanity of man is fraternally bound up with

creation, that is, responsible for that which has been neither

his I (son moi) nor his work? Might this solidarity and this

responsibility for any and all—which cannot be without

pain—be spirit itself?

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A remarkable interpretation indeed, worthy of the Talmudic spirit of interpretation

Levinas studied and admired so ardently. I liken the observation to the following

extraordinary remark made by a child to his mother, spontaneously metaphysical:

“Mother, when did we have me?” This retrogressive movement of being is very close to

the sense of retrogressive and all-encompassing responsibility Levinas finds in this

passage from Job. Neither his “I” nor his work. “I” in the sense of his ego, that limited

“moi” that must, in Levinas’s view, be transcended by the ethical self toward

responsibility for the other.

Mike Ryan Lecture Series, Kennesaw State College, October 7, 2003.

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Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 133.