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Ethics as First Philosophy Bettina Bergo

The idea that ethics could be first philosophy should strike us as curious. Should

we understand this as philosophically regressive, a strategy motivated by psychology or

social construction? To wit, no philosophical theorizing is possible without consideration

of the human being in light of a consciousness that develops socially or in families, by

stages. Should we understand ethics as first philosophy in terms of a refusal of

distinctions between factical existence and transcendental categories—as a presentation

of pre-philosophical practices, in the guise of phenomenology or another “empiricism?”

Above all, what is ethics in a thought, like Levinas’s, that sets forth neither rational

prescription nor criteria for calculating happiness or pleasures? I will not summarize

Levinas’s philosophy here so much as answer the questions: What is first philosophy if

and when it is ethics; and, what is meant here by “ethics?”

For Levinas, the claim that ethics is first philosophy requires extensive critical

work. He must recapitulate and limit philosophies built on identification (i.e., the law of

non-contradiction, sufficient reason, and dialectics). He must revisit the thought for

which truth is the free subsumption by cognition (in an Aristotelian or Husserlian sense)

of an object that gives itself according to profiles (Levinas, 1998a: 69). First philosophy

in Levinas will thus be unfolded thanks to two critical efforts: evincing the limits of

comprehension (in light of the phenomenological constitution of meaning), and

redefining transcendence, away from idealist forms toward embodied, intersubjective

experience. He is not the first twentieth century thinker to attempt this. Heidegger,

Merleau-Ponty, and Henry also present critiques of formalist elements in Husserl’s

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phenomenology of time-consciousness, in which the unity of ongoing immanent time

prevails over variable intensities of embodied, “hyletic,” data or changes in sensation.

Nevertheless, the objects of Levinas’s critique themselves form configurations: Husserl’s

transcendental egology and Heidegger’s Dasein, criticized in light of embodied

sensibility; Husserl and Heidegger, scrutinized in their respective approaches to

intersubjectivity. Levinas’s first philosophy will be unfolded through a critique of

fundamental ontology’s claim to the status of protē philosophia (Levinas, 1969: 47; 15-

17Fr). Elaborating ethics as first philosophy thus means undercutting hermeneutic

phenomenology’s deformalization of time in which lived “temporality reveals itself as

the meaning of authentic care” (Heidegger, 1962: 374; 432Gr), and care is the

fundamental way of being-in-the-world for the Dasein concerned with its own existence.

Neither the phenomenology of transcendental consciousness as a unified, dynamic

“temporalizing” and identification (as ownness), nor the interpretation of a temporal

being ahead-of-itself in its projects could give us ethics as first philosophy. Levinas’s

protracted task will be to draw phenomenological description away from epistemological,

even some existentialist, concerns. His ethics as first philosophy thus confronts two basic

challenges: 1) that of passing “beneath” Being as worldly, future-oriented, and

approached through a questioning “site” (Da-sein) (Heidegger, 1962: 374-5; 432-3Gr);

and 2) that of deconstructing consciousness as the unified and dynamic, intentional

construction of objects, in the world or in immanence. If there is any doubt that Levinas’s

first philosophy is directed primarily at Heidegger’s existential philosophy and at the

aforementioned formalism in Husserl’s phenomenology, then the address he gave in 1982

at Louvain, “Éthique comme philosophie première,” readily convinces us of this,

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although it begins, appositely, with Aristotle.

First Philosophy in Aristotle: Paradoxes of Metaphysics and Ethics

The 1982 address offers retrospective insight into Levinas’s middle work, Totality

and Infinity, because the project of first philosophy is there indebted to Aristotle, and

because the condensed 1980s lecture opens with the conundrum that first philosophy

posed to Greek metaphysics. Levinas’s 1982 strategy is explicit: to define first

philosophy by bringing to light a parallelism in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and his

Nicomachean Ethics, thereafter turning to Husserl and Heidegger. In his return to

Aristotle, Levinas adopts an approach redolent of the young Heidegger, in search of

concrete, lived contents against the more idealistic conceptions of Husserlian

phenomenology (i.e., intentionality, hylemorphism). Thus Levinas opens his lecture,

controversially reading Aristotle’s ontology together with his theology. He moves

between Metaphysics’ books Gamma and Lambda. Book Gamma sets forth the

uniqueness of a discipline whose object was universal being—“that which is qua thing-

that-is, and with this its states, conditions and predicates” (chapter I)—pursued down to

the senses of truth and error (chapters VII-VIII). The associated science is first

philosophy, integrating ontology and deferring the question of theology. As it is the

philosopher whose science concerns substance and principles (Aristotle, 1933: 1005b5),

he must also be concerned with universal being and “the most extreme causes [tas

akrotátas]” (Aristotle, 1933: 1003a27). The pursuit in first philosophy of absolute origins

necessarily leads to Aristotle’s divinity as first cause, and the apparently dual sciences of

being in general versus that of unconditioned causes has given rise to three questions: that

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of their identification (the cause of being qua being, merging with ontology); that of

priority, and that of a tension between philosophy and theology driving Aristotle’s

metaphysical project. Levinas observes that Aristotelian metaphysics led “to a God

defined by being qua being.” According to Levinas’s argument, it is onto-theology that

informs first philosophy—to the degree that theology is concerned with first causes

before considering final ones (Aubenque, 1962; Follon, 1958: 418).

In book Lambda (VI-X), Aristotle’s “god” is specifically approached, and in

negative terms. The characteristics of the Prime Mover are negations of imperfections in

sensuous substances (Follon, 1958: 419). And, while the prime mover is indeed a

particular being, rather than Being in a universal sense, theology and ontology are

intertwined because the particular being that is first can only be that which exists

independently of other entities, finite existence (Aristotle, 1933: book Lambda). In

Levinas Totality and Infinity, does not address the distinction between first and final

causes, but it surreptitiously informs his entire discussion of desire there, and it is at the

center of his concerns in 1982 (Levinas, 1969: 180; 155Fr). We will return to this; note

for now that Aristotle’s divinity engenders a unique “desire” in the intelligences close to

it, this characterizes the goodness of the final cause.

On Levinas’s 1982 interpretation of the simultaneous genesis of “ontology-

theology,” existence-in-general is merged with being as necessary and separate. But a

necessary being also implies something not found in the strictly ontological framework of

first philosophy: being, understood as the Prime Mover, is the Good itself. Hence, there

are always two principles: existence-in-general, and the Good, for which “contrary to its

nature can happen” (Follon, 1958: 415).

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The theological-ontological relationship between first and final causes raises

difficulties which Levinas reads in phenomenological terms. As first cause, the divinity

belongs to, yet stands apart from that to which it gives rise. As final cause, it exerts the

“attraction” implicit in perfection. Deformalized, this is true of the divine as of the human

dimension, and the paradox of the “dual inspirations” (Follon, 1958: 416; Aubenque,

1962: 279) in Aristotle’s Metaphysics admits a phenomenological translation when the

grounds for this tension are set into a hermeneutics of lived experience. Both features

noted are crucial to unfolding a first philosophy that can be called “ethics.” In 1982, this

motivates Levinas’s explicit turn from the Metaphysics to the Nicomachean Ethics, where

we find a parallel, aporematic approach to the question of who is perfectly happy.

Levinas observes: “[If the] elements of self-sufficiency…and of freedom from weariness,

insofar as these are possible for human beings…are patently characteristic of

[intellectual] activity: then this activity will be the complete happiness of man…”

(Aristotle, 2002: 1177b 25-30). In short, our finite human freedom entails the quest for an

activity that spares us fatigue and dependency. This could not be politics or other

employments. “[B]ut such a life will be higher than the human plane; for it is not insofar

as he is human that he will live like this but insofar as there is something divine in him,

and to the degree that this is superior…will its activity too be superior” (Aristotle, 2002:

1077b 25-30).

The sovereign activity of contemplative intelligence is the property of something

analogous to a final cause. As a life it is desirable thanks to something inhuman in finite

beings, something “divine.” Nothing lower than the life of contemplation suffices to

happiness, as “each of us would seem actually to be this” divine, inhuman thing

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(Aristotle, 2002: 1178a 3). Aristotle’s argument, which Levinas follows, unfolds as the

parallel between the contemplative life, the sovereignty of the first cause, and the

entelechy of the final one. But the paradox remains. The wisdom approaching the first

cause is devoted to a superlative being, but a being among beings nonetheless, in which

case ontology is the first philosophy. If, however, the first cause constitutes something

separate, foreign to being, then the question arises of how it exerts any influence on

existence. In the Ethics, if the highest reflective existence is desirable, then somehow we

must work against our “nature.” If the highest reflective existence is foreclosed given our

embodiment, then a specific ethics comes to the fore at two levels: first, ethics, with its

central concern for justice, the cornerstone of virtues, is primordial (Aristotle, 2002:

1129b 29). However, ethics as the object of a wisdom, in which something other than our

nature attracts that nature and moves it beyond itself, will also be fundamental to an

ethics qua first philosophy. Levinas proceeds along both these lines, even as he

denounces the Western hypocrisy that consists in being simultaneously attached to the

true (ontology as first philosophy) and to the good (theology as first philosophy)

(Levinas, 1969: 24-26; XII-XIVFr). “Ethics” is understood here (in Levinas as in

Aristotle) as a manner of living, with its accompanying evaluations; as an ethos (ηθος and

έθος, cf. Aristotle, 2002: 1103a 15-19).

In the Metaphysics as in the Ethics, then, final causes, whether divine being or

the divine life, are beyond human understanding and action, although they exert a

decisive force on desire (Levinas, 1969: 25; XIIIFr). In the “beyond” adumbrated by

Aristotle’s negative method, something like an epochē unfolds, suspending distinctions

between theory and practice and holding open contemplation of the meta-physical, even

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as humans are turned toward justice as universal virtue. This is what Levinas argues

explicitly in 1982. Less obvious is the fact that he worked out the same parallel logics

between metaphysics and ethics in the “Preface” and early chapters of Totality and

Infinity, without explicitly referring to Aristotle.

The 1982 seminar on “First Philosophy” is a polemical reading of Aristotle. But if

the Western tradition is indeed onto-theological, whatever the point of departure we take

(from ontology or theology, from books Gamma or Lambda), Levinas will stake his first

philosophy on the qualitative separation of these two inspirations. In his own substitution

of ethics for first philosophy (where ethics combines our sensuous, intersubjective

connection and the repetition of “responsibility”), Levinas sets the final cause of

metaphysics into ethical life, where it becomes a “metaphysical desire” for sociality

(Levinas, 1969: 39; 9Fr); this, even as factical existence remains ambiguously chaotic, if

occasionally concerned with justice as a demand.

The same seminar provides a roadmap to the two great works, Totality and

Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence; we can use it to guide us through

the phenomenological work done in these magna opera. In 1961, Levinas deformalizes

Husserl’s alter ego, which had been constituted as an Other whose behavior is similar to

mine. In Totality and Infinity, the Other amalgamates Aristotle’s first and final causes: it

is beyond thematization because it confronts me in a time that is specific to sensibility

and affectivity—a time that precedes in some way the structured flow of consciousness.

An intuition of goodness is concentrated in the face-to-face encounter, which is

independent of “being” yet leaves a trace in existence (Levinas, 1969: 39, 48, 63; 9, 18-

19, 34Fr). Levinas fairly credits the “epekeina tēs ousias” (the “beyond-being”) to Plato;

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however, it is Aristotle who inaugurated a less formalistic approach to embodiment in

which the primacy of intersubjective life can appear. Thus, Levinas’s choice is

unsurprising when one thinks of the resources in Aristotle. Heidegger’s own critique of

Husserl’s phenomenology revisited Aristotle, Augustine and Paul. Levinas’s proposed

deformalization “humanizes” the transcendence and desire that characterize respectively

Aristotle’s first and final causes; however Levinas will not go as far as Heidegger in

deformalizing of transcendence: “Transcendere means to step over; the transcendens…is

that which oversteps as such and not that toward [wohin] which I step over” (Heidegger,

1982: 299; 425Gr). For Levinas, the re-conceptualization of what is human, in light of

desire for the Other who is firstly beyond the physical as object of cognition (and

opposed to Heidegger’s “care”), is brought forth through our intersubjective encounters,

which inflect the social ethos itself and describe the fundamental spirit of original

“religion” (Levinas, 1969: 40; 10Fr). “Metaphysical desire” (Levinas, 1969: 42; 13Fr),

then, according to the spatial metaphor that Levinas employs for an affective movement

and pull, “trans-ascends” toward the Other (Levinas, 1969: 35; 5Fr), redoubling nature

with sociability and restructuring the “space” proper to Intersubjectivity itself. The Other

is and is not a “being” among others. Ethically, the Other is beyond being, and

cognitively, it is the first being that introduces me to a common world, as we will see.

Thus the parallels with Aristotle’s unmoved final cause (Aristotle, 1935: 1072b 2-13)—

centering on a “desire” similarly provoked by a being sui generis upon proximate beings,

and for Levinas, upon “me”—are clear. Certainly, “me” should be understood as a

subject in the accusative case; it refers to an “I” that is not the source of its acts. In

Levinas, this is another way of taking up Aristotle’s finite freedom as a freedom

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“invested” by the Other (Kisiel, 1993: 277-83). In his 1982 critique of first philosophy as

onto-theology, Levinas draws a concept of finite freedom—the raison d’être of ethical

life—from book X of the Nicomachean Ethics (Levinas, 1998a: 72; Cf. Aristotle, 2002:

1177b 25-30). He opposes this to its traditional conception: “If freedom denotes the mode

of remaining the same in the midst of the other, knowledge, where an existent is given by

interposition of impersonal being, contains the ultimate sense of freedom. [Finite

freedom] would be opposed to justice, which involves obligations with regard to an

existent that refuses to give itself, the Other [Autrui, the other person], who in this sense

would be existent par excellence” (Levinas, 1969: 45, trans. mod; 16Fr).

In characterizing finite freedom as the invested freedom of the face-to-face

encounter, Levinas restores the transcendence explicit in Aristotle’s dual viæ negativæ:

this freedom desires a deformalized and “humanized” final cause, something that in

acting never fully phenomenalizes: “The ethical relation, opposed to first philosophy

which identifies freedom and power, is not against truth; it goes toward being [l’être] in

its absolute exteriority, and accomplishes the very intention that animated the movement

unto truth” (Levinas, 1969 : 47 trans. mod; 18Fr). We see that Levinas makes his “final

cause” both a transcendence “opposed” to first philosophy as ontology, and a movement

toward being as the human being. In the desire for what is not phenomenal as an object of

contemplation, two important things occur. First, the fact central to metaphysics and logic

—viz., the adequation between mind and thing—breaks down, even as, second, the

condition essential to all intersubjective constitution in phenomenology is realized.

The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face. Our relation

with the Transcendent freed from all captivation by the Transcendent is a

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social relation. It is here that the Transcendent, infinitely other [cf. Aristotle’s

final cause], solicits us and appeals to us….The [structural] atheism of the

metaphysician means, positively, that our relation with the Metaphysical is an

ethical behavior and not theology [not a logos on first causes], not a

thematization, be it a knowledge by analogy, of the attributes of God….Ethics

is the spiritual optics….Metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is

enacted... (Levinas, 1969: 78; 50-51Fr)

Transposing the final cause to the human face understood as expression and the

gaze that singles “me” out, Levinas effects two fundamental shifts in first philosophy.

First, relations with transcendence become thoroughly intersubjective, before there is talk

of who the Other is qua individual. Second, Levinas plays Aristotle’s theology from book

Lambda off against his metaphysics (or ontology) in books Gamma and Epsilon.

Ontology requires no “god,” something Aristotle may have understood as he deployed

the two rival sciences of being qua being and of the divine as first and last cause. That,

however, is a debate we shall leave to Aristotle’s interpreters. For Levinas, in either case,

the move toward an ethos of sociality predominates. “Ethics is the spiritual optics” means

we are able “to see”—i.e., create meaning through the encounter of consciousness with

its objects—precisely because the social relation, moved by the “transcendence” of the

face as expression and ethical resistance, lays claim to no transcendent entity, to no

invisible god. Levinas’s deformalization argues that it is human interaction alone that

allows us to think of an invisible yet (personal) divinity. This is no mere “sublimation of

a Thou” (Levinas, 1969: 78; 51Fr). It is the way sociality unfolds, the ethos that is

intersubjectivity, in all the ambiguity of standing within and without being. Worth noting

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here is the way in which Levinas dismantles Heidegger’s initial destruction of Husserl’s

time-consciousness, Heidegger transferred the question of time as immanent

transcendental flux to time as the temporalization of care-alongside-things-in-the-world.

Under phenomenological brackets, Levinas will argue, against phenomenology with its

search for the grounds of intentionality, that “the Other is the principle of phenomena.

The phenomenon is not deduced from him; one does not rediscover him by tracing back

from the sign [that] the thing would be…for deduction is a mode of thinking that applies

to objects already given” (Levinas, 1969: 92; 65Fr).

Husserlian phenomenology does not “deduce the other,” but in its classical

expression (in the Ideas II, the Cartesian Meditations and the thirty years worth of notes

composing Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität) (Cf. Husserl, 1973; 1990; 1999),

it starts from a self that constitutes an alter ego. Therefore, to understand how the Other

can be Levinas’s “principle of phenomena,” we must turn to Husserl. Let me begin by

reviewing what “first philosophy” meant to Husserl. In the same year that Heidegger was

exploring Aristotle’s De Anima and Rhetoric as a way past neo-Kantian stalemates over

categoriality, Husserl gave a course entitled Erste Philosophie (1923-1924). The course

was an overview of the meaning of consciousness from Plato to Kant, passing through

Descartes and Hume. In an essay on Kant’s philosophy from the same period, 1924,

Husserl spoke of a conversion of the gaze—a new optics—which “raises us from the

level of the naïve positivity of the knowledge of the world to a knowledge of the world

based on the ultimate self-consciousness of knowledge with respect to what it achieves

under the titles of reason, truth, science” (Husserl, 1956: 286). Levinas’s theme of an

optics thus comes from Husserl, notably as a self-reflective approach to knowledge. In

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Husserl, this depends on a transcendental subjectivity understood as the consciousness of

temporalization and the temporalization of consciousness. Now, the paradox of internal

time-consciousness is that it flows steadily even as it preserves the chronological

positions of events taking place within it. The self-consciousness of knowledge, as a

reflectivity describing the structure of immanent temporalizing was, in 1925 as already in

1905 (the date of his first lectures on internal time-consciousness), the ultimate

foundation for Husserl’s optics (Husserl, 1969: section 36).

The evidence acquired at the same time brings forth the correct meaning

according to which we must understand…Kant’s heritage: important…is…to

understand the ultimate meaning of his revolution…better than he himself,

who was its initiator but not its fulfiller….Yet this understanding must be

expressed in a work that is fundamentally scientific;…in conformity with its

essence, [it] must begin without presuppositions;…it must draw from

originary consciousness. (Husserl, 1956: 286)

As critique, first philosophy is genetic phenomenology only when the latter is the science

of consciousness in its fundamental forms, which deploy regional ontologies like biology

and psychology. A thinking of a certain prime mover thus persists in Husserl (as time),

although we are far from Aristotle’s conception of protē philosophia. Confronting the

new foundation, Levinas accepts (already in 1930) certain advances made by Heidegger’s

deformalization of Husserl’s residual idealism (Levinas, 1995: 153-158). However, he

also accepts the primacy of Husserlian egology for the constitution of first philosophy

(Levinas, 1998b: 150). Nevertheless, in 1961, Levinas poses a question that

revolutionizes Husserl’s starting point: What is it that allows consciousness to constitute

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objects as part of a common world—as objective entities? If this question admits a

genetic answer, then phenomenology must show how it reaches that answer. It is here

that we encounter “the Other [as] the principle of phenomena.” Despite his 1920s work

on Einfühlung (empathy) (Husserl, 1973: 660-661; Husserl, 1990: 175-80; 167-72Gr), the

constitution of the other’s body, even the meaning of sexual relations, Husserl remained

with a conception of subjectivity as monadic (Cf. Luft, 2011). The paradigmatic, if

controversial expression of this is paragraph 49 of Ideas I “Absolute consciousness as the

residuum after the annihilation of the world” (Husserl, 1982: pp. 109-112; pp. 114-

117Gr).

The Genetic Order of Phenomenological Constitution

Steven Crowell offers an illuminating analysis of the intersections between

Totality and Infinity and Husserl’s 1929 Cartesian Meditations. There is a parallel

between the monadic self described by Husserl for whom the fundamental strata of

consciousness include the flow of temporalization and the sphere of “ownness,” and the

phenomenology of “separation” in Levinas (Crowell, 2010: 9). Separation denotes for

Levinas (Levinas, 1969: 109-21, 147-51; 81-94, 114-16, 120-25Fr) the activity and

variety of consciousness in but not reducible to its world. Separation recapitulates both

Husserl’s intentionalist monad and expands Heidegger’s structure of care. As he had

already argued in the 1940’s, Levinas will urge that separation contains two terms: first,

an embodied consciousness that comes out of and returns to itself in waking and sleeping,

always preserving a margin of autonomy relative to ontic existence. Second, an

indeterminate universe of light and darkness, which he calls the element: sky, air, sun.

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This universe, or brute nature, is not yet humanized, and our movement within it is

essentially pre-linguistic, which suggests it has, for us, a mythical format (Levinas, 1969:

140-42; 114-16Fr). This elemental universe is reflected in the creativity of mythical

thought, in which being unfolds without the stabilization of identification and concepts.

At this level, and evincing the plasticity of continuous creation, or better, natural

production, existence is “coming always, without my being able to possess the source”

(Levinas, 1969: 141; 114Fr). Crowell adds “there is no reason why [in the elemental] a

tree cannot turn into a maiden, or a butterfly…” (Crowell, 2010: 14). Autarchy and

enjoyment here move between immersion and separation in the activities of nourishment

and play; but only a shelter that is mine protects separation from this continuous

production without structure or limit (Crowell, 2010: 9; Levinas, 1969, 155; 128-129Fr).

This is because, with the shelter secured, we can begin to contemplate, thereby conferring

form on this mobile universe.

It is impossible fully to inhabit this mythical dimension of existence and

simultaneously to thematize it without an additional element able to bend the vector of

our intentional consciousness back from its immersion in elemental processes and toward

re-presentation. Indeed, re-flection takes shape thanks to something we could characterize

as the return of self and things to an “I” that can find itself in the accusative case. For

Levinas, the “I” is neither in the nominative nor in the accusative when pleasurably

immersed in the elemental. Pure acts require no subject. A tree does not single me out

and, for that reason, within this mode of existence (which does not disappear with the

psychological development of an ego), the tree is essentially no thing. As the sensuous

pre-conceptual dimensions of being, then, the element comes to be ordered through the

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objectification of the world in dialogue, when I offer my interlocutor entities as if picked

out against horizons of that hitherto unqualifiable world. A space of common names (as

opposed to the verbality of “essence”) emerges as a shared world in which pure sensory

qualities or fields concretize. This is the work of dialogue, rooted in what Levinas calls

the performative of “Saying,” which amounts to responding in the modality of

spontaneous sincerity (Levinas, 1998c: 45, 48-53; 77, 81-90Fr). Dialogue does not

presuppose language on this account but gives rise to it praxiologically (Jakobson, 1995:

94)—hence the inevitability of ethics as first philosophy. In 1961, the situation of

dialogue supposes a concrete encounter, the face-to-face, in the immediacy of which what

will emerge as “I” experiences the emotional force of singularization through a gaze

coming from something naked and vulnerable. What we call eyes, nose, flesh is, in its

immediacy—its affective impact on us—neither a consumable nor sheer indeterminacy.

It is easy to eliminate yet it “resists” simply by seeing me. This introduces into the regard

of the enjoying self a normativity that elicits a sense of responsibility—for the resistant

face. There is nothing utopian about this immediacy. As Crowell shows, it is in this way

that normativity enters into what was hitherto extra-normative and ontic.

Perhaps we cannot directly deduce thematizing consciousness from the

singularizing impact the Other has on me. Whereas Husserl’s analogical constitution of

the Other gave us something “out there” that moves as we do, and whereas Husserl insists

that an “I” is inassimilable to “an Other” because it is never in the site where that Other

is, Levinas takes an additional step. He shows that the Other, as one who expresses itself

physically and verbally, enacts its responsibility for self even as it remains vulnerable

(Crowell, 2010: 13). Responsibility is thus simultaneously accomplished by the me,

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surprised in its pursuits, and elicited by a being that is not simply free and responsible for

itself but vulnerable to the loss of that responsibility. Before I constitute the Other as an

other like me, before I can engage in conceptual, objectifying reflection, I receive that

singularization—repeatedly—from a being less like me than able to call me to account.

Interpellation may certainly open onto violence or objectification. But this entails being

seen, above all, without being faced. As such, the event of being objectified by a gaze is

patent in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and Sartre’s phenomenology of the voyeur. In

such moments, the objectified “I” modalizes its world into possibilities for flight or

struggle. For Levinas, however, the face-to-face singularizations open different

modalizations of being in the world, more fundamental than their expression in conflict

or production, because response is the condition of objectification through dialogue. If, in

Levinas, the “contact” element of intersubjective singularization deploys normative

distinctions not found in the element, then Levinas can claim ethics as first philosophy

because dialogue is performance; it is the giving of signification. But dialogue, which

offers objects through words, does not require a threat of violence as in Sartre, it even

precludes it in its incipience. Therefore, the institution of an objective world, in Levinas,

takes shape as the currency used to extend dialogical responsibility. It is not that Hegel

and Sartre cannot give us a first philosophy, what they cannot provide is the creation of

the Good merged with a desire for the Other who transcends my cognition.

Levinas’s 1961 phenomenology thus proceeds as if on two levels, with two

natures: the mythic, mechanistic unfolding of being as drives and production, and “a

strange sort of nature,” or an enigma that concerns the primacy of intersubjective

meaning-creation. Both levels cross through embodied affectivity—stranger still, both are

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felt as indeterminate sensations or affects. Yet, while they are intertwined, affect is not

reducible to the sensation (Levinas, 1998c: 108-109, 152; 170-173, 237-38Fr). In Totality

and Infinity, this enigma is called “the order of [Metaphysical] Desire…irreducible to

[relations governing] totality” (Levinas, 1969: 180; 155Fr). By 1974, the “strange nature”

is clearly the intersubjective structure of passive sensibility. But would this not sooner be

like a developmental psychology, possessing so many stages of ego-development? That is

hard to say, since the simplest act of objectification and concept-building presupposes

intersubjective openness and an Other. In any event, a two-leveled “nature” cannot be

reduced to brute existence; something like an intersubjective flesh unfolds, passively, as

natural, yet better than our instinctual selves. Could this be Levinas’s rejoinder to the

Aristotelian divine in us? To the degree that it is, then, Levinas’s divine (Other) enables

theorein, and not the reverse.

If existentialism has taught us the lived modalizations of embodied possibility,

then Levinas’s modalizations culminate with the question: What is the

(pre-)consciousness in which these originary objectifications begin to take shape

(Crowell, 2010: 20-21)? It is at that point that Totality and Infinity ends, with “the

extreme vigilance of messianic consciousness” (Levinas, 1969: 284-85; 260-61Fr).

Reading Levinas from Husserl’s phenomenology, Crowell has argued that the

“reversal of terms,” ethics before ontology, is essential to the intentional objectification

of any external object. Thematizing perception may be sensibility broadly construed,

perhaps predominantly seeing; but we must be able to see-as, to see X as Y for there to be

an objective, intersubjective world. Ethics as first philosophy precedes and makes

possible phenomenology as the science of the constitution of entities. Thus we

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understand Levinas’s strategy of approximating Aristotle’s ethics to the desire prompted

by his final cause. Understood as normativity and evaluation, even virtuous acts, ethics is

rooted in a desire for something that exceeds predication because it founds predication as

the objectified world. The Other sensuously and affectively overflows predication, but its

encounter gives rise to the dialogue out of which a human language unfolds.

However, the particular configuration of ethics and metaphysics that Levinas

proposes as his counterpoint to Aristotle in 1961 is less concerned with the

epistemological ambitions of phenomenology than with a desire that belongs neither to

intellect nor contemplation. If Levinas opens his ontic totality thanks to the transcendence

of the Other, then clearly Aristotle has done something comparable by associating the

final cause and the divine life, whose wisdom orients the other virtues (Aristotle, 2002:

1143b 5-16). Yet, while Levinas’s deformalization of the first cause (the radically

external Other) points toward an unthematizable that is pre-predicative life, the divine life

as Aristotle’s final cause entails a different negative logic: the closer we come to the

divine life, the more our behavior approximates that of the celestial intelligences. The

connection with Aristotle’s ethics is thus dual—theoretical certainly, but also prudential

in the specific sense that phronesis (practical wisdom) best expresses the movement that

Levinas calls the wisdom of love. And, as if demonstrating that the West may not be

equivalently in thrall to the true and the good, Aristotle adds: “wisdom is antithetical to

intelligence, for intelligence has as its objects the definitions for which there is no

account [axioms], whereas wisdom has as its object what comes last, and this is not an

object of systematic knowledge…” (Aristotle, 2002: NE, 1142a 25-28). The respective

accounts of what is first (pure intelligence) and last (embodied wisdom) come together in

19

Levinas’s thought through the rapprochement of Desire and goodness, an argument that

challenges the priority of contemplation over wisdom:

Transcendence is the transcendence of an I. Only an I can respond to the

injunction of a face. The I is preserved [thereby] in goodness, without its

resistance to the system showing itself as the egoistic cry of the subjectivity,

still concerned for happiness or salvation…. To posit being as Desire is to

repel at the same time the ontology of isolated subjectivity and the ontology

of impersonal reason realizing itself in history. (Levinas, 1969: 305; 282Fr,

trans. mod.)

Goodness, as the enactment of saying-to, denotes the institution of the intersubjective tie

which is first philosophy in Levinas. This is not the outcome of a motivating desire, it is

that desire, and it is meta-physical in the dual sense that it makes a world of shared

objects possible in language even as it outstrips existence as “natural,” mechanistic forces

in conflict. In Levinas, first philosophy as ethics overtakes the theorein of first

philosophy as ontology or theology. “One does not prove God thus, since this is a

situation that precedes proof [theology], and is metaphysics itself. The ethical, beyond

vision and certitude, delineates the structure of exteriority as such [ontology]” (Levinas,

1969: 304; 281Fr). In short, God is not the object of theorizing, we enact “God” in

responding to the Other, spontaneously limiting our own freedom. Such would be the

project that Levinas unfolds: first philosophy must cede to ethics as the phenomenology

of enacted intersubjective ties. This implies that first philosophy as mere epistemology is

impossible, because it is derivative, and, finally, that the tension between ontology and

theology in Aristotle’s first philosophy is radically displaced in Levinas: it becomes the

20

twofold moment of the gaze of the Other as summons, which elicits my address as the

beginning of dialogue and of a shared, objective world.

21

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