Face to Face with Levinas

Introduction

RICHARD A. COHEN Introduction Is an ethical philosophy primarily philosophical, a true discourse that happens to be about moral phenomena? Or is such a philosophy primarily ethical, an edifying discourse designed to stimulate good behavior, an exhortation, instruction or prescription rather than an explanation, description or denotation? Knowing that the drowning child must be saved, even when coupled with knowing how to save the child, is not the same as saving the child, unless knowing and doing are synonymous, which in our world they are not. For Levinas goodness comes first. His philosophy aims to pronounce this goodness, to articulate and emphasize it, and thus to realign its relation to the true. His thought is not simply an articulation, but a peculiar ethical exacerbation oflanguage which bends the true to the good. The issue between the true and the good is one of priority. Each claims absolute priority. If truth is primary then the criteria of epistemology, of cognition and knowledge, take precedence over moral standards. Knowledge interests dominate. Truth absorbs and transforms goodness to its own purposes, in more or less subtle ways, even when it claims not to. Aristotle and Hegel discover that the highest good ultimately surpasses the responsibilities and duties of citizenship, friendship and love. For these thinkers what is most needful is for thought to think itself. Such thought, however (and typically), includes citizenship, love, and the other less exalted human activities and relations, which are oriented toward and by 2 RICHARD A. CO/lEN knowledge. Tbday, to take another example, one often hears scientists lay claim to a "value-free" language, that is to say, to a language beholden only to itself, to its own criteria. The deconstruction inaugurated by Derrida, too - so apparently at odds with science as with all naivit~ - is only a more recent instance in a long tradition of the self-absorption of knowledge. But if the good were somehow primary in philosophy and life, and the standards of ethics took precedence over those of epistemology, then knowledge, for its part, would apparently be legitimately outraged. Is one not justified in fearing that the quest for truth would be hampered by moral scruples? Would it not be shackled by the nonfreedom of moral obedience? In the final account knowledge cannot distinguish moral scruple from tyranny or from cowardice; it has yet to learn one true morality, yet to see its proofs. In place of universal truth, or the quest for universal truth, one would have instead the contending particularities and vagaries of history: class truths, female truths, Islamic truths, and so on, each claiming moral superiority in a war of all against all. Epistemology and ethics on.ly seem able to distort one another unrecognizably. But is the opposition of ethics and epistemology an opposition of two systems on the same plane? Truth is not the other of ethics in the same sense that goodness is the other of epistemology. The false is the other of the true; evil is the other of good. How are true, false, good, and evil related? Nietzsche proposes that ethics and epistemology have converged in the goodness that the latter finds in truth and not in falsity. Nietzsche will challenge this epistemological preference for the goodness of truth. Heidegger sets out to show that ethics and epistemology converge in "onto-theo-Iogy," in the eminence given to one being over all other beings. He rejects the very form of this superiority. Levinas proposes that ethics and epistemology converge in a moral righteousness that is not the rightness of the true but that makes truth possible. For knowledge such a condition is an exteriority, but for ethics it is better than knowledge. Ethics would not be a legitimate or illegitimate epistemological power or weakness, in the Nietzschean or Heideggerian sense, but the responsibility of the knower prior to, and the condition of, knowing. Knowing cannot know such a condition. Socrates requires that we pause to know what right and wrong are before we act - but can Introduction this pause ever end? Cain asks if he is his brother's keeper and is thus already condemned. Knowledge, even when about morality, is insufficient , inadequate, inappropriate - and inasmuch as these terms of "criticism" are themselves products of knowledge, they too are insufficient . This does not, however, imply that ethics is an ignorance, a stupidity, for ignorance is but the other side of knowledge. Rather, for...