Levinas,Ethics and the People: A reply to Soyoung Lee and Paul Standish

Soyoung Lee and Paul Standish have criticised my article ‘Levinas: Ethics or Mystification?’ for misunderstanding and misrepresenting the phenomenological subtleties of Levinas's formulation of ethics. However, although their arguments are cogent and persuasive, I still cannot see how Levinas's ‘ethics of the Other’, regardless of its merits qua phenomenology or ethical philosophy, translates into the practical ethical and moral understanding that would transform people's everyday lives—which was the underlying theme of my original article. In this article, I shall develop this theme further with specific reference to the following difficulties, as I see them, relating to the practicality of Levinas's ethics: (1) it is unclear how ordinary people would gain an understanding of Levinas's ethical vision, or how, once gained, this understanding would change their behaviour; (2) the rejection of personal relations and attachments in favour of pre‐ontological abstractions and metaphorical images (as the ground for the possibility of ethical understanding) renders Levinas's ethical vision powerless to motivate individuals in their everyday lives; (3) conceived as a political project to transform society, Levinas's vision cannot be realised, not even in the commune; (4) the presumption that real human understanding can be gained through the study of Levinas, or any other philosopher, is a highly dubious one.