Introduction: philosophy as ethical exegesis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
But it belongs to the very essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or the exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and InfinityParents, teachers and religious leaders have always taught morality to their charges, to their sons and daughters, to school children, and to ordinary people. Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), the Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher, does something different, something perhaps more difficult. He teaches morality to the intellectual elite, to those who all too often, and all too proudly, have become our new “cultured despisers of religion”, thinking themselves too intelligent, too sophisticated, too cultured for the common imperatives and well-known limitations of “ordinary” morality. Whether they dismiss the authority of morality as “selfincurred immaturity”, “bourgeois superstructure”, “grammatical error”, “infantile internalization”, “mass delusion”, “physiological weakness”, or some other derisive reduction, Levinas aims to show them – at the highest levels of intellect and spirit – that morality is a matter for adults, intelligent adults included.
Levinas will show that nothing is more serious than morality. For at stake in morality is our highest individual and collective vocation, the very humanity of the human. His writings are difficult, then, not because morality is difficult. Everyone already knows the moral imperatives and knows that they run counter to our instincts and inclinations.
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- Ethics, Exegesis and PhilosophyInterpretation after Levinas, pp. 1 - 24Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001