Levinas is most famous for his claim that “ethics is first philosophy.” By this he means to criticize primarily the priority given to ontology, to the question of being as such, particularly in Martin Heidegger's philosophy and more generally in the western philosophical tradition. Levinas aims to show that my obligation to another person constitutes the starting point of all truth. Philosophy cannot fully grasp what Levinas calls the “face of the other.” Philosophy can, however, by way of a phenomenological retrieval, recover what ontology – the quest for the meaning of being – has forgotten: namely, the way in which the subject has already been “called” into responsibility by the revelation of the other's moral authority. In this sense, Levinas's thought challenges the “totalitarian” impulse of western ontology, which constitutes much of the western philosophical tradition. And it is Jerusalem, or Hebrew, as opposed to Athens, or Greek that, Levinas maintains, allows him to challenge philosophy's hegemony from within.

This description of Levinas's project not withstanding, I argue in this chapter that Levinas's relation to the western philosophical tradition, and to the modern philosophical tradition beginning with Descartes, is far more complex than Levinas's interpreters have allowed. While Levinas certainly does claim that the western philosophical tradition is “totalizing,” he also maintains that various figures in this tradition – including first and foremost Plato and Descartes, Heidegger's villains par excellence – articulated key aspects of the ethical philosophy that he, Levinas, seeks to retrieve.