Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: philosophy as ethical exegesis
- PART I EXCEEDING PHENOMENOLOGY
- PART II GOOD AND EVIL
- 5 Alterity and alteration: development of an opus
- 6 Maternal body/maternal psyche: contra psychoanalytic philosophy
- 7 Humanism and the rights of exegesis
- 8 What good is the Holocaust? On suffering and evil
- 9 Ricoeur and the lure of self-esteem
- 10 In-conclusion
- Index
10 - In-conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: philosophy as ethical exegesis
- PART I EXCEEDING PHENOMENOLOGY
- PART II GOOD AND EVIL
- 5 Alterity and alteration: development of an opus
- 6 Maternal body/maternal psyche: contra psychoanalytic philosophy
- 7 Humanism and the rights of exegesis
- 8 What good is the Holocaust? On suffering and evil
- 9 Ricoeur and the lure of self-esteem
- 10 In-conclusion
- Index
Summary
The task is not yours to complete; neither are you free to leave it off.
Rabbi Tarfon, Wisdom of the Fathers (Tractate Pirke Avot), ch. 2, v. 21The word by way of preface which seeks to break through the screen stretched between the author and the reader by the book itself does not give itself out as a word of honor. 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.
Levinas, “Preface”, Totality and InfinityBecause philosophy – like life – must be exegetical and ethical does not mean that it is not also critical, argumentative, analytical, logical, and reflective. Rather, it means that these approaches, all crucial to philosophical thought concerned with truth, find their ultimate context – their ultimate significance – in the unsurpassable yet non-encompassable encounter of one human being with another, and with all others, and hence in the overriding exigencies of kindness and fairness. This does not, as I have argued in all the chapters of this book, mean that philosophy is reduced to the relativism of psychology, sociology or history, or to that of decisionism, will to power or the play of semantic polysemy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics, Exegesis and PhilosophyInterpretation after Levinas, pp. 326 - 344Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001