It is one of the
most important lessons to take from reading Levinas that it is not directly about morality; that
is to say, it has nothing at all to do with values. This does not mean that
there is no relation between ethics and values, but it is not a foundational
one. I do not think this is unique to Levinas. I would say the same about
the Stoics, Spinoza or even Heidegger and Deleuze. Do not confuse ethics with
morality. One way of making this explicit is to say that ethics is ontological.
This might appear a curious statement in relation to Levinas, since one of this
books is called Otherwise than Being,
but one should be reminded that the source of his work is an explicit critique
of Heidegger and more specifically Being and
Time, which could have been called Ethics
and Time. Some say this book has no ethics, but for me it is a profoundly ethical book,
if one thinks ethics is about how one lives one's life, as the Stoics and
Spinoza explain, and not about making judgements. Because Levinas is writing against this ontology (which is an ontology of
specific kind), he calls what he does an ethics beyond being, but I would say that it is another way of doing ontology (a kind of neo-Platonism) rather than against ontology completely.
