Beyond Morality: Levinas and Ontology

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.

Religion and Philosophy

This is a particular problem for me, because my own entry into philosophy (entirely fortuitous, as anyone's), rather than just knowing about the history of philosophy, is Levinas. I believe it is completely impossible (though some think you can, and maybe even he did at one stage of his work) to separate his philosophical from his religious writings. When I had given this up, I thought about it negatively and naively, and their inseparability meant that he was susceptible to the same Nietzschean critique as Kant, but now I think that I am entirely wrong about that, because it puts the meaning of God in Levinas in completely the wrong place conceptually and historically.