Concluding Remarks

Abstract

What is the contribution of Levinas to contemporary ethics? Above all, Levinas has renewed the validity of a search for the formal conditions of any ethical system. Of course the question, What are the formal conditions of ethics, is answered somewhat differently in TI and OBBE. TI’s phenomenology of the face and the face-to-face relationship constitutes a remarkable contribution in itself. That Levinas gives us the face as it affects us, ethically, in the immediacy of a dialogical relationship, rather than as a concept or as an object, allows him to make it the source of a singular summons—thereby rehabilitating the traditions that set the good beyond, or before, being. Because we can imagine feeling caught in the gaze of another, losing ourselves in that gaze, and responding to it, we have little trouble understanding Levinas’ argument that a significant dimension of ethical life is irreducible to third person description. Indeed, if we are affected by the other’s face before we have time to reflect upon this event, then the argument that formal ethics should be first philosophy gains credibility. However, Levinas’ claim that the ethical encounter makes consciousness and social life possible—in the form of con sciousn esses capable of placing themselves in question—is more significant and indemonstrable outside of his phenomenology.