Levinas on Skepticism, Moral and Otherwise

Abstract

At the start of Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas announces a skeptical concern: Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.1 The skepticism that looms in this introductory sentence is, apparently, some variety of moral skepticism. When we do a righteous act or seek virtue, are we fulfilling our duty and doing the good, or are we'dupes' adhering to an illusory moral code? In the pages of the Preface that immediately follow, Levinas explains the situation that provokes this moral skepticism: war. War renders morality derisory and transforms reason into the art of winning at all cost; no Hobbesian could put it better.2 Given this striking opening, it is hard to avoid reading Totality and Infinity and the account of responsibility that Levinas outlines in that book as his response to the challenge of moral skepticism.3While it is true that Totality and Infinity comprises part of Levinas's answer to the moral skeptic, in this paper I will argue that a different and important element of Levinas's ultimate and best response to the challenge of moral skepticism is found in a passage near the very end of Otherwise than Being, entitled Skepticism and Reason.4 In order to make this case, I will begin by showing that in the opening of Totality and Infinity two different sorts of moral skepticism are set up as challenges to be addressed, both of which arise from the evidence of war. First, war privileges political calculations over obligations to persons in such a way that politics, which become the paradigm of good practical reasoning, are opposed to ethics. Second, war suggests that the meaning of the human individual and human action is visible only against the totalizing horizon of history, such that the dignity and value of persons is not intrinsic but rather depends on their place in the totality of being. After describing these two skeptical challenges, I will go on to argue that the first challenge is met by the account of responsibility and the relation to the other that can be found in Totality and Infinity. The second challenge, however, is answered in Skepticism and Reason in Otherwise than Being. There, Levinas responds to moral skepticism precisely by advocating a different variety of skepticism-namely, a skepticism that challenges the evidence of war by revealing that within its totalizing discourses there is always a break that pushes the totality open towards what exceeds it. As Levinas describes it, the break in totalizing discourses that is held open by skepticism offers a trace of the 'saying' that both grounds and ruptures the 'said,' thereby revealing that the meaning of human action overflows history and the meaning of persons overflows their place in the totality.It is perhaps because the skepticism of Otherwise than Being bears little resemblance to the moral skepticism announced at the start of Totality and Infinity that commentators on Skepticism and Reason do not typically bring these two texts together.5 Instead, the literature on this passage offers rigorous and helpful analyses of why Levinas is convinced that skepticism is inseparable from philosophy, how Levinas's account of language here responds to Derrida's well-known criticisms of Totality and Infinity in his essay Violence and Metaphysics, and whether Levinas's account can or cannot be read as a variety of transcendental critique or ancient skepticism.6 But the disanalogy between the moral skepticism that opens Totality and Infinity and the skepticism about philosophical language that closes Otherwise than Being should in fact invite wonder about the relationship between these two well-known discussions of skepticism. Here I aim to show that the later skepticism can be fruitfully read as a response to the earlier moral skepticism. Indeed, one might even say that on this reading Levinas's ethics ends up situated between two skepticisms: on the one hand, the moral skepticism to which it responds, and on the other, a unique linguistic skepticism that holds open the trace of an otherwise than being. …