Possible but never finished

Abstract

During the spring in 2005, I worked at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, where I was completing a book called Ethics During and After the Holocaust. One of its chapters drew upon an idea from Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, namely, that it is important to know whether, in Levinas’s words, we are ‘‘duped by morality.’’ On the particular day I am recalling, my reading took me to the Introduction of the English translation of Totality and Infinity that I was using. As I read those pages, the rhythm and cadence of the prose, as well as the content, were strangely familiar. Before long, I remembered that John Wild, my teacher, was the author of those introductory words. Reading them in 2005, I was reminded that Wild studied Levinas decades before it became fashionable to do so in the United States. It was characteristic of Wild not only to be on the cutting edge but also to be part of that edge. For him, doing justice to the history of philosophy meant that philosophy had to be fresh and contemporary, too. At the time of this writing in 2007, I can scarcely believe that I am older than John Wild was when I knew him during my twenties in the mid-1960s at Yale University, not many years before his untimely death in 1972. His influence on me