Avi Sagi’s Living with the Other: The Ethic of Inner Retreat takes up a particular challenge posed by the last three centuries of Western philosophical ethics: the radical split between those who locate the source of ethics in the self and those who locate this source in the other. Exemplified by Immanuel Kant, the first camp considers the ultimate source of ethical knowledge and behavior to be an active, autonomous agent who arrives at true ethical knowledge through epistemological processes. In this scheme, the other is therefore an object of knowledge just like any other object. On the other side, ethicists such as Emmanuel Levinas locate the source of ethical knowledge and behavior in the other. The presence of the other in front of the self breaks through all our ways of knowing and imposes a duty on the self heteronomously. In this scheme, the other will always be beyond objective comprehension.Each side of this debate has its strengths and weaknesses, and rather than choose a side, as so many philosophers have done, Sagi develops a path between these two radically opposing ethical philosophies and the many dichotomies they establish. In Sagi’s view, the other’s difference will always exceed the subject’s knowledge capacity, and in this way, maintains a role that is separate from the subject. However, Sagi takes the self as the correct starting point for ethics (4). After all, behind every ethical apprehension or act is the self apprehending or acting. The self always retains the power to turn away from the other, to refuse to perceive, learn, or act. What prevents the subject from subordinating the other and enables both subject and other to retain their distinct positions in the ethical relationship is not a theoretical intervention; it is a practical one. Sagi proposes a practice, which he terms “the ethic of inner retreat,” as the solution to this perennial problem (5). The self confines itself, pulls itself back, restricts itself, to make room for the other. The self develops a stance of openness to difference and self-critique, on the alert for moments when it must yield to the other. This movement of self-contraction creates the space for the other to be present in its full particularity before the self, to challenge the self’s understanding of the world and itself, and to call upon the self to act for the other’s needs.Through a thorough engagement with many strands of Western philosophical thought, literature, and the Jewish tradition, the seven chapters of the book explore the philosophical crossroads between Kantian and Levinasian ethics and Sagi’s practical solution to these intractable debates. Most refreshingly, the author is not afraid to take a firm philosophical stance in what are often high-stakes disciplinary debates. Sagi does not defer to many of the interpretive debates that rage around a particular thinker’s work, when those debates are not relevant to his larger project. This is notable in the field of Levinas studies, for example: a field rife with unresolved questions about what Levinas really meant or how to interpret various aspects of his work. This tailored approach dovetails with the book’s purposes; Sagi is after a workable, real-life ethical practice, and such debates often cloud the practical implications of ethical theories. The excellent work of the translator, Batya Stein, is of particular note here. Stein conveys Sagi’s firm and incisive views in a clear and straightforward manner, with a minimum of jargon. While chapter 1 outlines the central philosophical problem of the book in brief and accessible terms, chapters 2, 3, and 6 examine various aspects of the problem and demonstrate the ways that the ethic of inner retreat resolves each particular aspect. For example, in chapter 6, “The Real Other Beyond the Other,” Sagi argues that twentieth century ethicists’ turn to the other as the source of ethics actually gets in the way of doing right by a real, concrete other. One problem is that the philosophical other becomes an other only for the self (126–27). “Other” is a relative position and effectively subordinates the other to the self, thereby falling into the trap of Kantian ethics. And though Levinas departs from this tradition with his notion of the trace and the utterly transcendent Other, in Sagi’s view, Levinas’s abstraction does the real other no favors. How can we learn to do right by the other if it is so completely mysterious and inaccessible (133)? Instead, Sagi proposes to return to Husserl’s starting point in the self’s consciousness (133). To avoid the trap of the solipsistic subject that looms in Husserl’s philosophy, we must turn to the real-life circumstances in which we encounter others, and the ethic of inner retreat (134–35). While there is no mechanism of cognition that will reveal the other to the self and force the self to see beyond itself, the practice of inner retreat makes space for the other to appear (137).Chapters 4, 5, and 7 illuminate and expand the ethic of inner retreat by placing it in scenarios that test its soundness from three particularly challenging angles: one’s relationship to one’s homeland, the parent-child relationship, and the self’s relationship to God. By showing how the ethic of inner retreat is effective in maintaining these asymmetrical others’ distinct positions with regard to the self, Sagi demonstrates the ethical potency of this practice in preventing the self from subsuming the inanimate other, the subordinate other, or the silent other. If even the archetypal hierarchical relationship, that of parent to child, is corrected by the retreat of the parent – demonstrated in Chapter Five’s comparative analysis between the Binding of Isaac and the Oedipus myth—how much more so can relatively equal relationships benefit from this practice.Sagi’s emphasis on the other who is present, concrete, and visible raises two particular questions. In chapter 3, Sagi argues that the self apprehends the other’s concrete, real-life difference through vision (72). The self sees the other’s difference and does not turn away from it. And while vision is undoubtedly a powerful human activity, Sagi’s insistence on it as the primary vehicle for ethical knowledge and activity can read as ableist at times. One wonders what sensory options there might be for the visually impaired, or else for those practical circumstances where vision is not available, as might arise for a person of any range of abilities. Second, the emphasis on the visible and the present does not address the distant other. What motivates an individual to care for the other that cannot be seen, heard, or spoken to? Why should we exert ourselves for those in need in other places or other communities? These are questions that linger for the reader.More broadly, this emphasis on the concrete other illustrates how readers who interpret the thinkers at issue in different ways than Sagi may find themselves less persuaded by the book’s conclusions, or needing to adapt them. For example, Levinas scholars are famously divided on the question of the transcendence of the face. Totality and Infinity invokes both transcendental and empirical aspects of the face of the Other, and these aspects do not harmonize well.1 Since Sagi considers Levinas’s notion of the face to be utterly transcendent, he does not find much use in Levinas’s Other for his practical, real-life ethics (63). Readers who take an empirical approach to the face might see more resonance between Sagi’s ethic of inner retreat and a Levinasian ethic, than Sagi himself does.None of these critiques should detract from the boldness and strength of the project. Sagi’s invocation of the practical as a means to solve entrenched philosophical conundrums is both profound and convincing. It is reminiscent of leading Wittgenstein’s fly out of the fly bottle, a solution that should be available to any philosopher concerned with the real-life consequences of their theory.