Ethics as the Call of the Holy

It's hard to describe Levinas' thinking in a few phrases, because he wrote hundreds (apparently almost 500) books and articles! But he was fond of saying that the entirety of his philosophy could be summarized in the simple words, "Apres vous, Monsieur". His reflection on the horrors of the 20th Century, including the loss of several of his family members in the Shoa, led him to appreciate how impersonal and deadening was what he called a "totalizing" viewpoint, in which other persons were captured in knowledge but not acknowledged for what they really are, beings who transcend our knowledge, and place a claim on me. He said, our first word as a person is not Decartes' "ego cogito" (I am, I think), but "me voici!" (here I am!). The first word of the subject arises in the response to the other's call, the word with which the prophet testifies to the presence of God. Another person, in his or her transcendence, exerts a similar call on me.

For Levinas, the ethical, not the ontological, is primary. Others are not to be corralled into our cognitive categories. "Ethics is not a spectator sport. Rather, it is my experience of a demand that I both cannot fully meet and cannot avoid." Simon Critchley's "Introduction" in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, p. 22.

Levinas goes even further. In his funeral oration for Levinas in 1995, Jacques Derrida recalled a conversation with Levinas in his Paris apartment. "You know," Levinas said, "they often speak of ethics to describe what I do, but what interests me when all is said and done is not ethics, not only ethics, it's the holy, the holiness of the holy (le saint, la saintete du saint)." Ibid at p. 27).

I think not only of the prophet's call/response ("Here I am, Lord"), but Jesus' call ("Come follow me"), and the mother's calling of her baby into being through the mother's loving gaze (as described in von Balthasar). In all these cases, another person is a sign of the transcendent, an image of God (as we heard in last Sunday's gospel about the Roman coin [man is God's coin]), a being that places a holy call upon us, and enables us to be somebody in holiness by responding. "Levinas prefers this word [holiness] to the Greek word 'ethics' for describing the highest human destiny, holiness meaning a life wholly for the other." Catherine Chalier, "Levinas and the Hebraic Tradition," in Ethics as First Philosophy, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, at p.6.