Eye to I with Holiness

From an interview with Levinas: ("On the Usefulness of Insomnia", from Is it Righteous to Be? at pp. 235-36.)

Q. What is the ethical?

E.L. It is the recognition of holiness. To explain: the fundamental trait of being is the preoccupation that each particular being has with his being. Plants, animals, all living things strive to exist. For each one it is the struggle for life. And is not matter, in its essential hardness, closure and shock? In the human, lo and behold, the possible apparition of an ontological absurdity. The concern for the other breaches concern for the self. This is what I call holiness. Our humanity consists in being able to recognize this priority of the other. Now you can understand the first formulations of our conversation and why I have been so interested in language. Language is always addressed to the other, as if one could not think without already being concerned for the other. Always already my thinking is a saying. In the profundity of thinking, the for-the-other is articulated, or, said otherwise, goodness is articulated, love for the other, which is more spiritual than any science.

Q. This attention to the other, can it be taught?

E.L. In my view it is awakened in the face of the other.

Q.: Is the other about whom you speak the wholly Other, God?

E.L.: It is there in this priority of the other man over me that, before my admiration for creation, well before my search for the first cause of the universe, God comes to mind. When I speak of the other I use the term face. The face is that which is behind the facade and underneath "the face one puts on things." To see or to know the face is already to deface the other. The face in its nudity is the weakness of a unique being exposed to death, but at the same time the enunciation of an imperative which obliges me not to let it alone. This obligation is the first word of God. For me, theology begins in the face of the neighbor. The divinity of God is played out in the human. God descends in the "face" of the other. To recognize God is to hear his commandment "thou shalt not kill," which is not only a prohibition against murder, but a call to an incessant responsibility with regard to the other. It is to be unique, as if I were elected to this responsibility, which gives me as well the possibility of recognizing myself as unique and irreplaceable, of saying "I." Conscious that in each of my human endeavors -- from which the other is never absent -- I respond to his existence as a unique being."

Listen to Renee Fleming sing "You'll never walk alone"