1 Ethics as First Philosophy Bettina Bergo The idea that ethics could be first philosophy should strike us as curious. Should we understand this as philosophically regressive, a strategy motivated by psychology or social construction? To wit, no philosophical theorizing is possible without consideration of the human being in light of a consciousness that develops socially or in families, by stages. Should we understand ethics as first philosophy in terms of a refusal of distinctions between factical existence and transcendental categories—as a presentation of pre-philosophical practices, in the guise of phenomenology or another “empiricism?” Above all, what is ethics in a thought, like Levinas’s, that sets forth neither rational prescription nor criteria for calculating happiness or pleasures? I will not summarize Levinas’s philosophy here so much as answer the questions: What is first philosophy if and when it is ethics; and, what is meant here by “ethics?” For Levinas, the claim that ethics is first philosophy requires extensive critical work. He must recapitulate and
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Ethics as First Philosophy Bettina Bergo
The idea that ethics could be first philosophy should strike us as curious. Should
we understand this as philosophically regressive, a strategy motivated by psychology or
social construction? To wit, no philosophical theorizing is possible without consideration
of the human being in light of a consciousness that develops socially or in families, by
stages. Should we understand ethics as first philosophy in terms of a refusal of
distinctions between factical existence and transcendental categories—as a presentation
of pre-philosophical practices, in the guise of phenomenology or another “empiricism?”
Above all, what is ethics in a thought, like Levinas’s, that sets forth neither rational
prescription nor criteria for calculating happiness or pleasures? I will not summarize
Levinas’s philosophy here so much as answer the questions: What is first philosophy if
and when it is ethics; and, what is meant here by “ethics?”
For Levinas, the claim that ethics is first philosophy requires extensive critical
work. He must recapitulate and limit philosophies built on identification (i.e., the law of
non-contradiction, sufficient reason, and dialectics). He must revisit the thought for
which truth is the free subsumption by cognition (in an Aristotelian or Husserlian sense)
of an object that gives itself according to profiles (Levinas, 1998a: 69). First philosophy
in Levinas will thus be unfolded thanks to two critical efforts: evincing the limits of
comprehension (in light of the phenomenological constitution of meaning), and
redefining transcendence, away from idealist forms toward embodied, intersubjective
experience. He is not the first twentieth century thinker to attempt this. Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, and Henry also present critiques of formalist elements in Husserl’s
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phenomenology of time-consciousness, in which the unity of ongoing immanent time
prevails over variable intensities of embodied, “hyletic,” data or changes in sensation.
Nevertheless, the objects of Levinas’s critique themselves form configurations: Husserl’s
transcendental egology and Heidegger’s Dasein, criticized in light of embodied
sensibility; Husserl and Heidegger, scrutinized in their respective approaches to
intersubjectivity. Levinas’s first philosophy will be unfolded through a critique of
fundamental ontology’s claim to the status of protē philosophia (Levinas, 1969: 47; 15-
17Fr). Elaborating ethics as first philosophy thus means undercutting hermeneutic
phenomenology’s deformalization of time in which lived “temporality reveals itself as
the meaning of authentic care” (Heidegger, 1962: 374; 432Gr), and care is the
fundamental way of being-in-the-world for the Dasein concerned with its own existence.
Neither the phenomenology of transcendental consciousness as a unified, dynamic
“temporalizing” and identification (as ownness), nor the interpretation of a temporal
being ahead-of-itself in its projects could give us ethics as first philosophy. Levinas’s
protracted task will be to draw phenomenological description away from epistemological,
even some existentialist, concerns. His ethics as first philosophy thus confronts two basic
challenges: 1) that of passing “beneath” Being as worldly, future-oriented, and
approached through a questioning “site” (Da-sein) (Heidegger, 1962: 374-5; 432-3Gr);
and 2) that of deconstructing consciousness as the unified and dynamic, intentional
construction of objects, in the world or in immanence. If there is any doubt that Levinas’s
first philosophy is directed primarily at Heidegger’s existential philosophy and at the
aforementioned formalism in Husserl’s phenomenology, then the address he gave in 1982
at Louvain, “Éthique comme philosophie première,” readily convinces us of this,
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although it begins, appositely, with Aristotle.
First Philosophy in Aristotle: Paradoxes of Metaphysics and Ethics
The 1982 address offers retrospective insight into Levinas’s middle work, Totality
and Infinity, because the project of first philosophy is there indebted to Aristotle, and
because the condensed 1980s lecture opens with the conundrum that first philosophy
posed to Greek metaphysics. Levinas’s 1982 strategy is explicit: to define first
philosophy by bringing to light a parallelism in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and his
Nicomachean Ethics, thereafter turning to Husserl and Heidegger. In his return to
Aristotle, Levinas adopts an approach redolent of the young Heidegger, in search of
concrete, lived contents against the more idealistic conceptions of Husserlian
phenomenology (i.e., intentionality, hylemorphism). Thus Levinas opens his lecture,
controversially reading Aristotle’s ontology together with his theology. He moves
between Metaphysics’ books Gamma and Lambda. Book Gamma sets forth the
uniqueness of a discipline whose object was universal being—“that which is qua thing-
that-is, and with this its states, conditions and predicates” (chapter I)—pursued down to
the senses of truth and error (chapters VII-VIII). The associated science is first
philosophy, integrating ontology and deferring the question of theology. As it is the
philosopher whose science concerns substance and principles (Aristotle, 1933: 1005b5),
he must also be concerned with universal being and “the most extreme causes [tas
akrotátas]” (Aristotle, 1933: 1003a27). The pursuit in first philosophy of absolute origins
necessarily leads to Aristotle’s divinity as first cause, and the apparently dual sciences of
being in general versus that of unconditioned causes has given rise to three questions: that
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of their identification (the cause of being qua being, merging with ontology); that of
priority, and that of a tension between philosophy and theology driving Aristotle’s
metaphysical project. Levinas observes that Aristotelian metaphysics led “to a God
defined by being qua being.” According to Levinas’s argument, it is onto-theology that
informs first philosophy—to the degree that theology is concerned with first causes
before considering final ones (Aubenque, 1962; Follon, 1958: 418).
In book Lambda (VI-X), Aristotle’s “god” is specifically approached, and in
negative terms. The characteristics of the Prime Mover are negations of imperfections in
sensuous substances (Follon, 1958: 419). And, while the prime mover is indeed a
particular being, rather than Being in a universal sense, theology and ontology are
intertwined because the particular being that is first can only be that which exists
independently of other entities, finite existence (Aristotle, 1933: book Lambda). In
Levinas Totality and Infinity, does not address the distinction between first and final
causes, but it surreptitiously informs his entire discussion of desire there, and it is at the
center of his concerns in 1982 (Levinas, 1969: 180; 155Fr). We will return to this; note
for now that Aristotle’s divinity engenders a unique “desire” in the intelligences close to
it, this characterizes the goodness of the final cause.
On Levinas’s 1982 interpretation of the simultaneous genesis of “ontology-
theology,” existence-in-general is merged with being as necessary and separate. But a
necessary being also implies something not found in the strictly ontological framework of
first philosophy: being, understood as the Prime Mover, is the Good itself. Hence, there
are always two principles: existence-in-general, and the Good, for which “contrary to its
nature can happen” (Follon, 1958: 415).
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The theological-ontological relationship between first and final causes raises
difficulties which Levinas reads in phenomenological terms. As first cause, the divinity
belongs to, yet stands apart from that to which it gives rise. As final cause, it exerts the
“attraction” implicit in perfection. Deformalized, this is true of the divine as of the human
dimension, and the paradox of the “dual inspirations” (Follon, 1958: 416; Aubenque,
1962: 279) in Aristotle’s Metaphysics admits a phenomenological translation when the
grounds for this tension are set into a hermeneutics of lived experience. Both features
noted are crucial to unfolding a first philosophy that can be called “ethics.” In 1982, this
motivates Levinas’s explicit turn from the Metaphysics to the Nicomachean Ethics, where
we find a parallel, aporematic approach to the question of who is perfectly happy.
Levinas observes: “[If the] elements of self-sufficiency…and of freedom from weariness,
insofar as these are possible for human beings…are patently characteristic of
[intellectual] activity: then this activity will be the complete happiness of man…”
(Aristotle, 2002: 1177b 25-30). In short, our finite human freedom entails the quest for an
activity that spares us fatigue and dependency. This could not be politics or other
employments. “[B]ut such a life will be higher than the human plane; for it is not insofar
as he is human that he will live like this but insofar as there is something divine in him,
and to the degree that this is superior…will its activity too be superior” (Aristotle, 2002:
1077b 25-30).
The sovereign activity of contemplative intelligence is the property of something
analogous to a final cause. As a life it is desirable thanks to something inhuman in finite
beings, something “divine.” Nothing lower than the life of contemplation suffices to
happiness, as “each of us would seem actually to be this” divine, inhuman thing
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(Aristotle, 2002: 1178a 3). Aristotle’s argument, which Levinas follows, unfolds as the
parallel between the contemplative life, the sovereignty of the first cause, and the
entelechy of the final one. But the paradox remains. The wisdom approaching the first
cause is devoted to a superlative being, but a being among beings nonetheless, in which
case ontology is the first philosophy. If, however, the first cause constitutes something
separate, foreign to being, then the question arises of how it exerts any influence on
existence. In the Ethics, if the highest reflective existence is desirable, then somehow we
must work against our “nature.” If the highest reflective existence is foreclosed given our
embodiment, then a specific ethics comes to the fore at two levels: first, ethics, with its
central concern for justice, the cornerstone of virtues, is primordial (Aristotle, 2002:
1129b 29). However, ethics as the object of a wisdom, in which something other than our
nature attracts that nature and moves it beyond itself, will also be fundamental to an
ethics qua first philosophy. Levinas proceeds along both these lines, even as he
denounces the Western hypocrisy that consists in being simultaneously attached to the
true (ontology as first philosophy) and to the good (theology as first philosophy)
(Levinas, 1969: 24-26; XII-XIVFr). “Ethics” is understood here (in Levinas as in
Aristotle) as a manner of living, with its accompanying evaluations; as an ethos (ηθος and
έθος, cf. Aristotle, 2002: 1103a 15-19).
In the Metaphysics as in the Ethics, then, final causes, whether divine being or
the divine life, are beyond human understanding and action, although they exert a
decisive force on desire (Levinas, 1969: 25; XIIIFr). In the “beyond” adumbrated by
Aristotle’s negative method, something like an epochē unfolds, suspending distinctions
between theory and practice and holding open contemplation of the meta-physical, even
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as humans are turned toward justice as universal virtue. This is what Levinas argues
explicitly in 1982. Less obvious is the fact that he worked out the same parallel logics
between metaphysics and ethics in the “Preface” and early chapters of Totality and
Infinity, without explicitly referring to Aristotle.
The 1982 seminar on “First Philosophy” is a polemical reading of Aristotle. But if
the Western tradition is indeed onto-theological, whatever the point of departure we take
(from ontology or theology, from books Gamma or Lambda), Levinas will stake his first
philosophy on the qualitative separation of these two inspirations. In his own substitution
of ethics for first philosophy (where ethics combines our sensuous, intersubjective
connection and the repetition of “responsibility”), Levinas sets the final cause of
metaphysics into ethical life, where it becomes a “metaphysical desire” for sociality
(Levinas, 1969: 39; 9Fr); this, even as factical existence remains ambiguously chaotic, if
occasionally concerned with justice as a demand.
The same seminar provides a roadmap to the two great works, Totality and
Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence; we can use it to guide us through
the phenomenological work done in these magna opera. In 1961, Levinas deformalizes
Husserl’s alter ego, which had been constituted as an Other whose behavior is similar to
mine. In Totality and Infinity, the Other amalgamates Aristotle’s first and final causes: it
is beyond thematization because it confronts me in a time that is specific to sensibility
and affectivity—a time that precedes in some way the structured flow of consciousness.
An intuition of goodness is concentrated in the face-to-face encounter, which is
independent of “being” yet leaves a trace in existence (Levinas, 1969: 39, 48, 63; 9, 18-
19, 34Fr). Levinas fairly credits the “epekeina tēs ousias” (the “beyond-being”) to Plato;
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however, it is Aristotle who inaugurated a less formalistic approach to embodiment in
which the primacy of intersubjective life can appear. Thus, Levinas’s choice is
unsurprising when one thinks of the resources in Aristotle. Heidegger’s own critique of
Husserl’s phenomenology revisited Aristotle, Augustine and Paul. Levinas’s proposed
deformalization “humanizes” the transcendence and desire that characterize respectively
Aristotle’s first and final causes; however Levinas will not go as far as Heidegger in
deformalizing of transcendence: “Transcendere means to step over; the transcendens…is
that which oversteps as such and not that toward [wohin] which I step over” (Heidegger,
1982: 299; 425Gr). For Levinas, the re-conceptualization of what is human, in light of
desire for the Other who is firstly beyond the physical as object of cognition (and
opposed to Heidegger’s “care”), is brought forth through our intersubjective encounters,
which inflect the social ethos itself and describe the fundamental spirit of original