Michael L. Morgan's Discovering Levinas very admirably situates Levinas's work in historical and philosophical context—and provides us with lucid restatements of such key issues in Levinas scholarship as his relationship to phenomenology, his understanding of God, his relationship to contemporary moral philosophy, and how he comprehends Judaism. It is a rich and rewarding book. Morgan charts a commonsensical path through the labyrinthine Levinasian corpus that attempts to place Levinas in the most charitable light possible by allaying anxieties about what might appear to be problematic aspects of his thought. One could say that Morgan touches all of the right bases in his presentation of Levinas's thought—but he does not interconnect his discussion of them tightly enough to notice some of the devastating impact that results for Levinasian thought from this pursuit of interconnections, and to mobilize textual strategies to overcome it.

Levinas defines the ethical stance in terms of “a passivity prior to activity and prior to freedom” (155). He uses a variety of terms, such as “substitution,” “incarnation,” “responsibility,” “obsession,” “hostage,” “accusation,” “persecution,” “subjection,” and “proximity” to suggest “that the self is passive, obligated, and burdened, prior to being free and active—that, in a sense, the self is object before it is subject” (155). Morgan seeks to redeem the extreme, bizarre character of this formulation by proposing that “we think of the self as passivity as a transcendental condition … for meaningful human life, for the ordinary and the everyday as the fabric of social, intersubjective, and interactive human experience. Ethics is the metaphysics of meaningful human existence” (158–59).

In his major work, Otherwise than Being, Levinas is especially attentive to what he considers to be the problem of “the third party”—how our being dominated by the absolute demands of the other takes place against the background of the coexistence of multiple others with their heterogeneous claims on us and the inadequacy of the psychological and material resources at any individual human being's disposal for appropriately ethically dealing with all of them. Levinas acknowledges that “the third party [i.e., persons other than any particular one you are engaged with or related to] isn't there by accident. In a sense, all the others are present in the face of the other.”Footnote ¹ The awareness of the presence of the third party for Levinas constitutes the Greek phase of Western moral development (340), which renders conceptualization, generalization, theorizing, and comparative assessment and judgment necessary in all arenas of human deliberation, including the ethical. The “third party” also places moral dilemmas (how to preserve the oneness of the one in the face of the plurality of many ones) at the very heart of the moral enterprise. Morgan rightly says that “these [dilemmas] are not challenges to his [Levinas's] ethical insight but rather part of the process of coping with it and living with our realization of it” (418). “Ultimately, then,” according to Morgan's reading, “Levinas hopes for a kind of utopia, the ground for which is a permanent, deep feature of all human existence” (25).

As against Morgan, one could argue that “passivity as a transcendental condition for ethics” merely pushes the question of how to make sense of Levinas one stage back, without firmly resolving it. Subordination of one's interests and concerns to those of the other could just as easily and validly be nurtured by metaphors of distance as they are by metaphors evocative of overwhelming proximity. If the other is irredeemably separate and distinct from me, then I also cannot legitimately transform him into a means toward my ends. The affirmation (and even the priority of the other, barring cogent countervailing considerations on my part) can just as convincingly be predicated on metaphors of distance as upon metaphors of total closeness and identification. In fact, Morgan concedes as much when he discusses how Levinas conceives of ma'asei mitzvah (conformity to divine commandments) in general and ritual acts in particular in Judaism: “Such ritual acts, which help train Jews to acknowledge otherness and thus to recognize one's responsibility to others, do so by occurring in nature by setting up a ‘distance’ between the Jew and God as other. Ritual acts, that is, are part of the mythology of theology; they deal with Jews and God, but what they accomplish is a first step in the process of education that leads to the acknowledgment of the face of the other person” (378).

What I suggest ought to be considered is that perhaps the transcendental condition of rabbinic Judaism is the opposite of the transcendental condition of Levinasian ethics—which is to say, one needs a more probing exploration of the interconnections subsisting between two topics that Morgan discusses (transcendental philosophy and Levinas in Chap. 2 and rabbinic ethics and Levinas in Chap. 11) than the one that Morgan provides. Levinas's ethics of substitution could be appropriately regarded as a Jewish ethics if in fact a cogent linkage could be shown to exist between Jewish humility and Christian passivity. In my view, the two virtues are deeply antagonistic. A good textual locus for capturing the momentous differences that are at stake between them is Aphorism 515 of Pascal's Pensées: “Romans iii, 27. Boasting is excluded. By what law? Of works? Nay, but by faith. Then faith is not within our power like the deeds of the law, and it is given to us in another way.” Paul and Pascal emphasize an intimate conceptual bond that they take to exist between a religion that emphasizes justification by faith (Christianity) and humility, and a religion that focuses on justification by works (Judaism) and boasting. From their point of view, a religion that is pivoted on faith and denigrates works because it is so utterly God dependent induces humility. By contrast, a religion that assigns important theological space to human works (ma'assei mitzvah) creates unending occasions for boasting and the assertion of human pride.

From the negative theological perspective that Levinas endorses—one that emphasizes that we can only say what God is not, but not what he is, that, in effect, the whole divine vocabulary remains irredeemably metaphoric—one could say that Paul and Pascal have got it all wrong. Judaism assigns a central role to human doing in carving out the man–God relationship because of God's utter transcendence. The human community must assent to the idea of God and fashion a way of life that is geared toward acknowledging and serving him because, otherwise, the idea of God would be an unsustainable and untranslatable abstraction. The stress on deeds is itself a dramatization of our humility—of our hankering for an infinite dimension in our explanatory quests that we are then (because of its very unbridgeable metaphysical distance from us) unable to assimilate into our regular experience. The idea of God represents a limit to human rationality—and we structure a way of life centering around mitzvot to serve him and to worship him as an extended gesture toward integrating our awareness of and grappling with our limitations into an ongoing fabric of life.

By contrast, Christianity's characterization of itself as committed to salvation through faith transforms humility into passivity before God as the supreme virtue. In many respects, passivity constitutes the antithesis of humility—and, indeed, in its refusal to assign positive importance to deeds, represents a species of arrogance. Humility confronts a jarring issue of reflexivity that makes it akin to skepticism. The practicing skeptic who questions everything already knows more (that everything is vulnerable to questioning) than his skepticism warrants him to know. Analogously, self-consciously pursuing humility, critically assessing whether one is succeeding in cultivating it, and finally being able to acknowledge that it is within one's repertoire of moral virtues all foster a sense of pride concerning one's humility, which undermines the content of the virtue. To be a self-aware practitioner of humility is already to have forfeited the virtue.

Morgan devotes a good deal of attention to considering the role of skepticism in Levinas's thought. In addition to addressing the question of the role of skepticism in Levinas's argument in Otherwise than Being (305–13), he elaborates in two whole chapters (Chap. 6 and Chap. 9), taking Levinas to belong in relation to contemporary debates in moral philosophy between the moral realists and the antirealists (whether they be relativists, naturalists, or constructivists). The textual evidence with regard to this central question is ambiguous and complex. Drawing the lines of interconnection between Levinas's Jewish (rabbinic) self-identifications and questions pertaining to objectivity and subjectivity in moral judgment more tightly might have nudged Morgan to assign greater weight to the following considerations: Is moral realism the only route to take to get to ethics as first philosophy? Cannot skepticism and ethical constructivism accomplish the same result at a far lower level of ontological commitment? Why is ethical realism necessary in order to make the case for the primacy of the face—the absolute demand of the other over me? Does not a more pragmatic basis for this commitment yield the ultimately more powerful position because it is contingent on being able to show that the moral realist cannot do better than the moral pragmatist in coming up with a set of assumptions and a structure of argument that will exhibit the enduring nature of moral principles? This negative route might be the most we can traverse in moral argument—and this position might be part of the latent content of Levinas's thought.

In the Talmud's delineation of the virtue of humility in its famous story about Hillel (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 30b–31a), who refused to be ruffled by the provocative heathen who came to him in a series of visits on the eve of the Sabbath to ask a whole host of nonsensical questions and who in the end proclaims that he lost a huge amount of money in a bet that he would be able to upset Hillel, a more coherent and consistent reading of the virtue of humility emerges that has its analogues with regard to skepticism. Hillel responds to the heathen's cry of despair at his equanimity by saying that it would have been worth that the heathen should lose a lot more money and Hillel should not lose his balance and composure. In other words, given the way in which the virtue of humility militates against its own realization, the only way that it becomes humanly accessible, albeit in an adulterated, secondary form, is through the manifestation of egoistic pride. Hillel's pride in being able to sustain an even-tempered, inner-directed and inner-controlled disposition nurtures his humble stance in relation to the menacing, gratuitously intrusive heathen. Humility is a willfully fabricated external mask engendered by a self that is endlessly devoted to continuing calculations and manipulations that will exalt it in its own eyes. Humility forms a limit and a boundary of the self driven to its self-cultivation and self-transcendence (which turns out to be just one further stage in its self-cultivation).

Christianity seeks to eviscerate the taint of human selfhood, both in terms of how it theorizes the human approach to God and how it conceives of our relationship to others and to ourselves. The metaphors of God the son and the incarnation are supposed to conjure up the outpourings of grace and salvation from the divine side—dramatizing what is inconceivable and unattainable from the human side. Instead of God being a humble posit by a distraught humanity passionately grappling with its limitations, he constitutes an arrogantly fabricated disruption of our problematic human estate who presupposes the crushing of our humanity in the form of abject passivity before His saving and incomprehensible grace. Christian “humility” is achieved at the cost of a radical foreclosing of human groping and uncertainty. “Passivity,” by attempting to remove the taint of the self from humility, yields an unearned (arrogant) form of knowing passing itself off as a new form of knowing—namely, faith.

I would argue that Levinasian ethics with its primary emphasis falling on passivity before, substitution for, and incarnation of the Other reshapes human ethics after the manner that Christianity reconfigures the man–God relation. A self whose enthrallment by the Other precedes its integration of itself—a self whose nurturance of its ego cannot proceed outside the context of thorough subordination to the other—bears even as metaphor and transcendental deduction very little direct affinity to generally understood ethical norms and forms of behavior. The overtaking of the self by the Other before there can even be a self means that none of the menus of traditional ethical virtues from thoughtfulness to charitableness has scope in which to operate. A self that already incarnates the Other does not have to engage in the usual processes of ethical deliberation and judgment before it can behave in ethically approved ways toward others. Just as Christian theology in glorifying passivity circumvents the self and its rational limitations and deposits God in our laps instead of having us struggle toward Him, so, too, Levinasian ethics in underscoring the ontological primacy of substitution for and incarnation of the Other, in effect, jettisons ethics by giving us the Other as a precondition of selfhood, instead of acknowledging him or her as a perennially elusive goal that we delicately, tenuously, and precariously strive for. By denying the infrastructure of the self, the metaphor of closeness sells us much shorter than the metaphor of distance with regard to both religion and ethics.

In conclusion, I would like to say that Morgan's book is still an important book, because in the clarity and comprehensiveness of its treatment of Levinas, it enables us to gauge how far we can travel by taking Levinas at face value. In Morgan's reading, we are able to appreciate the full force of Levinas's rhetoric, and to understand better than we would have without his help why it has such a gripping effect upon us. The question that I have sought to raise in this review is whether, on a deeper level of interpretation, one needs to perceive Levinas's philosophy as diverging from his rhetoric in order to remain faithful to the Levinasian imperative of being maximally charitable toward him alongside all of our other human interlocutors.