Ethics as First Philosophy: Aristotelian Reflections on Intelligence, Sensibility, and Transcendence

One of Levinas' crucial contributions to contemporary thought is the understanding of ethics as first philosophy. This view calls for a radical critique of the priority traditionally accorded to rational-scientific knowledge, with respect to which the various disciplines would be construed in their derivativeness, merely as fields in which purely rational structures would find their application. In this perspective, theoretical knowledge, far from autonomous and self-grounding, is exposed as emerging out of practical involvements and, more broadly, out of the involvement in sensibility and phenomenality. Such an involvement is irreducible to experience understood as the content of formal and formalized knowledge as always already brought back to, contained in, and owned by self-consciousness. Rather, it points to experience as that which cannot be thematically circumscribed. It points to the "vivacity of life" as a matter of "excession (excession), the rupture of the container by the noncontainable" (EN 88). Such would be the "very event of transcendence as life" (EN 87) in its anarchic precedence with respect to all arkhe. © 2008 by Indiana University Press. All rights reserved.