In light of Heidegger's commitment to Nazism, Levinas felt compelled to reassess his earlier, impassioned Heideggerianism. The problem was not merely that Heidegger the empirical individual had become a Nazi. It was that he felt compelled to justify his political choice in an idiom drawn from his own singular brand of Existenzphilosophie. The entire process led to a certain attitudinal schizophrenia on Levinas's part. On the one hand, he felt that certain Heideggerian insights, such as the critique of the standpoint of the transcendental "subject," remained valuable. On the other hand, given Heidegger's intellectual proximity to Nazism, Levinas simultaneously sensed that the philosophy was rotten to the core.

Levinas sought to resolve or work through the problem in stages. In a 1934 essay "Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism," he condemned Nazism as a form of neopaganism that threatened the West's Judeo-Christian traditions. One of the article's targets was Heidegger, who early on had renounced Christianity and remained an avowed atheist. Later on, Levinas arrived at a deeper, more sweeping insight into the filiations between Nazism and Western thought in general. After the war, gruesome revelations about the death camps--in which most of Levinas's own extended family perished--provoked him to reassess the Western tradition in toto. Why was it, he inquired, that Western philosophy, despite its manifest sublimity and grandeur, could do nothing to prevent the genocidal mania of the Nazis? Especially damning, in Levinas's view, was the realization that in the face of the radical evil of Nazism, Western thought had demonstrated its own comprehensive impotence.

Levinas's reflections on these dilemmas developed into a wide-ranging indictment of the Western philosophical tradition. The basic problem was that, from time immemorial, metaphysics had privileged "ontology"--the study of Being, or of what things essentially "are"--over ethics. In other words, our most intimate and valued philosophical traditions have cared more about "beings" and how to define them than about our ethical dealings with fellow humans. The watchword of Levinas's mature philosophy, "ethics as first philosophy," sought to remedy the gross injustice entailed by the West's privileging of "theoretical reason" over moral concerns. Beginning with the Greeks, the West had embarked on a false path. Levinas sought to repose the question of "Athens versus Jerusalem," philosophy versus theology. By opting for Athens, or "ontology," the West, to its detriment, had demoted the importance of the biblical tradition in which, conversely, ethical commandments--Moses' receipt of the Ten Commandments at Sinai; Jesus' injunction to "love thy neighbor as thyself"--received pride of place.

Through his conception of ethics as first philosophy, Levinas sought to redress this pervasive and debilitating imbalance. He discovered another important source of ethical inspiration in Dostoyevsky's novels, which pit the spiritual power of "love," or caritas, against reason's instrumentalizing effects.

For Levinas, ethics derives from the claims of the Other, or l'Autrui. The centerpiece of his mature thought is the idea of the "face of the Other." In Levinas's view the face of the Other confronts us with an "infinite" moral claim, one that is anterior to all theoretical or intellectual judgments. He uses a series of dramatic metaphors--he frequently speaks of the Other's "nakedness" and "destitution"--to drive home the point that he or she stands totally at our mercy. To dramatize that our debt to the Other is essentially unsatisfiable, Levinas frequently cites an unsettling maxim from The Brothers Karamazov: "Each of us is guilty before the other for everything, and I more than any." Since, given our intrinsic limitations as finite beings, we can never entirely satisfy the Other's claims, at issue is a relationship of "infinity," or "transcendence." Theoretical reason, conversely, aims at a type of totalizing comprehension, or "closure," that Levinas belittles as "totality." It is incurably egocentric and proceeds by reducing the Other to Sameness--in Levinas's idiom, "ipseity." Thus the animating opposition of his 1961 masterwork: "Totality" versus "Infinity."

But the limitations of Levinas's method also need to be highlighted. For in attempting concertedly to distance his philosophy from Heidegger's errors, he may have enmeshed himself more deeply in the Freiburg philosopher's approach. Levinas's indictment of reason as "totalizing" betrays uncanny affinities with Heidegger's later thought, which was also predicated on a rejection of reason as a form of domination simpliciter. And in both cases, the vilification of reason goes too far. In the annals of Western thought, reason has always contained strong utopian aspirations. It promises a rectification of social injustice, a righting of wrongs. The radical critique of reason that both Levinas and Heidegger advocate risks rendering social criticism impotent. For without reason's capacity to make significant distinctions and cogent judgments, we would be deprived of the conceptual means of our own emancipation. We would stand speechless and impotent. Moreover, were their own philosophies to disregard communicative reason entirely, they would be unintelligible--in which case they would be, frankly, quite useless.

Moral reasoning provides us with a strong incentive to act in the world and to remedy oppression. Levinas's quasi-mystical veneration of Otherness, conversely, resembles an "epiphany." But it is nearly impossible to translate an epiphany into meaningful political action. As an experience of transcendence, an epiphany cannot be made into an object of legislation. Moreover, with Levinas, indebtedness to the Other becomes a relationship of exclusivity to the extent that it becomes physically and emotionally impossible to assume loyalty to multiple others. For these reasons, it is next to impossible to derive a meaningful politics from his ethical doctrines. Levinas confirms this suspicion when in Totality and Infinity he declares, "Politics left to itself bears a tyranny within itself." His messianic reverence for Otherness denigrates all other forms of action, including political involvement, as sordidly "instrumental." As such, it steadfastly resists generalization and leaves us in a type of political paralysis.

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