Prolegomenon Concerning the Scope of Ethics

Ethics is prima facie concerned with what one does or should do. Philosophically, it belongs to an area distinct from fundamental inquiries into what is (ontology) or how we know (epistemology). Yet at certain junctures in intellectual history ethics becomes more than that. It becomes essential to interpreting all realms of philosophy and of life. Ethics comes to be understood as fundamental to any disclosure of the world and to the very consciousness of self. From this perspective, what things are and how we know them cannot even be considered until an ethical relation has been taken up vis-à-vis others and perhaps even vis-à-vis an absolute or divine Other. Cosmology, or the representation of the universe, and the very foundation of knowing become irreducibly ethical matters and must necessarily be grasped in ethical terms. Ethics in this sense is more than one branch of knowledge among others; it enfolds in embryo a comprehensive vision of the world and its conditions of possibility.

What does it mean to have an ethical vision of human existence and relatedness in the world? How does life look when viewed through radically ethical optics? Certain intellectual projects push the ethical point of view to its limits and reveal its scarcely fathomable depths of significance. Among them are those of Dante and Levinas. The famous Dantesque, or possibly pseudo-Dantesque, Letter to Can Grande classifies the Paradiso as ethical or moral philosophy (“morale negotium, sive ethica”). This may strike us as somewhat surprising, given the sweeping cosmological and metaphysical scope of the poem. The encyclopedic embrace of all knowledge and culture, natural and divine, makes the poem philosophical in the broadest and highest sense. But evidently all this philosophy and general knowledge is to be understood as in essence ethical. It is in ethics that the significance of any kind of knowledge is realized, according to this outlook. Such an outlook has been accorded an explicit theorization in our own time by Emmanuel Levinas. In his conception of ethics as “first philosophy,” a radical claim again is made that all wisdom, human and divine, reduces in the end to an ethical knowing or unknowing.

Seen in historical perspective, the Letter to Can Grande’s classification of Dante’s poem as a work of ethics is actually not idiosyncratic but belongs broadly to the culture of rhetorical humanism, stemming from Cicero, in which Dante was steeped. Such a conception of ethics is attested, for example, in the twelfth century by John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon. Dante follows the Latin humanist tradition in elevating ethics to a preeminent position as the sum and goal of all knowledge. Quintilian provided a formulation of this principle that remained influential throughout the Middle Ages. Equated with the whole of oratory, itself considered to be an omni-comprehensive art and science, ethics comprehended all the other disciplines within itself.  By this account, knowledge generally is considered to be fundamentally ethical. Yet Dante gives a more specific and much more powerful motivation to “ethics” in a sense that can be seen as pointing in the direction of Levinas’s revival of ethical thinking. Interestingly, Levinas also recognizes “humanism” as a term with which his style of philosophy resonates, particularly in L’humanisme de l’autre homme.

It will be instructive for readers of Dante to glimpse the philosophical depths that ethical vision can entail as it is envisioned by Levinas. Beyond the sentiments involved and magisterially expressed by the poet, ethical vision constitutes an original access to truth of the kind that Dante wishes to impart. The benefits, furthermore, of this comparison are reciprocal. Dante’s example helps to render palpable and compelling some far-reaching motivations for ethical vision that Levinas tends to overlook or exclude. A number of Levinas scholars have felt that his stringently ethical thinking is lacking in a cosmological and aesthetic sensibility, and they have wished to integrate his ethics with these other dimensions of knowledge and experience.  Something of the kind can be found in full flower in Dante: he thereby helps us to imagine how a fully fleshed-out universe might be integrated into an ethical perspective, even where Levinas himself was not able or willing to pursue such a comprehensive synthesis.

This particular comparison, then, is illuminating because Levinas seems to lack the cosmic-aesthetic dimension of ethical vision that is so powerfully and vividly elaborated by Dante. Conversely, the deeper philosophical motivations for Dante’s vision as a rigorously ethical one are not readily apparent without explicit philosophical meditation on the meaning of ethical vision, and this is what Levinas supplies with such insight. Preliminarily, let it be said that for both authors the essence of ethics is a radical transcendence of oneself in relation to an Other who is other than all one can say. This relation is constituted in language, but specifically as its limit-condition and as manifest in the failure of language adequately to represent or express this unapproachable, inappropriable otherness.

In their different idioms, both Dante and Levinas tell of an experience of radical transcendence that reduces the individual subject to an absolute passivity and passion vis-à-vis what is characterized as not characterizable at all. Both find themselves face to face with the Ineffable. Their angles of approach to this ultimate experience of transcendence, however, are very different: Dante’s universal cosmological journey of consciousness culminates in the vision of God, whereas Levinas’s effort is primarily aimed at acknowledging the claim made by the particular other person facing one, a claim upon one’s unconditional responsibility as a limitless obligation. Nevertheless, crucial aspects of what I am calling ethical vision can be brought into focus by comparing these two very different ethical visionaries. In particular, this convergence can help us recognize more clearly the dimension of the ineffable as the final, inarticulable, ethical burden of language.