Levinas and Kant: Right, Law, and the Other

Beyond the deep affinities linking Immanuel Kant’s declared “primacy of practical reason” and Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy,” these thinkers radically diverge, as do modern rationalism and contemporary phenomenology. The paper shows that Kant, despite his declaration, continues to give primacy to epistemology and reason, as evidenced by the supreme status of law – both in nature, to be sure, and in the autonomy of rational self-legislation. This contrasts with Levinas who recognizes as “original right” a moral imperative more exigent than the rule of law, emanating from the alterity or face of the other person. Such original right orders the self pre-originally or “an-archically” to a moral responsibility to and for the other person before all else. In this way, Levinas, in contrast to Kant, understands the source of intelligibility – including the rationality of logic and science – in and as the goodness of the priority of moral obligation.