Ethics comes prior to ontology and shapes the way it forms. Only ethical frames can unravel the internal logic of society.

To say that ethics is first philosophy is to say that ‘ethics is an optics’.1 This means that my ethical response to my fellow human being is the lens through which all other philosophical questions must be addressed. Levinas's position has affinities with Stephen Darwall's recent account of how we recognize the moral authority of persons from the ‘second‐person standpoint’ (Darwall 2006),2 but for Levinas that authority is not merely of interest to ethics; it ramifies into a basic principle of phenomenological ‘seeing’ and so of philosophical method. According to Levinas this thought has eluded the Western philosophical tradition, which has instead sought to ground ethical relations—my obligations to others—in ontology, an account of what there is. Thus he holds that ‘the terms must be reversed’ (TI: 47): ethics—an account of obligation in its character as obligation—is prior to ontology, knowledge of being. This is a provocative thought that can be understood in many ways, some of which can be quite hard to motivate and defend.3 The best way to understand what it means is to recover the phenomenological problem that provided the context for its dialectical development. More specifically, I will argue that Levinas's idea can be defended if we see how it solves a phenomenological puzzle about responsibility, about that responsiveness to normative distinctions which is a condition on possessing the sort of intentional content we do.4

Thus the project is in a certain sense quite a restricted one. I will not argue (though I think it true) that the phenomenological approach to intentional content is superior to all others—neo‐Hegelian accounts such as those of Robert Brandom, John McDowell, or Robert Pippin, for instance, or the various computational approaches found in the cognitive sciences. To do so would require a different kind of paper. Rather, I will argue that there is a certain internal ‘logic’ to the phenomenological development of the problem, one that ultimately requires something like the move Levinas makes under the heading of ‘ethics as first philosophy’. The argument takes place in three stages. In Section 2, I show how Husserl traces the account of intentional content (an ‘objective world’) to the constitution of the other subject. But he fails adequately to link the nature of the other, so constituted, to the crucial element in the emergence of intentional content, namely, its normative structure. In Section 3, then, I argue that Sartre's phenomenology of the Look addresses this issue by showing how my experience of the other as subject is not originally the experience of an object with certain special properties (such as that of being conscious, as in Husserl) but of myself as being the object of a normative judgment. On this basis, the world I inhabit is itself transformed into a modalized—i.e., normatively structured—world. I then show that Sartre's phenomenology cannot do justice to its own insight without adopting what Levinas calls the priority of ethics over ontology. In Section 4 I address two objections to this conclusion that have arisen within the phenomenological tradition.

If the argument goes through, then establishing this logic also provides one sort of reason for seeing Levinas's controversial position as a defensible one—though I do not claim in this way to establish the defensibility of that highly diverse, and diversely motivated, position in all its particulars. On the contrary, I will apply the standard of phenomenological first‐person experience to both the content and style of Levinas's writing in such a way that one can distinguish in it a genuine phenomenological contribution and aspects that might be motivated by other aims.

Levinas himself provides encouragement for the project, since he explicitly claims that his idea is phenomenologically defensible: ‘the presentation and development of the notions employed owes everything to the phenomenological method’ (TI: 28). Phenomenology unpacks the horizons in which ‘naive thought’ and experience are embedded, horizons that ‘endow them with meaning’. At its limit, phenomenology thematizes the ‘overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives’ (ibid.)—namely, the ethical relation that Levinas proposes to describe. Because it is a condition on all ‘objectifying thought’, including the sort of thinking found in traditional ontology, thematizing this ‘forgotten’ experience will require a reversal of the traditional grounding relation between ontology and ethics. The charge of the present paper, then, is to make explicit how, as Levinas says, ‘Husserlian phenomenology has made possible this passage from ethics to metaphysical exteriority’ (TI: 29).5

Because we wish to situate Levinas's claim that ethics is first philosophy within its phenomenological context, not every antecedent of that idea will be equally relevant. For instance, he frequently invokes Plato's ‘good beyond being’ (epekeina tes ousias) in this connection. When Plato identifies the Good as the source and nourishment of all beings, including the eide, one might see a trace, within the Western tradition, of the priority of ethics over ontology. But such a trace cannot justify the idea. Levinas is also fond of characterizing the other person's ‘metaphysical’ stature by reference to Descartes' idea of God. When Descartes sees that his knowledge of his own imperfection presupposes the presence in him of the idea of God's perfection, an idea of which God alone could have been the source, this suggests the Levinasian idea that the Other is prior to the self and a condition on its knowledge of things in the world.6 But again, the theological language can only illustrate the idea, not support it. Indeed, ‘it is our relations with men that give to theological concepts the sole significance they admit of’ (TI: 79), and ‘our relations with men’ is precisely the terrain cultivated by the phenomenological approach.7 Finally, while Levinas often motivates his ideas by contrasting them with Hegel's (e.g., the latter's account of lordship and bondage), he does so not by criticizing Hegel's dialectical argument but by providing an alternative phenomenology. It is phenomenology that shows how the ‘totality’ articulated in Hegel's Logik presupposes the ‘infinity’ which is another name for the ethical relation; and it is phenomenology that undermines the Hegelian thesis that we are reduced by history to ‘being bearers of forces that command [us] unbeknownst to [ourselves]’ (TI: 21).