Ethics as first philosophy: Aristotelian reflections on intelligence, sensibility, and transcendence

ENThe present essay undertakes to show that a consonant understanding of the relation between the practical and the theoretical may be found in Aristotle. Such a way of receiving Aristotle's thinking is called for by Levinas himself. To be sure, he pervasively refers to Aristotle as one of the paradigmatic figures in a philosophical tradition obsessed with logic/ontology and culminating with Heidegger. And yet, Levinas also lets transpire, with occasional and sudden gestures, the irreducibility of Aristotelian thinking to the hegemonic aspirations of the metaphysics it inaugurates. For instance, he notes the resourcefulness of Aristotle's thinking of the plurivocity of being vis-a-vis the concern with justice. In the essay "Totality and Totalization," he highlights the inexhaustibly disruptive power of sensibility at work both in Aristotle and in Kant: "Discovering a rationality at the level of the sensible and of the finite, in contrast with the inordinate rationality of the Platonic Idea, rediscovering the Aristotelian intelligibility inherent in things (which expresses itself in the Kantian doctrine of schematism, in which the concepts of the understanding are exposed in time), Kant's [critical] philosophy seriously shakes the foundations of the idea of totality". Again, Levinas repeatedly underlines the way in which Aristotle's understanding of the agent intellect splits open any pretense at rational as well as subjective self-containment and s self-sufficiency. Various philosophies at their "heights," he says, make it apparent that the "questioning of the Same by the Other, and what we have called 'wakefulness' or 'life,' is, outside of knowledge, a part of philosophy." Among the symptoms of such a questioning, he mentions "the beyond being in Plato ... the entrance through the door of the agent intellect in Aristotle; the idea of God in us, going beyond our capacity as finite.