Facing the space of reasons

ENKevin Houser’s essay, “Facing the Space of Reasons,” enters into a comparative analysis of Kantian and Levinasian ethics. Holding to Levinas’s notion of absolute alterity, the alterity of the other in the for-the-other of ethics, he questions the priority and necessity of reason in responsibility, wondering about the role of the prerefiective. In the alterity of the face, Houser sees an alterity to reason. But insofar as other sorts of alterity also resist comprehension, he does not limit the alterity of the face to this resistance to reason. Thus, he focuses on the uniqueness of the alterity of the face to see how this singular alterity informs a specific form of reason-resistance, discussing how alterity and reason-resistance are related to moral responsibility. In many respects, Kantian and Levinasian ethics are similar. However, Levinas, unlike Kant, takes seriously radical alterity, embodiment, and sensibility, as positive components of his ethics. Houser makes the point that vulnerability constitutes alterity, and in this vulnerability as solicitation, alterity elicits the relationship of responsibility. Hauser invokes the figure of Cain, delving further into the relation between suffering and normativity, as understood each in his own way by Kant and Levinas. He writes of the difference between Greek wisdom and Jewish ethics to show that the most revolutionary or Copernican aspect of Levinas’s philosophy lies in its derivation of reason from ethics and not the reverse. Ethical anteriority or priority, however, is not understood historically or developmentally but normatively: ethics is the unconditional ground of order, including the order of reason.