Levinas’s ethical horizon, affective neuroscience, and social field theory

ENAccording to Simon Critchley, “Levinas’s big idea is that the relation to the other cannot be reduced to comprehension and that this relation is ethical.” The question that Critchley poses is simply: “But is he right?” My purpose here is to answer that question with evidence from outside Levinas’s works. In respect to Levinas’s main thesis that “ethics is first philosophy,” I give a short confirmation provided from neuroscience, then follow his hint about “The Interpersonal Curvature of Space” (77 291) to pursue this suggestion about social space by sketching a field theory. Instead of trying to explain and justify Levinas from within his own corpus, which has been done, we can confirm from external evidence that (1) humans are social by nature (which is not news, of course), and that (2) it is primarily through affectivity that we are social (for example, face recognition offers evidence supporting affect as the basis of sociality), and that (3) ethics emerges from within the social as an amplification of affect. Levinas’s ethical variation on the Hcidcggerian theme of the primacy of affective intcntionality over cognitive intentionality leads us to confirm the role of affect as protoethics both from neuroscience and from social field theory. In sum, inspired by Levinas’s grounding ethics on affect (instead of through cognition or volition), we search for evidence for or against that idea in social neuroscience.