Comments on Robert J. Anderson "From Hegel back to Kant: Levinas and the future of philosophy"

ENRobert Anderson represents Levinas as responding to difficulties inherent to Kant’s views. I find this approach enlightening, and consequently, rather than criticize Anderson’s paper, I will attempt to expand on it, with an eye not only to illuminating Levinas’s work, but also Kant’s. Viewing Kant from Levinas’s perspective allows us to understand several strands in Kant’s writings that I find especially compelling, despite the fact that they do not fit very nicely with what might be called Kant’s “official position.” The official position can be seen as motivated by the threat Kant perceived eighteenth-century intellectual currents to pose to morality. In Kant’s view, this threat results not only from the advance of Newtonian science, but also from (to use Levinas’s terminology) the totalizing theological outlook embodied in the Leibnizian metaphysics that Kant grew up with, for both are deterministic systems that are incompatible with the radical freedom necessary for the very possibility of moral principles and moral responsibility.