Abstract

A certain type of metaphysical manicheism has become quite prevalent among Levinas readers who insist in declaring his ethics to be a morally and, ultimately, politically necessary departure from Heidegger’s ontology. This approach inadequately moralizes Levinas’ articulation of the ethical which, I argue here, ought to be understood as an account of the pre-reflective normative conditions of ontology as meaning. In this paper, I seek to show that Levinas account of Ethics is squarely rooted in the epistemology of Heidegger’s Being and Time and that, his phenomenological articulation of pre-deliberative normativity may be read as the Deduction and Schematism of Being and Time, that is, as its central mechanism.