The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas's Reading of

Kant
Brigitta Keintzel

Levinas Studies, Volume 14, 2020, pp. 127-149 (Article)

Published by Philosophy Documentation Center

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/800590

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The Other as Categorical Imperative:
Levinas’s Reading of Kant
Brigitta Keintzel

Abstract: For Kant and Levinas, the categorical imperative is the only possible
formula for universalization. It has a structural necessity. Its claim is ultimate,
valid without exception, and therefore reason-based. What differentiates Levi-
nas from Kant is Kant’s assumption that “pure reason, practical of itself” is
“immediately lawgiving.” Levinas contradicted this form of reason legislating
itself as an end in itself: according to Levinas, reason has no self-generated
power. Although both agree that the achievement of an ethical insight depends
on “passivity,” in contrast to Kant Levinas does not consider this “passivity”
to be part of a conceptual insight. Its place is outside the subject. Instead of
an “archetype” that already exists in the subject, Levinas advocates the con-
ception of a counter-image whose form is based on the face. This face is not
speechless. His speech is based on a universalizable commandment, namely
the commandment: You shall not kill me. In its full extent, this claim can only
be understood via a body-based understanding of the categorical imperative.

Keywords: Autonomy, Responsibility, Reason, Body, Face, Ethics, Human

Rights

I
n the scholarly literature, the relationship between Kant and
Levinas is often either unjustly neglected or shortened and po-
larized. These abbreviations and polarizations give the impression that Levinas
and Kant represent different philosophical approaches which are incompatible in
their methodological orientation and cannot be brought into dialogue with each
other. The philosophical concern here is to describe and record the differences
between the two approaches. One of these differences (and polarities) should be
seen, for example, in the assertion that Kant is a thinker of autonomy and agency
and Levinas a thinker of heteronomy and responsibility. This dualism is thought
along the dividing line of body-mind. In this perspective, Kant is perceived as a
thinker for whom the purely intellectual and cognitive disposition of the subject
is decisive, whereas for Levinas the bodily existence of the subject is central. In
this shadowy juxtaposition, Kant and Levinas prove to be two sons of a common
(but lost) ancestry. This polarized confrontation is anything but accurate and

Levinas Studies Volume 14 (2020), ISSN 1544-7000 pp. 127–149

doi: 10.5840/levinas202132913
128 Levinas Studies, Volume 14

basically reflects only a caricature of both Kant’s and Levinas’s philosophy. To

make matters worse, there are already a number of debates in Kant scholarship
that have very different approaches. They revolve around the question of how
the “fact of reason” should be understood, and what correspondence this fact
has in the subject. However, this cannot hinge upon an ego-centered foundation:
when we speak of reason, it is necessary to distinguish a claim to reason from
a claim to validity. Levinas’s interpretation of the Kantian concept of reason
is also situated within the interpretative framework of this distinction. Here I
maintain that Levinas not only gave Kant’s philosophical concerns a new ori-
entation, but in some respects also claimed to take Kant’s claim of a “rigor of
reason” more seriously than Kant did. This seriousness can be seen in the way
Levinas interpreted Kant’s demands of practical reason. This interpretation is
based on a concentrated reading of Kant that is anything but superficial.
Nevertheless, Levinas’s understanding of Kant’s texts cannot be traced
back to exclusively hermeneutical concerns. His interpretation was developed
in direct confrontation with the totalitarian movements and violent crimes of
the twentieth century, especially the Shoa. As early as 1934, in his essay “On
the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas inquires into the conditions that led to
these events. I describe this connection in my first section. The reflections on the
approach of the Western tradition expressed in this essay provide a framework
within which Levinas’s interpretation of Kant’s philosophy is also situated. In
his interpretation, he was not concerned with bending Kant to the point of allow-
ing himself to be integrated into the framework of interpretation of his thoughts;
on the contrary, what Levinas claimed was to reclaim the very rigor of reason
Kant himself demanded for his own thought, and at the same time to renounce
those loci of retreat based in the pre-conceptual depths of the subject provided
by Kant’s ethics. This evolves into a complex view, which I describe in my sec-
ond section. This view claims to be formulated through the perspective of the
other. In my reading, Levinas’s appreciation of the perspective of the other is to
be seen as a deepening—and not a revision—of the transcendental philosophical
approach. The other, or more precisely the prerogative of the other, is the pri-
mary perspective from which the understanding of reason and ethics is opened
up. This perspective does not lead away from Kant, but back to him, albeit with
limitations. Levinas questioned Kant’s conceptual entanglement of “I think”
with universally anonymous concerns, but without renouncing universal claims.
According to him, universal claims are not a conceptual extension of individual
claims but begin to speak in the perspective of the other.
In my third section, I ask about the conditions through which the other
can enter the consciousness of the subject. The exploration of these precon-
ditions shows that Levinas has given different weight to philosophically
well-established concepts, something like that of “Vorstellung,” meaning and
relation. A different weighting of these terms also causes a different reading
 Brigitta Keintzel • The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant 129

of the categorical imperative. Nevertheless, these differences must not obscure

the commonalities: in both, the categorical imperative is an important point of
articulation that brings the force field subject into relation with the force field
society. In addition, Levinas has not failed to notice that there are different in-
terpretations of this imperative. The exploration of this difference is interwoven
with the question of what we are to understand by reason, what we can expect
from it, and how it can be validated at all. This claim is guaranteed in its entirety
by the prerogative of the other. For Levinas, it is the central perspective from
which the understanding of the categorical imperative opens up. This perspec-
tive allows us to bring Levinas into dialogue with Kant, and thus to appreciate
the seriousness of Kant’s enterprise—but it also allows us to examine the valid-
ity of the categorical imperative in light of totalitarian problems of the twentieth
century. This connection is necessary for Levinas: for him, there is no politically
free space in which a philosophical question can be asked. On the contrary, the
consideration of political manifestations shapes the conditions for the consid-
eration of Western tradition and thus also for the categorical imperative. An
important background for this was the rise of totalitarian movements, which
Levinas recognized in 1934—one year after the National Socialists seized po-
litical power in Germany—not only as a political but also as a philosophical
problem, as described in the part 1 of this article.

“Philosophy of Hitlerism” as Introduction for Levinas’s Understanding of Western

and Kantian Philosophy
After the assumption of power by the National Socialists, Levinas’s engage-
ment with German-speaking and, by extension, Western tradition resulted in a
marked intensification and profiling of his philosophical thoughts. Also influ-
enced by Rosenzweig’s intellectual framework, which constituted an important
intellectual resource for Levinas’s philosophy,1 Levinas did not consider Na-
tional Socialism “only” as a political event, but equally related to philosophical
interdependencies and premises.
The twenty-nine-year-old Levinas explores these philosophical connec-
tions and prerequisites in his essay “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,”
which begins with the statement: “Hitlerism is more than a plague or a conta-
gion or a madness; it is an awakening of elementary feelings.”2 In this essay his
subject of inquiry is not the existing “logical contradictions” but “the original
decisions” from which existing currents of thought emerge, as did those of the
“philosophy of Hitlerism.” These “original decisions” are founded in the denial
of the “non-originality” of human existence. In contrast, Levinas defends the in-

1
Well known to Levinas scholars is his comment in the preface of Totality and Infin-
ity: “We were impressed by the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig’s
Stern der Erlösung, a work too often present in this book to be cited” (Totality, 28).
2
Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” 64.
130 Levinas Studies, Volume 14

sight that the corporal contingency and existential exposure of human existence
are important preconditions for understanding freedom, which is based on the
self-legislation of the law. The question Levinas asks is: what contribution has
Western thought made towards understanding these “original decisions”? He
also looks for the structure of thought which characterizes the Western tradi-
tion—and which failed to oppose the emergence of National Socialism.
Levinas discusses liberalism as manifested in the last few centuries, in-
asmuch as liberalism was conceived as “the sovereign freedom of reason.”3
Kant is not explicitly mentioned in this passage, but Levinas’s philosophical
terminology certainly suggests that he is addressing Kant in his reflections on
autonomous and psychologically based freedom. Levinas describes as problem-
atic “that famous subject of transcendental idealism, that before all else wishes
to be free and thinks itself free.”4 This concept of freedom is problematic when
it becomes linked to an instrumental understanding of politics: “Political free-
doms do not exhaust the content of the spirit of freedom, a spirit that, in Western
civilization, signifies a conception of human destiny” as Levinas notes.5 And
it is exactly this inadmissible correspondence between philosophical will or
intention and the instrumental-political manifestation of freedom that must be
discussed in the political form of liberalism, when freedom is defined in terms
of realization but not in terms of liberation: “If the liberalism of these last few
centuries evades the dramatic aspects of such a liberation, it does retain one of
its essential elements in the form of the sovereign freedom of reason.”6 What
Levinas criticizes is that the “liberalism of these last few centuries” promotes
a concept of freedom that has meant a freedom for something. Levinas con-
tested this psychological (or religious) claim, which he considered an essential
component of an illegitimate, sovereign understanding of freedom. In Levinas’s
understanding, freedom must be a freedom that is unconditionally open to an
“unforeseeable future”; accordingly, this claim must not be based in any kind of
external guarantees. But when we assume that the claim of knowledge as to how
things appear is based on the claim that the world reconstructed by idealistic
philosophy “is steeped in reason and subject to reason,”7 this indeed constitutes
such an external guarantee.
The key problem with this approach is an unclear relationship between
idea and reason. Freedom is seen not only as a claim, but also as a manifesta-
tion. In this mental scenario, the conceptual relation between idea and reason
can no longer be questioned but is regarded as an “end in itself.” In his brief
exposé “The Struthof Case,” Levinas describes this “end in itself” as a perma-

3
Levinas, “Hitlerism,” 66.
4
Levinas, “Hitlerism,” 63.
5
Levinas, “Hitlerism,” 64.
6
Levinas, “Hitlerism,” 66.
7
Levinas, “Hitlerism,” 66.
 Brigitta Keintzel • The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant 131

nent source of Hitlerism: “The exaltation of sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice,
faith for the sake of faith, energy for the sake of energy, fidelity for the sake
of fidelity, fervour for the heat it procures, the call to a gratuitous—that is to
say, heroic—act: this is the permanent origin of Hitlerism.”8 Here, the object
of Levinas’s criticism is this claim to validity of freedom which nevertheless
remains embedded in the intellectual horizon of a supposedly rational being
and which is based on a hidden rational plan to be somehow rediscovered in the
process of knowing and realizing. Human freedom is reduced to the possibility
of foreseeing dangers that may threaten the self and averting them by reasonable
strategies.9 Through this controlled approach to history and reason, an uncon-
ditional unfolding of freedom can only partially succeed; it is constrained by
rational concepts or logical possibilities. Wo/Man remains a supernumerary
within a supposedly rational plan, a plan which suggests to her/him logical pos-
sibilities that nevertheless remain in permanent tension with humans in their
existential sensitivities. These “sensitivities,” according to Levinas, result from
the lifelong claims of “detachment” and “separating oneself.”10 These existen-
tial claims and necessity require that the question of meaning is not to be defined
against the background of a given logical construction of knowledge or an al-
ready predetermined plan of God or nature. Rather, history must be thought of
in its radical unforeseeability. Consequently, the focus of attention is not on a
rational principle, but on a philosophical consideration of existential claims,
which are connected with personal and social questions of meaning but are not
determined by logical constructions.
Levinas shares the insight into the necessity of the tension between logic
and ethics with many of his contemporaries. But he also discusses the prob-
lem of how to question a chronological understanding of time, which is often
equated with progress in Western history. This questioning cannot be achieved
through rational (logical) insights; instead, it must transpire in time via an ethi-

8
Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 149.
9
Levinas describes this understanding of freedom as follows: “Human freedom is
thus reduced to the possibility of foreseeing the danger of its own decay and to protecting
itself against such a decline. To make laws and create institutions based on reason which
will steer clear of the ordeal of abdiction is man’s unique opportunity. The romanticism of
the heroic stance, and the self-sufficient purity of feeling, must once more be substituted.
This substitute must be given its proper place and be put first. It is the contemplation of
ideas, something which makes republics possible. These republics crumble when one no
longer fights for something but for someone” (Difficult Freedom, 150).
10
The full quote is: “The soul’s detachment is not an abstract state; it is the concrete
and positive power to become detached and abstract. The equal dignity of each and every
soul, which is independent of the material or social conditions of people, does not flow
from a theory that affirms, beneath individual differences, an analogy based on a ‘psycho-
logical constitution.’ It is due to the power given to the soul to free itself from what has
been, from everything that linked it to something or engaged it with something [engagée],
so it can regain its first virginity” (“Hitlerism,” 66).
132 Levinas Studies, Volume 14

cal assurance of the subject’s own conditionality, linked by Levinas to a precise

understanding of reason. The claim of reason here is: how can we sharpen the
medium of reason in such a way that problems are not only recognized but also
justified for and by others. An ethical insight not only must be raised and well
argued; it also must gain approval and be justified. And it is precisely in this
interplay of perspectives that the ethical concerns of the other begin to take root.
Here, Levinas is also criticizing the instrumental use of wo/man for high-
er-level goals. Levinas’s reservations about an instrumental understanding of
history are based on phenomenological considerations. The body plays a key
role in these considerations. Our understanding of reason, history, and freedom
cannot be reduced on logical possibilities. Rather, in this context real freedom
means accepting “being chained to the body.”11
Freedom does not mean freedom from or with the body, but it is dependent
on the body. The body is not only a reference point, it is also an indispensable
point of departure; in fact, the state of “nudity”12—and thus also vulnerability,
bodily needs such as hunger or corporal integrity—signifies the imaginary van-
ishing point for the understanding of freedom. Still, freedom does not mean
absolutely setting the existence of my corporeality. Freedom is not simply free-
dom in the consciousness of my corporeality; it also demands a distancing from
this corporeality. This entails opportunities and dangers. One chance lies in the
contingency that it is precisely through such distancing that an existential (and
not historically justified) freedom can be preserved and constantly re-produced.
One danger is that when this distance is overcome, the bodily induced truth, like
a possession, is simply seized/grasped. From this vantage point, reified truths
emerge within which the subject’s understanding of physical truth is different
from other beliefs and bodily truths. Levinas describes the body-soul relation-
ship in drastic words. Precisely because the “being chained to the body” is
denied, “ideals of thinking” emerge that separate people from each other, only
to reunite them through rational constructions. Indispensable to this process are
mental operations bringing truth, lies, and deception into a conceptually close
relationship: Because “In the gap that separates man from the world of ideas,
deceit insinuates itself,” as Levinas notes.13 This gap between idea and reality
is problematic, because first the mental and then the factual manifestations of
“evil” enter stealthily, and then are declared to be a self-evident part of a social
reality that is difficult to question.
In 1934, shortly after the National Socialists’ assumption of power in Ger-
many, Levinas was adamant in his contention that the origin of “elemental evil”
is already inscribed in an ontological understanding of being: the singular as-

11
Levinas, “Hitlerism,” 70.
12
Levinas, “Hitlerism,” 65.
13
Levinas, “Hitlerism,” 69.
 Brigitta Keintzel • The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant 133

sertion made in his essay is that through a “formalization of time,”14 a thinking

subject can claim to be self-referential—but in claiming this, the subject is de-
ceiving him/herself. Put differently: the “formalization of time” in the process
of thinking creates a deceptive maneuver. This maneuver manifests itself in a
process of thinking that refers equally to the past, present, and future. Levinas
is thus criticizing an understanding of time that considers the diversity of being
without temporal distinction. This “being” also indiscriminately contains both
good and evil and is based on a thinking that brings universalism and racism
together into one context.15 A rampant universalism that sees good and evil as
“equivalent” must be stopped. However, according to Levinas, the alternative
may not be the actual adoption of a universal understanding of philosophy (and
of reason); instead, it is this concern for universal understanding that establishes
philosophy’s legitimacy. Thus, for Levinas the question is how we succeed in
describing the concerns of a legitimate universalism that is not about many (plu-
ral) benign and malign instances or systems of reason, but about one reason.16
Answering this question does not require the correct implementation of an idea:
lie and deception (as post-factual knowledge, to formulate it in a contemporary
frame) will creep into our thinking if we define “idea” as a self-contained el-

14
Levinas, Entre Nous: Deformalization of Time, 175–77. In more detail, with consid-
eration of Rosenzweig’s understanding of time, from the author, “Dauer und Augenblick,”
240–61.
15
Levinas, “Hitlerism,” 70.
16
Levinas describes a non-pluralistic understanding of reason as follows: “When the I
is identified with reason, taken as the power of thematization and objectification, it loses its
very ipseity. To represent to oneself is to empty oneself of one’s subjective substance and to
insensibilize enjoyment (. . . .) Reason makes human society possible; but a society whose
members would be only reasons would vanish as a society. What could a being entirely
rational speak of with another entirely rational being? Reason has no plural; how could
numerous reasons be distinguished? How could the Kantian kingdom of ends be possible,
had not the rational beings that compose it retained, as the principle of individuation, their
exigency for happiness, miraculously saved from the shipwreck of sensible nature? In Kant
the I is met with again in this need for happiness” (Totality and Infinity, 119).
As we shall see, it is precisely these hedonistic implications that contain a singular
understanding of reason which Levinas considers problematic. Catherine Chalier empha-
sizes in her study not only a different emphasis on the importance of happiness, but also
a different emphasis on the importance of hope for ethical thinking: “Nevertheless, in the
case of happiness, although both Kant and Levinas link it to the subject’s egoism and refuse
to put it at the center of moral preoccupations, though without condemning it, they do not
evaluate its persistence in the same way. Hence, Kant’s reflection on the worthiness to be
happy by means of morality justifies the concern for happiness to the point of making it an
ultimate hope, whereas Levinas announces its postponement as a result of the ethical un-
easiness caused by the weakness of the other but without postulating such a hope” (Chalier,
What Ought I To Do?, 139).
134 Levinas Studies, Volume 14

ement of meaning not in a processual exchange with the needs, opinions, and
thoughts of human beings.17
But Levinas does not stop at this philosophical and temporal-political di-
agnosis. Instead, he considers manifestations of National Socialism as a real
form of evolving evil and interprets this as a basis for the question: How do we
face the facts of dangers without clinging to illusions or fictions, and without
losing ourselves in self-deception? In philosophical terms, the question is: How
do we understand evil without explaining it metaphysically, mythologically, or
rationally? In psychological terms, the question is: How do we perceive the
outside world with its dangers and threats without living in self-deception or
in the mode of ontological imperialism (or narcissistic universalism)? These
questions not only touch on the foundations of human knowledge and dignity,
but also on the question of what we can understand by the term human reason,
and how we succeed in finding an understanding of reason not anchored in be-
ing. A separation between reason and being (and therefore also between reason
and understanding) is important because in order to be effective, reason—like a
judge or an independent verifier—must not be biased. Reason, which is based
on a direct or indirect involvement in the process of being, remains trapped in
the stranglehold of the so-called “real.” It cannot preserve its exclusivity (its
Principality)18; it is not one reason but one among many. In other words, reason
acquires its unique character when it succeeds in referring to being or empirical
reality and is not involved in it. Yet how is reason to manage this balancing act?
This is exactly where Levinas brings Kant into play as a philosophical
thinker. The particular attention Levinas gives to Kant’s philosophy thus should
not only be seen against the background of his own understanding of reason; it
is also linked to fundamental questions, such as how moral insights arises and
how they can be expressed in language, a language that then also allows for
intersubjective connectivity. Here, questions arise not only as to how reason can
aid in the establishing and recognition of meaning, but also as to what contribu-
tion reason makes to action. In this reference, Kant is an indispensable but not
uncontroversial point of departure.

17
The full quote is: “What characterizes the structure of thought and truth in the West-
ern world, as we have already stressed, is the distance that initially separates man from the
world of ideas in which he will choose his truth” (Levinas, “Hitlerism,” 69). From this
Levinas concludes that evil is not so much a deliberate cruelty, but an inattentiveness and
a “game” of thought. In the article “Transcendence and Evil” he describes the problematic
of an inattentive thinking as a non-difference between the real and the illusory: “the alter-
native of the real and the illusory breaks down” (Collected Philosophical Papers, 176).
18
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 177. I agree with Inga Römer’s emphasis
that the “Prinzipat” based on the formulation “Thou shall not kill me” can be identified as
a principle underlying all reasonable relationships. Compare with Römer’s Das Begehren
der reinen praktischen Vernunft: Kants Ethik in phänomenologischer Sicht, 384.
 Brigitta Keintzel • The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant 135

Levinas as a Reader of Kant

Levinas’s reading of Kant carries a special significance. His references to Kant
are sparse and nearly always based in a minimalist tendency that neither seeks
to address the prevalent issues of Kantian exegesis nor claims to answer open
questions in existing Kantian research (or link them to current issues). Levinas’s
estimation of Kant can be traced back to three insights: first, Kant’s separa-
tion between understanding and reason; second, the primacy of practical reason
over theoretical (pure) reason; and third, the outstanding role of the “synthesis
of apperception on condition that we understand it as a synthesis of intuition,
sight or light.”19 What does a “synthesis of intuition, sight or light” mean? From
a methodological standpoint we can say that Levinas’s does not identify the
transcendental apperception through a logical form. What he suggests is a shift
from rational to sensual claims. This shift enables not an irrational or a naively
dogmatic understanding of reason, but instead a richer understanding that leads
back to Kant’s rigorous understanding of reason, as I would like to show in this
section.
Here it is important to note that Levinas’s phenomenological, not concep-
tual, interpretation of apperception cannot simply be linked to an empirical view
of consciousness; for him, the attendant existential-spatial perspective is more
important. The subject is exposed to the world in that it is defined by the light:
the subject does not define the light. This in/transitive mode allows us to think
the subject not only in his presence but also in his absence, but not via an amal-
gation with the ray and source of light, and hence not by merging or matching
with an idea of being. A guarantor of this separation is the non-negotiable claim
of reason, which is ensured by the separation between understanding and rea-
son.20 This separation can be described in such a way that the objectives of
understanding can be exploited by different individual interests, whereas the ob-
jectives of reason are not negotiable: they claim independence from individual

19
“The complete quote is: “The world, whose existence is characterized by light, is
not, then, the sum of existing objects. The very idea of totality or of a whole is only intel-
ligible where there is a being that can embrace it. There is a totality because it relates to an
inwardness in the light. Here we come to recognize the profundity of Kant’s views about
the role of synthesis of apperception and of its unity in the constitution of the world—on
condition that we understand it as a synthesis of intuition, sight or light” (Levinas, Exis-
tence and Existents, 41).
20
Onora O’Neill rightly points out that Kant’s “fact of reason” is to be understood
as a postulate based on the difference between sensuality and understanding and is not to
be prematurely equated with an autonomy of the will (“Autonomy and the Fact of Rea-
son in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,” 82–83). Beate Rössler argues similarly: She
defends the meaning of autonomy as a necessary presumption for the understanding of
human rights—and identifies autonomy with independence from sensual claims (“Men-
schenrechte und Autonomie,” 250–53).
136 Levinas Studies, Volume 14

interests. These insights are cornerstones in Kant’s thinking and also essential
for Levinas—though he furnishes them with different conclusions.
In the essay “Transcendence and Evil,” Levinas sums up his position on
Kant as follows:
In distinguishing between ideas and concepts, reason and understanding,
Kant was indeed the first to separate thought from knowing, and thus to
discover meanings that do not rejoin being, or, more exactly, meanings not
subject to reality, which is in fact correlative with these categories. But this
thought distant from being, which is nevertheless not reducible to the mean-
ingless, is still understood by Kant to be empty of the things in themselves it
aims at. It is still measured against the being that it lacks. Ideas thus have a
dialectical status, in the pejorative sense which Kant gives to this adjective;
the transcendental illusion which plays this thought is the drama of an as-
piration after being. It is always as though rationality and the “spirit,” were
equivalent to the appearing of and knowledge of being, as though significa-
tion of meaning, intelligibility, were due to the manifestation of being, were
an ontology, here in the form of intentionality—a will, for a nostalgia, for
being. To be sure across these returns of ontology, Kant was bold enough
to formulate a more radical distinction between thought and knowing. He
discovers in the practical usage of pure reason a plot, which is not reducible
to a reference to being.21

It is precisely Kant’s understanding of practical reason through which Levi-

nas celebrates Kant on the one hand as a “thinker of transcendence,” who has
succeeded in differentiating between the process of thinking and the objects
of knowledge. He also praises Kant for the primacy of practical philosophy,
since it allows ethics and not epistemology to be regarded as the first form of
philosophy. However, Levinas expresses reservations regarding Kant when a
distinction is made between being and thinking not as absolute but “as if.”
Under closer examination, Levinas’s reservation here embodies a complex
view—including both agreement and disagreement, as I aim to show. Levinas
does agree with Kant when it comes to his emphasis on the condition of human
knowledge, which is a prerequisite for a meaningful understanding. But he does
not agree with him as long as this conditionality is equated with a cognitive-con-
stitutive act. The conditions for the possibilities of knowledge are not based on
a “logical-analytic identity of the transcendental apperception,” which is to be
understood as structurally analogous to a “manifold of the given.” To put it in
a nutshell: The ego is not because it thinks, it is before all else simply a “me.”
As “me,” it is identical not with itself, but with others—when it recognizes and
acknowledges not only its epistemic conditionality but also its ethical depen-
dence. As Levinas writes in the essay “Language and Proximity”: “The analytic
identity of transcendental apperception in Kant is distinguished from the multi-

21
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 175–76.
 Brigitta Keintzel • The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant 137

plicity of the given, irreducible to this identity.”22 Or, expressed in other words
and other mental images: In Levinas’s understanding there is not, as in Kant,
an analytic-logical unit that—like the neck of a bottle—controls the process
of knowledge and at the same time determines its capacity and limits. What
Levinas finds strange about Kant is an inversive—not negative—understanding
of ego identity. The ego is not an empty vessel that gathers projections of the
outside world, which can then be brought into a cognitive scheme via rubrics of
understanding. Perceptions cannot correlate to rubrics of understanding struc-
tured by “I think.” Levinas notes: “It is not because there exists, among beings,
a thinking being structured as I, pursuing ends, that being takes on signification
and becomes a world; it is because in the proximity of being is inscribed the
trace of an absence, or of the infinite, that there is dereliction, gravity, responsi-
bility, obsession and I.”23
According to Levinas, concepts of understanding are not correlative to per-
ception. The subject correlates with other subjects not by coherent thinking, but
by its proximity to language and by the “event of proximity,” as described in
the article “Language and Proximity.” In reality, Levinas is casting doubt on the
“immanent use of the concepts of the understanding,” which Kant apprehends
in a reciprocal relation to the perception of appearance; also under discussion
is the “immanent use of reason,” which in Kant is conceived with recourse to
a “hidden plan of nature.”24 This implicit recourse to nature weakens a close
connection between language and reason. We shall return later to this. For now,
let us stay with Levinas’s reservations against transcendental apperception. As
already mentioned above: for Levinas, a unity of “I think” reduced to a “logical
form” is problematic.25 But his criticism of a logical reduction does not mean
that the subject’s right to think is renounced. What Levinas claims, in diver-
gence from Kant, is that thinking is provoked (not accompanied) by perception
and does not—as Kant suggested—emerge through or develop by perception.
For Levinas, perception means to establish closeness while experiencing
resistance. This closeness constitutes the breeding ground from which lan-
guage—not war or violent confrontation—is formed. This contention is hardly
some instance of phenomenological pathos, but instead means above all that
perception is something concrete and at the same time something that resists. It
becomes concrete through a resistant process of contact—of touch—occuring

22
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 124n14.
23
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 124.
24
The full quote in German: “Man kann die Geschichte der Menschengattung im
großen als die Vollziehung eines verborgenen Plans der Natur ansehen, um eine inner-
lich- und zu diesem Zweck, auch äußerlich-vollkommene Staatsverfassung zu Stande zu
bringen, als den einzigen Zustand, in welchen sie alle ihre Anlagen in der Menschheit
entwickeln kann” (Kant, “Idee zu einer Allgemeinen Geschichte,” 45). Further reading:
Nathan Rotenstreich, Wege zur Erkennbarkeit, 127ff.
25
Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 65.
138 Levinas Studies, Volume 14

in language: “The visible caresses the eye. One sees and one hears like one
touches.”26
Distinguished from this is conceptual knowledge, where the sensual
remains “superficial”27 when thinking and seeing are conceived in a mutual con-
text of justification. In this frame, the sensual also remains problematic, because
this mutual context of justification also entails morally problematic aspects: “In
thought understood as vision, knowledge, and intentionality, intelligibility thus
signifies the reduction of the Other to the Same, synchrony as being, in its ego-
logical gathering.”28 Here, Levinas criticizes a cognitive process that takes place
as a mutual condition, or mutual obstruction, between thinking and perceiving.
For this mental operation, where egology is identified with presence, Levinas
considers the transcendental apperception of the Kantian “I think” as a pivotal
point of articulation, which according to him is asserted “from Descartes to
Husserl, and even in Heidegger.”29
What Levinas finds strange in Kant’s epistemology is his instrumental or
object-related understanding of perception, which sticks up into the logical unity
of “I think.” Levinas criticizes Kant’s epistemology in that it describes thinking
and perceiving structure as analogous to the guideline of a timeless-thinking
ego. Not only is perception the “perception of the perceived,” but “every ob-
scure thought of our being is also oriented toward something”30 writes Levinas
in Totality and Infinity. Both thinking and perceiving take place in the present.
According to Levinas, the temporal significance of the present is that it seeks
“to the future” and returns “to the past”: “every present is a preview and a retro-
spective.” This ambiguity refers to an act of representation that allows Levinas
a closeness to and a distance from Kant. Levinas describes this double position
in relation to Kant as follows:
The fact that in representation the same defines the other without being de-
termined by the other justifies the Kantian conception according to which the
unity of transcendental apperception remains an empty form in the midst of
its synthetic work. But we are far from thinking that one starts with represen-
tation as a non-conditioned condition!31

For Levinas, “Representation is pure spontaneity, though prior to all activity.”32

The characteristic “prior to all activity” means that “representation involves no

26
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 118.
27
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 118.
28
Levinas, Entre Nous, 161.
29
Levinas, Entre Nous, 161. The elaboration of these references would go far beyond
the scope of the present essay.
30
Levinas, Totality, 122.
31
Levinas, Totality, 125–26.
32
Levinas, Totality, 125.
 Brigitta Keintzel • The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant 139

passivity.”33 It has not an inversive but a negative orientation. It is not related

to anything; it delimits itself in the act of representing something. Therefore,
representation is negative and not positively related to being: “Its first move-
ment is negative: it consists in finding and exhausting in itself the meaning of an
exteriority, precisely convertible into noemata.”34 It is precisely the “uprooted”35
background of representation that marks a path of approach to the other: “The
total freedom of the same in representation has a positive condition in the other
that is not something represented, but is the Other.”36
For Levinas, there is no pre-reflexive correlation between the other and the
self; only an “uprooted”37 timely understanding of representation describes the
constitution of meaning:
To represent is not only to render present‚ “anew”; it is to reduce to the
present an actual perception which flows on. To represent is not to reduce a
past fact to an actual image but to reduce to the instantaneousness of thought
everything that seems independent of it; it is in this that representation is
constitutive.38

And it is this meaning/constituting function of representation that enables not

only a distance from but also a closeness to Kant. As Levinas continues: “The
value of the transcendental method and its share of eternal truth lies in the uni-
versal possibility of reducing the represented to its meaning, the existent to the
noema, the most astonishing possibility of reducing to a noema the very being
existent.”39
Levinas’s position on Kant regarding representation can be summarized
as follows: in his discussion of representation, Levinas proposes to conceive
the representable against the background of the unrepresentable. Levinas em-
phasizes that “Representation is pure spontaneity, though prior to all activity.”40
Representation is a happening in time: it is “pure presence.”41 Only when we
have accepted the non-originality of representation do we succeed in understand-
ing “the depth of the Kantian conception” that the “inner sense”42 is the central
33
Levinas, Totality, 125.
34
Levinas, Totality, 125.
35
Levinas, Totality, 126.
36
Levinas, Totality, 126.
37
Levinas, Totality, 127.
38
Levinas, Totality, 127.
39
Levinas, Totality, 127.
40
Levinas, Totality, 125.
41
Levinas, Totality, 127.
42
Levinas writes in Existence and Existents (41–42): “The world, whose existence is
characterized by light, is not, then, the sum of existing objects. The very idea of totality or
of a whole is only intelligible where there is a being that can embrace it. There is a totality
because it relates to an inwardness in the light. Here we come to recognize the profundity
of Kant’s views about the role of the synthesis of apperception and of its unity in the con-
140 Levinas Studies, Volume 14

point of departure from which the essence of the subject can be conceived. It is
this “inner sense”43 that cannot be reduced to a logical form and at the same time
constitutes the proximity of spatial positioning to verbal orientation.
This “inner sense” does not happen arbitrarily, but is embedded in an order.
Levinas employs order as a synonym for language and justice.44 Order does not
result from a central perspective of thinking, but from a decentering of per-
spective. This shift in thinking, which Levinas calls with Kant the Copernican
revolution, means that meaning is neither inscribed nor hidden in the ontology
of being, but lies outside or beyond being. Hence, it is therefore an order that
must be made by wo/men, and with consideration of meaning: “The fact that im-
mortality and theology could not determine the categorical imperative signifies
the novelty of the Copernican revolution: a sense that is not measured by being
or not being; but being on the contrary is determined on the basis of sense.”45
For Levinas, recognizing the Copernican revolution means that reason is
not explained by an immanent order46: it finds its location between people and
between the relations they produce. Its claim begins with the appearance of the
other and leads thence to the perceiving subject. Levinas called this relation-
ship, which unfolds in the outcome of the other, Reason. According to him, this
meaning of the other diverges from Western tradition: “The difference between
the two theses: ‘reason creates the relation between me and the other’ and ‘the
Other’s teaching me creates reason’ is not purely theoretical.”47
These different meanings of reason are reflected in the different formula-
tions of Kant’s categorical imperative. The phrase of the first formulation is:
“Do no action in accordance with any other maxim, except one that could subsist
with its being a universal law, and hence only so that the will could through its

stitution of the world—on condition that we understand it as a synthesis of intuition, sight

or light. (. . . .) It is a way of relating to events while still being able to not be caught up in
them. To be a subject is to be a power of unending withdrawal, an ability always to find
oneself behind what happens to one. Kant’s thesis that inner sense gives us only a subject
transformed by the conditions for all objectivity enables us to grasp just what is essential in
a subject, for a subject is never one with the idea it can have of itself; it is already a freedom
with regard to all objects, a drawing back, an ‘as for me. (. . .)’” An excellent overview of
the subject matter of inner meaning in the philosophy of Kant is given by Georg Mohr, Das
sinnliche Ich: Innerer Sinn und Bewusstsein bei Kant, 67–86.
43
Levinas, Existence, 42.
For example, in the article “Diachrony and Representation”: “Extra-ordinary,
44

for order is justice: extra-ordinary or absolute in the etymological sense of that ad-
jective, by virtue of its always being separable from every relation and synthesis,
extricating itself from the very justice in which that exteriority is involved” (Levi-
nas, Entre Nous, 167).
45
Levinas, Otherwise, 129.
46
In more detail, see part 3 of this article.
47
Levinas, Totality, 252.
 Brigitta Keintzel • The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant 141

maxim at the same time consider itself as universally legislative.”48 For Levinas,
this formulation needs to be clarified. For Kant, however, it is the basic for-
mula from which further formulations are developed. Levinas contradicted this
derivation, arguing that reason does not begin to speak as a formal instruction.
Reason cannot be defined as a concept that remains impersonal in its orientation.
For Levinas, reason is only effective as reason if it is not impersonal and has
not lost its face. In an impersonal form, reason becomes an overinclusive term
that can assemble different insights and actions. As described in the first section,
Levinas’s critique of a vague universalizing rule that brings good and evil into
a blurred relationship was outlined in his article “The Philosophy of Hitlerism.”
In the second formulation, a definition of reason is favored which reveals itself
in the face, thereby questioning—according to Levinas—idealistic and imper-
sonal claims to reason. Kant’s phrase is: “Act so that you use humanity, as much
in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as
end and never merely as means.”49
My reading of this discussion is that the preference Levinas gives to the
second formulation is not in mere contrast to the first, but instead pursues the
goal of clarifying the problems of the first formulation. In my view, Kant’s sec-
ond formulation of the categorical imperative becomes clearer if we consider
instrumentalizing as a semantic extension of killing. “Thou shalt not kill” and
thou shalt not instrumentalize—as a commandment of the second formulation—
have a common prerequisite. Revealing this connection, as I shall show in my
final section, is crucial to understanding the categorical imperative.50

The Other as Categorical Imperative

In Levinas, reason begins to speak due to its corporeality, and takes place in
dependence on this corporeality. This position has ramifications for Levinas’s
understanding of the transcendental and the transcendent. Instead of a tran-
scendental correspondence between body and mind, he asserts the primacy
of corporeality. This goes hand in hand with Husserl’s phenomenological un-
derstanding of representation,51 which distinguishes the object from the act of

48
Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 46 [AK 4:434].
49
Kant, Groundwork, 42 [AK 4: 429]. Levinas notes in the interview with the
title “Reality Has Weight”: “I like the second formulation of the categorical imper-
ative, the one that tells [me] to respect a man in myself when I respect the other. In
this expression, we are not in pure universality, but already in the presence of the
other” (in Is It Righteous To Be?, 163).
50
Here, we should take into account Römer’s comment that the (bodyless) other can-
not be considered as end in itself and therefore his mere appearance cannot be regarded
as transcendental ground for the validity of the categorical imperative (Das Begehren der
reinen praktischen Vernunft, 367).
51
The elaboration of a reference to Husserl would go far beyond the scope of the
present essay.
142 Levinas Studies, Volume 14

representation: “The object of representation is to be distinguished from the

act of representation (. . .).”52 According to this understanding, representation
need not be a medium (an emphatic bridge) that mediates between the world
of appearance and the way we perceive it. Representation does not fulfill an
object-constitutive, image-generating function. Both functions imply the idea
of an original—which we have already seen rejected in the last section. Levinas
not only criticized an object-constitutive and objectifiable, but also a timeless
understanding of representation. He conceives the body as warrantor of time,
initiating the transition to a time-related conception of representation.
“The body naked and indigent is the very reverting, irreducible to a
thought, of representation into life, of the subjectivity that represents into life
which is sustained by these representations and lives of them; its indigence—its
needs—affirm ‘exteriority’ as non-constituted, prior to to all affirmation,” writes
Levinas in Totality and Infinity.53 With the introduction of the “body indigent
and naked” as “this very changing of sense,”54 Levinas distances himself from
the Kantian category of relation. Not only is there no reciprocity between the
same and the other; there is no reciprocity between body and mind. The “third
Kantian category of relation” cannot explain how we physically “accomplish”
a position on earth;55 nor can it explain the genesis of meaning. Sense is not the
result of knowledge as a semantic extension of perceptible phenomena. Accord-
ing to Levinas, the emergence of meaning can be compared with the process of
nutrition: “The world I constitute nourishes me and bathes me. It is aliment and
‘medium’ [‘milieu’].”56
The precedence that the world—as a sensory phenomenon, as matter and
as existential life—has regarding thinking determines the way in which mean-
ing, and with it an ethical claim, arises. In order to describe this thought, Levinas
refers again—this time affirmatively—to Kant: transcendental activity is an in-
tellectual activity, which “does not issue in an object.”57 For Levinas, it is this
non-reference to the object which characterizes intellectual activity, and brings
“vision and touch,” “representation and labor”58 into a close relationship. From
the statement that the “senses have a meaning that is not predetermined as objec-

52
Levinas, Totality, 123.
53
Levinas, Totality, 127.
54
Levinas, Totality, 129–30.
55
Levinas, Totality, 128.
56
Levinas, Totality, 129.
57
This quotation also emphasizes Levinas’s ambivalence regarding Kant: “The Cri-
tique of Pure Reason, in discovering the transcendental activity of the mind, has made
familiar the idea of a spiritual activity that does not issue in an object, even though this
revolutionary idea was in Kantian philosophy attenuated in that the activity in question
constituted the condition for the object” (Levinas, Totality, 188–89).
58
Levinas, Totality, 190.
 Brigitta Keintzel • The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant 143

tification,”59 Levinas derives an intellectual void that he compares (by reference

to Plato) with a light that “makes space arise specifically as a void.”60 This void is
based on “total freedom” of the representation that has a “positive condition” not
in the “represented” but in the fact of the other61 This fact acquires a verbal mean-
ing through the distinction between the “look” and the “welcome” of the face.62
The meaning of the Other is revealed neither by means of a descriptive/
hermeneutical method nor by a conceptual derivation—but through question-
ing, which for Levinas simultaneously articulates a commandment and thus an
imperative that he also calls a “categorical imperative.” It is a commandment
without power in the sense of a claim to omnipotence, but instead with a “pas-
sivity”63 which derives force through its form: “Reason is identity that posits
itself as I (comme Moi). It is an identity that identifies itself—that returns to
itself—through the force of its form.”64 This raises the question of how Levi-
nas can justifiably speak of a categorical imperative if it is not produced, as
claimed by Kant, through the process of creating thought and timeless thinking,
but is instead triggered by the process of representative-instanteous thinking,65
as claimed by Levinas. Before going any further, it seems appropriate to point
out similarities (between Kant and Levinas) in the interpretation of the categor-
ical imperative:
For both Kant and Levinas, the categorical imperative is the only possible
formula for universalization. It has a structural necessity. Its claim is ultimate,
valid without exception, and reason-based. Levinas agrees with Kant that there
is only one possible guideline for describing ethical action. Both describe this
as a categorical imperative, in which subjective and generalizable experiences
59
Levinas, Totality, 188.
60
Levinas, Totality, 189.
61
The full quote is: “The total freedom of the same in representation has a positive
condition in the other that is not something represented, but is the Other.” Levinas, Totality,
126.
62
Levinas, Totality, 189.
63
The full quote is: “It is nevertheless remarkable that the notion of the rational, ini-
tially reserved for the order of knowledge [connaissance]—and tied, consequently, to the
problem of being as being—abruptly will have taken in Kant a meaning within an order
other than that of knowledge. This is true even though, of this adventure—essential to
humanity in the Western tradition—reason keeps its pretense to activity (in spite of the
passivity to which reason, as categorical imperative, does not fail to attest” (Levinas, Of
God Who Comes to Mind, 16–17). Adriaan Peperzak is right in arguing that “I think” is
a “formal and abstract” concept. A deformalization of “I think” is necessary because we
require a distancing from history and a “preference for morality over history.” Hence, he
concludes: “The only distance given to him (Levinas; B. K.) is the separatedeness that the
I, in awakening, discovers between the other, coming from elsewhere, and ‘me’” (Peper-
zak, “Some Remarks on Hegel, Kant, and Levinas,” 215).
64
Levinas, God Who Comes to Mind, 17.
65
“The subject that thinks by (and not with; B.  K.) representation is a subject that
hearkens to its own thought ( . . .).” (Levinas, Totality, 126).
144 Levinas Studies, Volume 14

converge. Similarly, Levinas agrees with Kant that this claim to validity is un-
conditional. But what differentiates Levinas from Kant is the assumption that
the “Autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws and of duties
in keeping with them” [Die Autonomie des Willens ist das alleinige Prinzip
aller moralischen Gesetze und der ihnen gemäßen Pflichten].66 As I have tried
to show, Levinas has contradicted this form of moral autonomy that has an end
in itself. In Kant’s word: “This holiness of will is nevertheless a practical idea,
which must necessarily serve as a model to which all finite rational beings can
only approximate without end and which the pure moral law, itself called holy
because of this, constantly and rightly holds before their eyes; [. . .].”67 For Levi-
nas the “will as will” is not a sufficient condition for the categorical imperative:
Because a “will as will” implies a visual image of the self, which is intended to
serve as a starting point and hidden reference for ethical action. Levinas contra-
dicts Kant precisely in the question of how representation is inscribed in what
we normally call reality or the mode of “appearance of objects” [Erscheinung-
sweisen der Objekte]. Representation does not create, but accompanies and
interrupts thinking.68 Also, the categorical imperative is not produced, but—
as noted above—has a “passivity” that derives its “power through form.” This
form is based, as already mentioned, on the face.
The question that arises here is: how do we get from the fact of a perception
to a reason-based claim as articulated by the categorical imperative? We can
successfully answer this question if we consider the approach Levinas took in
describing the categorical imperative. Unlike Kant, Levinas does not insist on
a spontaneity of intuition, concepts, or knowledge, but instead claims that the
unfolding of meaning occurs in reliant dependence on a fact—a fact that Levi-
nas calls a “fact of reason.” This fact is not based on a logical construction or
a principle, and not based on reasonable self-love [“vernünftige Selbstliebe”].69
But it begins in the face, speaking either as a demand or an appeal—an appeal
that simultaneously places “me” into question. I find the term “questioning”
important, because of its implicit mental proximity to Kant but also a distancing
from him. Both Levinas and Kant interpret this “questioning” with regard to its

66
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 30. Chalier is right in arguing that Levinas’s
rereading of Kant’s approach leads to a different understanding of autonomy, an under-
standing that is not based on self-care, self-interest, or on a “self-generating fact” but on
respect “due to the person of the other” (Chalier, What Ought I To Do?, 67). Also helpful
are O’Neill and Rössler’s investigations into the concept of autonomy, which emphasize
above all the conceptual proximity to the “fact of the law,” a proximity that cannot be un-
dermined by subjective claims to the validity of an autonomy. See note 20 above.
67
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 29.
68
Mohr is right in arguing that we should not—with Kant or through a special reading
of Kant—identify consciousness with “imagination as such” (“Vorstellung ü b er h au p t”).
In more detail: Mohr, Sinnliches Ich, 110–21.
69
Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 193; Critique of Practical Reason, 61.
 Brigitta Keintzel • The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant 145

moral consequences—but Kant sees it as a reflexive act abstracting from the

concrete situation, whereas Levinas sees it spatially and concretely.
The proximity of the other transcends the ontological limits of a knowl-
edge of human beings and world.70 The establishment of this proximity is quite
concrete. To understand this concreteness, we might require a symbolic trans-
lation: the other person enters into my thinking and into my consciousness like
a Trojan horse—not through my seeing, but through my tactile and attendant
acoustic consciousness. It is only through the sense of touch that our subjective
and intersubjectively interchangeable understanding of reality is revealed. In
Christological allusion and simultaneous demarcation, Levinas describes this
process of touching as the “incarnation of consciousness.”71 The spatial prox-
imity of the other plays a key role in the subject’s process of becoming aware,
which has not only perceptual but also moral qualities.
Through her/his corporeal existence, the other provokes a moral and spa-
tial questioning that Levinas also calls a “resistance”72—a resistance directed
against an “original volition” and a self-generating spontaneity of mental activ-
ities—the attributes that characterize the Kantian subject. The subject that—as
Levinas notes critically for the Kantian subject—finds itself in a “need for hap-
piness”73 is for Levinas the false address for the categorical imperative.
The central point in Levinas’s reading of the categorical imperative is that
reason has no self-generated power; Levinas thus contradicted the Kantian axiom
that reason can understand only what it has produced according to its design.74
But according to Levinas, reason points beyond itself. In this pointing-beyond,
neither ideals nor ideas can be addressed. The process of reason is set in motion
by the bodily-tactile presence of the other. It is thinking that is triggered by the
other—for Levinas an expression of a philosophical understanding of transcen-
dence—which furnishes an adequately persistent thinking with the faculty of
reason: “How can the transcendent signify the “utterly other”—which is indeed
easy to say, but which the common ground of the thinkable and of discourse puts
70
The full quote is: “The signification of proximity overflows ontological boundaries,
human essence, and the world. It signifies by way of transcendence and by way of the unto-
God-in-me [l’à-Dieu-en-moi], which is the putting in question of me.” Levinas, God Who
Comes to Mind, 167.
71
Levinas, God Who Comes to Mind, 156.
72
Levinas, Totality, 197.
73
Levinas, Totality, 119. Some Kant scholars would argue here that the pursuit of hap-
piness is not an ethical criterion for Kant. However, this does not take into account the fact
that even a subject’s striving to comply with the law entails implications of a satisfaction
that cannot be considered independently from sensual and self-referential preconditions.
Kant recognized this dilemma, which he tried to solve by claiming the existence of “rea-
sonable feelings” rooted in “rational self-love” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 61).
74
In German: “Vernunft sieht nur das ein, was sie selbst nach ihrem Entwurfe her-
vorbringt, und muß Natur nötigen auf ihre Fragen zu antworten, nicht aber sich von ihr
gängeln zu lassen.” In: Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Vorrede, BXII.
146 Levinas Studies, Volume 14

back into the world, and makes into a world?” asks Levinas in “Transcendence
and Evil.”75 For him, an intellectually based resistance against a self-centered
orientation is not arbitrary, but constitutes the “rigor of the reasonable.”76 Its
salient characteristic is unconditional validity, applying without exception and
therefore without contradiction. Levinas interprets the “rigor of the reasonable”
within the context of practical reason. It is not based on a conceptual under-
standing of universality, but rather articulated in the sentence: “Thou shalt not
kill.”77 This sentence is not a condition of experience, and is unconditionally
valid as a categorical (or moral) imperative. It has a normative power that Levi-
nas links to the “formal essence of the rights of man,”78 which begins to speak
in the categorical imperative: “The categorical imperative would be the ultimate
principle of the rights of man.”79
To associate this phrase with the second formulation of Kant’s categorical
imperative, which focuses on the so-called “end-in-itself,” is not a semantic
ploy, but has phenomenological consequences. This formulation not only allows
Kant to consider matter as a purpose,80 but also allows Kant and Levinas to re-
gard sensibility as a purpose81–a sensibility that, according to Levinas, begins its
speech in the face. In phenomenological extension, it can be stated that matter,
especially through the prerogative of the other, first of all means corporeality
and life.82 That corporeality and life (and not a reductive idealistic understand-
ing of reason) are to be regarded as an “end in itself” is—according to both
Levinas and Kant—not a law of nature but of morality.
Let us summarize: the categorical imperative is not created as a thinking
achievement, but is already present as a “passivity.” The naked body and its rep-
resentation, the face, as an end in itself is both the starting and the turning point
where meaning arises. Meaning is performed as an instanteous process,83 which

75
Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 177.
76
Levinas, Entre Nous, 156.
77
Levinas, Entre Nous, 184.
78
Levinas, Entre Nous, 172.
79
Levinas, Entre Nous, 157. To the connection “Violence, Justice, and Peace,” in more
detail: Pascal Delhom and Alfred Hirsch, “Vorwort,” 7–70.
80
Due to the fact that all maxims (subjective reasoning) have “a matter, namely an end,
and then the formula says: “That the rational being, as an end in accordance with its nature,
hence as an end in itself, must serve for every maxim as a limiting condition of all merely
relative and arbitrary ends” (Kant, Groundwork, 48 [AK 4:436]).
81
See above and Levinas, Totality,188.
82
Even a philosophical view of life allows not only similarities but also differences
between Kant and Levinas. Levinas wrote his philosophy in the name of (his) survival,
whereas Kant wrote his philosophy as a manifestation of life in general. To Kant’s philo-
sophical understanding of life, in more detail: Volker Gerhardt, Immanuel Kant: Vernunft
und Leben.
83
Levinas writes to this: “To represent is not to reduce a past fact to an actual image
but to reduce to the instantaneousness of thought everything that seems independent of it;
 Brigitta Keintzel • The Other as Categorical Imperative: Levinas’s Reading of Kant 147

nevertheless arises as a function of space. What Levinas is suggesting is a change

of perspective. It is not the idea of spacelessness or the “panoramic structured
reason”84 that sheds light on the existence of wo/man; it is concrete execution,
consisting in perceiving the other in his/her resistance as an interruption—
without neutralizing her/his otherness in an instrumentalized understanding of
recognition or in the process of killing. By emphasizing that neither cognition
nor action functions without space, the notion of precedence—both in the form
of matter and in the form of life—becomes crucial to understanding the categor-
ical imperative.
This precedence of world, matter, and embodiment not only affirms the
necessary difference between objective and judgmental analysis—and hence
also between understanding and reason; it also guarantees that ethics constitutes
primal philosophy, and that pure reason is to be understood through the primacy
of practical reason. Levinas’s conclusion is that the other, with his/her categor-
ical claim to non-instrumentalization and non-murder, is based on the claim of
life’s precedence and not death’s—a claim that can only be realized in peace.
My conclusion here is that since Levinas saw the categorical imperative as re-
ferring exclusively and unconditionally to the commandment of peace, he thus
deepened and radicalized the Kantian categorical imperative.85

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