What I mean in saying that ethics mirrors Hobbes’s state of nature is that like Hobbes’s natural right, ethical responsibility is logically and normatively anterior to politics but not chronologically anterior to it. Indeed, it is manifested only in politics. It is an a priori purity that includes in itself its own impossibility as purity and that can be manifested only in its impure version, the political world. This is not to say that Levinas’s ethics and Hobbes’s state of nature are similar in content. To the contrary: their contents are opposed, and it is for this reason that I say that they mirror each other. I will here develop this argument, focusing principally on the Talmudic readings “Judaism and Revolution” (DSS 11–53; NTR 94–119), “Model of the West” (ADV 29–50; BTV 13–33), and “The Will of God and the Power of Humanity” (NLT 9–42; NewTR 47–77).
The Contract
“Judaism and Revolution” is a reading of a discussion found in the Talmudic tractate Baba Metsi’a, folio 83a–b.10 The mishnah quoted in Baba Metsi’a 83a decrees that working hours and workers’ meals should be regulated by local custom, that is, neither by arbitrary will nor by universal law. The mishnah declares: “He who hires workers and tells them to begin early and finish late cannot force them if beginning early and finishing late does not conform to the custom of the place. Where the custom is that they be fed, he is obligated to feed them; where it is that they be served dessert, he must serve them dessert.”11 The phrase “conform to the custom of the place” means that local custom limits the employer’s generosity as much as his power, as is clear from a later part of the mishnah, which holds that promises to workers are also restricted by the custom of the place. Workers may expect neither less nor more than what custom dictates.
Understanding the text as being strictly oriented toward workers’ welfare, Levinas infers that the mishnah is concerned with the “rights of the other person” (DSS 15; NTR 97; emphasis in the original). What Levinas means by “the other person” is that, in the Mishnaic text, the workers are considered not in terms of their objective status as persons or citizens but in terms of their relationship with the “I” or ego of the text, the employer. That is, the text is concerned with how we treat those whom we subjectively perceive to be outside ourselves, and whom we accordingly regard as “others.” The phenomenological assumption that lies at the origin of the expression “the other” is that the reference is always the subject-who-perceives-the-other. In this context, Levinas’s argument is that the Mishnaic ruling is not a general law about free, rational, and responsible members of the community but a law about the people that the subject perceives as his or her exteriority: “It is not the concept ‘man’ which is at the basis of this humanism; it is the other man” (DSS 17; NTR 98). That is, the law depends on the fact that people perceive others and turn toward them. Turning toward others (or intentionality in phenomenological language) lies at the basis of the ethical responsibility for the other.
In Levinas’s thought, the ego is especially responsible for the other if the other is in a lower material position. As such, up to this point in the reading Levinas seems to be describing what he famously conceptualized as the ethical situation. There are two parties, employer and employee. The first has power and the other is poor: “The other as other is not only an alter ego. He is what I am not: he is the weak one whereas I am the strong one; he is the poor one, ‘the widow and the orphan’” (EE 162; EE’ 95). Consequently, the worker’s face expresses a demand that is a command, and the employer is infinitely responsible for him.
The mishnah continues with a story. Rabbi Yohanan ben Mathia asked his son to hire workers. The son promised “food” to the workers. When he came back, his father said: “Even if you prepared a meal for them equal to the one King Solomon served, you would not have fulfilled your obligation toward them, for they are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As long as they have not begun to work, go and specify: you are only entitled to bread and legumes” (DSS 17; NTR 98). The mishnah can be understood here in a simple and practical way: be precise in your contracts because if you are not, you risk a potential dispute. If you vaguely promise “food,” your workers may demand the finest sirloin, arguing that that is what they understood by “food,” or what they used to receive from their previous employer, or what they need for dietary or religious reasons. As the father tells his son, even a feast worthy of King Solomon would never be enough! Says the mishnah, since the father and son obviously cannot afford a meal fit for kings, they must make clear that the workers will receive the minimum prescribed by custom: bread and legumes.
This story, I suggest, illustrates the narrative of the “entrance of the third.” Before, we had two parties, the employer and his employees, the former being responsible for the latter. The former, however, has now been divided in two—the employer comprises a father and son, who have individual desires and opinions. This division between different opinions is in itself the manifestation of a third party. Crucially, the third party is not one of the three in particular: it is neither the father, nor the son, nor the workers (seen as “the other”). Rather, the third party consists of the very condition of there being three voices in the story. The infinite demand of the worker/other perceived by the father and exposed in his conversation with his son generates the question of the limit and sharing of responsibility. The employer is not only defined by his responsibility for the welfare of his workers; he is also partly defined by his interest in his own welfare, or that of his family, or indeed of any other people. He must calculate what he can give to the worker/other.
To summarize the foregoing, the conversation between the father and son is a paradigm of the “entrance of the third” for three reasons. First, most simply, it introduces—or exposes—the presence of three parties in the interaction. Second, it raises questions about the degree of responsibility we hold toward others. Finally, it reveals the difference between ethics, as an infinite—or at least vague and open-ended—promise, and politics, as the calculation of what is possible. As such, in Levinas’s philosophy, the “entrance of the third” does not imply the actual presence of three parties: competing ways to treat the other appear “in the face of the other.”12 As Fagan writes, “The ethical realm relied upon is always already political within itself.”13 Moreover, if in the Talmudic story the conversation between the father and son comes after the meeting between the son and the workers, namely, after the pure “ethical” meeting, in real life this chronology is immaterial. While temporal order is unavoidable in a story, in real life the son, workers, father, and everybody else coexist from the beginning. Ethics is the focus on responsibility regarded as the core of all relationships in a context in which all relationships already exist. It is in this sense that Levinas’s ethics is like the Hobbesian state of nature. Ethics is not a historical pre-political situation but that which gives meaning to the actual, phenomenal, political situation.
In short, calculations about how to treat the other—namely, the questions connected to the entrance of the third—are concomitant with absolute responsibility toward the other, though they are rhetorically expressed after it. For Levinas, the employer is and remains infinitely responsible for those who are under his or her authority. He rests this point on Rabbi Yohanan ben Mathia’s reference to “the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” This formulation has two meanings. The first, universalistic, interpretation is that in the Talmud the people of Israel are “a people who has received the Law and, as a result, a human nature which has reached the fullness of its responsibilities and self-consciousness. The descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are human beings who are no longer childlike” (DSS 18; NTR 98).
The second interpretation is based on the well-known biblical story in which Abraham welcomes three strangers, giving them food and shelter, without knowing that they are angels, without inquiring who they are (Gen. 18:2–8). Indeed, Abraham’s generosity toward his guests far exceeds his initial offer of plain bread and water (vv. 4–5); what he actually prepares is fine cakes, milk, curd, and a tender calf (vv. 6–8). As a result, Abraham’s descendants are “men to whom their ancestor bequeathed a difficult tradition of duties toward
