Continental Philosophy Review 32: 395–407, 1999.

© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the

OBJECTIVITY Netherlands.
AND OF JUSTICE 395

Objectivity and of justice: A critique of Emmanuel Levinas’

explanation

ALPHONSO LINGIS
Professor of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA USA

Abstract. For Emmanuel Levinas objectivity is intersubjectively constituted. But this

intersubjectivity is not, as in Merleau-Ponty, the intercorporeality of perceivers nor, as in
Heidegger, the active correlation of practical agents. It has an ethical structure; it is the
presence, to each cognitive subject, of others who contest and judge him. But does not the
exposure of each cognitive subject to the wants and needs of others result in the constitu-
tion of a common practical field, which is not yet the objective world of scientific cogni-
tion? For Levinas, the constitution of a world common to all is governed by the practice of
justice. Justice begins when above the self and the other there intervenes a third party, who
contests and judges both. But whether this third party is a representative of humanity, or a
figure of God, would not his justice be but the name of a higher egoism?

The Phenomenon of an imperative

As soon as thought arises, it finds it must conceive things correctly and rea-
son rightly. It must conceive things with coherent concepts and relate them
consistently. This imperative is not simply a program the individual rational
mind sets before itself. It exceeds the utility accurate knowledge of the envi-
ronment can have for the satisfaction of our needs and desires. Does this
imperative reveal an apriori subjection of the mind to the world, a claim of
the things on our minds?
Thought takes form in language, and rational thought responds to statements
put forth by others and submits its affirmations to the contestation of others. A
thought that aims at the truth of things subjects itself to the decrees of experts
endorsed by a given research community as to what is to count as observations,
how the terms of common language are restricted and refined for use in differ-
ent scientific disciplines and technological uses, what could count as an argu-
ment in logic, physics, history, or economics, and in penology, medicine,
automotive mechanics, or gardening. The physicist who deliberates seeks to
396 ALPHONSO LINGIS

determine what is true for the scientific community and more exactly for the
community of physicists. The physicist’s deliberation is also a practical de-
liberation: to determine “What should I (or anyone) think about this on the
evidence I have?” is also “What will 1 (or someone) have to do to verify this
empirically, to argue for it, and to have it accepted by the community of
physicists?”
Statements have not only an indicative or informative form, but a vocative
and imperative force. This force is formulated in the grammatical forms of
greetings, questions, and orders, but in fact every statement put forth is put
forth in response to other statements and calls for a response in turn. For
Emmanuel Levinas it is not the confusing layout of the environment that
questions and orders our discourse, but the presence of other speakers.
Levinas locates the vocative and imperative force of utterances in the move-
ment by which other speakers present themselves, face us. For someone to face
us is to call for our attention and demand something from us. What another
requires is a response in words and also in deeds. Levinas’s phenomenology
locates the appeal and demand visible on the face of another in its emptiness –
the nakedness of the eyes that look at us, the empty-handedness of his gestures,
the ephemerality of his voice which touches us but which we can refuse by
doing nothing, by continuing to do whatever we were doing.
Each time the other faces us, it is with a singular appeal and contestation.
If this vocative and imperative force is not localized and singularized, if the
imperative put on us is metaphysical, issuing from the Kantian God, or an
utterly nonobjective Sartrean Other, which Merleau-Ponty called a “faceless
haunting,” it cannot give rise to a veridical response in language nor a prac-
tical response in deeds. A veridical response in language formulates a state of
affairs in the environment open to one’s own observation and the other’s
verification. A practical response to the requirement another presents acti-
vates our skills and work on the resources at hand in our environment. The
presentation of another and of the appeal and demand with which he or she
faces is then not an intemporal transmundane dimension in which we exist as
for-another, but an empirical event.
The emptiness of an appeal and demand is visible, tangible – a given phe-
nomenon and not a theoretical construct. In Levinas’s phenomenological
description, the visible and tangible face is not simply the surface of a sub-
stance which is given to our eyes and hands that circumscribe and appropri-
ate. On the surfaces of the one who faces us hunger and want, the traces of
wounds and suffering, the wrinkles of sickness and aging are visible and
tangible. His or her skin is a surface exposing sensibility, susceptibility, and
vulnerability. In presenting himself to us, he exposes his need and wants; in
 OBJECTIVITY AND OF JUSTICE 397
singling us out, he appeals to our resources. But the want exposed to us in the
face and on the skin of another commands us. A want is an appeal because it
puts demands on us. Someone facing us in exposing his sensibility and sus-
ceptibility and also gives its vocative and imperative force to a question put
to us that asks for a veridical response. The one who faces us asks for a
response that casts the things open to detaching and appropriation by us in
the form of things accessible to others.
Does not a like imperative make itself known to us in our dealing with
other living beings not of our species, and with things? They do not lie about
us simply as substances and elements exposed for our enjoyment and usage.
To deal with them is to see what we have to do. We do not see a deer caught
in the branches of a tree in the flooding river without envisioning how it
could be freed and how we could free it. The post of an inhabited birdhouse
that is bending in the wind and is in danger of being uprooted designates our
powers to stabilize it. We do not see the mountain spring without seeing how
plastic bags which the wind has blown into it are choking it. The instrinsic
importance of these beings is visible with the urgency of their needs. Their
being in front of us, and our having the available resources to help make their
needs an appeal and a demand put on us who are there.
We are not simple intruders upon the ecosystem that brought us forth, as it
brought forth in interdependence its other animal and plant inhabitants, and to
make a home for ourselves is not only, as Levinas wrote, to establish a retreat
from the world of industry; it is also to live in relations of multiple symbiosis
with the land, the plants, and the animals. Our home is a place where we spend
far more time and resources looking after our birds and fish, our plants, than
looking complacently at them. On us our children, but also our art, our dance,
the research field open before the specific powers of our minds, our post in the
hospital and in the refugee camp imposes upon us what we have to do over a
long range, perhaps over our whole life. We neither invent these imperatives
nor receive them from the other legislating human minds. Kant himself could
only find for the rational agents, ends in themselves, something to do by mak-
ing them promulgators of the silent laws of nature. We expend our energies on
tasks that require us, on symphonies that call upon us to resound in a world
even if we are ourselves deaf to their splendors, on open roads and sun and
winds in which we leave our gaze and our laughter.
For Levinas it is suffering, and not the lacks and vulnerability of things
that has importance, suffering which is mired in itself, that urgently requires
assistance, and immediately afflicts my sensibility and my powers to act.
Suffering is not only the way the other recognizes his lacks, lesions, and
wounds; it is the way those lacks weigh on me immediately. For the suffering
398 ALPHONSO LINGIS

of another is not an object viewed at a distance; it afflicts me; the onlooking

eye flinches, feeling pain in itself. It is not the damaged surfaces of things
and non-human living beings, but the wounds and wrinkles of the skin, sur-
face of exposure of sensibility, that expose an appeal and impose a demand.
(But how is it that the suffering of other species is so strangely absent from
Levinas’s thoughts?)
This suffering is visible as a determinate demand put on me in those wounds
and wrinkles. My response is a material response; I make, with my words,
the things I see visible to him; I make, with my deeds, the resources I have
appropriated available to him.
But may not the suffering I see well be a suffering that does not seek to be
consoled? Nietzsche warned against imagining that we should alleviate a
suffering which another needs and clings to as his or her destiny – the inner
torments of Beethoven, the hardships and heartaches of the youth who has
gone to join the guerrillas in the mountains, and the grief of someone who
has to grieve the loss of her child. To be afflicted with his or her suffering
requires that we care about the things he or she cares for.
Another’s words of greeting open a silence for our words but also for our
reticence and our tact before the importance, urgency, and immediacy of the
demands of things. The suffering of the one who faces me, a suffering visible
in the bloodless white of her anguished face, may well be not the suffering of
her own hunger and thirst, but a suffering for the animals in her care dying of
the drought or the peregrines in the poisoned skies, a distress over the crum-
bling temple and for the nests of sea-birds broken by the tidal wave, a griev-
ing for the glaciers melting under skies whose carbon-dioxide layers are
trapping the heat of the earth.
Is it only his or her suffering that appeals urgently to us, has importance, and
afflicts us immediately? Is there not always joy in the one who faces us, even
joy in his suffering – the joy of finding us? Joy is an upsurge that affirms itself
unrestrictedly, and affirms the importance and truth of the face of the landscape
illuminated by joy. The one who faces us in joy does not only radiate his joy
which we find immediately on ourselves; it requires a response. The thumbs-
up that the Brazilian street kid – his mouth too voraciously gobbling our left
over spaghetti to smile or say obrigado – gives is a gift given us that we must
cherish in the return of our smile, a gift that we have no right to refuse. But the
joy of the street kid is not only a contentment in the satisfaction of his hunger;
it is a joy of being in the streets, in the sun, in the urban jungle so full of
excitements, and it is his laughter pealing over the excitements of the urban
jungle and the glory of the sun reigning over the beaches of Rio that gives rise
to his hunger and his relishing the goodness of restaurant spaghetti.
 OBJECTIVITY AND OF JUSTICE 399
A young fruit free uprooted by the storm is in danger of dying; once we
stabilize it and anchor it with guy-wires, it is once again wholly available for
our uses. Once I have satisfied the want and needs of the one of my own
species who faces me, does he or she not acquire the plenitude of a substance
and likewise fit into the circle of things available for my sustenance and
enjoyment? But the other who faces remains an appeal addressed to us, Levinas
says, because the appeal is displaced and renewed whenever it is satisfied.
The response with which we answer another’s question is itself a question
put to his judgement, and is open to a further question on his part. Even if he
assents to what I say to him, and assents to the representation of his presence
I formulate and put to him, he stands apart, beyond that representation, in
assenting to it – and his very assent is a question put to my confirmation. The
one who, in Leo Tolstoy’s story or Satyt Ray’s film, in times of famine gives
a stranger some bread from his stores, finds that stranger hungry and at the
door the next day, and with his wife and children. The wound we anesthetize
and bandage will have to be cleaned again and the skin once healed remains
vulnerable to all the harsh edges of the world. Thus the negativity of the need
and want with which another human faces us is an unending negativity. He or
she faces us as other in the infinition of this vulnerability.
The responsibilities I have to another, Levinas says, increase in the meas-
ure that I respond to them. From the first I find myself responsible for the
want and need, and the very irresponsibility of another – I find myself guilty.
And this guilt increases in the measure that I speak and act responsibly.
But the young fruit tree now stabilized with guy-wires likewise requires
water in the drought of summer, the stumps of its branches broken by the ice
of winter are susceptible to fungus and the invasion of rot, its leaves suscep-
tible to predatory animals and insects. They also continue to show us what
has to be done with the resources at hand.
Someone greets us in the street with a word or a gesture, calling for our
attention; we turn to him. He says something definite, and we give a definite
answer. If each time we respond adequately to what is called for, does not the
other fill up into something wholly positive? But Levinas says that to every
answer we give the other enchains a further query, initiating a dialectic that
has no end. Even when he assents to the answer we give and withdraws into
silence, he thereby continues to stand apart. Then does this not amount to
saying that the other requires the whole world from us – and make him an
absolute and abstract Other-in-general?
But the appeal and demand we find in the face of another who faces us is
not a demand that we offer him our resources, our possessions so that they
become his, or common – as though the God in the infinition of which he
400 ALPHONSO LINGIS

faces requires possession and enjoyment of the whole of nature. Must we not
say that the other who contests us in our affairs, our occupations, is not thereby
requiring that we replace the order we are putting on him with his, but re-
quires that we obey the order the things themselves require? His hunger con-
tests the appropriation of the abundance of the earth for ourselves only. It is
the ravages we wreck on the fecundity of nature by every project which has
only our own appropriation and egoist enjoyment as its end that he, child of
nature, contests.
The other greets us not first with the images recorded on them but with the
light in his eyes, turning to us the summons of the light itself that we become
luminous and delighting with its light. The other turns to us the night in his
eyes, summoning us not to a room where his egoist concerns are lit by elec-
tric switches, but to the unknown, the impersonal, the night itself. Respect
for the other is not, as Kant wrote, respect for the imperative for law that
rules in him and that commands us also; it is respect for the things about him
and for the elements and for the night to which we are destined together.
What makes the exposure of a want hollowing itself out in the measure
that it is filled a demand put on us? A demand is a force that binds our will. It
cannot be understood simply in terms of the negativity of susceptibility and
vulnerability. When it comes as an event, it is each time a specific force. But
it is not positive with the positivity of mundane things. Mundane things regu-
late our acts with the plenitude of their physical force. Levinas then explains
that the lacks and needs in his mundane substance make the other appear as
other than me, not simply an alter ego, and maintains the other in the removal
by which he or she stands beyond every response I give to him – and in this
distance there figures the force that judges my response, contests it or accepts
it. In the distance that he or she stands beyond every representation we form
of his or her presence, there arises the force to contest that representation or
accept it.
The otherness of the other cannot be understood as a juxtaposition, in the
same phenomenon, of the negativity of want and the positivity of force. Wants
and needs that imperatively command me – are something else than nothing-
ness and being. Levinas concludes that alterity must be conceived as an onto-
logical category other than being and other than nothingness. But alterity is
also an event in the world. Otherness is presented, as what is ungraspable and
unappropriatable, in the visibility of the face that looks at me.
But this concept of alterity proves very difficult to formulate. Levinas says
that the face is abstract, that it presents a movement of infinition. He uses the
concept of absolution; the face of the other is an absolute, disengaged from
the forces of the phenomenal environment. He says that the visible and tangi-
 OBJECTIVITY AND OF JUSTICE 401
ble face is the trace of a past that has never been present. Along with these
negative formulations, he also invokes the terms the Good, the superlative,
and God, which he tries to construct as something other then positive. God
would not be a separate Being but the dimension or the movement by which
another facing us commences an unlimited contestation and judgement on us
and on the course of the world.
Levinas invokes not “the divine,” but the monotheist God, whose unique-
ness speaks in the singularity of the one who singles me out to face me.
Levinas’s insistence on a monotheist God, and not a dimension of the sacred,
would preserve the irreducible singularity of the other.
But does not this alterity, which should designate the force of demand in
the appeal of one who faces, efface the face in which it is located? In making
the alterity of the monotheist God constitutive of the otherness of the one
who faces us, Levinas reduces the otherness between one who faces us and
another who also faces us to difference – difference in time and place, differ-
ence between the empirical figure of want and need each presents. And in the
measure that God is not conceived substantively, but as “the wholly Other,”
constitutive of the otherness of every other who faces us, the demand put on
us loses its location in the midst of the resources of the world and its
determinateness.

Objectivity

Objectivity is constituted in science. Nature of itself does not demand lan-

guage or command a certain form of language. Science, Husserl had explained,
is produced when every observation-report is subjected to contestation with-
out restriction, and the one who puts forth that statement commits himself to
answer to any objection. By giving a reason for the observation, the scientist
produces empirical laws; by giving a reason for the empirical laws, he pro-
duces a theory. The scientist subjects the form of his statements to the order
of nature because he subjects his discourse to the demand for reasons on the
part of other observers.
Levinas has followed Husserl in founding the form of objectivity on
intersubjectivity. It is an intersubjectivity of singular subjects who appeal to
and contest one another. By giving one another not only material resources,
but information, they constitute commonplaces and the zone of the world
each perceives as common. This world, however, continually fragments as it
forms, for each new subject born appropriates it for himself and his appro-
priation will be contested in turn. In making, with my words, what I see
402 ALPHONSO LINGIS

available to the one who faces me, I only envision the elements as destined for
my enjoyment and also his, and in making, with my deeds, the goods I have
appropriated available for his needs, I maintain the urgency of my needs which
have constituted them as goods. What we constitute is an egoism answering to
another egoism and whatever we agree upon becomes our ideology.
What if more than one faces us in the same time and place? A third party,
Levinas says, faces me and the one who faces me, and before him our state-
ments are judged objectively and our resources are compared according to
justice. He judges the adequacy of what I respond to my interlocutor and the
adequacy of what my interlocutor responds to my response. He determines a
just distribution of resources for the needs of each of us. In the third party
otherness is yet more other, yet more the alterity of God.
How would he not simply demand of us that the zone of the environment
I have shared with my interlocutor be now put in terms he understands and
the resources I have made available to the needs of the one who faces me be
offered to the third party?
The third party would have to demand a language in which all could com-
municate the perceptions of each. He would not ask for his needs, but for the
needs of all the others. In him the infinition of demands following every
response, of needs met opening upon other needs, would be yet more unend-
ing; in him the ab-soluteness, the abstractness of alterity would be yet more
ab-solute and abstract. In him Goodness and the superlative would be yet
more demanding. In his singularity the uniqueness of God would demand.
But would this demand bring forth an objective discourse in which the
elements and things of the world are converted into objects? Would it bring
forth justice?
The difficulty begins with the way Levinas has characterized the constitu-
tion of things. Science, which envisions things objectively, does not view
them as sustenances and resources shaped by our needs. Scientific observa-
tion investigates how things are structured and how they function to maintain
themselves and to produce effects on other things. (It does not view them as
relational nexus of force in Heidegger’s sense. For Heidegger the functional
property of a hammer is simultaneously how it fits against the inertia of the
nail and how it fits the hand that drives it.) The physicist aims to see how a
molecule maintains its constituents within itself, how each functions within
that molecule, and how it functions when attracted or repelled by other mol-
ecules. If he inevitably sees how it functions within his observational instru-
ments and before his eyes, he seeks to identify the distinctive effects of his
instruments and the particularities of human sense-organs. The astronomer
seeks to understand how stars are formed and maintain themselves, how they
 OBJECTIVITY AND OF JUSTICE 403
effect other stars and black holes and anti-matter, and how they come to an
end. A mathematician investigates the properties and functioning of math-
ematical domains independently of any foreseeable use, whether in the natu-
ral sciences or in technology. It has been said that the scientific view upon the
universe is a God’s-eye view. That is true only in the sense that it abstracts,
not from the particularities of the perceptual powers of human sense-organs
– which have to see the results even when it is an electronic sensor that makes
the observation – but from human needs and desires. When astronomers have
discovered, more recently, that our sun is already half-way toward its extinc-
tion, when evolutionary biologists have come to understand that the human
species and indeed mammals prevailed over the great reptiles not because
they were more fitted but because great catastrophes destroyed not only thou-
sands of species but whole phylae that might otherwise well have prevailed,
and when biogeneticists come to see the human organism itself as the nutri-
tive medium for the replicating DNA molecules, science becomes ever more
detached from the shapes human needs and desires may put on things.
Scientists have also become more aware of the measure to which their
observations are determined by decrees, issued by experts and endorsed by
the community of working researchers, as to what can count as an observa-
tion, what degrees of exactitude are possible and required, what can count as
an argument, and what can count as a demonstration. The result of their work,
the objective representation of the different domains of their investigations,
appear as the discourse of specific human communities at specific stages of
their civilizations.
However, a piece of objective knowledge is not just an agreement between
a specific number of trained researchers; it is an agreement about how some-
thing can be observed to function. It is not just a statement about how these
men and women speak to one another, responding to one another’s ques-
tions; it is also a statement about how this dinosaur perceived and moved in
its Umwelt, how this spider perceives and behaves in the layout circumscribed
by its perception, the features of an environment of limited scope that this
protozoa is sensitive to and responds to. It is a statement of what celestial be-
ings and forces this planet records and responds to, a statement of what atomic
beings and forces this molecule records and responds to. The technology en-
listed for scientific research aims to extend the powers of the human sense
organs with prosthetic organs enabling the researcher to see individual atoms
and black holes at the remotest ends of the universe, to see with the eyes of
eagles and wasps, perceive with the sonar echolocation of bats and the sixth
sense of fish, with the magnetic or cosmic sense of migratory birds and insects,
with the sensitivity of single cells or single molecules in those bats and fish.
404 ALPHONSO LINGIS

The objective truth which science works to represent is a representation in

which not only is my view compounded with the views of other humans who
face me, but the resultant compound of all human views is stripped of con-
cerns for human needs and desires and located in its humble place within the
views of birds and insects, dinosaurs, bats, and fish, stars and molecules.
Freud understood that the Copernican revolutions in science also work to
alter our needs and desires which can only be needs and desires in the world.
The permanent Copernican revolution that continues, continues to alter not
only how we understand the ways our needs and desires can satisfy their
urgencies, but those needs and desires themselves. Ecological sciences make
it impossible for us to continue to see the earth, the air, the skies as existing
only for our enjoyment, and the resources, the lakes and the mountains, the
flood plains of rivers and the rain forests, the insects and the fish as existing
only for our appropriation.
If the mathematician’s office, the physicist’s laboratory, the astronomer’s
telescope are so many zones of extraterritoriality where the subjugation of
scientific objectivity to human needs and desires is broken, how much tech-
nology today is being contrived to limit the growth of the human population,
to preserve the habitats of species humans cannot use for food, to break down
levees and vacate human settlements from flood plains, to preserve virgin
forests and polar glaciers!
The mathematician in the extrasterritoriality of his or her office, the physi-
cist in his or her laboratory, the astronomer’s at his or her telescope, the
biologist in his rain forest camp, who listen to the voices of numbers and
volumes, or molecules and stars, have turned away from human voices that
put urgent demands on them. But to turn away from the intrinsic importance
of the fragile and endangered earth, the air, the skies, the lakes and the moun-
tains, the flood plains of rivers and the rain forests, the insects and the fish is
also an injustice done to human voices.

The third party and justice

The third party who figures in Levinas’ account as the one who requires
objectivity and truth also figures as the one who determines a just distribu-
tion of resources for the needs of each of us. He would not ask for his needs,
but for the needs of all the others (other humans). In him the infinition of
demands following every response, of needs met opening upon other needs,
would be yet more unending; in him the ab-soluteness, the abstractness of
alterity would be yet more ab-solute and abstract. In him Goodness and the
 OBJECTIVITY AND OF JUSTICE 405
superlative would be yet more demanding. In his singularity the uniqueness
of God would demand. The third party is not another other addressing con-
crete wants and needs to me, because he stands in God.
But would this superlative God in whom all third parties are singular be
anything but a demand that all the goods, the elements and the furnishings, of
the world be put to the service of his unending need and wants? Does not
justice require justice to the needs of men and to the elements and things for
which they suffer, and justice to the needs of the elements and the things?
In expending my funds on medical treatment for my son who requires
repeated and immensely complicated surgery, and in giving him all the atten-
tion and support he needs, I neglect the wants and needs of my other son and
my spouse. In famine times the bread I give from my stores to the stranger is
taken from my own family. It is not only the stranger who knocks on my door
who faces me, but the strangers in remote lands, in Rwanda and Bosnia, who,
today, face us in the appeals and demands brought by satellite-relayed televi-
sion into our living rooms. In turning to the one who faces me with his or her
joy, I turn away from those who have no one but me to look to in their pain.
Practical necessity, in the sphere where it commands the doable, does not
resolve the demand for justice, as the resolution of a problem does not silence
the demands of truth. Every sacrifice of my attention, my time, my resources to
another already opens the horizon of justice for all. Each time I answer the
greeting of one who passes in the street, I sense the demand to respect all the
others, and the animals too. Without the passion for justice and truth, whatever
I do with my neighbor – or with my comrades exploited with me – becomes a
reciprocal egoism and whatever we agree upon becomes our ideology.
The one who faces me exposes all the determinateness of his suffering and
need or his joy, although the response I must find speaks in uncertainty. To
respond to what justice demands is yet more uncertain. This stranger at my
door needs bread; this child sick with cholera in a refugee camp needs rehy-
dration; these streetkids in Sâo Paulo need a shelter with protecting adults
and education. But how to organize a world economy that would really an-
swer all these needs, and how to organize the social and political structures of
society to realize such a world economy eludes any determinate third party
as it does me and the stranger before me. Every guerilla who is seized by the
demand for the overthrow of the dictatorship that oppresses his people knows
his struggle may fail, he may be shot with his comrades and buried in an
unmarked mass grave, his passion for justice lost in the night and fog. He
knows that if his struggle succeeds, he and his comrades do not know how to
continue the revolution and preserve it from foreign intervention, corruption,
and incompetency.
406 ALPHONSO LINGIS

He also knows he sacrifices his wife and children to answer the demand
for justice. The demand for justice is an injustice done to those whose needs
are important, urgent, and immediate.
We can say that our concept of justice, a political order preserved from
corruption and incompetency, a world economy that would no longer sacri-
fice the needs of some to the wants of others, remains abstract. But it is not
this abstractness that lifts our eyes from the urgency, immediacy, and im-
portance of the needs at hand. It is this abstractness that does not know how
to formulate itself into a realizable program that leaves us with nothing to
do but concern ourselves with the urgency, immediacy, and importance of
the needs at hand. The genuine concept of justice we can concretize will
always open further horizons of justice; it will be a justice that must always
become yet more just. The unending remoteness, the ab-soluteness, the
abstractness – the Godlikeness – of the third party as Levinas conceives
him can only call forth the abstractness of our concept of justice.
Because an imperative is a practical necessity, it prevails over what is
undoable. Because opening my stores to the famished refugees would give
both them and myself and my children but one meal before we all starve, it
cannot be imperative to do so. I cannot be obliged to leave the farm I am
cultivating to go to the deserts of Ethiopia to assist engineers trying to dig
wells. I cannot be obliged to turn from my neighbor whose house is on fire
to study how to make all building materials uninflammable.
Still, it is true that contemporary media, which present us with the faces
of famished and debilitated peoples in other regions and other continents
which our prosperity exploits, and which gives us access to the economic,
political, and technological information which makes progress toward so-
lutions possible, constantly changes what we thought was doable and do-
able by us.
No doubt the very notion of justice always goes beyond what is doable.
Every sacrifice of my attention, my time, my resources to another already
opens the horizon of justice for still another, and for all. Each time I answer
the greeting of one who passes in the street, I sense the demand to respect
all the others, and the other animals too. Without the passion for justice and
truth, whatever I do with my neighbor – or with my comrades exploited
with me – becomes a reciprocal egoism and whatever we agree upon be-
comes our ideology.
 OBJECTIVITY AND OF JUSTICE 407
Note

1. Can these difficulties be ascribed to an allegedly ontic character of our language which
determines by negation? Yet Heidegger found not only in the preSocratics but in the
resources of current language ontological terms. It would be strange indeed that our
language would have always misformulated the appeal and demand in the face it
continually recognizes and responds to.
408 ALPHONSO LINGIS