Emmanuel Lévinas is perhaps best known for his claim that ethics (literally and more accurately, "the ethical"--l'éthique--the domain of human relation rather than that of moral precepts and rules) precedes ontology. As Lévinas says in an autobiographical essay, "Signature" (from Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme, 1963; translated as "Signature" in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 1990), "The fundamental experience, which objective experience itself presupposes, is the experience of the other person. It is experience par excellence." The encounter with the other person, like the encounter with God, is an encounter with that which is absolutely beyond one's understanding and will remain beyond it, though one may not recognize that it does. But in being beyond one's comprehension, the other person is not also beyond relation.

According to Lévinas, the Western intellectual tradition has understood the...