A Historical Horizon: Beyond Metaphysics

Man becomes the object of his own study: the more he exerts his energy on his approach to himself the further he cleaves thinking from material activity by means of intensifying scrutiny on his own said activity. He makes himself a concept, sees how certain behaviors play out, believes he can divine the future by studying the past: he wants to master thinking, but in the process halts his own authentic being. His project is all too human.

Ethics as Optics – Emmanuel Levinas

“The first ‘vision’ of eschatology […] reveals the very possibility of a eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision—it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics.But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type.”