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.”