It could be argued that ‘the true life is elsewhere’, but Levinas deliberately reverses Rimbaud's words and states, ‘but we are in the world’. There is a commitment to engagement with and involvement in the world. To be ‘in-the-world’ is to be incarnate and enfleshed. Life is terribly secular. What Levinas will draw attention to, from his earliest phenomenological reflections in On Escape, Existence and Existents, and Time and the Other, is the salvific significance of secularity. Human fulfilment is not a withdrawal from the world, but a commitment to the world. God arises as the counterpart of the justice rendered to others. Thus there is a commitment to incarnate or enfleshed existence, for ‘we are in the world’.

Incarnate, or enfleshed, existence is a significant object of both phenomenological and theological reflection, not least in France, where, from its very beginnings, phenomenology developed a more overtly existential stress. Heidegger, of course, assuming Husserl's chair in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, had already published Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1927), and Levinas had been influenced by the stature of this work, and the themes of human existence which it developed. In France, however, phenomenology developed a particularly existential thrust. Already mentioned is Janicaud's criticism of phenomenology's original falling in France with Sartre's abandonment of the workplace of French phenomenological investigations ‘to turn resolutely towards politics and an ethics of engagement’ since, for Sartre, phenomenology was altogether too abstract, ‘too detached from concrete situations and sociopolitical struggles’.