Parents, teachers and religious leaders have always taught morality to their charges, to their sons and daughters, to school children, and to ordinary people. Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), the Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher, does something different, something perhaps more difficult. He teaches morality to the intellectual elite, to those who all too often, and all too proudly, have become our new “cultured despisers of religion”, thinking themselves too intelligent, too sophisticated, too cultured for the common imperatives and well-known limitations of “ordinary” morality. Whether they dismiss the authority of morality as “selfincurred immaturity”, “bourgeois superstructure”, “grammatical error”, “infantile internalization”, “mass delusion”, “physiological weakness”, or some other derisive reduction, Levinas aims to show them – at the highest levels of intellect and spirit – that morality is a matter for adults, intelligent adults included.

Levinas will show that nothing is more serious than morality. For at stake in morality is our highest individual and collective vocation, the very humanity of the human. His writings are difficult, then, not because morality is difficult. Everyone already knows the moral imperatives and knows that they run counter to our instincts and inclinations.