Levinas and Løgstrup on the Phenomenology (and Metaphysics?) of Moral Agency

Moral agency requires escaping the orbit of one’s self-concern. Both Levinas and Løgstrup offer an account of what is involved in this kind of perspective shift. For Løgstrup, this requires a forgetting of the self via an immersion in the patterns of life that spontaneously foster the other person’s welfare. For Levinas, it involves a transformation of the self towards responsibility for the other whose presence challenges the legitimacy of one’s self-prioritization. Both accounts make use of hyperbole when characterizing the imperialism of first-person claims and the moral disruption and asymmetry necessary to overcome it. This paper argues that this hyperbole plays an important methodological role but must be understood as metaphysically neutral – a distinction that Levinas’s philosophy more successfully maintains.