The essence of morality (in its relationship to phenomenological philosophy) from Levinas’s Totality and Infinity.

But the presentation and the development of the notions employed [in Totality and Infinity] owe everything to the phenomenological method. Intentional analysis is the search for the concrete. Notions held under the direct gaze of the thought that defines them are nevertheless, unbeknown to this naive thought, revealed to be implanted in horizons unsuspected by this thought; these horizons endow them with a meaning – such is the essential teaching of Husserl. What does it matter if in the Husserlian phenomenology taken literally these unsuspected horizons are in their turn interpreted as thoughts aiming at objects! What counts is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives. The break-up of the formal structure of thought (the noema of a noesis) into events which this structure dissimulates, but which sustain it and restore its concrete significance, constitutes a deduction – necessary and yet non-analytical. …  The signification that, in the present work, phenomenological deduction shows to underlie the theoretical thought concerning being and the panoramic exposition of being itself is not irrational. The aspiration to radical exteriority, thus called metaphysical, the respect for this metaphysical exteriority which, above all, we must “let be,” constitutes truth. It animates this work and evinces its allegiance to the intellectualism of reason. But theoretical thought, guided by the ideal of objectivity, does not exhaust this aspiration; it remains this side of its ambitions. If, as this book will show, ethical relations are to lead transcendence to its term, this is because the essential of ethics is in its transcendent intention, and because not every transcendent intention has the noesis-noema structure.

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Disclaimer: I’ve been wrong about morality a hundred times, but here is where I am.

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The desire to not know another for the sake of preserving one’s own understanding totality… this is to wish to rule one’s own world instead of serving in the world we share, which is infinite and mysterious but nonetheless not remote. Not only is it not remote, it is infinitely present if we can resist closing it out and explaining it away. Why do we close out the shared world? Because confrontation of the infinite arouses dread. Anyone who seeks comfort from “spirituality” and will not cross over the dark stretches of anxiety and perplexity which ring each understanding totality is not after spirituality, but comforting fantasies and distractions.

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I do in fact have a work ethic, but essential to that ethic is distinguishing between my work and that work that needs to be done in doing my work.