I’m starting to disbelieve in the common belief that Levinas is the heir of Buber, who has somehow made Buber obsolete. I don’t believe they share moral vision. Maybe the most important evidence is the experience of reading them, which could not be less similar despite their common material. Buber is an electrifying read, where Levinas is crushingly heavy and darkening.

Part of me enjoys thinking of Levinas as unbearably good (as a representative of Paul’s notion of the impossibility of Law), but another part of me thinks he is unbearable because his moral vision is ruinous.

Levinas might be the foremost advocate of the process by which the best are stripped of all conviction leaving the worst unsupervised and prone to unscrupulous conviction violent intensification.

The Other is indispensable to the central self, but that does not give it precedent. This might shed some light on the ancient insistence in Chinese thought that heaven must outrank earth (to put it as acceptably as possible).