1 Ethics as First Philosophy Bettina Bergo The idea that ethics could be first philosophy should strike us as curious. Should we understand this as philosophically regressive, a strategy motivated by psychology or social construction? To wit, no philosophical theorizing is possible without consideration of the human being in light of a consciousness that develops socially or in families, by stages. Should we understand ethics as first philosophy in terms of a refusal of distinctions between factical existence and transcendental categories—as a presentation of pre-philosophical practices, in the guise of phenomenology or another “empiricism?” Above all, what is ethics in a thought, like Levinas’s, that sets forth neither rational prescription nor criteria for calculating happiness or pleasures? I will not summarize Levinas’s philosophy here so much as answer the questions: What is first philosophy if and when it is ethics; and, what is meant here by “ethics?” For Levinas, the claim that ethics is first philosophy requires extensive critical work. He must recapitulate and limit philosophies built on identification (i.e., the law of non-contradiction, sufficient reason, and dialectics). He must revisit the thought for which truth is the free subsumption by cognition (in an Aristotelian or Husserlian sense) of an object that gives itself according to profiles (Levinas, 1998a: 69). First philosophy in Levinas will thus be unfolded thanks to two critical efforts: evincing the limits of comprehension (in light of the phenomenological constitution of meaning), and redefining transcendence, away from idealist forms toward embodied, intersubjective experience. He is not the first twentieth century thinker to attempt this. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Henry also present critiques of formalist elements in Husserl’s