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To those in the grip of deep psychic pain—depression, loss, paralyzing fear of death—ethics seems like a distant luxury. First I need to get well, a sufferer might say, then I can focus on the welfare of others. For now, he or she asks, what use do I have for ethics? Such a challenge is answered—powerfully, brilliantly, and lovingly—in Paul Marcus's breathtaking new book, In Search of the Good Life. Marcus's last book, Being for the Other, showed how a certain kind of ethics—that of the Continental philosopher Emmanuel Levinas—fills some of the gaps in traditional psychoanalysis. This one takes the project further, offering both a personal and theoretical, not to mention colorfully readable, journey through the many ways this brand of ethics transforms people's lives—saving them, in fact.
That is no easy project. Even to a philosophically informed analyst, Levinas's writings should prompt a simple (if perfectly anti-Levinasian) question: What good is this to me? It is not that Levinas is an uninteresting scholar. He has been hailed the greatest ethicist in Continental philosophy, and one of the most striking and revolutionary thinkers in twentieth-century phenomenology. Nor is it that he is an aloof academic. Levinas's every word bears the scars of vivid, earth-shattering experiences: the Holocaust, the uprooting of Shtetl Jewry, the French resistance, the heartbreaking corruption of his teacher, Martin Heidegger. It is, rather, that Levinas has made himself almost entirely out of reach, at least to someone demanding that he advise us what, exactly, to do.
That is, first of all, Levinas's own design. His writing is dominated by the idea that ethics cannot be captured or represented in language, or in what he calls “the said.” No first principles, laws, or dictates can constitute the true content of ethics. That is because ethics is not about content, it is about context: the relation of being toward the Other, or for