Responsibility for another person › Receiving a challenge

Return to the person for whom we already had an explanation. We may need to keep part of it. Their role, history, or circumstances can remain relevant. The question is whether our understanding allows them to address us and whether we can explain the response we make.

One way to examine the issue is to distinguish what we know about the person from what we take ourselves to owe them. A prediction about what they will do does not itself justify how we should treat them. A procedure for classifying a claim does not establish that every relevant consideration has been heard. These are limited conclusions that can be assessed without assuming that Levinas's entire philosophy is established.

Totality and Infinity presses the wider question of what makes such limitations ethically significant. Levinas locates it in a relation to someone who can call our freedom into question and exceed the account we have made of them. His challenge is to explain how thought can receive that interruption while continuing to think and judge responsibly.