There must be judgments, the state, political authority. The unique beings recognized by love, which are extrinsic to all genera, must be brought into the community, the world. […] One must bring oneself into the world[…]For love of the unique, the one and only must be given up.
” Man is, like the Creator himself, at the apex of the hierarchy of the worlds, the soul of the universe.[…] “molded from the clay of the earth,” does not translate literally as “man became a living being,” but rather “a living soul!’ The literal meaning is more profound: man is the soul of all “the worlds,” of all beings, all life[…]Being is, through ethics and man. Thus, man is responsible for the universe. He makes and unmakes worlds, elevates and lowers them. God’s reign depends on me[…]The world is[…]but because, through the human enterprise, it can be justified in its being. The human is the possibility of a being-forthe-other. That possibility is the justification of all existing[…]hat no detail of his acts, his words, his thoughts of every instant, is lost. Each one of them goes back to his root, on high, to take effect in the height of heights, in the worlds and among the pure lights of the high places[…]”Our acts, our words, our thoughts”[…]By thought “man transcends man,” as Pascal would say. An anthropology of an already human humanity, with unlimited responsibility[…]
One must judge, one must reach a conclusion. There must be knowledge, verification, objective science, system. There must be judgments, the state, political authority. The unique beings recognized by love, which are extrinsic to all genera, must be brought into the community, the world. One must bring oneself into the world[…]For love of the unique, the one and only must be given up. The humanity of the human must be set back within the horizon of the universal[…]This means, concretely, in Europe, the endless requirement of justice[…]the history of modern Europe attests to an obsession with the definitive. In opposition to the established order, there is an obsession with an order to be established on universal but abstract rules-i.e., political rules, while underestimating or forgetting the uniqueness of the other person, whose right is, after all, at the origin of rights, yet always a new calling. The history of modern Europe is the permanent temptation of an ideological rationalism, and of experiments carried out through the rigor of deduction, administration and violence[…]and the human dehumanized, sees hope only in the goodness of one person toward another, the ‘Tittle kindness”[…]. An invincible goodnes […]It validates no government, but rather bears witness, in the mode of being of our Europe, to a new awareness of a strange (or very old) mode of a spirituality or a piety without promises, which would not render human responsibiHty-always my responsibility-a senseless notion. A spirituality whose future is unknown ”.
From Emmanuel Levinas, In the time of the nations, translated by Michael B. Smith, first published in the USA, 1994, by Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, pp. 125-126-127 e pp. 134-135