Levinas and hermeneutics on ethics and the Other

Moral underpinnings of psychology and psychotherapy

In recent years, a number of theoretical and philosophical psychologists (Cushman, 1990; Fowers, 2005; Flyvbjerg, 2001; Gantt & Williams, 2002; Martin & Sugarman, 1999; Richardson, Fowers, & Guignon, 1999; Slife et al., 2005; Vandenberg, 1999) have echoed these critiques of modern individualism and addressed what they perceive to be ethical blind spots and something of a moral vacuum in our way of life. Many of them contend, moreover, that modern psychology and psychotherapy to a great extent are blind or oblivious to these ethical deficiencies and actually tend to perpetuate them by way of unacknowledged assumptions and tacit values that infuse theory, research, and practice in the field. For example, some argue (Cushman, 1990; Richardson, 2005) that modern psychology’s propensity for representing itself as an objective and value-neutral enterprise really masks a host of cultural and moral values, a “disguised ideology,” that it both surreptitiously advocates and hides from close scrutiny and possibly needed revision. Typically, these tacit ideals represent some form of modern “liberal individualism” or “liberal instrumentalism” (Sandel, 1996; Sullivan, 1986) that is insufficiently critical of our heavy reliance on instrumental rationality and the promotion of individual rights and autonomy as the key to the good life.

Ontological hermeneutics and dialogue

Some of these theoretical psychologists draw heavily on hermeneutic philosophy (Gadamer, 1960/1975; Guignon, 1983; Heidegger, 1927/1962; Richardson et al., 1999; Taylor, 1989) to clarify the nature of human action and the social world and to tease out and scrutinize the tacit values underlying psychological theory, research, and practice. In the hermeneutic or interpretive social science view, the kind of understanding sought in the humanities and a large part of the human sciences contrasts sharply with the sort of knowledge typically pursued in natural science. The natural sciences rely centrally on the exercise of a special capacity for abstraction that we might call “objectification.” To adopt an objectifying stance toward things is to ignore or abstract away from “subject-related qualities.” Such qualities are most of the meanings of and relationships among things that show up within our ordinary experience, concerned with our shifting desires, values, and aims. Thus, to take an objectifying stance means to “regard the world as it is independently of the meanings it might have for human subjects, or of how it figures in their experience” (Taylor, 1985, p. 31). Obviously this approach has proved its mettle in modern science and its powerful applications. However, there is no good reason to deny the validity of other kinds of interpretations of our experience and events, reflecting different ways of being involved with the world. It no longer seems proper to many of us to insist that reality must be only that which is formulated through the approach of abstraction and objectification. We have learned to question the detached, somewhat depersonalizing, “spectator” view of knowing and relating to the world that this approach entails (Slife & Williams, 1995).

In the hermeneutic view, humans are first and foremost “self-interpreting beings” (Taylor, 1989) who are “always ‘thrown’ into a familiar life-world from which they draw their possibilities of self-interpretation. Their life-stories only make sense against the backdrop of possible story-lines opened by our historical culture” (Guignon, 1989, p. 109). These lives are woven into the fabric of a holistic life-world where there are no sharp divisions between the person or mind, on one side, and the world, body, and others, on the other. The meanings we live by permeate and shape the practices and institutions of the “outer” world much as they belong to our “inner” life. ¹ There is certainly a place for scientific knowing and an instrumental stance toward the world. But in this view there is a more fundamental, ultimately practical or moral kind of understanding that humans always and everywhere hammer out together, as they seek to understand the meaning for them of events, the past, texts, works of art, social reality, and the actions of others, so that they can relate to them appropriately along the story-lines of their living.

On this account, a basic fact about humans, in Heidegger’s (1927/1962, p. 228) words, is that they “care” about whether their lives make sense and what they are amounting to. Taylor (1985) develops this notion of care with the idea that humans do not simply desire particular outcomes or satisfactions in living. Rather, they always or inherently make “strong evaluations,” even if only tacitly or unconsciously, about the quality of their desires and motivations and the worth of the ends they seek in terms of how they fit in with their overall sense of a decent or worthwhile life.

The kind of understanding pursued in this way is above all dialogical. In Taylor’s (2002) words, in both everyday life and human science inquiry, “understanding of a text or an event…has to be construed, not on the model of the ‘scientific’ grasp of an object, but rather on the model of speech-partners coming to an understanding” (p. 126). In other words, understanding is the result of a process of mutual communication, influence, negotiation, accommodation, and struggle, as in a conversation or a relationship. This process involves an exquisite, quintessentially human, sometimes almost unbearable tension. On the one hand, we harbor self-defining beliefs and values concerning things we truly care about, in which we have a “deep identity investment,” sometimes an investment in “distorted images we cherish of others” (Taylor, 2002, p. 141). On the other hand, since our ideals and our images of others and events are always partial or distorted in some way, we need not just to compromise and get along with others, but to learn from the past, others, or other cultures. Thus, in matters closest to our hearts, we depend greatly upon these others, their insights, their critical challenge of our points of view, and their beneficent influence.

Richardson and Fowers (1998) apply this perspective to psychological inquiry with the suggestion that hermeneutic dialogue offers an approach that is as good as or better than modern liberal theory and would-be “objective” social science in allowing us to defend and advance modern liberal values of human rights and dignity, and reveals a way that we can meaningfully and critically discuss more substantive issues of character, community, and the good life. It does this, in part, by bringing our modern ideals of dignity and equality out in the open, where, many of us feel, their considerable merits and their limitations can be discussed without any claims to unquestionable authority or strategies of intimidation playing a role in the debate. These authors suggest, following Gadamer (1960/1975), that dialogical understanding can be said to be an interplay of openness and application. Drawing on Warnke (1987, p. 167ff.), they characterize such dialogic understanding as involving genuine openness to any meaning or claim that actually involves granting it provisional authority to challenge our beliefs and prejudices. Application involves testing out whether an insight or point of view reveals new aspects of our current motives and dilemmas and helps make sense out of new circumstances. In the process, some reinterpretation or modification of old truths is inevitable. The danger or risk with openness is conservatism, in which we bow to authority or rationalize the status quo out of fear or timidity. The only cure for such inauthentic rationalization is further rigorous application of these claims to our unique historical situation. The danger or risk with application is subjectivism or the clever, opportunistic interpretation of events or principles in a self-serving manner. However, the only cure for such arbitrariness is further, sometimes annoying or painful openness to challenge from others (Gadamer, 1960/1975, p. 507).

Levinas: Ethics as first philosophy

Recently, a number of philosophical psychologists and others have seen the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1961/1969, 1974/1981, 1997) as a promising way of analyzing and resolving confusions and problems about modern psychology’s ethical underpinnings and cultural thrust (Bloechl, 2008; Clegg & Slife, 2005; Davis, 1995; Gantt, 1996, 2000; Gantt & Williams, 2002; Sayre & Kunz, 2005; Vandenberg, 1999). Levinas advances a distinctive thesis to the effect that much of the Western tradition has tended strongly to reduce, absorb, or appropriate what is taken to be “the Other” so that it approximates “the Same,” in philosophy, politics, and ethics. As Levinas (1997) puts it,

For Levinas (1997), intellectual activity involves “seizing something and making it one’s own,” reducing, appropriating, and grasping “the otherness of the known” (p. 76). This process effaces the alterity of “the Other,” and in this sense the Western tradition for Levinas, as Bernstein (1991) interprets him, is “imperialistic” and attempts to “conquer, master and colonize ‘the Other.’” Seeing this “reveals the violence that is implicit in the reduction of ‘the Other’ to ‘the Same’” (p. 69). According to Bernstein, though indebted to phenomenological tradition, Levinas is radical because of his claim that even Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s ontology fail to escape the reduction of “the Other” to “the Same.” Levinas’s antidote to this kind of imperialism is to open a space for the otherness of “the Other” conceived of as an “absolute other” that is prior to every initiative we might take in relation to “the Other” and prior to any imperialism of coercing “the Other” or defining Him/Her in our terms.

Levinas (1997) elevates ethics as “first philosophy” through an analysis of the encounter with “the Face of the Other.” The ethical relation to “the Other” begins with acknowledging the radical incommensurable singularity of the Other. The purpose of Levinas’s emphasis on the radical alterity of “the Other” is to resist the comprehending dominating power of reason in the Western tradition. Thus he insists on the absolute alterity of “the Other,” which is always beyond our grasp of understanding. For Levinas, the face-to-face relation with “the Other” is asymmetrical and he emphasizes unlikeness and lack of reciprocity in contrast to the traditional emphasis on likeness and reciprocity in relationships. The ethical implications of this view for responsibility in relationships are considerable. For Levinas, this asymmetry means that “I, in responding to ‘the Other’ (l’autrui), am always responsible for (to) ‘the Other’ (l’autrui), regardless of ‘the Other’s’ response to me” (Bernstein, 1991, p. 71). In Levinas’s view, “the Other” is utterly different, and so unknowable, and he emphasizes the ethical call implicit in the vulnerability of the Face of the Other. For Levinas (1997), “the Other” calls into question and challenges the complacency of the self, which, in claiming its right to be, may usurp “the Other.”

Levinas vs. hermeneutics

How might Levinas’s philosophy and hermeneutic thought be compared and contrasted with respect to their implications for social and psychological inquiry, especially concerning how they can address the ethical blind spots that many feel characterize both modern culture and much of contemporary psychology? Are they at odds on fundamental issues? Or might they complement one another in the search for a “situated psychology” (Cushman, 1990), one that does not ignore cultural context or obscure the inescapably ethical dimensions of psychological theory and research? It seems to us that they are both richly complementary and in some ways significantly at odds.

Mutual influence, dialogue, and learning from others

In our view, we need to be just as concerned about failing to “learn from” the Other, and vice versa, as about opportunistically or maliciously interpreting them in our terms. Often, what we most respect and appreciate about others is their hard-won expertise, knowledge, or wisdom on a particular topic or in a particular area of human practice or experience. Sometimes those we are inclined to admire and rely on for their insights or judgment are also quite humble and open to challenge or criticism from others, including others much less expert or experienced than themselves, from whom they may find they unexpectedly learn something new of real value. In learning from experts or becoming one oneself, on this view, we assume we are able to gauge the reliability and worth of another’s perspective, even if we critically sift it, test it out in various ways, and modify our appreciation of it as we cultivate our own judgment. A similar process takes place among relative equals, friends, intimates, and colleagues in everyday life where we pool our knowledge and insights extensively, one that hermeneutics characterizes “on the model of speech-partners coming to an understanding” (Taylor, 2002, p. 126).

Bakhtin (1981) and Taylor (1991) argue that we are not only essentially creatures of dialogue but veritable dialogical selves. In this view, the mature human self is not essentially a center of monological consciousness, often conceived of as an inner space or mind that contains representations of things outside or inside this container self, including “depictions of ends desired or feared” (Taylor, 1991, p. 307). Rather it is a scene or locus of dialogue. In this view, what I centrally am is an interplay or conversation among various voices, commitments, identifications, or points of view. Bakhtin imagines this self as a conversation or struggle among multiple voices, speaking from different positions and invested with different kinds and degrees of authority. Becoming a self means internalizing the ongoing conversation or dialogue from the world around us. Some of these voices Bakhtin terms “authoritative” (we might call them “authoritarian”) in an uncontested way. They are not in dialogue with other voices or positions, but are blindly accepted or compulsively rejected. Other voices are “innerly persuasive.” They have been tested, assimilated, retold in our own words. Picturesquely he says that they are “half-ours and half-someone else’s” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 385). Voices become innerly persuasive as a result of a certain kind of dialogic process. Each voice or position is “viewed” by others and glimpses its own image in the eyes of others. For this to take place, “outsideness” is necessary. An image of a voice may be structured only from the point of view of another voice, which is temporarily taken as a norm (p. 296). Each voice incorporates its own evaluative position at the same time that it remains open to the potential truth of the Other (unless it tries to dishonestly or defensively thwart that message or insight). This back-and-forth process draws out the potential insight and wisdom of different voices or positions and allows a new, temporary, open-ended unity to emerge.

Our concern is that Levinas’s approach considerably truncates this process, leaving out of the picture what Bakhtin (1981) calls “outsideness,” the key means by which we can gain a critical perspective on our own views and values and afford the same kind of critical angle of vision to others. The Levinasian stress on lack of reciprocity and difference between self and other may make ethics blind. The process of learning from others, including discerning part of the reason why we appreciate and respect others and they us, is largely obscured. All of the kinds of dialogue, mutual influence, mutual edification, and learning from others described here may, of course, be distorted or marred by denial, defensiveness, malice, or cruelty. But they may not, in which case constructive dialogue presupposes a kind of reciprocity and at least limited or partly accurate knowledge of others and their “being” that Levinas proscribes in order to defend the ethical relation. However, we suggest that hermeneutic dialogue that takes seriously the dialectic between respect for “the Other” and engaging them fully with one’s views and commitments can address Levinas’s concern for protecting the alterity of “the Other” while avoiding the danger of stifling legitimate critique. It may be a greater challenge to manage the interplay of granting provisional authority to the perspective of the Other to challenge one’s own while also bringing to bear one’s own sincere convictions in dialogue than simply to refrain from tendentiously imposing one’s own categories and viewpoint on the other person (or text, historical event, or social reality). In the absence of the right kind of reciprocity, we may remain significantly disconnected or alienated from others or ourselves.

Levinas and theoretical psychology

A number of leading theoretical psychologists have employed Levinas’s ideas to address the ethical blind spots or deficiencies they find in current social and psychological inquiry. Their analyses show the corrective power of Levinas’s approach but also illustrate the problems with his approach discussed in this paper.

For example, drawing on Levinas, Gantt (1996) paints an elegant portrait of the way in which we are indebted to each other for our very existence. He writes that,

Gantt goes on to indicate how this indebtedness binds us ethically to one another:

However, after acknowledging our dependence on each other and the moral relationship we have to each other, we are given very little guidance with regard to conducting our relationships in a complicated, conflict-ridden, interdependent world apart from being forbidden from violating “Otherness.” It is not clear how the “continuing questioning and answering” Gantt mentions amounts to more than a kind of mutual forbearance.

Though respect for the other and protection of the “Other” by resisting the imperialism of reductive, analytical reason may be perfectly legitimate in many situations, Levinas’s approach seems oddly closed to recognizing, exploring, and elaborating other forms of ethical engagement. For example, Gantt (1996) states:

The idea of escape from a self-serving hedonism advocated here is generally appealing. However, a striking feature of this passage is the way the author sharply dichotomizes that kind of shallowness or even addiction and a fairly radical “captivity to the needs of others,” a bit of hyperbole that seems as dangerous as it might be inspiring. It seems to us that the latter term of this polarized pair does not amount, as Gantt suggests, to a “conventional relationship” at all. Most of us would think that a conventional relationship—that is, a healthy or fully ethical one—includes at different times a host of qualities and transactions that fall between these extremes, such as mutual correction and learning from one another, assertiveness, appreciation and mutual affection, empathy, forgiveness, constructive argument, mild censure, at times even a bit of “tough love,” and the like (as surely Gantt would agree). But these are excluded from this Levinasian picture of things, leaving us in theory with only the choices of a kind of radical ethical purity or a thoroughly debased alternative.

Elsewhere, Gantt (2000) discusses how from a Levinasian perspective the psychotherapeutic relationship with the other, at its best, involves a “suffering-with.” He writes,

Once again, dogmatic reductionism and appreciating radical otherness are sharply dichotomized. If one had to choose, perhaps radical otherness is the way to go. But a lot of life and psychotherapy would seem to take place in a messy middle ground that the Levinasian view leaves largely in the dark.

This middle ground surely is important to psychology and mental health professionals. For example, in recent years, relational psychoanalytic thinkers (Aron, 1996; Mitchell, 1998; Mitchell & Aron, 1999; Skolnick & Warshaw, 1992), whose ideas have influenced theorists and therapists well beyond narrow psychoanalytic circles, have elaborated a social and interpersonal account of personality and thoroughly re-conceptualized the analytic process itself in interpersonal terms. Generally in line with the hermeneutic and dialogical self approaches outlined above, this relational view presumes that humans are defined foremost by their relationships and by the intrapsychic, interpersonal, social, and cultural contexts in which they live. Specifically, relational thinkers characterize the therapeutic situation as co-constructed by analyst and patient (Aron, 1996; Hoffman, 1998; Mitchell, 1993, 1997; Stern, 1996, 1997) and as structured by cultural, historical, and moral factors (Aron, 1999; Greenberg, 1999; Spezzano, 1998). Increasingly, analytic therapy is viewed as fundamentally relational and shaped at the core by the intentionality and action of both the analyst and the patient (Zeddies, 1999). From this relational perspective, what an analyst knows about any patient is inseparable from his or her unique mode of participation in the analytic relationship, and his or her subjectivity is intimately connected to and a shaping agent in how the analytic process unfolds (Hoffman, 1998; Renik, 1993). This radically personal and “irreducibly intersubjective” (Zeddies & Richardson, 1999, p. 582) view of the therapy enterprise is anything but depersonalizing and dogmatic, and would seem to be fairly congenial to what Gantt (2000) calls “suffering-with.” But it also describes—imperfectly, no doubt, but many find helpfully—an interpersonal thicket, a world of “all too human” entanglement, shared subjectivity, and mutual influence that a Levinasian perspective gives very little specific guidance in describing or navigating in an ethical and beneficial manner.

Here is another example. In a rich discussion of the “ethical context of human development,” the theoretical psychologist Vandenberg (1999) seeks to “cross-pollinate” Levinas’s ideas and research on early human development. Vandenberg gives a brief, compelling overview of Levinas’s thought. He concurs with Levinas that “much of Western philosophy has been structured by Greek concerns with epistemology, rationality, and the pursuit of truth,” the sort of truth that “is achieved through classification, generalization, [and] extracting the essential features of objects and events that endure across points in time” (p. 33). Even Husserl and Heidegger, whose work in the tradition of phenomenology and existentialism Levinas builds on, failed in his view to fully “appreciate the fundamentally social, and therefore ethical nature of human existence.” Rather, “Husserl’s attention to intentionality and Heidegger’s emphasis on ‘mineness’ still presume an isolated, solitary ego that must somehow eventually learn to engage and cooperate with other solitary individuals” (p. 32). By contrast, he argues, Levinas “proposes an alternative approach, emphasizing the importance of the unique existential encounter with others that cannot be reduced (without being destroyed) to an essence.” In this face-to face encounter, we “are in communion with others,” we “have a covenant with them,” and “knowing occurs within this context of interpersonal relatedness and responsibility.” In this context, “ethics is not a category of knowing, it is a condition for knowing” (p. 33).

Vandenberg (1999) summarizes a variety of research findings concerning early human development, arguing—very plausibly, it seems to us—that these findings suggest that infant development takes place in the context of deep human “relationship” and involves profound ethical “responsibility” in ways that a perspective like Levinas’s captures much better than conventional psychological theories. Research indicates, according to Vandenberg, that from “the first moments of life, neonates possess remarkable capacities for perceptual orientation to other people” (p. 37). Quickly, these “earliest social attunements, expressions, and communications” are “elaborated, deepening infants’ interpersonal involvement and exchange” (p. 37). Vandenberg terms this involvement “primary intersubjectivity.” It involves “expressive relational involvements and exchanges,” even though it does not yet involve “self-reflective awareness,” which only comes later (p. 38). Thus, it refers to the same general kind of co-constituted, practical, or ethical understanding among humans that hermeneutic thought, as well, deems more fundamental than explicit representations or scientific knowing.

Vandenberg (1999) stresses that research on infancy shows individuals to be not only “bound in an intimate web of interpersonal relatedness,” but also bound in a web of “ethical indebtedness” (p. 40), something that only “deepens with development” (p. 39). He interprets the research to show that caregiving for and communication with infants is inseparable from a keen appreciation for their “irreducible uniqueness” (p. 36), unpredictability, and “ungraspable mystery” (p. 35), without which appreciation—perhaps best called “love” or “a special concern and responsibility for a specific, unique individual”—children languish, appear to grieve, and may even die. The tendency of mainstream social science is to seek “objectivity” and a “separation of fact from value,” in which “[e]thics is separated from and subordinated to epistemology; a category of knowledge rather than a condition of being,” reflected in the use of the term “behavior” (p. 42). However, Vandenberg argues, “[e]thics is not something outside or superordinate to everyday exchanges, nor is it contained in a set of rules or in choices made at moments of crisis. Ethics is immanent in simple acts of communication and caregiving” (p. 40). Thus, human action, he suggests, is “more appropriately considered as ‘conduct’ than ‘behavior’” (p. 42).

In a profound way, Vandenberg (1999) uses Levinas’s ideas of ethics as “first philosophy” and the otherness of “the Other” conceived of as an “absolute other” to break the bonds of a distorting scientism or objectivism and assert the primacy of our ethical relatedness and indebtedness to one another. Such ethics is not one kind of knowledge, set of issues, or subtype of human action among others but a very “condition of being.” Moreover, Vandenberg makes a convincing case that such an account of our ethically imbued “primary intersubjectivity” makes better sense of a wide range of research on infant development and caregiver conduct than a conventional social science view of this research as value-neutral findings concerning a particular segment of human behavior. One can only imagine the benefit that would accrue if such a Levinas-derived philosophy were employed to reinterpret other interesting bodies of research in the human sciences!

However, it seems to us that Levinas’s philosophy has some distinct limitations as a guide for this kind of work. It serves well to drive home the point in a general way, as Vandenberg (1999) puts it, that we “cannot escape values, no matter what our stance, revealing the fundamental ethical nature of our conduct” (p. 42). But the Levinasian approach, we have argued—perhaps just in order to protect the primacy of ethics—obscures many facets of human ethical reciprocity and shared subjectivity that would seem to be a key part of the moral life. For example, at one point, Vandenberg asserts, “Infant–caregiver exchanges are asymmetric, as caregivers assume the responsibility for the direction of discourse, guiding infants into appropriate pathways of expression and experience” (p. 40). But he summarizes the results of research showing such exchanges to be anything but asymmetric. They describe, he writes, a situation in which “[c]ooperative engagement, a sense of personal agency, self-awareness, and a greater equality in communicative exchanges, all arise together. So too do new emotions of shame and pride” arise, as part of “increasing communicative complexity marking the appearance of a new deeper appreciation of self in relation with others” (p. 38). If by labeling these exchanges asymmetric, he means to invoke the Levinasian concept of the radical alterity of “the Other” in order to preserve their indelibly ethical character from any sort of reductionism, we suggest once again that this concept is distinctly one-sided and problematically oversimplifies the nature of ethical action.

To give one final example, Clegg and Slife (2005) advocate a sophisticated “Levinasian account of relational knowing.” They argue that most of the “methods of psychology are tied to a single, ideologically dogmatic way of conceiving both knowledge and practice” (p. 65), one that enshrines empiricism, prediction and control, instrumental applications, and a quest for certainty as overriding ideals for the field, evidenced in the strength in recent years of the empirically supported treatment (EST) movement, which slavishly and uncritically endorses this ideal. They suggest that Levinas’s defense of the “irreducible singularity of the self” against all “totalizing themes” provides us with a uniquely powerful way of undermining dogmatic scientism and properly appreciating the unique, unpredictable, irreducible human person who cannot be securely grasped or thematized.

There is a tendency on the part of theoretical psychologists who draw on Levinas to contrast his admirable stress on ethics as first philosophy with a ghastly and injurious objectifying social science in an almost Manichean fashion. Clegg and Slife (2005) soften this kind of approach to a significant degree. They cite evidence from Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence and elsewhere in Levinas’s writings suggesting that the inaccessibility of the Other does not mean that the Other

They add, “The Levinasian account of knowing is, to be sure, non-rational and non-ideological, but it is still an account of knowing. It does not so much disqualify knowing as subjugate it to the ethical” (p. 72). Similarly, Vandenberg (1999) asserts that there is a proper place for conventional social science methods and constructs, so long as they do not crowd out ethical experience or reduce it to static essences. He does not, however, indicate what that place is or how we might successfully integrate these two angles of vision on human phenomena. None of us has a fully adequate answer to this question. But it is time to squarely address it, not skirt it in favor of merely reiterating Levinas’s powerful critique.

It seems to us that Clegg and Slife’s (2005) characterization of the partial unknowability of the Other and the uncertainty that always accompanies it nicely opens the door to a blending or cross-fertilizing of a Levinasian approach with the sort of hermeneutic and Bakhtinian viewpoints outlined above. But the writers reviewed here do not take that step, and it seems badly needed. Their remarks remain cryptic, merely suggestive, and largely negative in the sense that they mainly tell us what the authors think is not an appropriate conception of knowing, or what Clegg and Slife term an “ethical epistemology.” It is non-rational and non-ideological, it is not totalizing or reductive, it does not entail a quest for certainty, and yet it is not “beyond experience,” and so forth. We hope to have made the idea plausible that hermeneutic thought, as well as other perspectives, has something to offer in terms of filling in the picture concerning our fundamentally ethical, interdependent, intersubjective human practices and relationships. It seems desirable that theoretical psychologists not rely exclusively or heavily on Levinas’s ideas as a framework for their critiques but, in addition, do the hard work of blending his ideas and other philosophical or social theoretical viewpoints. Otherwise, the limitations of Levinas’s approach will limit or adversely affect their accounts, including the risk of resting content with condemning (or even demonizing) scientism and failing more fully to develop a compelling “ethical epistemology.”