suggested by Mosaic law meets its opponent in the philosoph-
ical tradition, which has often undermined such religious de-
mands. The covenant cannot, after all, be made rational. There
is nothing more absurd than the honoring of father and
mother above other humans, many of whom are, to any ob-
jective (that is, philosophical) eye, worth far more than one’s
parents.
In his essay on Lévinas in Writing and DifferenceDerrida
tacitly acknowledges the autonomy of Jewish ethics, its sepa-
rateness from philosophy. Lévinas’s demand to attend to the
person before you comes from outside philosophy: it is a form
of religious empiricism. Empiricism recognizes the brute real-
ity of the world, the things themselves, as opposed to the
abstraction usually emphasized by philosophy. And so the em-
pirical sense, in its rough immediacy, presents a kind of an-
tiphilosophy. The philosopher tends to see empirical reality as
a challenge, along with the primitive ethical demands of scrip-
ture that emphasize this reality (the poor widow at your door,
the crying orphan).
Here Derrida shows his difference from a thinker like
Hegel, for whom there is, in effect, nothing outside of philos-
ophy. Hegel understands empiricism as a partial, limited per-
spective, ripe to be superseded by Hegel’s own idealist posi-
tion. For Hegel, quarreling perspectives must be understood as
interdependent, as pieces of a puzzle—but pieces that become
essentially worthless once the puzzle is complete. In The Phe-
nomenology of Spirit,successive steps in the history of philos-
ophy are assimilated and rendered obsolete by Hegel and his
readers. For Hegel, then, empiricism stands for a moment in
the story of philosophy as it moves toward its triumph; not, as
Derrida presents it, the recognition of a world that challenges
philosophy from outside.
128 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology