On wakefulness

Questioner: Your work is altogether imbued with a moral
preoccupation. Curiously, after a period of liberation in which it has been rejected, science and, notably, biological discourses have led men to pose ethical questions. What is your view about this evolution?

Emmanuel Levinas: Morality has, in effect, a bad reputation.
One confuses it with moralism. What is essential in the ethical is often lost in the moralism which has been reduced to an ensemble of particular obligations.

Questioner: What is the ethical?

Emmanuel Levinas: It is the recognition of holiness . . . [T]he
fundamental trait of being is the preoccupation that
each being has with [its own] being. The concern for
the other breaches concern for the self. This is what I
call holiness. Our humanity consists in being able to
recognize the priority of the other, as if one could not think without already being concerned for the other.

~Emmanuel Levinas,
On the Usefulness of Insomnia