Levinas’s Return to Platonic Semantics

Levinas repeatedly calls his thought in the 1960s a “return to Platonism.” Whereas most scholars read this statement as part of Levinas’s critique of multiculturalism and moral relativism, I look at Levinas’s Platonism on its own terms as a theory of meaning. Levinas offers a tridimensional theory of meaning based on two kinds of Platonic “separation” (chōrismos): (1) a sepa­ration between historical variability and ethical universality, corresponding to the relation between sensibles and forms (“eidetic separation”); and (2) a further separation between ethical universality and its ground or condition in the other person, corresponding to the relation between the forms and the Good (“agathistic separation”). Levinas’s Platonism consists in a differentiation between three semantic planes: contextual meaning, a-contextual meaning, and a goodness beyond all meaning, respectively.