The mishnah continues with a story. Rabbi Yohanan ben Mathia asked his son to hire workers. The son promised “food” to the workers. When he came back, his father said: “Even if you prepared a meal for them equal to the one King Solomon served, you would not have fulfilled your obligation toward them, for they are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As long as they have not begun to work, go and specify: you are only entitled to bread and legumes” (DSS 17; NTR 98). The mishnah can be understood here in a simple and practical way: be precise in your contracts because if you are not, you risk a potential dispute. If you vaguely promise “food,” your workers may demand the finest sirloin, arguing that that is what they understood by “food,” or what they used to receive from their previous employer, or what they need for dietary or religious reasons. As the father tells his son, even a feast worthy of King Solomon would never be enough! Says the mishnah, since the father and son obviously cannot afford a meal fit for kings, they must make clear that the workers will receive the minimum prescribed by custom: bread and legumes.
This story, I suggest, illustrates the narrative of the “entrance of the third.” Before, we had two parties, the employer and his employees, the former being responsible for the latter. The former, however, has now been divided in two—the employer comprises a father and son, who have individual desires and opinions. This division between different opinions is in itself the manifestation of a third party. Crucially, the third party is not one of the three in particular: it is neither the father, nor the son, nor the workers (seen as “the other”). Rather, the third party consists of the very condition of there being three voices in the story. The infinite demand of the worker/other perceived by the father and exposed in his conversation with his son generates the question of the limit and sharing of responsibility. The employer is not only defined by his responsibility for the welfare of his workers; he is also partly defined by his interest in his own welfare, or that of his family, or indeed of any other people. He must calculate what he can give to the worker/other.
To summarize the foregoing, the conversation between the father and son is a paradigm of the “entrance of the third” for three reasons. First, most simply, it introduces—or exposes—the presence of three parties in the interaction. Second, it raises questions about the degree of responsibility we hold toward others. Finally, it reveals the difference between ethics, as an infinite—or at least vague and open-ended—promise, and politics, as the calculation of what is possible. As such, in Levinas’s philosophy, the “entrance of the third” does not imply the actual presence of three parties: competing ways to treat the other appear “in the face of the other.”12 As Fagan writes, “The ethical realm relied upon is always already political within itself.”13 Moreover, if in the Talmudic story the conversation between the father and son comes after the meeting between the son and the workers, namely, after the pure “ethical” meeting, in real life this chronology is immaterial. While temporal order is unavoidable in a story, in real life the son, workers, father, and everybody else coexist from the beginning. Ethics is the focus on responsibility regarded as the core of all relationships in a context in which all relationships already exist. It is in this sense that Levinas’s ethics is like the Hobbesian state of nature. Ethics is not a historical pre-political situation but that which gives meaning to the actual, phenomenal, political situation.
In short, calculations about how to treat the other—namely, the questions connected to the entrance of the third—are concomitant with absolute responsibility toward the other, though they are rhetorically expressed after it. For Levinas, the employer is and remains infinitely responsible for those who are under his or her authority. He rests this point on Rabbi Yohanan ben Mathia’s reference to “the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” This formulation has two meanings. The first, universalistic, interpretation is that in the Talmud the people of Israel are “a people who has received the Law and, as a result, a human nature which has reached the fullness of its responsibilities and self-consciousness. The descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are human beings who are no longer childlike” (DSS 18; NTR 98).
The second interpretation is based on the well-known biblical story in which Abraham welcomes three strangers, giving them food and shelter, without knowing that they are angels, without inquiring who they are (Gen. 18:2–8). Indeed, Abraham’s generosity toward his guests far exceeds his initial offer of plain bread and water (vv. 4–5); what he actually prepares is fine cakes, milk, curd, and a tender calf (vv. 6–8). As a result, Abraham’s descendants are “men to whom their ancestor bequeathed a difficult tradition of duties toward the other man, which one is never done with, an order in which one is never free. In this order, above all else, duty takes the form of obligations toward the body, the obligation of feeding and sheltering” (DSS 19; NTR 99). However, is one infinitely responsible for others because these others are part of a tradition of infinite responsibility? Indeed, in the mishnah, it is the workers, not Rabbi Yohanan ben Mathia and his son, who are called “descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Levinas seems to understand the story as follows: The very presence of the descendants of Abraham reminds us of Abraham’s tradition of absolute responsibility. Their tradition of responsibility makes us responsible for them.14
Thus the presence of the other generates two parallel conditions. The first is based on the identification of the other—the workers in the mishnah—as descendants of Abraham. Abraham opened his house to his guests and, in his rush to serve them, offered even more than he had first proposed. This ancestry, according to Levinas, reminds us of our infinite responsibility toward others. In Levinas’s reading of the Talmudic story, the son’s approach to the workers is like Abraham’s to his guests: what is owed to the other is undefined and can never be enough. From this, it can be derived that all relationships are like those of Abraham vis-à-vis his guests and the son vis-à-vis his workers, because all relationships potentially involve power. Ethical responsibility for anyone over whom the ego has power or potential power—that is, for anyone—is an irreducible fact: it has, and needs, no reason because it is the sign of the transcendence that constitutes the starting point of all human relationships.
The second condition is based on the identification of the other as people whose needs and will compete with the subject’s own needs and will. When considered this way, our responsibility toward the other can never in fact be infinite, because we also have responsibility toward ourselves. The solution to this problem is a “contract” (DSS 20; NTR 100), like that in the Talmudic story, under which the workers are entitled not to “food,” with an open-ended definition, but to some kind of food.15 Within the bounds of this contract, Levinas insists that this food must be a decent, human meal, not food typically given to slaves or fit for animals.16 That is, workers are entitled to meals that respect them as human beings. This idea returns in slightly different form in a section of the Gemara immediately following the mishnah. An employer offering a salary higher than prescribed by custom should not expect longer hours but better work from his workers. As Levinas comments, the contract must respect the human condition and people’s need for sleep and free time: “The quality of my labor I am willing to discuss, but I will not bargain over my human condition, which, in this particular case, expresses itself as my right to get up or to go to sleep at the hour dictated by custom [à l’heure coutumière]” (DSS 23–24; NTR 101).
The contract is justified by the “human condition,” that is, by the workers’ “rights,” or by the “rights of the other person” mentioned above. Levinas’s use of the term “rights” here is atypical: Levinas usually describes the ethical meeting as a transcendent order that appears in the face of the other—namely, as something applied to or imposed on the subject, not as something deserved or owned or received by the other.17 Put simply, his ethics is formulated in terms of duties and not in terms of