 Michael Morgan has discussed Levinas’ existential basis of ethics in relation to the three ethical schools just indicated (2007). He reminds us that Levinas is working at a pre-theoretical and embodied level that represents the impetus behind ethical systems forged through reflection, tradition, and critique. In that sense, Levinas’ objective is simultaneously phenomenological and hermeneutical: he describes the encounter with the other, argues that it imposes a limit on object constitution, and interpretively traces ethics back to the birth of intersubjective meaning. As opposed to Heidegger’s inaugural question of being, Levinas’ concern is with the exteriority or transcendence of the other who addresses me. Consistent with Morgan’s claim, Diane Perpich has argued that the face-to-face in Levinas gives rise to a “normativity without norms” (2008: 126–127). For his part, Steven Crowell observes that the normativity of the face is also epistemic; it is the ground for the objectivity of any perception because, if the other did not face me and call my experience into question, I would never encounter a “sense of the normative, of standards against which the validity of my experiences can be judged” (Crowell 2015: 574). Indeed, the first normativity I experience, prior to reflection, corresponds to an affect (TI: 294), which accompanies my experience of the other’s exteriority. At the same time, I respond to that other. As Levinas writes, 