 It is impossible to set up a temporal order of succession or alternation between being and the good beyond being. For humans, the good comes to pass almost trivially and in everyday contexts. Of course, as readily as responsibility and generosity may be glimpsed in human affairs, cruelty and competition are also obvious. Given this, Levinas seeks support for his intuition about the good in at least two moments in the philosophical tradition wherein its occurrence and irreducible value have been identified: Plato’s Idea of the good, and Descartes’ infinite substance, which points beyond itself to an unknowable cause. However, that humans experience moments of inexplicable generosity, even enact them spontaneously, is a fact that would remain enigmatic within an ontology of competing drives or merely utilitarian desires. In that respect, the trace of the good is present within existence as the possibility that something other than rivalries and instrumentalization take place intersubjectively.