Here I am for the others—an enormous response, whose inordinateness is attenuated with hypocrisy as soon as it enters my ears forewarned of being’s essence. . . . The hypocrisy is from the first denounced. But the norms to which the denunciation refers have been understood in the enormity of meaning . . . to be true like unrefrained witness. In any case nothing less was needed for the little humanity that adorns the world. . . .

After the death of a certain god inhabiting the world behind the scenes, the substitution of the hostage discovers the trace, the unpronounceable inscription, of what . . . does not enter into any present.

—Levinas, Otherwise Than Being

By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, [the philosophers] betrayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement. Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, comfortableness. . . . how many lies lay hidden under the best honored type of their contemporary morality. . . . Every time they said: “We must get there, that way, where you today are least at home.

—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil