Overcoming Structural Goodness through Ethical Transcendence Small Goodness (la petite bonté) as Human Flourishing:

The ethical hermeneutics of Emmanuel Levinas is a provocation to be otherwise where the meaning of being is to be interrogated in the ethical event of asymmetry of a self-other ‘relationless relation’. Contemporary questions of human life and its meaning with regard to philosophy and its significance has to be investigated in the “miracle of exteriority.”

The idea of ‘small goodness’ as interpreted  by Levinas from the insights of the novel Life and Fate remains the crux of the argument of this paper, i.e., the meaning of human existence – one’s relation to the other – is far beyond being, system and structure. A society that is completely dehumanised by the decay of all human values, failure of human relations, in such a social misery life  seems  unpredictable and worthless. There is a loss of human dignity  and value, lack of respect for one another, an absolute despair and desolation of all human aspirations for meaning and being. Engendered by the traditional practical and noetic
totalisation philosophy remains a point of no consolation.