Thinking the other, thinking otherwise: Levinas’ conception of responsibility

ABSTRACT

Probably no other philosopher described the encounter with the other (human being) in a more radical way than Emmanuel Levinas. This led him to a new interpretation of responsibility as origin of all our ethical obligations towards others. He put into question a philosophical tradition of thought he accused of taking the ego as sole origin of all foundation of meaning. In this paper, I begin by outlining Levinas’ criticism of the occidental tradition of thought to explain the place of the other in his writings. I go on to explicate Levinas’ peculiar understanding of ‘responsibility for the other’. I will show how important it is in Levinas’ work not to isolate the question of responsibility from the question of justice. Finally, I examine what other capabilities would be required in order to act in a responsible and just way.

KEYWORDS:

• The other
• responsibility
• justice
• Levinas
• abstentions of judgement or epoché

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the organizers of the symposium ‘Fascination with the Unknown: The Other’ and the participants for their comments and questions. The author is especially grateful to Eva-Maria Engelen, Kristina Musholt and Miriam Akkermann for helpful remarks and constructive criticism on a previous version of this manuscript. Parts of this paper are based on the work that has previously been published in Buddeberg, E. Verantwortung im Diskurs (Berlin: De Gruyter Verlag, 2011).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Eva Buddeberg is lecturer in the Department of Political Theory and Philosophy at Goethe-University Frankfurt. Her research focuses on questions of social and political philosophy, French philosophy and phenomenology, normative ethics and the history of early modern and modern political thought. She has published in various fields of moral philosophy, political theory and social philosophy.

Notes

1 Levinas’ objection against the phenomenological tradition is that the other’s signification does not depend on the subject perceiving the other as someone, but that the other signifies in himself even without being perceived intentionally as someone by the subject.

2 Even the verb ‘to respond’ must not be understood only as a verbally articulated answer, for as such, it would be part of the intentional world relation whose supremacy Levinas precisely puts into question by his explication of the encounter with the other.

3 Thereby, Levinas describes the other, as in the quotation above, not only as the one to whom we are exposed but also as the one who depends on our care and consideration and therefore determines and obliges us by his dependency.

4 Cf. Musholt and Engelen (2018), on the special way we relate to other human beings as second persons.

5 This does not exclude that someone can also decide not to answer. However, this deliberative refuse of an answer might still be considered an answer to the other, namely the answer that someone does not want to answer.

6 This, of course, is not Levinas’ terminology, for he precisely wants to put into question traditional ontological thinking in philosophy.

7 We live in a world with more than one other who are also others to each other.

8 Possible – for as soon as we realize their plurality, we are related to them in an intentional way and therefore are able to reflect on our behaviour towards them.