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Levinas, Emmanuel

Levinas has insistently proposed that caring responsibility can only be understood in its most basic modality if we can somehow transcend the intentional relation toward the world that accompanies all modes of being and thinking. Levinas has aimed to show that it is only in the direct and unmediated relation to the other that we can gain a glimpse of the primordial meaning of the caring encounter that he discusses as the human responsiveness to the appeal of the other who needs my care. Usually we think of other people as selves who are in the world just as we are in the world as selves. And so, we are cohabitants, fellow human beings who live in reciprocal relationships. In these relations each of us cannot help but see others as objects of our personal perception and thinking. But this is not the only possibility. It also may happen that the other person bursts upon my world and makes a claim on me outside of my own intentional cognitive orientation. In other words, it is also possible to experience the other in the vocative: as an appeal that the other makes on me. This is especially true of situations where we meet the other in his or her vulnerability, as when we happen to be handed a hurt and helpless child, or when we suddenly see a person fall in front of us. What happens then is this: I have felt a response that was direct and unmediated by my intentions or thinking.

 

Selected Readings:
Levinas, E. (1979). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Levinas, E. (1981). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (1995). Conversations with French Philosophers. (F. Rötzer, ed.) Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Levinas, E. (1996a). The Levinas Reader. (S. Hand, ed.) Oxford: Blackwell.
Levinas, E. (1996b). Proper Names. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Levinas, E. (1998). On Thinking of the Other: Entre Nous. New York: Columbia University Press.
Levinas, E. (2001). Existence and Existents. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (2003). Humanism of the Other. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Levinas, E. (2008). Basic Philosophical Writings. (A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, R. Bernasconi, eds.) Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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