Bringing Levinas Down to Earth

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-316
Author(s):  
Joe Larios ◽  

This paper adds to the critical work on the relationship between Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Levinas by arguing that the experience of the face of the other can be made compatible with Jonas’s understanding of metabolism thus allowing for an extension of who counts as an other to include all organic life forms. Although this extension will allow for a broadening of ethical patients on one side, we will see that a corresponding broadening of ethical agents on the other side will prove to be more difficult owing to the exceptionality of the human being that they both maintain and believe is expressed through the experience of responsibility.

Maska ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (179) ◽  
pp. 8-17
Author(s):  
Didier Plassard

The article discusses the changes in puppetry that occurred mostly in the second half of the 20th century. It addresses the changes in organization that led from small family groups to institutionalized public institutions and follows the organizational example of ensembles of drama theatre institutions, as well as changes in the relationship between the animator and the puppet that allow the disillusioning emergence of the animator into the visual field of the viewer. The “manipulator” who is no longer hidden influences the change in the manner of narration, in the aesthetic and the political senses both; at the same time, the qualitative difference between the manipulator as a living, physical and human being and the puppet on the other side is suddenly revealed. The article concludes by addressing the ethical dimension in the puppet theatre as it stresses the understanding of the puppet as the face of the other whose life is the responsibility of the human being. The article carries out its instructive review and theses with the help of several illustrative examples.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-73
Author(s):  
Vinicio Busacchi

By following Ricoeur’s perspective, this article aims to show how the dialectic of vulnerability and effort constitutes the person’s emancipatory driving force. The author starts from a confrontation between Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricœur’s philosophies of the human being, deepening the various stages in order to reinterpret the initial idea that we are born an individual, whereas becoming a person is a process that goes through an interrelational and cultural dialectis. It is from this perspective, which more so than others reveals a significant proximity between Ricœur and Levinas, that the idea of identity as a hermeneutical path of emancipation reveals its dimension of ethical challenge. That ethical challenge concerns, on the one hand,  the relationship between passivity/vulnerability and subjective powers, and, on the other hand, the relationship between the capacity to be recognised by others and the will to progress with them through the challenges of mutual recognition.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal

This article reads between two recent explorations of the relationship between religion, chaos, and the monstrous: Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep and Author's Religion and Its Monsters. Both are oriented toward the edge of chaos and order; both see the primordial and chaotic as generative; both pursue monstrous mythological figures as divine personifications of primordial chaos; both find a deep theological ambivalences in Christian and Jewish tradition with regard to the monstrous, chaotic divine; both are critical of theological and cultural tendencies to demonize chaos and the monstrous; and finally, both read the divine speech from the whirlwind in the book of Job as a revelation of divine chaos. But whereas one sees it as a call for laughter, a chaotic life-affirming laughter with Leviathan in the face of the deep, the other sees it as an incarnation of theological horror, leaving Job and the reader overwhelmed and out-monstered by God. Must it be one way or the other? Can laughter and horror coincide in the face of the deep?


Trictrac ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petru Adrian Danciu

Starting from the cry of the seraphim in Isaiahʹ s prophecy, this article aims to follow the rhythm of the sacred harmony, transcending the symbols of the angelic world and of the divine names, to get to the face to face meeting between man and God, just as the seraphim, reflecting their existence, stand face to face. The finality of the sacred harmony is that, during the search for God inside the human being, He reveals Himself, which is the reason for the affirmation of “I Am that I Am.” Through its hypnotic cyclicality, the profane temporality has its own musicality. Its purpose is to incubate the unsuspected potencies of the beings “caught” in the material world. Due to the fact that it belongs to the aeonic time, the divine music will exceed in harmony the mechanical musicality of profane time, dilating and temporarily cancelling it. Isaiah is witness to such revelation offering access to the heavenly concert. He is witness to divine harmonies produced by two divine singers, whose musical history is presented in our article. The seraphim accompanied the chosen people after their exodus from Egypt. The cultic use of the trumpet is related to the characteristics and behaviour of the seraphim. The seraphic music does not belong to the Creator, but its lyrics speak about the presence of the Creator in two realities, a spiritual and a material one. Only the transcendence of the divine names that are sung/cried affirms a unique reality: God. The chant-cry is a divine invocation with a double aim. On the one hand, the angels and the people affirm God’s presence and call His name and, on the other, the Creator affirms His presence through the angels or in man, the one who is His image and His likeness. The divine music does not only create, it is also a means of communion, implementing the relation of man to God and, thus, God’s connection with man. It is a relation in which both filiation and paternity disappear inside the harmony of the mutual recognition produced by music, a reality much older than Adam’s language.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Carlos Alvaréz Teijeiro

Emmanuel Lévinas, the philosopher of ethics par excellence in the twentieth century, and by own merit one of the most important ethical philosophers in the history of western philosophy, is also the philosopher of the Other. Thereby, it can be said that no thought has deepened like his in the ups and downs of the ethical relationship between subject and otherness. The general objective of this work is to expose in a simple and understandable way some ideas that tend to be quite dark in the philosophical work of the author, since his profuse religious production will not be analyzed here. It is expected to show that his ideas about the being and the Other are relevant to better understand interpersonal relationships in times of 4.0 (re)evolution. As specific objectives, this work aims to expose in chronological order the main works of the thinker, with special emphasis on his ethical implications: Of the evasion (1935), The time and the Other (1947), From the existence to the existent (1947), Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (1961) and, last, Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (1974). In the judgment of Lévinas, history of western philosophy starting with Greece, has shown an unusual concern for the Being, this is, it has basically been an ontology and, accordingly, it has relegated ethics to a second or third plane. On the other hand and in a clear going against the tide movement, our author supports that ethics should be considered the first philosophy and more, even previous to the proper philosophize. This novel approach implies, as it is supposed, that the essential question of the philosophy slows down its origin around the Being in order to inquire about the Other: it is a philosophy in first person. Such a radical change of perspective generates an underlying change in how we conceive interpersonal relationships, the complex framework of meanings around the relationship Me and You, which also philosopher Martin Buber had already spoken of. As Lévinas postulates that ethics is the first philosophy, this involves that the Other claims all our attention, intellectual and emotional, to the point of considering that the relationship with the Other is one of the measures of our identity. Thus, “natural” attitude –husserlian word not used by Lévinas- would be to be in permanent disposition regarding to the meeting with the Other, to be in permanent opening state to let ourselves be questioned by him. Ontology, as the author says, being worried about the Being, has been likewise concerned about the Existence, when the matter is to concern about the particular Existent that every otherness supposes for us. In conclusion it can be affirmed that levinasian ethics of the meeting with the Other, particular Face, irreducible to the assumption, can contribute with an innovative looking to (re)evolving the interpersonal relationships in a 4.0 context.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abimael Francisco do Nascimento

The general objective of this study is to analyze the postulate of the ethics of otherness as the first philosophy, presented by Emmanuel Levinas. It is a proposal that runs through Levinas' thinking from his theoretical foundations, to his philosophical criticism. Levinas' thought presents itself as a new thought, as a critique of ontology and transcendental philosophy. For him, the concern with knowledge and with being made the other to be forgotten, placing the other in totality. Levinas proposes the ethics of otherness as sensitivity to the other. The subject says here I am, making myself responsible for the other in an infinite way, in a transcendence without return to myself, becoming hostage to the other, as an irrefutable responsibility. The idea of the infinite, present in the face of the other, points to a responsibility whoever more assumes himself, the more one is responsible, until the substitution by other.


Author(s):  
Susan Petrilli

AbstractIdentity as traditionally conceived in mainstream Western thought is focused on theory, representation, knowledge, subjectivity and is centrally important in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. His critique of Western culture and corresponding notion of identity at its foundations typically raises the question of the other. Alterity in Levinas indicates existence of something on its own account, in itself independently of the subject’s will or consciousness. The objectivity of alterity tells of the impossible evasion of signs from their destiny, which is the other. The implications involved in reading the signs of the other have contributed to reorienting semiotics in the direction of semioethics. In Levinas, the I-other relation is not reducible to abstract cognitive terms, to intellectual synthesis, to the subject-object relation, but rather tells of involvement among singularities whose distinctive feature is alterity, absolute alterity. Humanism of the other is a pivotal concept in Levinas overturning the sense of Western reason. It asserts human duties over human rights. Humanism of alterity privileges encounter with the other, responsibility for the other, over tendencies of the centripetal and egocentric orders that instead exclude the other. Responsibility allows for neither rest nor peace. The “properly human” is given in the capacity for absolute otherness, unlimited responsibility, dialogical intercorporeity among differences non-indifferent to each other, it tells of the condition of vulnerability before the other, exposition to the other. The State and its laws limit responsibility for the other. Levinas signals an essential contradiction between the primordial ethical orientation and the legal order. Justice involves comparing incomparables, comparison among singularities outside identity. Consequently, justice places limitations on responsibility, on unlimited responsibility which at the same time it presupposes as its very condition of possibility. The present essay is structured around the following themes: (1) Premiss; (2) Justice, uniqueness, and love; (3) Sign and language; (4) Dialogue and alterity; (5) Semiotic materiality; (6) Globalization and the trap of identity; (7) Human rights and rights of the other: for a new humanism; (8) Ethics; (9) The World; (10) Outside the subject; (11) Responsibility and Substitution; (12) The face; (13) Fear of the other; (14) Alterity and justice; (15) Justice and proximity; (16) Literary writing; (17) Unjust justice; (18) Caring for the other.


Semiotica ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (209) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Augusto Ponzio

AbstractIt is not with the State that personal responsibility arises towards the other. According to Emmanuel Levinas, the other is every single human being I am responsible for, and I am this responsibility for him. The other, my fellow, is the first comer. But I do not live in a world with just one single “first comer”; there is always another other, a third, who is also my other, my fellow. Otherness, beginning with this third, is a plurality. Proximity as responsibility is a plurality. There is a need for justice. There is the obligation to compare unique and incomparable others. This is what is hidden, unsaid, implied in legal discourse. But recourse to comparison among that which cannot be compared, among that which is incomparable is justified by love of justice for the other. It is this justification that confers a sense to law, which is always dura lex, and to the statement that citizens are equal before the law. From this point of view, State justice is always imperfect with respect to human rights understood as the rights of the other, of every other in his absolute difference, in his incomparable otherness.


2006 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Dalla Torre

Dopo essersi rilevato il fenomeno della rinascita del fatto religioso nell’odierna società secolarizzata, grazie anche al massiccio fenomeno immigratorio, si descrive l’impatto del pluralismo etnico-religioso sulle tradizionali realtà degli ordinamenti giuridici statali; impatto reso ancora più problematico per l’ascesa di nuovi poteri, in particolare quello tecnico-scientifico, insofferenti ad una eteroregolamentazione non solo sul piano etico, ma anche sul piano giuridico. Si mette quindi in evidenza una crescente ambiguità che investe la biogiuridica: da un lato la nuova esigenza di riconoscere il rivendicato “diritto alla diversità” da parte delle diverse formazioni etnico-religiose; dall’altro l’esigenza di una regolamentazione giuridica uniforme a garanzia dell’ordinata convivenza attorno ad una scala valoriale che abbia nella “vita” il bene centrale ed ultimo da salvaguardare. Tra le conclusioni cui si giunge è innanzitutto quella per cui la pacifica convivenza in una società multietnica e multireligiosa può essere assicurata, nel rispetto delle diverse tradizioni e culture, attraverso il ricorso a moderati e saggi riconoscimenti di spazio al diritto personale all’interno degli ordinamenti statali, ma nei limiti rigorosi posti dalle esigenze di tutela della dignità umana. Ciò tocca anche la questione dei “nuovi poteri” che, nel contesto di una società globalizzata, impongono una rielaborazione dell’idea di diritto che, partendo dal quadro di un sistema di fonti che tende sempre più ad essere organizzato non secondo gerarchia ma secondo competenza, si ispiri al principio del riconoscimento dell’essere umano nella sua dignità, indipendentemente dall’appartenenza etnico-religiosa. Infine si mette in evidenza l’inaccettabilità di un “diritto debole”, solo procedimentale, perché sostanziale negazione della funzione stessa del diritto, che è quella di prevenire e/o dirimere i conflitti tra interessi in gioco e, quindi, i contrasti tra le parti della società, difendendo nel rapporto i soggetti più deboli; così come si mette in evidenza che il prezioso bene della laicità dello Stato non è – come invece spesso si ritiene – salvaguardato da un “diritto debole”, ma solo da un diritto giusto. ---------- After being noticed the phenomenon of the rebirth of the religious fact in today’s secularized society, it is described also the impact of the ethnic-religious pluralism on the traditional realities of the government juridical arrangements; impact made even more problematic for the ascent of new powers, particularly that technical-scientific, impatient to an heteroregulation not only on the ethical plan, but also on the juridical plan. It is put therefore in evidence an increasing ambiguity that invests the biojuridical: from one side the new demand to recognize the vindicated “law to difference” from different ethnic-religious formations; from the other the demand of a uniform juridical regulation to guarantee of the orderly cohabitation around to a scale of value that has in “life” central and ultimate good to safeguard. Between the conclusions which the author comes it is, first of all, that for which the peaceful cohabitation in a multiethnic and multireligious society can be assured, in the respect of the different traditions and cultures, through the recourse to moderate and wise recognition of space to the personal law into the government arrangements, but in the rigorous limits set by the demands of guardianship of human dignity. This also touches the matter of new powers that, in the contest of globalization, impose a new elaboration of the idea of law that, departing from the picture of a system of sources that extends more and more to not be organized according to hierarchy but according to competence, inspire to the principle of the recognition of the human being in its dignity, independently from the ethnic-religious affiliation. Finally it is put in evidence the unacceptability of a “weak law”, just procedural, as substantial negation of the law function itself, which is that to prevent and/or to settle the conflicts between affairs at stake and, therefore, contrasts between the parts of the society, defending in the relationship the weakest subjects; as it is evidenced that the precious good of laity of the State is not - like instead it is often considered - safeguarded by a weak law, but only by a correct law.


1970 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-190
Author(s):  
Marek Drwięga

This paper deals with the problem of what otherness consists in, and what its foundation is, within the I–Other relation. In this way, the study also explores the limits of ethics and of a quasi-religious attitude, in order to establish what is required to shape interpersonal relations in a non-violent way, when faced with the radical otherness of another human being. Such an investigation also intersects with a broader ethical discussion that aims to take account of glorious or heroic acts, focused on the issue of supererogation. The aim of the present study is to demonstrate the degree to which a neglect of reciprocity and justice in the context of such philosophical research constitutes a risky step. To this end, the main aspects of the debate between Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricœur are introduced. After examining the position of Levinas, and how Ricœur interprets the I–Other relation in Levinas, an attempt is made to assess whether the latter’s line of criticism is pertinent and helpful for attempts to arrive at the core of the disagreement between the two thinkers.


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