Humanism in the Levinas's Ethics of Responsibility

Abstract

This essay argues that Levinas's responsibility defends and promotes humanism of the Other by prioritizing the Other. He passionately and enthusiastically develops and justifies this claim in his corpus. His claim that ethics is first philosophy is important for understanding his responsibility construct. By this construct, he is searching for a possibility for upholding humanism. Still more important, his formulation of ethics is a novelty because he does not begin by creating theories as in the deontology and consequentialism. Levinas's ethics can be described as phenomenological because ethics begins with the face-to-face encounter between two persons: The Subject/I and the Other. The visage that appears is a metaphor for the total expression of the circumstances of the “Other” who is himself different from the Subject/I. Levinas is so obsessed with the aphorism: “the face of the Other is a face in need.” For him, therefore, satisfying the needs of the Other is only by bearing responsibility. Levinas's responsibility motivates, promotes and defends humanism. Welfare of the human Otherness is the meeting point of responsibility whether religiously or ethically conceived.