Emmanuel Levinas: Responsibility and Election

Abstract

Although some people argue Emmanuel Levinas is a Jewish thinker because he introduces in his philosophical work ideas which come from the Jewish tradition, I want to present him as a philosopher. A philosopher who tries to widen the philosophical horizon which is traditionally a Greek one but, at the same time, a philosopher who does not want to abandon it. In one of his main books Totality and Infinity (1969), he describes western civilization as an hypocritical one because it is attached both to the True and to the Good, but he adds:It is perhaps time to see in hypocrisy not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets, (p. 24)When reading Levinas we may realize that such an ‘hypocrisy’ might well be a blessing from a philosophical point of view. One of Levinas's philosophical aims is to refer to the Greek language of philosophy—a language he asserts to be of universal significance—in order to elucidate ideas that come from the Hebrew world view, from the prophets and from the sages. He wants to give a new insight into Greek categories and concepts but he refuses to abnegate the philosophical requirements for accuracy. That is why when he refers to biblical verses or to Talmudic apologues, he does not want to prove anything. His philosophical writings are indeed philosophical because he does not yield to the temptation of substituting the authority of a certain verse or of a certain name to the philosophical requirement of argumentation.

Work identification and responsibility in moral breakdown

“…It must be noted that we are not only responsible to the other, but also we are responsible for ourselves to the other, and we must defend ourselves to the other. The other challenges the self's right to exist: ‘I am for the other in a relationship of deaconship: I am in service to the other’ (Levinas 1981: 161, quoted in Chalier ). Levinas goes further to argue that it is only in responding to the other that the self is constituted as a moral being and, even more profoundly, the relation to the other is prior to being, self‐relation, and our relation to the world ‘responsibility for another is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it’ (Levinas 1981: 114, quoted in Chalier ).…”

A relational approach to providing care for a person suffering from dementia

“…For Levinas a relation is beyond the ontology of being, and is out of reach of the grasping. The person is seen out of responsibility to another, rather than that responsibility developing out of the person: ‘caring for the other is not an act of free choice but the very structure of his (Levinas) definitions of subjectivity’ (Chalier 1993, p. 64).…”