Alterity

Where Husserl started from subject and object and Heidegger from Dasein in its world, Levinas grounds ontology, epistemology and ethics alike in the face-to-face relation between self and other.

Put simply Levinas starts philosophy somewhere new: not with a mind facing objects (Husserl) or a person in their world (Heidegger), but with one person meeting another face to face. Everything else grows from there.

What stops me from absorbing another person into my totality is not some weakness in me, Levinas argues, but the other's infinity: they are radically other and cannot be possessed.

Put simply Levinas: I can never fully take in or own another person, and that is not a failing on my part. They are simply, endlessly other than me.

For Levinas, metaphysical desire does not aim at anything I could ever have: "desire is desire for the absolutely other," and the absolutely other is unpossessable by its very nature.

Put simply Levinas: the deepest kind of desire is not for anything I could get. It is a desire for someone wholly other, who by nature can never be possessed.

In Levinas's Philosophy and Awakening, the other tears me loose from the central place where I posit myself; I must then see myself from their side and answer for myself.

Put simply Levinas: meeting another person knocks me out of the center of my own world. I have to see myself as they see me, and answer for myself.

Shore reads Levinas's Other as God secularized: beyond reach, beyond possession, always beckoning, and without that beckoning we could neither come into our own nor feel responsible.

Put simply Shore: Levinas's "Other" is like God in secular form: out of reach, never possessed, always calling. Without that call we could not become ourselves or feel responsible.

Levinas floats, as no more than a possibility, the thought that transcendence toward another human and transcendence toward God may not be so easily told apart; the distinction should not be rushed.

Levinas's Other calls to me where Sartre's looks at me, Shore observes: the call is a summons to responsibility, a demand that the I account for itself.

Put simply Shore: Sartre's other person looks at me; Levinas's other person calls on me, asking me to take responsibility and account for myself.

Shore traces an arc: Husserl poses the problem as epistemology, Heidegger as ontology, and Levinas folds both into a project that is, at bottom, ethical.

Put simply Shore's arc for the lecture: Husserl asks how we know other minds, Heidegger what it is to exist among others, and Levinas folds both into a question that is, at bottom, ethical: what we owe each other.