From The Separate Self To The Absolute Other:a Study On Levinas’s Absolute Ethos

According to Levinas, Western philosophy has been an ontology, which reduces the other to the same. This reduction implies violence against the other person. The purpose of Levinas’s ethics is the resistance to the ontology of war. Starting from the point of exteriority, Levinas tries to go beyond the Western tradition, especially the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, and then builds up a metaphysical ethics as first philosophy. The central structure of this metaphysical ethics is the relationship between subject and transcendence, furthermore, the relationship between the separate self and the absolute Other. Levinas attempts to reveal our original experience of the other person:the experience of face-to-face with the other person. This experience is prior to the objectification and any intentional constitution of the other person.Levinas’s description on the experience of the other person begins from the phenomenonology of a separated self (interiority) through an examining of sensibility. In the dimension of sensibility, human beings are absolutely separated, the I dwells in the world and enjoys the elements. The absolute separation resists any systematization and totalization of human being, which means every one is an absolute individual. This is the central connotation of Levinas’s phenomenological description of the self. The absolute separation breaks up the totalizing of history and system of human being and makes the true encounter with the alterity of the other person possible. This encounter is a process of welcoming the other, which breaks up the interiority (ipseity) of the self and requires my absolute responsibility.For Levinas, the internal clue to the relationship with the other is time. Unlike Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas makes a diachronic interpretation of time:time is fractured, the past can never be recalled in the past, and the future is always beyond my arrival. The relation to the future is just like the relationship to the other person:the other person comes to me but can never be grasped into of my understanding and control. This is the main implication of what Levinas claims, that "time is the relationship with the other." Levins establishes a basic foundation for his ethics thought through this new interpretation of time.In the absolute experience of the other person, the encounter with the other puts forward an absolute ethical principle:"You shall not permit killing." This law is revealed on the face of the other person. Face is not a plastic image, it represents "all weakness, all mortality, all nakedness and need" of the other person encountered. Face directly shows me an undeniable person outside of my existence and the vulnerability and alterity of the other person. Within the original experience about the other, I encounter with other person who questions my freedom and power, and orders me:You shall not allowd murder. The bareness and extreme poverty of the face can only be experienced in the filed of the "absolute experience".With regard to the field of "the absolute", we could say that Levinas’s ethics aims searching for the possibility of the impossible, revealing the original experience in which I am totally passive in front of the other person who command my infinite responsibility. The face is not a power to command what people should do or should not do; it’s just a weak way of showing the need and vulnerability of the other person. Therefore, this ethical position seems to be Utopian. As a metaphysical ethicist, Levinas tries to discover the possibility of this impossibility as transcendence. This afford would let Levinas trace back to the original experience of our human being, in which reflective and objecting action are originated. Metaphysical ethical reflection contains a number of specific ethical issues, such as love, hospitality, freedom, responsibility and justice.Love is a relationship to the other, this relationship is ambivalent because of the alterity of the beloved. Levinas claims that love exists only because of the alterity (the invisible part) of the beloved, to love therefore is to maintain and respect the strangeness of the other. Unconditional responsibility for the other means unconditional hospitality to strangers, this hospitality does not have to take into account any benefits and consideration, it just gives the strangers what they want and never ask for reasons. This is an absolute ethical position. In the context of global politics, hospitality is now more than just a welcoming the other into my house, it relates to global political issues such as immigrants, refugees, the homeless and humanitarian aid. It’s very hard to achieve the unconditional hospitality (responsibility) in political reality, but we can get a kind of conditional hospitality—hospitality with rules. The conditional hospitality is based on the basis of unconditional hospitality. As for the issue of the association of ethics and politics, Levinas points out that the state of "face to face" must be transferred into the field of political state through "the third" in order to ensure justice among I and the others. The face-to-face relationship is transformed into fraternity, in which many others co-exist without losing the face and the singularity of every one (the other). The face-to-face relationship therefore comes to be a social relationship in fraternity. The emergence of the third constitutes social relations, and justice would then come to be possible. Therefore, ethics is the beginning and the standard of justice (politics); politics is the completion of ethics.The real significance of Levinas’s ethics lies not in the specific moral rules, but rather in guiding us to seek the possibility of transcendence. Levinas attempts to examine the absolute field of our experience in the hope of showing us a possibility of transcendence and the true ethical state of human being. This ethical state is always there, it will not disappear, but it can not be achieved. Transcendence constitutes the foundation of human being as human being. The other person can be a real other person only when he/she is treated ethically. Namely, the alterity of the other exists only in the dimension of ethics. Ethics makes people to become social beings, become beings with holiness. This holiness comes from our association to the absolute otherness of the other. If there is no such transcendent dimension of our human being, we would not be called human being.