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Article: ETHICS AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY AND THE OTHER'S AMBIGUITY IN THE DIALOGUE OF BUBER AND LEVINAS
- Article from:
- Philosophy Today
- Article date:
- April 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright DePaul University Spring 2006. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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On Emmanuel Levinas' instructive readings, Martin Buber's writings sketch the ambiguity of the other whose approach presses for an ethics as first philosophy. They concur that the other, approaching on the horizon of a world I experience, amidst the objects I use, breaks through the world's horizon with a differential force that alters the same. Yet Levinas writes of Buber that although his thought "prompted me to engage in a phenomenology of sociality" which uncovers in the face of a given other an infinite command to "answer for its life," this logic demonstrates "where all ambiguity of the relation to the other lies."1 Simply put, the "alter" denotes at once a finite difference and the ...