Face-to-face
Encyclopedia
The face-to-face relation refers to a concept in the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Lévinas
Emmanuel Levinas was a Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher and Talmudic commentator.-Life:Emanuelis Levinas received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania...

' thought on human sociality.

Lévinas' phenomenological account of the "face-to-face" encounter serves as the basis for his ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

 and the rest of his philosophy. For Lévinas, "Ethics is the first philosophy." Lévinas argues that the encounter of the Other
Other
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...

 through the face
Face (sociological concept)
Face, idiomatically meaning dignity/prestige, is a fundamental concept in the fields of sociology, sociolinguistics, semantics, politeness theory, psychology, political science, communication, and Face Negotiation Theory.-Definitions:...

 reveals a certain poverty which forbids a reduction to Sameness
Identity (philosophy)
In philosophy, identity, from , is the relation each thing bears just to itself. According to Leibniz's law two things sharing every attribute are not only similar, but are the same thing. The concept of sameness has given rise to the general concept of identity, as in personal identity and...

 and, simultaneously, installs a responsibility for the Other in the Self
Self (philosophy)
The philosophy of self defines the essential qualities that make one person distinct from all others. There have been numerous approaches to defining these qualities. The self is the idea of a unified being which is the source of consciousness. Moreover, this self is the agent responsible for the...

.

Lévinas' account of the face-to-face encounter bears many similarities to Martin Buber
Martin Buber
Martin Buber was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of religious existentialism centered on the distinction between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship....

's "I and Thou
I and Thou
Ich und Du, usually translated as I and Thou, is a book by Martin Buber, published in 1923, and first translated to English in 1937.-Premise:Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:...

" relation. Its influence is also particularly pronounced in Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

's ethical writings. (However, some post-structuralist thinkers maintain that Derrida does not agree with Levinas. See, perhaps most significantly, Martin Hägglund
Martin Hägglund
Martin Hägglund is a Swedish philosopher, literary theorist, and scholar of modernist literature, currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows...

.)

The major difference between Buber's account of the I and Thou
I and Thou
Ich und Du, usually translated as I and Thou, is a book by Martin Buber, published in 1923, and first translated to English in 1937.-Premise:Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:...

 relation and the ethics of the face-to-face encounter is the application of Lévinas' asymmetry towards the other. For Buber, ethical relation meant a "symmetrical co-presence," while Lévinas, on the other hand, considers the relation with the other as something inherently asymmetrical: the other as they appear, the face, gives itself priority to the self, its first demand even before I react to it, love it or kill it, is: "thou shalt not kill me". Such a demand for Lévinas is prior to any reaction or any assertion of freedom by a subject. The face of the other in this sense looms above the other person and traces "where God passes." God (the infinite Other) here refers to the God of which one cannot refuse belief in Its history, that is the God who appears in traditional belief and of scripture and not some conceptual God of philosophy or ontotheology
Ontotheology
Ontotheology means the ontology of God and/or the theology of being. It refers to a tradition of philosophical theology first prominent among medieval scholastics, notably Duns Scotus...

.
In the face-to-face encounter we also see how Levinas splits ethics from morality. Ethics marks the primary situation of the face-to-face whereas morality comes later, as some kind of, agreed upon or otherwise, set of rules that emerge from the social situation, wherein there are more than just the two people of the face-to-face encounter.
This ethical relation for Levinas is prior to an ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...

 of nature, instead he refers to it as a meontology
Meontology
Meontology is the philosophical study of non-being.The word comes from the Ancient Greek μή - me "non" and ὄν - on "being" . It refers not exactly to the study of what does not exist, but an attempt to cover what may remain outside of ontology...

, which affirms a meaning beyond Being
Being
Being , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living".In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it...

, a mode of non-Being (Greek: me-on).
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK