Levinas on Shared Ethical Judgments
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 233-242, 2011
University of Queensland TC Beirne School of Law Research Paper No. 12-5
6 Pages Posted: 10 May 2012
Abstract
Emmanuel Levinas’s emphasis on the face to face encounter as the site of ethical engagement makes a genuinely shared conception of ethics seem both unnecessary and impossible. Discussions of this aspect of Levinas’s theory have tended to focus on his notion of the third [le tiers]. However, while the third explains why shared ethical judgments are necessary, it does not explain how they are possible. This article offers an alternative response, based on Levinas’s comments on the temporality of ethical experience. In order to see how shared ethical judgments are possible, we need to pay attention to the diachronic, as well as the synchronic, dimension of the face to face. This allows us to deepen the account of ethical discourse associated with the third.
Keywords: Levinas, ethics, politics, time, the third
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