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The ethical experience is to find that there are things that I am not causally determined, but obligated, to say and to do. Emmanuel Levinas locates this experience not in the perception of the order of nature or of society, nor in the intuition of the imperative of reason within my mind, but in the encounter with appeals and demands addressed to me when another faces meThere are theoretical and practical difficulties with the way Levinas elaborates this experience. Outside of the face to face encounter, Levinas conceptualizes our experience of the things of the world as appropriation. He does not acknowledge the demands things, and living beings of other species, put on us. To fix the distinctiveness of the human face, Levinas attributes to it an infinite dialectic of demands, identified with God. But in the me asure that God is conceived as "the wholly Other', constitutive of the otherness of every other human who faces us, the demand put on us loses its location in the midst of the common world and its determinatenessLevinas sees the otherness of another in the need and want with which the other faces us. But the needs and wants of another arise out of the other's fundamental positivity. The other's needs and wants are in principle satisfiable, and do not generate an unending unsatisfiability. Levinas's assertion that I am responsible before all the others for all the others, held accountable for the deeds and misdeeds of others, for the very responsibilities and irresponsibility of others — cannot be the basis for effective action

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9347-0_6

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