Ninth Study: Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other

Abstract

Levinas’s account of a person’s relation to an Other parallels second-person engagement at a pre-cognitive level of subjectivity. The goal of this study is to explore the relations of Levinas’s ethics and James’s pragmatism. A person’s encounter with an Other startles and makes one aware of their own limitations and creates for oneself a sense of insecurity. A face-to-face encounter compels one to awake to a responsibility for the care of an Other. In this relation with the Other, one becomes aware of a third person outside that ethical relation and that oneself is a third person, and the collection of third persons creates a society. One’s freedom to act and commit to an ethical relation is also a freedom to turn away from it in violence. It is realized that one has the freedom to avoid violence and preserve freedom only by communicating with other third persons of society and arranging for an impersonal rational state. A balance is arranged between the individuality of the person and the impersonal state which ignores individuality. The result is that one’s freedom is limited and preserved. The pluralistic reality of experience implies that a person’s actions can be determined ethical only in retrospect. It is determined in the flow of subjectivity through intersubjective space with an Other. The ethical nature of an act emerges in the context of the particular circumstances of a situation. The implication for psychology is a greater attention to intersubjective space.