What does levinas mean when he claims that ethics is the first Essay

What does levinas mean when he claims that ethics is the first philosophy - Essay ExampleIn light of that, it dirty dog be said that Levinas is non writing an ethics at altogether. Instead, he is exploring the meaning of intersubjectivity and lived immediacy in light of three themes transcendence, existence, and the clement other (Bergo, 2007). Levinas claim that the first philosophy is ethics, then, must be understood based off of his arcane interpretation of the idea of ethics nonetheless, the argument has some compelling qualities. Levinas ethics begins with the simple, face-to-face interaction with some other human being. Levinas tries to make the claim that the way that people behave when faced with each other implicitly places them in the same moral universe. At the core of Levinass mature thought...are descriptions of the bump with another person. That encounter evinces a particular feature the other impacts me unlike any worldly object or force. I can constitute the o ther person cognitively, on the basis of vision, as an alter ego. I can match that another human being is like me, acts like me, appears to be the master of her conscious life. That was Edmund Husserls basic phenomenological climax to constituting other people within a shared social universe. For Levinas, then, the fundamental reality to an social encounter is the basis for ethics. This ties in with ideas of ethics that Victorian-era scholars, Hume and Enlightenment scholars in general had about the unequivocal connection among empathy for others and moral behavior. (Wright, 1983, pg. 232 Parrinder, 1972 Halperin, 1974). Hume, for example, argued that empathy preceded more advanced moral judgments and was a necessary condition for those judgments Sympathy is the source of the esteem, which we pay to all the artificial virtues (Wright, 1983, pg. 232). Humes position is that empathy naturally guides us to behave to others morally There is no need to aver most fathers that it is wrong to starve their children, and no need to tell people not to beat their friends randomly. It is when that empathy is scraggy that pathological behavior is caused. Hume argued that the role of morality was merely to make explicit and clear the transition from obvious principles derived from empathy to abstract behavior norms. Indeed, the Enlightenment in total agreed with Levinas sentiment that it was human sympathy and interpersonal interaction that gave birth to moral behavior. Even Adam Smith, seemingly amoral in his defense of markets, actually off-key a deep empathy in human behavior, which combined with a fundamental political and economic equivalence that he assumed for his model