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 croupe be said that Levinas is non writing an ethics at all. Instead, he is exploring the meaning of intersubjectivity and lived immediacy in light of three themes transcendence, existence, and the human other (Bergo, 2007). Levinas claim that the first philosophy is ethics, then, must be understood based off of his esoteric 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 gist of Levinass mature thought...are descriptions of the coming upon with another person. That encounter evinces a particular feature the other impacts me un same(p) any worldly object or force. I can constitute the ot her person cognitively, on the basis of vision, as an alter ego. I can see 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 approach 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 obvious connection between 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 regularise most fathers that it is w rong to starve their children, and no need to tell people not to beat their friends randomly. It is when that empathy is stunted that pathological behavior is caused. Hume argued that the role of morality was exactly 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 assumed a deep empathy in human behavior, which unite with a fundamental political and economic equality that he assumed for his model