Immanuel Levinas was born in the early nineteen hundreds and grew up in a time of war. He was drafted into the French army and was captured as a prisoner of war for a number of years. This experience as a prisoner of war gave him a negative view of human existence. He saw the hate and violence, which he discusses at great lengths in his works. Levinas uses the human face as the basis for his ethics. He does not ground his ethics in reason or ideas but instead in the face. His ethics is an ethics of love, and he calls this love “wisdom” insofar as it is a form of knowledge, but not knowledge of comprehension. The face is what makes one act ethical since gazing upon it shows the vulnerable side of a person and causes one to be immediately present. In the human face we see the face of God. The ethics of the face consists of moving away from what one’s ego tell them about a person and answering the call for help emanating from the face.
To begin looking at the ethics of the face, Levinas paints a picture of the human being becoming egos. He discusses the metaphysics of existence that says that humans will do whatever it takes to persist in being and opposes what could defeat its existence. This idea comes from Spinoza’s claim that “everything that is does everything to persist in its existence.” This need for existence is what becomes the ego’s need to exist and makes humans do anything to keep alive.
There are some social consequences that come with the ego’s need to persist. These consequences reflect what Levinas saw in war and prisoner of war camps. The first consequence is violence. A person meets another and tries to imagine him not existing. This causes the need to eradicate that person since he is seen as a blob standing ...
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...e that is unfamiliar to him or her. The face commands one to help the other. This ethics encompasses all human connections since the face is something that all peoples have and interact with when they meet another.
Works Cited
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Fraud, murder, courage, and strong will are all words that can be linked to humanity. These words will often raise questions like, who did it, how they did it, or why. Can it be that the true answer to these questions lies in getting a better understanding of our human nature? Does man act according to his divine plan, or is he taught how to act? In analyzing the works of Hsün Tzu and Jean-Paul Sartre, I will determine which of these two philosophers offers the strongest foundation for living an ethical life in the modern era.
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Milan Kundera contends, “A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral” (3). In this it is seen that the primary utility of the novel lies in its ability to explore an array of possible existences. For these possible existences to tell us something of our actual existence, they need to be populated by living beings that are both as whole, and as flawed, as those in the real world. To achieve this the author must become the object he writes of. J.M. Coetzee states, “there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination” (35). Through this sympathetic faculty, a writer is able to give flesh, authenticity and a genuine perspective to the imagined. It is only in this manner that the goal of creating living beings may be realized. Anything short of this becomes an exercise in image and in Kundera’s words, produces an immoral novel (3).
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In this context, face holds the same meaning as the metaphorical application of ‘saved my face,’ which would be applied to a situation in which an embarrassing situation is deftly avoided (88). However, the notion of ‘face’ in a metaphorical application finds its origins in word conducted by Erving Goffman. Based off of Goffman’s work, Brown and Levinson produced their politeness theory, which asserts: “The reason we are polite is that we are concerned with maintaining two distinct kinds of face: negative face [and] positive face” (88). Negative face means that one’s actions are unimpeded by others, and positive face means that one’s wants are desirable to at least some others (88). The notion of face, considered as a general term, is a widely accepted factor in the evaluation of politeness
Judaism presents the concept of morality as one of goodness which is engraved into the fabric of life. As “the language of morality” (Sacks, “The World’s Most Enduring Moral Voice”), the Torah comments on historical actions from a moral perspective. In his introductory article to the year 5777, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks discusses the basic features of Jewish ethics, each inferred from key values of the Torah. By recognizing humans as free and responsible moral agents, the Torah issues a commandment to value life as sacred; consequently, the redirection of violence is crucial to attaining the ideal state of morality as propagated by the Torah.
Cahn, Steven M. and Peter Markie, Ethics: History, Theory and Contemporary Issues. 4th Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Maya Angelou once said, “you may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” Jean Paul Sartre devotes his second chapter in Being and Nothingness on ‘The Body,’ demonstrating his historical knowledge, following an influence embedded in Hegel’s theory. In the film, Cleo From 5 To 7 , director Agnès Varda demonstrates a reflective perspective on freeing oneself from the bias of what others view as the ideal vision of beauty. Sartre shows that the being-for-itself, or the human being starts to become more aware of his or her own moral existence, only when he or she sees themselves being perceived by another being for-itself. Sartre says that we become more aware of ourselves in the hands or comparison
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According to Existential psychotherapy, inner conflict within an individual are caused by personal confrontation with person is due to that individual 's confrontation with his/her own principles. Such principles are the inability to evade death, one’s freedoms and the responsibilities bestowed upon them and phenomenology as coined by Irvin D. Yalom. These principles form the basis for conceptualization
Morgan, Michael L., ed. Classics of Moral and Political Theory. 5th ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011. Print.
Furrow, Dwight. Ethics- Key Concepts In Philosophy. New York, NY: Continuum, 2005. Print. 20 Oct. 2011