Alterity Ethics – Levinas

Abstract According to the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, ethics – not ontology – is “the first philosophy”. In the following Article, we will reconstruct the Levinasian ethics from the perspective of the primacy of alterity, arguing that this focus on the Other may also have consequences for business ethics. The distinction between the Same (Le Même) and the Other (L’Autre) helps the French thinker to surpass a solipsistic ontology (from Plato to Heidegger) and to get to the definition of the absolute radicality of the Other. The Other of Levi-nas, the “Stranger in his strangeness,” irreducible to Me, receives the face of the “disadvantaged” (poor, widow, orphan, refugee, beggar, etc.), whom I must greet. Ethics can be summed up in the concept of “Being-for-the-Other” (the co-rigid opening of otherness to ipseity) or, in other words, “my goodness” (according to Platonic philosophy, which showed that Good transcends both Essence and Being). The Heideggerian phenomenology of death is transcended by Levinas under the influence of the ethics of otherness from Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Levinas claimed that the “death of the Other” is the “first death” starting from the biblical commandment “Thou shall not kill.”