THE CONCEPT OF RESPONSIBILITY BEYOND BEING IN LEVINAS

Abstract

The concept of responsibility is a constitutive component of Levinas' thinking. He is present in the main works, occupying a prominent position in the expositions of themes throughout his theoretical production. It is part of the category collection with which Levinas explains his main philosophical theses. It is one of the main concepts he uses to call into question basic intuitions of traditional philosophy, such as the idea of being, being in action, essence, subject, consciousness, freedom and, above all, the conviction that thought is capable of exhausting the sense of truth, exteriority and otherness. On the other hand, it is with the concept of responsibility that it articulates several categories to make explicit its anthropological conception and its ethical destiny. From the anthropological point of view, it questions the Western definition of man as a rational animal, capable of synthesizing the plurality of reality in the interiority of consciousness. As for ethics, it manifests the refusal to be considered as a theme, sometimes secondary, of the philosophical thematization. It proposes that the vitality of reason be directed in the perspective of the question of the meaning of the human and in the consideration of ethics as the first philosophy. For it is the ethics that commands the work of truth and, being beyond the "vision and certainty," delineates the condition of the other as different and unfathomable. The present text intends to present the reflections of Emmanuel Levinas on the category of responsibility present in the argument of the work Other than to be or beyond the essence. An attempt will be made to emphasize that the Levinasian understanding of responsibility has a very different perspective from traditional propositions. He suggests a different alternative to traditional formulations, judging them ineffective, assimilated as theoretical events produced by processes of rationalities rooted in logical and abstract formalities. Levinas proposes to understand the responsibility beyond being as a constitutive and defining element of the ethical sense of the human.