A Ética da alteridade: uma reflexão sobre a responsabilidade pelo outro em Emmanuel Lévinas

Abstract

This scientific monograph addresses the ethics of Alterity: a reflection on responsibility for the other in Emmanuel Lévinas. The elaboration of this scientific monograph employed the bibliographic research method, aided by the hermeneutic technique, which consists of reading, interpreting, and analyzing works by the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, and interpreting texts by other philosophers who address the topic. The monograph raises the following problem: how can the ethics of alterity, based on responsibility for the other, promote respect, care, and justice for the other in a society where humankind perpetuates acts of violence? In modernity, Man exalted his ego and saw the other as the stranger, the different one, and lacking any ethical sensitivity, perpetuated acts of injustice and inequality against the other, which materialized through wars, holocausts, xenophobia, racism, genocides, massacres, and all kinds of anti-humanistic evils that are still perpetuated today in our society. Lévinas, in his ethics of alterity, argues that this other was forgotten by the philosophers who preceded him, because he discovers that the other was the target of objectification by the self, which consequently, in intersubjective relations, the self aimed to exert power over the other in order to violate them. However, this violence results from selfishness and takes on various forms in human relations, which calls into question the life of the other in humanity. However, the research is guided by the following starting questions: what was the context and influences that contributed to the emergence of the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Lévinas? What is the basis for the ethics of alterity? How does responsibility promote and preserve the humanity of the other? Emmanuel Lévinas, through his ethics of alterity, denounces that the anti-humanistic evils perpetuated by modern man were perpetuated by man due to forgetting the other, failing to be responsible for him, and the philosophical exercise that Lévinas undertakes in his thought is to rescue this other who is violated to death by the self so that he may be welcomed, appealing to the self to have an infinite responsibility for the other, because the other has a face and it is fundamental that his humanity be recognized. The ethics of Alterity in Emmanuel Lévinas invites us to think about the other through a vision that goes from the particular to the universal, that is, the other is my neighbor who lives in the same society as me, the other is the stranger, is the one who is hungry and lives in misery, is the wronged one, all need to be welcomed and held accountable.(TRADUÇAO NOSSA)