In Humanism of the Other, Emmanuel Levinas argues that it is not only possible but of the highest exigency to understand one's humanity through the humanity of others. Based in a new appreciation for ethics, and taking new distances from the phenomenology of Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, the idealism of Plato and Kant, and the skepticism of Nietzsche and Blanchot, Levinas rehabilitates humanism and restore its promises. 
He expresses disappointment with the revolutions that became bureaucracies and totalitarian governments, and the national liberation movements that eventually led to oppression and international wars. Defining the human as subject, ego, synthesis, identification, cognition, and mood all too easily lead to subjugation, persecution, and murder. 
Painfully aware of the long history of dehumanization which reached its apotheosis in Hitler and Nazism, Levinas does not underestimate the difficulty of reconciling oneself with another. The humanity of the human, Levinas argues, is not discoverable through mathematics, rational metaphysics or introspection. Rather, it is found in the recognition that the suffering and mortality of others are the obligations and morality of the self.

Humanism of the Other

Politics & Social Sciences

Poller, Nidra

Lévinas, Emmanuel

Philosophy

University of Illinois Press

Nidra Poller Troubled Dawn of the 21st Century authorship intl 360 pages Troubled Dawn of the 21st Century began as a writer’s notebook and led to my transition from the art of the novel to a novelist’s singular style of journalism. At the end of September 2000 I was mentally constructing my next novel that would expand from the mother-daughter axis of the previous work, Madonna Madonna, to the third generation, from mother to daughter to grandchild. The challenge I had set for myself was abruptly replaced by the existential conflict that has occupied me ever since. The alleged provocation of Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, followed two days later by the al Dura blood libel, jolted the course of contemporary history. I recognized immediately that a real life novel was unfolding before my eyes. And I began to grasp it in terms that only a novelist could perceive and elaborate. Since the late 1970s I had been writing almost exclusively in French. Including the novel referred to above. Neither assimilated nor integrated nor expatriated, I lived harmoniously with my share of France. Like a bird, briefly pausing on a branch. I felt no need for roots. Immigration was my homeland. From Mittleuropa to the United States to Western Europe, why not? But the tree that supported that branch began to shake violently and sent me flying into emergency mode. I responded, naturally, in French. Cahier d’une honnête citoyenne [notes from a simple citizen] was addressed to the society in which I lived, the media, old and soon to be lost friends, new friends and allies, political leaders, younger generations, my native land, and my newfound Zionist rebirthplace. Like so many cosmopolitan Jews that did not wear that identity on their lapels or on a fine gold chain, I was thrust into a virtual ghetto, a frenzy of meetings, lectures, broadsides, facts &amp; figures sustained by newly formed groups and revitalized institutions. In that atmosphere of heightened awareness and concrete danger—violent anti-Semitic acts were counted by the hundreds, adding up to thousands—I used every skill and talent with which I am endowed to observe, analyze, and express the momentous transformation of contemporary reality. The Metula News Agency publication in 2002 of “Un Sac de billes” [followed by the English version “A Bag of Marbles”] launched my “journalistic career.” The chronicle published here is a unique document composed in a fertile geopolitical crescent —France, Israel, the US—in a historical period of radical transformation. No retrospective account could ever capture the full force of that living breathing reality. The point being missed is that a new world order is taking shape before our eyes, and we are responsible for the shape it takes. Will it be a world faithful to democratic values in all their imperfection and largely huddled under the umbrella of American military might, or a world delivered up to the logic of blackmail: we can do this to you because you don’t know how much we suffer and it’s all your fault, and you can’t hit back at us because if you do we’ll send the whole world down the tubes. What is happening to Israelis today will happen to every one of us tomorrow. It all comes down to a five year-old girl shot in cold blood as she hid under her bed. And Israeli troops going into Hebron and killing the man who sent the man who killed that child. Troubled Dawn, April 2002

Troubled Dawn of the 21st Century

Politics & Government

authorship intl

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