"I must feed my body and arrange my house in order to receive the foreigner knocking at my door; if I posses a home, it is not for me alone." (Peperzak, 1993, pp.24-25)
There are many who would argue that in order to develop an ethical relationship, an empathy, for others, one must first acquire knowledge about them. The thinking goes something like this... "how can we expect children to care about people in such-and-such a country if they cannot even place it on a map?" There is something initially reasonable and compelling about such an argument, not least because such thinking (knowledge before ethics) is, as we shall see, entrenched deep in the Western tradition.
As our reading of Levinas in the last posting began to make clear, the history of Western thought has been long dominated by a tradition which sees consciousness as preceding, and having priority over, my encounter with the world. We might call this an 'egocentric' philosophy, one in which the Self comes first, and in which Others appear literally as an after-thought, that is, once they have been submitted to the integration, the 'violence', of thought. What Levinas proposes instead is a philosophy in which ethics, or our relationship with the Other, becomes fundamental. For Levinas, we have a primordial and unchosen responsibility for the Other, which comes before knowledge. Importantly, this is not to deny the Self. Rather, it is to say that the self comes into the world in relation to Others. As Peperzak writes,
