Session Information
Contribution
60 years after Shoa, regardless of the countless humanistic discussions and opinions nowadays, we are permanently confronted with the barbarity of war, with the affliction of humans. As the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas says: humanistic thinking of our time is "ineffectual" and a rethinking is inevitable. Levinas' these: the ethics is the first philosophy, prior even to ontology, knowledge and theory. He challenges with this thesis the priority of epistemological approach and analytical conceptual thinking of Western European tradition. Levinas opposes the cognitive thinking which makes possible the contemplation of people as objects. The other as Other is here not understood as an object with specific characteristics, which in certain ways will be our own, it rather retires into its secret. The other, the unknown sense immediately remains invisible and absent even if it appears as a "trace" . According to Levinas it is a "overvalue" of the always inextiguishable and virtually always momentous meaning. The secret, the unseen, can never appear in the visibleness by dint of cognition, of thema-tising .The distance between the perception - the visible sense and the secret - the invisible meaning, the secret remains (according to Levinas) forever infinite. Levinas characterises the relationship to Other as a "relationship to the face". The other person's face means to us the openness, which exposes us to the infraction, trauma and to an indignity, a defamation. But at the same time it is this which forbids us to kill. The access to the Other is the ethical relationship via its face that is a secret and not via the analytically conceptual perception. To that extent basic ethical mindsets are an opening, in "egression from oneself" (so Lévinas), to disengage from egoism, from selfish interest. The matter of concern is not to hurt other humans. I would like to present some reflection on the thinking about otherness of the stranger, of other person, of the child as a secret. My presentation will firstly focus on a basic category of the thinking of Levinas: that is on another perception of the other person, the child - the metaphysical one. Finally, I attempt to present a key aspect of Levinas' educational thinking - the resposibility and the authenticity. My comments and statements are guided by basic ideas, wich are presented by Levinasin in his text "Humanism of the Other" and his essay "Anti-humanism and education".
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