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Totality And Infinity Rhetorical Analysis

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Recognizing the Other as a Path to Morality

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas examines how people can treat each other morally. You must recognize the dichotomy of the Same (yourself) and the Other (the other person). You must recognize that the Other infinitely transcends your own categories. We see the Other by looking into their face, we communicate with the Other by using language, and by doing this, we can prevent going to war with the Other. Finally, I provide some practical applications of Levinas’ thought, such as how it can help us avoid inappropriately judging people who are of different socioeconomic levels than we are, and how it can help us understand cultural differences.

The Same is the self; it to say “I” to yourself. To …show more content…

That is, they do not recognize the face of the Other, but instead view the other person through the original person’s preconceived categories. As long as you do this, you will be unable to treat the other person ethically, because you will not see the other person as they really are, but only as an extension of your own …show more content…

For example, we might describe people with different adjectives, such as “intelligent,” “kind,” or “gentle.” Or we might say that they’re an “INFJ” according to the Myer Briggs Personality Indicator, or a “4” according to the Enneagram test, and so on. However, these tools are ultimately insufficient, since they limit the infinity of the Other through established categories.

We use language in order to traverse the infinite distance between the Same and the Other. This “distance is untraversable, and at the same time traversed” (62). Truth arises when a person recognizes the Other as such, “where a being separated from the other is no engulfed in him, but speaks to him” (62).

In every moment, we are ready to go to war with another person. We do this when hunger and fear make us think that it is worth it to hold ourselves over the other person, for “hunger and fear can prevail over every human resistance and every freedom” (35). However, we always have the freedom to resist hunger and fear, however tempted we may be, as “freedom consists in knowing that freedom is in peril” (35). It is imperative to resist the urge to treat the other as merely an object, and that we perpetually postpone this urge (35). When we do go to war, we must obscure the face of the Other, since if we recognized the face of the Other, then we would most likely not be able to go through with our war towards

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