Responsibility for another person › Totality and the work of comprehension

You have an explanation ready for someone before they begin to speak. You know their role, the difficulty they represent, and the response your procedure permits. Then they say something that your explanation has left out. The encounter can reveal a difference between knowing things about a person and allowing that person to question how you have understood them.

Emmanuel Levinas gives this difference a demanding philosophical form in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Published in French in 1961, the book challenges the priority given to comprehension when we describe our relation to another person. Levinas asks whether the other can be received as more than an element within a world organized around the self. His answer connects the encounter with ethics, language, and the idea of infinity.

This is not a psychological finding that people naturally respond generously when someone speaks. People can disregard or injure others. Levinas is investigating the ethical significance of the encounter, including how it can call our freedom and our established understanding into question. Reading him requires distinguishing that philosophical claim from a promise about actual behavior.

The title's totality concerns a whole within which the meaning of each element is determined. Levinas worries about forms of thought that give the whole priority over the singular person. Another human being can then appear chiefly through a role, a category, or a place in a historical process. What the person says matters only insofar as it fits that arrangement.

Comprehension is valuable in many settings. We need concepts to identify problems, explain causes, and coordinate action. Levinas's challenge is directed at the claim that comprehension exhausts our relation to another person. If the other is only what my categories allow me to recognize, the relation has already been organized around my power to determine its meaning.

Suppose a visitor to an office is classified as an applicant with an incomplete form. That description may be accurate and useful. But if every attempt to explain the missing information is treated as irrelevant, the visitor has been reduced to the case as the office has defined it. This is a hypothetical illustration of a danger in categorization. It does not establish that procedures are inherently unjust or that a particular office has acted wrongly.

The philosophical question is what allows the classification itself to be challenged. More information can revise a category, but Levinas asks about the standing of the person who addresses us. Do we receive the speaker only as a source of data, or also as someone whose claim can put our manner of receiving them in question?

His language of the same and the other helps identify this issue. The same concerns a self that maintains its identity through its relations with the world. The other person cannot be adequately understood simply as something made familiar within that self's projects. Their alterity, their being other, is at stake in how the relation occurs.