Levinas made the Self-Other relationship philosophy’s central concept

Evidence

Levinas turned away from the fog of Being, and went the other way — towards individual, living, human entities. In his best-known work, Totality and Infinity, published in 1961, he made the relationship of Self with Other the foundation of his entire philosophy — as central a concept for him as Being was for Heidegger. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 625

Categorization

• DEFINE: Positions the ethical Self-Other relation as Levinas’s foundational concept, replacing Being—essential orientation for understanding the movement.
• XREF: connects to: Levinas made the ethical relation to the Other foundational to existence itself — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 628; Levinas’s life spans modern phenomenology from Husserl to ethics of the Other — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 989; The for-others requires a totality in which selfness and the Other are reciprocal structures (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Levinas made the ethical relation to the Other foundational to existence itself #expands (0.95) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 628
• Levinas’s life spans modern phenomenology from Husserl to ethics of the Other #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 989
• For Levinas the enemy emerges within alterity, not outside it #expands (0.80)
• Levinas’s ethics of the other sets a limit where the neighbor becomes an enemy #expands (0.80) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 828
• The for-others requires a totality in which selfness and the Other are reciprocal structures #complicates (0.75)
• The other’s love reveals the self by exposing its own otherness #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1884
• The for-itself’s free spontaneity makes the Other’s existence possible #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 781
• The nothingness separating self and Other precedes and founds all relation #complicates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 675
• Beauvoir held that every Self-Other duality inevitably breeds conflict #complicates (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 265
• Colonial knowledge targeted the Other while Islamic juristic knowledge targeted the Self #complicates (0.70)