Emmanuel Levinas, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
What I have spent a lifetime thinking can be stated simply, though the simplicity is deceptive: the relation to the other person is more original than any relation to being, and this priority is what I call ethics as first philosophy.1 Philosophy, since the Greeks, has begun with being and truth — with the question of what there is and how we can know it.
Even Heidegger, who renewed the question of Being with extraordinary force, remained within that horizon: Dasein discloses Being, and other persons enter as Mitsein, already comprehended within the project of that disclosure. What I am claiming is that this beginning is not the true beginning. Before I comprehend the being of the other, before I thematize him or her within any horizon I project, the other has already addressed me — and that address is a command, an obligation, a calling that no ontology can absorb.2
The comprehension of Being in general cannot dominate the relationship with the other; rather, that relationship commands the first. The face (visage) is the name I give to the way the other addresses me. It is not a perceived figure, not a datum of consciousness. It comes from a height and a destitution simultaneously — the "asymmetrical height and destitution of the Other" — and in coming it contests my spontaneous appropriation of the world, my comfortable perseverance in my own being.3
What the face says, before any words, is: you shall not kill. And the first sentence I am called to is me voici — here I am — already in the accusative, already obligated before any choice. The alterity of the other is not simply recalcitrance to knowledge; it is a positive force, but its positivity is moral rather than ontological.4 This is the reversal I am proposing with respect to the whole tradition: not that ethics is a department of philosophy built on a foundation of ontology or epistemology, but that the ethical relation is itself the most originary relation, the one that makes all other discourse — including philosophical discourse — possible and meaningful.
Now, philosophy as theoretical discourse requires more than the face-to-face. It arises, I have said, when alongside the other I must also approach the third party (le tiers) — every other other beyond this singular encounter.5 The third introduces comparison, calculation, institutions, justice. But the third is given through the face of the second; without the prior asymmetric responsibility, justice would have nothing to be just about.
What the encounter with the other man reveals — and this is perhaps the deepest claim — is that fraternity can take on an importance that exceeds ontological weight entirely.6 The face of the other bears the trace of what the tradition called God, but without requiring cosmology or metaphysics to sustain it: the word God becomes meaningful in the face of the neighbor, not as the unconditional foundation of the world, but as the secret that the human face carries and discloses.
When I speak of first philosophy, I am referring to a philosophy of dialogue that cannot not be an ethics. Even the philosophy that questions the meaning of being does so on the basis of the encounter with the other.Alterity and Transcendence, pp. 117–119
The latter relationship commands the first. I cannot disentangle myself from society with the Other, even when I consider the Being of the existent he is.Totality and Infinity - An Essay on Exteriority, pp. 47–48
The subject is traumatized, loses its balance, its moderation, its recuperative powers, its autonomy, its principle and principles, is shaken out of its contemporaneousness with the world and others, owing to the impact of a moral force: the asymmetrical 'height and destitution' of the Other.Time and the Other, pp. 26–27
The alterity of the Other is not simply recalcitrant to knowledge and caresses; it is a positive force; but its positivity is a moral rather than an ontological or epistemological force.Time and the Other, pp. 26–27
It is inasmuch as I have not only to respond to the Face of the other, but alongside him to approach the third party, that the necessity for the theoretical attitude arises.9 Philosophy, Justice, and Love, p. 119
the fact that fraternity can mean the annulment, or the eclipse, of that ontological importance of attachment, that a different importance, a different 'above all else,' a different absolute can move us... fraternity can take on an importance in excess.Alterity and Transcendence, pp. 117–119