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What must I do (and why me)? | 93
commands the first. (...) This „saying to the Other” - this relationship
with the Other as interlocutor, this relation with an existent — precedes
all ontology; it is the ultimate relation in Being.”*' Language, therefore,
precedes awareness; the companion of necessity precedes the object.
Lévinas explains the priority of speech over language thus in the section
of his work titled “Language and Objectivity”: “The word that designates
things attest their apportionment between me and the others. (...) To
thematize is to offer the world to the Other in speech. (...) This
objectivity is correlative not of some trait in an isolated subject but of
his relation with the Other.”*’ The Other, however, does not merely
speak to me, but addresses me: they has something to say, to which they
expects a response, i.e., they wants something from me. Recognising
the right to expect a response, i.e., accepting responsibility for the Other,
is for Lévinas not the consequence of understanding but its precondition.
He thus reaches the conclusion that our basic experience of reality has
an ethical nature. In this encounter, man awakens to himself as the
subject of responsibility towards the Other. The basic relation is not
acquaintance but commitment. “To recognize the Other is to recognize
a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give,” claims Lévinas.** To
understand someone is to understand the very much concrete things
one has to do regarding him/her: “...my position as I consists in being
able to respond to this essential destitution of the Other, finding
resources for myself. The Other, who dominates me in his transcendence
is thus the stranger, the widow and the orphan, to whom I am
obligated.”**
Eco-ethics has hardly started to explore the possibilities of Lévinas’
theory of the absolute responsibility that grounds man’s existence in this
world. The reason for this is clear. The source of the claim for a response
is, for Lévinas, personal connection, the asking, urgent Face of the
Other turned towards us. Can we attribute a similar summoning power
to the whole or particular parts of our experience of reality, to the joy/
suffering of a living being or to the beauty or desolation of a landscape?
Does the look of our fellow-beings contain inexhaustible meaning for
us? In brief: does nature have a Face? ‘The question is posed by Lévinas
himself in an early writing. He leaves it unanswered, but hints that
81 Ibid. pp.47-48.
2 [bid. p.209.
8 Ibid. p.75.
= Ibid. p.215.