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The face-to-face relation (French: rapport de face à face) is a concept in the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas' thought on human sociality. It means that, ethically, people are responsible to one-another in the face-to-face encounter. Specifically, Lévinas says that the human face "orders and ordains" us.
Levinas advances the thesis that all ethics derive from a confrontation with an other. This other, with whom we interact concretely, represents a gateway into the more abstract Otherness. The distinction between totality and infinity divides the limited world, which contains the other as a material body, from a spiritual world.
Language as saying is an ethical openness to the other; as that which is said – reduced to a fixed identity or synchronized presence – it is an ontological closure of the other.' [1] The complication Levinas introduces into his analysis of the face-to-face gives his ethics a further reach toward the kind of universalist ethics of a humanism:
For Emmanuel Levinas, meontology was whatever had meaning beyond ontology, the ethical primary demand of the other in a face-to-face encounter. According to Levinas, meontology refers not to another being but to an inability to be that leads to a transcendent realm "other than being". [2] However, Levinas suggested that meontology, as the ...
Face-to-face (philosophy), a philosophical concept described by Emmanuel Lévinas based on the idea that people are responsible to one another in their face-to-face encounters Face-to-face interaction , a concept in sociology, linguistics and communication studies involving social interaction carried out without any mediating technology
Emmanuel Levinas [3] [4] (born Emanuelis Levinas; / ˈ l ɛ v ɪ n æ s /; French: [ɛmanɥɛl levinas]; [5] 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to metaphysics and ...
For Levinas, the Other is given context in ethics and responsibility; we should think of the Other as anyone and everyone outside ourselves. According to Levinas, our initial interactions with the Other occur before we form a will—the ability to make choices. The Other addresses us and we respond: even the absence of response is a response.
The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, identified the Other as one of the conceptual bases of intersubjectivity, of the relations among people. In philosophy, the Other is a fundamental concept referring to anyone or anything perceived as distinct or different from oneself.