The art of connecting….

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-chameides/the-art-of-connecting-to_b_4310221.html?ir=Green

Extract

Facing “the Other”

I find a real resonance between Ishmael’s diagnosis of our species’ ills and the work of noted French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, specifically his notion of “the Other.” Tautologically, the Other is simply someone else, or, to use a term common to theology, “that which is not us.” Throughout history, otherness has triggered fear and violence and has been used as justification for slavery and imperialism.

But to Levinas, the Other provides a path to transcendence, a way to find meaning, indeed ecstasy. In Totality and Infinity Levinas writes, “Meaning is the face of the Other.” Face-to-face relations with the Other imparts knowledge, creates connection. As Levinas scholar Adriaan Peperzak writes:

“When Levinas meditates on the significance of the face, he does not describe the complex figure that could be portrayed by a picture or painting; rather, he tries to make us ‘experience’ or ‘realize’ what we see, feel, ‘know’ when another, by looking at me, ‘touches’ me: autrui me vise; the other’s visage looks at me, ‘regards’ me.”

From this notion flows a responsibility we all share for the Other.

Strictly speaking, Levinas viewed the face-to-face relationship as the purview of human-to-human interaction, which would leave Ishmael and his ilk in the Other category. But Ishmael is a special case — come on, the guy can communicate with a human, and there’s the whole parable thing. So, as other writers such as Barbara Jane Davy have done before, allow me to pull Levinas’s philosophy into the realm environmen