Finished a course in Philosophy and was introduced to several outstanding thinkers ranging from Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Rosensweig, Schelling, to Agamben. The one who I found maximum empathy with at a deep personal level would be Emmanuel Levinas. Even though extremely difficult t get a grip on, I shall spend the next few months reading him.
Sample this meaning of the 'other' and its ethical significance for the 'self': "The ethical moment, the moment in which the moral "ought" shows itself, is found, for Levinas, on the level of sensibility when the egoist self comes across something that it wants to enjoy, something that it wants to make a part of itself, but cannot. That which the self wants to enjoy but cannot is the other person. The reason that it cannot enjoy the other person is not rooted in some deficiency of sensibility, but in the other person who pushes back, as it were, who does not allow him/herself to be consumed in the egoism of my enjoyment. The other resists consumption. The presence of the other, on this level, is not, properly speaking, known. The other person is encountered as a felt weight against me."
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