Phenomenology is a field of philosophy that tries to describe what our experience of the world is, from our perspective. It comes up with theories on how our consciousness interacts with the world. By understanding our relationship with the world, we can get closer to understanding things like our existence, what knowledge is, what ethics we should live by and so on.

So to answer questions about knowledge and ethics, some phenomenologists believe that we need to understand our existence first, some believe that we need to understand consciousness itself and some believe that we must acknowledge our freedom before we begin to understand anything else.

Levinas believes that these starting points are incorrect, because they are self-centered; looking to the self is an insufficient starting point in trying to understand how we interact with the world. What he instead suggests is looking at our relationship with others, as a starting point for developing any branch of philosophy. It’s the ethical responsibility towards the other that is the first philosophy to adopt.

So why this ethical responsibility?

When we encounter the other person, it is the most fundamental experience. There’s something that stirs deep inside when we look at the face of another, an ethical demand to be responsible, to not harm that person. This feeling is inherent, it’s automatic, it comes before any philosophical theory.

Before we come up with any theory of knowledge, the relationship between humans comes first.