ETIKA KAIP PIRMOJI FILSOFIJA: SENAMADIŠKA AR ŠIUOLAIKIŠKA?
ETHICS AS THE FIRST PHILOSOPHY: OUTDATED OR MODERN?

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with Emanuel Levinas’ conception of ethics as the first philosophy. It is shown that the very possibility of ethics is compromised both theoretically by presuppositions of postmodern thinking and practically by tragic events of life itself. Regardless of that, Levinas not only substantiated the meaningfulness of ethical conduct, but also reformulated the fundamental goals of philosophy in the ethical perspective. He paid due regard to the fact that the most outstanding classical philosophers – Plato, Descartes, Kant – in one or another way indicated ethical matters as fundamental instances that constituted philosophy. The problem of the uniqueness of a person is one of the fundamental spiritual problems faced by man nowadays. The problem is logically presumed by the famous Descartian formula ‘cogito ergo sum’ which substantiates ego as a thinking thing. Levinas revealed the origins of ethical imperatives in his phenomenology of Face at the same way presenting a solution of the problem mentioned above. The responsibility that emerges in relations with Other and reveals itself in the fundamental ethical imperatives makes a person unique, because a person is unsubstitutable in this knot of subjectivity.

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