ABSTRACT
According to Elie Wiesel, “Madness is the result not of uncertainty, but certainty” (Wiesel, 1992). Thought does not begin with knowledge. Knowing and understanding arise from exchange, address, and a person in front of me – always saturated with the ethical. Said differently, it is our very boundedness to one another, our vulnerability of living in this world as fleshly and small, and the calling and address made by one another’s vulnerabilities that are the starting points of rationality, personhood, and subjectivity. Emmanuel Levinas makes the assertion that ethics precedes ontology and that “ethics is first philosophy” (Levinas, 1989). We begin with the encounter and then theory, systems, and ontological paradigms stagger forward into words, definitions, and institutions. This is a radical notion, which upsets knowledge claims and foundational rubrics that frequently guide conceptualizations about the human subject. It is this type of assertion, one among many, that has fueled an ethical turn in the humanities during the second half of the 20th century. A phenomenologically rich and socially conscious ethics has taken center stage in a variety of academic disciplines, inspired by the work of philosophers and theologians concerned with the moral fabric of subjectivity, human relationships, and socio-political life.
