ABSTRACT
It is clear that Levinas’ ethical concepts have the ability to encourage psychology with its emphasis on the Other – allowing the Other to speak on her own terms without appropriating her into the same. Levinas reminds psychology of the importance of the Other. But Levinas’ ethics is also very problematic in application. His focus on the impossibility of understanding the Other and the call to never appropriate the Other does not allow for an application of his ethics. A hermeneutical model is needed to enter into conversation and to interact with the Other, but Levinas is critical of philosophical hermeneutics because he finds appropriation in its method of understanding. In this paper I use Levinas’ concept of fecundity (wherein he finds the same and the Other coexisting within the father/son relationship) to move towards an ethical-hermeneutics. This ethical-hermeneutics attempts to balance the ethical concerns of Levinas with the hermeneutical conversation of Gadamer to build an ethics that does not appropriate the Other but still allows for conversation.
