Ethics and Exteriority

For Levinas' Phenomenological Deontology, the sphere of Ethics is what he calls 'Exteriority'. Whereas 'Interiority' in his System characterizes the privacy of Consciousness, Exteriority is what is, in principle, beyond the reach of that Consciousness, namely the experience undergone by an Other, which one has access to only through the intrusion into one's own experience of the Face of the Other. In particular, Ethics begins, for Levinas, with one's being made aware of the expression of Need in the Face of the Other, which one experiences as inescapably deontological. Conscience is, thus, for Levinas, an external image, not an internal voice. In contrast, what is most fundamentally External to Consciousness in the Formaterial Individual is one's own Externalizing movements, processes which have typically been beyond the ken of the Phenomenalistic-Phenomenological tradition. Hence, one's experience of an Other as Exterior presupposes the extending of oneself towards them, e. g. a gesture of welcome, an invitation to share a problem, etc. In other words, it is the doing or not doing something about someone else's need, not the mere awareness of it, that opens up the sphere of Evolvemental Phronetic concern. More generally, the benefitting of another that Individual Evolvement entails is that which is not to the detriment of oneself. That is, the sphere of Phronesis is not exclusively Exteriority, but both Interiority and Exteriority, in combination.