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humans which signifies humanity’s posture of moral rectitude as much as its physiological
characteristic.
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The face incorporates, for example, the ethical injunctions of seeing no evil,
hearing no evil, speaking no evil, and killing nobody. Heteronomic ethics is compelled to take
the side of civility, peace, or nonviolence that preserves the dignity and nobility of the other as
human being for the very reason that the ultimate end of violence armed with epistemological
infallibility and moral inculpability is the extermination of the other from the face of the earth.
Arendt, as we have above discussed, faults Eichmann’s banality of evil as the consequence of his
“authentic inability to think,” that is, his inability to think from the standpoint of the other which
contributed to the mass murder of Jews.
By defending heteronomy, Levinas continues Ludwig Feuerbach’s radical and
revisionary pursuit of ethical and social thought based on the primacy of Thou. What
(Ptolemaic) geocentrism is to self-centeredness, (Copernican) heliocentrism is to other-
centeredness. The heteronomic ethics of responsibility may thus be called a Copernican
revolution in ethical thinking. As a matter of fact, there is no ethics involving self-regarding
acts, enlightened or otherwise; only other-regarding acts entail ethics. This is the good reason
why the commonplace term self-responsibility is a contradiction in terms. As the “you” or “we”
is not a plural of the “I,” the self alone fails to make ethics possible; indeed, the self without the
other defaces or effaces the ethical. It is only the presence of the other that makes the ethical
possible. Levinas thus holds that human plurality is not a multiplicity of numbers, but is
predicated upon the radical alterity of the other or what Arendt calls “distinction” in defining
human plurality. In this sense, as other-centeredness is the elevated platform of the ethical,
alterity should be spelled and replaced by Mark C. Taylor’s neologism altarity
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grounded in the
idea of “altar” (or the Latin altare) that signifies “a high place.” Here the idea of “altarity”
Convention