Relations

Levinas says that each of us encounter others in the world, "others" if you will. These other entities automatically make demands upon us because of their existence in our world. The first demand is "Don't kill me". Are we generally murderous beings that would follow that course of action if not dissauded? Of course not. Perhaps there's more than one way to kill someone. We have our individual sphere of existence that gets intruded upon by others. When this happens, we have the option of understanding those people by their qualities and nothing else. Our friend or acquaintence becomes simply "the girl with brown hair that talks alot" or "my roomate's annoying cousin from Kansas". When we do this, however, we essentially reduce them to non-humans. We are, in a way, killing them. We must see beyond these things and take people as actual people. This is the only way to create real and meaningful relationships. Why don't we? Because treating others as people automatically creates demands upon us. We're unable to retreat into our own little world and focus on ourselves. It's not easy and/or necessarily comfortable. And yet, I think if a lot of people (certainly not all people) really understood, they'd realize that it is in fact what they've been seeking, going about it in entirely the wrong way.

This is why relationships are so important, though. By having someone to make demands upon me we are forced to look beyond ourselves and recognize others as humans. I think this applies to marriage. Does marriage necessarily mean we'll be recognizing our spouse? Nope. We can just classify them away and 'kill' them as easily as not. In addition to this we can (with our spouse) essentially become a single ego and exclude others. We've all met those married people who have nothing else in their universe...not so good. This leads to the importance of children. When we introduce a third, it doesn't just introduce a third person that could conceivably become part of the conglomerate ego we've created, it seems to introduce the idea of other introducing even our partnership. There could be another child, another person at any time. We are opened to the fact that we have to deal with others as people and not simply have a Cartesian life focused on creating our universe and pleasures; we have to deal with the world that surrounds us, a world filled with other things, equipment, enjoyments and most especially, other people.