Verdade e justiça na obra “Totalidade e infinito” de Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

In this work what we tried to demonstrate was to investigate in the work “Totality and Infinity” of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, what he thinks and how he deals with the question “truth and justice”. We started our investigation by giving some definitions, such as the question of the face in Levinas, which thus acquires an important place for the author, since it is the very place of truth, which is no longer theoretical, but ethical and/or metaphysical, since the face does not lend itself to objectification, this ethical truth becomes possible if we take into account that the face is the expression of singularity, of the individual, the only one to exist. And alterity, which is essential for the future questions of his work such as truth and justice, which in the face to face with the nakedness of the face of the other my suffering, which previously was in its entirety in me, gains meaning and becomes a suffer “so that” the other does not suffer. Subjectivity is substitution, the face of the offended other is my cause. Unlike Heidegger, who maintained the primacy of ontology as the first philosophy, Levinas will from then on place emphasis on ethics as the first philosophy, in which the entity starts to matter for the philosopher, therefore Levinas's critique of ontology makes him find in the face of the other a notion capable of changing ontological structures and confronting violence and injustice.