Responsibility to Others versus Individual Selfishness

The 20th century philosopher Emanuel Levinas, responding to the horrors of the Holocaust, considers our ethical responsibility to other humans as follows: â€Å"The Ego loses its sovereign coincidence with self, its identification where consciousness comes back triumphantly to itself to reside in itself†¦The challenge to self is precisely reception of the absolutely other†¦[T]he Other hails me and signifies to me†¦by its destitution, an order. Its presence is the summons to respond†¦To be Me/Ego thenceforth signifies being unable to escape from responsibility.† (â€Å"Signification and Sense† 32-33). What Levinas is trying to explain is an individual is a person, or human, by how others perceive that individual, thus an individual is ethically responsible for others as well as others to the individual or is otherwise a loss. Throughout Dante’s The Divine Comedy 1: Hell and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the idea of the responsibility to others versus an individual’s selfishness is a constant debate. In both Dante’s The Divine Comedy 1: Hell and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the responsibility to others is something that is expected. In Dante’s The Divine Comedy 1: Hell, Dante is guided through Hell and learns how various sins are punished, the traitors being near the bottom. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth is told his destiny to become king, and then face internal conflicts of the various murders he performed in order to achieve the power of being king. Dante’s The Divine Comedy 1: Hell andShow MoreRelatedWilliam Shakespeare s King Lear1470 Words   |  6 PagesShakespeare’s tragedies accentuate the qualities of human behavior and interactions with others when faced with adversity where the emotions of greed, ambition and madness are strongly expressed. 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