Emmanuel Levinas's The Responsibility Of The Self

The impossibility for the self, after encountering God, is to remain in itself without entering into the very despair that Kierkegaard describes. The realization of self, before God, is the very call to respond to the need of the other. Emmanuel Levinas writes:
No one can stay in himself; the humanity of man, subjectivity, is a responsibility for others, an extreme vulnerability. The return to self becomes interminable detour. Prior to consciousness and choice, before the creature collects himself in present and representation to make himself essence, man approaches man. He is stitched of responsibilities. Through them, he lacerates essence.1

The actualization of the self is the understanding and accepting of responsibility for other inherent to the nature of self. Many would stop at this point claiming, as Levinas does in the aforementioned quote, that coming into consciousness of self is a realization of this responsibility to the other. However, as has previously been established, the consciousness of self only comes through encounters with God that lead to the realization of the

Severson writes, “Responsibility is about self-actualization and the maximization of one 's potential. This does not mean that one disregards the needs of others or that responsibility does not include obligation to the neighbor. It is, rather a question of primacy. What responsibility is supreme?”8 For the Christian, in understanding the self before God, the responsibility that is supreme is the responsibility first and foremost to God. As Kierkegaard explained it is only the self relating to itself resting transparently in God that can overcome the clutches of sin and become itself. The maximization of one 's potential is to commit oneself to the ongoing encounter of God that is perpetuated through the continual response to the need of the