Czy odpowiedzialność za drugiego może być imperatywem rozumu? Kant a Levinas

This article is an attempt to confront Levinas’s ethics of responsibility with Kant’s theory of the categorical imperative and the autonomy of the mind on some crucial issues. Pointing out differences and similarities, I consider a number of hypotheses regarding their mutual relations. I propose the following options: the categorical imperative as a foundation of the principle of responsibility; responsibility for another as a condition of ethical sensibility in a subject capable of acting rationally and morally; Kant’s rational ethics as an elimination of ethics built on desire; responsibility for another as a fundamental questioning of the autonomy of the mind and free will; a possible synthesis of both ethics by limiting Kant’s concept of the autonomy of the mind and Levinas’s concept of absoluteness. While not deciding which stand is best justified, one must note Levinas’s symptomatic favoring of Kant, even though he is well-known as a thorough critic of European philosophy.