Motherhood as a Metaphor for Ethical Responsibility in Emmanuel Levinas’s Phenomenological Thought

Like his other French contemporaries’, Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological and ethical thought accommodates many metaphors originated from and related toward family and gender roles to expose all the previous philosophical traditions to serious criticisms. Among these roles, he lays stress upon, and gives brilliant importance to motherhood and its related role(s) as it has a fundamental ethical significance in all cultural-educational traditions to make a concrete-passive ground for his theory of ethical responsibility: this kind of responsibility, as Levinas elucidates it, comes into reality prior phenomenologically to the third, and therefore, prior to society and politics. As the surmounting axiological paradigm case in Levinas’s thought, motherhood and maternity are interwoven with ethical responsibility since the two sides have a common axiological modality. In this paper, the author’s main objective is to illustrate the axiological equivalence between motherhood and ethical responsibility while portraying the fact that they both have robust gender comportment.