let us imagine a linear and rational world, where you are alone at this time and place, focused on that single project (e.g. your essay). From a multiple possibilities and perspectives in which you could have approached your project, you finally (somehow) narrow down to the words or actions you have written or done thus far.

Then the there is a knock on your door. You open the door and you stare at a stranger. It takes you 2 seconds to recognize that it is your friend, who for some reason has come to visit. This interruption to your project (a shock, a displeasure, or just simply an interruption) takes a while to register. But before you know what you are doing, you are in a conversation with your friend, after inviting the friend into your house. You discover (though not unsuspecting) that he or she has a problem and you will, in the next hour or two, play the role of a listener or even an adviser, if he or she decides to align what he or she thinks with your advice. Or it could be he or she knew the answer to the problem all the while, but found no means to articulate it (or have a listener to verify). You gamely give the friend what he or she wants. You have a nice cup of tea or coffee. And finally, the conversation ends and you are once again left alone.

You pause a moment, quite glad you have just helped a friend, and you probably do not really see it as a distraction but it was truly great to have your friend to visit you. And then you stare at your project again. And perhaps you may suffer from the same shock you have had when you met your friend. What have I just written?

now, try to recall that initial shock.

you could have been staring at infinity.

---

the philosophy of Levinas in a nutshell.

I discovered this philosophy (without reading him, I was reading Sartre) when I was taking a dump in my hotel in La Spezia, Italy. My thoughts were finally consolidated on a train ride back from Montreux to Munich. I decided to reject Sartre's existentialism and concept of nothingness and believed instead that neither essence nor existence predicts my actions, but on the relation of the Other (always there) with me (as-long-as-I-am-here) that always leaves me with a shock, which then causes a reaction in relation to the Other. Henceforth, I understood that my identity ultimately is a reaction to what I perceive before me. This empirical world sounds really small, but consciousness (and unconsciousness) as you will agree, is a universe.

Having agreed on where I stood in relation to Sartre's philosophy, to my shock two years later, I discovered Levinas and then the rest is history.

In short, I consciously engage and disengage with everything around me. Crossing boundaries, playing around with infinitude and finitude. I sometimes say what people expect me to say. But sometimes I shock people by saying what they do not want to hear or the words or actions completely make no sense to them. The rewards are amusing. Not least to say intriguing. Because I discover both the potential of our minds, I also saw the depravity in them. What you have is a plateau of circles intersecting each other (it's not a spiritual atom, but molecules), perhaps moving in Brownian motion but always receptive to outside forces - heat, weak/strong nuclear, electro-magnetic. For we live alone and also not alone. There is a shared and collective memory of our history. But there is also always an individual history we are responsible to.

We can leap around from one state to another, but we not just become someone completely new. We bear traces of them. Failure to acknowledge makes us very miserable; more because you are trying to be (singularly) someone you are not, when change has already become part of you. Therefore I still disagree with the general interpretation of Kierkegaard that there are a few states to leap around...to and fro (aesthetic, ethical, religious). All these boundaries are within us. The true test of faith is how we relate to them. How the inward individual regards them as well as disregard them.

It is how the inward individual relates to the Supreme Other. and still be responsible to these states of humanity.

there are no answers (except perhaps abstract ones).
We are all and one at the same time. we cannot have the same solutions to all problems. we just do what we must do, in shock, perhaps in fear but certainly in trembling and in silence. (like Abraham)

ultimately, my philosophy is not yours.