Freedom of the other in Levinas

The concept of freedom, which has been the subject of philosophy since ancient times, is still searching for its meaning today. Philosophers of different periods have tried to answer the question "What is freedom?" but no common understanding has been reached. In its simplest form, freedom can be defined as the ability to think and act according to one's own free will and desires without being under any pressure. When we look at the understanding of the concept in the historical adventure, we encounter different questioning descriptions. In ancient times, freedom was mostly evaluated based on reason and knowledge within the framework of individual activities and individual actions. According to Plato, freedom is gained in the realm of ideas by living a virtuous life; according to Aristotle, freedom is the ability of human beings to exist for their own purposes through their own reason, to realize their actions with these choices and to achieve the "good". By the Middle Ages, philosophy was influenced by religion and suppressed; concepts such as reason, virtue and the good mentioned by Plato and Aristotle were tried to be reinterpreted by adapting them to revelation and theological teachings and were limited by religious dogmas. According to Augustine, one of the most important thinkers of the Middle Ages, man can only be free if he obeys God's commands. With the Renaissance and Reformation movements, churches lost their importance, there was a return to reason and knowledge by getting rid of religious teachings and theological pressures, and the Age of Enlightenment began. If we look at the thinkers who make these conceptualized periods remarkable, we find the following details. While Thomas Hobbes argued that one can be free to the extent permitted by the state through the social contract, John Locke emphasized that the state should protect rights such as life and liberty by putting forward the concept of property. According to Immanuel Kant, the most important philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, freedom is the cause of responsibility, a person is free to the extent that he can determine his desires according to the moral law, and according to Kant, freedom is a characteristic of desires, not actions. In the early 20th century, the Lithuanian-born French philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanuel Levinas criticized Western philosophy with his anti-ontological discourses with his view that "the first philosophy is Ethics". Levinas was influenced by the views of Husserl and Heidegger, and his admiration for these two philosophers turned into criticism with the rise of antisemitism after the Second World War. In contrast to Heidegger's Dasein, Levinas goes through the concept of Other. In Levinas, the first freedom begins with hypostasis, the first freedom begins with the break from the existing, with the transition to something else. Levinas; "the otherness of the other is my responsibility for the other, which creates weight, which escapes. What marks humanity is to worry about the other. To be responsible for another is to be a hostage. One becomes a hostage unjustly, but this injustice is the basic element of responsibility." He puts the Other in front of the Self and the Others in front of them...With the inclusion of the Others, the third party in this relationship, the concepts of state and justice come to the fore. In our 100th anniversary, in which the Republic is defined as freedom, this study on "The Freedom of the Other in Levinas" will examine Levinas's ethics and the place of freedom in this ethics in the context of God, death and time based on the definitions of self, other and third.