[1][2] Lévinas' phenomenological account of the "face-to-face" encounter serves as the basis for his ethics and the rest of his philosophy.
Lévinas argues that the encounter of the Other through the face reveals a certain poverty which forbids a reduction to Sameness and, simultaneously, installs a responsibility for the Other in the Self.
Lévinas' account of the face-to-face encounter bears many similarities to Martin Buber's "I and Thou" relation.
The major difference between Buber's account of the I and Thou relation and the ethics of the face-to-face encounter is the application of Lévinas' asymmetry towards the other.
This ethical relation for Lévinas is prior to an ontology of nature, instead he refers to it as a meontology, which affirms a meaning beyond Being, a mode of non-Being (Greek: μή, me "non" and ὄν, on "being").