Emmanuel Lévinas put some critical though on the ontological tradition in European philosophy. For him, the Other cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional ontology. Instead, ethics is the first philosophy, as he maintained that subjectivity has formed our subjected-ness to the other. Our responsibility for-the-other was already rooted within our subjective constitution, not as a derivative feature of our subjectivity but as an obligation founded in our subjectivity, which was given a meaningful direction and orientation.