Indeed, one might say that neither More nor Luther can see his dialectical opponent as his neighbor—and therefore neither understands that even in long-distance epistolary debate Christians are obliged to love their neighbors as themselves. Maybe the very philosophical concept of “the Other” arises only when certain communicative technologies allow us to converse with people who are not in any traditional or ordinary sense our neighbors. In his book Works of Love, Kierkegaard sardonically comments, “Neighbor is what philosophers would call the other.”
