Levinas E-Book

Colin Davis

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 359

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the 20th century.

In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the centre of Levinas's thought - alterity, the Other, the Face, infinity - concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation.

Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, describing the context in which he worked, and the impact of his writings. He argues that Levinas's work remains tied to the ontological tradition with which he wants to break, and demonstrates how his later writing tries to overcome this dependency by its increasingly disruptive, sometimes opaque, textual practice. He discusses Levinas's theological writings and his relationship to Judaism, as well as the reception of his work by contemporary thinkers, arguing that the influence of his work has led to a growing interest in ethical issues among poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers in recent years.

Comprehensive and clearly written, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in continental philosophy, French studies, literary theory and theology.

Leseprobe

LEVINAS

An Introduction

Colin Davis

Polity Press

Copyright © Colin Davis 1996

The right of Colin Davis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1996 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 2004, 2007

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ISBN: 978–0-7456–1262-1ISBN: 978–0-7456–1263-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978–0-7456–6612-9 (eBook)

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

1Phenomenology

2Same and Other: Totality and Infinity

3Ethical Language: Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence

4Religion

5Levinas and his Readers

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who have helped me in innumerable ways with this book, in particular Sarah Kay, Peter Hainsworth, Edward Harcourt, Christina Howells, Gary Mole, Wes Williams, Emma Wilson, Michael Worton and Maike Bohn. I am grateful to the British Academy for granting me extended leave during which the book was completed.

Abbreviations

References to Levinas’s works are given in the text. Where a page reference is followed by slash and a second reference, the first refers to the French edition and the second to the English translation. In these cases, translations are taken from the English edition, sometimes slightly modified for consistency or clarity; titles of Levinas’s works appear in English in cases where references are given to both French and English editions. Where only one reference is given, and for French texts other than those of Levinas, translations are my own. The following abbreviations have been used:

AHNA l’heure des nationsBVL’Au-delà du verset/Beyond the VerseDEDe l’évasionDFDifficile liberté/Difficult FreedomDVIDe Dieu qui vient à l’idéeEDEEn découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et HeideggerEEDe l’existence à l’existant/Existence and ExistentsEIEthique et infini/Ethics and InfinityENEntre nousHAHHumanisme de l’autre hommeMTLa Mort et le tempsNPNoms propresOBAutrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence/Otherwise than Being or Beyond EssenceOSHors sujet/Outside the SubjectPHThéorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de HusserlQLTQuatre lectures talmudiques/Nine Talmudic ReadingsSSDu sacré au saint/Nine Talmudic ReadingsTITotalité et infini/Totality and InfinityTOLe Temps et l’autre/Time and the Other

Introduction

The thought of Emmanuel Levinas is governed by one simple yet far-reaching idea: Western philosophy has consistently practised a suppression of the Other. Levinas has explored this idea in a publishing career which spanned over six decades. He was born in Lithuania in 1906; he moved to France in 1923, studied under Husserl and Heidegger in Germany between 1928 and 1929, and in 1930 published the first book on Husserl in French, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. His status as one of the leading philosophers in France was confirmed with the publication of Totality and Infinity (Totalité et infini) in 1961. His considerable body of publications sought, from a variety of angles, to elaborate the ethical nature of the relation with the Other. Levinas died in 1995.

In the early part of his career, Levinas made his name as one of the earliest and most important exponents of German phenomenology in France. He began writing on Husserl and Heidegger at a time when they were largely unknown in France; and Levinas’s early work played an instrumental role in making phenomenology one of the key influences on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular and post-war French philosophy in general. However, the most important phase of Levinas’s philosophical career began as his dissatisfaction with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger became more explicit. As early as in 1934, Levinas’s essay ‘Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlérisme’ (reprinted in Les Imprévus de l’histoire) illustrated his concern for the ethical dimension of philosophy. After the Second World War this concern came to dominate his work; and his distinctive contribution to ethics justifies the unique place that he has come to occupy in twentieth-century French thought.

Recent years have seen a remarkable growth of interest in Levinas’s work in the French- and English-speaking worlds. Although Levinas’s concerns have changed little over the last four decades, developments in French philosophy and their repercussions in British and American universities have served to make his work an almost obligatory reference point in fields as diverse as theology, sociology, anthropology, literary criticism and theory, as well as in philosophy itself. The reason for this lies in his long-standing enquiry into ethical questions. Of the major strands in post-war French thought – existentialism, Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism – only the first two are widely seen as having a direct bearing on ethical issues; and both have long since lost much of their influence on French and international intellectual stages. Structuralism and post-structuralism seemed at least in their initial phases to have little to say on ethical matters. Structuralism characterized the subject as the intersection of linguistic, mythological or ideological forces which leave little space for individual agency and responsibility. Post-structuralist thinkers moved away from the rigid schemes and scientific claims of the structuralists, but maintained the view of the subject as an outdated humanist illusion to be demystified. Rather than the self-conscious, self-possessed source of insight and values, the subject was to be regarded as decentred and elusive, possibly no more than an effect of language or the residue of still-unliquidated and pernicious metaphysical thinking. However, the post-structuralists themselves vigorously resisted the charge that their writing was incompatible with ethical concerns. Jacques Derrida, whose work played an important role in spreading post-structuralist thought in the English-speaking world, had in fact published the first extended discussion of Levinas’s philosophy in 1964; and, through the seventies and eighties, post-structuralist thinkers turned increasingly to a direct confrontation with political and ethical issues. It remains disputed whether this should be regarded as a new direction for post-structuralism or as a development of interests which were always implicit in its investigations. Whatever the case, the ethical turn of post-structuralism contributed to a climate in which contemporary philosophical debate has to a large part become dominated by Levinas’s abiding concerns: what does it mean to talk of justice or responsibility when the belief systems which sustained such terms are in a state of collapse, is it possible to have an ethics without foundation, without imperatives or claim to universality?

Before all else, the contemporary importance of Levinas’s ethics derives from the crucial role it accords to the problem of otherness; this ensures that Levinas’s reflection has resonance in areas beyond his own circles of interest, for example in feminism, anthropology, post-colonial studies or gay and lesbian theory. Levinas pursues his investigation in the vocabulary of modern French philosophy, particularly in his use of terms such as ‘Same’ and ‘Other’. These terms, introduced into philosophical debate by Plato, have occupied such a central position in recent French thought that Vincent Descombes uses them for the title of his study of French philosophy since 1933, Le Même et l’autre. Levinas’s account of the relationship between Same and Other has proved to be highly influential. In Levinas’s reading of the history of Western thought, the Other has generally been regarded as something provisionally separate from the Same (or the self), but ultimately reconcilable with it; otherness, or alterity, appears as a temporary interruption to be eliminated as it is incorporated into or reduced to sameness. For Levinas, on the contrary, the Other lies absolutely beyond my comprehension and should be preserved in all its irreducible strangeness; it may be revealed by other people in so far as they are not merely mirror images of myself, or (as shall be discussed in chapter 4) by religious experience or certain privileged texts. Levinas’s endeavour is to protect the Other from the aggressions of the Same, to analyse the possibilities and conditions of its appearance in our lives, and to formulate the ethical significance of the encounter with it.

Levinas’s conception of ethics may cause some initial confusion amongst English-speaking readers. Levinas is not interested in establishing norms or standards for moral behaviour, nor in examining the nature of ethical language or the conditions of how to live well. In most contexts, the French word used by Levinas, l’éthique, might just as well be translated by ‘the ethical’ as by ‘ethics’; and the ethical, like the political (as distinct from politics in the more restricted sense), refers to a domain from which nothing human may be excluded. Levinas’s ethics, as an enquiry into the nature of the ethical, analyses and attempts to maintain the possibility of a respectful, rewarding encounter with the Other; and it endeavours to discern the sources of a humane and just society in this encounter. In this book I explore some of the causes, difficulties and ramifications of Levinas’s ethical enquiry.

The project of discussing the vast body of Levinas’s writing (he has published around thirty books) in five short chapters seems rash, and perhaps positively brazen. A more schematic account of Levinas’s work will be presented than he himself might have endorsed; and, given the disparate nature and scope of his writing, different readers will inevitably find their own interests inadequately represented in this book. I am all too aware, for example, that a great deal more could (and perhaps should) have been said about Levinas’s views on history, politics and art, or about his later response to phenomenology and his influence on recent philosophy and theology. However, quite apart from the fact that such questions might have exceeded my own intellectual means, they would have gone beyond the relatively modest ambitions of this book: to give a concise, clear and readable account of the main lines of Levinas’s thought and development. The question remains of whether or not a study such as this is needed. A large number of books and articles of both an introductory and a technical nature have now been published on Levinas’s work. However, in my view the more technical works on Levinas’s thought tend to take too much for granted, reproducing (at least for readers such as myself) many of the problems of reading posed by Levinas’s texts rather than usefully elucidating them; and the introductory works, when not embarrassingly reverential, sometimes fail to explore basic difficulties raised by Levinas’s key terms. For these reasons, it seemed to me worthwhile, from the position of a relative outsider and as an aid to those who like myself may feel intrigued and mystified by Levinas, to attempt to analyse in as accessible form as I could manage the coherence and obscurity of his thought.

The first chapter of the book deals with Levinas’s work on phenomenology published in the thirties and forties. The chapter describes Levinas’s initial enthusiasm for, and subsequent growing discontent with, the thought of Husserl and Heidegger. As Levinas comes more and more to see the work of his German teachers as replicating the suppression of alterity which he believes to be characteristic of Western thought in general, he begins to lay the foundations for his own philosophy. This chapter explores Levinas’s engagement with Husserl and Heidegger in some detail in order to demonstrate the reasons for his dissatisfaction with their thought. Subsequent chapters examine the mature elaboration of his philosophy.

Chapters 2 and 3 discuss what most commentators agree are Levinas’s two major philosophical texts, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Autrement qu’être ou audelà de l’essence, 1974). Although the two works have much in common, the chapters devoted to them highlight different issues which illustrate the evolution in Levinas’s thought and philosophical practice. Chapter 2 concentrates on the aspect of Levinas’s thought for which he is best known: his ethics, derived from an encounter with the Other which puts the self into question. In Totality and Infinity, however, Levinas anticipates but does not entirely effect a break with the grand traditions of Western thought: as he acknowledges, he still uses the language of ontology and, I suggest, he may not maintain the respect for the Other which he advocates. Chapter 3 shows how, partly in response to the discussion of his work by Jacques Derrida, Levinas rethinks his positions in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. The chapter discusses how Levinas elaborates a theory of language, based on the distinction between Saying and the Said, which helps to explain his complex textual performance in that work.

Chapters 4 and 5 are more general in scope. Chapter 4 deals with Levinas’s texts on religious and Judaic themes. The chapter shows how his conception of God and his understanding of Judaism have important parallels in his philosophical work, so that there is a constant and productive exchange between his different areas of interest. The final section of the chapter analyses his commentaries on the Talmud and the general theory of textuality and interpretation which underlies them. Chapter 5, entitled ‘Levinas and his Readers’, attempts to show how the model of textual openness discussed in the previous chapter can also be applied to Levinas’s own writing. The chapter describes the difficulties that commentators have had in situating Levinas’s work in the general context of contemporary French philosophy; at the same time, owing to the often enigmatic nature of Levinas’s textual practice, his work has been assimilated to a wide range of different philosophical positions. The chapter attempts to explain why Levinas is at the same time so difficult to pin down and so readily adaptable to a variety of purposes.

I am aware that some readers will consult a book such as this rather than reading Levinas’s notoriously difficult texts. For such readers, it is worth signalling that some of Levinas’s shorter articles, such as those collected in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (first edition published in 1949) and Entre nous(1991), give a more succinct and accessible introduction to his work than Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Finally, I should say something about spelling and capitalization. On the title pages of some of Levinas’s books his name appears with an accent (Lévinas), whereas on others there is no accent. I chose not to use the accent for no better reason than that this seemed preferable in a text written in English. In the use of capitalization, notably on the word ‘Other’, I have attempted to reproduce Levinas’s own practice as accurately as I could, even though Levinas himself is not always consistent. In some English-language editions and studies of Levinas’s work, a convention has been adopted according to which autre (whether or not it is capitalized by Levinas) is translated by ‘other’ and Autrui by ‘Other’. However, I have not followed this convention since it blurs the essential distinction made by Levinas between autre and Autre (of which Autrui is the personalized form), which I attempt to explain in chapter 2.

1

Phenomenology

In 1932 Raymond Aron returned from Berlin to Paris and told fellow students Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir about his discovery of Husserlian phenomenology. Sartre, according to de Beauvoir, ‘turned pale with emotion’: here was precisely what he had been looking for, a means of extracting philosophy from the most concrete, apparently most banal, experiences.1 By this time Levinas was already intensely involved with the adventure of phenomenology. In Freiburg between 1928 and 1929 he had studied under Edmund Husserl in his final year of teaching and under Martin Heidegger in his first. In 1930 he published the first book on Husserl in French and in 1932 the first substantial article in French on Heidegger’s philosophy;2 and he collaborated on the French translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1931). More than Sartre, who adapted Husserl and Heidegger for his own ends, Levinas devoted much of his early philosophical career to explicating the work and significance of his German teachers. In subsequent years he has continued to insist that, despite fundamental divergences from Husserl and Heidegger, he has remained faithful to the phenomenological method that he first encountered through them.

Today, it is difficult to appreciate Sartre’s emotion on first discovering Husserl. Phenomenology, out of fashion in Continental thought and never in fashion outside it, seems to belong to a quaint past where consciousness was held to be sovereign, where the reflexive, self-present subject could still assume its centrality in an intelligible world. Yet it is important to remember that phenomenology occupies a vital position in the genealogy of modern Continental thought: its influence on the existentialism of Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty was crucial; it provided methods and themes for some of the most innovative literary critics of their day, such as Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard. Some of the most important recent thinkers have been preoccupied with its founding texts: Paul Ricœur has devoted a considerable part of his work to a discussion of Husserl and Heidegger; Jean-François Lyotard’s first book was an introduction to phenomenology; Jacques Derrida’s early reputation was established at least in part on his introduction to and translation of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry and his patient reading of Husserl in LaVoix et le phénomène.3 Phenomenology occupies a central place in the philosophical trajectory of modernity, even if its methods and aims have been rejected; and the post-structuralists might just as accurately be called post-phenomenologists.

Levinas played an important part in the dissemination of phenomenology in France; Ricœur described him as the founder of Husserl studies in France, and Sartre acknowledged that he played an important role in his discovery of phenomenology.4 Yet Levinas’s role in the dismantling of the prestige of phenomenology is no less important. The aim of this chapter is to account for Levinas’s involvement with phenomenology and to explain his gradual development of a post-phenomenological ethics which characterizes itself in opposition to the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger. The process is a slow one: in terms of published material it begins with Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl in 1930 and culminates in Totality and Infinity in 1961.

Husserl and Heidegger

According to his own account, Levinas discovered through Husserl ‘the concrete meaning of the very possibility of “working in philosophy’” (EI, 19/28). Husserl offered him a method of philosophical investigation which depended neither on inflexible dogma nor on chaotic intuition. Levinas places this discovery at the very origin of his own intellectual project (see EN, 141). And Husserl occupies a privileged position in his writing in two senses: firstly, through the phenomenological approach which Levinas never fully renounces even though he comes to reject many of Husserl’s central ideas; and, secondly, through the continuing reference to and discussion of Husserl’s key texts and notions. Levinas’s first book was on Husserl, and the final essay in one of his later collections, Outside the Subject (Hors sujet, 1987), is devoted to Husserl’s conception of the subject. Levinas considers the principal and abiding contribution of phenomenological method to be its heightened reflexivity towards its own status; it teaches the philosopher to confront the world whilst also radically questioning the manner in which the world is presented to him or her:

A radical, obstinate reflection about itself, a cogito which seeks and describes itself without being duped by a spontaneity or ready-made presence, in a major distrust toward what is thrust naturally onto knowledge, a cogito which constitutes the world and the object, but whose objectivity in reality occludes and encumbers the look that fixes it. […] It is the presence of the philosopher near to things, without illusion or rhetoric, in their true status, precisely clarifying this status, the meaning of their objectivity and their being, not answering only to the question of knowing ‘What is?’, but to the question ‘How is what is?’, ‘What does it mean that it is?’ (EI, 20–1/30–1)

The encounter with Heidegger was, for Levinas, no less decisive than his discovery of Husserl’s ideas. Already in Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl Levinas presents a distinctly Heideggerian interpretation of Husserl, particularly in the emphasis on the ontological aspects of phenomenology and his criticisms of Husserl’s intellectualism and neglect of historicity.5 Yet the influence of Heidegger is more restricted: Levinas describes Being and Time as ‘one of the greatest books in the history of philosophy’ (EN, 255; see also EI, 27/37), but he rarely refers to any of Heidegger’s later writings. And Levinas is cautious in his acceptance of Heidegger’s influence. Although he continues to admire Being and Time, Levinas has difficulty separating Heidegger’s later philosophy from his involvement with the Nazis in the early thirties. Like Adorno,6 Levinas even suggests that the key notion of Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) already introduces into Being and Time the seeds of Heidegger’s subsequent political disgrace (see EN, 255–7; EDE, 170). The work of Heidegger appears to Levinas as a crucial but dangerous stage in modern philosophy; to escape the limitations of his thought entails thinking through and beyond him rather than returning to the comforts of pre-Heideggerian naïvety. In the rest of this section I shall outline the significance of the work of Husserl and Heidegger as Levinas understood it in the thirties and forties; and in subsequent sections I shall describe the reasons for Levinas’s increasingly critical attitude towards key aspects of their thought.

At its very simplest, phenomenology has been characterized by the slogan ‘Zu den Sachen selbst’ (‘Back to the things themselves’). This is proclaimed by Husserl as his ambition and accepted as founding the philosophical originality of phenomenology by Heidegger at the beginning of Being and Time.7 But to return to the things themselves turns out to be less simple than the slogan might have led us to hope. One of the principal ambitions of Husserlian phenomenology was to give an absolutely secure philosophical foundation to the natural sciences. This could only be provided by a stringent reflection on what science does not normally question: the role of the perceiving consciousness in the constitution of the perceived world. Husserl cannot accept as unquestionable the ‘natural attitude’ of scientific realism, that is the presumption that the world as we experience it exists outside and independently from consciousness. Knowledge is only entirely secure if it is, in the term used by Husserl, apodictic, that is beyond any possibility of doubt; and, at least in the initial stages of reflection, I cannot be certain that the world as I experience it really exists. As Descartes suggested, the evidence of the senses can be misleading: I might be dreaming, or I might be mad, or I might simply be mistaken in my perceptions.8 The key notion of intentionality, which Husserl took from his teacher Franz Brentano and which plays a central role in Levinas’s analysis and later critique of phenomenology, asserts that all consciousness is consciousness of something, that all mental acts (for example perception or memory) have an object. But even intentionality does not necessarily guarantee the independent existence of intentional objects: intended by consciousness, they are also constituted by it. Intentionality implies a relationship with something outside the self, but does not yet give it apodictic certainty. As Husserl writes in his Cartesian Meditations, ‘Whatever exists for a man like me and is accepted by him, exists for him and is accepted in his own conscious life, which, in all consciousness of a world and in all scientific doing, keeps to itself.’9

So, the phenomenological ‘Return to the things themselves’ begins by putting into doubt the very existence of the things to which it aims to return. Husserl follows a procedure which he calls phenomenological reduction, or transcendental reduction, or the epoché, and which he explicitly compares to the method of Cartesian doubt. Apodictic certainty can only be acquired if everything which can be doubted is provisionally bracketed off. This includes the existence of the external world, and – crucially – the existence of other consciousnesses. What this leaves, according to Husserl, is consciousness itself: when I am conscious of a tree, I may doubt the objective existence of the tree, but I cannot doubt the reality of my consciousness. The ‘me’ I thus discover is not my empirical self, born in such and such a year, teaching at such and such a university: these things could themselves be errors or illusions. The epoché reveals a transcendental Ego which is not a part of an objective natural order, but which actually constitutes the knowable world through its intentional acts. For Husserl consciousness is primary and absolute; the transcendental Ego is the first apodictic certainty from which all others must be derived.

For the phenomenologist, getting back to the things themselves inevitably involves reflecting on the ways in which the Ego perceives and experiences those things; the intentional object cannot be separated from the consciousness that intends it. Husserl was well aware of the dangers of solipsism into which this line of thinking could easily fall. In the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations he attempted to offset such dangers by demonstrating that a second epoché could reveal the apodicticity of both other egos and the external world. I shall return to this and its importance for Levinas in the final section of this chapter. In his earliest discussions of Husserl’s work, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (1930) and ‘L’Œuvre d’Edmond Husserl’ (originally published in 1940 and reprinted in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger in 1949), Levinas alludes only in passing to this problem. He concentrates on what he regards as the positive contribution of Husserlian phenomenology, making no more than brief and schematic general criticisms. The issue of solipsism remains largely implicit, and Levinas concentrates on the philosophical vistas opened up by Husserl’s accounts of intentionality and intuition.

Despite Husserl’s ambition of giving a secure foundation to scientific knowledge, the major achievement of his work for Levinas lies in the liberation of philosophy from the stranglehold of naturalist epistemology. Husserl achieves this by rethinking the notion of the phenomenon. Proponents of scientific objectivity implicitly rely upon an unquestioned ontology according to which a stable essence lies hidden behind the flux of perceived phenomena. The phenomenon, then, is conceived as a potentially deceptive surface which we must go beyond if secure knowledge is to be acquired. Husserl boldly erases this implicit separation of essence and phenomenon. Phenomenology is not the study of phenomena as distinct from essences, but the study of phenomena as the available mode of presentation of essences. Phenomenology, then, surpasses naturalist epistemology by establishing two new areas of investigation: existence is to be studied in all its multiplicity, and not just as a fallible sign of unchanging essences; and the phenomenologist will also enquire after the meaning of the existence of objects, not in any grand theological sense, but as it is conferred on the world by acts of consciousness.

The link between these two areas of investigation is provided by intentionality. Levinas describes how, for Husserl, intentionality is the characteristic activity of consciousness as it constitutes itself in relation to the world (see PH, 69). Consciousness is directed outside itself; and since the world as experienced is intended, in the phenomenological sense, its meaning and intelligibility are also assured. Husserl’s consciousness, characterized by its intentional acts, is not self-enclosed; on the contrary, at the very centre of consciousness is a primary openness to what lies outside it: ‘The interest of the Husserlian conception [of intentionality] consists in having put, at the very heart of the being of consciousness, contact with the world’ (PH, 73).

Levinas describes how Husserl surpasses naturalist epistemology by rethinking its fundamental distinction between subject and object. For Husserl, the relationship with the object takes place within the subject; the very distinction, then, presupposes and relies upon a transcendental subjectivity in which the ‘objective’ world is constituted as a meaningful object of experience. Intuition, in the special sense given to the word in Husserlian phenomenology, is in consequence not an unreliable, ‘unobjective’ form of knowledge, but rather what Levinas calls ‘the primitive phenomenon which makes possible the truth itself’ (PH, 19). Intuition is pre-objective because it is a mode of knowledge which does not presume the existence of the objective world required by scientific realism; it makes possible the direct knowledge by consciousness of its own intentional objects.

Two important strands emerge from Levinas’s discussions. Firstly, Husserlian phenomenology provides a method for investigating the experience of the world freed from the search for objective essences hidden beneath phenomenal existence. Secondly, in its reliance upon the capacity of consciousness to reflect freely upon itself, it also represents what Levinas calls ‘the authentic spiritual life’ (EDE, 45). The transcendental Ego possesses itself fully as it constitutes the world through its intentional acts. Particularly in his 1940 article, ‘L’Œuvre d’Edmond Husserl’, written whilst Sartre was formulating his own ideas on consciousness and liberty which would culminate in L’Être et le néant (1943), Levinas repeatedly insists that phenomenology is a philosophy of freedom:

The philosophy of Husserl is ultimately a philosophy of freedom, of a freedom which is realized as consciousness and is defined by it; of a freedom which does not only characterize the activity of a being, but which is posited before being and by relation to which being is constituted. […] Man, able to coincide absolutely with himself through phenomenological reduction, thereby regains his freedom. Phenomenology does not respond only to his need for knowledge which is absolutely founded: this is subordinate to the freedom which expresses the demand to be an I and, in relation to being, an origin. (EDE, 49)

At this stage in his thinking Levinas does not directly confront the issue that would preoccupy Sartre during the forties: the limitations imposed on the freedom of consciousness through its relationship with the world. Levinas pays little attention to the tensions, stresses and conflicts that might arise when consciousness encounters a world potentially hostile to its intentions. In his endeavour to promote a better understanding of Husserl, Levinas seems concerned to make him as coherent and topical as possible; and in the Introduction to Théorie de l’intuition he openly states that he will refrain from any full-scale philosophical critique (PH, 15–16). Even so, this does not mean that Levinas completely suppresses any reservations he might have. He suggests two principal avenues of criticism; one has immediate importance in the context of his study, and the other will acquire greater significance with time.

Firstly, he reproaches Husserl with his intellectualism. Consciousness, as Husserl describes it, is primarily reflexive and contemplative. Revealed through phenomenological reduction, it stands outside time and the experiences it observes; historicity and temporality appear as secondary properties rather than the very conditions of the transcendental Ego: ‘Philosophy seems, in this conception, as independent of the historical situation of man as theory which seeks to consider everything sub specie aeternitatis’ (PH, 220).

Secondly, Levinas briefly alludes to the problem of intersubjectivity and the existence of other minds posed by the theory of the transcendental Ego. Théorie de l’intuition was written without explicit reference to Cartesian Meditations and before Husserl’s important late work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936). So in his first book Levinas only touches on a difficulty that Husserl’s own later work would attempt to resolve: the epoché which reveals the transcendental Ego cannot on its own demonstrate the existence of other egos (see PH, 214–15). In his 1940 essay Levinas mentions but does not criticize Husserl’s later analysis of social relations and the presence of others (see EDE, 48).

The issues raised in thinking through the second of these areas will lead to the most characteristic aspects of Levinas’s later thinking. The criticism of Husserl’s intellectualism and the abstraction of the transcendental Ego from history derives from the fact that, even in his earliest written work, Levinas is reading Husserl through the powerful lens of Heidegger’s Being and Time. From the very beginning of Théorie de l’intuition Levinas acknowledges that his reading of Husserl is heavily influenced by Heidegger (see PH, 14). Husserl is portrayed as laying the foundations for the work of Heidegger; and what this means in practice is that Levinas will search for those traces in the writings of Husserl which anticipate the transformation of phenomenology by Heidegger, who is seen as continuing but also crucially modifying the phenomenological project (see PH, 15). Heidegger gives to phenomenology an onto-logical turn, as he accords it a privileged role in the endeavour to describe Being. According to the opening pages of Being and Time, the phenomenon as it is understood in phenomenology is the site where Being reveals itself (35). From this conception, the founding questions of Heideggerian phenomenology arise: what is the meaning of Being, what is the mode of its presentation, and how do finite, historical beings (ourselves) come to understand it?

These questions influence both the language and the general shape of Levinas’s reading of Husserl. As Heidegger’s precursor, Husserl is described as developing a new way of thinking about Being, conceived now as revealed to perception rather than residing in some atemporal domain distinct from the experience of phenomena: ‘Perception gives us being; it is through reflecting on the act of perception that we must seek the origin of the very notion of being’ (PH, 108). So, Heidegger stresses the ontological dimension of phenomenology already found in Husserl’s work, and he develops it for his own purposes. The ontology of Being and Time rests upon Heidegger’s careful distinction between what is (being, das Seiende, or l’étant in French) and the Being of what is (Being, das Sein, l’être). As Levinas frequently insists, Heidegger emphasizes the verbal form of the word Sein (to be): Being is not a static essence existing outside time, but an event or process. In a sense, Being does not exist; if it did it would simply be another being. Rather, Being is the mode of existence of beings; it is not fully identifiable with beings, but neither can it be abstracted from them.

Heidegger uses the term Dasein to name that being by and through which Being comes to be known. Dasein is a problematic term for Heidegger’s commentators and translators. Neither in French nor in English has any translation been found which could command broad support. Heidegger’s first French translator, Henri Corbin, initially translated it by existence, and later, controversially, by réalité-humaine (human reality);10 and Derrida, whilst criticizing Corbin’s translation, argues that, although Dasein is not man, neither is it anything other than man.11 The English translators of Being and Time prefer to leave the term in German.12 The form of the German word is certainly important to Heidegger himself. The Da (there) of Dasein (literally: being there) indicates Dasein’s situatedness in time and space; and this situatedness is the inescapable condition which makes it possible for the truth of Being to be revealed. Being cannot be known, indeed it does not exist, outside the moment and place from which Dasein understands it. So, the understanding of Being does not liberate Dasein from its historical existence; on the contrary, understanding belongs to historical existence, and Dasein can only understand Being as historical.

For Levinas, the importance of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology lies in the dislodging of the absolute primacy accorded by Husserl to consciousness. As we saw earlier, Levinas reproaches Husserl for his intellectualism and for his abstraction of consciousness from history. The transcendental Ego of Husserl gazes at the raw matter of life from a disinterested, uninvolved, ahistorical position; consciousness is sovereign, responsible only to itself, and free. Heidegger on the other hand provides Levinas with a way of understanding Being and beings as originally constituted by the fact that they are always already engaged in time and history, without recourse to the absolute self-liberation promised by phenomenological reduction:

For Heidegger my life is not simply a game which is played in the final analysis for the benefit of thought. The manner in which I am engaged in existence has an original meaning, irreducible to the meaning which a noema has for a noesis. The concept of consciousness cannot take account of this. For Heidegger existence certainly has a meaning; and in affirming the meaning of existence which for him does not have the opacity of a brute fact, Heidegger remains a phenomenologist; but this meaning no longer has the structure of a noema. The subject is neither free nor absolute, he is no longer entirely responsible for himself. He is dominated and overwhelmed by history, by his origins over which he has no power since he is thrown into the world and his thrown-ness [déréliction] marks all his projects and all his powers. (EDE, 48–9)

In this passage Levinas discards the Husserlian terms noesis and noema (which refer to the acts and objects of consciousness respectively) and replaces them with a Heideggerian vocabulary: history, world, thrown-ness (Levinas translates Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (thrown-ness) by déréliction), project. This change of vocabulary, with an ethical potential not realized by Heidegger but already glimpsed by Levinas, brings with it a reorientation of the phenomenological enterprise. Heidegger is still a phenomenologist because he continues to believe meaning derives from human existence and is available to human enquiry; the world is the object of, in Husserl’s term, an intentional Sinngebung (literally: giving of sense) which guarantees that what we experience has meaning for us because we can only experience the world as meaningful. But Heidegger has knocked consciousness off its pedestal and made the Da of Dasein the very foundation and condition of its truth.

Heidegger, then, renews the question of Being and replaces consciousness, which is free and transcendental, with Dasein, which is ‘dominated and overwhelmed by history’ (EDE, 49); its Being must be understood as inseparable from temporality and historicity. What Levinas finds in Heidegger is a philosophy totally immersed (despite its off-putting language) in the world, in experience, facticity (the rootedness of the human subject in contingent, physical reality) and desire. At the same time Heidegger makes it possible to pose the fundamental question of Being: phenomenology and ontology are not opposed because Being is characterized as the mode of existence of beings; Being is that which beings understand (pre-philosophically) and seek to know (philosophically). Heidegger combines the concerns of ontology with the description of experience in a bold and exhilarating synthesis.

In Levinas’s early texts on Husserl and the article ‘Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie’ (first published in 1932, and in a shorter version in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, first edition 1949) Heidegger’s work appears as a new departure for phenomenology. In later essays, such as ‘L’Ontologie dans le temporel’ (1948) and ‘De la description à l’existence’ (1949) (both in En découvrant l’existence), Levinas continues to pursue his self-assigned role as mediator of German thought in France, but he also begins to express more openly his dissatisfaction with his philosophical masters. Heidegger’s work is described as a tragic testimony to an age and to a world that may need to be surpassed (see EDE, 89). And at the end of ‘De la description à l’existence’ Levinas poses a simple but resonant question. He suggests that Heidegger’s ontology is in some respects strictly classical in its account of the relationship between Being and beings, and asks, ‘But is the relation of man to Being uniquely ontology?’ (EDE, 106). Does ontology exhaust the possibilities of relationship with Being, or is there something which exceeds ontology? Does the search for the meaning of Being miss something which may be even more fundamental? Levinas does not answer his own question. Even so, it is suggested that ontology, which Heidegger established as the proper domain of phenomenology, will in turn have to be displaced; and although Levinas does not yet say so, he will discover in the ethical encounter of self and Other a relationship that cannot be explained by the ontic–ontological difference between beings and Being.

Beyond phenomenology

In the Introduction to Existence and Existents (De l’existence à l’existant), partly written whilst he was a prisoner of war and first published in 1947, Levinas acknowledges his debt to Heidegger but also asserts the need to escape the influence of the German philosopher:

If at the beginning our reflections are in large measure inspired by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, where we find the concept of ontology and of the relationship which man sustains with Being, they are also governed by a profound need to leave the climate of that philosophy [le climat de cette philosophie], and by the conviction that we cannot leave it for a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian. (EE, 19/19)

The phrase ‘the climate of this philosophy’ suggests that Levinas is not just talking about specific, detailed disagreements. The events of 1933 to 1945 were decisive for his disaffection with phenomenology. It would be wrong to attribute this solely to his disgust at Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis; at the same time his disappointment over his former teacher’s actions and subsequent silence about the Holocaust certainly do play a role in the evolution of his views. In intellectual terms, Levinas’s desire to escape the climate of Heidegger’s thought entails the rejection of a philosophical style and the world view inherent in it.

In the earliest works in which he expresses his own views rather than expounding those of others – the article ‘De l’évasion’ (1935), Existence and Existents (1947) and Time and the Other (1947) – Levinas adopts an approach which shows clear signs of the influence of Heidegger. His accounts of need, shame and nausea in ‘De l’évasion’, or laziness, fatigue and effort in Existence and Existents, are clearly in the lineage established by Heidegger’s descriptions of anxiety, fear, dereliction or care in Being and Time. However, important differences of emphasis can be seen. From the beginning of the early article ‘De l’évasion’, Levinas clearly alludes to the concerns of Being and Time when he describes his aim of renewing ‘the ancient problem of Being as Being’ (DE, 74). However, as Jacques Rolland has observed, the article is characterized by a latent conflict with Heidegger, even if the German philosopher’s name is not quoted in the text itself.13