Husserl and Levinas

Resumen El presente artículo ofrece una interpretación teleológica de la vida consciente y se basa, sobre todo, en la postura fenomenológica de Emmanuel Levinas. Sin embargo, es preciso tener en mente que la fenomenología husserliana está siempre presente como sustrato de ésta. Por ello, a partir de una lectura en que ambas perspectivas se complementan, trazaré un esquema en el que la totalidad de la conciencia se realiza como teleológica y explicaré el papel preponderante que cumple la síntesis en los (...) procesos de constitución para desarrollar los elementos de la ética levinasiana que culminan en una lectura teleológica de la vida consciente. Así, la infinitud con la que Levinas describe el encuentro ético deja de ser sólo una instancia de corte ético-ontológico para describir un momento teleológico.The present paper proposes a teleological interpretation of conscious life based on the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas. However, since Husserlian phenomenology serves always as a background for Levinas’s position, I offer a reading in which both views complement each other. First I lay out a scheme in which the totality of consciousness is realized as teleological and then I explain the predominant role played by synthesis in the constitution processes in order to develop the elements of a levinasian ethics culminating in a teleological reading of conscious life. Thus, the infinity with which Levinas describes the ethical encounter ceases to be only an instance of an ethical-ontological dimension to describe a teleological moment as well. (shrink)

This paper examines how Sartre’s early phenomenological works were influenced by Emmanuel Levinas’s The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Sartre embraced two key aspects of Levinas’s interpretation of Husserl: 1) that phenomenology is an ontological philosophy whose foundation is the doctrine of intentionality; and, 2) that consciousness’s being consists in intentionality, which entails that consciousness is non-substantial as well as pre-reflectively or non-thetically aware of itself. In addition to adopting these views, Sartre also became gripped by a methodological problem (...) raised by Levinas. Namely, phenomenology reflects on consciousness, yet reflection modifies the consciousness it reflects on. I argue that Sartre responds to this problem by developing two of Levinas’s ideas: that reflection is a motivated act and that reflection must adequately grasp consciousness’s temporality. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is known for his idea of ethics as first philosophy. In Totality and Infinity, he expresses this concept with the phrase “truth presupposes justice”. Levinas’ ethical thought has been much discussed in previous literature. However, its implications for contemporary theories of truth have not been discussed at length. This paper aims to investigate how far Levinas’ reinterpretation of truth ranges from a phenomenological point of view. In the first section, by reading closely the first section of Totality and (...) Infinity I disclose some peculiarities of Levinas’ concept of truth: the “I” as a knowing subject is separated from the world. truth is accomplished by discourse towards the other person. to attain to the truth, the “I” needs to justify not only the fact that he or she describes but also himself or herself. By putting these three points in relation to Husserl’s analysis of communication and that of B. Williams in his Truth and Truthfulness, the second section shows that Levinas’ concept of truth, which may seem bizarre to some, can contribute to contemporary theories of truth insofar as it reinterprets the concept of truth from the perspective of a “personal” relation to the other person to whom the “I” speaks. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the argument between Husserl and Levinas on the issue of intentionality: for Husserl, the “noesis and noema” correlation is the basic structure of intentionality, every intentional act has “I-pole” and “object-pole.” However, for Levinas, there is kind of intentionality without object, that is the sensibility of intentionality, and this kind of intentionality keeps the otherness of the other. Levinas modifies Husserlian intentionality and applies a wider meaning to it: for Husserl it’s kind of conscious intentionality, (...) but in Levinas, it represents a kind of bodily intentionality. With the challenge to Husserl’s priority of the presentation of intentionality in consciousness Levinas goes further into the ethical revelation on the face of the other. In Levinas’s view, the face of the other belongs to the exteriority which is totally outside of my consciousness, and the welcoming of the face and the work of justice condition the birth of truth itself. (shrink)

This work is driven by the attempt to criticise Phenomenology with the help of Levinas. Similar to the Frankfurt School, he characterises it as a “vision of essences”. These eidetical essences are, and can never be fully absolute, not only because several movements of Hegelian Dialectics are refuted in submitting knowledge either to the imago of mere immanence, or to normative structures which are postulated as invariant like in certain versions of Neoplatonism, but because they function as an apriori of (...) an eternally unfinished and fragmented Lebenswelt. Maybe it is to harsh to compare Husserl to the neoscholastic readings of Descartes and to the formalist interpretations of Kant. Husserl is well aware of the kinaesthetic foundations of consciousness and, contrary to Heidegger, he even promotes Spinozism in a certain phase of his work which excels his adolescent fervour of Berkeley. Nevertheless, Husserl incorporates a subject-based, “monadic” transcendentalism, that paradoxically leads to the dissolution of subjective identity. Traditional reasoning itself is exfoliated to perfection in Heidegger afterwards. Husserl's halfhearted formalism ignores the materialist theory of the simulacrum by Lucretius. Heideggers philosophy widens this overseen aspect in calling the Eidos an Aussehen in referring to the Presocratics, but it despises any kind of method and finally flees in to poetry, maintaining its fatalist errors which it committed right form the start: this is why it gained the name of pseudo-concreteness. Cursed through a specific anti-sociological tendency caused by an anti-empiricist vision of history, their theories virtually (not conceptually) exclude the influences of society on philosophy: they are the end result of the era of Kulturkampf, in which idealism tried to battle positivism, naturalism and historicism. Husserl even defines this philosophical battle as the very struggle of existence. The formulation of the Eidos becomes performance. Aristotle used Eidos synonymous to genus and species. Hence the amplitudes of these philosophies foster the metaphysical standpoint of race, that got out of hand in the Nazi Era and even later on. The “topic” of blood and soil appears in Husserl's definition of Heimwelt and his Eurocentrism. Phenomenology is in no case to blame for National Socialism, and it has very little to to with its causes. My work simply tries to make the same analogy that Marx had made for Hegel. It tries to describe, how two leading philosophers of the German Bourgeoisie are reproducing the categories of their surrounding society without even really observing it. (shrink)

This paper explores, from a phenomenological perspective, the conditions necessary for the possession of intentional content, i.e., for being intentionally directed toward the world. It argues that Levinas's concept of ethics as first philosophy makes an important contribution to this task. Intentional directedness, as understood here, is normatively structured. Levinas's ‘ethics’ can be understood as a phenomenological account of how our experience of the other subject as another subject takes place in the recognition of the normative force of a command. (...) This supplies a condition that—as the paper shows by examining Husserl and Sartre on how our experience of the Other constitutes an ‘objective’ world—earlier phenomenologists have misunderstood, because they have treated ethical experience as ‘founded’ on a prior theory of representation (‘ontology’ in Levinas's language). Ethics is first philosophy because it is only by acknowledging the command in the ‘face’ of the Other that we can account for the sensitivity to the normative distinctions that structure intentional content. Throughout, the paper shows how Levinas's analyses, in Totality and Infinity, draw upon and develop the analyses of Husserl and Sartre. (shrink)

Central to Levinas’ “phenomenological” approach to ethics is his identification of an “infinite signification” in the human face. This insistence on the appearance of an infinitely signifying phenomenon has led many, notably Dominique Janicaud, to decry Levinas’ work as anti-phenomenological: little more than a novel approach to metaphysics. A significant element of the phenomenological revolution, Janicaud insists, referencing Husserl and the early Heidegger for support, is grounded in the recognition that phenomena arise in and are circumscribed by finitude. Any reference (...) to an infinite phenomenon which breaks with apperception, he therefore concludes, necessarily breaks as well with the phenomenological tradition, signaling a reversion to idealism, metaphysics, and ultimately theology. As this paper will argue however, a close reading of Husserl reveals not only the recognition of infinite phenomena; but, more significantly, the possibility that all phenomena are potentially infinite. This means that in many ways Levinas is not only more faithful to Husserl’s project than is often admitted; but moreover, that Levinas’ work serves as a lens through which a hitherto under-emphasized element of Husserl’s work can be examined – an element which challenges the traditional critique of Levinas. What’s more, the possibility of infinite phenomena opened up in Husserl’s work, when read through Levinas’ analysis of the ethical significance of the infinite, creates the possibility of recognizing the potential ethical value of all objects, and not merely one object in particular: the human face. This possibility, as I will show, contributes to further blurring the already ambiguous distinction within Levinas between “good” and “bad” infinities – a blurring which, as I will argue, serves as a powerful heuristic in interpreting certain human pathologies, from obsessive compulsive disorder and certain forms of schizophrenia, to the temptation of evil. In this way, an analysis of the status of the infinite in Husserl and Levinas provides a purely phenomenological ground for exploring issues traditionally seen as the exclusive domain of metaphysics and theology. (shrink)

Taking as its jumping off point recent attempts in the sciences of the mind to facilitate direct brain-to-brain communication, this article considers the challenges such a development poses to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. This is examined initially through recourse to Husserl's description of the encounter with the other in the Cartesian Meditations, Levinas’ rival account in Totality and Infinity, and Derrida's contribution to this dialogue in the essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. All three turn around the problem of how the externality (...) and otherness that constitutes the other qua other can be presented to the I while being maintained in its very externality and otherness. The paper asks whether the prospect of fully realised telepathic communication would overcome intersubjective distance by offering a direct insight into the other's phenomenological interior, and how such a relation is to be conceived using the terms outlined in the above trio of texts. Finally, through appealing to Derrida's enigmatic essay ‘Telepathy’ and offering a close reading of his late concept of teleiopoesis we will overturn the phenomenological terms in which the discussion has so far been framed while arriving at a form of telepathy that is not reducible to the simple communication of a message between an active sender and a passive recipient, but which simultaneously maintains the distance between the actors involved. Teleiopoesis undermines the stable identity of the terms I and other and consequently the very concept of intersubjectivity is put into question. (shrink)

In his first reading of Husserlian phenomenology, Levinas offered a very interesting criticism of the very notion of intuition, understood as an impossible pretension to grasp in its supposed immediacy the self-giving of the Origin. In his mature work, the role of the Husserlian intuition is played by desire: but the latter is conceived in its strong irreducibility to nostalgia. Human desire is always desire of the same for the other. This paper tries to understand the delayed temporalityof desire as (...) rooted in the radical past of separation. (shrink)

Es sabido que Levinas pasa por ser uno de los primeros y mejores intérpretes de la obra de Husserl y tampoco nadie duda ya, a estas alturas de la investigación, de la decisiva mediación histórica que significó para la naciente fenomenología francesa la labor pionera de nuestro joven autor. Filósofos como Sartre, Ricoeur o Henry no se podrían entender completamente sin el concurso de la obra más temprana de Levinas. La tesis principal que ha vertebrado mi exposición defiende que una (...) parte considerable de la carrera intelectual de nuestro autor -la desarrollada concretamente en los años anteriores a la Shoah- debe ser comprendida como una meditación de la filosofía de Husserl y lo que es aún más importante, que el original tratamiento que nuestro autor irá otorgando con posterioridad a la misma no supone, de hecho, sino su prolongación más allá, incluso, de los límites precisos que el propio fundador de la fenomenología llegara tal vez a prever para ella. La hipótesis de la que he partido es que nos hallamos ante una influencia que supera la mera referencia instrumental a Husserl para convertirse en una de las claves más determinantes y permanentes en la filosofía de Levinas. La contribución principal de mi tesis consiste en haber mostrado ese carácter peculiar y dinámico con el que Levinas fue asimilando la doctrina fenomenológica al tiempo que comenzaban ya a barruntarse en él muchas de las preocupaciones más acuciantes de su posterior filosofía. -/- . (shrink)

Although Levinas does not specifically articulate an environmental ethic, he certainly has a concept of nature working within his philosophy, a portrait of which can be drawn from the various texts that describe in detail what he believes to be the human, primordial relationship to the elemental. The following essay is an attempt to articulate how Levinas comes to define that relationship, and to imagine what kind of environmental ethic is implied by it. We will see that an important, dichotomous (...) distinction is made between two types of infinity, the “bad infinity” of the sacred and the “good infinity” of the holy. This distinction corresponds to the separated subject’srelationship to the natural world and to the human world. For Levinas, this distinction addresses not only the rationalist vs. empiricist question concerning the relationship between consciousness and the body, a guiding question for modern philosophy from Descartesthrough Husserl, but also the question concerning technology, especially as it is posed by Heidegger and other twentieth century continental philosophers. These two related questions can help guide us to an understanding of how Levinas imagines environmentalimperatives toward both the body’s exclusive relationship to nature, and to the interpersonal relationships between the self and other human beings. We will begin this analysis with Husserl’s answer to the question of consciousness. (shrink)

This book contains the translation of a collection of Emmanuel Levinas’s essays on Husserl. The essays reflect Levinas’s reading of Husserl from 1929 until 1977. The book is divided into three parts reflecting on Levinas’s changing interpretation of Husserl during this time period. Part 1 is called “Husserl’s Phenomenology” and contains essays written from 1929 to 1940. Part 2, “Levinas’s Husserl,” spans the period of 1959–65. Part 3, “Beyond Husserl,” only holds two essays. One is dated 1974, the other 1977. (...) They display Levinas’s own phenomenology. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers are increasingly turning to the work of Emmanuel Levinas to bring a consideration of ethics into their own thinking. As an exponent of the phenomenological tradition, Levinas ranks with Heidegger and Sartre; as a disciple of Husserl, he was one of the most independent and original interpreters, testifying to the fruitfulness of Husserl's phenomenology. In collecting almost all of Levinas's articles on Husserlian phenomenology, this volume gathers together a wealth of thoughtful exposition and interpretation by one of the (...) most important European philosophers of the twentieth century. Levinas's thought is relevant to a broad variety of disciplines and concerns. This volume serves as a reliable introduction for the beginning student, as well as satisfying the expert's more demanding and critical desire for insight into the complexities of Levinas's thought. (shrink)

In a work of foundational thinking of the first rank and perhaps his most important book to date, French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas attempts to establish the primordiality of ethics by exhibiting the structures of the ethical subject and distinguishing these from theoretical reason, even from a conatus towards the Good. In his earlier Totality and Infinity Levinas interprets this difference morphologically within the context of a Husserlian Lebensweltphilosophie as sensuous immediacy, habitation, fecundity and, beyond ontology, the commanding relation with the (...) Other. In the present work the focus shifts to discourse itself. This turn is a response to the problematic set forth in the later Heidegger as the ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings and the coming-to-pass of this difference in the Logos, as well as to French Structuralist and post-Structuralist thought which interprets language as a system of signs and meaning as arising within a field of intralinguistic difference. For both, the epistemological subject as it has been traditionally understood dissolves. But, Levinas argues, ethical subjectivity, a nul-site beyond ontology, more primordial than the ontological difference which exists as receptivity to and responsibility for the Other, remains. This work is a sustained meditation on the Good and the structure of responsibility which precedes Being and consciousness. (shrink)