Otherwise than Nothing: Heidegger, Levinas, and the Phenomenology of Evil

Central to Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of Martin Heidegger is his assessment that Heidegger’s phenomenology delimits the possibility of dealing with ethical questions in any sincere way. According to Levinas, Heidegger ontologizes these questions, reducing them to mere means to a deeper understanding of Being. Levinas, by contrast, attempts to forge a phenomenology which can providea metaphysical account of ethics which goes beyond being. In this paper we will explore the nature and validity of Levinas’s critiqueof Heidegger by comparing his approach to the question of evil to Heidegger’s as presented in his 1936 lecture course on Schelling’sFreiheitschrif.