Abstract

This dissertation examines the contributions of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas to an understanding of the fundamental meaning and possibility of ethical phenomena. I begin with the problem of ethics as it is articulated by Heidegger in his criticisms of Western metaphysical thinking. Heidegger claims that we need to rethink the meaning of ethics without reliance on traditional metaphysical categories, but this task remains secondary to his own concern over fundamental ontology. ;Since Heidegger does not concretely explore the meaning of ethics, I consider subsequent efforts to produce Heideggerian ethics. Focusing in particular on the work of Werner Marx, I question the adequacy of a Heideggerian analysis of human relations and the adequacy of any ethics that depends on an individualizing modification of the anonymous bonds of community. ;In an effort to provide a more adequate description of human relations and the meaning of ethical responsibility, I turn to the work of Emmanuel Levinas. I explore Levinas's radical and polemical response to Heidegger, his effort to rethink what it means to be for the human being including his distinctive descriptions of the face to face relation, his attempt to point to the elemental conditions that constitute human subjectivity, and his exploration of the possibility of ethics understood as infinite responsibility of one for another. ;Through a selective reading of Levinas's texts and consideration of various critics of Levinas, this dissertation concludes that Levinas does not merely call into question some failure in Heidegger's existential phenomenology or add an analysis of the ethical relation of responsibility to Heidegger's Dasein analytic. Levinas's entire philosophical project challenges the primacy of ontology in an effort to point to the priority of ethics for human existence and thought. His work provides substantive criticisms of Heidegger, demands a radical rethinking about the meaning of ethics, politics, justice, goodness, and truth, and calls for a philosophy that is driven by the exigencies of ethical responsibility