Husserl and Levinas: The Ethical Structure of a Philosophical Debt

Abstract

The article examines Levinas’s evolving relationship with Husserl. It shows how the critical dialogue with Husserl and, specifically, the transfiguration of Husserl’s key notion of “intentionality,” grounds the maturation of Levinas’s ethical thinking. It does so by unpacking the manner in which the Levinasian critique of Husserl is tied to a concept of “debt” through which Levinas understands his long-lasting relationship with the founder of phenomenology.

Notes

1. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Ruin of Representation,” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 111.

2. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 28.

3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 190.

4. Emmanuel Levinas, “Non-Intentional Consciousness,” in Entre Nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 123.

5. Levinas, “The Ruin of Representation,” 112.

6. Emmanuel Levinas, “On Ideas,” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, 13.

7. Levinas, “On Ideas,” 13.

8. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1991), 29.

9. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43–44.

10. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 27, 66, 29.

11. Edmund Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes, trans. G. Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Armand Colin, 1931).

12. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 89.

13. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 89.

14. Emmanuel Levinas, “From Consciousness to Wakefulness,” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, 164.

15. Levinas, “From Consciousness to Wakefulness,” 90.

16. Levinas, “Philosophy and Awakening,” in Entre Nous, 86.

17. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 123.

18. Levinas, “Philosophy and Awakening,” 85–86.

19. In this context, it is interesting to notice that, while Levinas is preoccupied with the ethical implications of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity, he does not show any particular interest in Husserl’s ethical writings, with which he is likely to have been familiar. On Husserl’s ethics, see Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, in HUA, vol. 28, ed. Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988); Ullrich Melle, “From Reason to Love,” in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy: A Handbook, ed. J. Drummond and L. Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002); Joacim Siles i Borras, The Ethics of Husserl’s Phenomenology (London: Continuum, 2010); see Sophie Loidolt, “A Phenomenological Ethics of the Absolute Ought: Investigating Husserl’s Unpublished Ethical Writings” in Ethics and Phenomenology, ed. Mark Sanders and J. Jeremy Wisnewski (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

20. Levinas,“Philosophy and Awakening,” 87.

21. Levinas, “Philosophy and Awakening,” 87–88

22. Levinas, “Philosophy and Awakening,” 87–88

23. Levinas,“Philosophy and Awakening,” 87–88

24. Levinas, “The Ruin of Representation,” 148–49.

25. Levinas, “The Ruin of Representation,” 148–49.

26. Since Husserl could not offer a rejoinder on this point, it remains open whether Levinas’s interpretation of Husserl’s understanding of the “experience of the stranger” succeeds in doing justice to his position. Furthermore, Levinas also tends to disregard a question that Husserl would certainly pose to him, as Derrida later did, concerning the very possibility of making room, in philosophical terms, for radical transcendence. Is not the Levinasian manner of introducing radical transcendence into philosophical discourse a contradiction in terms? Is not the very attempt to conceptualize transcendence already a betrayal of the uncontainable essence of the transcendent?

27. On Husserl’s discussion of the “inverse movement” that ultimately leads to the “explosion” of the noematic structure, see Hagi Kenaan, “Subject to Error: Rethinking Husserl’s Phenomenology of Misperception,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 7 (1999): 55–67.

28. Levinas, “Non-Intentional Consciousness,” 123.

29. On Levinas’s conception of the Said and the Saying, see Hagi Kenaan, “The Plot of the Saying,” in Etudes Phenomenologiques: Levinas et la phénoménolgie 22.43–44 (Brussels: Ousia, 2006), and The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), pt. 2 “Talk.”