<CN>2</CN>

<CT>Emmanuel Levinas</CT>

<CST>Ethics as first philosophy</CST>

If Husserl and Heidegger bequeathed us a phenomenology as rigorous science befitting first

philosophy, it is Emmanuel Levinas who first and most drastically reconfigured the very terms

by which that legacy is today assessed. Levinas, who was born in 1906 in Lithuania, visited

Freiburg as a youth in 1928 to study under Husserl. It was there that he met Heidegger, whose

own thought was to exert a lasting impression on his own. The time was a spirited, sometimes

even stormy, one for phenomenology. Just the year before Levinas’s Freiburg arrival, Heidegger

had published Being and Time, a work that daringly read the history of philosophy from Plato to

Kant as mischaracterizing our human existence by neglecting the question of that existence’s

relation to the larger question of the meaning of Being. In doing so, Heidegger’s

phenomenological ontology reawakened the venerable, but long dormant, problem of Being. And

Heidegger’s phenomenological peers were in no way exempt from the charge of having

neglected the question of Being as a problem. Husserl’s own phenomenology, no less than

Descartes’s philosophy which had inspired it, was a central (if only implicit) target of

Heidegger’s destruction of the history of philosophy.

It was therefore in this productive, albeit contentious, context that Husserl in 1929

delivered his Cartesian Meditations. In addition to constituting a systematic introduction of his

thought to France, it served as an oblique response to Heidegger’s criticism. Transcendental

phenomenology was certainly Cartesian, Husserl conceded readily, but not at all problematically

so, as Heidegger was alleging. Levinas, who himself was in attendance, later translated the

Fourth and Fifth Meditations into French and published them in 1931. As a result of his labors,

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phenomenology took hold in France, rising to prominence in the pre-war years through the

works of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It was Levinas’s own phenomenological work, however,

particularly his tireless meditation on the themes of “the face of the Other” and “the trace of

God,” which most productively and originally engaged phenomenology and the wider

philosophical tradition within which it was inscribed.

For Levinas, the question of what, or who, I am is indivisible from the question of my

ethical relation to others. Accounting for the human being’s distinctive status therefore requires

an investigation into the basis of our relationship with others. It is in this responsibility to and for

others, he will argue, that our human uniqueness consists. Accordingly, phenomenology

undergoes more than a deepening, but a reformation. For Husserl, phenomenology lingers on the

“problem of intentionality,” or, more precisely, the question of how transcendental consciousness

makes possible the everyday experience of the world we take for granted. As for Heidegger, the

mystery of intentionality remains pressing but for a different reason: the task becomes one of

reconducting that inquiry back to the question of Being. Levinas rejects both these conceptions

of phenomenology. Phenomenology is not to be an investigation of consciousness or of Being, as

his predecessors had insisted, but to be an account of our ethical responsibility to others. It is

therefore no overstatement to say that his phenomenology, today known for the credo “ethics is

first philosophy,” has laid the primary foundation upon which much of the subsequent work in

contemporary French phenomenology has built.1

As Jean-Luc Marion has recently done well to note, we are all today Levinasians whether

we realize it or not.2 Nearly everyone will have at least encountered “the face” as a philosophical

expression, even if the fact that it is Levinas who coined it, much less what it signifies, remains

obscure or unknown to them. Likewise, almost no one is entirely ignorant of the related notion

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that the experience of encountering another person (hereafter “the other”) is an event of central

philosophical importance. Though mention of “alterity,” “transcendence,” and “ethics” has

become so widespread in continental philosophy today that such themes are almost clichés, they

nevertheless frequently are misunderstood. The idea that intersubjectivity is the royal road to a

philosophical appraisal of humanity and that the phenomenological tradition is particularly suited

to provide such an account, now taken as common sense, was not at all a commonplace when

Levinas began working out the details. To better appreciate the originality of Levinas’s rich

contribution to phenomenology and the critique of the history of philosophy it represents (a

tradition which he calls “ontology”), it will therefore do to begin by examining an insight as

pertinent as ever, even if, because it has been repeated so often, we sometimes no longer

appreciate its revolutionary stakes.

Levinas formulates the essential claim in a variety of ways, but always in reference to a

concern with “the face of the Other”: appearing from beyond the field of my consciousness, the

face issues an appeal that, in claiming me, calls me to responsibility. Such an experience,

regardless of however we ultimately characterize its contours, puts my freedom into question by

rendering me responsible to and for others. As Levinas summarizes: “A calling into question of

the same—which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same—is brought about by

the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other

ethics.”3 This account of the origin of moral responsibility opposed to the duty exposited by the

philosophers.

In a long tradition typified by thinkers like Kant or Sartre, humanity’s uniqueness was

seen as consisting in our freedom. Though the details of these various views lie beyond the scope

of our current purposes, it will do simply to note that, in essence, for such views autonomy is

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seen as the hallmark of being human. Levinas himself has no interest in denying that we are in

some sense free, nor does he deny that we are rational. What he denies is that the capacity to

rationally self-legislate our action defines what makes us human. For Levinas, the human

condition is not foremost determined by the power and value of freedom; there is more to us, and

that excess is disclosed in the encounter with the face. When the face of the other appears,

commanding us “thou shall not commit murder,” it undercuts my habitual self-regard. By putting

my freedom into question and thereby defying the powers lying within the domain of my own

consciousness, it puts into question what Levinas calls the “enjoyment” of the “same.”

In the natural attitude (Husserl) or average everydayness (Heidegger), things disclose

themselves as “ready-to-hand” within a world reflecting our “circumspective” projects.

Everything is arrayed in accordance with my desires, and the inclination to gratify them. The

“same,” thus, signifies the egoistic mode of experience in which things are coordinated strictly in

terms of my own wants. Such an existence is like an amusement park, since there is nothing

contravening my lusty freedom. According to Levinas, this is a mode of voluptuous existence in

which I answer to no one. Reality, when experienced in this way, as if existents were a function

of my own needs, excludes an ethical relation to another. Justice is denied. What we find instead

is something not unlike what Hobbes thought was true of human nature and hence “civil”

society: a conglomeration of selfish beings pursuing mutually irreconcilable self-seeking

interests. Anyone who visits the modern shopping mall on Black Friday will see why some have

thought that Hobbes was correct.

The appearing of the other interrupts this system of egoistic enjoyment. Questions

regarding what Levinas means, however, immediately arise: are we being invited to reflect upon

a feature of our everyday experience, or is Levinas signaling something else, asking us to

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recognize a transcendental enabling structure that makes all experience, including the empirical

event of seeing another’s visible human face, possible? Is the face an actual visible face of

another person present to me in the flesh, or does it mark instead a transcendental condition of

possibility for experience?4 In working toward an understanding of “ethics as first philosophy,” it

will do to examine Husserl and Heidegger, since their own phenomenological accounts of

intersubjectivity will represent seminal foils to Levinas’s own.

Levinas, it must be noted, does not dispute that subjectivity involves an I who constitutes

intentional objects (Husserl), nor does he dispute that it involves being-in-the-world (Heidegger).

Each account, however, he claims, omits the heart of the human experience. They distort our

relation toward others. My being who I am entails my always already standing open to the claim

of others, but because we generally ignore it, this is precisely why, according to Levinas, it will

be necessary to highlight the “traumatic” disruption characterizing the face’s appearance.

Without such an encounter we would persist in a narcissistic slumber—a state of inhabiting our

surroundings he terms “separation.” As he explains, “In separation—which is produced in the

psychism of enjoyment, in egoism, in happiness, where the I identifies itself—the I is ignorant of

the Other.”5 Levinas will be careful to qualify the point, noting that though the history of

philosophy generally sees autonomy as the highest human value, it has not always deliberately

recommended selfishness. Some of freedom’s greatest champions took themselves to be

establishing the essential respect in which freedom and morality are indivisible. Kant, for

example, saw morality as a duty originating in our autonomy: moral obligation, he thought,

including our duties we owe to others, consists in the individual’s rational capacity for self-

legislation. For Kant, insofar as acting on moral duty is a matter of freely acting on what the

moral law demands, “freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each another.”6

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By contrast, according to Levinas, moral duty is instead founded on a heteronomy which, far

from issuing straightforwardly from our freedom, instead puts that autonomy into question.

Whereas for Kant a moral action is praiseworthy or blameworthy strictly depending on whether

one has acted out of an appropriate respect for the moral law’s authority, Levinas diverges. If for

Kant any motivation besides the respect for the moral law is at best irrelevant to the

determination of whether I have done my duty, for Levinas, a consideration of the troubles of the

other is central to the status of the action as moral. Morality, thus, is not first a matter of the

Right, but of the Good. Says Levinas,

<EXT>The presence of the Other, a privileged heteronomy, does not clash with freedom

but invests it. The shame for oneself, the presence and desire for the other are not the

negation of knowing: knowing is their very articulation. The essence of reason consists

not in securing for man a foundation and powers, but in calling him in question and in

inviting him to justice.7</EXT>

A moral action that does not orient itself by a felt need to alleviate the other’s suffering (an

action bereft of any genuine empathy or compassion) is in a crucial respect inhuman, and thus

unethical. Even when I fulfil duty by enacting a moral maxim out of a reverence for the law, it

does not necessarily follow that I have sufficiently seen to someone’s troubles. As Levinas

reminds us, obeying the moral law does not exclude the possibility that I have failed to consider

the situation from an empathetic perspective. To perform a moral duty autonomously is, for

Levinas, compatible with the act’s exhibiting the egoism of the “same.”

On the Levinasian picture, I do not accede to an ethical duty merely by deploying my

own rational capacity for freedom; instead, I am summoned to responsibility by a claim that

issues from a call originating in the face of the other. This call to responsibility, arriving from

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outside and above me, transposes me from a solipsistic environment articulated by egocentric

concerns into a communal world shared with others. And yet, we may wonder: is this original, or

is it not something already discovered, if not by Husserl, then certainly Heidegger? It is true that

both Husserl and Heidegger emphasized responsibility’s importance. Husserl had seen the norm

of absolute self-responsibility as what sustains our culture’s rational telos, while Heidegger

viewed it as the capacity crucial to our facing up to the ontological significance of what it means

to be someone who opens (and in turn sustains) worldly intelligibility. Levinas was familiar with

both these accounts of responsibility, and he will have something different in mind by the term.

Central to that reformulated account is the appearance of the face. Levinas’s initial and perhaps

seminal analysis of the issue in Totality and Infinity will serve as our guide.

“The eye,” Levinas writes there, “does not shine; it speaks.”8 But what precisely does the

other’s gaze say?9 Or better, how can the eye be said to speak at all? Does it possess a voice?

And if so, how is that of some concern to the notion of phenomenology as ethics? The outline of

an answer is contained in a claim from that same text which has become as celebrated as it

remains cryptic, one to which we therefore shall give due attention, by placing it in its

phenomenological context: the face rises up into appearance in the figure of an arresting appeal.

It appears as a kind of confrontation, not because it is hostile or adversarial, but because it

exposes, and as a result momentarily disables, the egocentric natural attitude of the one who

undergoes it. It is thus a confrontation insofar as it confronts me with the realization that, prior to

being put into question by the other’s appeal, I typically do not pay any serious attention to

things around me save for how they matter to me. In issuing this appeal that calls me to

responsibility, the face consequently renders me subject to the other’s need. And thus, regardless

of how I choose to respond to the appeal, it discloses the self-absorptive tonality of my everyday

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attitude. It leaves its mark, exposing our self-regard. In an illuminating passage from Totality

and Infinity, Levinas explains how the face confronts us with an irreducible transcendence that

prevents us from reducing the other to “totality,” thereby laying the basis for an ethics that

avoids ontology’s reduction of everything to the “same”:

<EXT>The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in

me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze,

in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at

each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to

my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum—the adequate idea […]. It expresses

itself. The face brings a notion of truth which, in contradistinction to contemporary

ontology, is not the disclosure of an impersonal Neuter, but expression; the existent

breaks through all the envelopings and generalities of Being to spread out in its “form”

the totality of its “content,” finally abolishing the distinction between form and

content.10</EXT>

The face’s appearing overpowers the categories of our customary concepts and everyday habits,

halting our tendency to experience things egocentrically. It neutralizes our initiative over the

situation, rendering us subjects who must respond to it, rather than conduct it. Heidegger’s

“existential analytic” had of course outlined the textures of that egocentric dimension in Being

and Time. As its analysis of average everydayness has shown, we understand ourselves in terms

of the world. In the world, we mind tasks and obligations in view of the projects underpinning

them. In turn, this “everyday coping” supplies us an understanding of what it is to be who we

are. For instance, assembling a desk in my new apartment is a task I do “for-the-sake-of” being a

good husband. Not only the task itself, but also the tools necessary for finishing it (screws, nails,

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wood, hammer, etc.) orients my action and hence I myself; it supplies me an understanding of

what it means to be the one I am, namely, a husband. The concern I invest in living up to these

customary routines of everyday married life, however, is precisely what is put into question

when the other calls me to responsibility. For, in interrupting the tendency to experience my

surroundings as simply mine, and hence in disorienting my ability to treat the situation in terms

of the self-regarding interpretation that my project gives it, it destabilizes the quotidian

environment that previously appeared inflected only by my own interests. In short, the face of

the other obliges me to consider somebody’s needs besides my own. The appearing of the face

demands that I heed the troubles of the other. And not only that. In this encounter, I might finally

see things from someone’s perspective besides mine. This event, which is as jarring as it is

unsettling when it assails us in the midst of our egocentric preoccupations, is, as Levinas

remarks, “traumatic.” For, in having my very freedom put into question, the face not only

appeals to me at its own initiative; it shatters my solipsistic cocoon. It issues a command that

disrupts, by painfully impressing, the egoism of my everyday routines. It is an experience that

wounds, revealing to my shame the myopia of what I have become accustomed to consider

normal; for what we consider normal (jobs, hobbies, entertainment, etc.) concerns nothing but

our own needs and interests.11

If ordinarily our experience is egocentric, an experience disrupting and thereby

reconfiguring it would be supremely worthy of our phenomenological attention. For this reason,

Levinas assigns the experience of encountering the other the pride of place he does. His entire

conception of “ethics as first philosophy” pivots on the experience of being called, and having to

respond, to the other. The face-to-face encounter through which our egocentric “interiority” is

invaded by an unbidden “transcendence” calls us to responsibility. It is a moment that produces a

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reformation in the structure of experience. No longer do I live simply in a solipsistic environment

inflected by my desires. Instead, I find myself situated in a “world”: a communal, intelligible,

normative place of meaning where I am held accountable to and for others. It marks, in short, the

transition from an experiential reality in which I simply enjoy the pleasure of living, to one in

which these same surroundings come to reflect the fact that they belong to others, too. The world

is no longer simply mine, but shared. And not only do I find myself so situated in a communal

place; I find myself stirred to mind the troubles of others. This “ethical exorbitance” descends

from “on high,” opening me to an irreducible transcendence lying beyond the instrumentality and

banality of everyday self-interest. Stirring within me what Levinas will call “metaphysical

desire,” I no longer live to satisfy my own desires according to a logic of hedonic interest, but

now in light of this felt desire for goodness. This is the moment of responsibility, when I realize

the true depths of my humanity by undergoing a call to respond to the troubles of others. In

doing so, I accede to myself.

The other therefore wounds me, to be sure. Yet this does not guarantee I will respond

appropriately. My response might be to help in some respect or to a certain degree, and yet

nevertheless inadequately. Even when I outwardly act with someone else’s need in view, self-

interest can still be my secret motivation. Not only might I choose to respond to the situation

solely in view of my own egoistic ends, but, worse still, I might try to silence the claim by

ignoring it. Who has not known the shame of having resolved not to help someone who we know

needed us? Sometimes we do less than all we can, and sometimes far less than that, even to the

point of doing nothing at all.

Because the face cannot override the freedom it challenges (we are always free to resist

it), what does the fact of its mere appearing accomplish, regardless of how we respond? If we

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know it cannot prevent us from sometimes being lulled back into egocentrism, and we know it

does not settle what form a life that assumes such a responsibility will exactly take on, the call,

simply in summoning us to respond, wounds us.

Thus, despite the admitted ambiguity of what it says, the face is decisive in other regards.

As Levinas himself observes, the wound it leaves initiates a threefold revolution in our

experience: first, from ontology to ethics; second, from “totality” to “Infinity;” and finally, from

freedom to justice. Being rendered answerable (or held accountable) to the other discloses a

dimension of our subjectivity that the history of philosophy standardly overlooks. Levinas takes

up the Heideggerian analysis of quotidian life to extract a lesson from criticizing it. There is a

foundational interiority, an egocentric “enjoyment,” or a solipsism, at work when immersed in a

daily task. In underestimating the full depth of this interiority, the Heideggerian philosophy is

unable to locate the radical transcendence of the other’s “exteriority.” For beneath the

teleological superstructure opened up by being-in-the-world, there exists a private economy of

desires and needs that unfolds within the purely subjective experience of our lived bodies. Much

of our daily activity is dedicated, in one way or another, to protecting, preserving, and

maintaining our bodies.12 There is a certain contentment that accompanies the satisfaction of

these needs. Levinas highlights it: “The self-sufficiency of enjoying measures the egoism or the

ipseity of the Ego and the same. Enjoyment is a withdrawal into oneself, an involution. What is

termed an affective state does not have the dull monotony of a state, but is a vibrant exaltation in

which dawns the self.”13 Where the existential analytic characterizes the world as a teleologically

structured field of possibilities with entities “ready-to-hand” for our “circumspective” projects,

Levinas locates a more profound depth to that milieu. The actions we take to satisfy our needs

are not in the first place done for the sake of any theoretical activity or normative project. They

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are done purely for the sake of the satisfaction they provide. Our daily commerce with things, as

Levinas points out, is not directed solely to an extrinsic purpose or project, but rather the

enjoyment we take in them. As he comments,

<EXT>But the outcome is the point at which every signification is precisely lost.

Enjoyment, the satisfaction and egoism of the I, is an outcome in function of which

beings take on or lose their signification as means according as they are situated on the

way that leads to it or away from it.14</EXT>

We might, for example, put on tea for a visiting friend, and our doing so is done in light of the

standards governing what is appropriate to do in such a situation, and thus such norms orient our

understanding of our friend’s visit as the kind of event it is. Yet the material act of drinking the

tea, of testing the temperature with my lips, of smelling its aroma, of feeling the warmth of the

cup in my hands—all that requires no justification beyond itself. It is its own end. Whereas

Heidegger or Sartre emphasize that we disclose only with respect to a project, Levinas shows

that the “enjoyment” of the “same” unfurls according to an egoistic system of desires and needs.

Prior to the advent of the face, the absolute term of our everyday experience is neither practical

understanding nor theoretical knowing, but satisfying our sensible needs.

On the subject of this solipsistic enjoyment, Levinas says,

<EXT>The things we live from are not tools, nor even implements, in the Heideggerian

sense of the term. Their existence is not exhausted by the utilitarian schematism that

delineates them as having the existence of hammers, needles, or machines. They are

always in a certain measure—objects of enjoyment, presenting themselves to “taste,”

already adorned, embellished.15</EXT>

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The critique of being-in-the-world does not deny that we are ontologically distinctive owing to

our understanding of Being. But this characterization of ourselves, when left at that, implies the

deeply misleading suggestion that “Dasein is never hungry.” We are embodied beings who thirst

and hunger, who require shelter and material comfort, who need rest and sleep, and thus it will

do no good to ignore the “elemental” feature of our subjectivity from any analysis that seeks to

disclose the essential structures and tonalities of our existence.16

Thus, despite the legion of criticisms that they entail solipsism, transcendental

phenomenology and existential philosophy actually in a way underestimate the full depths of our

natural egocentrism. The implications of such a recognition are significant. What is the result

when we overlook such egocentrism? One immediate danger, Levinas will not tire of noting, is

to consign the other to the “totality” of the “same.” “Totality” designates a system of thought

(and corresponding action), whereby everything is reduced to a finite concept, to the finite power

of knowing, or to our conceptual predilection for oversimplification and generalization. Others

are reduced to an intentional object, they show up only according to the constraints our

expectations, assumptions, and conceptualizations impose. They show up falsely. This

dehumanizing reductionism occurs most clearly in the theoretical accounts of humanity offered

by the modern natural and human sciences: the “consumer” of economics, the “homo sapiens” of

biology, the “citizen” of political theory, or the “viewer” of mass media. But a related

reductionism is surreptitiously at work in our everyday encounter with others. Too often we

reduce the other person to the role he is performing (the grocery cashier, the mailman, the

restaurant waiter, etc.) rather than respond to his humanity. We do not encounter him in his

humanity, but reduce him to a role.17 Absent is a “metaphysical” relation to the other, one

whereby I enter “a relation with a reality infinitely distant from my own reality, yet without this

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distance destroying this relation and without this relation destroying this distance, as would

happen with relations within the same.”18 This is the power of the face. The face invests the

possibility of a rapport with others that we had theretofore been suppressing. It discloses the

“Infinity” present within me, revealing that we are always already in a fundamental condition of

openness (and hence vulnerability) to the other. Essential to who I am is the fact that I am open

vulnerable to the appeal. When I answer it, not only do I realize that the other must always defy

my conceptual capacities to pigeonhole him (“If I can no longer have power over him,” says

Levinas, “it is because he overflows absolutely every idea I can have of him”), I can now treat

him humanely, by acting in a way that heeds his dignity. Unlike the “alter ego” (Husserl) or

Mitsein (Heidegger), the other now resists any totalizing conception I might form of him: “The

notion of the face, to which we will refer throughout this work, opens other perspectives: it

brings us to a notion of meaning prior to my Sinngebung and thus independent of my initiative

and my power.”19 Defying attempts that would reduce him to an object of our representational

powers (and hence an idol), the face safeguards the integrity of the other, ensuring we may never

entirely comprehend him. Even those we have known for years can surprise or disappoint us.

Here we should hasten to add that this critique holds true, not only of Husserl and

Heidegger, but the wider history of philosophy. “Ontology” is the Levinasian term of art for that

history said to mishandle our relationship to the other. How so? First, it mischaracterizes (by

downplaying) the extent to which selfishness rules the natural attitude of being-in-the-world.

Moreover, it misses the “trauma” characterizing the event of having this interiority invaded by

the other’s irreducible transcendence. For those who have steeled their hearts from experiencing

this claim, instead plunging themselves into the solipsistic rhythms of everyday life, they go so

far into darkness that they do not even see how selfish they have become. Commenting on this

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egocentric reductionism, Levinas says, “Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a

reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the

comprehension of being.”20 Levinas’s direct allusion to Heidegger is meant to be pointed. But

prior to turning to the critique of Heidegger, an appraisal of Husserl’s own account of

intersubjectivity is needed.

The face arrives upon us from beyond the field of consciousness, a paradoxical fact that

Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity will attempt, but fail, to accommodate. The other for

Husserl is the “alter ego,” a unique intentional object for consciousness, to be sure, but for all

that still an intentional object. Hints that Levinas will force phenomenology to rework its

conception of the other are already evident in his earliest writings. As early as the late 1920s, in

the text The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, a study dedicated to Husserl’s

transcendental philosophy, we read Levinas already suggesting that intersubjectivity is the key to

decrypting the mystery of how intentionality itself constitutes meaning. We also see evidence

that he already senses that a proper accounting of our ethical relation to others will be

transcendental phenomenology’s Achilles’ heel. The text already portends a break with the

Husserlian presupposition that, as Levinas comments, “Intentionality is what makes up the very

subjectivity of subjects.”21 He writes:

<EXT>The works of Husserl published so far make only very brief mentions of an

intersubjective reduction. We can do no more than repeat what Husserl has said.

However, we believe that this intersubjective reduction and all the problems that arise

from it have much preoccupied Husserl. He has studied the Einfühlung, the intuition

through which intersubjectivity becomes accessible; he has described the role played in

the Einfühlung by the perception of our body and its analogy with the body of others; he

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 has analysed the life which manifests in this other body a type of existence analogous to

mine.22</EXT>

The Husserlian explanation of the encounter with the other in terms of empathy is one Levinas

will eventually reject. Empathy, understood as an “anologizing” act of intentionality, does not

accommodate the other’s mode of transcendence. As a result, Husserl’s phenomenology will

repeatedly struggle to resolve the paradoxes to which his account of the other’s appearing gives

rise: does the encounter with the other in transcendental consciousness lead to solipsism? If

transcendental consciousness constitutes everything in the world (the other person not excepted),

how does the alter ego rise into appearing? Would not such an account reduce the subject to an

object? How, then, does intentionality render the encounter with the other possible?

These are the problems to which Husserl turns in the famous Fifth Meditation. The other

person, he maintains, is constituted by transcendental consciousness as an alter ego.

<EXT>We must, after all, obtain for ourselves insight into the explicit and implicit

intentionality wherein the alter ego becomes evinced and verified in the realm of our

transcendental ego; we must discover in what intentionalities, syntheses, motivations, the

sense ‘other ego’ becomes fashioned in me and, under the title, harmonious experience of

someone else, becomes verified as existing and even as itself there in its own

manner.23</EXT>

The alter ego is not any other object; he is himself a subject. Just as the world appears to me, so

the world appears to him. This presents an obvious paradox. If the alter ego appears to me in

consciousness, but part of what it is for him to be a subject is that I myself am an object to him,

then how can he appear as a subject when reduced to an intentional object of my own

experience? Is not to say that another subject appears as an intentional object, thereby to annul

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that very appearance? Husserl suggests a solution. When encountering another ego,

transcendental consciousness experiences the fact that something about the alter ego lies beyond

what can be given. The experience the other ego has of himself as subject transcends my own

experience, an ontological inaccessible as register as a limitation standing in the way of my

powers of constitution. Because I can only experience my own experience, but not the alter ego’s

as he does his own, the transcendence of the other is preserved. Paradoxically, the other is

accessible as inaccessible. As Husserl explains,

<EXT>Properly speaking, neither the other Ego himself, or his subjective processes or

his appearances themselves, nor anything else belonging to his own essence, becomes

given in our experience originally. If it were, if what belongs to the other’s own essence

were directly accessible, it would be merely a moment of my own essence, and

ultimately, he himself and I myself would be the same.24</EXT>

This transcendental account of the alter ego’s constitution aims to steer a middle course between

two equally untenable paths standardly charted in the history of philosophy. On one extreme, the

other is said to exist in a mode entirely indistinguishable from that of other worldly objects. But

such a view, aside from distorting the experiential facts (encountering a man is different than

encountering a rock or a cat or a wall), eliminates the other’s subjectivity. And in any case, this

understanding of the other would still not resolve the puzzle of how intersubjectivity is possible;

instead, it merely eliminates the problem by ignoring the experiential reality which originally

gave rise to it. On the other extreme, we might maintain that the other is different from other

objects, for he is not an object at all, but a subject. But in so underlining his transcendence, we

might conclude that we therefore can never be sure that he exists, since his own conscious

experience necessarily transcends our own. How do we know his is not an automaton? Without

58
having access to that experience, I lack any assurance that the other really has a mind. Thus, we

face a dilemma: whether we affirm the alter ego’s existence (at the cost of reducing him to the

status of an object), or else affirm his peculiar mode of transcendence (while admitting we have

no direct access to his own experience), the apparent result is solipsism.

Husserl knew of the dilemma, and his analyses evince a serious concern to resolve it. It is

one thing to explain how others “co-constitute” objects with me; it is quite another to explain

how those others themselves are constituted in my experience as fellow subjects. How is that

possible? In a thematic move that Merleau-Ponty will later appropriate critically, the body proves

crucial. In a process called “appresentation” or “co-pairing,” the transcendental ego “analogizes”

the visual appearance of the other’s body with its immediate lived experience of its own; I see

that the body of the other is in some sense the “vehicle” for a subject who finds itself in

possession of its embodied powers, just as I find myself similarly endowed. Husserl says,

<EXT>It is clear that, with the other Ego, there is appresented, in an analogizing

modification, everything that belongs to his concretion: first, his primordial world, and

then his fully concrete ego. In other words, another monad becomes constituted

appresentatively in mine.25</EXT>

The text is careful to emphasize that the “analogy” in question is not inferential. Though that

allays some worries, it does not lay them to rest entirely.

For the essential question remains open: how is it possible on this approach to

accommodate the other ego’s irreducible transcendence? Husserl respects the fact that an

object’s appearing always involves an absence (as with the die or house), yet the transcendence

of a spatial object is always relative to the power of consciousness to in principle bring what is

currently absent into presence. I may walk to the other side of the house, or rotate the die in my

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hand. But the transcendence characterizing the appearing of an object is less extreme than that of

the other ego. Husserl attempts to accommodate that all-important distinction so as to rightly

thematize the other’s mode of appearing, but, having reduced everything to the horizons of

intentionality, Husserl neglects the irreducible excess of the other’s appearing. As Levinas

observes,

<EXT>What does it matter if in the Husserlian phenomenology taken literally these

unsuspected horizons are in their turn interpreted as thoughts aiming at objects! What

counts is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience

from which it lives.26</EXT>

Needless to say, it is one thing to criticize ontology for its failing to identify the form of

transcendence besides the one it does. It is something else to describe that transcendence, and

explain why it matters. From the perspective of Husserl’s account of horizonal intentionality, the

other person is reduced to a constitutional object. In consigning the other’s appearing and the

ethical relationship that appearing establishes to a “totality,” Husserl reduces the transcendence

(or “exteriority”) of the other to the “same.” In reducing the other to a phenomenon constituted

by the intentional powers of transcendental consciousness, transcendental phenomenology, like

so many other notable examples in the history of philosophy before it, unsuccessfully attempts to

reduce that which is irreducible.

But has not Levinas discovered more? The criticism of Husserl’s account of

intersubjectivity not only confirms that the other is not an alter ego; it also undercuts the idea that

I too am myself primarily an ego. In addition to not accounting for the other’s mode of being,

Husserl’s analysis likewise distorts our own.

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 The way forward hinges on what Levinas calls “counter-intentionality.” At its core,

subjectivity is not characterized in terms of an autonomous I, but as a me subject to a

heteronomy. The problem of the other is something dissoluble through ordinary intentional

analysis. To the contrary, the face-to-face encounter exhibits a “counter-intentionality.” The

intersubjective relation does not consist in constituting another as alter ego, but in being put into

question by that other. The face arrests my powers of constitution by neutralizing the initiative

and power of my intentional consciousness, rendering the one who receives the call, not an I, but

a me.27 Phenomenology, hence, is no longer solely to be a meditation on the “problem of

intentionality.” Now, no longer is the issue how the I of transcendental consciousness constitutes

the other person as alter ego, but instead how I am rendered a subject by being made to answer

before someone else. To acknowledge the phenomenon of “counter-intentionality” with Levinas

is thus to lay the problem of intersubjectivity on new ground. The task is not to explain how the

other person is constituted as another me, but instead how in being called to responsibility, I am

rendered a me. Hence, the aim of phenomenology itself changes.

Where for Husserl everything given traces its origin back to the transcendental

constitution of intentionality, with Levinas, the key phenomenon is exactly that which exceeds

the horizons of intentionality. But how does the reversal take place? How does the face render

me a subject who no longer remains a self-interested autonomous ego doing only as he pleases?

Here, it is necessary to turn to Levinas’s conception of “Infinity.” The face exhibits complete

transcendence, a true “infinity” that overflows the capacity of any transcendental act of

consciousness to constitute or direct it. As Levinas comments, “Infinity is transcendence itself,

the overflowing of an adequate idea. If totality cannot be constituted it is because Infinity does

not permit itself to be integrated. It is not the insufficiency of the I that prevents totalization, but

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the Infinity of the Other.”28 The face saturates us with a superabundance of meaning exceeding

the possibility of any finite conceptual mastery. He remarks, “Finally, infinity, overflowing the

idea of infinity, puts the spontaneous freedom within us into question. It commands and judges it

and brings it to its truth.”29 The face’s appearing exposes us to a regime of phenomenality that

lies outside the scope of signification and intentional fulfilment. It thrusts us beyond the

“totality” of the natural attitude, stirring us from the egocentrism of everydayness. For the history

of philosophy that Levinas interrogates critically, there can be no genuine “overflowing,”

because that which appears (the “object”) must always in principle conform to the transcendental

conditions imposed by consciousness. “Infinity,” by contrast, breaks apart the “totality” that

arises as a result of intentionality, initiating an ethical relation to others, where I am no longer the

ruler of my solitary kingdom.

Confronted by the call to see the situation not in terms of my own need, but in those of

the other’s instead, I am able, should I choose, to “welcome” the other in an act of “hospitality.”

The transcendence opened in the face-to-face encounter in which I am called to respond to and

for others exhibits what Levinas calls the “metaphysical” relation. At the heart of the relation is a

desire (ever inexhaustible) that founds the possibility of conversation, since it enables me to

“offer up” the world to others in speech. My being exposed before-others lays the groundwork

for justice, for it founds the possibility of shared understanding and mutual recognition.30 In

short, it secures the possibility of justice. By entering into genuine conversation (not “idle talk”),

we must also listen. Language requires that I admit my answerability to others, who call me to

account for myself. It calls for humility: “the very fact of being in a conversation consists in

recognizing in the Other a right over this egoism, and hence in justifying oneself.”31 The ethical

solipsism of enjoyment is abolished (or at least temporarily subdued). Things come to be held in

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common, a commonality that presupposes a recognition of the other as someone who has an

absolute claim on our action and attention.

<EXT>Language does not refer to the generality of concepts, but lays the foundations for

a possession in common. It abolishes the inalienable property of enjoyment. The world in

discourse is no longer what it is in separation, in the being at home with oneself where

everything is given to me; it is what I give: the communicable, the thought, the

universal.32</EXT>

Levinas’s cryptic remarks on language raise many questions. To wit, if Heidegger is renowned

for his sustained and powerful meditations on language, why is Levinas so critical of Being and

Time’s account of language? In Heidegger, the other is reduced to a mode of my own being-in-

the-world; I encounter the other as Mitsein in the mode of “solicitude.” Though Heidegger does

not doubt the existence of others (he has no patience for the traditional skeptical problem of other

minds), by tracing their mode of existence to a Dasein’s powers of projection, he reduces “the

Other to ontology.” If for Heidegger, “attunement” is central to our finding ourselves in the

world (anxiety-before-death being the most preeminent of such moods), the existential analytic

cannot account for the face-to-face encounter. Persisting in a condition of transcendental

solipsism, Dasein is incapable of adopting the requisite humility to welcome the other. The

Heideggerian call of conscience that is said to summon us to authentic understanding originates

from and within oneself. Dasein enters into a silent discourse with itself. Always preoccupied

with the worries and concerns associated with its activities, Dasein never answers the Levinasian

call of responsibility. Always thrust back on itself, it cannot even hear the call. Absorbed in its

own concern, the claim of others remains silenced.

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 Any analysis of Levinas that neglects the issue of the “trace of God” would be

incomplete. Hence, we must ask: if the face of the other discloses a transcendence beyond our

naturally egocentric attitude, does it not perhaps open us up to God? Through revealing our

obligation to our “neighbor,” does not the transcendence of the face also reveal them in the

imago Dei? Levinas’s own relationship to the question of God is indisputably complicated and

sometimes rather ambivalent. The divergent interpretations to which his work has given rise

bears that witness. Some have discounted his phenomenology precisely on the grounds that it is

said to be thinly veiled theology; others, by contrast, have taken him to task for the very opposite

reasons, claiming that he was actually in fact an atheist.33 Suffice it to say the question of the

relation between Levinas’s phenomenology and revealed religion is an exegetical, philosophical,

and biographical thicket. We would perhaps do best to set aside these questions, and instead

concerns ourselves, as phenomenology always has, with the experiential facts themselves as they

disclose themselves to us.

What happens when we do? We could say much, even if some of it will be hotly

contested. It will do then to begin with an observation that everyone will agree on: in putting my

freedom into question, the face reminds me that I was always already responsible. It issues an

appeal that, calling us, comes upon us from elsewhere. Assailing us with an excess of meaning

that we cannot conceptually master (it leaves us speechless in the moment it arrives), it exhibits a

transcendence that Levinas will accordingly resort to the notion of the Platonic “Good Beyond

Being” in order to name. The call arrives unbiddenly. In language that portends the later analyses

of Jean-Louis Chrétien, it exposes us to an “immemorial past” that disrupts the integrity of the

egocentric present it shatters. In shattering the routine of a time previously spent on gratifying

our thirst for pleasure, it opens an “eschatological” time oriented by the felt need to respond to

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the needs of others. When the face of the other jolts us from the egocentric slumber from which

it would dispel us for good, we feel welling up within us an unspeakable yearning to make

amends for everything. We feel overpowering shame, but also a flicker of hope. If only we could

somehow make amends, we tell ourselves, or at least the beginnings of one. If only in doing what

we can we could somehow eliminate the suffering of those who have suffered because of us. In

the face of such suffering, we wish that we could free him from it, or at least somehow dull it.

What else beyond this—if anything at all—the face reveals will remain an item of

interpretive dispute. And still, our powers of description have not as yet wholly abandoned us.

So, it bears pressing on. What more do we experience in the face’s appeal? In this yearning to

lessen, if not entirely disburden, our neighbor of his own burdens, we experience an ache in the

very heart of creation. The longing for justice, welling up within us, reveals the true depth and

breadth of the suffering all around us. We feel ourselves suddenly cast amid a cosmic sea of

suffering which we know ourselves to be powerless to subdue. We feel the impotence of our

human frame, and the corresponding impossibility of making amends for all the wrong we

personally have done in the past. The suffering in the eyes of the other acts as a mirror,

confronting us with what we had considered secret transgressions, including those we had maybe

until then thought we had put behind us. We were wrong. The wounds are still there, as are the

regrets and sorrows. No doubt part of the pain is the humbling realization that the true weight

and extent of it defies the powers of our full comprehension. Our powers of speech desert us.

Here, we are not only at the limits of coping, but of our words. Wounding us, this call to

responsibility (and one would not be without reason to say repentance) commands us to respond

to a claim we know we will never adequately equal. No doubt that is just another element of the

felt sadness. But it is also the inchoate stirrings of an experience sweeter than the one preceding

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it was bitter. We are knocking on the doors of grace. Laid bare by the penetrating gaze of the

other, we find ourselves confronted with an irreducible transcendence, a desire for goodness, a

need to see the suffering of our fellow man eliminated, or at least recompensed. We feel within

us the yearning for justice.

When we are the victim of injustice ourselves, we can feel very alone. We also feel

misunderstood. Seeking help from others can lead them to react as if, by our doing so, we are

somehow conceding that we deserved to be treated in the way that we were. All the while, those

who are doing the wrong are not held to account for their actions; in this sick reversal of truth, it

can come to seem as if we, the one who is blameless, has committed the harm. That is the

perversity of evil, and it is one of the sorrows involved in enduring the hypocrisy of injustice.

Understandably, we want someone not only to understand our plight, but to come to our aid.

Like the Jews in captivity to Pharaoh in Egypt, we yearn to be released from the bondage of our

oppressors. But it is not all bad. In facing such trials, we come to learn why it is so important to

reach out to those who themselves may be facing their own silent trial. As Moses wrote so often

in the Pentateuch (and as Levinas never tired of citing), we are called to identify with the burden

of others. Accordingly, suffering injustice in our own lives positions us to be responsive to others

when we see that they are facing their own. We, too, know what it is like to be held captive, for

we know what it is to be a stranger in an inhospitable land. Our own suffering has made us

susceptible to the pain of others. In turn, when we are called to do so, we can do our small part to

help those in their own dark hour who need relief. When the summons comes, we are fit to

answer it: “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt”

(Deuteronomy 10:18).

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 But is there perhaps more in the face of the other than what even Levinas allows? If

Levinas himself will always pause short of it, are not we ourselves entitled to see in the

neighbor’s face what the eyes of faith throughout the centuries have traditionally seen in it? Are

we not under the gaze of the one true Face, the one of the Savior who, in already having suffered

for us, will one day wipe away the tears of those who love Him? In the transcendence of the face

are we not met, if only dimly, with the invisible face of Christ? Himself returning to the theme of

the “stranger, orphan, and widow” as he so often would, Levinas’s analyses call to mind the

famous account of the Day of Judgment in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. According to

that text, each of us will on the Last Day be judged according to whether (and how) we

responded to the need of others. Some, whom Christ names the “sheep,” are those who saw fit to

answer the need they saw in the face of others. They will receive the glory of eternal life. As for

the others whom this same text names the “goats,” for those, in short, who silenced the claim and

preferred living deliciously for themselves (like the “rich man” Luke describes), they will receive

condemnation. It is hardly worth saying that the text represents as dire the task of deciding

whether the face of our visible human neighbor bears the invisible trace of Christ. The sobering

question, essentially left hanging by Levinas’s own account of the other, is one Jean-Luc Marion

and the other phenomenologists will later take up. Still, by placing a description of the

experience of the other’s appearing at the heart of phenomenology’s conception of the human,

Levinas has not only reordered its aims. In recognizing that “Consciousness is born as the

presence of a third party,” his thought has reawakened a different, but no less significant,

question than Heidegger’s question of Being.34 In redirecting our attention to the other’s

appearing, Levinas contests the accepted boundaries of his day’s phenomenology. And for that,

philosophy is now no longer the same, but indelibly other.

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 <NH>Notes</NH>

1 The issue of Levinas’s legacy will arise in subsequent chapters. For now, the aim is to situate

his philosophy in the immediate historical context to which it responded.

2 To see this remark in the full context of an illuminating discussion regarding Levinas’s

contribution to phenomenology, see Jean-Luc Marion’s “The Care of the Other and

Substitution,” in K. Hart and M. Signer (eds.), The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews

and Christians (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010), 201. For a recent analysis of

Levinas's critique of Heidegger's phenomenological ontology, and how that Levinasian account

influences Marion's own view of phenomenology, see chapter four, "Note sur l'indifférence ontologique

de Levinas," in Marion's Figures de phénoménologie: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Henry, Derrida (Paris:

Vrin, 2015), 59-73.

3 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43.

4 For two studies on this question, see Steven Crowell’s “Why is Ethics First Philosophy?

Levinas in Phenomenological Context,” European Journal of Philosophy, 2015, 23 (3), 564–88

and Jack Marsh’s “‘Flipping the Deck’: On Totality and Infinity’s Transcendental/Empirical

Puzzle,” Levinas Studies: An Annual Review, 2016, 10, 79–113. Whether the face should be

viewed as a transcendental enabling-structure or the visible face of a concrete individual is an

interpretive matter intensified by Levinas’s own remarks. He sometimes seems to run the

transcendental and empirical distinction together. Though the matter remains an issue of

unresolved exegetical dispute, we shall follow the very fine suggestion of Jeffrey Bloechl, who

proposes “Infinity” be taken as the transcendental enabling condition for the empirical

welcoming of another concrete individual’s appearing, while the term “the face” be reserved for

naming the event in which that call is concretely issued in another person’s looking at me. For

more on this way of parsing the issue, see Bloechl’s “Ethics as First Philosophy and Religion,” in

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J. Bloechl (ed.), The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of

Emmanuel Levinas (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2000), 130–64.

5 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 62.

6 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 29.

7 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 88. If for Kant and the tradition of rational morality that follows him our
ethical duty to others is said to consist in the respect for the moral law itself, and not upon any affective
dimension, it is different not only with Levinas, but also in Husserl. Husserl’s Fifth Meditation suggests that his
transcendental idealism makes no room for the role of love and affect in grounding our ethical duty to others, but
the writings of his later manuscripts correct that misimpression. Our absolute ethical duty to others is underpinned
by an affective dimension, which, for him, consists in a sensible, affective, and intuitive love of neighbor. For a
discussion of Husserl’s considered view of ethics, see chapter four, “Le Dieu éthique,” specifically
“Amour et phénoménalité de Dieu,” in Emmanuel Housset’s Husserl et l’idée de Dieu (Paris: Cerf, 2010),
125-145.

8 Ibid., 66.

9 There are actually four terms—Autre, autre, Autrui, and autrui—Levinas uses that might be

translated as “other.” Understandably, that presents significant translation and interpretive issues.

Though important in their own right, they are beyond the scope of our present discussion. For a

recent study that admirably tackles these questions, see Dino Galleti’s “Of Levinas’ ‘structure’ in

address to his four ‘others,’” Continental Philosophy Review, 2015, 49 (4), 509–32.

10 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 50–51.

11 This description of everyday experience accords, it is true, with what many consider normal.

However, I do not mean to suggest that a life of self-involvement truly is unavoidable. The idea

that overcoming our inherent egocentrism is possible is not a claim unique to Levinas. It is found

in the phenomenological work of Marion, Henry, and Lacoste also. In what form of life would

this overcoming be possible? A life of faith, for one, is a form of existence that excepts itself

from the transcendental egoism of our natural attitude. By presupposing the death of the “old

self,” such a life of renunciation vanquishes egocentrism. One’s guiding interest becomes loving

God and one’s neighbor as oneself, rather than simply loving oneself above everything else. A

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recurring theme across these phenomenological texts, we will see, is that loving and self-

knowledge cannot be separated.

12 Michel Henry describes beautifully the “material economy” to which bodily needs give rise

when he writes, “Precisely because none of the needs that mark our fleshly condition can remain

without response, because they emerge with an insistence whose pressure quickly becomes

intolerable, various impulses arise in our flesh itself. By these the flesh endeavors to change its

discomfort into the well-being of provisionally gratified desire. In this way the grip that the

system of our needs exerts on us corresponds to the set of activities necessary for their

satisfaction.” For this remark in its context, see the whole work in which it appears, Words of

Christ, trans. C. Gschwandtner (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,

2012), 36. This “system” to which Henry refers is what Levinas himself characterizes as the

“enjoyment” of the “same.”

13 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 118.

14 Ibid., 95.

15 Ibid., 110.

16 To my knowledge there is little work that has been done on the question of sleep in Levinas

and the other phenomenologists. The work of Patrick Levy on Heidegger and sleep is an

exception, and worth consulting.

17 The telling formulation of Kierkegaard, with whom Levinas on many philosophical issues

will agree, summarizes how totality falsifies reality by reducing the other to a conceptual idol.

As Kierkegaard said, “once you label me, you negate me.”

18 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 41.

19 Ibid., 51.

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20 Ibid., 43.

21 Levinas, Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, 41.

22 Ibid., 151.

23 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 90.

24 Ibid., 109.

25 Ibid., 115.

26 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 28.

27 The notion of the saturated phenomenon in Marion’s phenomenology of givenness will

radicalize this Levinasian insight, as we shall cover in that chapter. For an additional and recent

discussion on the that relationship, see chapter five, "D'Autri à l'individu suivant Levinas," in Jean-Luc Marion's

Figures de phénoménologie: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Henry, Derrida (Paris: Vrin, 2015) 75-93.

28 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 80.

29 Ibid., 51.

30 One would not be alone in hearing echoes here of Martin Buber’s account of the dialogical

relation. However, Levinas’s explicit remarks about Buber are sparse, and, when he does

mention the latter’s “I-Thou” relation, the point is not to emphasize his general agreement with

Buber’s view, but usually to accentuate the differences.

31 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 40.

32 Ibid., 76.

33 Dominque Janicaud, for one, lays what he thinks is the deserved blame for theology’s illicit

intrusion into phenomenology directly at Levinas’s feet. On the other hand, Merold Westphal,

who is otherwise quite sympathetic to Levinas’s philosophy, comments that Levinas was himself

personally an atheist. For more on the matter, consult Westphal’s “Thinking about God and God-

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Talk with Levinas,” in K. Hart and M. Signer (eds.), The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas

Between Jews and Christians (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010), 216–29.

34 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 160. I say the question concerning the relationship between

philosophy and theology takes precedence over Heidegger’s own question of the meaning of

Being for at least one decisive reason we owe most notably to Marion. It is worth rehearsing.

According to Heidegger, philosophy as phenomenological ontology will always have a uniquely

foundational status since, as Being and Time contends, it concerns the question of Being,

whereas other disciplines merely concern the question of a particular region of beings—they

remain “positive sciences.” In short, the “ontological difference” between Being and beings

guarantees that theology, which investigates God and hence a being, will in some respect always

remain methodologically subject to the comparatively foundational findings of phenomenology,

since the latter, unlike the former, alone investigates Being. Accordingly, for Heidegger,

phenomenology must proceed by “methodological atheism” since God, who is just a being, is not

the issue at stake when the issue concerns the question of the meaning of Being. But this entire

way of putting things seems to us never to justify its main presupposition: what if

phenomenology’s topic of interrogation was not in fact Being, as Heidegger repeatedly insists,

but something else? What, we may ask, rules out the possibility that it might fall to

phenomenology after all to say something about God when the true principles of its method are

finalized? Is it not entirely possible, contrary to Heidegger’s suggestion, that the “ontological

difference,” by rightly distinguishing God and Being, far from erecting an opposition between

philosophy and theology, in fact reconciles them by highlighting their common interest? In short,

what if phenomenology and theology concerned one another precisely because phenomenology,

no longer concerning itself solely with the question of Being, and theology, no longer

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approaching God from the horizon of Being, intersected in a horizon beyond Being? If God is no

longer thought within the horizon of Being, and phenomenology is no longer to take as its final

task the clarification of the meaning of Being, could not God enter into phenomenology? It is

precisely this hypothesis that other contemporary phenomenologists have all, each in his own

way, explored, as we shall see. For one characteristic example of such an attempt, see Jean-Yves

Lacoste’s La phénoménalité de Dieu: Neuf études (Paris: Cerf, 2008).

<REFH>Bibliography</REFH>

<REF1>Kant, I. Critique of Practical Reason in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. M. Gregor,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Levinas, E. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne

University Press, 1998.

Levinas, E. The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. A. Orianne, Evanston,

IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh, PA:

Duquesne University Press, 1969.</REF1>

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