Levinas (1) – Influences

Outline:

Levinas’s Relationship with Husserl and Heidegger

• Levinas’s work in France focuses on explaining and disseminating philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger.
• Levinas’s relationship with these philosophers is crucial for understanding his own philosophy and the significant role phenomenology has played in 20th-century Europe.
• Notable philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean-Luc Marion have elaborated their personal works from the channel opened by Husserl.

Phenomenology: Husserl

• Levinas finds phenomenology fundamental to his work in philosophy.
• Phenomenology provides a method to examine the contents of consciousness and observe the operations of thought in relation to the world.
• Husserl proposes providing the sciences with a foundation that legitimizes their activity, challenging the “natural attitude” of scientific realism.
• He aims to reach an “apodictic” certainty that forms the required basis of science, beyond an approximate and probabilistic knowledge.

Concept of Consciousness

• Consciousness constitutes its contents, endowing them with meaning, and does not limit itself to passively receiving them.
• Consciousness constitutes its objects through intentionality, which is projected towards its objects and constitutes them.
• This intentionality is projected towards its objects and constitutes them through the “phenomenological reduction” (epojé), an operation where the existence of the previously directly accepted contents of consciousness is put in abeyance.
• The intentional object – any content of the consciousness, constituted by it – is inseparable from the consciousness that has constituted it with its intentionality.

Intentional Analysis

• Phenomenology examines how this constitutive action takes place, the way in which the consciousness perceives and experiences the objects of the external world, among others.
• This new conception of consciousness departs completely from the classical subject-object relation and the appearance of the second to the first, dispensing with old ideas of adequacy of the first to the second and of representation.

Understanding Phenomenology and Its Impact on Philosophy

Naturalistic Epistemology and Phenomena

• Naturalistic epistemology assumes a stable, permanent essence behind phenomena.
• Cognitive errors occur at the level of phenomena, not the essence.
• Husserl eliminates the distinction between phenomenon and essence, viewing the former as the mode of presentation of the latter.

Phenomena and Consciousness

• Phenomena are registers of objects in consciousness that appear due to the intentional action of the consciousness.
• The relationship with the object occurs within the subject, which gives sense and meaning to the external world.
• The intuition of intentional objects is pre-objective, not presuming the “external” existence of the world.

Phenomenological Description

• The phenomenological method reveals other sensations implicit in the experience of a physical object.
• The phenomenological description reveals new layers of structural significance, leading to a more general synthesis.
• Phenomenology reveals concrete experiences, unlike the abstraction of the sciences.

Phenomenological Reduction

• Husserl locates the primary evidences or phenomena in structures proper to consciousness.
• This purifies these contents of all historical and cultural conditionings that man has within himself.
• The primary evidences are sought in their transparency and immediacy, allowing for a reconstruction of knowledge that guarantees solid certainty.

Levinas’ Importance of Phenomenology

• Levinas emphasizes the new phenomenological conception and method, which eliminates empirical prejudices about subjects and objects.
• Phenomenology calls for distance from what has been learned, refraining from applying assimilated concepts, and discovering phenomena directly.

Edmund Husserl and Levinas’ Influence on Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl’s Influence on Phenomenology

• Husserl, founder of phenomenology, emphasized the importance of consciousness being aware of itself and its operations.
• Phenomenology’s concrete character prevents speculative and metaphysical excess, ensuring an anchorage in experience.
• Levinas’ adoption of the phenomenological method broadened its scope by exploring pre-intellectual and affective strata of experience.

Critiques of Husserl’s Philosophy

• Husserl’s intellectualism and proclivity to solipsism were criticized by Levinas.
• He argued that Husserl’s philosophy presented a theoretical, reflective, and contemplative consciousness, outside of the world and time.
• Levinas argued that the transcendental ego is isolated from other minds, projecting intentionality from its autonomous consciousness.

Levinas’ Perspective on Phenomenology

• Levinas criticized Husserl’s relationship with the Other, arguing that the Other does not occur as a content for thought or reflection.
• Heidegger’s perspective introduced consciousness in time, in the historical situation of man, transforming the Being conceived as a static, permanent, and supratemporal essence into the mode of existence of individual beings.
• Heidegger called Dasein (“being there”) the entity whose being is to exist, situated in time and space.

Being and Time (1927)

• Levinas’ work, Being and Time, presents Being as pure existence, not concretized in an entity.
• He introduced the reflection on Being in being, arguing that being ceases to be thought from a delocalized abstraction.
• Being is the mode of existence of beings or entities, with the only possible conception and reality given in the spatio-temporal rootedness of the entity.

Martin Heidegger’s Influence on Levinas’ Philosophy

Martin Heidegger’s Influence on Levinas

• Heidegger’s work, Being and Time, challenged the abstract and timeless transcendental self.
• Heidegger and Levinas both critiqued Husserlian phenomenology, which opposes a subject embedded in concrete existence.
• Levinas saw this as a new path for thought, introducing consciousness into the existential flow.

Heidegger’s New Philosophy

• Levinas maintained Heidegger’s practice of phenomenology, focusing on meaning produced by human consciousness.
• Heidegger’s new philosophy starts from the facticity of the temporal entity in Levinas’ daily life.
• Levinas argues that this approach responds more faithfully to the experience of intentional openness to the world and others.

Levinas’ View on Being and Time

• Levinas opposes Heidegger’s existential analysis of the entity against the horizon and in the light of Being.
• He believes that the moral interest in man is subordinated to the ontological question of Being.
• Levinas argues that the fundamental encounter is with Being, not with other beings.

Levinas’ Distancing from Heidegger

• Levinas distanced himself from Heidegger with firmness, focusing on two impulses: critical and constructive.
• The critical impulse is historical and personal, as Heidegger adhered to Nazi barbarism.
• Levinas’ personal ideas, such as the realization of man in ontology, became explicit discrepancies.

Levinas’ View on Ethics

• Levinas argues that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology reduces the ethical to understanding, arguing that ethics is irreducible to the concept.
• He asserts that ethics is the first philosophy, not requiring the understanding of Being, ontology, or metaphysics.

Initial stage: phenomenology; from existence to the existent; the other

Levinas carries out a profound task of explanation and dissemination in France of the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. It is worth examining his relationship with them, both to understand the character of his own philosophy, incomprehensible if its phenomenological beginning is ignored, and because of the enormous importance that phenomenology has had in 20th century Europe, to whose diffusion he contributed decisively. Not only Jean-Paul Sartre, who saw in this orientation the possibility of constructing a formal thought from; and not on the margins, of the concrete facts of daily existence; also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Marion, among other outstanding philosophers, elaborate in France their personal works from the channel opened by Husserl and made known by Levinas. (Outside France the main continuators of phenomenology, besides Heidegger, have been Hans-Georg Gadamer. Max Scheler. Hannah Arendtjan Patocka and Roman Ingarden)[7].

Phenomenology: Husserl[8]

Levinas finds in phenomenology something as fundamental as “the concrete meaning of the very possibility of ‘working in philosophy’” (EI), since it provides him with a method that is decisive at the beginning of his task and also beyond, when, although he rejects many of Husserl’s ideas and renounces the literal application of the phenomenological method, he remains – as he repeatedly affirms – faithful to its spirit. What phenomenology offers him is a way of examining the contents of consciousness and of observing the operations of thought itself in its relation to the world.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), mathematician by training and brilliant university professor of his discipline, proposes in his philosophical task to provide the sciences with a foundation that legitimizes their activity, since in his understanding the naturalism or positivism predominant in his time are working in an uncritical way in terms of the assumptions about the understanding of reality and their own activity: they are “naive”, unaware of the foundations of thought, they take reality for granted as objective data and proceed to analyze it without further ado, without questioning their own procedures. Husserl calls this lack of critical foundation the “natural attitude” of scientific realism (which in his time is expressed in positivism): the assumption that the world as it is experienced exists “outside” and independently of consciousness. To overcome and invalidate this realism, he tries to reach, beyond an approximate and probabilistic knowledge, an “apodictic” certainty -necessary, indubitable- that forms the required basis of science. The initial discovery of the creative activity of consciousness in scientific activity – which is not limited to passively registering something previously given to its intervention – will lead Husserl to broaden the scope of his activities, and to become interested not only in the episteme (the foundation of science), but also in the moral and the human. There are different modes of consciousness, according to the different spheres of experience, which give rise to different modes of knowledge.

The consciousness constitutes its contents, that is, it endows them with meaning; it does not limit itself to passively receiving them. The simple perception of an object, let alone the interpretation of a fact, is accompanied by an intense background activity in which the consciousness relates to the correlates of its own contents on the basis of a horizon of implicit conceptions (see box “The Phenomenological Description”). The way in which it constitutes them is intentionality: all consciousness is consciousness of something, all mental acts, such as perception and memory, have an object. (That all consciousness is consciousness of… means both that the objects are in the consciousness – that they are not taken for granted – and that there is no consciousness prior or anterior to its own contents). In order to understand how this intentionality is projected toward its objects (intentional objects) and constitutes them, Husserl proposes moving from the “natural attitude” proper to common sense and the sciences, in which consciousness lives immersed in the world and relates passively and uncritically to things (it accepts them as they come to it or appear to it), to the “phenomenological” or “transcendental attitude”, in which the consciousness becomes critical, that is, it becomes aware of itself, of its activity and its contents, and at the same time of the conceptions that it has passively accepted in the “natural attitude”, which have made it understand things “normally”, “like everyone else”. This transition from one attitude to the other takes place by means of the “phenomenological reduction” (or epojé), an operation in which the existence of the previously directly accepted contents of consciousness is put in abeyance. This is an initial act of deliberate and radical skepticism: nothing can be taken for granted, everything that admits the slightest doubt must be put in parentheses, neither accepted nor denied, and in any case recovered at a later moment of the analysis, when a table becomes “a table”. The phenomenological reduction consists in the remainder that remains once everything that admits doubt has been put in suspension. With the suspension of all the contents of consciousness, the very structure of these contents is detected: consciousness, a transcendental self that is not the empirical self (the historical self to which such and such things have happened in its particular life), that does not form part of the natural order. It is this transcendental self that constitutes -dota of sense- the known world by means of its intentional acts. The intentional object -any content of the consciousness, constituted by it- is inseparable from the consciousness that has constituted it with its intentionality. This is the activity of the mind, which is always produced – the consciousness creates its perceptions, interpretations and evaluations from its background activity – even if it goes unnoticed by the natural attitude of common sense and the uncritical sciences. Phenomenology examines how this constitutive action takes place: the way in which the consciousness perceives and experiences the objects of the external world, among them other consciousnesses.

Thus, intentional analysis starts from uncritical naivety (“natural attitude”) and proceeds to define the deep structures of intentional action, which are forgotten in naivety. What is concrete according to phenomenology is not the sensory or empirical data, what we perceive, but the a priori structures – prior to perception – that confer meaning to these data. This new conception of consciousness departs completely from that which has predominated in the philosophical tradition: it is no longer based on the classical subject-object relation and on the appearance of the second to the first, thus dispensing with the old ideas of adequacy of the first to the second and of representation.

Naturalistic (or realist, or objective) epistemology assumes that behind the diversity and multiplicity of phenomena there is a stable and permanent essence; it holds, therefore, that cognitive errors occur at the level of phenomena, of what is perceived or appears. If I see a stick that twists as it enters the water of a river, it is because I “see it wrong”. Husserl takes the decisive step of eliminating the distinction between phenomenon and essence, and of conceiving the former as the mode of presentation of the latter: one does not have to put aside the appearance of the crooked stick in order to arrive at the essence of the straight stick, but one has to understand why the stick appears crooked to consciousness. Phenomenology ceases to postulate a supposed external immutable reality veiled by appearances. It attends to the diversity of what appears, of the multiple and changing, of the hitherto despised phenomenon.

Phenomena -the registers of objects in the consciousness- are constituted (appear) by the intentional action of the consciousness. In projecting its intentionality, the consciousness gives meaning to the world, not because it so desires or optionally decides, but because it is its only way of experiencing it as something meaningful. The relationship with the object takes place, then, within the subject, which is the one that gives sense and meaning to the external world. The intuition (appearance) of intentional objects is pre-objective, it does not presuppose the “external” existence of the world. From this approach it follows that consciousness, the transcendental self, acquires a new freedom. “Man, able to coincide absolutely with himself through phenomenological reduction, regains his freedom” (DE). Consciousness can attain direct knowledge of its own intentional objects without having to pass through the idea of Being that has determined all of Western philosophy up to this point. This, as we shall see, will prove decisive in Levinas’ philosophy. In Husserlian idealism, the subject (consciousness) is the origin of everything.

Phenomenological description

It is possible to give an idea of the phenomenological method with an example. We wish to reflect phenomenologically on the perception of physical objects. We choose a phenomenon, let us say the vision of a sheet of paper. The natural attitude ascertains the visual sensation of this sheet and proceeds immediately either to take it for granted -common sense- or to analyze it in its basic constituents – “realistic” science-. The phenomenological attitude slows down and retreats. To begin with, it reveals that there are other sensations implicit in the experience of the leaf -touch, smell, etc.-, which form expectations and configure the experience from the start: we do not anticipate that the leaf is viscous or that it can be pierced with the hand or that it smells of basil, but that it is smooth, firm and that it smells like a sheet of paper (or ink if there is something recently written on it). These other sensations are implicit in the experience of “seeing” the sheet: failure to fulfill any of them would result in a substantial modification of the vision. If we deepen the examination of the expectations implicit in the perception of the sheet, we will reveal new layers: we will arrive at the use that can be made of the sheet, which includes both our previous practices with other sheets and our knowledge of what others have done with the paper. With the leaf we can write a shopping list, a love poem, an outline for the exposition of the phenomenological method, we can make origami figures, cut-outs. All these experiences and background knowledge, which in each case will decisively influence our vision of the leaf, are constituent structures of perception: they are implicit, and although they are imperceptible to the natural attitude of common sense and the sciences – which remain on the flat level of sensation – they emerge in the phenomenological description. This offers us a much richer and denser vision, much more certain, of experience. If we continue in the deepening of this experience, we will discover new layers of structural significance, we will reach a more general synthesis. It will be understood that things -the leaf in this case- exist on a background, and with other things to which they are related. Whether or not there is something written on the leaf, whether it belongs to a notebook or is loose, whether there are utensils near it -pens, pens, a printer- not only determine the vision of the leaf, but also the meaning implicitly attributed to it. It is also discovered that the leaf is an artifact made from raw materials with other artifacts. Each new layer of structural meanings, of relationships, creates broader syntheses: industrial, social, cultural, ecological, etc. contexts are revealed. The synthesis can be as general as the whole world. And anything, product or activity can be described phenomenologically: a mathematical formula, a literary work, a stone, an action. Phenomenology reveals concrete experiences, unlike the abstraction of the sciences. Even consciousness can be the object of phenomenological reduction on a second level capable of revealing, according to Husserl, the concrete existence of other consciousnesses in the world.

By locating the primary evidences or phenomena in structures proper to consciousness, Husserl can carry out the phenomenological reduction (epojé): purifying these contents of all the historical and cultural conditionings that man has within himself, which determine him when he is not conscious of them because he passively suffers their action. Husserl seeks the primary evidences in their transparency and immediacy. From here it will be possible a reconstruction of knowledge that guarantees that solid certainty that has not existed until now.

Levinas stresses the importance of the new phenomenological conception and method, and unreservedly admits that it has provided him with an adequate instrument to develop his philosophical task. It allows him to eliminate empirical (factual) prejudices about subjects and objects, and to suppress accumulated layers of conceptualization, in order to allow the full and immediate manifestation of experience as it occurs in interiority. Phenomenology calls to distance oneself from what has been learned, to refrain from applying assimilated concepts, and to discover phenomena -things as they appear in consciousness- directly. It is a new way of looking that presents itself as a philosophical renaissance.

The notion, imprisoned under the direct gaze of the thought that defines it, nevertheless reveals itself already implanted, behind the back of this naive thought, in horizons unsuspected by this thought; these horizons lend it its meaning: this is Husserl’s essential teaching. (TI 14)

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), founder of phenomenology, the philosophical current that most deeply permeated 20th century Europe. Levinas introduced his ideas decisively in France at a very early stage, which gave the phenomenological movement enormous strength in his adopted country.

By rejecting the “natural attitude” of the sciences – “To do phenomenology is to denounce as naive the direct vision of the object” (EDE) – phenomenology makes consciousness much more conscious of itself and of its own operations. Another main effect of the phenomenological method, which will decisively influence both Heidegger and Levinas, is the concrete character it gives to ideas (or essences), which makes it a principle of caution and criticism: its intuitive and concrete mode of demonstration prevents any speculative and metaphysical excess. The fact of “going back to the things themselves”, that is, starting from phenomena, guarantees an anchorage in experience that is lost when starting from an abstract conception. It is a principle of rigorous rationality that guarantees the direct vision of the intuitions of the transcendental self. Concreteness subjects philosophical activity to a vigilant awareness of its own activity and nature, which is purified of any external adherence to its ideas and intuitions.

In his peculiar and free adoption of the phenomenological method, Levinas will broaden and deepen its scope by exploring pre-intellectual and affective strata of experience, in which he detects the first moment of moral life and transcendence towards others, but we must not lose sight of the fact that his inquiry is based on phenomenology.

The distancing from canonical phenomenology is not limited to the broadening of the field, but also takes on a critical aspect. Levinas is quick to point out what he sees as serious defects in Husserl’s philosophy. In the first place, intellectualism: Husserl presents a basically theoretical, reflective and contemplative consciousness, external to the world and to time, outside of the historical situation of man, of his concrete living, of existential density. The transcendental I constitutes its objects from a disinterested, disincarnated, uninvolved, indifferent position; the consciousness is in a freedom that only responds to itself. Secondly, the proclivity to solipsism: the transcendental ego is isolated from other minds, it does not establish connections of intersubjectivity with others. It projects intentionality from its autonomous consciousness.

As phenomenology, [phenomenological description] remains within the world of light, the world of the solitary ego that has no relation to the other as other, for whom the other is another self, an alter ego known by empathy, that is, by a return to itself (EE 123).

Above all, there is a basic discrepancy, which will be defined as Levinasian thought takes hold. Phenomenology maintains, with the axiom of intentionality, that any thought is characterized primarily by being directed towards its content. In the relationship with the Other according to Levinas this phenomenological structure does not occur, because the Other does not occur as a content for thought or reflection. The Other is not a phenomenon that appears in consciousness, but an enigma that opens and attracts, but resists the comprehensive action of intentionality. Fundamental ontology: Heidegger[9].

The two criticisms that Levinas makes of Husserl are very much influenced, as he himself recognizes more than once, by Heidegger’s perspective. Heidegger has given phenomenology a new direction, he has introduced consciousness in time, in the historical situation of man. The Being that all previous philosophy has conceived as a static, permanent and supratemporal essence becomes the mode of existence of individual beings, it cannot be abstracted or understood apart from them. This being in which Being is realized is an entity that exists in time, a historical process. Heidegger calls Dasein (“being there”) the entity whose being is to exist, unlike all other entities, whose being consists in being precisely what they are (the being of a stone is to be a stone, that of a storm, to be a storm). Dasein is “sein” (“being”) in the sense that it exists, that it knows that it exists – its being is to exist; and it is “da” (“there”) because it is there, among things (in the world) and in time, it knows that it exists in temporality as a finite being. Dasein, which is not exactly man, but neither is it something alien to him, is situated in time and space, and only in this situation can it aspire to comprehend Being, which lacks existence outside the spatio-temporal anchorage of existing beings. Historicity has become a necessary condition of access to Being, which every entity experiences pre-philosophically and can try to know philosophically.

Heidegger’s great work, Being and Time (1927), is something new with respect to all previous philosophy; it is the irreversible irruption of the twentieth century in philosophy. If this had been understood as an analysis of first principles and Being, a problem to which various answers have been given throughout history -Forms or Ideas, substance, God, Deus sive natura, Deus sive natura, Deus sive natura, Deus sive natura, Deus sive natura, Deus sive natura. God, Deus sive natura, will, spirit…-, Being and time poses Being no longer as something, but as pure existence, not concretized in an entity (however general it may be). And this being that is existence can only be accessed from the temporal or historical consciousness of Dasein, the entity whose being is to exist and not to be something. Levinas understands that the deepest part of Being and time is in the distinction between Being (Sein) and entities (Seindes): the so-called “ontological difference”. Being is what all ontology has been conceiving and defining, what it truly is. Being is what exists in time, it is Dasein. Heidegger, then, introduces the reflection on Being in being. Being ceases to be thought from a delocalized abstraction: it is no longer an exterior and objective gaze that observes an eternal and timeless being. “Being” has become, from the noun conceived by the whole philosophical tradition, a verb that becomes because it is an event, a process, and not a static essence. Being is the mode of existence of beings or entities. The only possible conception and reality of Being are given in the spatio-temporal rootedness of the entity.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) turned Western thought upside down with Being and Time (1927), a work that Levinas studied in depth and from which he gradually distanced himself after an initial intense enthusiasm.

To the abstract and timeless transcendental self that Heidegger and Levinas denounce in Husserlian phenomenology, the former opposes a subject embedded in concrete existence, a subject that is neither free nor absolute, that is within history and has found itself thrown into the world (as Robinson has been thrown to the island by the swell). His thought and knowledge cannot transcend this historical situation, being in the world, among things. This passage from transcendental abstraction to historical concreteness is something decisive for Levinas, the revelation of a new path for thought.

Heidegger does not break completely with Husserl. He maintains the practice of phenomenology because he is concerned, like Husserl, with meaning, produced by human consciousness, which confers meaning on the world with intentionality. But it creates a new philosophy -or fundamental ontology-, as has been exposed, by wresting this consciousness from its transcendence and introducing it into the existential flow, by holding that Being is only comprehensible and effective within this existence. It is this complete inclusion and immersion of consciousness in history and time, in experience, in contingent and physical reality, that initially fascinates Levinas as a new philosophical approach. What he considers its great advance with respect to Husserlian phenomenology is that it starts from the effective situation of the temporal entity (very close to the human being, although not fully identified with him) in his daily life: that it starts from his facticity. He judges that the new approach responds more faithfully to the experience of intentional openness to the world and to others, because it adds the practical and the moral to the merely intellectual.

While agreeing with Heidegger in the rejection of the primacy of the theoretical and in the affirmation of the concrete and temporal (being-in-the-world), Levinas detects, in his prolonged reflection, that in Being and time the entity is subordinated to Being: even being-there, concrete entity, is understood within a referential whole, the horizon of Being, the entity is not observed in itself but subsumed in the abstraction of Being, in its light. The moral interest in man is subordinated to the ontological question of Being. Levinas judges that this maintains, at bottom and at base, the abstraction, because it does not attend to basic vital and empirical facts such as joy and pain. Heidegger’s Dasein never has hunger, nor deep desires, nor an experiential relationship with others: he lives alone, like Robinson on his desert island. The fundamental encounter is not with other beings, but with Being. That being-in-the-world (there) ends up being just as abstract and impersonal as the transcendental self, it is submerged in solipsism, in incommunication and incommunicability. At best it is an integrated circuit, a closed loop that only refers to Being, and not to man:

For Heidegger, the very process of being – the essence of being – is the emergence of a certain sense, of a certain light, of a certain peace that ask nothing of the subject, nothing express that is interior to a soul. […] Confidant, but also spokesman, herald, messenger of being; man does not express any conscience. (HOH, 100)

To Heidegger’s existential analysis of the entity against the horizon and in the light of Being, Levinas will oppose a description of the experience in the world in which he discovers new layers of meaning and experience: the encounter with the neighbor and an interiority made of sensibility and affectivity. Philosophy has traditionally ignored sensations and emotions (also Heidegger when observing the entity from Being); Levinas not only recovers them, but establishes a continuity between them and places them at the basis of moral experience and ethical reflection.

The influence of Heidegger will be profound and prolonged in the work of Levinas, who will always consider him one of the greatest philosophers in history and will maintain that one cannot think in any pre-Heideggerian way at the risk of falling into an inadmissible naivety. But he will distance himself from the German philosopher with firmness, without backtracking. There are basically two impulses in this distancing, one critical and the other constructive. The critical one, which has already been mentioned, has two aspects. On the one hand it is historical and personal: Heidegger has adhered to Nazi barbarism, in 1933 he gave a speech as rector of the University of Freiburg extolling the principles of racial and national supremacy, and afterwards he has never retracted it. On the other hand, it is philosophical: Levinas suspects that adherence to Nazism is not only of a personal or empirical and contingent nature; he believes he finds in Being and Time several arguments that point to and justify this alignment.

The positive impulse emerges in the process of constructing a thought of his own. The measured objections that Levinas tangentially presents to Husserl and Heidegger in his works of diffusion become explicit discrepancies as he abandons the role of commentator and articulates his more personal ideas. Specifically, he wonders if the realization of man is to be found in ontology, in the understanding of Being, if there is no other, more basic dimension. A 1951 text entitled “Is ontology fundamental?” marks the break with Heidegger and advances ideas that will be taken up and developed in Totality and Infinity. In it, for the first time, the ethical is instituted as the proper dimension of the human. Understanding is displaced and relegated; what is more: the ethical relation is unassimilable by understanding, it excludes it. Levinas argues that not only Husserlian phenomenology but also Heidegger’s fundamental ontology – which understands particular beings within the realm of Being – reduce the ethical to understanding, to what he generically calls “ontology”. Ethics, the encounter with the Other, Levinas affirms, is irreducible to the concept, it is not thematizable. The person in front of me resists being included in a concept: he does not allow me to reduce him to a category such as “European”, “African”, “adolescent”, “woman”, “disabled” or even “human being”, only my ontological violence can pretend to drown his absolute individuality, to transform him into a subject. Ethics as a spiritual optic consists precisely in curbing ontological violence and protecting ethical value. That is why ethics is the first philosophy, it does not require the understanding of Being, it does not require ontology or metaphysics, or rather, it is already metaphysics itself. Thus the irreconducible separation with respect to Heidegger is produced.