Balductum Musings

Tag: consciousness

  • Levinas (2) – Evasion and the “Il y a”

    “The Overflowing of the Self (On Evasion)” by Levinas

    • Levinas’s work, On Evasion (1935), marks the beginning of his philosophical training.
    • The text explores fundamental states of mind, such as necessity, shame, and nausea, similar to those of Heidegger in Being and Time.
    • Levinas criticizes the notion of Being, calling for a new approach to ontology.
    • The book introduces the theme of the necessary departure from ontology, or escape from Being.
    • Levinas criticizes the idea of Being as unsatisfactory and calls for a new route to leave it.
    • The being explored in On Evasion experiences physical and affective states such as need, pleasure, shame, and nausea.
    • The being is characterized by a “need for excess” or “excedancer,” which is not due to a fundamental lack but a desire to transcend itself.
    • The self feels desires that can be satisfied and a metaphysical desire to transcend itself that is impossible to fulfill and inexhaustible.
    • The need to evade takes on a dramatic form as it is the need to escape existence as such, escaping the brutal truth that there is being.
    • The self’s identity contains the need to escape from itself, a movement outwards with no specific destination.
    • The self’s desires that can be satisfied admit of disappointed satisfaction, as it also feels the non-fulfillment of the great Desire, that of leaving the self behind.

    Understanding Human Duality and Ontological Claustrophobia

    Understanding Pleasure, Shame, and Nausea

    • Pleasure symbolizes the unfulfilled promise of self-emancipation, often mixed with pain.
    • Shame is the shame of being oneself, revealing the self that uncovers itself.
    • Nausea is the pure being of being oneself, experiencing oneself without reflective knowledge or any idea.

    Ontological Claustrophobia

    • This suffering is not due to a lack of the power of being, but fullness.
    • The power of being drives the desire to leave being, and the need to escape is existence itself.

    The Concept of “There is”

    • Levinas’ main concept is “There is being” (il y a de l’être), which is impersonal existence.
    • Il y a is inextinguishable, beyond any conceivable or defined existence.
    • Being is rooted in a time and a space, found in the delocalized ubiquity of its y.
    • The il y a lacks the principle implied in subjectivity, as it does not admit any subjectivity.

    The “There is”

    • Levinas’ main concept before his development of the ethical relationship.
    • The il y a is always present, like the ever-deepening abyss upon which beings exist.
    • Levinas adds images of the il y a, such as the silence of a child’s room and the void that can be imagined before creation.

    The Concept of ‘Ilya’ in Philosophy and Art

    Empirical Illustrations of ‘Ilya’

    • Film and music create silence, revealing the presence of absence and existence without existing.
    • The energy released in the initial singularity of the universe is also ‘ilya’.
    • The concept of ‘ilya’ is impenetrable to reason and philosophical inquiry.
    • Levinas offers an empirical example of ‘insomnia’, the absence of sleep but not of consciousness.

    The Perception of ‘Nocturnal Space’

    • The perception of this nocturnal space produces horror due to the insurmountable fatality of being irredeemable.
    • The ‘there’ in its deaf neutrality never disappears, even when the individual subject emerges from it.

    The Emergence of Consciousness from ‘Ilya’

    • The emergence of consciousness from ‘Ilya’ is ‘hypostasis’, where the subject acquires a separate existence from the neutral background of the ‘there is’.
    • Consciousness, the subject, and personal identity emerge from the ‘Ilya’, they do not pre-exist it.

    The Attachment of Beings to Being or Existence

    • Beings or existents are attached to being or existence, and vice versa.
    • There is an emergence, a hypostasis, whereby being is individuated and acquires a separate identity.

    Fatigue and Resistance to Existence

    • Fatigue is the way of appearing of the need to escape, rejection of existence that cannot be rejected.
    • It is the ego’s resistance to existing, a resistance that presupposes existence.

    The ‘Ilya’ will almost completely disappear as an explicit principle in Levinas’ later reflections, but will still exist as it exists in existence anonymously.

    _________________________________

    The Overflowing of the Self (On Evasion)

    On Evasion (1935) marks the beginning of Levinas’s own work. Despite the enormous importance he has had as an introducer of phenomenology in France almost at the same time as it was taking shape in Germany, and that at the age of only twenty-six, his lucid understanding of the new philosophy has mainly meant the last stage in his philosophical training (an enormously elevated training). On Evasion already raises its own issues, and in a personal style. It is undeniable that the shadow of Heidegger still extends over this brief text, as it will also (in a more tenuous way) over the two subsequent books: the exploration of fundamental and revealing states of mind, such as necessity, shame and nausea in On Evasion are of the style of those that the German philosopher makes of anxiety, fear and care in Being and Time. But there is also an uneasiness, a dissatisfaction with the notion of Being. He declares that “the old problem of ontology” must be reformulated in a new way. Read within the context of his philosophy, Of Escape stands out for introducing one of Levinas’ great themes: the necessary departure from ontology, the departure (escape) from Being.

    In this, his first work, Levinas already denounces as unsatisfactory the idea of Being predominant in the philosophical tradition: “It is a question of leaving Being by a new route, even at the risk of destroying certain notions that seem evident to common sense and to the wisdom of nations” (DE 127). This approach is situated “beyond” Husserl’s phenomenological intellectualism — of his transcendental ego — and of the entity seen from the being as it is presented in Being and Time. The being that Levinas explores experiences physical and affective states: need, pleasure, shame, nausea. In On Evasion there is a phenomenological and existential analysis of these states that retains many features of the method of the two masters, but which is already distinguished from them by the determination with which the particular dimension of the human being is emphasized.

    This being is characterized by his “need for excess” (besoin d’excedancer, this term is one of the few Levinasian neologisms). This need consists of not feeling satisfied within one’s own being, in one’s particular sphere, and in the desire to transcend it or to go outside oneself. This need is not due to a fundamental lack, but quite the opposite: the being desires to transcend itself precisely because it is full, because the fundamental aspect of the experience of fullness is to go beyond itself. The self feels desires that can be satisfied — hunger, thirst, learning… — and that affirm it, and a metaphysical desire to transcend itself that is impossible to fulfill and at the same time is inexhaustible. It is a duality specific to the human being that has a dramatic form:

    Existence is an absolute that asserts itself without referring to anything else. It is identity. But in this reference to himself, man distinguishes a type of duality. His identity with himself loses the character of a logical or tautological form; it assumes, as we shall show, a dramatic form. In the identity of the self, the identity of being reveals its nature of entrapment because it appears in the form of suffering and is an invitation to evasion. So evasion is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break the most radical, most irredeemable entrapment, the fact that the self is itself. (DE 98)

    The need to evade takes on a dramatic form because it is the need to escape existence as such, to escape the elementary and (as Levinas defines it) brutal truth that there is being (il y a de l’être). Being is insurmountable because existence is something permanent and basic. In a few pages we will see how this statement is argued in From Existence to the Existing and Time and the Other. Now it is important to remember that human beings by their very nature want to get out of themselves. Being is experienced as imprisonment, as being chained, riveted to oneself. To be is already an invitation to get out of being. The very identity of the self contains the need to escape from itself. This need is for a movement outwards with no specific destination, a restlessness that does not seek repose. Desires that can be satisfied — those that concern the self as an identity with itself — in reality only admit of a disappointed satisfaction, because at the same time as the self pleasurably experiences its fulfillment, it also feels the non-fulfillment of the great Desire, that of leaving the self behind. Adopting the Heideggerian distinction between the ontic (that which concerns the entity) and the ontological (that which concerns being), Levinas’ description of the duality of the human being is that it is disappointingly realized in the ontic and painfully frustrated in the ontological. The being desires to escape from itself and cannot.

    The aforementioned analyses of the states of pleasure, shame and nausea are linked to the observation of human duality. Pleasure augurs the emancipation of the self, a promise of evasion that is not fulfilled: that is why it is mixed with pain. (We almost lose ourselves in pure joy when drinking cool water in summer after a long walk, when listening to a favorite piece of music, when suddenly and unexpectedly understanding something that happened ten years ago. Almost but not quite: we do not lose ourselves.) Shame is the shame of being oneself, of not being able to break with oneself, of not being able to hide one’s nakedness from oneself: “What shame uncovers is the self that uncovers itself” (DE 113). In nausea one experiences the pure being of being oneself: one experiences oneself without reflective knowledge, before any idea, in its simplest and most oppressive neutrality. The self feels attached to itself, enclosed in itself, “without any window to anything else” (DE 120).

    All these states reveal what John Llewelyn calls “ontological claustrophobia”. It is of the utmost importance to understand that this suffering is not produced by a lack of the power of being — it is not the frustration of a desire unsatisfied by incapacity — nor by the fact described by Heidegger and Sartre that the being has found itself, at birth, involuntarily thrown into existence. The suffering of ontological claustrophobia is not denial or deprivation, but fullness. It is consubstantial with the fact of being fully being: the power of being drives it to desire to leave being. The need to escape is existence itself.

    For Levinas, to be means primarily and almost exclusively to be human. All the states and the existence of the human being are described in their concreteness. The problem of being, the need to escape, is revealed to the human being in his or her daily life, in the fact of being placed as substance in existence, in his or her embodied present. It is this very model of the human being that will be the object of reflection in later books.

    Il y a (“there is”) (From Existence to the Existing)

    Existence is permanent and basic, irrepressible, which is why the Desire of the self to escape from itself is frustrated. “There is being” (il y a de l’être), has been declared as an elementary truth in On Evasion. This is the main concept of From Existence to the Existing: il y a, or “there is”. Il y a is impersonal existence — il y a as in il pleut (“it’s raining”), il fait nuit (“it’s dark”) or il fait chaud (“it’s hot”) — anonymous, general, indeterminate, neutral, in itself: it is “existing without existing”, prior to the constitution of the individuated human subject. Any further definition is necessarily paradoxical: it is presence within absence, the sound that is heard when everything is silent, Being without beings, the fullness of emptiness. The il y a is inextinguishable, it is beyond any conceivable or defined (particular) existence. Being is rooted in a time and a space; the il y a is found in the delocalized ubiquity of its y. It is existence without a world. Since it does not admit any subjectivity, the il y a lacks the principle implied in subjectivity.

    The “there is” (Il y a)

    The il y a is Levinas’ main concept before he develops his reflection on the ethical relationship Although it is hardly ever explicitly mentioned in works subsequent to On Evasion, From Existence to the Existing and Time and the Other, this enigmatic presence is always there, like the ever-deepening abyss or background upon which beings exist. To the initial equation of the il y a with insomnia — in which there is no proper consciousness, no subject, no representations, only “there is” — Levinas will add two more images in an interview (included in Ethics and Infinity): “My reflection on this subject starts from childhood memories. You sleep alone, the grown-ups go on with their lives; the child experiences the silence of his room as a ‘buzzing’. […] Something similar to what you hear when you put an empty shell to your ear, as if the void were full, as if silence were noise. Something that can also be experienced when you think that even if there were nothing, you cannot deny the fact that “there is”. Not that there is this or that, but that the very scene of being is open: there is. In the absolute void that can be imagined before creation, there is».

    Three more empirical illustrations can be added. Film buffs are familiar with the empty shots that the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu inserts between scenes: the characters leave the field of the camera and the camera remains motionless. For a moment, what the viewer sees is the pure presence of absence, existence without existing, il y a. Music, by creating silence — silence in music and in everything else does not happen from the outset, but is produced — also reveals this fundamental il y a. Astrophysicists explain to us that the snow that can be seen on the screen of analog televisions when no channel is tuned in is, in part, the energy released in the inconceivable initial instant of the big bang that gave rise to the universe. This energy, already contained in the initial singularity, has remained timelessly in the universe: it is also il y a.

    It can therefore be related to eternity: to the timeless eternity of the unnameable being.

    The notion of il y a, prior to any thinkable object, is impenetrable to reason, to the philosophical inquiry subsequent to this initial description. It is what in philosophy is called incomparable. It is more acceptable to intuition. That is why Levinas offers an empirical illustration of it: insomnia, which is the absence of sleep but not of consciousness. In the small hours of the morning, insomnia blurs everything, there is neither wakefulness nor sleep, consciousness is not there but neither does it cease to be. There is a presence without a beginning. The self is not there in insomnia as I am not there. Something similar happens in the twilight state, that no man’s land, a state without content. There is a presence, but a neutral, anonymous presence. In both states there is existence or presence without a subject.

    The perception of this nocturnal space, which is not empty but full of the nothingness of everything, produces horror, because “the fatality of being irredeemable” is insurmountable: it cannot be circumvented by death, by sleep or by dreaming. Levinas quotes several Shakespearean passages to express (not explain) this horror: Hamlet’s soliloquy on to be or not to be (“but in that sleep of death, what dreams may come we shall remember”), Macbeth’s anguish in the face of Banquo’s ghost (“Macbeth hath killed sleep”)[10]. The “there” in its deaf neutrality never disappears. Even when the individual subject emerges from it to pass into existence, they take it with them, they do not detach themselves from it.

    The emergence of consciousness from the il y a is hypostasis. This term — which Levinas takes from the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus — should be understood as production and realization, in which the subject acquires a separate existence from the neutral and anonymous background of the “there is”. Consciousness, the subject and personal identity emerge from the il y a, they do not pre-exist it. The sense of movement is clearly expressed in the title: from existence (il y a) to the existent (being, human being).

    Beings or existents are attached to being or existence, and vice versa. They are like light emerging from darkness but retaining this darkness within itself. However, there is an emergence, a hypostasis, whereby being is individuated and acquires a separate identity. Levinas examines this process based on three conditions that make it possible. If in On Evasion he has analyzed existential states such as pleasure, shame and nausea in their relationship with the need to leave the self, in On Existence to the Existing he examines laziness, fatigue and effort as states that accompany hypostasis. These analyses are phenomenological and are on the metaphysical, essential level; they do not refer to an effort or to an empirical or sporting tiredness. They are situated in the ontic perspective, which concerns the entity, being or existing as such.

    Fatigue is the way of appearing of what Levinas has called the need to escape: rejection of existence that cannot be rejected, because il y a de l’être (“there is being”). It is the reluctance of being at the moment of hypostasis, of its emergence and presentation. It would be the propensity to sleep due to the effect of the weight of being. Fatigue is also the ego’s resistance to existing, a resistance that, as such, already presupposes existence. Like tiredness, it occurs at the moment of hypostasis. Its effect is to delay: it delays the emergence of being into existence. Like tiredness, it is a concrete way in which reflexivity assumes particular and personal existence.

    The il y a will almost completely disappear as an explicit principle in Levinas’ later reflection, but it will not lose its basic presence as the background of being. In later books it will exist as it exists in existence: anonymously. If in this il y a de l’être, in Levinas’ books il y a de l’il y a, “there is there is”.

  • 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.