Levinas in his preface to the German translation of Totality and Infinity wrote the following: «This book which wants and feels to be of a phenomenological inspiration proceeds from a long frequentation of Husserl's texts and from paying a ceaseless attention to Sein und Zeit » (I translate).
The topic of my paper is going to be that «ceaseless attention» that Levinas paid to Being and Time as he was preparing Totality and Infinity.
The word «ceaseless» not only suggests that a debate with Heidegger thoroughly pervades Levinas' book but also that the debate at stake had already occurred in Levinas' work before the publication of Totality and Infinity.
Consequently I am invited to divide my analysis into two stages.
In a first stage, I'll try to find out evidence of a debate with Heidegger in the early work of Levinas, before Totality and Infinity.
In a second stage, I'll try to display the major signs of an attention paid to Being and Time in Totality and Infinity.
Since Levinas himself devotes more than hundred pages of the first section of Totality and Infinity to define basic concepts and principles of his investigation, I'll try first to contrast those concepts and principles with Heidegger's own concepts and principles in the investigation carried out by him in Being and Time.
Secondly, in the light of such contrast I'll try to show briefly how the debate with Heidegger operates on the level of concrete descriptions.
In order to scrutinize the traces of a debate with Heidegger in the early work of Levinas, allow me to focus primarily on one of the two essays published by him in the years following the end of World War II, essays thanks to which he imposed himself as an original thinker in the French phenomenological movement which was winning fame through the works of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Those two works are From existence to the existent and Time and the Other.
I would like to suggest that the very titles of those short books already demonstrate a deep attention as well as a strong resistance to Heidegger who was arguing in Being and Time in reverse terms, by which I mean in terms of a movement from the existent to existence and in terms of Time and the Self.
As a matter of fact that resistance within the admiring attention was already anticipated, several years before, in a text written by Levinas in 1940 on what he called L'ontologie dans le temporel: Ontology in the temporal, and conceived as an introduction to Being and Time for the students of Jean Wahl, professor at the Sorbonne. The text has not aged at all. It combines close attention and critical resistance.
Close attention to the extent that it is focused indeed on the only primordial question of Heidegger's investigation: the question of the sense of Being, and on the answer given to the question by the Heideggerian analysis of the structures of the comportment of human beings, whose essence is to be there, thrown in their own existence and temporally projected toward their end.
But the close attention is combined with a critical resistance. Indeed Levinas concludes his careful presentation by pointing out two essential flaws of Heidegger's new ontology:
1. the shutting of all «window upon the eternal»;
2. the fact that the predominance of the ontological is such that the relation to the other is no longer fundamental. Indeed, I quote: «The ontological question is raised within the Same, this Self who by existing has a relationship with Being as his own Being»(89), which means that the ontological problematic develops itself within the boundaries of an exclusive Selfhood. Levinas writes in the same context: «In the original time, or in Being towards death, (Heidegger's ontology) discovers the nothingness upon which it is based, which means that it rests upon nothing else than itself.»
On close inspection the reader who happens to know the further development of Levinas' thought is compelled to observe that the emphasis put on those two flaws already sketches the main lines of a debate with Heidegger. I believe that those main lines can be expressed by the following questions: Is the relationship of an existing being to Being primordially an inner relation between that being and its ownmost Being? If it is the case indeed, does it mean that the relation to the Other is in no way fundamental? More concretely, if it is true that such an inner relationship between a being and Being is grounded upon the ownmost temporality of that existing being, am I supposed to claim that time is something that I give to myself without any involvement of a gift coming from the other? Or - to put the issue in ethical terms - if what is fundamental is my inner relationship with my ownmost Being, does this primordial ontological Selfhood entail that my first obligation is towards myself, and consequently that my obligation towards the Other comes second as a merely ontical derivation of a selfish ontological obligation?
Those questions are at the background of the post-war publications of Levinas before Totality and Infinity. They play, however implicit they might remain in the text, a decisive role in both From existence to the existent and Time and the Other.
Let me focus on From existence to the existent in order to find evidence of a debate with Heidegger around the questions I just mentioned. The key concept introduced by Levinas in that little book is «hypostase»: hypostasis. For those who are acquainted with Heidegger's analytic of Dasein, the word hypostasis immediately evokes an echo to the key word used by Heidegger in order to characterize the mode of being called Dasein, i.e. the word ek-stasis. According to Heidegger, the ownmost relationship of an existing individual to its existence is ek-static. This is what Levinas criticizes. He writes: «The idea which seems to rule Heidegger's interpretation of human existence consists in conceiving existence as ekstasis, possibility, consequently exclusively as an ekstasis towards the end»(19). This is precisely the target of his critical reflections which, as he says, «are governed by a profound need to leave the climate of that philosophy »(ibid.).
However Levinas insists that his point is not at all to leave that climate «for a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian». And he acknowledges at the beginning of his investigation that Heidegger is right when he teaches that the relation between a being and Being in the verbal sense of the word should be taken seriously in all the strength of its relational character. Accordingly Levinas acknowledges his debt with regard to Heidegger: «At the beginning, our reflections are in large measure inspired by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger where we find the concept of ontology and of the relationship which man sustains with Being» (19).
In other words, Levinas agrees with Heidegger as far as the concept of ontology is concerned. The task of ontology is not the task of a superscience defining the ultimate properties of all beings and characterizing their relations. The task is to ask what it means to be, a question that only makes sense for the human being, a question which points to a relation between a being, or an existent, and its Being or its existence.
But it is one thing to agree with Heidegger on this formal concept. It is quite another thing to agree with Heidegger's definition of the relation existent-existence in ekstatic terms.
At close inspection, it turns out that the very title of Levinas' short book De l'existence à l'existant expresses his disagreement. Indeed the title, as I was suggesting, indicates a reversal of Heidegger's problematic. Levinas' title indicates a process, a transition, a move from one point to another point. The move at stake in Heidegger's ontology is not from existing to the existent but the reverse: from existent to existence, which means in his frame of thought from an existing human being who finds himself thrown among other beings and whose mode of being is at first determined from without and not properly his own - uneigentlich - towards a mode of being which is his ownmost possibility, and becomes authentic by facing his finite and mortal temporality. Or, to use the language of Levinas at that time, the move at stake in Heidegger's ontology takes place as a transition from a condition which is the condition of a substantive towards a purely verbal condition: das Dasein existiert umwillen seines, Dasein exists for the sake of its own existing. By contrast, the title chosen by Levinas for his book of 1947 indicates a transition from a condition which is initially verbal to the condition of a substantive.
But of course in order for that reverse transition to make sense, the point is to understand what verb and substantive mean in Levinas' own problematic. His title suggests that the human being emerges as a substantive out of a condition which is initially verbal. It is here that the notion of hypostasis plays a decisive role. The word hypostasis which is Greek literally means «staying under». In the history of philosophy the word was of frequent use in neo-Platonism and especially in Christian neo-Platonism where it designated the status of the created in its relation to the creator. The creator, in neo-Platonism, was taken to be a pure verb whose essence is to exist whereas the created, at several levels, merely derives from that source in a limited manner which is an hypostasis of the divine. The created is a substantive refracting the pure verb under which it stays.
Likewise the hypostasis in Levinas' sense of the word is a relational notion. But the relation designated by the word does not take place between a divine verb and a substantive refracting it. The relation at stake in Levinas' use of the word is the emergence of the human substantive, an existent out of a verb which is strictly anonymous, neutral, impersonal, called in French: il y a, there is. By naming hypostasis the primary relation between an existent and existence, Levinas means that the human being emerges first of all from an anonymous flow of existence under which he stays, to which he is intimately submitted and which again and again is experienced by him as a load, a burden he has to sustain.
I believe that the notion was chosen by Levinas as a phenomenological reply to Heidegger's notion of ekstasis. The notion is meant to draw attention to a relation to existence which is overlooked by Heidegger's emphasis on ekstasis.
Indeed the relation existent-existence called hypostasis takes place beneath all intentionality either as understood by Husserl in terms of a noetic-noematic correlation characterizing consciousness or as understood by Heidegger in terms of a project characterizing Dasein.
Because hypostasis as a relation of staying under the burden of the there is escapes all intentionality, it can only be approached in situations which cannot be described according to the bi-polar structure intention-intended. Among those situations we find for example fatigue, laziness, insomnia. It is easy to observe that those situations have no place whatsoever in Heidegger's analytic of Dasein for the simple reason that they escape all intentional project. Nobody can project to be weary or insomniac. Those states are frequently considered to fall exclusively within the province of psychology or physiology. Levinas shows that they denote a basic situation of the human existent in his relation to existence. Fatigue reveals that existence is a burden for the existent. Laziness as the impossibility to start anything reveals an inner inhibition at the core of any beginning. Insomnia as a state of dispossession of oneself and of subjection to the mere repetition of an empty present reveals that the existent is innerly submitted to the anonymous factuality of the there is. It is important to notice that in all those states the present is experienced as disconnected, resisting to a projection towards the future. In other words those situations are in no way ekstatic in Heidegger's sense. And indeed by referring to those situations, Levinas wants to detect the specific features of an hypostasis opposed to all ek-stasis.
Allow me to recall the contrast between those features and the features of Heidegger's ekstasis.
The very title of Levinas' analysis of the features of hypostasis is already very significant as far as the contrast is concerned. The title is position. It means that it is always at some place, here, that an individual emerges from the anonymous there is. Whereas Heidegger defines the individual existent as a there-being, Levinas defines it as a here-being. The Da of Da-sein is right-away absorbed in an ek-static movement. Levinas objects that the emphasis put on such movement overlooks what he calls the position of consciousness.
This is why he writes: «The here that belongs to consciousness, the place of its sleep and of its escape into itself, is radically different from the Da involved in Heidegger's Dasein. The latter already implies the world. The here we are starting with, the here of position, precedes every act of understanding, every horizon and all time.»(71)
Along with a primordial localisation, position denotes a primordial embodiment of the singular existent emerging from the anonymous there is. On this again there is a striking contrast with Heidegger. Because he conceives of immediacy as the projection of an individual upon an articulated world in which the point is to produce results, the embodiment of the existent is almost overlooked. It only appears marginally through words like Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit which designate the way things appear within the frame of everyday concern: they appear ready to hand or present at hand. The very use of these key words demonstrates that Heidegger considers the body only in terms of mean for grasping, holding, controlling. By contrast, Levinas insists that «the place before being the concrete surroundings of the Heideggerian world is a basis thanks to which the body is the very event of consciousness»(122, texte fr.)
Essentially linked to a body, position is essentially linked to the present as well. Levinas insists that the present of position «refers only to itself, starts with itself, is impervious to the future»(73). And he explicitly objects to Heidegger when he writes that the instant «is devoid of the power to be beyond itself». Whereas Heidegger claimed that the open-ness to a future defined the relationship of a Dasein to Being, Levinas claims: «It is really the instant that is the accomplishment of existence (...)» and he specifies: «of itself an instant is a relationship (...) although this relationship does not refer to any future or past, nor to any being situated in the future»(76).
In other words, the self-referential character of the present is such that it is deprived of all ek-static dimension. Position, linked to a body and to the present, indicates what Levinas calls «the definitive character of my very existence», «the fact that I am forever stuck to myself. And this element is my solitude»(84). By itself the present cannot open a future. By itself it is irrevocably encapsulated in the subjectivity of an ego.
In order for time to emerge as a dimension of openness in which the overcoming of the irrevocable is possible, the encapsulation of the ego upon itself has to be broken.
Here we brush the issue dealt with by Levinas in his second book: Time and the Other. Essentially enclosed within itself, the existent, in the hypostasis, experiences «the need for time as for a miraculous fecundity of the instant itself, by which he recommences as other»(93). But the otherness of time cannot come from the self; it is not a dialectical reversal within the Self. «The impossibility of constituting time dialectically is the impossibility of saving oneself by oneself and of saving oneself alone». Therefore one cannot claim, as Heidegger does, that the solitary subject is able to deny and transcend itself, that it is pervaded by negativity. The alterity, or otherness inherent to time, the «renewal that time brings is not an event which can be accounted for by the monad of the Self: it comes to me only from the other» qua other (93-94).
Here again the contrast with Heidegger is striking. When Levinas insists that sociality and time are inseparable, the sociality he has in view is not Heidegger's mitsein. Indeed being-with instead of breaking solitude merely expands solitude, whereas sociality in Levinas' sense is not being with another but «facing» another. It is not, as he says, a participation in a third term: «It is the face-to-face situation of a relationship without intermediary, without mediation»(95).
I now reach the second step of my presentation: the debate with Heidegger in Totality and Infinity. As I said, the first section of the book outlines the basic concepts and principles of the entire investigation carried out in that work.
The title of the section is Le Même et l'Autre, The Same and Self/ and the Other.
The section is divided into three parts:
A. Metaphysics and Transcendence
B. Separation and Discourse
C. Truth and Justice
In each of these subtitles there is at least one word which also belongs to Heidegger's language and which designates a key topic of Being and Time. Consequently we may surmise that in each section a debate with Heidegger is at stake.
A. Right at the beginning of subsection A,
Levinas quotes a verse of Rimbaud: «The true life is absent» and he
adds the following: «But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and
persists in that alibi. It is turned towards the 'elsewhere',
the 'otherwise', and the 'other'». This metaphorical introduction
is meant to provide the most general characterization of metaphysics
in the history of thought. Metaphysics is a movement from a
condition of being at home with oneself in the world towards an outside
of oneself.
To that extent metaphysics, before being a doctrine, is a desire for the
other, as Plato has already acknowledged. But traditionally the desire
for the other pervading metaphysics was taken to be a desire for another
home. In other words being at home was at the beginning of the
metaphysical movement and at the end as well. Accordingly the
metaphysical movement was like an Odyssey, a circular movement
longing for a return on a higher level supposedly offered to a view,
thanks to which the desiring metaphysician, i.e. the human being as such,
truly becomes itself. So understood the metaphysical desire is aiming
to a full visibility through which thought reaches an achievement.
Levinas fully agrees with the notion of a metaphysical desire as a desire for the other but he fully disagrees with the supposed accomplishment and satisfaction of that desire in a final visibility. Metaphysics, he says, is désir de l'invisible. The other is not at all offered to a vision of the Self. It is desired as invisible.
Hence the meaning of the word transcendence in Levinas use of it. Since the metaphysical desire aims to the otherness of the other without possible satisfaction or fulfillment in an ultimate vision, the movement of such desire is transcendence. The word designates an elevation. It is a «transascendance»(35), Levinas says. Transascendance is a relation between myself and the absolute exteriority of the other which is such that the Self and the Other cannot be part of a visible totality in which their relation would be symmetrical and reversible. In other words, transascendance is a «breach of totality»(35).
Upon close inspection it appears that a confrontation with Heidegger is involved in that characterization of metaphysics and of transcendence. The confrontation is, so to speak, condensed in Levinas' strong formula: «Metaphysics precedes ontology». Metaphysics has precedence over ontology. By contrast, Heidegger claims that metaphysics accomplishes itself in ontology, that is in the vision attainable by the human Dasein of what it means to be. The Greek word for vision is theoria. Heidegger again and again insists in Being and Time on the precedence of the bios theoretikos, contemplation as the highest way of life.
In Levinas' analysis the trouble with theoria is that it does not fit with metaphysical desire because it does not respect the alterity of the other. To be sure it claims to let what it contemplates manifest itself for its own sake but since its contemplation is a matter of understanding it always renounces the marvel of exteriority by absorbing the other into the Self thanks to a third term that the knowing subject finds in itself. So does Heidegger's ontology by finding the key to the meaning of Being in my own temporality. The primacy of the question of Being in Heidegger's thought leads to a self-sufficiency, to egoism. Metaphysical desire as understood by Heidegger is a desire to be properly myself to the detriment of the Other. Ontology is an Egology.
This is what confirms Heidegger's notion of transcendence. Transcendence in Being and Time is not a movement of elevation towards the other but a movement through which the individual Dasein, by overcoming what is not properly its own, elevates itself to an insight into what is exclusively its own, its ownmost possibility, the possibility of its own death. Dasein becomes authentic by confronting its own mortality. Transcendence in Heidegger's sense is essentially a return to the Selfhood of the Self. It is a totalization.
According to Levinas there is only one way for transcendence to avoid that totalization, to be a breach of totality: it is by being ethical, by acknowledging the primacy of the Other over the Self.
To say that Metaphysics precedes ontology amounts to claim that Ethics precedes ontology, whereas in Heidegger ontology precedes ethics. Levinas used to quote repeatedly Plato's famous formula: to agathon epekeina tès ousias and to translate it into: the Good is beyond Being. It is significant that Heidegger also used to quote repeatedly the same formula but to deprive the motto of an essentially ethical connotation by reading it as meaning Being is beyond beings. In other words what is at stake in Plato's formula for Heidegger is merely my elevation towards my ownmost possibility, not at all my elevation to the height of the Other.
Or to put it differently, what is at stake in Plato's formula according to Heidegger is my ability to attain freedom by overcoming by myself what is not properly my own, my attachment to beings other than myself and even my attachment to myself as a being given among other beings. This is what Levinas criticizes when he writes about Heidegger: «The relation to Being which operates as ontology neutralizes beings in order to understand them. Hence it is not a relation to the other qua other, but a reduction of the other to the sameness of the Self. Such is the definition of freedom: to maintain oneself against the other, in spite of all relation with the other, to ensure the autarchy of the Ego. Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power»(36-37, texte fr.). By contrast, what is at stake in Plato's motto according to Levinas is the putting into question of my power by the ethical command coming from the other; in other words, it is not the increasement of my spontaneity but the investiture of my freedom by the other, the justification of my freedom by the other.
B. Let me consider now the second division of Totality and Infinity, which bears the
title: Separation and Discourse. The French word «discours» used
by Levinas and correctly translated into discourse, is the equivalent
of the German word Rede which plays an important role in
Being and Time's analytic of Dasein. According to Heidegger, discourse is an
existential, i.e. an ontological basic characteristic of
existence. That is the way Heidegger retrieves Aristotle's definition
of the human being as zoon logon echon, as a living being who
has the gift of speaking.
In his peculiar reappropriation of Aristotle's notion of logos, Heidegger contends that discourse is essentially apophantic, which means that it reveals something, it discloses what it talks about; the topic of discourse is a theme made visible to the speaker and to his listeners thanks to words which bestow a determination, a form to what is talked about. Hence speaking is primarily speaking about something, and listening to a speaker is primarily gaining access to the visibility of a subject-matter about which listener and speaker can agree.
It is to be noticed that according to this reading of the Greek logos, discourse does not address itself to someone invoked but to a theme that one evokes and about which one discusses. It is no less remarkable that, according to this reappropriation within an ontological framework, discourse is the mediator of a vision of beings and more deeply a vision of the meaning of Being. Indeed in Being and Time vision operates at two levels: the level of everydayness on which we see the meaning of entities around us according to our usual concern, and the level of authenticity in which discourse reaches its accomplishment in the silent call that my Dasein gives to itself in order to take up its ownmost possibility: mortality. Consequently discourse in its essence is not only a monologue but a mere preamble to a transparent sight of oneself by oneself.
The very title chosen by Levinas for the introduction to his notion of discourse is extremely significant of a contrast with Heidegger's characterization of discourse. The title suggests that discourse occurs and is made possible by a situation of separation between the Self and the Other. Whereas discourse in Heidegger's sense is made possible by the ability for the Self to have access to the Other, i.e. for the speaker - either individually or in community - to render the world visible and to seize it as a subject-matter offered to a view.
The primary situation of discourse in Levinas sense is a separation between myself and the other human being, a face-to-face situation. Speaking is primordially speaking to someone else.
Instead, in Heidegger's notion of it, speaking is primordially speaking about entities, about beings, either with oneself or with a member of the same speaking community.
Let's consider Levinas' description of separation. In the separation involved there are two terms: the Self and the Other. As such the Self, i.e. the ego is selfish. Its mode of being is economic, searching satisfaction of needs, enjoying what is offered to it, considering what surrounds it as a supply corresponding to its own demand. Moreover the Self is autonomous and even autarchic; imposing its own law, enlarging its rule. As such the selfhood is a totalization, it includes everything in its realm, asserts an absolute independence, and thoroughly ignores the Other. But there are two terms. The Other breaks the Totality of the Self by overflowing absolutely the capacities that the Self a priori contains. Coming face-to-face vis-à-vis the Self, the Other is an Infinity installing in the Self a desire which is in no way a need to be satisfied, because it is submitted to an appeal, a call, an interpellation which again and again puts the Self into question instead of providing an answer to its wishes.
This situation of separation between the Totality of the Self and the Infinity of the Other is the birthplace of discourse.
What is primordial in discourse is the interpellation of the Self by the Other. Such interpellation is not at all the offering by the Other of a meaning for which I find in myself a key. It is not the disclosure of a theme corresponding to my disclosing project.
Against Heidegger, Levinas insists that invocation, this «saying to the other ... precedes ontology.» It also precedes all disclosing for the way in which the other presents itself, the face of the other «does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze». As Levinas writes, the face of the other «at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me with». Instead expressing a theme, the face of the other manifests itself kat auto, as such, absolutely, «it expresses itself», period. And it is of course Heidegger whom Levinas has in mind when he writes: «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»(51). Or: «The absolute experience is not unconcealment but revelation: coincidence of the expressed and the one who is expressing».
Unconcealment, dévoilement, these words translate a key word in Being and Time: Unverborgenheit which is Heidegger's translation of the Greek word for truth: aletheia.
C. We thus reach the topic of the third division of the
first section of Totality and Infinity. Indeed the title of the third division
is Vérité et Justice, Truth and Justice.
This subtitle, by introducing a link between truth and justice right away suggests once again a debate with Heidegger. Indeed the issue of truth as disclosedness is everywhere at stake in Being and Time but justice is nowhere mentioned in the book. The word justice does not even appear in the very careful index of the English translation.
Moreover when Heidegger in the wake of Being and Time devoted an essay to defining the essence of truth, the link he focused upon was not Truth and Justice, but Truth and Freedom, by which he meant the resoluteness by which Dasein faces its ownmost Selfhood: being towards death.
Let me pay attention to the first subdivision in Levinas' study of the link between Truth and Justice. The title of that first subdivision is significant enough: « Freedom called into question».
The phrasing could fit with Heidegger's problematic if, but only if, it meant that Dasein's resoluteness in the confrontation with its own mortality is able again and again to put itself into question by reversing the everyday tendency to fall away from authenticity and to pay more attention to ordinary preoccupations than to its authentic selfhood. But it is precisely not what is meant by Levinas' phrase. On the contrary, for Levinas, the freedom of the Self is unable on its own to call itself into question: it is called into question by the Other. That calling into question occurs in the face-to-face with the Other, a face-to-face which is at the foundation of justice. Indeed the primordial meaning of justice is what Levinas calls: la «droiture de l'accueil fait au visage», the «uprightness of the welcome made to the face»(82).
The calling into question of my freedom by the Other depends on my subordination to the Infinity of the Other who «presents himself as interlocutor, as him on whom I am not allowed to have power, whom I am not allowed to kill», thereby conditioning «this shame where, qua I, I am not innocent spontaneity but usurper and murderer»(84). Hence «it is the welcome of the Other, the commencement of moral consciousness, which calls in question my freedom»(ib.), entails the awareness that my spontaneity is of itself arbitrary and that only the Other can invest or justify my freedom.
In this context, Levinas writes, in a clear allusion to the existentialism of Heidegger (and Sartre): «Existence is not in reality condemned to freedom, but is invested as freedom. Freedom is not bare. To philosophize is to trace freedom back to what lies before it, to disclose the investiture that liberates freedom from the arbitrary»(84-85).
But beyond the allusion we do find in this context an explicit objection to Heidegger. Indeed Levinas writes: «We therefore are ... radically opposed to Heidegger who subordinates the relation with the Other to ontology (which moreover he determines as though the relation with the interlocutor and the Master could be reduced to it) rather than seeing in justice and injustice a primordial access to the Other beyond all ontology»(89). What is primordial in Heidegger's ontology is the relation of the Selfhood of Dasein to Being; and the other is there taken into consideration marginally with respect to the ontological relation in such a way that the ethical is either ontologicized or reduced to the ontic. By contrast, what is primordial for Levinas is not ontological but ethical. Justice, not Being, is the origin of truth. Truth presupposes Justice.
Allow me to focus briefly on the points in Levinas' argument which obviously target Heidegger.
There is, according to Levinas, a traditional conception of truth that Heidegger does not overcome in spite of all his deconstruction of truth as adequacy and his attempt to define truth in terms of unconcealment. That traditional conception refers truth to an ultimate spectator characterized as a solitary Ego. Whatever the differences between the Cartesian Cogito and the Heideggerian Dasein, between the universal doubt and the epokhè of everydayness, in both cases solipsism is part of the definition of the core of the problematic. But Levinas discovers in the negativity of the Cartesian doubt a lesson he doesn't find in the negativity of Heidegger's transcendence. He insists that Descartes «possesses the idea of infinity, and can gauge in advance the return of affirmation behind the negation. But to possess the idea of infinity is to have already welcomed the Other»(93). There is no trace of that welcoming in Heidegger's analytic of Dasein. Whereas Descartes puts the infinity of the Other at the very foundation of the appearing of the world, that appearing such as it is described by Heidegger depends exclusively on the disclosing project of the Self and his solitary logos. By contrast, Levinas writes this: «The world is offered in the language of the Other; it is borne by proposition. The Other is the principle of phenomena»(92).
Here hermeneutics reappears but as an hermeneutics which radically breaks with the totalizing circle of selfhood in which it is imprisoned by Heidegger. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that what appears to me in the world appears as meaningful but he insists that Heidegger's description of the two levels of disclosure of meaning - everyday concern and being-towards-death - fails to recognize that in both cases the relation with the Other is essential to the opening of meaning. By claiming with respect to the first level that the mere appearing is only the residue of a practical proposiveness which is the root of meanings, Heidegger turns objectivity into a mere effect of a project of power which is mine. To this Levinas objects: «Objectivity is not what remains of an implement or a food when separated from the world in which their being comes into play. It is posited in a conversation (an ëntretien") which proposes the world. This proposition is held between two points which do not constitute a system, a cosmos, a totality»(96). As to the second level, Heidegger is obviously the target of the following statement: «Qua practical, signification refers ultimately to the being that exists in view of this very existence. It is thus derived from a term that is of itself an end.... The process from which beings would derive their meaning would not only in fact be finite, but as finality it would by essence consist in proceeding to a term, in coming to an end». This is a fair picture of Heidegger's phenomenology of meaning. But Levinas objects forcefully to that conception when he writes: «But the outcome is the point at which every signification is precisely lost»(94). Indeed that point in Heidegger's description results in the loss of every signification, inasmuch as it is a point of solitary and silent vision of one's own nothingness, a vision from which the Other is entirely excluded, and which is the culmination of Selfhood or Sameness.
To that Levinas objects that «Signification or intelligibility does not arise from the identity of the same which remains in himself, but from the face of the Other who calls upon the same»(96-97).
Whereas in Heidegger the signified refers to a signifier which is my ownmost possibility, the signified in Levinas refers to a signifier which is the Other. Whereas in Heidegger signification is maintained only thanks to an hermeneutic circle which ultimately is the circle of a selfish Dasein existing for the sake of itself, in Levinas, by contrast, «signification is maintained only in the breach of the ultimate unity of the satisfied being»(95).
I thus reach the concluding stage of my presentation.
What is the impact of the principles I have recalled on the level of the concrete descriptions? Is the debate with Heidegger also present on that level?
Yes indeed.
The evidence of the debate on that level is provided by many analyses. Allow me to focus briefly on only one of them which is obviously conceived by Levinas as a reply to an analysis which is at the core of the problematic of Heidegger's fundamental ontology: the relation to death.
It strikes me to observe how much in its very phrasing Levinas' analysis is the exact opposite of Heidegger's description.
First sign of opposition: Whereas Heidegger claims that it is in the anticipation of his own death that Dasein is able to confront his projective essence by turning the possibility of his impossibility into his ownmost potentiality, Levinas already in Time and the Other insists that «what is important in the proximity of death, is that at a certain moment, nous ne pouvons plus pouvoir, we no longer have the power to...». Death, he says, is «the impossibility to have a project»(T. A. 62).
Second sign of opposition: Precisely because Heidegger considers death with respect to the possibility which constitutes the Dasein, he carefully avoids to consider it as an event. By contrast Levinas insists that death is an event, more specifically an event to which no apriori could correspond in myself, hence an event which occurs to me beyond the order of any potentiality. He writes: «My death comes from an instant upon which I can in no way exercise my power»(234).
Third sign of opposition: Whereas Heidegger claims that the anticipation of his own death renders Dasein transparent ("durchsichtig") to himself and offers him a clear insight into his ontological condition, Levinas conversely insists that «Death is a menace that approaches me as a mystery; its secrecy determines it - it approaches without being assumed...»(235).
Last sign of opposition: In Heidegger, death understood as the basic existential is assumed in an awareness which is essentially solitary and non relational (unbezüglich). Levinas, by contrast to Heidegger's analysis of anxiety in those terms does not hesitate to state that the menace of death «comes to me from an absolute alterity»(ibid.). Which means that instead of erasing all relation to the other, death shows what Levinas calls «a reference to an interpersonal order»(234). He writes accordingly: «The solitude of death does not make the Other vanish, but remains in a consciousness of hostility, and consequently still renders possible an appeal to the Other, to his friendship and his medication... Death approaches in the fear of someone, and hopes in someone»(234). Or, as he said in Time and the Other: «my loneliness is not confirmed by death but broken by death»(63).
All this demonstrates that about a topic which is approached by Heidegger with respect to selfhood only and in terms of a totalizing project of the Same, Levinas detects signs of a breach of that Totality thanks to the Infinity which constitutes the otherness of the Other.