From the Impersonal to the Personal:

The Radical Journey of Emmanuel Levinas

H. Evrim Bayndr

Supervisor: Assistant Professor zge Ejder Johnson



MA Thesis
Yeditepe University
2010








Contents:


Abstract:1
zet:..2
Introduction:..3
Chapter 1: Levinass Main Steps
A. Husserl and the Criticism of Intentionality:10
B. Heideggers Articulation of the Phenomenological Method:.17
C. Towards The Impersonal Experience:....23
D. The Problem of Escape: Enjoyment, There is and Hypostasis:..28
Chapter 2: The Personal Dimension
A. Identity, Narcissus and the Other:...39
B. The Role of the Face:..47
C. The Idea of Affirmation in Levinass Work.......55

Conclusion:.63
Bibliography:..69




1






Abstract:



In this thesis, Emmanuel Levinass work will be read with regard to some of the
consequences caused by a new manner of philosophizing that he stated as the movement
without return. According to Levinas, this movement goes beyond the boundaries of the
traditional understanding that conceives ontology as first philosophy. Such an attitude
demands for a substitution of ontology with ethics. In order to elaborate the meaning of this
substitution and the way a radical separation from ontology and Being is offered, the logic
that operates Levinass criticism of the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger will be
touched upon. In the light of this reading, I will then try to show that, through the transitions
between the personal and the impersonal, a profound idea of an affirmation is harbored in
Levinass work.

Key Words: There is, enjoyment, trace, the Other, affirmation.


2







zet:



Bu tezde, Emmanuel Levinasn yapt, geri dn olmayan hareket olarak ifade etmi
olduu yeni bir felsefe yapma tarznn dourduu olduu kimi sonular bakmndan
okunacak. Levinass gore, bu hareket, ontolojiyi ilk felsefe olarak kavrayan geleneksel
anlayn snrlarnn dna kar. Bylesi bir tutum, ontolojinin etikle yer deitirilmesini
talep eder. Sz konusu yer deitirmenin anlam ile Ontoloji ve Varlktan yaplan radikal
ayrln ne ekilde nerildiini ayrntlandrmak iin, Levinasn Martin Heideggerin
fundamental ontolojisine dnk eletirisini ileyie sokan manta deinilecek. Daha
sonra, bu okumann nda, kiisel ve kiisiz olan arasndaki geililikler vastasyla,
Levinasn yaptnda bir olumlama fikrinin tand gsterilmeye allacak.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Var, keyif alma, iz, Baka, olumlama.



3

Introduction









Contrasted with the dignity of philosophers in giving an exact definition to philosophy
especially that of Kants argument that we cannot learn philosophy but can learn how to
philosophize and the disturbingly ongoing philosophical importance of this question,
Levinas is much more cool-headed and clear to offer an answer: Action recuperated in
advance in the light that should guide it.
1
However, the apparent simplicity and certainty of
the answer, this very moment announces a paradox too. If an act is already accomplished,
how could it be taken back before it is done? There is for sure an excessive and anti-logical
use of the terms before and after here. Yet the action recuperated in advance that Levinas
speaks of, is nothing similar to Heideggers notion of presupposition conversely it finds its
profound meaning in his attack to the fundamental ontology that will take place in his
texts as the appearance of the highest level of this self-deceiving journey: It occurs under the
light of the everlasting terms of Greek philosophy which, whether in German, French or
English languages we are speaking, turns them into a way of speaking in Greek again. This
light that is shown by Heidegger in the etymology and the very essence of the word

1
Emmanuel Levinas, Deconstruction in Context, The Trace of the Other, Edited by Mark C. Taylor, The
University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 347.
4

phainomenon
2
, is itself the source of a secure world in which the possibility of any act in
its radical sense is overthrown.
Following the definition Levinas offered for philosophy, we will read his work as a
journey regardless of whether he already had in mind his substantial problems at the very
beginning of his work or not starting from the desire aiming at the things themselves and
finally, after a certain stage, arriving at a completely different attitude other than that of
phenomenology, an attitude which fundamentally leaves the conventional intention to take
ontology as first philosophy since Aristotle.
So how can it be possible to accomplish an act that does not present itself as the very
withdrawal of itself? Once a whole history of philosophy is criticized for staying within the
borders of this deceiving journey, a rupture and a radical change is demanded from
philosophy in order to give an account of its challenge. This change and the rupture, as will
be shown later, becomes possible only after a new terminology that gives way to an ethical
manner of thinking is introduced to the philosophical discourse. However, this ethical way
of thinking does not mean that a certain theory of ethics is proposed or any moral judgments
are made. What is important for Levinas is to search for the meaning of ethics.
In this thesis, we will focus on Levinass rupture with respect to two decisive terms
which are the personal and the impersonal. They are indispensible in the project of
leaving the terminology of ontology. One reason that makes these terms decisive is that they
both allow us to speak of the circularity of the act of philosophers in a non-ontological
way and be critical about it: To state the fundamental character of the history of philosophy
as the act that is previously taken back, is to accuse it for exercising the violence and
hegemony of the impersonal over the personal. All the problems concerning transcendence
and immanence, the relation between the universal and the particular, the substantiality of

2
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell Publishers, 2001,
p. 49.
5

things, the subject-object distinction, the everlasting struggle between realism and idealism
and the idea of the ontological difference which approaches to Being with respect to our
forgetting of it, are, for Levinas, ways of affirming the impersonalization of thought. In
them, at the end of the day, there is nothing radical because the laws of the home we stay in
are obeyed and the journey of thinking, either this or that way, is experienced as the inner
circularity of Being. This is the experience of what was already given, of that which shows
itself both as the starting and the ending point.
According to such a criticism, Being is understood as the area in which nothing
personal can escape or survive. The verb is serves as the ground that equalizes and puts into
a spontaneity anything that rests upon it. So in order for Levinass philosophy to be
consistent in itself and be loyal to the definition it proposed for philosophy and so either to
approach to the borders of a non-philosophy or to philosophize in a completely different
way, has to resist the attack of the impersonal that is performed by the ontological mode of
thinking.
On the other hand, when the experience of there is is concerned, the term
impersonal will have a rather positive connotation too. But still, this will not mean that a
certain ontological argument is offered. What will be at stake is the change in our
relationship with Being when ethics is taken as first philosophy. So the term impersonal
will both serve as a means for criticizing the history of ontology and a tool for a new way of
speaking of the world when the personal order of a non-ontological philosophy is taken into
account.
For Levinas, the structure of the text should be in accordance with the excess of the
move that is able to leave its origin, namely its starting point. The philosophical work itself
should be a departure without return and it shouldnt require the gratitude of that which
6

it goes to.
3
Such cannot be accomplished with the intention of constructing a text that
already knows where to go and follows Socratess statement that every lesson introduced
into the soul was already in it.
4
A text that does not try to find an association with or an
acceptance from its goal and absolutely does not know where and how to go: This is what
one should look for and we must not forget that for Levinas, social relationship and the
ethical dimension it implies is prior to any questioning of being as being. Thus we can argue
that Levinas has the awareness that no philosophical text can ever be isolated from being in a
dialogue with someone. This dialogue is not the dialogue of the soul with itself that Plato
mentioned.
5
Besides it doesnt signify a relationship of reciprocity, symmetry, togetherness
or union. The movement that breaks the circularity of the self-dialogue demands from the
philosopher the courage to take the step which is now understood as the encounter with the
another person. If this encounter is not going to be a way of reducing the otherness of the
person addressed, then the whole effort of the philosophical work is determined as belonging
to the realm of ethics. At that rate, what is stated as an ontological argument is considered as
a certain unconcern for the unpreventable ethical situation wherein the text finds itself.
What gives the text the chance to resist the invasion of the impersonal is nothing but
this attempt to turn thinking into a way of welcome. This does not come from the individual
effort of the philosopher in his loneliness, for he is at this stage already deaf to the word
coming from the personal dimension of ethics. According to Levinas, the identification and
the loneliness of subject is itself the source of this anonymous region where anything
personal is removed. So if a text does not simply proceed to discover and make
comprehensible the regions where it does not know, but takes into account the possibility of
a word coming from outside, from where all the categories and distinctions belonging to

3
The Trace of the Other, p. 349.
4
Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987,
Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity, p. 49.
5
Ibid, p. 49.
7

being are overcome, then it may find the chance to take the step that manages to leave its
starting point.
Throughout the thesis, we will try to show the deterministic stages of Levinass
thought so that we can see how the shift from the impersonal to the personal takes place. In
this regard, it is meaningful that Levinass early works are more concentrated on the
analyses of the existential experiences. This at the same time shows that there is a
mutualness between the thematic progress of his work and the very idea of overcoming the
impersonalization of thinking that characterizes the western philosophy.
In order to give a description of this progress, we will first explain Levinass account
of Edmund Husserl for it plays a decisive role in criticizing the intentional method of
phenomenology. According to Levinas, Husserls intentional method, in the final analysis,
imprisons the subject within the borders of the spontaneity that reduces what is intended to
the act of intentionality. In that sense, phenomenology becomes a way of rearticulating the
deceptive act of philosophy. The role of this criticism keeps its importance until the end of
Levinass philosophical career.
On the other hand, it was Martin Heidegger who played the most determining part in
Levinass work; so a large amount of our thesis will focus on the relationship between these
two philosophers. Heideggers fundemantal ontology is considered by Levinas as one of
the most important innovations in the history of philosophy because it introduces the idea of
the ontological difference. At the same time, Heideggers philosophy represents the most
improved version of ontology: In it, Levinas finds both the most fruitful source for thinking
of the ethical difference and one of the most dangerous moments in the history of
philosophy: As Heideggers success in avoiding to reduce the difference grows, the
unconcern of ontology towards the Other becomes even more indifferent. For Levinas,
8

Heideggers Being stays as the logos that is the word of no one.
6
But the reason for this is
not that Heidegger offered a certain misconception of Being; it rather finds its source from
the very essence of Being; a philosophy of being would never be able to avoid stating the
impersonality as the basic feature of logos. In that sense, there is a very strict reciprocity
between Levinass struggle with the impersonalization of thought and his criticism towards
Heidegger.
We will later discuss Heideggers use of the terms phenomenon, semblance and
appearance in the Introduction of Being and Time; this will help us to show why these terms
fail to grasp the movement without return that Levinas aims to achieve. After this, we will
explain how the desire to go to the things themselves carries Levinas to think of a Being
without beings. This Being which in Heidegger always thought of as being in a relationship
of belongingness with beings, will now be considered as alone. The Heideggerian distinction
will be left for a seperation between these two terms. By doing this, Levinas will reach to a
completely new way of using the expression there is which signifies an existence without
existents and which serves as the basis on which a subject is going to emerge. From now on,
the subject will be defined in its relation to the need to escape from the horrible experience
of there is. On the other hand, the second aspect of the escape will be enjoyment and
ecstacy. This terms, in Levinass descriptions, do not mean an ontological mood but a way
of putting a distance between the I and the self which are taken as the two elements of the
identification of the subject. Through enjoyment, a subject both flees from the weight of
being and also secures his identification.
In order to understand more clearly Levinass argument on the domination of identity
and its relationship with the impersonalization of thought, we will later discuss Heideggers
book Identity and Difference in which he tries to show the mediation taking place within the

6
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, Trans. Aplhonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, 1998, p. 299
9

formula of identity which is A is A. This will be necessary for us to elaborate the function of
identity and to see why Levinas wants to move away from the interiority it insists. By doing
so, our aim is going to be to understand the function of Levinass concept of the trace which
is neither a phenomenon nor a semblance or appearance and which cannot be explained in
terms of closure and disclosure for it already opens the subject to the Other and to eternity
that are beyond all these distinctions. This trace for Levinas is the face and in the midst of
this world of sensibility, with all its visionary features, serves as a means to break the
domination of Being and visits this world without being reduced to its categories and
without being revealed. Thus the search for truth takes a completely new form which forces
us to leave the questioning of Being. This seperation is not simply a new stage in our path,
but the very opportunity to get in touch with the meaning of Levinass desire to attain the
radical act that the philosophers have overlooked. However, we should again note that this is
not for going for an other questioning that may turn out treating the Other as if it is another
articulation of Being.











10

Chapter 1:
Levinass Main Steps









A. Husserl and the Criticism of Intentionality


Although Levinas began his philosophical career as a phenomenlogist, he announces in the
very early 1948 book titled Time and the Other that, as long as phenomenology is considered
as a radical method of experience, he took part out of phenomenology when he investigates
the concept of hypostasis which deals with the passage from existing to the existent
7
(what
Levinas understands of an experience of existing or existence is first of all an impersonal
one and it takes place totally out of the subject. Thus to employ the word experience here
would simply be a misuse of the term). In addition to this, only one year before Time and the
Other, just in the second paragraph of Existence and Existents, he indicates that an attempt
to think of Being or a being in general separated from the beings is already alien to the
phenomenological method that considers the contract of beings with Being always in

7
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, Trans. Richard A. Cohen, Duquesne University Press, 2003, p. 54.
11

relation to instantaneity:

A being has already made a contract with Being; it cannot be isolated from it. It is.
It already exercises over Being the domination a subject exercises over its attributes.
It exercises it in an instant, which phenomenological analysis takes as something that
cannot be decomposed.
8



Yet it is not our purpose to approach Levinas with regard to a rupture from phenomenology,
or the meaning of a possible return of phenomenology even after it is overcome, but there is
a need to elaborate his account of Husserl and his departure from and criticism against the
intentional method.
In the preface of Totality and Infinity, Levinas very shortly summarizes how he
understands the main argument and concern of Husserls phenomenology:

Intentional analysis is the search for the concrete. Notions held under the direct gaze of the
thought that defines them are nevertheless, unbeknown to this nave thought, revealed to be
implanted in horizons unsuspected by this thought; these horizons endow them with a
meaning such is the essential teaching of Husserl.
9



Philosophizing with respect to these unsuspected dimensions which are taken as the
phenomena of phenomenology and which are to be revealed through a phenomenological
reduction that leaves the natural attitude or the nave approach of sciences is what
phenomenology aims at. Such a perspective, while offering a ground for all other sciences
and having the assertion of being a rigorous science, also goes into the profoundness of the
intentional life which give meaning (Sinngebung) to the nave experience of the world.

8
Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, p. 17.
9
Totality and Infinity, p. 28.
12

Intentionality, in its irreducibility, stripped of all relations of, such as, sign to signified,
whole to part etc., makes us realize that the objective finds its roots in its intentional birth in
consciousness.
10
This does not mean that the objective is merely subjective; the intentional
method keeps the transcendence of the objective within the condition of a consciousness
which is always the consciousness of this objective. As is well known, Husserl says that,
after the phenomenological reduction, we come up with the pure consciousness in its own
absolute being which constitues all worldly transcendencies.
11
Thus what really exists
for Husserl is not the objective, the noema, but the noesis, namely the acts of consciousness.
The phenomena of phenomenology show themselves in the intentions.
12

We should keep in mind that Levinass philosophical project has always been in
search of a thought that is distinctively separated from any anonymous and impersonal
understanding of it. This is probably the main and everlasting theme for him. The
decomposition of Being from beings which phenomenology cannot achieve and which ends
with the arrival of there is that is the very impersonality of Being, should be considered as an
intermediate (and necessary) stage before an ethical philosophy dealing with the otherwise
than being is developed. At this point, Husserls criticism of the ninteenth-century
psychologism which Levinas also strictly opposes to for reducing I to a thinking that is not
the thinking of an I to anonymous thinking gains a decisive importance in his struggle
against the impersonalization of thought. By avoiding such reductions, Husserls
phenomenological reduction leaves behind the pure I that is defined in a paradoxical way
as transcendent in immanence
13
that Levinas likes to emphasize. According to Levinas,
this is one of the exceptional moments in the history of philosophy that thinking somehow
had a contact with what is beyond Being. The intrusion of paradoxes are the signs of this

10
Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, Trans. Michael B. Smith, Standford University Press, 1993, p. 153.
11
Edmund Husserl, Ideas I, Trans. F. Kersten, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983, p. 113.
12
Outside the subject, p. 155.
13
Outside the Subject, p. 151.
13

excessive attitude throwing us to the borders of ontology. In Otherwise than Being or
Beyond Essence, Levinas writes:

The history of philosophy, during some flashes, has known this subjectivity that, as
in an extreme youth, breaks with essence. From Platos One without being to
Husserls pure Ego, transcendent in immanence, it has known this metaphysical
extraction from being, even if, betrayed by the said, as the effect of an oracle, the
exception restored to the essence and to fate immediately fell back into the rules and
led only to worlds behind the scenes. The Nietzschean man above all was such a
moment. For Husserls transcendental reduction will a putting between parantheses
suffice a type of writing, of committing oneself with a world, which sticks like ink
to the hands that push it off?
14



The ink we use to bracket the nave presuppostion that a world exists in itself and that there
is a reality in itself, may already have sticked to our hands. This, on the one hand, while
dissolving the subject into the world it constitutes and opens the possibility of a fundamental
ontology in the Heideggerian sense (which Levinas in many respects supports against
Husserl), it is also the very possibility of a phenomenological reduction and a type of
writing, an excessive type that finds its possibility in its impossibility. Such an
interpretation does not seek for the possibility of a full and exact reduction, but tries to see
what can be the meaning of this extravagance from a wider angle. At this point, Levinas
definitely is on the side of Derridas criticism of Husserl and his deconstructive method.
There he finds a poetic writing that not simply interprets a text but with a new frisson and a
literary effect, deconstructs all the conditions that makes a text possible through



14
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being and Beyond Essence, Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University
Press, 1998, p. 8.
14

an inversion of limiting concept into precondition, of defect into source, of abyss into
condition, of discourse into locus [lieu], and the inversion of these inversions into destiny:
the concepts having been stripped of their ontic resonance, freed from the alternative of true
or false. At the outset, everything is in place; after a few pages or paragraphs of formidable
calling into question, nothing is left inhabitable for thought.
15



And nothing is left inhabitable for intentionality too. Such a text leaves no place for a subject
looking for the things themselves and their openinig to consciousness. This for sure is not a
mere negation of the world but a continuing inversion of inversions until a destiny shows
itself by carrying us away from the hegemony of the subject and logocentricism. The destiny
implies the passivity of the subject. A stage where all projections and masteries become
powerless. There subject leaves itself to the tragic flow of thinking to the degree that
nothing is left inhabitable for thought and so the process of inversions not only will strip
off the concepts from their ontic resonance, but as we will later discuss in detail, will also
carry the subject to the border between there is and the Other.
So for Levinas, in the final analyses, however innovatively Husserls analyses of
intentionality may go down into the depths of the contradictions arising from the reduction
of transcendence into immanence and experiences the metaphysical extraction of extreme
youth, it still suffers from not being able to think a movement beyond intentionality and the
meaning of phenomenological reduction from an even broader context. Here Levinas argues
that intentionality is not the ultimate spritual relation.
16
The relationship that subject
maintains with the Other should not be intentional in Husserlian sense.
Husserls concept of Sinngebung is particularly important when we consider
Levinass criticism, for he refers the same term in his analysis of face through a totally

15
Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, Trans. Michael B. Smith, Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 56.
16
Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert
Bernasconi, Transcendence and Height, Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 22.
15

different approach:


The first instance of signification is produced in the face. Not that face would receive a
signification by relation to something. The face signifies by itself; its signification precedes
Sinngebung. A meaningful behaviour arises already in its light; it spreads the light in which
light is seen. One does not have to explain it, for every explanation begins with it.
17



For Levinas, the visitation of the face into the world, breaks the egoistic world of subject and
interrupts its intentionality. A phenomenology of face is not possible because face is not a
phenomenon but an enigma. The shift from natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude
is alien to face to face relationship where the questioning of things themselves is now out of
concern. In Time and the Other, Levinas surprisingly says that in turning on a bathroom
switch we open up the entire ontological problem.
18
In such a daily experience, what we
have is light and the objects that we intend to under the condition of light; and there is also a
subject who turns on the light and comes into a specific relation with the source of the light.
Ontology and / or to exist ontologically is as simple and easy as that. But there is also an
extravagance in this simplicity; it is too simple; a simplicity that is seated at such a degree
that while making my daily life be ruled by a navety, it immediately calls us to the
investigation of what is beyond it and opens to the endless contradictions caused by the path
going to the things themselves the depth of phenomenon is hidden and possible under the
simplicity of Husserls dictum. However, the ephiphany of face is antacedent to these sense-
giving structure of intentions. But its priority neither signfies a hierarchical order, nor
anything ultimate.
We should, for a last word, also mention that the two crucial concepts of Levinas, the

17
Totality and Infinity, p. 261.
18
Time and the Other, p. 62-63.
16

Same and the Other, which will be dealt with in the proceeding chapters, as Simon Critchley
pointed out, take part in Husserl in a way that Levinas strictly opposes to. As far as the
concept of Same in Husserl indicates the subjective thoughts as it does to the objects of those
thoughts, it then includes both noeses and noemata. Critchley says:

So, the domain of the same maintains a relation with otherness, but it is a relation in which the
ego or consciousness reduces the distance between the same and the other, in which, as
Levinas puts it, their opposition fades.
19



















19
Cambridge Companion to Emmanuel Levinas, Simon Critchley, Introduction, Cambridge University Press,
2002, p. 15.
17

B. Heideggers Articulation of the Phenomenological Method


As is mentioned in the previous part, in Levinass work, Heideggers phenomenology is
supported against that of Husserl. But still, this doesnt change the fact that Heidegger is
taken by Levinas as the main target area in order for an ethical philosophy to be developed. A
large part of Levinass terms (such as there is, trace, face, enjoyment, the Other) is
constructed as a polemic against Heideggers own concepts. This part will give an explanation
of Heideggers Introduction to Being and Time so that we may later see the underlying
problems that causes the opposition between these two philosophers.
The role of phenomenology, as being the method of the investigation, is central to
Heideggers philosophy in the sense of philosophizing with respect to a fundamental
ontology. To explain this, it is necessary to show the way phenomenology is situated in
relation to the questioning of the meaning of Being that Heidegger takes to be the essential
issue of the book.
This questioning, along with being an issue for Being and Time, is the very issue of
Dasein too. Far from being an intellectual one, Daseins asking of this question is its mode
of Being.
20
The reason for Heidegger to consider the meaning of Being as the primary
problem of philosophy is strictly related to the fact that Daseins questioning of itself is
indispensible and is not due to any choice. This is also the point where Heidegger finds the
possibility to leave the concept of subject which, throughout the history of metaphysics, is
always understood not in relation to its Being but to the object it opposes to. Starting from
Husserl, phenomenology has the concern of overcoming the subject-object distinction and

20
Being and Time, p. 27.
18

going down its ground. So the task of Heideggers philosophy becomes a way of making
Dasein transparent in its own Being.
21

According to Heidegger, phenomenology and ontology reciprocally need each other in
order for the meaning of Being to be questioned properly. Ontology is concerned with Being
of beings and it aims to make them stand out in full relief.
22
At this point, the first thing
Heidegger mentions is that phenomenology comes into play as the method to be used for the
investigation that ontology goes for. That phenomenology is methodological implies that it is
not concerned with what of the objects of this investigation but how of the research.
23
By
stating this, Heidegger supports Husserls word to the things themselves as the formulation
of the methodological aspect of phenomenology. To take the investigation of things
themselves as the task of philosophy is not to choose and focus on a particular area of
research. Phenomenology (which is made of the words phenomenon and logos) literally
means science of phenomena
24
and although it has the same structure we find in the terms
theology, sociology or biology, it does not stand among them as if it is a specific
branch of knowing. Here it is clear that Heidegger still follows Husserl and what he tries to
make explicit is that phenomenology does not investigate things as psychological,
sociological or physical phenomena or as they appear to us under certain categories or after
certain reductions which make possible for regional sciences to speak of the knowledge of
those areas. The aim of phenomenology is to be able to leave behind all the presuppositions of
these sciences.
Heidegger writes:


21
Ibid, p. 27.
22
Ibid, p. 49.
23
Ibid, p. 50.
24
Ibid, p. 50.
19

[Phenomenology] is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is
opposed to taking over any conceptions which only seem to have been demonstrated; it is
opposed to those pseudo-questions which parade themselves as problems, often for
generations at a time.
25



By fundamentally differentiating itself from these regional areas of research, Husserls word
expresses the underlying principle of any scientific knowledge.
26
However, the formulation
of phenomenology at the same time expresses a self-evidence too. As if, it is not self-
evident and close enough to us, Heidegger speaks of bringing closer this self-evidence. It
is only by insisting on this self-evidence that the free-floating constructions can be avoided.
By the expression free-floating constructions, Heidegger probably has in mind not simply a
particular philosopher like Leibniz or Hegel but a whole history of metaphysics that thinks
either in a realistic or an idealistic manner. To make things clear, Heidegger continues by
giving a description of the etymology of the term phenomenology.
In Heideggers description of the etymology of the word, the term phainomenon
comes from phainesthai which means to show itself. But the way this showing takes place
is nothing like an act happening between a subject and an object.
27
The word phainesthai has
the form of middle-voice which in Greek grammer serves as a means to express an act in
which a subject does something to itself. Heidegger also says that the word is derived from
phaino which means to bring to the light of day, to put in the light.
28
So the way for
phenomenon to show itself is to put itself into the light for itself to be seen. However, the
linguistic traps we are opposed to can from this very moment be seen. This light does not
simply refer to the openness of a space in which a thing becomes visible, for what we speak
of here is not an entity or a being, but the very Being or phenomenon of these beings. There is

25
Ibid, p. 50.
26
Ibid, p. 50.
27
Ibid, p. 51.
28
Ibid, p. 51.
20

not a surrounding enlightened space for the phenomenon to be put in, although language may
give that impression or make it sound that way. Phenomenon is itself this openness as we can
also see in the word a-letheia (which in Greek philosophy means truth but etymologically
dis-closure or un-hiddennes). It is its own openness and within that it shows itself. So
Heidegger says: phenomenon signifies that which shows itself in itself .
29
It neither shows
itself as another thing nor shows another thing instead of itself. It at the same time does not
need to stand on something other than itself in order to manifest itself. There is nothing
beyond it: Behind the phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else.
30

Even in a brief etymological description of the term, we can find the sources for the
justification of the concern of phenomenology to overcome the subject-object distinction.
But there is also a second way for phenomenon to show itself which Heidegger calls
as semblance. In semblance, phenomenon shows itself in a way that it looks like
something or other.
31
It is the privative mode of phenomenon, not something completely
otherwise than phenomenon or something that signifies the absence of it.
The most important thing for Heidegger to mention here is that there is a structural
interconnection between these two types of showing and everything depends on seeing this
interconnection.
32
It is not that there is first a phenomenon that shows itself and then hides,
but there is only the self-showing of phenomenon whether in itself or as semblance. Even the
hiddenness of phenomenon is a way for itself to show itself. Here it is possible to say that the
darkness and unattainability of the thing-in-itself of Kant is alien to the essential character
of phenomenon.
So what differentiates Heideggers distinction between phenomenon and semblance
from that of the distinctions of the history of metaphysics? Is Heideggers distinction able to

29
Ibid, p. 51.
30
Ibid, p. 60.
31
Ibid, p. 51.
32
Ibid, p. 51.
21

free itself from the two world theory (which for Nietzsche characterizes the history of
philosophy) or accomplish Husserls phenomenological project to attain a non-oppositional
thinking? In order to show the difference, Heidegger explains that semblance is nothing
similar to the term appearence: Appearing is a not-showing itself.
33
Appearence speaks of
a state in which phenomenon somehow couldnt achieve to show itself. To substitute
appearence with semblance is one of the basic aspects of metaphysical thinking. The
misinterpretation of semblance as appearence leads philosophers not to define but
presuppose the concept of phenomenon.
34
So as far as there is only the self-showing of
phenomenon, it comes out that within the metaphysical conception of it, it actually shows
itself as appearence and according to Heidegger, semblance is posited as mere appearence.
The metaphysical distinction that lies on the presupposition of the phenomenon can be
overcome and these terms can be differentiated from each other only when the structural
interconnection between phenomenon and semblance is made clear.
However, there is even more in this presupposition: The forgetting of Being. This
forgetting can be at such a degree that we may be far away from even raising the question it
demands from us.
35
If ontology is not treated in a phenomenological manner, this question
will never be asked in the way it should be. As we said at the start of this part, the issue of
Being and Time is also the issue of Dasein and to have such a concern is rooted on this
forgetting. That a phenomenon can be covered is the ownmost possibility of phenomenology.
Heidegger writes:

Whenever a phenomenological concept is drawn from primordial sources, there is a possibility
that it may degenerate if communicated in the form of an assertion. It gets understood in an
empty way and is thus passed on, losing its indigenous character, and becoming a free-floating
thesis. Even in the concrete work of phenomenology itself there lurks the possibility that what

33
Ibid, p. 52.
34
Ibid, p. 53.
35
Ibid, p. 59.
22

has been primordially within our grasp may become hardened so that we can no longer grasp
it. And the difficulty of this kind of research lies in making it self-critical in a positive sense.
36



These sentences tell us that phenomenological method is an attempt to be in accordance with
the very ambiguity of Dasein that is ontically closest to itself and ontologically farthest.
37

The ontic level here refers to a pre-phenomenological understanding of Dasein. The positive
aspect of the difficulty of phenomenology is found in the onticallity of Dasein too. By
keeping in mind this parallelity, we should here mention that before starting to explain his
account of phenomenological method, in paragraph 5 Heidegger already says that we must
rather choose such a way of access and such a kind of interpretation that this entity [Dasein]
can show itself in itself and from itself.
38
So it can be said that phenomenology takes place in
Being and Time first of all as considering Dasein as its object of research. We cannot separate
the play between semblance and appearence or hiddenness and un-hiddenness from the game
happening within Dasein, or the game that gives Dasein its name and meaning, and later on,
in the proceeding chapters of Being and Time, its world. Thus an idea of a full
phenomenological reduction would for Heidegger probably be a misunderstanding of this
ambigious character of Dasein. Phenomenology, for Heidegger, should always be a
phenomenology of Dasein.






36
Ibid, p. 61.
37
Ibid, p. 37.
38
Ibid, p. 37.
23

C. Towards The Impersonal Experience


Even though Levinas appreciates Being and Time for introducing one of the most important
innovations ever in the history of western philosophy, namely the ontological difference, his
principle critique towards ontology is seated at philosophizing against the philosophy of
Neuter, namely Dasein. Contrary to traditional understanding, in Totality and Infinity, he
argues that materialism is established not in the discovery of the primordial function of the
sensibility, but in the primacy of Neuter.
39
It is as if the game of Being penetrated into
Heideggers philosophy in a way that carries the anti-religious essence of philosophy to a
religion in reverse
40
, during a project that assumes a godless way and so aims to be more
open to Him [God] than the onto-theo-logic that was later mentioned in Identity and
Difference.
41
What we find here is the rejection of theism for the sake of going beyond the
rational thought; thus, the arrival of a new theology that is expressed in an atheist
terminology. Yet, again for the same reason, for Levinas, Heideggers philosophy comes up
to be a faint materialism which thinks of Being as the logos that is the word of no one.
42

But, how can we think of logos (and even not with its deep philosophical
implications but in any daily expression like adieu or pardon in their utmost
ordinariness) as a word that belongs to someone, to a humanistic existence in his absolute
singularity and otherness? By the word singularity, we do not mean to express the identity of
another self, but its wholly otherness and separation from any determination given by the
subject; this primarily implies the idea that the otherness and the possibility of a personal

39
Totality and Infinity, p. 298.
40
Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity, Trans. Alphonso
Lingis, Duquesne University Press, 2000, p. 53.
41
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, Trans. Joan Stambaugh, The University of Chicago Press, 2002, p.
72.
42
Totality and Infinity, p. 299.
24

and human logos are rooted beyond the identification of the subject. In order to hear this
unusual sound of the word coming from a personal source, from where the neutralizing
Being is surpassed, the limits of impersonalization that ontology based thinking insists on,
has to be discovered. Especially in his early works, Levinass strategy was to focus on this
impersonal structure, or to speak properly, the stucturelessness of the mere act of existence
and its everlasting insistence on existing. While Heidegger argues that the essence of
Dasein lies in its to be,
43
Levinas considers this essence by referring to its etymological
meaning where the latin word esse implies interestment. The concept of interestment
includes much more than it seems at the first glance. If to be is the essence of Dasein, then
this very basic structure of interestment first of all signifies the fact that the act that is
appropriate to essence is nothing but a way of persisting on the benefit of the ego and Being.
Being, ego, essence: These do not come before their acts, but as if, in a removed and
inaccesable past, they have already attended their acts and made themselves their only issue,
they solely repeat and sustain themselves with an enormous carelessness for exteriority and
transcendence.
To determine the fundamental event of human being as a questioning of its Being (a
questioning which neither comes from an intellectual curiosity, nor is an excess as Levinas
wants to attain at its most radical sense, but is what draws the borders of the egostic world of
Dasein) is not an illusion of Heidegger or simply a misinterpretation of human existence. It
is a fact and it is ontology.
Being is always in accordance with thinking and they reciprocally make possible the
adequacy in general: [The idea of being] is the idea that is of itself adequate.
44
The
adequacy is so primary and spontanious and the terms between which adequacy happens are
so close to each other that when the subject grasps its being, it apparently realizes that the

43
Being and Time, 42
44
The Trace of the Other, p. 346
25

question concerning whether being have already grasped him or he did it, falls into an
obscurity an obscurity which neverthless hides itself by leaving behind the obviousness of
adequacy and by calling philosophy to itself for an inquiry that makes possible and includes
the possibility of philosophizing in a phenomenological, idealistic manner:

The intentionality caught sight of, by the phenomenological movement, at the core of
practice and affectivity confirms the fact that self-consciousness, or the identification of the
self, is not compatible with consciousness of , that is, consciousness of being. And,
conversely, the whole weight of being can be resolved into a play of inwardness and stand on
the brink of illusion, so rigorous is the illusion. The apparition of being is possibly but
appearance. The shadow is taken for a prey; the prey is let loose for the shadow. Descartes
thought that I could have accounted for the heavens and the sun out of myself despite all
their magnificence. Every experience, however passive it be, however welcoming, is at once
converted into a constitution of being which it receives, as though the given were drawn
from oneself, as though the meaning it brings were ascribed to it by me. Being bears in itself
the possibility of idealism.
45


However, the inescapable self-questioning of Dasein in which he finds his ontological
constitution, signifies the narcissism of Being. This narcissism is not simply of
philosophers, but is what defines and characterizes Being. The ways of philosophizing by
considering ontology as the first philosophy may never have an end, for the insistence of
Being on itself can take countless number of shapes. It works as an inconsumable source a
source which is the source of itself:

The being is propagated in infinite images which emanate from it; it delates in a kind of
ubiquity and penetrates the inwardness of men.
46




45
Ibid, p. 346.
46
Ibid, p. 345.
26

Its movement has two directions happening at the same time: While it fills the emptyness of
everywhere, it actually constitutes this everywhere, it becomes this everywhere and it
always-already denounces that it has always already been as such. Its insistence on itself that
forces Levinas to use an excessive expression as it delates in a kind of ubiquity is not
sourced from an inability to express but it is its own excessiveness or inability (or its radical
ability to exist).
This makes it fall into the paradox that is inherent to itself:


The essence thus works as an invincible persistence on essence, filling up every interval of
nothingness which would interrupt its exercise.
47



Being is made up of an insistence in being. It is as if this insistence comes before being, or
the insistence is itself its being. An egoism that is so inherent in language that the
spontaneity of being seems to give no chance for an interruption coming from beyond this
spontaneity. At this point, the extremity of Heideggers ontology, on the one hand, is seen as
a violent interpretation of this fundamental event of being; on the other hand, by doing so, it
opens a way to propose a new approach that can put into play these interruptions. Levinas
considers Heidegger mainly with regard to Being and Time. There he finds the idea of
ontological difference which allows him to move towards a philosophy of the Other.
Besides, late Heidegger is substantially neglected and this disregard is essentially because he
in time starts to speak of Being as seperated from Dasein and as having an even more
impersonal character. This inclination in Heidegger denounces the growing violence of
Being towards the Other.
What is left insufficently thought of in Heidegger is to conceive Being with respect to

47
Otherwise Than Being and Beyond Essence, p. 4
27

its insistence sustain its permanency. This insistence of Being is the narcisim of the ego that
has no interlocutor other than the echo of its own sound. Is it possible to encounter a sound
that is beyond this echo? If so, how should we understand this encounter? And after all, how
far the essence of Being can fight for reducing this sound into the circularity of its self-
dialogue?




















28

D. The Problem of Escape: Enjoyment, There is and Hypostasis


Levinass philosophical project, starting from his first novel book On Escape (1935), shows
us a carefully planned development of concepts, notions and critical questions that give rise
to one another by eventually making clear the big and the principle idea overflowing all
through his work. All the problems he introduced in his early books, somehow maintain a
connection with the latter. The problem of escape, in this respect, serves as the first means
that allows Levinas both to leave the climate of Heideggers philosophy
48
and to develop
his own standpoint towards the ontology based thinking. In On Escape, the notion of escape
at first glance seems to be signifying a slight split away from Heidegger and the possible
consequences of this are not clear yet, but in time it comes out that it opens way to a
substantial separation not only from Heidegger but also from the whole history of
philosophy. At the same time it keeps its critical role even after Levinass attempt to
overcome ontology becomes more serious and insistent with the entrance of new terms such
as face, trace and the Other.
Going back to Aristotle, the ancient problem of philosophy, namely the investigation
of beings as beings, for Levinas, can be renewed if we consider our fundamental relation
with being in regard to the need to escape from it.
49
The unavoidable questioning of Being
and the imprisonment of the I to itself do not have to be understood in the way Heidegger
did:

If our existence is ecstatic and self transcending, it is not so in the pursuit of being, but in a
flight from being.
50


48
Existence and Existents, p. 19.
49
Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, Trans. Bettina Bergo, Standford University Press, 2003, p. 60.
50
Ibid, p. 60.
29

The fact that our existence is ecstatic and self transcending, invites us to acknowledge the
paradoxical structure of subject. It is not that there is first a subject in an absolute
enchainment to itself, and then the need to escape and a possible self transcendence comes,
but rather subject is always-already in the state of an ecstase or happiness. It is always one
step out of itself. It is as if it is not enough for itself and feels the lack of it, but on the
contrary, it doesnt want to be itself. The mere fact that self is itself, self is full of itself,
shows the weight of being that subject needs to get out of. The ecstase, however, does not
signify a radical separation of self from itself. Levinas understands it in relation to the terms
such as pleasure and the need which occurs within the sphere of intentionality. They do not
cause a fundamental change in the identification of the subject but although they aim at
separation, which always ends up with the arrival at home, to where we feel safe, the secure
identity of the ego.
In order to develop an argument that considers the habitation of man on earth with
respect to the egoism of the subject, Levinas needs to criticize Heideggers account of
everydayness. As is well known, in Being and Time, Heidegger starts his existential
analytics departing from the Dasein in its everydayness. While Heidegger explains
everydayness through an understanding of present-at-hand and defines the world as being
a system of tools, Levinas says that it is in fact an ensemble of nourishments.
51
Even the
hammers, needles and machines, before being tools or implements, are the objects of
enjoyment that satisfy a need.
52
We first of all live from [vivre de] them instead of
relating to them as instruments. The mere fact that human beings have to eat and cover
themselves, is what Heideggerian Dasein have missed. Eating is not just eating, a biological
event that can be thought as being non-relational to the basic events of ontology. It puts into
question my freedom and can never be seperated from anything related to my identification.


51
Time and the Other, p. 63.
52
Totality and Infinity, p. 110.
30

Enjoyment which is not a psychological state among others but the very pulsation of the
I
53
occurs when the escape from the weight of being without totally leaving the region of
the Same but by accomplishing the primary movement of the it, namely the need.
54
Thus we
reach to a point where enjoyment, need and labor are considered as the fundamental
occurrences of our existence. In addition to this, the difficulties and the paradoxes of
philosophizing by due to the assumption of ontology as the first philosophy, can already now
be seen. Enjoyment and happiness, as they imply a separation and the need to escape from
being, they at the same time put into question what is beyond ontology and have a contact
with it:

The reality of life is already on the level of happiness, and in this sense beyond ontology.
Happiness is not an accident of being, since being is risked for happiness.
[Enjoyment] does not express (as Heidegger would have it) the mode of my implantation-
my disposition-in being, the tonus of my bearing. It is not my bearing in being, but already
the exceeding of being; being itself befalls him who can seel happiness as a new glory
above substantiality; being itself is a content which makes up the happiness or unhappiness
of him who does not simply realize his nature but seeks in being a triumph inconceivable in
the order of substances. Substances are only what they are. The independence of happiness is
therefore to be distinguished from the independence that, for philosophers, substance
possesses.
55



What Levinas is trying to do here can be understood as one of his basic attempts to
understand the subject in a non-ontological way. From now on, it is not going to be
approached as being situated within the distinction between ontic and ontological spheres
where the play between revealing and concealment of its Being characterizes its moods. This
is a decisive moment in going beyond the ontology of Heidegger, since without such a

53
Ibid, p. 113
54
Ibid, p. 116.
55
Ibid, p. 112-113.
31

move, it would probably be impossible to get out of the domination of Being. We will see
that the neccessity of Levinass account of need, pleasure and enjoyment will be clearer
when we consider the primacy of ethics and the much more significant aspects of the notion
of escape.
Thus Levinas calls us to think of an existence without existents which he says that,
for Heidegger, it would probably be meaningless to speak of. So a separation of Being and
beings is taken into account. For Levinas, this separation is nothing like the Heideggerian
distinction. There are actually more than one way to explain and understand the meaning of
such an attempt. One of them may simply be to focus on the starting words of Levinass
article Existence Without Existents in Existence and Existents; there he says: Let us
imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness.
56
This simple expression
let us imagine, calls us to play a game with being, a thought experiment. However, the
game always carries the possibility of turning into seriousness. An attempt to imagine the
inverting of things into nothingness in the arbitrariness of let us, this anti-intellectual
attitude, has a meaning and maybe it is much more important than any philosophical effort to
conceptualize it. This meaning shows its importance when thinking, in a totally childish
way, accomplishes to refuse its most fundamental act that is to be in accordance with being.
Now the game turns into seriousness. We are far away from our starting point, we are now in
where a starting point, a subject and a now is removed. For the subject cannot pursue and
conquer what he is up to and cannot approach to it as he does to the objects, the use of the
word experience will not be proper. The struggle of Being against anything that can interrupt
its hegemony ends up with the loss of its beings, namely the entities. An existence without
existents withstands the invasion of nothingness and wins the victory by leaving behind the
horrifying event of what Levinas calls there is. The expression there is is always said by a

56
Existence and Existents, p. 57.
32

subject and directed towards an object or towards what is to be constituted as an object; but
this time, it is not uttered by anyone and signifies nothing, or it signifies itself at the
impossibility of signification and sinks into itself. Its anonimity is essential
57
says Levinas.
It is beyond the distinction between thing and itself for it is a being in general which did
not have a contract with a subject. It surpasses all the questions concerning locality and gives
no chance to distinguish inwardness from exteriority. We do lose all our sense of habitation
in being.
Here we can broaden Levinass argument in order to support it and articulate the case
more clearly. The critical point here is this: It is as if it is not me who feels the horror but the
there is itself and so this is what makes my horror grow infinitely. But is not treating there
is not simply as the source of horror but as kind of subject that reflects on and cares for
itself, misinterpret the situation and already arise from the inability of a subject to think and
experience the impersonal? Considering the obscurity as originating from the incapability of
subject, assumes a self-sufficient and absolute consciousness where all the questions are
answered and there is no alienation. However, this would simply destroy the horror and
reduce all the obscurities it includes into a misuse of categories or a transcendantal schein
in Kantian sense. We may also refer to Spinoza who argues that subject may only have the
knowledge of the two of the infinite number of attributes of God. But what if God, the only
substance is itself made of an insufficiency? An experience of there is is also close to what
Deleuze says about the double direction of becoming in Logic of Sense: Personal
uncertainty is not a doubt foreign to what is happening, but rather an objective structure of
the event itself.
58
The paradoxical structure of there is does not come out of a certain
subjective illusion but belongs to the very character of it.
Levinas also states that his reason to introduce the term there is is to explain a

57
Ibid, p. 57.
58
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, Continuum Books, 2004, p. 5.
33

situation wherein there would still something left playing itself out even if there were
nothing.
59
What is tried to be done here is to go into the depths of the mere act of there is,
force it to stand out against its removal, embrace its beyond and fill the abyss it consists of.
After all this, the question of whether it is me who just imagines there is or it is there is
that enforces itself to my thought and torments it, loses its importance. It is a challenge
against Being to see how far it can go in being able to be.
There the possibility is itself impossible and the absence of presence rules
everything. From now on, the word everything is neither considered as the totality of
beings, nor a universal that makes possible the access to the knowledge of every single
entity. As David Wood points out, that there is a universe is not a fact among others.
60
He
says:

Contexts determine meanings, and possibilities; they determine what is appropriate,
plausible, and, in the case of indexically infected propositions like it is sunny today,
they even determine truth But if we understand context like this, what becomes of
the idea of an ultimate context? It would suggest that there was a widest or deepest
framework which, when we reached it, would finally determine the significance of
every other sub-context. Is that what the experience of sacred horror comes to?
Surely it signals precisely the opposite insight: that the world is not a context of
significance, but transcends all tacitly shared assumptions; that it is not a framework
at all, but is beyond all frameworks an abyss. It is an abyss just because it cannot
supply final answers to ultimate questions; it can offer guarantees and no
assurances.
61



To think of there is, the being in general only with regard to its epistemological function

59
Ibid, p. 65
60
David Wood, Thinking After Heidegger, Blackwell Publishers, 2002, p. 15.
61
Ibid, 15
34

will not comprehend the case. The critical point here is maybe, the attempt to attribute
ontological existence to the ultimate context, is itself a way of thinking of the abyss:
Thinking of what thought cannot intend to and deal with as a content of consciousness.
Levinass analysis on there is, becomes more crucial when he considers the horror of
it more fundamental than Heideggers anxiety towards nothingness:

The horror of the night, as an experience of the there is, does not then reveal to us a danger
of death, nor even a danger of pain. This is what is essential in this analysis. The pure
nothingness revealed by anxiety in Heideggers analysis does not constitute the there is.
There is horror of being and not anxiety over nothingness, fear of being and not fear for
being; there is being prey to, delivered over to something that is not a something We are
opposing, then, the horror of the night, the silence and the horror of the shades, to
Heideggerian anxiety, the fear of being to the fear of nothingness. While anxiety, in
Heidegger, brings about being toward death, grasped and somehow understood, the horror
of the night with no exists which does not answer is an irremissible existence.
Tomorrow, alas! One will still have to live a tomorrow contained in the infinity of today.
There is horror of immortality, perpetuity of the drama of existence, necessity of forever
taking on his burden.
62



We should this very moment bear in mind that to locate the horror of being as primordial to
the anxiety over nothingness will later serve Levinas as a means to overcome the distinction
between being and nothingness in order to show that the movement towards the Other and
hence the social relationship are more determining than Daseins being-towards-death.
However, the fundamentality of the horror of there is does not signify any authenticity in the
Heideggerian sense. Strictly speaking, it is not fundamental and not a start. It happens before
every starting takes place. This event which is completely outside the subject, announces
both the impossibility to escape and to have a home.


62
Existence and Existents, p. 62.
35

But how can it for a subject be possible to have a life, an identity that is secured by
enjoyment, after the horror and the vertigo of there is, inasmusch as we know that it is not a
subjective illusion? How could it be possible to overcome the insomnia? These questions, for
Levinas, leads us back to a past where the subject emerges. At this point, Levinas refers to the
concept of hypostasis in order to explain how a subject and a consciousness arises. He writes:

To concieve a situation wherein soltitude is overcome is to test the very principle of the tie
between the existent and its existing. It is to move toward an ontological event wherein
existent contracts its existence. The event by which the existent contracts its existing I call
hypostasis.
63



Here we can again see that Levinas thinks of the existent and its existing as being separate.
An existence which is not yet contracted by an existent, as we have just mentioned, is called
there is. It is from there is that a subject is going to emerge.
He starts the discussion by trying to think beyond the loneliness of Dasein and find a
way to overcome it. This is not for escaping from the loneliness in an egoistic manner, but it
serves as a possibility to approach subject on account of its ground where it finds its Being
and by contracting it, gains the name Dasein and stucks into the necessity of being understood
in terms of its existential analytics in Heideggers philosophy. The analyses of Being and
Time, in that sense, goes for either the impersonality of everyday life or the solitary
Dasein.
64

At this point Levinas needs to interpret the relation between Being and beings not with
regard to the concepts of closedness and disclosedness or phenomenon and semblance for
such would overlook the fundamental function lying in this relation, but by going out of the
relation. These two concepts that play a fundamental role in Heideggers philosophy, for

63
Time and the Other, p. 43.
64
Ibid, p. 40.
36

Levinas, are the terms of ontological thinking in which all the ways going to what is outside
subject are already closed.
The main idea here is to reach to the ground which in Heideggerian terms is
considered as the Being of beings and always taken as belonging to entities in such a way
that seperates it from beings and attempts to go into the depths of how this connection had
happened. A question as how could the reciprocal belongingness of Being and beings have
occurred and beings contracted their Being endeavors to get at what was there and what was
happening before subject and its identification. The obligation to use the verb being even
when trying to express what was before being, is the basic character of being. It is made up of
an insistence on being. In order for a particular being to question and express itself, it should
have a being. So what Levinas tries to do here is to think of the being in general without a
thinking subject and introduce new concepts other than concealment and unconcealment
to account for this non-substantial ground.
Questioning the anteriority itself, the origin and the start, is what metaphysical inquiry
looks for and Heideggers Dasein, by being ontologically farest and ontically closest
65
to
itself, as we mentioned earlier, already stems form this very basic ambiguity of its existence.
Here Heidegger uses the word mineness when he wants to explain the relationship of
Dasein with its Being. At this point, Levinas takes a step back from Dasein, to where the
concept of priority is slowly left and so the subject is understood in relation to this non-
originary base. It is from this base that subject emerges and it should not be understood in
terms of belonging or mineness. However, when there is becomes mine, this causes a
fundamental change in its structure.

65
Being and Time, p. 37.
37

For Levinas, the questioning of Being is already a contract with Being.
66
In this
contract, the anonymous and the impersonal being, namely there is, now becomes the Being
of a being and through this process that the identification of the subject is completed. The
basic paradox of this contract takes its source from our inability to think of a being before it
took on its Being. Levinas writes:

This is not an artificial and arbitrary hypostasis of two terms of a tautology, where we would
have set that which exists to one side, so as to then imagine an act by which an existent takes
over its existence. We are not being duped by the verbal repetition. The duality of existence
and existents is to be sure paradoxical since that which exists cannot take over anything if it
is not already existing. But the truth of this duality, the effecting of this take over, are
attested to by certain moments in human existence where the adherence of existence to an
existent appears like a cleaving.
67


In order to explain this contract, Levinas first opposes the present to there is. The present is
here defined as starting out from itself.
68
It does not have a past and never depends on a
starting point to secure its existence. It is the starting point itself. But this start does not have a
future too: It only starts; without continueing, without even finishing. The infinity of there is
cannot be understood as the summation of finite things until eternity. Such a definition
would still presuppose infinity by reffering to it in order to define it and understand it in terms
of finitude. Infinity, before being a matter of magnitude, is where there are no starting and
ending points. Thus the emergence of a present is a rip in the infinite beginningless and
endless fabric of existing.
69
For the present is always a starting from itself, a starting where
no beginning is possible, its essential form is an evanescence. This is why it does not last
and become old. We can never catch it and all the time feel the lack of this. To pass from one

66
Existence and Existents, p. 23.
67
Ibid, p. 22
68
Time and the Other, p. 53
69
Ibid, p. 52.
38

moment to the other is always to pass from one evanescence to the other. The calculation of
time, the working of clocks and the role of seconds and hours are nothing but dramatizations
of these starting points. To be a subject is always to be in accordance with this essential form
of the present. Thus subject carries this character and we may say that it becomes a way of
starting out from itself too.
To contract with the anonymous existence through the emergence of a present, is to
accomplish the identification of the subject. For Levinas, this is the mastery and sovereignty
of an existent over its existing. But he also talks of a dialectical reversal inherent to the
event of hypostasis: identity is not only a departure from self; it is also a return to self.
70


Against the anonymous there is, horror, trembling and vertigo, perturbation of the I that does
not coincide with itself, the happiness of enjoyment affirms the I at home with itself.
71



















70
Ibid, p. 55.
71
Totality and Infinity, p. 143
39

Chapter 2:
The Personal Dimension









A. Identity, Narcissus and the Other



In Identity and Difference, Heidegger tries to show the mediation taking place within the
formula of identity which is A is A. The formula, at first glance, may seem to be a mere
repetition of the term A. This repetition, while always keeping the possibility of being
understood in such a simple manner, leads us to another way of interpreting too. As
Heidegger says, it is the the highest principle of thought.
72
Every thought starts from it. To
think is to affirm and participate to the identification of A with itself. The affirmation and
participation of thinking do not take place after the emergence of identity. It always-already
finds itself in it and thus already now is confronted with the hardness of deciding on whether
it is me who speaks on identity or it is identity itself from which the speech comes from. The
effort to distinguish between these two will remain as the main issue of Heideggers
philosophy. However, this is not a new return of subject-object distinction, or the traditional
problem concerning which is prior to which. The problem belongs to the fundamental issues

72
Identity and Difference, p. 23.
40

concerning the authenticity and everydayness of Dasein.
In any case, the simplicity of the principle of identity still keeps its importance. By
having the character we told above, isnt it the most useless and the most necessary
expression at the same time? The irrefutable necessity of the principle is at such a degree
that what is left for us is only to ignore it. No scientific research needs to think on it in order
to make progress. As far as to express the term A is already to acknowledge the
identification of A with itself, why do we need to stress on it? It is as if we fall short in
expressing the singularity and identity of A by being forced to divide it into two terms. How
many As are there in the expression? One or two? Or is it possible to count them like
numbers? Is the formula of identity expressed in a correct way? On the one hand, it is
expressed in the best and the only possible manner; but on the other hand, it still lacks of not
being able to express what it meant to say. Identity acts as if there is no difference in it, or
this is what we expect from it. It assumes and insists on me the nave idea that sameness is
merely sameness and it shouldnt require a distinction in order to be told. It is not that the
expression is not perfect enough, but may be the perfection itself is not enough. Not enough:
But on the face of what or who?
Heidegger never asks the questions of what is beyond identity or how identity
emerges, but he mainly wants to tell us that throughout the history of philosophy, the
difference and the distinction between A and A are not questioned properly. The formula of
identity has the function of repressing the speaking of identity. Therefore we should let
identity to speak, instead of speaking on it in a kind of hegemonic way. In the pre-Socratic
period of western philosophy in which thinking had not encountered with the principle of
identity yet, something completely different was happening compared to the subsequent
tradition of metaphysics.
For Heidegger, to incarcerate identity to its principle is to misunderstand the
41

relationship between Being and identity. One basic character of metaphysical thinking is to
consider identity as belonging to Being or as a category of it. However, as we see in
Parmenidess famous expression For the same perceiving (thinking) as well as being,
Being is taken as a characteristic of identity.
73

At this point, Heidegger understands Sameness as a belonging together and this
together is always determined by belonging. So how are we going to understand this
belongingness of Being and thinking within the Same? What is the relationship between this
and ontological difference? Heidegger writes:

But how can Being ever come to present itself as thought? How else than by the fact that
Being is previously marked as ground, while thinkingsince it belongs together with Being
gathers itself toward Being as its ground, in the manner of giving ground and accounting for
the ground. Being manifests itself as thought. This means: the Being of beings reveals itself
as the ground that give itself ground and accounts for itself.
74



In the reciprocal belongingness of Being and thought and the revealing of Being as thought,
two main act takes place: To give the ground (ergrnden) and to account for (begrnden).
The former belongs to ontologic and the latter to ontic spheres. Thus Heidegger says: The
principle of identity speaks of the Being of beings.
75
From now on, the matter of thinking is
going to be to think of Being in terms of difference.
76

We will not give a detailed explanation of Identity and Difference; for our purpose
here, it is enough to make clear that the dialogue of soul with itself that Socrates speaks of,
now comes to a phase where the ontological difference becomes the fundamental issue of
philosophy. Our matter is not to walk in Heideggers way, but to see what other

73
Ibid, p. 28.
74
Ibid, p. 57.
75
Ibid, p. 26.
76
Ibid, p. 65
42

consequences of such a philosophy of loneliness can be.
If we accept the game taking place between to give the ground and to account for
as a resonance happening within Dasein, within the transcendence and everydayness of a
human being, then what else can the character of this self dialogue include? Does it not
have a narcissist dimension which on the one hand imprisons it to its loneliness and on the
other hand, closes its ears to any word coming from another Dasein? Levinas criticizes
Heidegger for considering the relationship between another Dasein with the preposition
mit. This consideration, for Levinas, closes all the doors opening to beyond identity and to
social relationship. Heideggers way of relating with the Other is nothing but reducing it to
the Same and an affirmation of the loneliness of Dasein.
Here it will be explanatory to refer to Anaximanders poetic narration that Nietzsche
quotes and finds in it a superlunary thinking that does not welcome an ordinary mode of
living:

What is your existence worth? And if it is worthless, why are you here? Your guilt, I see,
causes you to tarry in your existence. With your death, you have expiate it. Look how your
earth is withering, how your seas are diminished and drying up; the seashell on the mountain
top can show you how much has dried up already. Even now, fire is destroying your world;
someday it will go up in fumes and smoke. But ever and anew, another such world of
ephemerality will construct itself. Who is there that could redeem you from the curse of
coming-to-be?
77


If we ask a question as simple and daily as who is there at such an awareness of the
enchainment to being, an enchainment that can not be freed from even by death, by this
insufficient expiation, then we should be careful about this unfamiliar use of the it. One
who asks the question, already knows about the absence of the interlocutor, of someone who
is the address of the question who. So there is a challenge in the question: It pushes the limits

77
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Regnery Publishing, 1962, p. 48
43

of the curse of coming-to-be and seeks for a radical way of asking and of hearing an
answer that may open a hole at the circularity and unfinishing construction of existence.
Anaximander himself may be hopeless about the possibility of such a move, or he may not
even question transcending this curse, but the extremity of such a hopelessness is more
valuable than any nave optimism. In it, what is tried to be expressed is the coming back of
being even after it goes up in fumes and smoke and is buried in nothingness. Here it is not
hard to remember Levinass analysis on there is that we mentioned in the previous chapters.
This superlunary thinking that is expressed with a kind of horror that Levinas spoke of,
takes its source from the impossibility of addressing someone who is the collocutor of the
question who. As far as a question is made up with the verb being and we are obliged to say
who is, we then affirm the victory of is on who. To ask the question in the form who is
there is already to reduce there to here, transcendence into immanence. Therefore, it is not
a question at all. The question is asked with the horror of the impossibility of asking a
question. Do not the anger and the accusation we find in the word of Anaximander show the
non-ontological dimension he tries to open us? As long as there is an accusation, there must
be a crime too. We need someone to come and rescue and even redeem us as if we
committed a crime in a past we do not rememeber. Thus prior to the investigation of beings
as themselves, there lies a relationship that was practiced for the profit of Being. It refers to
an irreversible past that its irreversibility is the very curse of it. And if, even to be mortal is
not enough to expiate it, then we may say that the degree of the guilt should go beyond
death. The expiation can only be accomplished by a movement going beyond being and
nothingness. So the discussion should not be carried on within the terminology of ontology,
but by establishing a new dialogue that is to be understood in an ethical manner.
In order to make clear the question Anaximander asks, we can consider the story of
Narcissus who asks the same question and hears only the echo of his sound. As is well
44

known, in the Roman version of the story of Narcissus, a nymph called Echo falls in love
with young Narcissus who is also the son of a nymph. One day when Narcissus was in the
woods to hunt stags, Echo followed him and tried to find a way to speak. Finally, Narcissus
heard the sound of her footsteps and shouted: Who is there? The answer of Echo was
same: Who is there? Then Echo showed herself to him but Narcissus arrogantly refused
and told her to go away. Echo spent rest of her life without being able to communicate with
him and suffering alone. The day she died, only her voice, namely the echo of Narcissuss
sound remained back.
The story tells us why the Same, before anything else, implies the very narcissism of
ego, of being an I. Narcissism is not simply a matter of ones love toward oneself, but the
basic character of an identity which is made up of the refusal of the Other. The forfeit of this
guilt is getting stuck between the question and its echo. From now on, it is even
impossible to decide on which is the echo and which is the question. Thinking becomes a
way of constructing and affirming the anonymity of existence where nothing personal can be
inhabited. In such a world, the difference hidden within the principle of identity relates with
transcendence and the Other in a way as to ignore what Echo was saying before she became
an echo.
So our matter will be to find a way to approach the Other without reducing its word
to the echo of the Same. At the beginning of this chapter, we emphasized on the
imperfection of the principle of identity; the inability to express flawlessly the game between
the question of Narcissus and its echo shows the absence of the Other. But this absence is
also the very presence of it: For the presence of the Other is beyond the distinction between
being and nothingness, its way of entering into my world resists all the categories of subject.
The encounter with the Other can only occur when the identity of the subject is risked for the
very desire to accomplish the encounter. So what can be the consequences and conditions of
45

such an approaching that takes the question who is there? as an unconditional acceptance
and welcoming of the address of the question?
Let us first read what Levinas wrote in his article titled No Identity about things
we said on the paradoxes of the ego:

There is a divergency between the ego and the self, an impossible recurrence, and impossible
identity. No one can remain in himself: the humanity of man, subjectivity, is a responsibility
for the others, an extreme vulnerability. The return to the self becomes an interminable
detour. Prior to consciousness and choice, before creation is assembled into the present and
into a representation and becomes an essence, man approached man. He is made of
responsibilities. With them he rends his essence. It is not a question of a subject assuming or
escaping responsibilities, a subject constituted, posited in itself and for itself as an identity; it
is a question of the subjectivity of the subject, its non-indifference with regard to the other in
a responsibility that is unlimited for not measured by commitments, to which assumption and
refusal of responsibilities refer. It is a question of responsibility for the others to which the
movement of recurrence is detoured, in the troubled entrails of the subjectivity it rends.
78




That a subject is made of responsibilities does not refer to any narration concerning Being
but acknowledges the priority (but not in an hierarchical manner, as far as this term belongs
to ontology) of response that Narcissus couldnt notice. The interminable detour that we
come up with in every return to the self and in the movement of recurrence, denounces the
presence of the Other that we can not do without referring to. Thus to insist on the paradoxes
and the impossibility of immanence will become a way of welcoming the transcendent
without considering it within a transcendental or phenomenological philosophy which takes
transcendence as being constituted. This insistence is nothing like Heideggers attempt to
reveal the authentic dimension of language and to let language speak. As long as authenticity

78
Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, No Identity, Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne
University Press, 2000, p. 149.
46

belongs to Being of beings and stays loyal to the as such structure wherein the movement
of recurrence is still not overcome, philosophizing in an ethical manner should be a way of
invitation rather than revealing.
The final move but not signifying a finality or ultimacy of Levinass journey will
become clear in his analysis on face. As is known, the punishment given to Narcissus was to
see the reflection of his face on the pool and fall in love with himself. But after he found out
that the face he saw on the pool was his own, he apparently realized the impossibility of
requiting himself or being requited by himself. The only face in his world stays as the
reflection of his own face. However, for Levinas, approaching to the Other will be possible
in face-to-face relationship where face is accepted as the trace of the Other. It is from this
analysis that the significance of the transition from the impersonal to the personal will
become clearer.
















47

B. The Role of the Face


In the part titled Sensibility and the Face of Totality and Infinity, Levinas asks probably
the most crucial question of his philosophy, without which, it would perhaps be impossible
to get out of the region of ontology and propose a third term in place of semblance and
phenomenon, thing and itself, and so of Heideggerian distinction between ontic and
ontologic:

Is not the face given to vision? How does the epiphany as a face determine a relationship
different from that which characterizes all our sensible experience?
79



What Levinas is trying to express here is that, by keeping all its transcendence, face still
survives as being given to vision. Without losing its abstractness, it manages to stay in its
concrete structure. The sensible experience, for Levinas, is not a fumbling
objectification.
80
As we mentioned before, sensibility and enjoyment is already a way of
separation from being a seperation that sustains the identity of subject. But when face is
taken into account, we will see that a fundamental change will occur in Levinass
explanations on the function of sensibility. It causes a rupture in the structure of the sensible
world. From now on, although face is given to vision, it will not be understood by way of
living from and enjoyment. The most shocking thing about his analysis of the face may
be that, while almost all philosophers, in order to overcome a particular philosophical
obstacle, tend to offer abstract concepts like spirit in Hegel, pure I in Husserl or even
flesh in Merleau-Ponty be it has a much different character than others, here what we

79
Totality and Infinity, p. 187
80
Ibid, p. 187
48

find that a philosopher is just saying that there is something called face and we know, see
and live with it, and it is the gateway to beyond being, to infinity, to holiness and to the very
heart of social relationship. The way Levinas makes this move, the apparent easiness of it,
cannot be separated from the ambiguous character of the face itself. As Bernhard Waldenfels
says, face lurks at the borderlines which separate the normal from anomalous.
81
In face to
face relationship, the gap between normal and anomalous becomes more than anything else:
We are confronted with the difference at its most advanced stage, in a stage more radical
than the ontological difference of Heidegger: The difference is now not ontological, not
expressed within the terms of ontology, but has an ethical dimension. Besides, the influence
of Martin Bubers I and Thou relation on Levinas is remarkable too. In Bubers account, the
relationship with Thou is always a one with the eternal Thou: in each Thou, we address
the eternal Thou.
82
Although, in Levinas, the relationship with the another person opens the
I to infinity and harbors similarities with the I and Thou relation, the asymmety in which the
face-to-face relation takes place is absent in Buber.
Let us enlarge on what we said roughly until now. The first thing we can say about
face is that it opens itself to us under the light that illuminates our world so as to give us the
chance to have a journey to come back home again. With all its features that we need for
ourselves and for others in daily life, it takes place in this world as if it exists among the
plentitude of appearances like the other objects. It seems that it has no privilege in contrast
with the other objects with regard to the fact that they share this world of sensibility and find
a place in it. It is material, alive and tangible just like the other parts of our bodies. No matter
in what measures the enigmatic structure of face comes into and covers an important part in
Levinass philosophy, we must always keep in mind the ordinariness in which it inevitably
finds itself. On the other hand, this must definitely not be taken as the defeat of face. As if

81
Cambridge Companion to Emmanuel Levinas, Bernhard Waldenfels, Levinas and the Face of the Other, p.
63
82
Martin Buber, I and Thou, Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1937, p. 6.
49

there is a challenge against Being, its beings and this world is full of identity and materiality,
face dares to enter into the heart of interiority by accepting to be made of the most basic
qualities of it and still keeping its character that is beyond materiality, sensibility and the
distinction between appearance and phenomenon. It resists being even when it is filled up
with all the qualities of it. It is from this point that we will try to understand how the
entrance of transcendence into immanence can be possible and in what sense it gives us the
chance to talk of the enigma of trace.
Levinas describes the relationship between these two by first explaining again how
sensibility serves as a means to flee from there is. It is only under the condition of light that
the void and darkness, in which the objects hidden are to be revealed and related as sensible
things. But this void is not simply nothingness or as he said in Time and the Other before,
not anything like the undeterminate ground where perception carves out things.
83
There
is is more than being undeterminate and it should not be confused with the thing in itself
from which a transcendental subject constitutes the world. Levinas writes: Even in the
absence of any particular object, there is this void itself.
84
As we mentioned before, the
existence of this void is impersonal and anonymous. Just like a faceless god, it imposes upon
us its irrepressible coming back despite all negations. This facelessness is also the absence of
a faade from which an object can be revealed and be seen. For instance, we can see a play
dough in its formless state which does not signify anything, but this seeing does not mean
that something is exhibited to us. The play dough acts as if it does not have a faade and
cannot be seen. To give it a shape, is to give it a surface, before producing a tool or a work
of art. But the play dough is not only an imitation of the matter in its darkness, or there is, or
if one is still insistent in calling it that way, the thing in itself. Levinas argues that,
although this interpretation may seem nave, the depth of the thing can have no other

83
Time and the Other, p. 47.
84
Totality and Infinity, p. 190.
50

meaning than that of its matter, and the revelation of matter is essentially superficial.
85
Here
we can see that, what gives Levinas the opportunity to speak of the revelation of matter as
being superficial and as being able to be understood by the example we gave, is his former
explanations on materiality and sensibility. To define materiality as the fullness of a thing
with itself and to state sensibility as a means of separating from being is already to
acknowledge the revelation as belonging to superficiality. We use the word universe both to
signify the cosmos that is subject to physics and to express the universal, the ultimate
context or simply the everything or the totality of things as abstract philosophical
concepts. Here Levinas opens us a new dimension to understand the duality and the game of
substutition taking place between the matter and thought and / or the concrete and abstract.
When materiality is understood as the identification and the fullness of I with self, then we
approach to the border where the concrete and the abstract comes into a union. The hardness
of a rock or my body are not simply tactile qualities of them, but it is the very hardness and
materiality of identity. Thus whether we talk of a Heideggerian revelation of Being in
beings, or an exact separation of Being arriving at the horrifying rustling of there is, we
are never out of the region of materiality. The very physicality of universe is a dramatization
of identity and an enormous effort to access to a state wherein I is in an exact union with the
self. But because there is never a complete union and an absolute fullness, the matter always
keeps the possibility of being destructed. This is how while discussing there is in Existence
and Existents, Levinas finds a smiling horror in the books of Huysmans, Zola and
Mauppasant who are known to be naturalist or realist writers and who also defend
themselves as being so.
86
What happens in an extreme realism is the destruction of this
realism. Too much naveness ends up with the loss of it. An excessive attempt to go to the
thing as it is, carries us to there is where there is no form and surface. An extreme realism

85
Time and the Other, p. 192.
86
Existence and Existents, p. 60.
51

shows us the play dough in its absolute blankness: an unexpected and unlooked end.
So for Levinas, the revelation of a thing is to give surface to this matter in darkness.
Production of all kinds of tools and implements aims at such an exhibition. In art, this
becomes much more obvious:

It is art that endows things with something like a faadethat by which objects are not only
seen, but are as objects on exhibition. The darkness of matter would denote the state of a
being that precisely had no faade.
87



To think of a world without faces is not just to assume a condition with a plane surface on
our faces, without eyes, mouths, noses and all the geographical structure of it, but also to
think of a world without the very phenomenon of surface and an exhibition. It is for sure not
a coincidence that we do not use a special word to name the human face. It is simply named
as face, as if all the surfaces of all other objects depend on it and as if it is the possibility of
them to have a surface. Human face is not another surface among the others. The acts of
closure and disclosure starts from face. However, face itself is beyond these relations. The
form and the surface of a chair may disclose the formless state of a piece of wood as a chair,
but face does not disclose anything. The presence of face is not a way of reducing
transcendence into immanence. For Levinas, it is the trace of the Other that enters into my
world without being captured by the egoism of subject. To understand the difference of trace
from Heideggers concepts, we will now recall an example Levinas that gave as mentioned
in the first chapter.
In Time and the Other, Levinas writes: in turning on a bathroom switch we open up

87
Totality and Infinity, p. 192-193.
52

the entire ontological problem.
88
The access to almost all problems that ontology deals with
can be found in this simple daily act. For while appearing, the Being may seem to me as an
appearance, I may think I am seeing a chair while looking at a table from a certain angle and
certain light conditions. Heidegger does not go into the depths of this gap between two types
of illusions but he somehow assumes that they are connected. Above we have showen how
this gap can be understood by using Levinass explanations on materiality and sensibility.
The question we can ask here is this: How are we to relate with the Other just within the act
of turning on and off the light that illuminates the room we are in? Levinass argument is
that the Other that resists our intentionality is completely out of the room, but we are not free
from being confronted with its entrance or the visitation of the face. So what stays
completely out of the categories of being by still surviving to be in the room? The answer
will be the traces we find all around the walls and furniture. The traces left by our fingers or
the traces of nails on the wall: None of these can be related as substances or accidents. They
exist neither alone, nor as the attributes of something that exists in itself. Nothing depends
on them and they do not depend on anything. A finger print on a vase does not represent,
conceal or disclose a finger. What it does is to announce that a finger had passed from here
and it is not here anymore. It is obvious that we could witness the passing of the finger if we
were in the room when it was happening. One can also say that turning off the light simply
makes these traces inaccessible for me by throwing them into the darkness of matter and
nothingness as it does to the other objects. However, when Levinas speaks of the human face
as the trace of the Other and as the passing of it, he refers to a now that has never been a now
for us. It had happened in a before that could never be accesible for a subject. One could
never be fast enough to witness that moment. The impossibility of making this moment a
content of consciousness and remembering it arise from the fact that this is actually not a

88
Time and the Other, p. 62-63.
53

moment but the infinity itself. The intentionality and the interestment of subject which we
find in its need and enjoyment, now is interrupted by this unusual encounter with the trace.
This will also be the point where the ethical dimension of the debate becomes clearer.
Levinas writes:

Disiniterestedness in the radical sense of the term, ethics designates the improbable field
where the Infinite is in relationship with the finite without contradicting itself by this
relationship, where on the contrary it alone comes to pass as Infinity and as awakening. The
Infinite transcends itself in the finite, it passes the finite, in that it directs the neighbor to me
without exposing itself to me. This order steals into me like a thief, despite the outstretched
nets of consciousness, a trauma which surprises me absolutely, always already passed in a
past which was never a present and remains un-representable.
89



Here we can make a simple inference about why the trace of the Other that we encounter in
the face of another person opens me to beyond the finitude of being. First, everything leaves
its own trace: When we see a scar, we can understand if it is the scar of a bullet or a knife.
The tracks of a car or a bus are different. But when the trace of the Other is concerned, we
must be careful about the paradoxical situation we come up with: The Other leaves its trace
in such a way as to take part in this world as the other of every process of being and
identification. The trace is left as being the trace of another person in front of every single
subject. But this does not mean that I am also simply another for others, for such would
neutralize the asymmetry of inter-personal relationship. The difficulty of thinking on this
asymmetry arises from the hardness of using the language in an anti-logical way. Levinas
argues that, in the relation between I and the Other, it is not possible to find the structure that
formal logic finds within its terms. Logic imposes itself upon us in every single attempt to
express the otherness of the Other. As we said before, to insist on the growth of

89
Basic Philosophical Writings, God and Philosophy, p. 171.
54

contradictions and on an of extreme skepticism is what Levinas offers us in such situtations.
























55

C. The Idea of Affirmation in Levinass Work



In the light of what we have said until now, our aim is now going to be to find a location to
Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy within the prophetical discourse of Friedrich Nietzsche. Such
a perspective, while affirming Nietzsche's work as an acceptance and an invitation of future,
accounts for that of Levinas, rather than solely being a thought that takes the priority of ethics
and the beyond that transcendence implies as its fundamental concern, as a new way of
speaking of the world. What happens to the world throughout Levinas's movement without
return, a movement that goes out of the region of being-in-the-world? What remains back,
what has already remained back, or even, is going to remain forth, in a future, and in a past,
just through the traumatic encounter with the another person, with what opens the I to
otherwise than being? How does the structure of the world changes and a philosophy of
affirmation gains a new dimension after the entrance of the trace and the ethical
commandment you shall not kill! into existence? These will precisely be the questions I will
be dealing with.
Towards the end of his career, in a 1983 interview, Levinas says that he was often
criticized because of harboring an underestimation of the world in his philosophy.
90

Throughout the interview, rather than defending himself against such critics or making
explicit what they exactly are, he prefers to leave the question open, and turns once again all
his attention to the ethical order in which the relationships that ontology presupposes are
surpassed. However, although there is always a tendency in him in avoiding a possible
response to such criticisms, there are also rare moments when he shortly refers to Nietzsche

90
Jill Robbins, Is It Righteous to Be?, Philosophy, Justice and Love, Standford University Press, California,
2001, p. 177.
56

and feels the need to put himself out of the target area of Nietzsches attack against the two
world theory
91
that takes its source from the degeneration of life and the opposition
92

directed to it. If there is an idea of a retrieval of metaphysics in Levinass work, this is
advocated with a supreme attentiveness for the overall position of philosophizing after
Nietzsche. And if, Nietzsche appears in Levinass texts in unexpected moments that confuses
the reader in making a comparision between these two philosophers (either as taking Levinas
as a successor of Nietzsche, or as the opposite), this is, if we are to attest to Jill Stauffers and
Bettina Bergos account of the relation,
93
the very positiveness of it. We will consider the
meaning of this positiveness as being already announced in Nietzsches demand from his
readers to lose and deny him in order for him to return to them.
94
The return and the
intrusion of Nietzsche into Levinass work both acknowledges the prophecy and by way of
this acknowledgment, suggests a reading of Levinas that conceives him as the philosopher
who risks and excites the idea of affirmation through his account of ethics as first philosophy
and his renewal of the term beyond (a term which, according to Nietzsche, is nothing but an
invention that deprives the value of the only world that exists).
95

In the part titled The Free Spirits of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche prophetizes
about an oncoming species of philosophers who will be free spirits and whom he
baptizes by the name attempters (Versucher); a name which he states as being not free of
danger.
96
These philosophers, for Nietzsche, will surely not be dogmatists and their
good will have no value as long as their neighbour takes it into his mouth and thus

91
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twighlight of the Idols, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, London, 2003, p. 50-51
92
Ibid, p. 39.
93
Nietzsche and Levinas: After the Death of a Certain God, Ed. Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo, Columbia
University Press, New York, 2009, p. 2. The results of this abundant relationship are shown in various extents
and aspects by the contributors of this book.
94
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, London, 2004, p. 6.
95
Ibid, p. 103.
96
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, London, 2003, p. 70-71.
57

becomes common.
97
They will not be Nietzsche's neighbours, neither Nietzsche will be
theirs. Neighbourhood, in that sense, is the type of relationship that neutralizes the difference
opened by the future that directs one to the free spirit that is expected and prophetized upon.
A relationship between free spirits, therefore, takes place out of the common ground wherein
one is by assimilated the another person by cleaving to the ideas of her. To refer to Levinass
terminology, the assimilation is not the assimilation of an emprical content received or
transfered from one to the other, but the syncronization of the interlocutors by being located
on the common ground of the spontaneity that neighbourhood or any dogmatism
presupposes.
The logic that operates Nietzsches prophecy is in accordance with the will to avoid a
possible reduction of the difference. But in order to accomplish this goal, it is not enough to
propose a theoretical argument against the reduction. The aphorism itself must be the space
that this irreducible relationship comes about: It shouldnt simply speak on the difference, but
be infected and differentiated by it. From this point of view, the manner Nietzsches word
announces the danger is a one that relies on a bidirectional emphasis (and, moreover, as we
will argue, in reference to Levinass interpretation, a bidirectional laughter)
98
in that the two
sides of it relate with each other in a way as to break the spontaneity and the now in which the
confrontation of the reader with the said of the aphorism tha takes place: Initially, and at first
glance, one sees the quizzical face that smiles in the tone of his writing (which is the very
locus that one should look for in order to understand him).
99
It is quizzical and it smiles, for
there is here a certain kind of sarcasm characteristics of him that attacks the self-preservative
judgments of the morality which would consider such an attempt as dangerous. But his

97
Ibid, p. 71.
98
Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, p. 18. One should have to go all the way to the nihilism of
Nietzsches poetic writing, reversing the irreversible time in vortices, to the laughter which refuses language.
99
Ecce Homo, p. 5. It would probably be legitimate to say that this is true for all of his writings, but particularly
with regard to what proceeds from the mouth that tells Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche emphasises the
necessity of hearing the tone of his speech.
58

irony does not halt here: So, secondly, there is another first glance: It is dangerous for himself
and the "free spirits" too. The tone of his expression, as though suddenly extracted from the
context in which it manages to render its humour meaningful, starts to say more than it says
(just as the way Levinas defines infinity as to think more than one thinks)
100
and lets the
aphorism communicate the abyssal dimension by causing, as Jill Marsden states in her After
Nietzsche, a rupture thought.
101
The essence of this rupture is characterized by a new way of
philosophizing that starts from the abyss.
102
This is the moment when the hegemony of the
moment and the thinking subject over the anonymous flux of becoming is disturbed and the
identity it imposes upon life is abolished. The smile slowly frees itself from an owner and
turns into the horrendous and the impersonal laughter which has noone to take it on and
nothing to which it is directed. It is at this laughter and at this tone that the free spirits are
called and their otherness with all its unpredictability and danger is affirmed. The affirmation
of the free spirit does not come after calling her. To affirm her is already to call and to
prophetize upon her. It is to embrace that which is impossible to be embraced, to harbor what
is absolutely alien to the aphorism.
Precisely within this character of the aphorism that Levinass philosophy can be
situated as the danger that Nietzsche expects and that threatens a philosophy of affirmation.
Let us focus on what Levinas says about the laughter of Nietzsche: One should have to go all
the way to the nihilism of Nietzsches poetic writing, reversing the irreversible time in
vortices, to the laughter which refuses language.
103
First, there is the refusal of the language.
This is not a mere negation, but as Acha Liviana Messina suggests, amounts to what Levinas
calls the otherwise said.
104
In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, the otherwise
said designates a certain way of writing that leads one back to the irreversible and

100
Collected Philosophical Papers, Phenomenon and Enigma, p. 72.
101
Jill Marsden, After Nietzsche, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2002, p. ix.
102
Ibid, p. 6.
103
Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, p. 18.
104
Nietzsche and Levinas, Acha Liviana Messina, Levinass Gaia Scienza, p. 203.
59

transcendent past that one faces in the very break of the spontaneity between those who face
each other. This is, as repeatedly stressed by Levinas, an asymmetrical and irreducible
relationship in which the signification of the Saying that comes from the transcendence of the
Other is each time betrayed within the Said. So the otherwise said becomes a way of
inviting the anarchical past (and future) into the homeland of the subject and its secure
identity. Such an invitation takes place as a journey: It is to move beyond the subject and its
sphere of intentionality (the movement without return), threaten its security and let the trace
(which signifies the groundlessness that cannot be understood in terms of any distinction
between being/nothingness and closure/disclosure) penetrate into its ground and so its being.
Although this suggests a radical scepticism which in each time tests its unavoidable betrayal
and reduction and shows the courage to fall into the paradoxes of immanence, it at the same
time struggles for a straightforwardness or uprightness [towards transcendence] which in
any sense are not used to imply belief
105
but function as a renewal of Nietzschean yes and
affirmation for the benefit and the good of the Other. But is this really a renewal? And, if
so, in what sense?
At this point, Messina point outs probably the most crucial and determinant aspect of
Levinass relation to Nietzsche. While the madness of Levinas takes its source from the
irreducibility of the relation to the Other and the affirmation is understood as anarchical,
the madness and the affirmation of Nietzsche hinders the reader from finding an affirmative
priority and even humiliates her in such an attempt.
106

According to Messina, the indeterminate character of Nietzsches yes still contains
the possibility of having a profound contact with that of Levinas. In order to show the
relationship, she finds an ethics in the joyful wisdom of Nietzsche by defining the
innocence of the child in the third metamorphosis in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a pure

105
Levinas Reader, God and Philosophy, p. 184. ...the sentence in which God gets mixed in with words is not
I beleive in God
106
Nietzsche and Levinas, p. 203.
60

welcoming in the ignorence of the future (that was already mentioned in Gay Science). By
this move, she associates Nietzsches ethics (as the responsibility of the child for the future)
with the ethical schema found in Levinas.
107
On the other hand, her analysis proceeds towards
accounting for the gap unfolded between Nietzsches critical instability and Levinass
affirmative priority in relation to latters understanding of God after its death. First, Levinas
considers the death of God as the death of a world behind scenes and of a moral God.
108

Levinass God does not arise from a theological argument; it is indissociable from the death
of God, indissociable from the for nothing which Nietzsche thought the gaiety of such an
event...
109

So, in Levinass case (but one may also find a similarity with this in Heideggers
Being, Merleau-Pontys flesh or a notion such as gift in Derrida), the determination of
an affirmative priority belongs to the very essence of philosophizing after Nietzsche. Can we
not take this as the very danger that Nietzsche foresaw in his prophecy? In the aphorism we
mentioned in the beginning of this part, Nietzsche not only says that the oncoming free-
sprits will not be dogmatists, but they will have their own truth and good too.
110

Although the term truth is one of the notions that is violently refused and humiliated in
Nietzsche, it is welcomed (with a dangerous name, attempters) when the philosophers of
future are concerned. But as we said before, these are not two different moments in
Nietzsches philosophy; the prophecy affirms that which is completely other than its own
project. Accordingly, not only the advocation of God, but of the truth and the good are
central and indispensible for Levinas; the affirmative priority is given to the anarchy of the
good and the truth.

107
Nietzsche and Levinas, p. 206-207.
108
Ibid, p. 209, 211.
109
Ibid, p. 212.
110
Beyond Good and Evil, p. 71.
61

But, still, is there really a humiliation of Levinas by Nietzsche when we take in
account Levinass work as a philosophy of affirmation? One could think that way and may be
this is true, but as far as Levinas didint gave an extensive place to Nietzsche in his reading of
the history of philosophy and never attempted to offer a detailed and a comprehensive
interpretation of him (as Martin Heidegger did, by fixating the will to power to a certain
moment in the history of the forgetting of Being), we shouldnt be rush in coming to a
conclusion. The ambivalance we come up with in trying to discover a connection between
these two philosophers is precisely because Levinass polemic does not arise against
Nietzsche but Heidegger.
The missing point I find in Messinas interpretation is Levinass everlasting insistence
on reaching the personal dimension of thinking and fighting against the impersonalization of
it. This struggle, as we have mentioned before in the first chapter, demands for a climate
change, that is, a separation from the climate of Heideggers philosophy. To determine the
basic character of Levinass work in respect to his relation to Nietzsche should not overlook
this fundamental concern; for if Nietzsche wanders around Levinass philosophy like a ghost
and appears in rare and flashing moments, Heidegger is always present there, with all the
gravity of his work and its climate which is characterized by the absence of and the
unconcern towards the Other and the personal in its absolute singularity.
In this quote, there is probably one of the most explanatory statements of Levinas that
expresses the gravity of this climate.

It is in the face of the other that commandment comes which interrupts the progress of the
world. Why would I feel responsible in the presence of the face? That is Cains answer when
he is asked: Where is your brother? He answers: Am I my brothers keeper? That is the
face of the other taken as an image among images, when the word of God it bears is not
recognized. We must not take Cains answer as if he was mocking God or he was answering
62

like a child: It isnt me, somebody else did it. Cains answer is sincere. Ethics is the only
thing lacking in his answer; it consists solely of ontology: I am I, and he is he. We are separate
ontological beings.
111


Can we not say that a philosophy that takes ontology as first philosophy and that is defined as
a phenomenology of Dasein is lacking the same ethical gesture too?




















111
Is It Righeous to Be?, Philosophy, Justice and Love, p. 171-172.
63

Conclusion



The progress of the thesis has taken place as a way of reading Levinass philosophy an
action that is not recuperated in advance. We explained why such an action takes the form
of welcome rather than revealing or disclosure. In doing so, we saw how the ancient problem
concerning beings as beings is left behind and arrived at an ethical phase that looks for an
idea of transcendence that is beyond the context of ontology or to speak in Levinass words,
for the otherwise than being.
The essential lack of simplicity
112
that Levinas sees as being inherent to existence,
announces the intrusion of the trace of the Other into the world. The relationship with the
trace is first of all a break in the spontaneity between beings. This break does not offer any
idea of a new relation in the sense of situating them in another ontological order. Now it
becomes impossible to speak of the world in any ontological sense. The matter is not to
question the substantiality of entities or Being of them, or not primarily to overcome the
subject-object distinction, but by way of this ethical movement, to turn thinking into a
welcome and an encounter with the individuality of the Other.
Thus before anything else there is a relationship and an encounter in which thinking
is understood as a way of either being responsible or not. Simple and daily words like
hello, adieu or pardon should not be taken as secondary modes of thinking that serve
as a means for communication. There is no thinking before or after the encounter.
In the thesis, it has been emphasized that the most important aspect of this shift from
ontology to ethics is first of all a problematization and renewal of the concepts impersonal

112
Existence and Existents, p. 28.
64

and personal. They have now been located into the heart of thinking by being dispersed all
over the texts of Levinas and by melting into every single analysis of him on enjoyment,
identity, there is, face, etc. Here it is crucial to understand that non of these are dead and
stable terms: They are all taken as being in movement and change; but as we have said
before, neither the change nor the movement is to be considered with respect to their
ontological resonances. Enjoyment and perceiving are already ways of putting a distance
between I and there is, but this still takes place just near the border beyond which the
smiling horror
113
of there is appears through the materiality of objects. And this distance is
never determinate. The surface of objects express a meaning, they look at us; but at the same
time they are infinitely flowing to the limit of an absolute blankness that absorbs subjects
act of looking and throws her into the abyss of there is again by suspending the perception.
Besides, face is also both material and abstract. It signifies both what is beyond there is and
participates to the materiality by always having the risk of being surpassed by there is. After
all, it can be said that the attempt to let operate all of these transformations, transitions and
shuttlings between these terms in a growing complexity and with an even more passion for
paradoxes everytime, is what stays as an everlasting concern for Levinass work.
So what we would like precisely to point out here is that the terms impersonal and
personal work as the operating powers for Levinass explanations on the diversity and
complexity of transitions between the elements of his thought. Without them there would
probably be no way of speaking on the primacy of ethics and no act in the radical sense of
the word. One thing we should again stress is that all of the complexity of these
transformations, transitions and the descriptions made on these terms should not include any
ontological implications in which either the structure or the game of being are questioned.
May be the hardest thing in understanding Levinas is that it is very easy for one to be

113
Ibid, p. 60.
65

intended to think of his analysis as still taking part in the region of ontology. To insist on the
priority of the relation between the impersonal and the personal to any other description of
the world is from this reason the most decisive point. As we mentioned before, what
ontology does is to impersonalize thought and to state the basic character of ontology in such
a manner, is a way of speaking outside ontology and being extremely critical about it: It first
of all says that considering ontology as first philosophy is already a lacking in ethics. To
speak of the impersonality of thought is not an explanation of a fundamental feature of it but
simply saying that it is not ethical and that there lies an immense lack of ethical move
towards the Other.
We have seen that the journey of Levinas is a transition from the Same to the Other,
from immanence to transcendence, and so from the impersonal to the personal: This
transtition is what Levinas calls a movement without return. We have also tried to make
clear that such a movement should never be considered as a one-sided move as in the case of
crossing a line. What is at stake here is that the movement without return lies in the
enhancements of the complexity of the relationship between the impersonal and the
personal.
Let us raise again the question we have just asked: As a result of Levinass attempt to
philosophize in a non-ontological way, what happens to the world? As far as we are not
anymore permitted to speak of it as taking part within an existential context, how are we
going to deal with it? Did it simply dissappear into the void of nothingness? If a certain
experience of there is is concerned, yes. But as we explained before, this doesnt mean the
refusal of the world or the return of a certain two world theory; it rather signifies a radical
moment in which the world falls into an absolute impersonality. Pure nothingness and there
is that comes after it, are what disqueten the restfulness of being at a world that is understood
as a home. Besides, an even more radical move comes into question when the experience of
66

trace is concerned. However, in a similar way to the experience of there is, this doesnt mean
that the world is covered with trace, or now there is a plane of trace that one inhabits in
instead of the world.
In this respect, Levinass non-ontological philosophy may offer us an opportunity for
the rearticulation of the term world. To do this, we should first leave considering the world
as a home. If such a conception presupposes the hegemony of the Same over the Other and
the victory of the circularity of Being wherein nothing but the secure identity of the subject
is affirmed, then a world understood as neither the totality of substances, nor Daseins
being-in-the-world should be taken as not a land above which a journey takes place, but as
the very losing of the identity of this land itself. To criticize the term world as an ontological
category does not have to be a negation of it. It may also be understood as a new conception
of the world that takes it as a process of personalization in which the search for truth and all
metaphysical concerns appear within the face-to-face encounter, welcome and the social
relationship. However, the act that overcomes the authority of the identity does not offer the
alienation of the subject to the world it lives in. The subject is not alienated but it is alien on
this world. In that sense, to be alien is to keep the distance between the subject and the
world, to avoid any reduction of it. As is known, Levinass comparision between the
journies of Odysseus and Abraham points out the fact that while the former leaves his home
in order to turn back, the latter never comes back again.
114
This corresponds to the difference
between a whole history of ontology and Levinass own account of philosophizing. But cant
we also say that after this differentiation between two kinds of journies, the worlds of
Odysseus and Abraham are not the same? If they were, then this would presuppose a world
that stays the same while offering two types voyages: One which cannot distinguish between

114
According to the Greek mythology, Odysseus, the king of Ithaka, leaves his home for the Trojan war that
lasted for ten years, and turns back to Ithaka again in a journey of another ten years. On the other hand, by
listenning to the command of God, Abraham departs from his homeland Haran to Canaan but never returns
back to his country.
67

staying at home and leaving it, for it experiences its journey as the circular movement of the
world within itself (or, to refer to Socrates again, dialogue of the soul with itself); and one
which breaks this fundamental structure of the world, that is to say, a shift from the
circularity.of being. As we have said before, Abrahams journey is not towards another
world or a world beyond which may imply a traditional metaphycial distinction in which
there is a mistrust for and negation of the world in the Nietzschean sense of the word.
By associating his own philosophical journey to that of Abraham, Levinas considers
a radical work as the movement of the Same unto the Other which never returns to the
Same.
115
The experience that does not dissolve into the rumble of an anonymous event
and shows the courage to encounter with the very personality of another, of what relates one
to the transcendence beyond Being, calls the subject to a conception of alturism that
understands this move as a new discovery of himself. Levinas writes:

In desire the ego is born unto another in such a way as to compromise the sovereign
identification of the I with itself, an identification of which need is but the nostalgia, and
which the consciousness of need anticipates. The movement unto another, instead of
completing and contenting me, implicates me in a situation which by one side should not
concern me and should leave me indifferent: What then was I looking for in this convinct-
ship? Whence comes to me this shock when I pass, indifferent, under the gaze of another?
The relationship with another puts me into question, empties me of myself and does not let
off emptying me-uncovering for me ever new sources. I did not know myself so rich, but I
have no longer have right to keep anything.
116



Here we see something that Levinas does not mention often: The richness of oneself and the
uncovering of him for the new sources. But this uncovering of the new sources are not
subject to the relationship between potentiality and actuality which take part within an

115
The Trace of the Other, p. 348.
116
The Trace of the Other, p. 350-351.
68

economy of the capabilities and the I can of the subject. The ethical alturism of the I is
here understood as the enchancement of his ways of encountering with the world. The
moment that I realize that I did not know myself so rich is at the same time the moment
that I have no right to keep anything. This richness is not the richness of an I or the
richness of his Being. What makes the I rich is the fact that this richness does not belong to
him; it cannot be kept, but only be experienced under the gaze of another person which frees
the gaze of the I from being a capability and intentionality of him. This is the experience of a
thinking which is nothing like the traditional conception that imprisons it into a manner of
impersonalizing the world.
According to Nietzsche, those rich in life are characterized by the fact that they
enrich it and give presents to it. So they see things fuller, more powerful and pregnant
with future. Rather than stating this seeing as the forerunner of phenomenology, cant
this future also be understood as being interpreted in Levinas as the transcendence to
which the desire of the subject aims and as break in the spontaneity that neutralizes the
difference between I and the Other? As far as Levinas clearly states that his aim is not to
construct a certain ethical theory but to search for the very meaning of the ethics itself, can
we not take this attempt as a new way of speaking on the world?
In a well known aphorism, Nietzsche says: And when you gaze long into an abyss
the abyss also gazes into you.
117
We may say that the radical act of Levinas can now be
understood as a manner of bringing a personal dimension to the gaze of the abyss.







117
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 2003, p. 102.
69

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