Download The Cambridge Companion to Levinas by Simon Critchley PDF
By Simon Critchley
Emmanuel Levinas is now well known along Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre as essentially the most very important Continental philosophers of the 20th century. His abiding predicament was once the primacy of the moral relation to the opposite individual and his imperative thesis was once that ethics is first philosophy. His paintings has had a profound influence on a couple of fields open air philosophy--such as theology, Jewish reports, literature and cultural concept, psychotherapy, sociology, political thought, diplomacy idea and significant criminal thought.
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Extra info for The Cambridge Companion to Levinas
Sample text
The positive German reception of Levinas, with the notable exception of phenomenologists like Bernhard Waldenfels and critical theorists like Axel Honneth, was largely thanks to Freiburg Catholic theologians such as Ludwig Wenzler and Bernhard Caspar, and has obviously been dominated by the question of German guilt for the Shoah. The vicissitudes of the Anglo-American reception of Levinas might also be mentioned in this connection. The reception begins in the Catholic universities in the USA, many of which enjoyed strong connections with the Dutch and Belgium Catholic academic milieux such as Duquesne University and Loyola University Chicago.
Thus, despite the novelty of his work, Heidegger rejoins and sums up the great Platonic tradition of Western philosophy, where the relation to particular beings is always understood by way of mediation with a third term, whether universal form or eidos in Plato, Spirit in Hegel or Being in Heidegger. Yet how can a relation with a being be other than comprehension? Levinas’s response is that it cannot, ‘unless it is the other (autrui)’ (bpw 6). Autrui is arguably the key term in all of Levinas’s work and, in line with common French usage, it is Levinas’s word for the human other, the other person.
Ethics, for Levinas, takes place as the putting into question of the ego, the self, consciousness or what he calls, in the term that he borrows ˆ from Plato, the same (le Meme, to auton). What is the same? It is important to note that the same refers not only to subjective thoughts, but also to the objects of those thoughts. In Husserlian terms, the domain of the same includes not only the intentional acts of consciousness, or noeses, but also the intentional objects which give meaning to those acts, or noemata.