Levinas - The Levinas Reader (ed Hand)

2 Introductiontion on Husserl's theory of intuition. He also discovered Heidegger's Beingand Time, and attended the famous 1929 encounter between Heidegger andCassirer at Davos, which for Levinas marked 'the end of a certain humanism'.In the thirties, he took French nationality, married and worked in theadministrative section of the Alliance Israelite Universelle. At the outbreakof war, Levinas was mobilized as an interpreter of Russian and German. Hewas quickly made a prisoner of war, reading Hegel, Proust and Rousseau inbetween periods of forced labour. Levinas's book, Existence and Existents,with its description of anonymous existence, and the states of insomnia,sleep, horror, vertigo, appetite, fatigue and indolence, was begun in captivity.After the war he returned to Paris to become the director of the EcoleNonnale Israelite Orientale amiJat the College philosophique, founded by JeanWahl, he gave a series of papers which were to become Time and the Other.Since 1957 he has contributed to the annual Talmud Colloquium of FrenchJewish intellectuals. His 1961 doctoral thesis earned him an appointment atthe University of Poitiers. This was followed by a move to Paris-Nanterre in1967 and to the Sorbonne in 1973.These biographical details delineate the major influences on the work ofLevinas, a work which progressively analyses the alterity of existence inExistence and Existents; subjectivity, time and eros in Time and the Other;ethics as first philosophy in Totality and Infinity; the importance of languagein Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence; and the question of God in DeDieu qui vient cl l'idee.The most important of these influences is undoubtedly phenomenology.Husserlian phenomenology involves the methodical analysis of lived experiencefrom which can be derived the necessary and universal truths of allexperience. Human experience is no longer seen as pure cogito, but asalways tending towards something in the real world. Rather than proceedby abstract deduction, or dialectic, the phenomenological method enablesconsciousness to become reflexive, to recognize the intentionality that allowsan object to emerge as meaningful. The lack of presuppositions in such amethod reveals the relation between logical judgement and perceptual experience.Truth and meaning are shown to be generated.Heidegger builds on Husserl's phenomenology while rejecting some of itscentral features. The notion of phenomenology is retained in Being andTime though the idea that one can isolate and so examine the purelyconscious status of objects is rejected. The growing importance of the ego inHusserl, which leads him in Cartesian Meditations to redefine phenomenologyas an 'egology' is rejected, though the notion of a transcendentalconstitution is still held. Heidegger shifts attention from the existence ofbeings to our very understanding of Being. Existential moods are now seenas the ontological ways in which we come to understand our being-in-the-