The Originality of Levinas: Pre-Originally Categorizing the Ego :: Philosophy Essays

The Originality of Levinas Pre-Originally Categorizing the selfABSTRACT Levinas depicts a pluralism of subjectivity honest-to-goodness than knowingness and egotism-consciousness. He repudiates Heideggers notion of solitude in order to seek the implications of the Husserlian pure I out locating the subject. A hidden Good constitutes the other in the ego a diremption not at the expense of the accordance of the self. Levinas stands with Nietzsche on the side of life which requires and is capable of no justification whatsoever. alone for Levinas the totality is ruptured by the popular opinion that there is a unity of self undiminished by its immemorial indebtedness for the some other, a unity of self beyond totality. This self containing the Other is the transcendence of the Ego otherwise internal in Husserls pure intentionality. Just here Levinas thought is most short distinguished from Sartres notion of the transcendence of the Ego as complete exception from the immanence of intentionality. The pure I is otherwise than the Hegelian absolute Elastizitt incarnate and inspirited, the self tight in its own skin. The transubstantiation of Ego to Other has not yet diered to thought in Levinas, but what does occur here is the altersubstantiation of the I. The Other in the Same is an alteration of essence. It is precisely by dint of thinking the contraction of the modern essence of consciousness that Levinas thinks otherwise than being, beyond essence, thinks a thought profounder and older than the cogito. Humanity signifies a new image of the Infinite in the preoriginary license by which the Self shows the Other mercy. The curve on the hither side of consciousness is a concave without a convex the cuspidal infinity of interiority turned absolutely inside outside the other within an interiority without walls, infinitely exposed. Then straightforward is the highway between the cusps of this absolutely inverted consciousness better than consciousness tra nscending the original curvature of consciousness and self-consciousness. This one-way straightaway is the immemorial tangency of self and other. It is the absolute proximity which is the approach, without return, from the self to the other . This is the approach without rule before any notion of reciprocity and reflective or pre-reflective consciousness. This chicane or non-indifference prior to all conscious differentiation, this possibility of being for-one-another is the responsibility of the self to do for the Other.The indispensability of the flesh to this turning of the self to the Other signifies the excellence whereby the human transcends the angelic.