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

The Originality of Levinas Pre-Originally Categorizing the EgoABSTRACT Levinas depicts a pluralism of subjectivity older than consciousness and self-consciousness. He repudiates Heideggers notion of purdah in order to explore the implications of the Husserlian pure I outside the subject. A hidden Good constitutes the Other in the self a diremption not at the expense of the adept of the self. Levinas stands with Nietzsche on the side of life which requires and is capable of no justification whatsoever. But for Levinas the totality is ruptured by the thought that there is a unity of self undiminished by its patriarchal responsibility for the Other, a unity of self beyond totality. This self containing the Other is the transcendence of the Ego otherwise inherent in Husserls pure intentionality. Just here Levinas thought is most perfectly distinguished from Sartres notion of the transcendence of the Ego as complete exclusion from the immanency of intentionality. The pure I is otherw ise than the Hegelian absolute Elastizitt incarnate and inspirited, the self tight in its own skin. The transubstantiation of Ego to Other has not yet occurred to thought in Levinas, but what does occur here is the altersubstantiation of the I. The Other in the Same is an alteration of center of attention. It is precisely through 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 freedom by which the Self shows the Other mercy. The wander 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, boundlessly exposed. Then straight is the highway between the cusps of this absolutely inverted consciousness better than consciousness transcending the original curvature o f consciousness and self-consciousness. This one-way straightaway is the immemorial contact 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 method before any notion of reciprocity and reflective or pre-reflective consciousness. This hit the hay 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 rightness whereby the human transcends the angelic.