Abstract
Emmanuel Levinas is known for his idea of ethics as first philosophy. In Totality and Infinity (1961), he expresses this concept with the phrase “truth presupposes justice”. Levinas’ ethical thought has been much discussed in previous literature. However, its implications for contemporary theories of truth have not been discussed at length. This paper aims to investigate how far Levinas’ reinterpretation of truth ranges from a phenomenological point of view. In the first section, by reading closely the first section of Totality and Infinity I disclose some peculiarities of Levinas’ concept of truth: (1) the “I” as a knowing subject is separated from the world. (2) truth is accomplished by discourse towards the other person. (3) to attain to the truth, the “I” needs to justify not only the fact that he or she describes but also himself or herself. By putting these three points in relation to Husserl’s analysis of communication and that of B. Williams in his Truth and Truthfulness, the second section shows that Levinas’ concept of truth, which may seem bizarre to some, can contribute to contemporary theories of truth insofar as it reinterprets the concept of truth from the perspective of a “personal” relation to the other person to whom the “I” speaks.
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- 1.
In Totality and Infinify, the term “sincerity” (sincérité) is used to refer to an attendance of the other person at his or her own presence or speech (cf. TI 220), while in Otherwise than Being, it refers to an exposedness of “I” to the other (cf. AE 85). In this paper, the term is used in the sense of an attitude of “I” who welcomes the presence of the other person, which I believe covers either usage.
- 2.
Cf. Gaëlle Bernard, « La vérité suppose la justice »—L’exercice éthique de la philosophie selon Levinas, in: Studia Phaenomenologica, Zeta Books, 2007.
- 3.
Cf. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, chap. 5.
- 4.
“Interiority is essentially bound to the first person of the I. The separation is radical only if each being has its own time, that is, its interiority, if each time is not absorbed into the universal time” (TI 50).
- 5.
On the face of it, Levinas’ notion of interiority seems to collapse into a Cartesian dualism that separates the internal mind from the external world which Heidegger opposes Dasein as it is Being-in-the-world. In fact, though, it is actually Levinas, who, more than any other his contemporary thinkers who were much indebted to Heidegger’s criticism against the traditional concept of subject, did not try to rehabilitate Cartesian dualism but to redefine the interiority or psychism in terms of a “way of being”. Cf. Jocelyn Benoist, Le cogito lévinassien: Lévinas et Descartes, in: Jean-Luc Marion (dir.), Positivité et transcendance, Paris: PUF, 2000, p. 115; Raoul Moati, Evénements nocturnes: Essai sur Totalité et Infini, Paris: Hermann, 2012, pp. 151–152.
- 6.
Cf. Jean-Michel Salanskis, L’épistémologie de Totalité et Infini, in: Le concret et l’idéal. Levinas vivant III, Paris: Klincksieck, 2015, pp. 194–197.
- 7.
“But we have also indicated that this relation of truth, which at the same time spans and does not span the distance—does not form a totality with the “other shore”—rests on language […]” (TI 59).
- 8.
“In discourse the divergence that inevitably opens between the Other person as my theme and the Other person as my interlocutor, emancipated from the theme that seemed a moment to hold him, forthwith contests the meaning I ascribe to my interlocutor” (TI 212–213).
- 9.
“The “vision” of the face is inseparable from this offering language is. To see the face is to speak of the world” (TI 190).
- 10.
Cf. Jean-Michel Salanskis, ibid., pp. 202–203.
- 11.
Levinas calls this justification of oneself in the discourse towards the other person an “apology” (cf. TI 29).
- 12.
“The originality of separation has appeared to us to consist in the autonomy of the separated being. Whence in knowledge, or more exactly in the claim to it, the knower neither participates in nor unites with the known being. The relation of truth thus involves a dimension of interiority […]” (TI 59).
- 13.
“The subjective and its Good cannot be understood out of ontology. On the contrary, starting with subjectivity in the form of saying, the signification of the said will be interpretable. It will be possible to show that there is question of the said and being only because saying or responsibility require justice. […] Thus alone will the terrain of disinterestedness that allows us to separate truth from ideology be given its truth” (AE 77).
- 14.
Bernard Williams, ibid., p. 96.
- 15.
Edmund Husserl, Husserliana vol. 14. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Texte aus dem Nachlass, Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928. Ed. Iso Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.
- 16.
Edmund Husserl, Husserliana XIX/1, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band. I. Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phaenomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Ursula Panzer (ed.), Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984, pp. 44; 50.
- 17.
Without this distinction, we cannot understand the following passage: “the pretention to know and to attain the Other (l’Autre) is accomplished in the relation to the other person (autrui), which flows into the relation of language […]” (TI 65).
- 18.
Levinas writes with majuscule Autrui (the Other Person) to designate the other person who presents himself or herself as the Other (cf. TI 214)
- 19.
Cf. Shojiro Kotegawa, « Le tiers me regarde dans les yeux d’autrui »: qui est. le « tiers » d’E. Levinas? in: Revue internationale Michel Henry, Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2015.
- 20.
Søren Overgaard, Wittgenstein and other minds: rethinking subjectivity and intersubjectivity with Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl, New York: Routledge, 2007, chap. 7–8; Micheal L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 163–167.
- 21.
I am grateful to Aya Tanaka, who read the draft and corrected some errors, and Yong Chen who gave me many helpful comments at the “International Conference on Phenomenology “Consciousness and the World” (3–4 June 2016, Tongji University, China). I would like to dedicate this article to Professor László Tengelyi, who encouraged my research especially in the fifth Symposia Phaenomenologica Asiatica (August, 2011, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong).
References
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Williams, Bernard. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Kotegawa, S. (2019). Truth and Sincerity: The Concept of Truth in Levinas’ Philosophy. In: de Warren, N., Taguchi, S. (eds) New Phenomenological Studies in Japan. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11893-8_12
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