Abstract
Levinas’ review of Husserl’s Ideen I represents his first philosophical publication, appearing 1 year prior to the 1930 publication of his thesis, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. At first glance, Levinas’ review appears philosophically unremarkable, but as I shall explore in this essay, traces of a profound germination of thought are nonetheless discernable, hinting towards central pre-occupations of Levinas’ thinking to come. As I shall examine, Levinas considers Ideen I as the perfected soliloquy of light and reason; the reduction to the absolute of a solitary transcendental subjectivity, situated in “face to face encounter” with beings, fulfills the secret (metaphysical) desire of Western Philosophy. Yet, the Ideen is also perforated by holes that render its phenomenology of reason incomplete. In addition to a subtle emphasis on the implied ethics of knowledge underlying Husserl’s transcendental idealism, Levinas identifies the dual omission of time and the Other from the scope of transcendental reflection. A path of thinking through the Ideen thus becomes delineated that Levinas will untiringly come to explore in his struggle against the soliloquy of light and reason in the name of the Other.
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- 1.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Fribourg, Husserl et la phénoménologie,” Revue d’Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande 5/43 (May 1931): 403.
- 2.
Edith Stein: “I was twenty-one and all excited over everything that was going to happen to me. Dear old Göttingen! I think only people who were between 1905 and 1914, in the brief flowering of the Göttingen School of phenomenology, can appreciate what that name contains for us.” Quoted in Alasdair Macintyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (Rowman and Littlefield: London, 2005), 20.
- 3.
Throughout this paper, I shall refer to Ideen I simply as “Ideen.”
- 4.
Cf. Yasuhiko Murakami, Lévinas phénoménologue (Jérôme Millon: Grenoble, 2002).
- 5.
“Sur les ‘Ideen’ de M. E. Husserl,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger CVII/3–4 (March–April, 1929): 230–65; hereafter HI.
- 6.
Adriaan Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 39.
- 7.
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 68.
- 8.
Quoted in Alasdair Macintyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 18.
- 9.
Quoted in Alasdair Macintyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 15.
- 10.
Cf. “Intentionalité et sensation,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1988), 145–164.
- 11.
Cf. André de Muralt, The Idea of Phenomenology: Husserlian Exemplarism, trans. G. Breckon (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
- 12.
Cf. James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004).
- 13.
Cf. Andrea Staiti, Geistigkeit, Leben und geschichtliche Welt in der Transzendentalphänomenologie Husserls (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2010), Chapter 1.
- 14.
Cf. Mikel Dufrenne, The Notion of the A Priori, trans. E. Casey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966).
- 15.
It would be an intriguing exercise to read Levinas’s assessment of the Ideen in tandem with Husserl and Heidegger’s joint attempts to arrive at common ground in their unsuccessful Encyclopedia Britannica article.
- 16.
Emmanuel Levinas, “L’oeuvre de Edmund Husserl,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1988), 7–51; 35; hereafter OH.
- 17.
Cf. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. D. Dahlstrom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
- 18.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Phenomenological Movement,” Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 167.
- 19.
Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” Writings and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), 85.
- 20.
One cannot fail to recognize the manner in which, in Levinas’s own rehabilitation of the priority of the Other, the face of the Other is not a visible form of self-showing or evidence: the Other resists the Husserlian conception of Es-selbst-geistig-zu-Gesicht-Bekommen.
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de Warren, N. (2013). Emmanuel Levinas and a Soliloquy of Light and Reason. In: Embree, L., Nenon, T. (eds) Husserl’s Ideen. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5213-9_16
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