Husserl and Levinas: Transformations of the Epoche

Abstract

Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology offered the possibility of once again doing philosophy at a time when funereal signs were forecasting the immanent demise of the philosophical enterprise. Itself a new beginning, Husserl’s phenomenology argued that philosophy is a beginning anew, a taking up of the task of thinking and being in an original way. Many would respond to Husserl’s call. And among them would be Emmanual Levinas, who perhaps spoke for many of Husserl’s students when he said that “it was with Husserl that I discovered the concrete meaning of the very possibility of ‘working in philosophy’…”¹ How was it that Husserl’s philosophy offered such a possibility?

I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.

Edmund Husserl The Crisis, I, 7, 18

Our analyses claim to be in the spirit of Husserlian philosophy, whose letter has been the recall in our epoch of the permanent phenomenology, restored to its rank of being a method for all philosophy.

Emmanuel Levinas Otherwise Than Being, 183