The Originality of Levinas: Pre-Originally Categorizing the Ego

The Originality of Levinas: Pre-Originally Categorizing the Ego

ABSTRACT: Levinas depicts a pluralism of subjectivity older than consciousness and self-consciousness. He repudiates Heidegger's notion of solitude 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 unity 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 immemorial responsibility for the Other, a unity of self beyond totality. This self containing the Other is the transcendence of the Ego otherwise immanent in Husserl's pure intentionality. Just here Levinas' thought is most perfectly distinguished from Sartre's notion of the transcendence of the Ego as complete exclusion from the immanence of intentionality. The pure I is otherwise than the Hegelian absolute Elastizität: 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 essence. 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 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 straight is the highway between the cusps of this absolutely inverted consciousness — better than consciousness — transcending the original curvature of 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 love 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.