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Einleitung: Philosophie als Passion. Das gebrochene Denken von Emmanuel Levinas
The essay gives a short introduction to Levinas’ passionate thinking by focusing on the failure of all philosophical trials in theodicy.
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The essay gives a short introduction to Levinas’ passionate thinking by focusing on the failure of all philosophical trials in theodicy.
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This paper intends to analyze the question of the embodied subjectivity in Emmanuel Levinas’s work, starting from a specific point of view: the controversial reception of Husserl’s phenomenology. In the early period of his confrontation with Husserl, Levinas criticizes the excess of theoreticism in transcendental idealism. However, he then seems to discover right inside of it the conditions to bring the philosophical debate out of the limits of knowledge theory. This is when he recognizes the important role played by the body in the husserlian description of the act of sense-giving (Sinngebung). Though, while praising Husserl for his conception of sensibility – as the “Commentaires nouveaux” clearly show – Levinas actually proceeds to an original rethinking of the meaning of incarnation, beyond the purity of the ego, and the supposed “property” of the flesh.
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This paper will take a closer look at Levinas' ethical subject and diachronic time in relation to Heidegger's project of Being and Time. Throughout the analysis, I will show how Levinas reformulates Heidegger's task and overcomes its limitation by successfully construing “the whole of time”, in the mode of discontinuity. Levinasian Diachronic time reveals a new signi-fication of finiteness, to be a Messiah, who dedicates oneself to the suffering others without seeking other-worldly hopes, for the “responsibility of a mortal being for a mortal being” itself is “the relationship with the infinite”. Furthermore, I will argue that through this diachronic time, Levinas attempts to construct a new structure of eternity under the influence of Rosenzweig. Levinas declares that only after falsifying hopes are dissolved in despair, infinity breaks into time, and enables “mortal human beings” to participate in “immortality” through the time of the Other. Whereas Heideggerian ontology attempted to articulate the meaning of Being-in-general based on the being of Dasein and temporality, Levinas captures that the pri-mordial horizon of ethics is the manifestation of the face of the Other and diachronic time, which lead us to think beyond Being, namely, “the otherwise than being”.
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Sartre and Levinas both described the relation to the other referring to Descartes’ idea of the infinite. Comparing these two phenomenologies sheds a light on the great influence Sartre had on Levinas’ ethics. While the two philosophers agree that the other is « a hole in the world » in the sense that he negates my intentionality, they fundamentally differ on the ultimate meaning of this negation. Following the thread of the Cartesian idea of the infinite, this article deciphers Levinas’ critique of Sartre, leading to his ethics of the face.
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In this paper, I explore the thesis according to which ipseity cannot be conceived of without acknowledging a radical absence and alterity in its very core that makes it possible. To develop this thesis, I draw on Levinas’ reading of Descartes and Marion’s reading of Augustine. After a brief introductory part on what we could call, with Marc Richir’s term, the symbolic tautology of ipseity, I show how such a tautology is deconstructed by Levinas’ interpretation of the idea of the infinite in Descartes’ Third Meditation. I then proceed to contrast the results of this reading with Marion’s take on the problem of the memoria in Augustin’s Confessions. Both readings point towards a radical and immemorial dimension of absence that – by impeding the self from fully possessing itself – makes paradoxically ipseity possible in the first place. In the conclusion, I pose the question of whether – in order to account for this absence that reveals a transcendence in the most inner intimate of the self – one has to abandon phenomenology for ethics or some kind of new theology or if a strictly phenomenological description of this dimension of the experience of ipseity is possible.
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This text aims to show how, in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, the moment of jouissance is constitutive of the selfhood of the ego and conditions the very possibility of a sensitivity to the other man, and so the possibility of the ethical relation itself. These considerations on the enjoyment invited us to think artistic creation and poetry as a way to respond to anesthesia of our sensibility through knowledge, which is a characteristic of western thought for Emmanuel Levinas.
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Many readers of Emmanuel Levinas understand his thought as being oriented only by transcendence and therefore denigrate the immanent dimension of metaphor within his texts. Such readings reduce the complexities of Levinas’s text to a set of polemical, orthodox proclamations such as The Other is Most High and Ethics is First Philosophy. However, Levinas’s work invites us to contemplate not only transcendence, but also the way that immanence emerges though relationships with an infinitude of others, third persons whose voices murmur within the system of language, articulated in concrete elements such as metaphor. Levinas employs metaphor to converse with the inherited ways that temporal becoming has been articulated, recurrently reorienting them to expose a variety of ethical-phenomenological constellations. To expose the dynamics that remain clandestine to the orthodox interpretation, this paper will chronologically trace the development of various families of metaphors such as those of having and doing; those of dimensionality, those of orality, those of familiarity, and those of birth, gender, and death, thereby demonstrating the multitude of roles and perspectival positions assumed by the subject during its temporal becoming.
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Levinasian philosophy is characterized as a philosophy of ethical subjectivity and asymmetrical responsibility. Ethics is understood as the subject that gives itself entirely to the Other. However, the Other is never alone. His face attests to the presence of a third party who, looking at me in his eyes, cries for justice. There is no longer any question for the subject to devote himself entirely to the Other (ethical justice), to give everything to him at the risk of appearing empty-handed before the third party. How then to serve both the Other and the third party? The question of the political appears in the thought of Levinas with the emergence of the third party who, like the Other, challenges me and commands me (social justice). The third party establishes a political space. Politics is in the final analysis the place of the universalization of the ethical requirement born from face-to-face with the face of the Other.
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In his late works Husserl interprets the crisis of European sciences as the loss of their meaning for life. The diagnosis seems to suggest therapeutic strategy: to overcome the crisis, phenomenology must return to the evidences of the life-world. The article argues that the husserlian strategy of overcoming the crisis consists not in the elimination of the break with the prescientific evidences of the natural attitude, but, on the contrary, in the radicalization of the breach. Thus, I want to show that Husserl seeks to overcome the crisis of sciences by means of more radical crisis of phenomenology. In Husserl’s view, phenomenology must become the only science, which does not presuppose the life-world, since it problematizes it. I am going to argue also, that the counterintuitive strategy is not just of the historico- philosophical interest, but is meaningful for the actual philosophical understanding of the lifeworld. To justify those claims, I will proceed in three stages. In the first section of the article, I analyze the difference between the objective world and the life-world, which is the point of departure of husserlian interpretation of the crisis of sciences in Crisis. Bringing into correlation the difference between the objective world and the life-world in Crisis with the distinction of the ideal world and the real one in Ideas I, I disclose the ambiguity of husserlian interpretation of the crisis of European sciences. According to Husserl, the crisis arises, when science transcends the life-world through the idealizations, and, at the same time, presupposes the immediate prescientific evidences as something that is taken for granted. In the second section, I argue that the strategy of overcoming the crisis in Crisis is based on the phenomenological epoche, which allows for the porblematization of the life-world without presupposing it, Within this context I demonstrate the motivational unity of two reductions, performed by Husserl in Crisis–the reduction to the life-world, stripping the reality of the garb of ideas mistakingly taken to be the reality itself, and the reduction of the life-world, turning it into horizon and depriving phenomenologist of a right of relying on the life-worldly evidences, which is taken for granted in the natural science and renders it possible. The unity of the reductions indicates that phenomenological descent back down to the life-world is treated by Husserl as the radical break with the evidences of the natural life. The third section discusses the question, whether the problematical character of the lifeworld can be revealed only from the point of view of disinterested spectator, or it can be discovered, in a way, from within, in pretheoretical experience, which capacitates the life to problematizing itself and motivates phenomenological epoche. I argue that, although the question is not answered in a suitable way within husserlian analyses of the motivation for the epoche, the key to the solution of the problem is provided by the genetic phenomenology, since it thematizes the historicity of the life-world. I interpret the historicity as the ambivalent pretheoretical experience, constituting both the self-evidence and the problematical character of the life-world.
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The goal of this essay is to suggest some elements for a phenomenological critique of ideology, based on the philosophy of affectivity proposed by Maine de Biran at the beginning of the XIX century. It also draws on the work of the Belgian phenomenologist Marc Richir, who developed some of the concepts postulated by Maine de Biran into a theory of intersubjective affectivity centered on the concept of contagion. The last part is an attempt to use these concepts for a critical analysis of the influence advertisements have on our affective disposition and how said influence modifies our phenomenological comprehension of the world.
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The concept of “utopia” appears in Marc Richir’s first article in 1968. Although Richir does not ever explicitly claim it, it nevertheless plays a very fundamental role in his thought, particularly in the political field. By analyzing the different layers of meaning that characterize the human community, from the most established to the most archaic, we would like to defend the idea that what he calls in Du sublime en politique “utopian sociality” or even “the utopian community” is in truth the register of transcendental interfacticity. To do this, we will have to explain in what and how the socio-political link differs from the links of transcendental intersubjectivity and interfacticity. We will argue that, for Richir, it is phantasia and affectivity that hold the political community together. We will then explore what role transcendental interfacticity plays in the field of politics, more particularly in its articulation with the declination of absolute transcendence into political transcendence.
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The purpose of this article is the phenomenological description of theatrical performance throughout the revision of some of the key-concepts of Hans Thies-Lehmann’s and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s reception theories from the perspective of Marc Richir’s thought concerning the architectonical transposition of experiencing. This revision includes the Freudian concept of “evenly hovering attention” (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit) that Lehmann describes as the spectator’s optimal disposition of reception, and the concept of “perceptual multistability” which in Fischer-Lichte’s theory is meant to outline the spectator’s instability in the perception of the actor and the represented character. I will rethink the phenomenalization of the above mentioned phenomena primarily by introducing Marc Richir’s thoughts concerning the primacy of phantasia over perception and his description of the experience of the sublime. I will argue that the phenomenon of theatrical performance (in several cases) can be the ground of a collectively performed act of symbolic and aesthetic Stiftung.
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The purpose of this article is the phenomenological description of theatrical performance throughout the revision of some of the key-concepts of Hans Thies-Lehmann’s and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s reception theories from the perspective of Marc Richir’s thought concerning the architectonical transposition of experiencing. This revision includes the Freudian concept of “evenly hovering attention” (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit) that Lehmann describes as the spectator’s optimal disposition of reception, and the concept of “perceptual multistability” which in Fischer-Lichte’s theory is meant to outline the spectator’s instability in the perception of the actor and the represented character. I will rethink the phenomenalization of the above mentioned phenomena primarily by introducing Marc Richir’s thoughts concerning the primacy of phantasia over perception and his description of the experience of the sublime. I will argue that the phenomenon of theatrical performance (in several cases) can be the ground of a collectively performed act of symbolic and aesthetic Stiftung.
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The article presents analyses of the manner in which “phantasy”, Marc Richir’s preferred concept of the imagination, can be observed and understood with clarity in relation to the experience of music. By elaborating examples of musical experience, to which Richir refers in his analyses of phantasy, it is shown that phantasy expresses itself as the originally affective dimension of experience, articulated by the correlation between the lived-bodiliness of phantasy (Phantasieleiblichkeit) and the sublime affectivity of the phenomenological apeiron. To this end, the systematic connection between music and phantasy, the concept of rhythm, the unique mobility of Phantasieleiblichkeit, and the sublime dimension of affectivity will be successively explored.
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An attempt is made to develop a basic framework for an existential-phenomenological perspective on personality disorders. Its starting point is taken from the psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński and the philosopher Józef Tischner. The former provides a clinical framework capacious enough to allow ethical, existential, and phenomenological explorations. This conceptual “space” is then explicitly recognized, addressed, and fulfilled by the latter’s investigation of personality dynamics proper to “the hideout.” In order to supplement this thread of thought with a specific illustration, a “case” provided by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his Notes from the Underground is investigated. Then, in turn, Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be is referred to, so that the deepest roots of personality disorders can be identified with an ontological dynamic proper to the avoidance of non-being. Finally, some brief remarks are made concerning how all the above relates to the idea of a normatively neutral science and how it can be integrated with more up to date clinical practice.
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In my essay I examine the organically interweaving Hegelian terms of unity and dialectics and try to outline one of their alternative interpretations. The study has three parts. In the first I introduce the process-character (aufheben) of the Hegelian thinking by commenting two Hegel quotations. In the second part I attempt to visualize (Kippbild/reversible figure) this process character; at the same time interpreting visuality as concept underpinned by a result from the philosophy of mathematics: by the procept (dynamic unity of process and concept). In the last part of the essay, which is intentionally kept as a draft calling to co-creation of thoughts, I’m looking out to potential realization conditions of the above treated in human communities.
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Phenomenology of liturgy is the main philosophical project of Jean-Yves Lacoste, a contemporary French thinker, up to this time not well known in Poland. Liturgy is hereby understood in a broader sense, as a mode of life, which consist of facing God, understood as a subject and a promise of relationship. Therefore, it seems to be both a philosophical and mystical experience, which is why it is going to be considered here as philosophy of mysticism. The paper examines Lacoste’s undertaking of the task of thinking, his way to philosophy of mysticism, as well as the relation between philosophical and mystical experience in his thought. Finally, a question will emerge: is mysticism in its core a way of experiencing time?
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In the first of two essays on the ontological ground of otherness, and its phenomenological availability, we argue that what we call the “occasion” within the encounter of others are sources as well as re-sources for disclosing the results of a construction and concealment of a secret identity, one we keep from ourselves even though we have created it. Yet, individuals are capable of returning their encounters to the well of sensus communis, and that sensus communis is as natural as it is cultural. Human beings are not compelled to interpret strangeness as threat, even if we are culturally compelled to interpret strangeness itself. Narrative lives in our sensus communis, and it is open, revisable, even danceable. Immediacy is person, the person that is community, and it is sublime, is both liked and disliked.
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The self that corresponds to the answers given to the question "Who am I?" is embodied in the body. The self necessarily requires a body. This study focuses on the relationship between body and self, by means of a phenomenological body-centered reading. In this context, the concepts of embodiment, living body and conscious body in the phenomenological body approach, the concept of self in social psychology and symbolic interactionism, and Anthony Giddens' concept of reflexive self are used as a basis to evaluate the relationship between body and self. In this sense, the aim of the study is to describe the relationship between body and self.
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