Instead, Levinas insists that the Other person is irreducible to my experience of him/her, and so never present or co-present with me. Levinas critiques both Husserl’s recognition of other people as like me, or alter ego, and Buber’s insistence that relation with another is reciprocal, because both approaches-on Levinas’s account-reduce other people to my own experiences of them, recognizing others as co-present and equal.
In this paper, I (a) explore how Levinas’s notion of alterity represents an intentional move away from Husserl’s conception of alter ego, (b) briefly review Levinas’s criticism of Martin Buber’s dialogical philosophy, and (c) argue that Levinas’s responses to Husserl and Buber expose some weaknesses in his own ethical phenomenology. Much of Levinas’s philosophical study of time and intersubjectivity indirectly addresses the unanswered questions of Edmund Husserl’s fifth Cartesian Meditation, specifically whether his account of the constitution of intersubjectivity overcomes the risk of solipsism that follows his conception of intentionality: how does Husserl’s phenomenological account move from the recognition of a transcendental ego to the constitution of a community? Though Levinas’s understanding of ethical response and responsibility is often attributed to his religious commitments, it proves helpful to concentrate on the Husserlian roots of Levinas’s philosophical work. (Buber 1970, 58)Įmmanuel Levinas’s earliest philosophical work directly engages the core problems of Husserlian phenomenology, specifically the concepts of intentional consciousness and the constitution of time through the encounter with the Other. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity. In place of Buber’s relational subjectivity, we find in Levinas a form of the categorical imperative:Īnd the two walked on together. Levinas runs into the problem of solipsism, which he mistakenly identifies early on in Husserl as he struggles with the privileging of the Other. Levinas’s application of his criticism of Husserl to Buber misconstrues Buber’s dialogical philosophy and misvalues the notions of alter ego and intersubjectivity in Husserl.
Levinas similarly criticizes Martin Buber’s reciprocity as reductive and insists that intersubjectivity is always asymmetrical.
Levinas rejects Husserl’s construction of alter ego, radicalizing it with his own alterity. Alterity and Asymmetry in Levinas’s Ethical PhenomenologyĪBSTRACT: Levinas’s first forays in ethics may be read as extensions of his engagement with Husserlian phenomenology.
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