§ 34. Levinas and Sartre as a new generation of Husserl’s successors
We now arrive at the third stage of Husserl’s reception in France (Dupont makes the differentiation more elaborate and identifies four), which directly includes Levinas and Sartre as the first two French thinkers who ventured beyond mere reference, critique, or explanation of Husserl’s dense thought. They were the first to actually incorporate his insights (both methodological and content- related) into their own philosophical enterprises. I suggest that our apprehension of their philosophical positions can benefit greatly from elucidating this liaison (between Husserl and them), and that it is even more essential when we attempt to compare them. To set the stage for following analyses, let me mention a few statements by Sealey, which might appear – when we examine them carefully – as perhaps not taking into account all the implications of intentionality, as we described it thus far. She states that “[…] consciousness is such that it is always ‘to the left or right of’ that of which there is consciousness. In other words, intentionality happens in terms of this spatial orientation.”267
This claim is non-problematic (apart from the omission of abstract thinking) as we have witnessed firsthand in Husserl’s own words that the subject is incarnated and therefore always situated “somewhere next to something.” We also addressed the idea of horizontal structure of perception, which contains principally infinite number of iterations of whatever it is we might perceive at the given moment. As we concluded at the end of Chapter II., this also implies temporality as a necessary dimension and through analysis of various levels of awareness, we revealed that by means of horizontal structure of intentionality, the conscious act always contains more “than it contains in actuality” in that particular time. The latest progress in this respect was Husserl’s account of the appresentation of the other from the fifth Cartesian Meditation, and we shall explore the implications of this conception later in this chapter and finally in the following
267 SEALEY, Kris: Moments of Disruption, p. 98.
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one when we turn our attention to the phenomenological encounter with the other. Let us bear this in mind and explore another except from Moments of Disruption:
“On this account, consciousness-as-intentionality remains a valid structure of consciousness that allows us to account for its relation to the world. However, there exists that duality within identity across which the subject relates to itself, and for which intentionality does not account.
Intentionality is concerned with those experiences whereby consciousness freely surpasses itself, or its position in being, toward the object, or that which is ‘not-consciousness.’ As such, it is unable to account for the relationship between consciousness and its ‘self’ precisely because, in that relationship, consciousness is unable to make itself the kind of ‘other’ that it would surpass toward itself.”268
How are we to understand the claim that the consciousness-as-intentionality (a notion Sealey uses to describe the account of transcendence employed according to her reading by Sartre) cannot account to a type of duality within identity that would require consciousness to target itself in unmodified manner? If we accept the notion of constant auto-affection (albeit non thematic) – would not that solve the problem? If what we seek is “nonintentional intentionality”, we need not look further than this constant temporalization of the subjective pole of our experience.269 We shall discuss in greater detail how Sartre employs this notion later in this chapter (based on a reading of Transcendance de l'ego). In fact, Sartre confirms this model also in his second treatise about imagination L’imaginaire from 1940.270 In short, there is plentiful evidence that he keeps employing this notion throughout the period from the mid-thirties onwards. We can stay close to the topic of temporality and discover similar issue regarding the interpretation of Levinas:
268 SEALEY, Kris: Moments of Disruption, p. 104.
269 ZAHAVI, Dan: Self-awareness and alterity. A Phenomenological Investigation. Northwestern University Press (Evanston, 1999), p. 199.
270 « La conscience a une conscience de soi non-thétique comme d’une activité créatrice. » SARTRE, Jean-Paul: L’imaginaire. Gallimard (Paris, 2013). P. 287.
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“Hence, when Levinas determines that hypostasis occurs prior to a time of subjectivity, he determines that by the time of intentionality, something has already occurred, which can never appear in, or be temporalized in terms of intentionality. It is precisely its origin that the subject can never own or make present. For this reason, this origin comes to the existent from an ‘elsewhere,’
and is encountered as a locus of obsession and not as a condition of autonomy.”271
This “event” or “beginning” should then remain “[maintained categorically] outside of and irreducible to the temporality of subjective life.” Sealey thus concludes that Levinas’s subject maintains an origin, which due to its “position” is outside of the intentional reach. By doing so, she reveals “a disturbance within interiority, without the annihilation of that interiority as – for Levinas – a condition for “the possibility of radical transcendence.”272 It other words, this accounts to a radical alterity in self. It is however precisely in terms of intentionality, that
“Levinas’s analysis of enjoyment has shown that separable subject is made possible by the interiorization of sensible input. The separate self is therefore by definition for Levinas a receptive self.”273 When comparing both, Sealey finds that: “Sartre’s account privileges freedom, in the sense that any positioning in or rivetedness to being is signified as a[n] obstacle for freedom. This is to already bypass the meaning of positionality that Levinas uncovers in his articulation of identity as a relation between ‘moi’ and ‘soi.’”274 To address these topics, I will continue exploring the source material further.
§ 35. Levinas and La ruine de la représentation revisited
The translation of Husserl’s lectures from Paris was entrusted to Gabrielle Peiffer (first four meditations) and Emmanuel Levinas275 (who translated the fifth and last one). What is interesting, Husserl later expressed dissatisfaction with how the translation turned out. As I alluded to in the
271 SEALEY, Kris: Moments of Disruption, p. 77.
272 SEALEY, Kris: Moments of Disruption, p. 77.
273 BATNITZKY, Leora: “Encountering the Modern Subject in Levinas,” p. 17.
274 SEALEY, Kris: Moments of Disruption, p. 54.
275 1906 – 1995. Born in Lithuania. Naturalized French citizen since 1930.
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Introduction, some passages from the original text were not translated, some technical terms were misunderstood, and there were even mistranslations.276
Levinas’s formal training in philosophy began in Strasbourg in 1923. Thanks to a recommendation from Jean Hering, he spent the summer semester of the academical year 1927/1928 and the winter semester in the academic year 1928/1929 directly with Husserl in Freiburg. It was soon after Husserl become pensioned, when he was still teaching several courses.
It is interesting to note that the topics of the courses attended by Levinas were phenomenological psychology and the constitution of intersubjectivity. Therefore, it is possible to legitimately entertain that some aspects of Levinas’s critique of Husserl (most notably revolving around the issue of intersubjectivity) originated from Husserl himself. At that time, his own views were already deviating significantly from the content of his first volume of Ideas, which he very likely reflected during the courses. Levinas’s first oeuvre concerned with phenomenology was coincidentally his summary and discussion of the first Ideas. This text was published in a volume of the journal Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger from April-March of 1929, only a few months after Husserl’s lectures. In the period of emerging interest, it became much appreciated guideline into the study of Husserl’s uneasily accessed thought for a significant part of the French scholarly public. His dissertation entitled Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl277 was published the following year.
While it would be undoubtedly informative to examine the contents of this book, it could also prove misleading in regards to my general topic. My primary goal is to focus on the moment of Levinas’s break from Husserl, which, as we will see in this chapter, happened some thirty years later. The text proves, however, that Levinas was indeed influenced by the exchanges described in the preceding chapter as he refers mostly to Hering, but several times also to Delbos and towards the end of the text even to Šestov.278
276 LAVIGNE, Jean-Francois : « Lévinas avant Lévinas : L’introducteur et le traducteur de Husserl », p.
50.
277 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: La Théorie de l'Intuition Dans la Phénoménologie de Husserl. Vrin (Paris, 2001).
278 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: La Théorie de l'Intuition Dans la Phénoménologie de Husserl. Pp. 11, 13, 61, 80, 153 for Hering; 18, 135, 143, 146 for Delbos; and 220 for Šestov.
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Regarding Levinas’s interpretation of Husserl, the most significant passages can be found in the fifth chapter of his dissertation, which deal directly with the issue of intuition.279 Perhaps the most striking claim of Levinas (and one that seems to indicate his later criticism of Husserl’s notion of intentionality) consists of Levinas interpreting Husserl’s conception of subject who in so far as existing is always already in the world, before (next to) objects, which constitutes its (subject’s) being. However, one can find very explicit statements from Husserl in his Ideas, that go in the exact opposite direction. He in fact employs (by executing the reduction) a subjectivity which exists independently of its objects, but moreover also a notion of consciousness “without the world” established as fundamental eidetic possibility.280 In the following passage, I will focus on disserting the relation between intentionality and intersubjectivity while turning to the middle period of Levinas’s work, which within the scope of his own systematical philosophy offers more articulated reservations against Husserl’s analyses described earlier.
In the text entitled La ruine de la représentation – a text from 1959 I already referred to before – Levinas attempts to capture and describe the most essential traits of phenomenology. He begins his treatise, to reiterate, by stating: “Phenomenology is intentionality”. His subsequent goal is to explain the notion of intentionality and highlight what entails its biggest asset for phenomenological enterprise. Besides the well-known roles of sensuality and being related to an object (which we will leave aside for now), he is captivated by another notion, which he finds no less important. This notion is – as the title suggests – the incompatibility of intentionality with re-presentation. He describes re-presentation in the following manner:
« La re-présentation aborde les êtres comme s’ils se soutenaient entièrement par eux-mêmes, comme s’ils étaient des substances. Elle a le pouvoir de se désintéresser ne fût-ce que pendant un
279 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: La Théorie de l'Intuition Dans la Phénoménologie de Husserl. Pp. 101-142.
280 LAVIGNE, Jean-Francois : « Lévinas avant Lévinas : L’introducteur et le traducteur de Husserl », p.
63. Cf. « En réalité donc, la pensée de Husserl est l’inverse de ce qui Lévinas expose : La réification de la subjectivité ne consiste pas à poser le « sujet indépendant de tout objet », mais au contraire à poser l’objet comme indépendant de l’être du sujet. La conscience en effet n’est réifiée, selon Husserl, que dans son apperception empirique, c’est-à-dire par le choc-en-retour, sur elle, de la présupposition générale du monde qu’effectue l’attitude d’esprit naturelle. » P. 64.
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instant, l’instant de la représentation de la condition de ces êtres. Elle triomphe du vertige de l’infini conditionnement qu’ouvre en eux la vraie pensée et la pensée vraie. »281
Phenomenology – unlike this re-presentative thematization (empirical realism) – teaches us that,
“immediate presence of things (next to us) is not equal to the understanding of their meaning, and so it cannot substitute the truth.” According to Levinas, Husserl attempts to overcome this immediateness by employing the idea of “analysis of intentions, analysis capable of informing us about being (which is supposed to be only touched on and reflected by these intentions) rather than about thinking, which enters these intentions.” All of this happens at the transcendental level and in its discovery Levinas sees the “essential contribution of phenomenology,”282 precisely because it is at this level that we can maintain the difference between the “Same” and the “Other”
without deducting the latter from the former or without being absorbed by it. This has become, as is widely known, the backbone of his theory of intersubjectivity, but I will come back to it later.
§ 36. Intentionality as a contraposition to re-presentation
Regarding intentionality itself, Levinas further adds that it is not notable for him by virtue of it subsuming the correlation of the subject to the object, in other words by the subject’s presence
“next to things”, but because of the “new meaning” that it can “bestow upon this presence.”283 Analysis of consciousness is necessary for the illumination of things because the intention, which is directed at them, does not apprehend their meaning, but merely a specific abstraction in a specific unavoidable misunderstanding; it is because the intention in its spanning towards the object is at the same time a certain unfamiliarity and failure to acknowledge the meaning of the thing in question.284 This is, according to Levinas, caused by the fact that every such intention is also an oblivion of everything, what it contains only implicitly. At this moment, he himself very explicitly refers to the inner and outer horizon of sensuality, which Husserl laid out in Cartesian
281 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 176.
282 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 177 .
283 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 179.
284
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Meditations.285 Elaborating on that, Levinas explains that even though intentionality entails specific relation to an object, it (the object) always bears certain implicit – non-thematic – meaning.
Being present to things hence always implies another presence, which refers to the horizons as the correlates of these implicit intentions and which “not even the most attentive thought of an object, which is given in natural stance, can reveal.”286
However, according to Levinas, the classical conception of subject-object relationship fails to accommodate this. This is so precisely because the classical conception exhausts the subject- object relationship by the notion of presence (or “presenting” of one to the other). “The object is given precisely how the subject currently conceives it.”287 Levinas considers this relation to be completely conscious regardless of the length of its duration in time, as it “eternally sparks this transparent and actual presence” and so remains “in the etymological meaning of the word a re- presentation.” The intentionality stands in contrast to it by the virtue of it bearing “countless horizons of its implications” and conceiving always infinitely more “things” than the object, towards which it is currently directed. Therefore, a thought is not a clear and absolute presence, nor is it a pure representation. To postulate the intentionality means to treat that what is being thought of as connected to the sphere of the implicit, where it does not slide accidentally, but where it is rooted because of its own essence.288 Unlike that, the thinking which “forgets its own implications, the implications invisible without the reflection of this thinking (i.e. itself), operates with objects instead of actually conceiving them.”289 According to Levinas, the role of the transcendental reduction consists of putting a stop to this process, and in “descending to the truth, in order to reveal the re-presented beings in their transcendental emergence.”290
« L’idée d’une implication nécessaire, absolument imperceptible au sujet se dirigeant sur l’objet, ne se découvrant qu’après coup, dans la réflexion, ne se produisant donc pas dans le présent, c’est-
285 § 19 in: HUSSERL, Edmund: Cartesian Meditations.
286 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 80.
287 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 180.
288 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 181.
289 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 182.
290 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 182.
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à-dire se produisant à mon insu – met fin à l’idéal de la représentation et de la souveraineté du sujet, met fin à l’idéalisme où rien ne pouvait entrer subrepticement en moi. »291
According to Levinas, Husserl proved that thought following its object contains in itself “other”
thoughts leading into noematic horizons, which the subject leans on while moving towards the object.292 Precisely these horizons assume the “transcendental role” – the sensibility and sensible qualities are not identical with the matter, from which the categorial form and ideal essence are formed, they are rather a “situation”, in which the subject situates itself in order to execute the categorical intention. “My body” is not only a perceived object – it is also a perceiving subject.
The land (la terre) is not something that Levinas would consider as a background, on which the objects or things can merely appear. He considers it to be a necessary condition “that the subject always requires to be able to perceive them in the first place.” 293 He therefore concludes that the horizon implied in intentionality is not therefore only a vaguely conceived context of the object, it is a situation of the subject.294
With all of this in mind, Levinas turns his attention to the notion of phenomenological reduction again and deems it justified not because it would open the apodictic sphere of immanence, but because it opens “the play of intentionality,” because it is accompanied by a
“renouncing the object as fixed, when such object would be a mere result and a decoy concealing this game.”295 Thinking which remains faithful to what was just described and directed towards an object in “all honesty of its intention” therefore contains more than it contains, and “otherwise”
than it contains in actuality. It this sense, Levinas does not consider it as immanent in itself, regardless of the fact that it holds an object in its stare, and means it in its presence, as he says, in the “flash and bones.”296 Hence, according to Levinas, we ought to avoid both idealism and
291 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 182.
292 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », pp. 182-183.
293 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 183.
294 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 183.
295 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 185.
296 LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 187. Cf. « Nous sommes au-delà de l’idéalisme et du réalisme, puisque l’être n’est ni dans la pensée, ni hors de la pensée, mais que la pensée elle-même est hors d’elle-même. Il faut un acte second et un esprit de l’escalier pour découvrir les
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realism. It is because in this perspective, being is not “in thinking nor outside of it” – he would say that it is outside of itself. He concludes his analysis by the following words:
« Mais dans une phénoménologie où l’activité de la représentation totalisante et totalitaire est déjà dépassée dans sa propre intention, où représentation se trouve déjà placée dans des horizons que, en quelque façon, elle n’avait pas voulus, mais dont elle ne se passe pas – devient possible une Sinngebung éthique, c’est-à-dire essentiellement respectueuse de l’Autre. Chez Husserl lui-même, dans la constitution de l’intersubjectivité, entreprise à partir d’actes objectivants, s’éveillent brusquement des relations sociales, irréductibles à la constitution objectivante qui prétendait les bercer dans son rythme. »297
If we briefly stop for a moment and reflect on the Levinas’s arguments, it is clear that this particular text can be considered as being very positive towards the Morava-born founder of phenomenology.
Levinas basically identifies himself with his stances, moreover even in connection to the version of intersubjectivity founded on the dichotomy of the “Same” (le Même) and the “Other” (l’Autre), which he made famous very soon after publishing this text and which serves as a backbone of his later position accenting transcendence. Precisely this position will become the central topic now.
horizons cachés qui ne sont plus le contexte de cet objet, mais les donneurs transcendantaux de son sens.
Il faut pour tenir le monde et la vérité plus que l’instant ou l’éternité de l’évidence. » LEVINAS, Emmanuel: « La ruine de la représentation », p. 185. This is interesting to compare with the following:
« Mais Husserl n'est point réaliste : cet arbre sur son bout de terre craquelé, il n'en fait pas un absolu qui entrerait, par après, en communication avec nous. La conscience et le monde sont donnés d'un même coup : extérieur par essence à la conscience, le monde est, par essence, relatif à elle. C'est que Husserl voit dans la conscience un fait irréductible qu'aucune image physique ne peut rendre. Sauf, peut-être, l'image rapide et obscure de l'éclatement. Connaître, c'est « s'éclater vers », s'arracher à la moite intimité gastrique pour filer, là-bas, par-delà soi, vers ce qui n'est pas soi, là-bas, près de l'arbre et cependant hors de lui, car il m'échappe et me repousse et je ne peux pas plus me perdre en lui qu'il ne se peut diluer en moi : hors de lui, hors de moi. » SARTRE, Jean-Paul: « Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl : l’intentionnalité », Situations I. Gallimard (Paris, 1947), pp. 29-32. P. 30. Sartre’s text is from the January of 1939, Levinas’s is the later by some twenty years.
297 LEVINAS, Emmanuel : « La ruine de la représentation », p. 188.