Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion

4. Insight and Drift

4 Insight and Drift After metaphysics came to an end (positively in Hegel, negatively in Nietzsche ), it was Edmund Husserl and phenomenology which inspired a new beginning of philosophy. For better or worse, this fact cannot be denied, and the twentieth century has again and again borne witness to the philosophical inspiration to be found in Husserl’s phenomenological insight. Many of the most well-known thinkers of the past hundred years began their careers with work on Husserl, the founding figure of phenomenology —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean-Paul Sartre, to name just a few. Even Jacques Derrida’s earliest works were confrontations with Husserl, and it was in and through readings of Husserl that Derrida worked out his earliest critiques of metaphysics and presence. Looking at this list of names, therefore, it would not be extravagant to suggest that, throughout the twentieth century, it has been the reception of Husserl and phenomenology that has stimulated and fertilized new advances in continental philosophy —even if these authors eventually left phenomenology for Marxist engagement, literary theory, or perhaps more generally the structuralist/ poststructuralist debates. Recently, at the end of the twentieth century, philosophy has seen another return to phenomenology that has brought it back to the forefront of philosophical debate. Some have even hailed this retrieval of phenomenology as a counter to the dominance of the structuralist discourse that has so thoroughly expelled philosophy from the philosophical discipline—or swallowed it up. Like all returns, however, this return enacts a difference. Many previously central phenomenological concepts have been displaced or revised , no longer assuming the importance they once had; and many previously overlooked or marginalized concepts and passages have assumed cenHusserl 62 Part 2. Ethical Phenomenology tral importance. It is as if the return to phenomenology claimed that it was going back to the idea, or ideal, of phenomenology glimpsed by Husserl but lost or suppressed by each of its historical manifestations—Husserl’s own phenomenology included. My reading of phenomenology will follow the readings of Husserl put forward by the leaders of this movement. For my purposes, Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry offer the most powerful interpretation of the idea of phenomenology; and it is to their readings of Husserl that I will make reference in seeking to understand the phenomenological notion of phenomenon and subjectivity. The Appearing of Appearance Phenomenology has been able to initiate this new beginning because of its pretense to lay bare not simply a new region of beings or objects of experience but the necessary beginning of any and all experience. As opposed to particular regional sciences, phenomenology, and the reduction which was its royal road, claimed to lay bare the appearing of all that appears—beings, objects, or whatever else one wants to call what appears in experience. As such, the phenomenological breakthrough represented a radical attempt to extend the possibility of appearing to all beings. According to Jean-Luc Marion, the question motivating phenomenology was this: “Can the conditions of presence be extended to the point that all beings reach it, beyond the limits set by previous states of metaphysics, or even by any metaphysics at all? Can the givenness in presence of each thing be realized without any condition or restriction?”1 This attempt to embrace the appearing of each and every implies a radical redefinition of possibility (and eventually of presence) such that the possibility of appearing is extended to all that appears , even what appears as the impossible, without regard for prior conditions or limits. As Marion has argued, the phenomenological redefinition of possibility marks a radical departure from previous figures in the history of philosophy . In Kant, for instance, “that which agrees with the formal conditions of experience, that is, with the conditions of intuition and of concepts, is possible.”2 In this definition, possibility is determined not simply by the appearing of phenomena but by the conditions for experience. The field of phenomenality or appearing is thus limited to what is embraced by these conditions, and only those phenomena which admit these conditions are allowed the right to appear. More specifically, these conditions are the forms of the intuition and the concepts of the understanding, conditions which are identified precisely with the power of knowing in and through a finite, that is limited, mind. In Kant, at the least, what appears owes the possibility of its appearance to the power of knowing, which alone can legitimate , justify, grant that appearance. Thus, anything is possible...