Face to Face with Levinas

1. Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas

EMMANUEL LEVINAS AND RICHARD KEARNEY 1. Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas Richard Kearney: Perhaps you could retrace your philosophical itinerary by identifying some of the major influences on your thought? Emmanuel Levinas: Apart from the great masters of the history of philosophy - in particular Plato, Descartes, and Kant - the first contemporary influence on my own thinking was Bergson. In 1925, in Strasbourg University, Bergson was being hailed as France's leading thinker. For example, Blondel, one of his Strasbourg disciples, developed a specifically Bergsonian psychology quite hostile to Freud - a hostility that made a deep and lasting impression on me. Moreover , Bergson's theory of time as concrete duration (fa duree concrete) is, I believe, one of the most significant, if largely ignored, contributions to contemporary philosophy. Indeed, it was this Bergsonian emphasis on temporality that prepared the soil for the subsequent implantation of Heideggerian phenomenology into France. It is all the more ironic, therefore, that in Being and Time Heidegger unjustly accuses Bergson of reducing time to space. What is more, in Bergson 's Creative Evolution, one finds the whole notion of technology as the destiny of the Western philosophy of reason. Bergson was the first to contrast technology, as a logical and necessary expression of scientific rationality, with an alternative form of human expression that he called creative intuition or impulse - the elan vital. All of Heidegger's celebrated analyses of our technological era as the logical culmination of Western metaphysics and its forgetfulness of being came after Bergson's reflections on the subject. Bergson's importance to contemporary Continental thought has been 13 14 EMMANUEL LEVINAS AND RICHARD KEARNEY somewhat obfuscated; he has been suspended in a sort of limbo; but I believe it is only a temporary suspension. Could you describe how, after Bergson, you came under the influence of the German phenomenologists, Husser! and Heidegger? It was in 1927 that I first became interested in Husserl's phenomenology , which was still unknown in France at that time. I traveled to the University of Freiburg for two semesters in 1928-29 and studied phenomenology with Husserl and also, of course, with Heidegger , who was then the leading light in German philosophy after the publication of Being and Time in 1927. Phenomenology represented the second, but undoubtedly most important, philosophical influence on my thinking. Indeed, from the point- of view of philosophical method and discipline, I remain to this day a phenomenologist. How would you characterize the particular contribution of phenomenology to modern philosophy? The most fundamental contribution of Husserl's phenomenology is its methodical disclosure of how meaning comes to be, how it emerges in our consciousness of the world, or more precisely, in our becoming conscious of our intentional rapport (visee) with the world. The phenomenological method enables us to discover meaning within our lived experience; it reveals consciousness to be an intentionality always in contact with objects outside of itself, other than itself. Human experience is not some self-transparent substance or pure cogito; it is always intending or tending towards something in the world that preoccupies it. The phenomenological method permits consciousness to understand its own preoccupations, to reflect upon itself and thus discover all the hidden or neglected horizons of its intentionality. In other words, by returning to the implicit horizons of consciousness, phenomenology enables us to explicate or unfold the full intentional meaning of an object, which would otherwise be presented as an abstract and isolated entity cut off from its intentional horizons. Phenomenology thus teaches us that consciousness is at once tied to the object of its experience and yet free to detach itself from this object in order to return upon itself, focusing on those visees of intentionality in which the object emerges as meaningful , as part of our lived experience. One might say that phenom- Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas 15 enology is a way of becoming aware of where we are in the world, a sich besinnen that consists of a recovery of the origin of meaning in our life world, or Lebenswelt. Your second major work was entitled En dicouvrant t'existence alice Husserl et Heidegl~f!T. If Husserl introduced you to the phenomenological method, how would you assess your debt to Heidegger? Heidegger's philosophy was a shock for me, and for most of my contemporaries in the late twenties and thirties. It completely altered the course and character of European philosophy. I think...