And Levinas’ Deconstruction of the Heidegger’s Ontology
Derrida develops his practice of deconstruction out of
Heidegger’s practice of the destruction of metaphysics that enabled
him to move from Husserl’s phenomenology to his hermeneutical way.
In Being and Time Heidegger did a hermeneutical phenomenology
of the existential in order to develop his ontological way of thinking.
Heidegger made a fresh start as he identified the metaphysical
preconceptions that underlay Husserl’s theory of consciousness.
Heidegger thought that words such as “consciousness”, “subject”
or “substance” are the results of metaphysical theories which
keep us from really getting to the phenomena of human being.
Thus Heidegger had to destroy the history of metaphysics
in order to get a view of human being or Dasein and thus
on page 41 of Being and Time he writes:
The thing-in-being whose analysis
is our task is we ourselves.
The being of this thing-in-being
is each one’s “mine” (je mines)
This jemeinigkeit or Ipseity helps Levinas move toward
the me who is responsible to the face of the other and Heidegger
also moves towards ethics as he analyses Dasein in his or her
mood-discourse-understanding for we can be in the world
inauthentically in ambiguity, idle talk or curiosity or we
can become authentic and have a proper care for being itself.
Heidegger did develop a philosophy of responsibility and saw
man as the shepherd of Being and thought of thinking as thanking
with a sort of Nietzschean affirmation Heidegger thought that
we should be grateful for all that is and that is responsibility.
So Derrida points out how Heidegger moved beyond Husserl
toward and ethical viewpoint, but Levinas must still move
beyond Heidegger to develop a philosophy of love for
others who call me from desire to possess to desire to serve.
II,2.6 And Levinas Destruction of Plato’s Metaphysics
The title of Derrida’s essay on Levinas is Violence and Metaphysics
and already at the beginning on pages 85 and 86 Derrida says a great
deal about how Levinas gets beyond Heidegger with Platonic eros
and then Levinas must still get beyond the violence of that metaphysics.
Levinas’ philosophy of love and his loving ethics has to do with
two kinds of desire: that which desires to possess and for the infinite
which does not satisfy desire but which opens it to transcendence.
Plato’s metaphysics has to do with the Good beyond Being or the
epekeina tes ousias and as Derrida says on page 85:
In Totality and Infinity the “Phenomenology of Eros”
describes the movement of the epekeina tes ousias
in the very experience of the caress.
Levinas entitles the last section of Totality and Infinity
Beyond the Face and section a of that is The Ambiguity of Love
and then B is The Phenomenology of Eros which Derrida considers.
As Derrida explains on page 93 the affectivity of need and desire
as love are very different for need is self-centered but
Desire, on the contrary, permits itself
to be appealed to by the absolutely irreducible
exteriority of the other to which
it must remain infinitely inadequate.
Platonic eros in its Divine Madness in The Phaedrus is open
to this kind of infinite for it is not an intentionality of
disclosure but of search: a movement into the invisible.
In a certain sense it expresses love, but suffers from an inability
to tell it as Levinas explains on page 258 of Totality and Infinity.
However, while Greek love can go this far and prepare the way
for Jewish ethics it does not reach the alterity of the other in the face
of the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan and thus
Levinas must with Heidegger destroy the history of Platonic
metaphysics, which Derrida prefers to less violently deconstruct.
II,2.7 And Levinas’ Destruction of Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Having learned philosophy as a Catholic Heidegger knew Aristotle
very well as he was developed in different ways by Aquinas and Scotus.
When Heidegger destroyed the history of metaphysics by showing
all of its ideas that should not be used by the phenomenologist
he dealt with the notion of substance which is a thing in itself
that forms the core of the Aristotelian tradition; but Levinas does
not even bother with Aristotle because his ethics is so different.
Levinas sees the ethical relation as totally asymmetrical so that
there is no mutuality or reciprocity between humans and thus
Aristotelians would think that Levinas’ ethics is impossible.
Aristotle does not get rid of the I and develops a self
realization
