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  1. 2 Filozofia (Philosophy)

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  1. 2 Hofmeyr B.

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1

ON ESCAPING THE SEEMINGLY INESCAPABLE: REFLECTIONS ON BEING IN LEVINAS

100%
Hofmeyr B.
Filozofia (Philosophy)
|
2012
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vol. 67
|
issue 6
460 – 471
EN
Like his one-time teacher, Heidegger, Levinas makes a distinction between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiendes), but prefers to speak of ‘existence’ and the ‘existent’. Again, like Heidegger, Levinas understands existence in its verbal sense as the self-unfolding act of Being that is attested to in the manifestation of particular beings. Unlike his teacher, however, existence signals for him the unbearable heaviness of Being, as if being a Jew as opposed to being a German in Europe in the years preceding WWII cast a different light on the human existential condition, through which alone we have access to Being. Levinas’s particular conceptualisation of existence, forged at a particular world historical juncture, forms the basis for his particular ‘metaphysical’ account of the conditions of possibility of ethical action. Although Levinas’s early essays present us with an extensive mediation on the nature of existence, only a few commentators offer it more than a mere cursory sketch. My aim in this essay is therefore to throw some light on Levinas’s conceptualisation of Being from its root in Plato’s understanding of essence as ‘ousia’, its indebtedness to Heidegger’s ontological difference, and its ultimate departure from the latter’s understanding of Sein as generosity and Lichtung. As we shall see, existence for Levinas is a two-sided coin that encapsulates the empowering verbal sense of Being as dynamism and the overpowering stultifying sense of irremissible contract in which is inscribed the exigency of an impossible escape. It is this very conceptualisation that informs Levinas’s lifelong trans-ontological quest for a path otherwise and beyond Being.
2

FACEBOOK EFFACING THE FACE? REASSESSING LEVINAS’S ETHICS IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY

100%
Hofmeyr B.
Filozofia (Philosophy)
|
2014
|
vol. 69
|
issue 2
119 – 130
EN
Though the distant Other, the faceless stranger becomes ever closer and more accessible through various technological mediations and social networks, we seem to grow increasingly disconnected from any possibility of what Levinas calls ‘proximity’. ‘Proximity’ – the face-to-face encounter with the other person – signals a traumatising indictment of the gravitational pull of our egoism rooted in what Spinoza referred to as our conatus essendi. Rather than individualistic self-actualisation, Levinas sees brotherhood as the fundamental presupposition of our shared humanity and as the foundation of freedom and equality. While rather a-ethical than immoral, it is our very conatus that seems to open the door to indifference, prejudice and hate. On the other hand, the possibility of ethical action, of a humane society, is something that Levinas attempts to account for by the help of a responsibility more fundamental than our ontological blueprint.
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