A Temporality of Dasein (Heidegger) and a Time of the Other (Levinas)

Abstract

Contemporary humanistic reflection expounds dissimilarity, dis-sense, difference and excludes from the base of human existence the essential possibility of reducing a variety of discourses to only one rule of sense. This reflection treats dissimilarity in terms of ontological pluralism. In the case, of Levinas philosophy, this pluralism puts dark metaphysical mystery before the clarity of learning reason and puts ethics before ontology. It is impossible to coordinate these different realms. This has come to be an, as it were, an “irresolvable” quandary jumping out of the ontological framework. That point of view calls into question every attempt to organize reflection on any sense, because it will be threatened with a totality of sense. In the meantime, the sense warranted by a lucid method leaves behind that which is most important for a human being, namely, the dark mystery of death. The mystery of our inevitable end signals the end of a human’s pure sensible activity, signals a suffering that follows from passivity. The human being is facing something that is bigger than he is, which is impossible to reduce to a clear circle of that-which-shows-itself-from-itself (Husserl).1 Nonetheless, man undertakes an attempt to spin out a tale having any sense, because, as it seems, a linguistic way of expression, even when it calls into question every sense, is an irremovable feature of a human’s being-in-the-world. Those aspects of humanity exposed by contemporary hermeneutics are not able to be eliminated from the human world. However, this sense is not something which is given, but is a task realized by a word. The occurrence of a word is here at stake: This is a conversation/search, where the word arrived at cannot be said to be the last word. The constantly occurring word evokes a sense of the world—the world has to say something to us. The phenomenological way to grasp the world is to see the human world as the world of sense.