The Missed Encounter Between Husserl and Levinas: On the Possibility of Ethics
Open Access
- Author:
- Laferte-Coutu, Meredith
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 23, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Daniel Purdy, Outside Unit & Field Member
Nicolas De Warren, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Leonard Lawlor, Major Field Member
Robert Bernasconi, Major Field Member
Leonard Lawlor, Program Head/Chair
Ted Toadvine, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- Husserl
Levinas
ethics
phenomenology
responsibility
subjectivity
values - Abstract:
- This dissertation stages the missed encounter between the French-Lithuanian thinker Emmanuel Levinas and the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl on the possibility of ethics. This is a curious gap, historically and in scholarship, considering that Levinas, for whom ethics was central, studied with Husserl, was instrumental to the introduction of his thinking to France in the 1930s, and was deeply indebted to his thought. The never-enacted debate between the two thinkers hinges on a fundamental ethical question, namely whether the good is constructed by subjective activities of valuing and willing or whether it comes from elsewhere. The stakes of this difference concern nothing less than whether the source of goodness can ultimately be found within the structures of subjectivity. My doctoral work specifically accomplishes two aims. First, it reconstructs a Husserlian ethics based on Husserl’s recently published manuscripts and lectures. He never systematically developed his ethical thinking in published works, and the texts where he did write about ethical concerns were made accessible only in the past two decades. I argue that Husserlian ethics centers on a reflective method, encapsulated by the novel notion of an ethical attitude, that accounts for the endurance of value commitments over time despite the threat that contingency poses to rational practice. This includes a critical reflection on the values and ends that motivate personal life, and an encompassing grasp of that life as a whole horizon of possibilities. Second, though Levinas was heavily influenced by the phenomenologist, he was deeply critical of the theoretical and subject-centered approach of phenomenology, seeing it as failing to grasp the true meaning of ethics. However, Levinas never had access to Husserl’s ethical writings. To bridge this gap, I develop a Levinasian reading of the Husserlian ethics I reconstruct to evaluate how it changes Levinas’s critique of phenomenology. If phenomenology is meant not just as a transcendental critique of reason but as a practice and vocation, as I argue Husserl’s ethics shows, then the relation between phenomenology and ethics must be clarified. This is precisely the pivotal point on which Husserl and Levinas productively disagree. The deepest relationship of the subject with the good, for Levinas, is not tied to social and personal values, as Husserl proposes, but consists in a more fundamental encounter with the other human who calls me to be responsible for them. Enacting the encounter between Husserl and Levinas does not yield a choice between the two approaches. Instead, the central question is that of their relationship. Nevertheless, insofar as Levinas already raises the question of how phenomenology can bear a relation to transcendence, the spirit of this research is more Levinasian than Husserlian. As a result, the key insight which now applies to Husserlian ethics is that phenomenology alone is insufficient to account for the possibility of ethics. Missing is a bond with the other that is irreducible to the same. Yet this does not devoid phenomenology of its worth as an approach to sense and to ethical life. On the contrary, it shows the stakes of whether to conceive ethical meaning within structures of striving. Only if the good is not something that can be realized in the first place does responsibility extend further than what the world has made it possible for people to do, think, imagine, or desire. At the same time, only if the good is determined by the changing motivational circumstances of personal, social, and historical situations, can leading an ethical life be deemed a rational, indeed worthwhile enterprise, instead of a consolation for the senseless suffering that fills our world. This dissertation thinks the undecidability between these two accounts of the good and their relation to the subject.