the phenomenology reader 2

Levinas was largely responsible for introducing phenomenology to French philosophy students of the 1930s. Husserl and Heidegger were constant influences on his thought, as was his fellow Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig. Levinas greatly admired Husserl’s account of intuition, in which value is not confined to the sphere of judgements, but already present in concrete experience. At the same time he accepted Heidegger’s critique of the former’s transcendental idealism and theoreticism. Inspired by Rosenzweig, however, Levinas went on to reject what he regarded as Heidegger’s totalising philosophy of being. The consistent thread in Levinas’ work is that the Western ontological tradition up to and including Heidegger has more often than not sought to reduce the Other---where this term indicates the other person---to the same. Put more precisely, it has tried to comprehensively represent and account for Otherness through the totalising sameness of impersonal concepts and categories. For Levinas, by contrast, I encounter the Other as absolute and singular transcendence outside myself and outside all possible forms of representation and explanation. This transcendence is in his view the ground of ethics, of a fundamental and indeclinable responsibility for the Other person that precedes every ontology.

在引介现象学给1930年代的法国哲学学生上面，列维纳斯负有主要的责任。胡塞尔和海德格尔与列维纳斯的犹太同胞思想家罗森茨威格一样持续地影响着他的思想。列维纳斯极为赞赏胡塞尔关于直观的思考，在其中，价值不是被限制于判断的领域，而是已经呈现在具体的经验里。在同时，列维纳斯接受了海德格尔对前者超越性的观念论与理论至上主义的批判。然而，由于受到罗森茨威格的启发，列维纳斯逐步拒绝了他所认为的海德格尔的关于存在的整体性哲学。在列维纳斯著作中始终贯彻的主线是西方本体论传统常常寻求把他者还原为同一，这其中也包括海德格尔，当然他者这个术语也意味着他人。更准确的说，它是致力于通过整体性的同一性这个非人称的概念和范畴来广泛地表现和思考他性。对于列维纳斯，与此相反，我遭遇到了作为超越我自己之外的绝对的、独一无二的他者，并超出了所有可能的表现和解释的形式。这种超越就其而言是伦理的地基，而对他人的基本的、无变化的责任则优先于每一种本体论。

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Levinas’ middle and late prose is not notable for its clarity, with its elliptical, paradoxical character ensuing from his wish to avoid a rationalistic or representation terminology. Our first selection is one of his best known, and comprises the greater part of “Ethics and the Face”, taken from the third section ofTotality and Infinity. In the preceding section of this work, Levinas had contended that the human being lives initially at a level of sensibility. Here it is a centre of sensations, some of which it naturally prefers because they satisfy its needs. The satisfaction of a need is characterised chiefly by enjoyment. The human being enjoys the food and drink that it incorporates and the multifarious things that it appropriates so as to sustain and enhance its being. At the level of sensibility and enjoyment, things are there to be consumed---that is, absorbed or encompassed---by a centripetal, egoistic self. They are reducible to the sameness or homogeneity of a self-concerned individual.

列维纳斯中后期的文章并不是因为其清晰度而显著，他采用椭圆式的、似是而非的风格希望逃避理性主义的或表现性的术语。我们所选的《伦理与脸》是其非常著名的作品《整体与无限》第三章节中重要的部分。在这部作品的先前章节，列维纳斯已经雄辩地指出人类最初是活在感性的水平。这里感觉成为中心，这当中有一些自然的喜欢，因为它们满足了需要。需要的满足主要是通过享受而定性。人类享受那些合并的食物和饮料，这五花八门的东西很适当地维持和加强着人类的存在。在感性和享受的水平上，东西在这里被向心的、自我中心主义的自己所消费——也就是说，被吸收或被环绕。它们被还原为自我关心的个人的同一或同质。