Levinas and time

Over the course of a philosophical career that spanned six decades, Emmanuel Levinas developed a distinct and radical understanding of time. The everyday experience of synchronous time marked by clocks and calendars is, for Levinas, an abstraction from the way time functions more fundamentally. For Levinas, the primary experience of time is a feature of the relationship with the other person. Better known for his philosophy of extreme responsibility, Levinas's philosophy of time becomes, by the end of his career, the linchpin for his argument that the other person has priority over the self. His concept of time has received little attention, despite the critical and functional role that it plays in the mature expressions of his ethical philosophy.;This dissertation traces the genesis of Levinas's deliberations on time, from its roots in Lithuania and Judaism to academic influences like Henn Bergson, Franz Rosenzweig, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. The study then examines all of Levinas's major works and dozens of his minor works to better understand how his treatment of time develops across his career. Time is not an abstract puzzle for Levinas; it relates at every stage to the driving sense that Western philosophy has privileged the self over the other and therefore has defaulted to an egoistic understanding of time as the eternal "now." Levinas critiques egoism in various ways, sustaining some ideas and abandoning others. This research traces the ebb and flow of Levinas's treatment of time on its way toward the culminating expressions found in his later works.;Readers of Levinas have often been troubled by some features of his philosophy, including the difficulty of his writings, his controversial invocation of the feminine, and the blurry line in his work between philosophy and religion. These themes each relate directly to his treatment of time. This study will consider the problems and benefits of Levinas's understanding of time as diachrony and ultimately suggest some possibilities for thinking about time after Levinas.