The intersubjective phenomenologies of Hegel and Levinas: A comparative analysis of an unlikely similarity

The following study is an attempt to understand the fundamental ethics of Emmanuel Levinas and the phenomenology of G. W. F. Hegel as philosophies of intersubjectivity. In this study we hope to make an important contribution to Levinas scholarship by historically locating Levinas' interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the twentieth century French-Hegelian tradition. The historical location of Levinas' thought concerning Hegel is important because a French-Hegelian reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit is not a textually accurate portrayal of Hegel's thought. We will argue that a French-Hegelian reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit actually misinterprets the meaning of "teleological" time and "the end of history" in Hegel's text, and that it does so for expressly political purposes. We will argue that Levinas' French-Hegelian misinterpretation affects both his portrayal of Hegel's phenomenology and his own ethical phenomenology. Locating Levinas' Hegel in a French-Hegelian tradition is important for understanding his phenomenology because Levinas negatively situates his own ethical account of intersubjectivity against what he takes Hegel's phenomenology of intersubjectivity to consist in. As a consequence, Levinas goes to great lengths in Otherwise than Being to describe time as "diachronous" in direct contradistinction to what we will argue is a French-Hegelian misreading of "teleological" time in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit . After we establish a proper reading of Hegel's phenomenology of intersubjectivity, and we establish how Levinas misunderstands the Phenomenology of Spirit from a French-Hegelian perspective, we will be able to access the viable similarities that actually inhere between their purportedly "diametrically opposing" phenomenologies of intersubjectivity. These similarities will give us a logical point of contact between the two philosophers in terms of which we can normatively evaluate their respective accounts of intersubjectivity. At the end of this project, we will suggest some reasons for thinking that Hegel's account is more philosophically interesting than Levinas' because it enables us to retain a thinking of subjectivity in terms of which meaningful and important ethical questions can be asked.