Selfhood and transcendence: Emmanuel Levinas and the origins of intersubjective moral theory, 1928--1961

This dissertation is a genetic study of the origins and development of the intersubjective theory of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. It begins in 1928, when Levinas published his own dissertation, and ends in 1961, when Levinas's most significant attempt to explain and justify this theory, Totality and Infinity, appeared.;The dissertation is most basically a study of the texts, major and minor, that Levinas composed during the period of the germination of his distinctive approach to the subject. Close attention to these materials, in philological and contextual detail, allows a relatively clear picture of how and under what circumstances he evolved. The most important catalyzing factor in Levinas's philosophical development, the dissertation attempts to show, is the affiliation of his teacher and master Martin Heidegger with the National Socialist party in 1933.;A good part of the dissertation is occupied with a historical and conceptual reconstruction of the French intellectual and philosophical atmosphere in which Levinas's development occurred. One chapter investigates the early transmission of German phenomenological conceptions of intersubjectivity to France, contending that it is not only the defects in those original traditions but the initial failure of French philosophers to perceive them that made the problem of intersubjectivity so exigent once Heidegger's alliance with barbarism forced Levinas to confront it. Another chapter focuses on the Kierkegaard revival of the Parisian 1930s as a plausible explanatory matrix for Levinas's first and hesitant steps away from his former teacher.;In order to provide as rich an explanation as possible of where exactly Levinas found the intellectual resources to move beyond Heidegger to his own vision of ethical intersubjectivity, the dissertation takes a substantial detour into the theology of Weimar Germany. Levinas himself paid homage to a crucial predecessor, Franz Rosenzweig, and this link has been explored in the literature before this dissertation. I hope, however, that in building on earlier results I have been able to provide a far more detailed and point-by-point account of where Levinas relied for Rosenzweig for help in the elaboration of his ethics. This very detail allows a new sense of the great extent to which Levinas both had to transform what he took from Rosenzweig and break with the rest.;The dissertation concludes and culminates in a detailed reading of Totality and Infinity itself. The dissertation tries to erect as plausible a suggestion as the evidence will bear that instead of denying the importance of philosophy to the justification of ethics, Levinas strongly affiliated with the initial Western attempt in Plato's thought to discover a foundation for ethics. And far from depending on theological conceptions, the dissertation argues, Levinas both intentionally and inadvertently secularized what he found in religion in propounding an ethics that "swings free" of that background. In concluding with an argument for the parallelism between Levinas's humanism and Immanuel Kant's Enlightenment morality, the dissertation offers a reading of this philosopher opposed to typical understandings of his thought as either pre- or postmodern. It is, the dissertation contends, as a modern philosopher that Levinas becomes more rather than less relevant to ethical theory and practice today.