Levinas and the Night of Being by Moati Raoul; Wyche Daniel; Benoist Jocelyn

Author:Moati, Raoul; Wyche, Daniel; Benoist, Jocelyn [Moati, Raoul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2016-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

The Metaphysical Context of Intentionality

Phenomena within the Space of Questions and Answers

From the very outset of Being and Time, Heidegger insists that the emergence of the question of the sense of being constitutively presupposes the preliminary phenomenon of an as-yet vague and undetermined (“average”)1 comprehension of being. The obscurity of our initial comprehension of being thus motivates the need for clarification, which is to say that it demands an explicit elucidation of being through the formulation of the question of the sense of being. Levinas returns to this thesis numerous times throughout his oeuvre, seeking to draw out all of the consequences of our awakening to the question of being, through the elaboration of what he calls “the question of the Question”: “Yet the question about the question is more radical still. Why does research take form as a question? How is it that the ‘what?,’ already steeped in being so as to open it up the more, becomes a demand and a prayer, a special language inserting into the ‘communication’ of the given an appeal for help, for aid addressed to another?”2

Here Levinas only broadens the Heideggerian question by referring it back to the concrete situation within which any question comes to be posed—essentially and above all in the form of an invocation of the Other: “Even the philosophy that questions the meaning of being does so on the basis of the encounter with the Other”;3 or, as he says in Totality and Infinity, “Questioning is not explained by astonishment only, but by the presence of him to whom it is addressed.”4

An ontological phenomenon is thus inseparable from the elucidation of the concrete situation within which the question of its sense is posed. This means that, for Levinas, we cannot limit ourselves to Heidegger’s triple articulation of “that which is asked about” (Gefragtes), “that which is questioned” (Befragtes), and “that which is to be found out” (Erfragtes), in order to bring to light the conditions under which the question of the sense of being can be posed. Rather, it is a question of no longer attempting to identify that existent who is likely to provide the sense of being—Befragtes as Dasein, as “the identical subject, allegedly placed in the openness of Being”—in order to elucidate, beneath it, the inscription of the phenomenon in question in “the crux of a diachronic plot (which remains to be determined) between the Same and the other.” This kind of diachrony of manifestation does not amount to an “immediate instant of opening and intuition,” but is rather identified with the situation of interlocution, the enduring, “silent coming and going from question to response.”5

The possibility of phenomena, and indeed of every objective manifestation in general, is situated within the gap between questions and answers. For that reason, it must be understood in terms of the primacy of the metaphysical relation of teaching over fundamental ontology, according to the formal relationship of that which conditions to the conditioned object. Further, where impersonal Hegelian reason absorbs

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.