Radical Finitude Meets Infinity: Levinas's Gestures To Heidegger's Fundamental Ontology

Abstract

This article explores the consecutive modifications that phenomenology underwent in the works of Heidegger and Levinas. In particular, it discusses their importance for contemporary attempts to expand -and transcend -phenomenology in philosophy and the social sciences. Heidegger and Levinas responded to the problem of subjectivity -and intersubjectivity -in diametrically opposed ways and consequently the exposition of their thoughts involves focusing on conceptual dichotomies like finitude and infinity, time and eternity. Ultimately, it is argued that the very conceptions of the human being that the two thinkers furnish under the guise of Dasein and Autrui reveal the impasses associated with western metaphysics and pave the path for the development of more adequate theorizations of subjectivity, radical otherness and communal being. KEYWORDS Dasein/Autrui • death/murder • finitude/infinity • time/eternityFor manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression 'being'. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.

From narrative to action: Paul Ricoeur's reflections on history

“…Indeed, Ricoeur points out that in Heidegger's Being and Time death is never thematized as murder and that the death of other people (qua death of the impersonal das Man/the-they) is always interpreted as an inauthentic confrontation with death (see also Mouzakitis [2007] for a similar interpretation on the issue, although at that time I was not aware of Ricoeur's argument and was simply drawing on Levinas). Ricoeur further argues that Heidegger's preoccupation with death might at first glance resemble the 'loving of death as a sister, after the manner of the poverello of Assisi', but evidently lacks the latter's profundity because it is not based on the experience of agape that remains excluded from the horizon of Being and Time (and one feels tempted to add from the horizon of Heidegger's oeuvre).…”