Heidegger vs Levinas
Ontology against ethics-as-first-philosophy
Venue: Levinas, *De l'existence à l'existant* (1947); *Le Temps et l'autre* (1948); *Totalité et infini* (1961); *Autrement qu'être* (1974).
Heidegger's student insists that the face of the other interrupts the priority of being.
Emmanuel Levinas had studied with Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg in 1928–29 and translated some of Heidegger's early lectures into French. His mature philosophy is a sustained critique of Heidegger from within phenomenology: where Heidegger places the question of Being as first philosophy, Levinas places ethics — the encounter with the Other (autrui), whose face commands "thou shalt not kill" prior to any ontological thematisation. The political-biographical context shadows the philosophical one: Levinas, a Lithuanian-French Jew whose family was murdered in the Shoah, attacks an ontology associated with a thinker whose Nazi affiliation he never forgave. *Totalité et infini* (1961) is the major statement; *Autrement qu'être* (1974) refines it into a more radical critique. The exchange is foundational for late-20th-century continental ethics — Derrida, Marion, and the broader "ethical turn" all owe it.
Historical Context
Levinas was interned as a prisoner of war in Germany 1940–1945; his Lithuanian family was killed in the Shoah. He continued to wear Heideggerian philosophical language (Dasein, the ontological-ontic distinction) while inverting its priority. The 1947 *De l'existence à l'existant* is the first major work; Heidegger never engaged him in print.
Parties
The question of the meaning of Being is first philosophy; the analytic of Dasein discloses the structures (being-in-the-world, care, being-toward-death) that any ethical phenomenon presupposes. Ethics is regional; ontology is fundamental.
Key arguments
- Without an account of Being, ethical claims about agents and obligations have no clarified subject-matter.
- The "Letter on Humanism" (1947) explicitly subordinates ethics: "Thinking that thinks the truth of Being … is in itself the original ethics."
- Encounter with the other is a regional phenomenon within the broader analytic of being-with (Mitsein) in *Sein und Zeit*.
- The Levinasian priority of ethics is itself based on an unexamined ontology of the Other; the foundational question remains.
Allied schools
Ethics is first philosophy. The face of the other interrupts ontological totalisation: before I can ask the question of being, I am already addressed by the Other whose face commands an asymmetric responsibility.
Key arguments
- The face of the Other resists being grasped as object or theme; it commands rather than appears.
- Heidegger's ontology, by privileging Being over the Other, opens the way to (and shares responsibility with) totalising philosophies that the Shoah revealed in their political form.
- Responsibility for the Other is asymmetric, infinite, and prior to any reciprocity; ethics is not a region of ontology but its interruption.
- The "saying" (le Dire) of address to the Other precedes the "said" (le Dit) of thematic content; phenomenology, properly extended, recovers this priority.
Allied schools
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Observer · Metaphysical Agency in ethical mode: is the Other a region of being to be thematised, or the source of obligation that precedes thematisation?
Verdict in retrospect
Levinas shaped the late-20th-century "ethical turn" in continental philosophy: Derrida's late work, Marion's theology, the broader recovery of ethics as a serious philosophical topic all owe to him. Heidegger's ontology continues to be developed (Vattimo, Marion in different directions). Whether ethics or ontology has priority — and whether the choice is forced — remains contested.
Related Debates
Sharing parties or aligned schools.
Related Experiments
Experiments that share dimensions and/or aligned schools with this debate.
Other Personas Aligned With This Debate
Ranked by declared-influence weight in the schools either party is allied with. The named parties themselves are excluded — they're already listed above.
Works Most Aligned With This Debate
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Related Contemporary Dilemmas
Dilemmas that engage the same dimensions as this debate.
Further reading
- Levinas, *Totality and Infinity* (1961; tr. Lingis, 1969)
- Levinas, *Otherwise Than Being* (1974; tr. Lingis, 1981)
- Critchley, *The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas* (1992)