Dan:

The link between Levinas and Hegel is worth considering -- and not to be
dismissed out of hand.  It is, of course, complicated, but your
supposition of a link is warranted -- and requires no apology.  (For
some reason, Levinas seems to be fetishized by a number of his admirers,
treated as if he were a prophet or something whose insights cut against
rather than stand in some fairly obvious -- even if uneasy, as is the
case with all original thinkers -- relation to the tradition of
philosophy).  Like Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, Levinas attended the famous
lectures on Hegel by Kojeve and was influenced by them.  He had already
studied with Husserl and Heidegger.  What seems to be the primary
insight in Levinas -- elaborated and developed in interesting and
sophisticated ways -- that allows him to make additional crucial
contributions to phenomenology is that our experience and understanding
of finite totalities of experience (of more or less coherent and
habitable "worlds") is "always already" conditioned and interrupted by
the other, and that our fundamental relation to the other is primarily
ethical rather than conceptual or perceptual (at least when these are
taken to be opposed to the ethical).  It is a kind of call to
responsibility, a call not to kill the other by assimilation or
totalization.  But the standard response to this call is one that
produces a mask for the other -- killing her in her otherness --
precisely in the effort to be true to her.

As you are clearly aware, to anyone who has actually studied Hegel (and
not the caricatures of Hegel as the totalizing or omnivorous "bad guy"
culminiting all that is evil in Western metaphysics), that is a fairly
obvious quasi-Hegelian insight (or at least a reaction or response to a
Hegelian insight).  Of course, some argue that Hegel doesn't remain true
to this insight in the end; but this is controversial: recent studies of
absolute knowing (e.g. an essay called "absolute knowing" by Burbidge in
The Owl of Minerva) suggest that the knowing that is absolute for Hegel
ends up being a kind of stance of open-waiting, that prepares itself for
surprise.  In any case, to say Levinas is at least partially indebted to
Hegel or that his work embodies a kind of return to Hegel is not to
dismiss him.  What makes Levinas rich and worth reading is how much
mileage he can get from the insights he borrows (or rediscovers)
combined with his skill as a phenomenologist and thinker, who pays close
attention the unspoken and unspeakable dimensions of the world of lived
experience.

    Dan Shaw wrote:

    Again, as a novice, I am only trying to place Levinas in the =
    tradition. A natural opposition I jumped to was Heidegger's emphasis
    on =
    the confrontation with Being versus Levinas' focus on the other. When =
    Damon said something to the effect that, for Levinas, subjectivity
    comes =
    only in the presence of the other (something Heidegger would not agree =
    with, to my mind), that sounded quite Hegelian. But I won't be making =
    any further remarks on Levinas until I have read him at some length, =
    which will be after the journal edition is compiled but hopefully
    before =
    the book is finished.

Take care,

Nate

--
Nathan Andersen
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Collegium of Letters
Eckerd College
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