Sunday, January 13, 2008

Levinas on Heidegger and Aristotle

I just think this is a wonderful interpretation of Heidegger, that lets you into the amazingly rich place where Levinas is coming from: the entirety of Being and Time can perhaps be read as the attempt to think as gathered-together or non-separated this separation Levinas marks in Aristotle:

Man is thus Da because this manner of having being in his charge is not an intellectual affair but man's entire concreteness. The Da is the manner of being-there in the world, which is to question about being. The search for the signification of being does not come about in the same manner as in Aristotle. Like Aristotle (see Metaphysics A, 2 ["We begin by wondering that things are as they are."]), Heidegger speaks of astonishment or wonder, but for Aristotle wonder is nothing other than the consciousness of one's own ignorance: knowledge comes from my wanting to know. There is in Aristotle a complete separation between Sorge and questioning, a complete disinteredness of knowledge. This is not at all the case in Heidegger.
-God Death and Time, 25

Now, the crucial thing for Levinas is that this gathering-together of what in Aristotle is separated is not taken far enough by Heidegger.

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