| Abstract | Yet in the crucial years in the late 1920s and the very early 1930s, [Emmanuel Levinas] never counted as a pure Husserlian except in the short time between his reading of the Logical Investigations and the beginning of his sojourn in Freiburg, and perhaps not even then given his earlier training in Strasbourg. "To speak the language of a tourist," Levinas recalled in the 1980s of his trip to Freiburg, "I had the impression that I went thinking to visit [Edmund Husserl] and found [Martin Heidegger] instead."(8) It is difficult to overestimate Heidegger's role in Levinas's development, and the burden of the interpreter rests partly on retrieving what Levinas called in retrospect "the ambiance of those readings when 1933 was still unthinkable."(9) Heidegger's Being and Time, which Levinas continued to count as "one of the finest books in the history of philosophy"(10) came as a shock to Levinas as to many in his generation, "completely altered the course and character of European philosophy,"(11) and revolutionized Husserlian phenomenology by retrieving a question and mode of analysis long forgotten. Even after 1945, Levinas remained of the opinion that "a man who undertakes to philosophize in the twentieth century cannot not have gone through Heidegger's philosophy, even to escape it."(12) At Heidegger's invitation, Levinas attended the colloquium of French and German intellectuals at Davos in the summer of 1929, which he called "a summit of thought"(13) that signaled "the end of a certain humanism,"(14) and the annunciation of a new philosophical order.
Richard A. Cohen, otherwise Levinas's most profound American exegete and disciple, claims that "Levinas has never been a Heideggerian," and adds elsewhere that "[t]hough influenced [by Heidegger], Levinas was never -- contrary to Herbert Spiegelberg's unsupported charge -- a Heideggerian."(29) It is indeed possible and worthwhile to construct a meaningful argument to the effect that Levinas had differences with Heidegger from the very beginning, yet it is only through an equal sensitivity to how far Levinas traveled with the early Heidegger and how much he drew from him (a willingness that does not entail "charging" Levinas with anything) that the biographical and philosophical itinerary between 1930 and 1935 becomes intelligible. Indeed, a recovery of the excitement Heidegger's work inspired upon its publication licenses such an interpretation. In his article, Levinas noted the enthusiasm that had spread through Germany beginning in the 1920s and saw it as valid. "[L]a Gloire ne s'est pas trompée," he commented. "No one who has ever done philosophy can keep himself from declaring, before the Heideggerian corpus, that the originality and power of his effort, born of genius, have allied themselves with a conscientious, meticulous, and solid elaboration." Heidegger's work had to be seen, he added, as the belle fierté of phenomenology.(30) Instead, then, of vainly attempting to redeem Levinas from any Heideggerian association, even at the peril of anachronism, it is more fruitful to hypothesize that it might have been exactly that peril of association and even identity that compromised Levinas after 1933 and forced him to attempt to transcend Heidegger. Levinas, in other words, understood himself and thus has to be understood as enough of "a Heideggerian" in 1930 to have been shocked, distraught, and philosophically instigated by Heidegger's Nazi turn.
Yet Levinas accepts Heidegger's reformulation of the problem of Being as a philosophically sound criticism of what he called "bourgeois philosophy." As [Robert John Sheffler Manning] describes it, "Levinas criticizes or, to use Heidegger's phrase, `destroys' the history of ontology in the same manner and on the same basis as Heidegger. More than this, however, Levinas does this for the same reason and with the same intention as Heidegger."(48) But if Levinas followed Heidegger in claiming that in penetrating to the level of ontology one reaches "the heart of philosophy...renew[ing] the ancient problem of Being as such,"(49) Levinas entered the Heideggerian problematic only to exit it through what he termed "excendence." Levinas is not fundamentally interested in a fleeing of Dasein from itself, which has Heideggerian precedent, but rather the escape from Sein itself. Levinas, then, ultimately looked favorably on "the experience of a revolt" that Being inspired and that he thought characterized his generation and much contemporary literature. In the words of one commentator, "The debilitating relationship with absurd and irremissible Being that always traps the self would not have been conceived by Heidegger in its brutality and its tragedy."(50) What Heidegger unearthed to address, Levinas addressed to escape.
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