Levinas on Meaning and Sense

Parker Emmerson

Phenomenology taught by William Edelglass

Word Count: 626

First Submitted: December 3, 2008

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Assignment: Your response should have four parts.  First, provide a brief overview of the

main themes of the previous class meeting.  Second, articulate in your own words what

you believe is/are the author’s central claims for the assigned reading that day.  Third,

philosophically engage the central claims.  Do you believe the author has presented a

persuasive argument to justify the claims?  Is there reason to believe the claim/s to be

only partially true?  Or, are there good reasons to reject the central claims made by the

author?  In this part, if you find it helpful, you can draw, with moderation, on other

authors you have read in this or any other class.  Finally, please articulate two questions

the text raises for you.  Briefly situate your two questions in the assigned text and

articulate why your question is important to the author’s philosophical project.  Please

number each section.

Parker Emmerson

Levinas on Meaning and Sense

I. In our last class, we discussed Meaning and Sense by Levinas. We

discussed why intellectualism will not always be successful in finding

exactly accurate definitions for meaning. This is because the meaning

source comes out of intuitition and intentionality of a singular particular

object. Interpreted constitution of meaning has a smaller probability of

having an accurate recognition of causality even through logical

connections than the validating causal relationship, which is the

underlying constitution of meaning. We also discussed how meaning is

constituted culturally. The source of an individual object is its place in the

context that provides access to its meaning. To me, this begins to deny

that there is an objectively present world. We also discussed the

“Economic Meaning.” I would also note from part 3 that the expression of

meaning through art and poetry occurs through consciousnesss.

II. In Meaning and Sense, Levinas’s thesis is that, “Height ordains being” and

also that the character of being has meaning apart from just the sense of

being. Levinas suggests that meanings are distinguished in their context

of sense and that through a unique existence of being, we may being to

diverge from the Economic idea of God and see that, “sense is impossible

on the basis of the ego” (BPW 48). So far, the scientific method has shown

to be a descriptive way of resolving paradoxes as it suggests that we can

turn quantitative value judgments into theses, which have a qualitatively

interpretable normative description of experience. The absolute is how

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Parker Emmerson

we find use from what is not, like the hollow of a bowl, and there is still

much to debate in the resolution of paradox. Levinas says that the

cultural meaning revealed, derived from a historical perspective, is

jostled by the abstract being of the other, “The Other comes to us not only

out of the context but also without mediation” (BPW 53).

III. “The calling into question of oneself is in fact the welcome of the

absolutely other” (BPW 54). The absolute as the cancelation of

measurements in their fundament with relation to each other presents a

realm for differentiating the being from the emptiness and the suggested

relations, which have functionality (Heidegger’s ready at hand). “Thus in

the relationship with a face, in the ethical relationship, there is delineated

the straightforwardness of an orientation, or sense” (BPW 55). Yet, even

in the absence of substance, the sense of emptiness is of the present at

hand. Levinas proposes that the revelation of the other occurs through

the epiphany of the face. “To be qua leaving a trace is to pass, to depart, to

absolve oneself… the trace would be the very indelibility of being” (BPW

61-62). If most of the past is behind us, and most of the future is before

us, and the race is, “the presence of that which properly speaking has

never been there, of what is always past,” then what is the phenomenon

of a thing in terms of traces? If there is a divine force of truth within the

creation’s mechanism of which God would form miracles, it is reasonable

to believe that our actions would be both free due to the incompleteness

of total systems and consequential in the communication and

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Parker Emmerson

understanding of the metaphysical. Though, a solid grounding in

phenomenology must be substantiated, and the miraculous and the

transformative must come from the sense. It is the actions that are the

miracle, which inspires other miracles, and brings about the epiphany of

the other.

IV. Can we read faces like maps of memories of life? And, how would this

apply to the subjective perceiver whose every instant belongs to the

world? Can we converse in the abstraction?

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