The Breathing of the air: presocratic echoes in Levinas

ENRelinquishing the rhetorical interrogation in the above epigraph, let us restate it positively: "We Westerners " Others have already explored some of the ways in which Levinas' philosophy is sustained by the biblical inspiration. And Levinas himself is willing to recognize, at various points in his essays, the presence of the Socratic, Platonic, and even Aristotelian legacy (to stay with some major Greek, post-Socratic thinkers) within his own thought. Is Levinas also nourished by the Presocratics as his statement suggests? And what would a Levinasian reading of the Presocratics reveal? Would different possibilities of philosophical thinking open up, within the very origins of Greek philosophy, if one were to let the Levinasian inspiration breathe through such an originary thinking? These are the questions I would like to take up in the remainder of this essay. After a necessary, brief, and certainly unsystematic excursus on some Presocratic themes that might be said to echo in Levinas' philosophy, I will focus more specifically on the presence in Levinas of a rather minor, but thus even more significant, Presocratic thinker, Anaximenes, and his "theory" that air is the arche of all things.