The Environment: a critical appreciation of Levinas’s analysis in existence and existents

ENAlphonso Lingis’s article shows how Levinas’s early philosophy breaks with the relational ontology of Heidegger’s Being and Time and with the theory of comprehension that justifies that ontology. While showing how Existence and Existents contains extraordinarily incisive insights into the phenomenal nature and type of existence of worldly realities, Lingis also notes that at this early stage we also find ontological interpretations that prefigure some of the questionable directions of Levinas’s late work, in particular his seeming obliviousness to the other than human life.