From Hegel back to Kant: Levinas and the future of philosophy: a commentary on the Preface to "Totality and Infinity"

ENDespite its stirring first sentences, its powerful and unforgettable first page, both the Preface, and Totality and Infinity as a whole, lapse quickly into a seemingly obscure presentation. Is this book merely another example, a reader might immediately ask, of the undisciplined, jargon-laden writing which characterizes so much of what has come to be called post-Modernism? The answer is emphatically no. There is an extraordinary discipline present in Levinas’ thought. Why, then, is this thought articulated in such a difficult manner? For all of its originality, Totality and lnfinity is at the same time a serious debate with many of the major figures in Western philosophy. Much of Levinas’ strange terminology consists of allusions to those thinkers (‘maieutics’, to take just one example, stands for Plato, at least one strain of his thought, the midwifery announced in the Theaetetus, the Socratic dialogue in general, the theory that knowledge is recollection, all of which come dangerously close to a solipsistic idealism which Levinas strenuously opposes). One purpose of this present article will be to expose such allusions. But Levinas’ grasp of the history of philosophy is so extensive and profound that no reader, certainly not this one, is likely to recognize all of them. What will be attempted here will not be a summary of his thought. The procedure will be to loosely follow his own order of presentation in the Preface, hoping to give the reader some guidance and to render Totality and Infinity more easily readable.