Acta Structuralica

international journal for structuralist research

Series | Book | Chapter

202617

Sensibility and proximity

Emmanuel Levinas

pp. 61-97

Abstract

Truth can consist only in the exposition of being to itself, in a singular inadequacy with itself which is also an equality, a partition in which the part counts for the whole, is the image of the whole. The image immediately welcomed without undergoing modifications is a sensible image. But the divergency between the image and the whole prevents the image from remaining in its fixity; it must stand at the confines of itself or beyond itself, so that truth not be incomplete or one-sided. The image has to symbolize the whole. Truth consists in a being whose images are its reflection, but also its symbol, being identified through new images. A symbol is apperceived or set up, and receives its determination in passivity and immediacy, or sensible concretion. But this immediacy is, in the knowing of the truth, always repressed. Knowing is then indirect and torturous. It is produced on the basis of the sensible intuition, which is already the sensible oriented toward that which, in the midst of the image, is announced as beyond the image, this as this or as that, this stripping itself of the halo of sensibility in which it nonetheless is reflected and abides. The intuition is already a sensibility becoming an idea, of another this as this, aura of another idea, openness in the openness. This dovetailing of ideas nowise prejudges the analytical, synthetical, dialectical spring which enables us to bring one idea out of another. Nor does it prejudge the hard work of "experimental" or "rational" research (which, in the concrete, is always divination and invention) which makes these implications explicit, draws one "content" out of another, identifies this and that. The subjective movement of cognition thus belongs to being's very essence, to its temporalization in which essence takes on sense, in which the image is already an idea, a symbol of another image, both theme and openness, pattern and transparency. This subjective movement, however, belongs to the very indifference of a noema to a noesis and to the thinker that is absorbed and forgotten in it.

Publication details

Published in:

Levinas Emmanuel (1991) Otherwise than being or beyond essence. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 61-97

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-7906-3_3

Full citation:

Levinas Emmanuel (1991) Sensibility and proximity, In: Otherwise than being or beyond essence, Dordrecht, Springer, 61–97.