Levinas essay notes
presents an account which is ambiguous in an ambiguous style. ascribing a relationship with others as non-distinctly working in two seemingly apposite fields. one field based on knowledge - knowledge in the cultural sense - and another field posited upon a pre-thetical orientation.
knowledge; the other exists on the same plane as the world. the subject grasps the other in the plane of culture. each subject is sedimented in cultural history and is unknowable to themselves without such sedimentation. the sedimentation is not consciously developed nor signified. the sedimentation works in the background. this background has the purpose of setting out in contrast those others and objects that the subject is percieving. without the background perception has nothing to perceive against. one cannot perceive against oneself alone. one cannot perceieve oneself without background. the subject's consciousness is centrifugal. consciousness throws out meaning and receives meaning from the world through a network of understanding built from cultural experience. everyday objects, objects of the world, unknown objects, and language only have meaning through their lateral relationships to the signs. without sedimentation these networks are meaningless - non-existent - and thus the thowing out of meaning and the receiving of meaning would be empty. perceptual data may be received but not perceived. nothing would be perceived because consciousness would not be able to make any sense of the world.
- consciousness is talked about in its extended sense with the use of the sense and the sensed.
the subject knows that the other is in the world perceiving the same world that the subject is perceiving yet it is clear that the other is not another ego. there is a known alterity.
pre-thetical orientation; the other exists inbetween the subject and the world. there is a 'desire' for the experience of the alterity of the other. this is not the totalising effect that knowledge may have in understanding the other, by making the foriegn the same. this is experiencing the other in the presence of something else. there is also an access to the world through this alterity.
the body acheives a reflection by touching itself. it simultaneously is a subject-object. this reflection is extended to the other. the other is never an object. it is not transcended.
Labels: essay, intersubjectivity, levinas, merleau-ponty, notes, ros