Rozemund Ulje - Thinking Difference with Heidegger and Levinas

THINKING DIFFERENCE WITH
HEIDEGGER AND LEVINAS

SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought

David Pettigrew and Franois Raffoul, editors

THINKING DIFFERENCE WITH
HEIDEGGER AND LEVINAS

Truth and Justice

ROZEMUND ULJE

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2020 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ulje, Rozemund, author.

Title: Thinking difference with Heidegger and Levinas : truth and justice / Rozemund Ulje.

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2020. | Series: SUNY series in contemporary French thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019036170 | ISBN 9781438478814 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438478821 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Heidegger, Martin, 18891976. | Lvinas, Emmanuel.

Classification: LCC B3279.H49 U45 2020 | DDC 193dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036170

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sections of chapters 1 and 6 have been published as parts of Hegel and Levinas: On Truth and the Question of Interruption, Hegel Bulletin 39, no. 2: 22135. Sections of chapters 4 and 6 have been published as parts of Metaphysics and Its Other, in Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida: The Question of Difference , edited by L. Foran and R. Ulje (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016). I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to reprint the material in this book.

The research for and the writing of this book have taken place over a significant amount of time and in a number of different institutions. Part this work was completed at the Archives Husserl in Paris; I am grateful to Marc Crpon and Jocelyn Benoist for their warm welcome. Furthermore, I would like to thank everyone at the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, especially Timothy Mooney and Dermot Moran, who read and commented on draft versions of this work. I am also thankful to Joseph Cohen, who has opened up a world in which philosophy becomes a gesture of and a dedication to responsibility. Moreover, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University, where I feel truly at home. I also wish to thank Andrew Kenyon at SUNY Press for his help. Thank you, Werner, Saskia, Willem, Robbert, Ijsbrand, Tertia for your love and trust. Jullie zijn het fundament . Finally, I wish to thank Gertjan, who, with a smile, makes me remember what matters.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

It is possible to say, perhaps, that the defining aspect of the history of philosophy is thinking truth in terms of the intelligibility of the presence of Being. This intelligibility would be capable of comprehending truth as that which is present, as that which can be disclosed and that of which it is possible to synchronize into a whole. The equation of truth with presence assumes that however different terms of a relation might appear and however dispersed over time they might seem, in the end, they are rendered commensurate; an expression of unity.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel could be named as the representative of the concern with the deployment of truth as a comprehension of that which is present. Hegel claims that philosophys entire history is to be thought as the development of truth. He writes in the Phnomenologie des Geistes : The true is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. It means for Hegel that truth is the movement of reason, which is the history of philosophy itself. For Hegel, thus, there is an intrinsic relation between the history of philosophy and philosophy. This relation implies that different philosophical systems throughout history can be read as the progressive unfolding of truth, since they are moments in its realization.

Hegel suggests that the movement of reason manifests itself both in and as difference. is able to grasp or comprehend the movement of differentiation by revealing itself as the identity of different entities. According to Hegel, the task of philosophy is to gather and recollect the essence of the truth of Being, which means nothing other than as the foundation from which difference can arise. This essence, manifesting itself as difference, is the foundation for thinking, because thinking can think the recognition of difference as identity and simultaneously identity as difference. Since thinking is capable of recognizing identity in difference and difference in identity, there is never an alterity that remains outside the movement of thinking, as any alterity is comprehended within this movement itself.