Totality and Infinity

Totality and infini: essai sur l'extériorité

This book is a representative work by the renowned phenomenologist Levinas, forming the core of his early thought and having a profound influence on phenomenology. In this book, Levinas views traditional Western ontological philosophy as a totalistic philosophy. This philosophy, which takes existence as a totality as the ultimate source of meaning, obliterates the meaning and value of the individual and is imbued with violence against others. In contrast to this totalistic philosophy, Levinas, through a phenomenological analysis of the face, demonstrates that the other person presented in the face signifies absolute exteriority, a true infinity irreducible to interiority. He further demonstrates that the ethical relationship between self and other precedes both the existential relationship between self and other and the existential relationship between self and object. In this sense, ethics precedes ontology. The book ultimately demonstrates that there is an irreducible non-identity between self and other, and that the face-to-face encounter between self and other is the ultimate relationship in existence. Therefore, philosophy is necessarily pluralistic. The origin of the world is plurality, each expressed self. Ultimately, this plurality achieves peace through the goodness of subjectivity.

2016-08-01

北京大学出版社

340

9787301272497