The Body and Transcendence in Emmanuel Levinas’ Phenomenological Ethics

Abstract

This paper is a presentation of Emmanuel Levinas' notion of corporeality that shows struggling dialectic from a phenomenology of a sensible subject towards an ethics of transcendence.With the author's attempt to show that the Good is given and received through sensibility held by the body dwelling in the world, she proposes that the seeming conflict between the seeming corporeal pull to dwelling as against the Desire to take an ethical flight can be settled when one courageously confronts the following truths about humanity: that human beings are, 1) more than their thoughts, as 2) they are made of flesh and blood and that 3) they are in and thus influenced by the world.Through the work of corporeality, the subject is weakened by pain despite virility, suffers despite being at home and longs for a sublime unknown in the face of plenitude.By the stern conviction that existence can also be obscure and indefinite for consciousness to old, Levinas is able to explain how an egoistic subject is humbled and prepared to welcome the Other.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.