Levinas’s Diachronic Thought
Committee: Andrew J. Mitchell (director), Jill Robbins, John Lysaker.
Abstract
My dissertation lies at the intersection of ethics and the philosophy of time. In particular, it addresses the following question: “How can my relation to another person constitute, not a mere event within the flow of my experiences, but something which changes that flow and restructures the way in which I experience things?” The 20th-century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas helps us to address this question. During a five-year captivity in a Nazi-administered prisoner of war camp in Germany, Levinas drafted a highly innovative theory of time which would respect the alterity of the other person. He explained how the other person could affect the flow of my time-consciousness without becoming a mere item within it. Ultimately, Levinas’s philosophy of time provides us with the conceptual tools to think of a non-reductive relation between self and other.
My claim is that Levinas’s rethinking of time allows for a new ethics centered around the radical alterity of the other person. Levinas's ethics relies on his theory of time. Time shapes human experience, and Levinas’s goal is to describe an experience of the other person which can preserve her exteriority to me. This is done, I contend, through his notion of diachrony. Diachrony refers to a structure in which two temporal orders meet. When I meet another person, her temporal flow “cuts across” my own flow without being encompassed by it. To reveal the importance of time for an ethics of alterity, my dissertation outlines this diachronic structure formally. Then, it deformalizes this structure through analyses of concrete temporal experiences that have preoccupied Levinas throughout his philosophical career: insomnia, fecundity, aging, patience, messianism, and the political.
My dissertation lies at the intersection of ethics and the philosophy of time. In particular, it addresses the following question: “How can my relation to another person constitute, not a mere event within the flow of my experiences, but something which changes that flow and restructures the way in which I experience things?” The 20th-century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas helps us to address this question. During a five-year captivity in a Nazi-administered prisoner of war camp in Germany, Levinas drafted a highly innovative theory of time which would respect the alterity of the other person. He explained how the other person could affect the flow of my time-consciousness without becoming a mere item within it. Ultimately, Levinas’s philosophy of time provides us with the conceptual tools to think of a non-reductive relation between self and other.
My claim is that Levinas’s rethinking of time allows for a new ethics centered around the radical alterity of the other person. Levinas's ethics relies on his theory of time. Time shapes human experience, and Levinas’s goal is to describe an experience of the other person which can preserve her exteriority to me. This is done, I contend, through his notion of diachrony. Diachrony refers to a structure in which two temporal orders meet. When I meet another person, her temporal flow “cuts across” my own flow without being encompassed by it. To reveal the importance of time for an ethics of alterity, my dissertation outlines this diachronic structure formally. Then, it deformalizes this structure through analyses of concrete temporal experiences that have preoccupied Levinas throughout his philosophical career: insomnia, fecundity, aging, patience, messianism, and the political.
