The Inheritance and Breakthrough of Phenomenology to the Tradition of"Being"from the Perspective of"Metaphor of Light"
In the long essay"Violence and Metaphysics"on Levinas'philosophy,Derrida mentions that up to Hei-degger's ontology,the tradition of Western philosophy has been"Hellenistic",because throughout this entire his-tory philosophy has been dominated by the founding concept of ancient Greek philosophy-"being".This domi-nance is reflected vividly in the"metaphor of light"initiated by Plato.In the classical phenomenology represented by Husserl and the early Heidegger,the field illuminated by"light"is the field of intelligibility(i.e.meaning),the field of existence that logos can describe,that is,the field of being.Being,phenomenality,meaning,logos are united in the metaphor of light by the principle of evidence and the phenomenological method of reduction,which excludes all transcendence.Levinas criticizes traditional metaphysics as ontologicalism.It is precisely because of the improper limitation of phenomenality by"light"that some actual and possible experiences in the life world are arbitrarily excluded by classical phenomenology as"transcendent",so"metaphor of light"is actually"violence of light".By rehabilitating sensibility/affectivity to its place in philosophy,Levinas achieved a phenomenological re-duction of the meaning of the"transcendent"and proved that meaning and language originated in the faces of Oth-ers,so the realm of being was not the whole realm of meaning.This work broke decisively with the tradition of Greek philosophy.
metaphor of lightphenomenologyphenomenalitybeingsensibility/affectivity
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
