Da representação à sensibilidade: um olhar levinasiano sobre a fenomenologia

Abstract

In the occidental philosophical tradition, the gnoseological reflection did not conferred to sensibility a prominent role. The sensitive life has value just when it is submitted to the forming power and the structuring of intellect or understanding. Criticizing the intellectualism of our philosophical tradition, Levinas defends the primacy of representation, that is, the theoretical movement and the objectifying movement of consciousness, without which, the sensitive would never mean or to have meaning. To explicit this these by Levinas is the aim of the present dissertation. For that, we will identify some consequences of this representations primacy and to present a way of philosophizing which aims to rehabilitate the sensibility in the philosophy s framework. Therefore, we focused, initially, in the concept of representation, mainly in what regards the gnoseology built by modern philosophers among them, Husserl, the father of phenomenology. He is the philosopher who we studied in a more detail, because, in many ways, he was the master of Levinas. Thus, we present the reading and the further analysis of the work Logical Investigations II (1901), entitled About intentional experiences and their contents . We opted for this logical investigation because of Levinas s several references in his text Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology (1930). Initially, this text motivated this search and supported, mainly, the studies developed in the second chapter of this dissertation. Levinas s reflection about Husserl s phenomenology enabled us to resume some critical comments about modern thinkers, as also to glimpse philosophical horizons which open a beyond the theory in the representation. If, on one hand, Husserl could be seen as the culmination of a tradition, which favored the representation instead of sensibility, Husserl is the same who taught Levinas the importance of a phenomenology based on sensibility! In Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World (1967) Levinas criticizes the primacy of representation and presents the importance of returning to the study of sensibility which is not reduced to the gnoseological status of knowledge. In this sense, we return to the concept of sensibility beyond the submission of the rational and totalizing I . Levinas s attention is focused on an I that do not have a way to exist only guided by the immanent sphere of consciousness, but rather notices himself or herself as being an I next to the world, an I embodied, an I in situation . So, this is, curiously, the teaching of Hurssel! The phenomenology of sensibility developed by him provoked, according to Levinas, the representation s ruin. However, this ruin does not mean, in Levinas s conception, to embrace an anonymous metaphysics (Heidegger), but rather to embrace a new way of making philosophy that is not based on the primacy of ontology and logos. In this sense, it is a philosophy as wisdom of love, that is, it does not come from the logic of yourself , but rather from the alterity (another human being) that come to us as a face , as a concrete presence (someone else). The I in Levinas s concept is immersed in other search: the attitude of respect, of responsibility, of care, of ethos not only in relation to himself or in relation to herself, but also and, especially, to the other , to the world and the unexpected in history.