Levinas: Meaning and Sense (1964)

1.  Meaning and receptivity.  There are two classic theories: (1) for Plato and Husserl perception involves an intuition of object-meanings; (2) for Heidegger the simpliect [object] requires being as its horizon--being, namely, which is gathered--with no privilege accorded to what others regard as the alleged sensory "basis" of metaphoric language.  ["Gathered" is Heidegger's word for the synthesis (Kant) that brings together what is in the background or margin (Husserl) of any object of consciousness].

2.  Meaning, totality, cultural gesture.  Meaning is an affair of invoking variously (it need not be through language--a gesture suffices) a cultural world or totality.  The body provides the sense of Being that is presupposed as the background on that basis of which intellectual recognition can occur.

3.  The antiplatonism of contemporary philosophy of meaning.  If meaning arises (only) through each cultural, Being-and-world-gathering act, there is no eternal perspective for us; there are no colonizing hierarchies of insight.  This multivocal condition is atheism.

4.  The "economic" meaning.  The attempt founders to reduce the cultural play of meanings to a basic meaning, a function of the values univocally determined by human need.  But human needs are always also culturally expressive.  (Note nationalism as need, too.)  And the drive for unified, fulfilled society presupposes (as in Plato's Republic) something that transcends need.

5.  The unique sense.  Pluralism is incoherent, since it can't help presupposing or needing a Source of sense.  But the (western) traditional Source of sense was the no longer credible and still economic religion of a supernatural God of miracles.  The analysis of sense must yield the notion of God that sense harbors.

6.  Sense and work.  Sense arises from orientation toward an Other--as seen in the noble work done in 1941, work done without getting anything in return, without triumph, without eternal life, work done on behalf of a future beyond my death.

7.  Sense and ethics.  There is desire beyond need, a relation to the Other--who is both (1) understood hermeneutically (in the customary ways of interpreting) and (2) functions to orient meaning.  The relation to the other is neither engulfed in the reflective pretentions of philosophy's self-consciousness nor solicited in a naive-spontaneous way by the need for "God."

8.  Beyond culture.  Plato mistakenly thought mind could rise above culture and grasp eternal truth, but retained the potential for tyranny.  Nevertheless, finding the abstract man in each man, he paved the way for a new moral Platonism, capable of judging cultures.

9.  The trace.  The face is a visitation (not an effect, not a sign--both of which are intramundane).  The other is the trace of Him, of illeity--absolutely past, absolutely transcendent, not the (Husserlian) correlate of any intention. . . beyond iconography [cf. Hegel's critique of representation as picture-thinking].  "The revealed God of our Judeo-Christian spirituality."  Thence being has a sense (not a finality; there is no end.  True happiness attends desire which is not extinguished in happiness.