Levinas: Meaning & Sense

Levinas on Meaning and Sense

I.

In our last class, we discussed Meaning and Sense by Levinas.
We discussed why intellectualism will not always be
successful in finding exactly accurate definitions for meaning.
This is because the meaning source comes out of intuitition
and intentionality of a singular particular object. Interpreted
constitution of meaning has a smaller probability of having an
accurate recognition of causality even through logical
connections than the validating causal relationship, which is
the underlying constitution of meaning. We also discussed
how meaning is constituted culturally. The source of an
individual object is its place in the context that provides
access to its meaning. To me, this begins to deny that there is
an objectively present world. We also discussed the
“Economic Meaning.” I would also note from part 3 that the
expression of meaning through art and poetry occurs through
consciousnesss.

II.

In Meaning and Sense, Levinas’s thesis is that, “Height
ordains being” and also that the character of being has
meaning apart from just the sense of being. Levinas suggests2

Parker Emmerson

that meanings are distinguished in their context of sense and
that through a unique existence of being, we may being to
diverge from the Economic idea of God and see that, “sense is
impossible on the basis of the ego” (BPW 48). So far, the
scientific method has shown to be a descriptive way of
resolving paradoxes as it suggests that we can turn
quantitative value judgments into theses, which have a
qualitatively interpretable normative description of
experience. The absolute is how we find use from what is not,
like the hollow of a bowl, and there is still much to debate in
the resolution of paradox. Levinas says that the cultural
meaning revealed, derived from a historical perspective, is
jostled by the abstract being of the other, “The Other comes
to us not only out of the context but also without mediation”
(BPW 53).

III.

“The calling into question of oneself is in fact the welcome of
the absolutely other” (BPW 54). The absolute as the
cancelation of measurements in their fundament with relation
to each other presents a realm for differentiating the being
from the emptiness and the suggested relations, which have
functionality (Heidegger’s ready at hand). “Thus in the
relationship with a face, in the ethical relationship, there is
delineated the straightforwardness of an orientation, or

3

Parker Emmerson

sense” (BPW 55). Yet, even in the absence of substance, the
sense of emptiness is of the present at hand. Levinas
proposes that the revelation of the other occurs through the
epiphany of the face. “To be qua leaving a trace is to pass, to
depart, to absolve oneself… the trace would be the very
indelibility of being” (BPW 61-62). If most of the past is behind
us, and most of the future is before us, and the race is,“the
presence of that which properly speaking has never been
there, of what is always past,” then what is the phenomenon
of a thing in terms of traces? If there is a divine force of truth
within the creation’s mechanism of which God would form
miracles, it is reasonable to believe that our actions would be
both free due to the incompleteness of total systems and
consequential in the communication and understanding of the
metaphysical. Though, a solid grounding in phenomenology
must be substantiated, and the miraculous and the
transformative must come from the sense. It is the actions
that are the miracle, which inspires other miracles, and brings
about the epiphany of the other.

IV.

Can we read faces like maps of memories of life? And, how
would this apply to the subjective perceiver whose every
instant belongs to the world? Can we converse in the
abstraction?