With all my talk of Levinas the last couple of weeks I really should address a bit about what is at stake. To do that let me start not with Levinas but with Husserl. As late as the Fifth Cartesian Meditation Husserl was struggling with the problem of the Other. Clearly there is a difference. I can't, for example, experience an other's pain in the full sense they do. He suggested that my experience of their pain is akin to how I have memories of my own past pains. As Husserl characterizes the problem it isn't how I understand others but how they are constituted for me. That is how is it that the other enters into my consciousness as the other? To Husserl the other isn't given as other objects are. Rather there is always a gap in my experience of the other which isn't the case for objects. (At least in Husserl's eyes) At best with other humans are merely indicated by what is constituted originally for me.
Husserl, even while thinking he can solve the problem acknowledges the problem.
Transcendental reduction restrict me to the stream of my pure conscious processes and unities constituted by their actualities and potentialities. And indeed it seems obvious that such unities are inseparable from my ego and therefore belong to his concreteness itself.
But what about other egos, who surely are not a mere intending and intended in me, merely a syntehtic unities of possible verification in me, but, according to their sense, precisely others? Have we not therefore done transcendental realism an injustice? The doctrine may lack a phenomenological foundation; but essentially it is right in the end, sinc eit looks from a path from the immanency of the ego to the transcency of the Other. (Cartesian Meditations §42, The Essential Husserl, 135)
Husserl continues introducing the phrase "appresentation" which is roughly an indication that points to a gap or emptiness but which had its own kind of verification. That is we have an experience which can't be filled in the sense of fulfilled intentionality in Husserl's phenomenology. Roughly then this becomes the experience of the accessibility of what is not originally accessible.
The character of the existent "other" has its basis in this kind of verifiable accessibility of what is not originally accessible. Whatever can become presented, and evidently verified, originally - is something I am; or else it belongs to me as peculiarly my own. Whatever, by virtue thereof, is experienced in that founded manner which characterizes a primordially unfulfilllable experience - an experience that does not give something itself originally but that consistently verifies something indicates - is "other." It is therefore conceivable only as an analogue of something included in my perculiar ownness. (Cartesian Meditations §52, The Essential Husserl, 149)
Phenomenologically then the Other is really just a modification of myself since it is only conceived within my own awareness. It is, however a secondary kind of giving, more like memory as I mentioned. So when I encounter someone I "apperceive" them as having experiences such as pain which are the same "as if" I were having them. Thus for Husserl seeing an other person as an other really isn't that different from any other form of constitution. Say how a rock is constituted for me.
Obviously both Levinas and Derrida disagree. And this approach of Husserl constitutes one of the main problems both grapple with. In addition there is the problem of this grasping of the other given as an indication. (Roughly, as a sign rather than as the thing itself, much as my memory of a pain is a sign to the pain and not pain itself) It is over this issue of sign that Levinas and Derrida differ.
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Blogged by Clark Goble