Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present Ricœur’s and Lé vinas’s approach to the concept of selfhood (French soi) as a response to the dispute over subjectivity which was initiated by the critics of modern tradition of the absolutization of Cartesian cogito. The debate on the notion of selfhood has not been closed yet. The author analyses two diff erent approaches to the problem. One appeals to the Hegelian dialectic, adjusting it to the formula “oneself as another” (discounting that part of the dialectical movement in which Hegel jumps to a vision of absolute knowledge). The other refers to the category of substitution. Both Ricœur and Lé vinas point to the Platonic opposition of the notions of “the Same” and “the Other.” Ricœur’s initial claim breaks with the established language of ontology. Moving beyond the circle of sameness-identity towards the dialectic of sameness- and selfhood-identity entails the transformation of the notion of otherness: it is no longer an antonym of “same,” but it is a kind of otherness that is constitutive of selfhood.

Highlights

  • Thanks to phenomenology we discover that thought is not filled with the presence of that at which it is directed, but it opens up in the process of infinite filling.[33]

  • Non-intentional phenomenology describes the kind of experience of the Other the constitutive characteristic of which is remoteness, absence and distance, i.e. one that persists in the sphere preceding all sense and rules, but is “measured against the sense toward which we understand something and ourselves, and measured against the rules by which we operate when treating somebody or something in this or that fashion.”[34]. As he refers to the Cartesian idea of Infinity, which the self discovers in himself as a summons that is coming from outside, and that is not a part of immanence, but that which tears it apart, Lévinas speaks about the Other-in-the-Same

  • The dispute between Ricœur and Lévinas reveals the difficulty of making coherent the two different interpretations of the Husserlian phenomenology, which as their starting point adopt the Aristotelian belief that it is impossible to be speaking about the acting man without defining the experiencing man

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Summary

Introduction

The new language for describing the experience of the self, which comes to be expressed with the formula “the-one-who-is-himself-andthe-other,” was developed in a threefold critical reference to the Platonic opposition of the terms “the Same” and “the Other,” the Cartesian and post-Cartesian philosophy of reflection, which treats the cogito as a pole constitutive of all sense, and the Hegelian model of dialectic leading to abolition of all differences (assimilation of all otherness) and making the subject a totalising and unifying principle.

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