Levinas recast Heidegger’s Being as a terrifying, inhuman affliction

Evidence

Like Sartre during his interlude in the Stalag, Levinas wrote prolifically while he was incarcerated. He was able to receive writing paper and books, so he read Proust, Hegel, Rousseau and Diderot. He kept notebooks out of which grew his first major work of philosophy, Existence and Existents, published in 1947. Here he developed earlier themes, including that of the ‘il y a’ (‘there is’) — the amorphous, undifferentiated, impersonal Being that looms over us in insomnia or exhaustion. This is Heidegger’s Being presented as a terrible affliction, rather than as a mystical gift to be awaited in awe. Levinas had a particular horror for what Heidegger had called the ontological difference: the distinction between beings and their Being. If you take away individual beings in order to be left with pure Being, Levinas felt, you end up only with something terrifying and inhuman. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 624

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘il y a’ — the impersonal, oppressive Being of Levinas — as the key inversion of Heidegger’s ontological difference.
• XREF: Connects to earlier material on Heidegger’s Being and ontological difference, which Levinas directly inverts here. — connects to: Levinas’s face-to-face ethics rejected Heidegger’s collective Being-with — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 627

Broader Connections

• Levinas’s face-to-face ethics rejected Heidegger’s collective Being-with #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 627