ABSTRACT
Many central terms of Levinas’ philosophy have a clear emotive connotation, such as desire, enjoyment, indolence, horror, love/eros, sensibility, proximity, and obsession. But are these emotions? And does this make Levinas a “phenomenologist of emotions”? The answer must be “no” if emotion is understood in the classical phenomenological sense: That is, either as a certain class of acts or intentional directedness that reveals certain properties and values of a given, or as a mood that is a mode of Dasein’s existential understanding—of Being, of itself, of the world, or of others. It must also be “no” if this would lead to subsuming Levinas’ ethics under the dualism of rationalist and sentimentalist ethics. Levinas neither attributes conventional cognitive nor hermeneutic functions to emotions, nor does he advocate that it is rather “moral feelings” than reason that make us morally responsive and responsible beings. Instead, Levinas is concerned with showing that the orders of (cognitive as well as emotive) intentionality, visibility, and intelligibility build on and answer to a primary affective exposedness. He describes this exposedness as a radical passivity of “sensibility” that is ruptured and imbued by an ethical imperative. In this sense, Levinas generally conceives subjectivity in affective terms. And in this sense, the answer to the question if he plays an important role in the phenomenology of emotions can be “yes.”
