NIHILIZMAS IR PRASMËS PROBLEMA: E. LEVINAS
NIHILISM AND THE PROBLEM OF SENSE: E. LEVINAS

Summary/Abstract: In the article, attempt is made to reveal the relation between Emmanuel Levinas’ thinking and nihilism. Levinas belongs to the epoch, which, from the Western perspective, can be called nihilistic par excellence. What is the relation of Levinas’ thought to nihilism then? Can the great challenge of Levinas to Western philosophy be interpreted as a challenge to (its) nihilism? Levinas, like Heidegger, does not regard nihilism as an “event” that concerns just the spirit – morality, religion, politics and so on – of a certain epoch, but assigns it to the thought itself as the thought of Being. Thus the topos of nihilism for Levinas is the very same “sphere” of spirit and Being identified already by the Western thought. Is it possible, however, to say that Levinas’ attitude to the phenomenon of nihilism coincides with the actual self-consciousness of nihilism in Western philosophy? Although in Western philosophy we may notice different models of nihilism, the understanding of nihilism as the theory of Überwindung (transgression, overcoming) is highly important for the Western thought, its identity, and its self-consciousness. In Levinas’ point of view, the Western thought, based on the nihilistic “logic”, by itself is the thinking from the perspective of totality. The requirement of overcoming nihilism is based on the nihilistic “logic” as well. Levinas’ philosophy requires not the overcoming of nihilism, but “escaping” from one’s own thinking based on such logic. Thinking “based on” the “logic” of nihilism is the totalizing thinking of Being. Therefore, escaping for Levinas means the “escaping” from the “strangling noose of Being” and the “desolation” of the level of Being. Does Levinas succeed in accomplishing what Western metaphysics has never accomplished, i.e. in performing the movement of overcoming and transgression of nihilism? Levinas applies the same conceptions of metaphysics and trans-cendent that gives sense to the nihilistic experience of Western metaphysics, although he maintains them against the nihilistic “logic” of Western thinking itself. The break (demolition) of totality appears for Levinas not in the plane of pure thinking. The meaning cannot be “regained” as something that, according to nihilistic “self-consciousness” of Western ontology, was lost. Otherwise than Being, it can be detected as the Other. Therefore Levinasian thinking of the Other as other is not the accomplishment of nihilistic Überwindung: it is a thinking that establishes itself as escaping from the requirement controlled by the nostalgia of the same One.

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