Levinas Argument Against Hegel

One can see Hegel as the culmination of Greek philosophical thinking, as a part of German Idealism in a response to Kant, but also at the start of continental philosophy which reacts against Hegel. This paper will examine Hegel’s dialectical movement presented in the famous Lord and Bondsman passage in the Phenomenology of Spirit (PS), and Levinas’s response to Hegel in Totality and Infinity (TI). A critical evaluation of Levinas’s argument juxtaposed against Hegel will reveal the differences and similarities between the two. This paper will conclude that Levinas fails to overcome Hegel in TI.

Although Hegel’s famous central ontological thesis of universal Geist is dead, Hegel still impacts all aspects of (especially French) continental philosophy; in many ways Hegelian philosophy is a philosophy which refuses to come to an end. One central theme in Hegel is the desire for mutual recognition as presented in the famous Lord and Bondsman passage in the PS. In this passage, Hegel follows the dialectical movement, through sublation (Aufhebung), in the development of consciousness into independent

Behind the development towards absolute knowledge lies a dialectical development in consequence of affirmation, contradiction, and further denial into a larger synthesis. A crucial movement occurs when the self turns outwards from consciousness to self-consciousness; a part of the dialectic of unhappy desire. According to Hegel, self-consciousness exists only through recognition by others, Hegelian intersubjectivity, and this recognition is mutual; self-consciousness faces ‘another’ self-consciousness. This recognition must be reciprocal, is symmetrical, and achieved ‘when each is for the other what the other is also for it’. However, humans strive for recognition and therefore this desire leads to a struggle for life and