ABSTRACT
The movement of Western metaphysics has been, by and large, an attempt to render the concepts of transcendence and ground accessible to thinking. Beginning with Aristotle and continued by subsequent interpreters of the luminous project inaugurated by Plato, the question of the status of transcendence reaches its apex in the absolute idealism of Hegelian metaphysics which, simultaneously, also signals its conflation or confusion with the concrete immanence of finite historical becoming. And if metaphysical transcendence does not disappear or fully manifest itself as presence in Hegel, then it surely appears to be unresurrectable in the light/darkness of Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God. Yet in the wake of Husserl’s attempt to establish a transcendental or eidetic phenomenology to ground empirical inquiry, two significant voices rise above the din of an encroaching philosophical and cultural nihilism in defense of the need to revaluate the meaning of transcendence—those of Heidegger and Levinas. 1 Not merely content with reinscribing in yet one more variation “form,” “substance,” or “presence,” both thinkers seek to subvert the modernist project of rendering the invisible expressible to consciousness by focusing on that which has been either systematically rejected, downplayed, or ignored by philosophy as a whole. For Heidegger, especially in the context of his early work, it is the status of nothingness for the determination of the status of metaphysics; and for Levinas, it is the relation between infinity and alterity for the determination of the status of ethical intersubjectivity.
