ABSTRACT
Franz Brentano's phenomenology is now the eidetic science of phenomena in a "phenomenological sense", i.e. constitutive correlations of consciousness (appearing/that which appears) accessible thanks to the phenomenological reduction. In other words, neither intuition nor everyday understanding are sufficient to "make manifest 'what is being talked about'" if the latter is the most exceptional phenomenon of Being. Emmanuel Levinas’s “expression” is literally meant to overcome Martin Heidegger’s “phenomenon”, just as his “ethics” aims at challenging the role of “ontology” qua “first philosophy”. However, despite such explicit opposition, the “expression” of the Other displays all the structural features distinctive of Heidegger’s most exceptional phenomenon of all. Levinas’s self-manifestation of the Other qua revelation/expression thus appears as a variety—though allegedly more fundamental—of Heidegger’s (reformalized) “phenomenological phenomenon”. The natural attitude’s priority, however, is only “temporal”, not “original”. In other words, as Marion puts it, if phenomena are derivatively limited and bound, originally the Givenness of the phenomenon is unlimited and unbound.
