ABSTRACT
Levinas is seen as largely responsible for taking phenomenology to France. Levinas raises questions about notions of ‘absolute’ and scientific truth. ‘Truth implies experience for experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature’. Levinas thus helps us raise crucial questions about ethics and vested interest – for example within our counselling/psychotherapy training organizations. Notions of autonomy tend to go unquestioned in our culture. The Hebraic notion of heteronomy gets left out, in a received historical view that civilisation in the West went from Egypt to Athens and Rome. Derrida argues that Levinas has been caught in a Christian conspiracy that developed the notion of ethics because Christians could not take life’s rawness, and Grosz has argued that Levinas has ignored gender.
