ABSTRACT
Must phenomenologists of thinking deny that thinking can be found outside of esotericism? In this chapter, a negative answer to this question is defended by exploring the notion of exo/esoteric thought as it is unpacked by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Emmanuel Levinas. The chapter presents an argument against a prima facie plausible consideration in support of a positive answer that thinking (or thinking of thinking) can be found outside of esotericism. The argument is mainly based on two accounts of conceptual language: (a) Hegel’s phenomenology of common sense and (b) Levinas’s ethical declaration that not every discourse is a relation with interiority. It is argued that the answer to the question set out above is to be found in the combination of Hegel’s speculative idealism along with Levinas’s divine-command ethics.
