Abstract
Summary. Levinas' early interpretation of Husserl mainly revolves around the significance of the latter's doctrine of transcendental or monadological idealism, construed as the attempt at grounding "being" in the structure of "reason." In the following paper, we will elaborate on what we take to be the core of Levinas' reading of the phenomenological idealism, that is, the new conception of being implied in it.
As will be argued for, the theory of "constitution," namely, the claim that there is a co-relation between "modes of being" and subjective "modes of givenness," results for Levinas in the acknowledgment that "being" is irreducibly plural. After discussing what the consequences of such a thesis are (a radical dismissal of any form of "naturalism"), we will touch on what Levinas holds as the limits of the Husserlian conception, i.e., the inability to provide a notion of otherness, which would not merely be the expression of just an ontological category (that of "person") among others.