Knowing Beyond Objectification: Ricœur, Levinas, and the Phenomenology of Testimony

Abstract

Paul Ricœur and Emmanuel Levinas both pose their accounts of testimony against Edmund Husserl’s account of reflective consciousness, which posits the subject as a theorizing consciousness that transforms the exterior world into an interior object of knowledge. From their critiques of Husserl, Ricœur and Levinas present their own accounts of testimony which disrupt the dichotomy of subject and object, lending themselves to a deeper engagement between the listener and the testifier. However, Ricœur’s account of testimony does not go far enough in challenging the framework of knowing subject and object of knowledge, while Levinas’ account makes the mistake of erasing the specificity of another person in an attempt to provide an account of the unintelligible. I propose that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work on dialogue can bridge the gap between Ricœur and Levinas’ work on testimony. I will conclude that a compelling account of the relationship between the self and others should preserve the other’s alterity while positioning the other as an interlocutor who has the power to shape the self’s own understandings. This framework elevates testimony to a source of meaning in and of itself by acting as an entrance point into an ethical relationship with the other and by providing an opportunity for the self’s own understandings to be changed in light of what the other has to say.

Keywords: testimony, Ricoeur, Levinas, Gadamer, dialogue


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