The Awakening of Husserlian Empathy and Levinasian Ethics

My paper interrogates Levinas’s critique of Husserlian empathy by tracing the role of imagination from Husserl’s description of basic empathy through his later account of motivational empathy. I argue that although Levinas remains critical of the representational function of imagination in Husserl’s basic apperceptive empathy, the quasi-temporal displacement of imagination in Husserl’s higher-level motivational empathy effectively anticipates Levinas’s account of a diachronic ethics. I propose that by reading Levinas’s account of maternal substitution as a transposition rather than as a rejection of Husserl’s higher-level account of empathy, the difference between the Levinasian account of substitution and Husserlian account of empathy is attenuated. Although Levinas challenges the representative function of imagination in Husserl’s basic empathy, the de-presencing function of imagination, as articulated by Husserl in his account of higher-level empathy, anticipates Levinas’s own account of a diachronic ethics born of temporal vulnerability, figured otherwise by Levinas, as maternal substitution.