How is ethical priority possible? — The ethical turn in Levinas's concept of temporality

Abstract

Levinas's claim that ethics precedes ontology fundamentally depends upon a radical reconfiguration of temporality. While classical phenomenology, particularly in Husserl and Heidegger, understands temporality as the condition for consciousness or the disclosure of Being, such conceptions remain structurally centered upon subjectivity and therefore fail to account for the originary status of ethical responsibility. Against this tradition, Levinas relocates the origin of time within the encounter with the Other, transforming temporality from a neutral horizon of experience into the very condition of ethical obligation. The notions of the face, the immemorial past, and diachrony reveal a temporal structure in which responsibility precedes freedom, intentionality, and self-consciousness. Rather than unfolding as a continuous succession of past, present, and future, ethical temporality emerges through interruption, asymmetry, and irreducible alterity. Such a reconstruction not only redefines subjectivity as fundamentally responsive to the Other but also provides the temporal foundation for Levinas's conception of ethics as first philosophy. Ethical temporality, therefore, constitutes not a secondary theme within Levinas's thought but the structural principle through which the transition from ontology to ethics becomes philosophically intelligible, while simultaneously opening a new phenomenological perspective on the relationship between time, subjectivity, and ethical responsibility.