Ethics usually focuses on actions, with thinking or unthinking only having significance insofar as they lead to good or bad behavior. Heidegger and Levinas, however, argue that thinking in certain ways, or not thinking in general, is ethical or unethical on its own rather than just by having good or bad consequences. Heidegger’s early work makes unthinking conformity (regardless of to what) an important part of inauthenticity, while his later work turns the thinking of being into our central “ethical” task, intentionally blurring the distinction between thinking and acting. Levinas makes thinking about humans in a certain way – namely as thinkable, as fitting into and exhausted by comprehensible categories – itself an act of conceptual violence, regardless of what deeds follow from it. We conclude with Kierkegaard who criticized humanity’s tendency to sleepwalk through their own lives, only waking up by confronting something unthinkable. This thought can be seen as a common source for both Heidegger and Levinas, as well as a way to keep the two in a continuously off-balance strife with each other.

Continental Philosophy | Major Philosophers