The present paper aims to view three ways of thinking time by Levinas. The following analysis reorders and interprets what he has said. The text does not make any other claims but aims to offer a possible reading of Levinas’s philosophy.
Existential time
To be or not to be, i.e., a question about life and death is raised daily and hourly within existential time. This is a question about survival. It is possible due to the dialectics of being and nothingness. In this struggle where the whole is at stake, in this becoming, which is also the drama of getting older, the last word still inevitably belongs to death. Death makes ridiculous and irrelevant free existence in its persistence to be, in its choice to live, and to preserve itself. In a certain sense, life is a support of life; that is, the resistance against annihilation. Survival is carried out through engulfing the other in the identity of the Ego; however, how long and until which moment? Are not all attempts to avoid death in vain? Finally, does not nothingness triumph over every effort to perpetuate a finite being? There is no big difference whether a human being is struggling against nothingness with a minute advantage over the others and with his face turned towards the future since the future of any future is death; or it runs, focused on the receding past, on the ruins left after death in such a way that death stabs him in the back; or cling to the present, to the passing moment, which cannot be stopped, but immediately disappears in the abyss of nothingness. Postponing the death moment, no matter whether by heroic, nostalgic, or well calculated behavior - this delay, in which life of the finite being is lived, is existential time.
Levinas is absolutely clear that nobody knows when death will come. Ego cannot grasp the moment of its own death. It overcomes the scope of its possibilities. Death is not what Heidegger calls “possibility of impossibility”, but what Levinas calls “impossibility of any possibility”. Death seems to come from an agency over which Ego has no control. Death is the threat that approaches us inevitably. Time that separates Ego from death, that is, existential time, gets thinner in the course of life. Life is passing in spite of the whole activity of the Ego dedicated to self-preservation. In this opposition to transience, Ego cannot make the last step, cannot cover the last distance to the end and cannot witness the last moment, that of the surprise, as if the bonny hand of death has grabbed it out of nothingness. In this way consciousness disappears as if death has made a leap to the Ego. As if death comes from a direction opposite to the direction of time and Ego is confused in its project about the future by this counter movement of death, by the inevitability approaching it with its absolute otherness. Fear of death is the fear of violence of the other exercised on the Ego - fear of the absolutely unpredictable. The individual has its time due to the awareness of this compulsion, of this condemnation, of this tyranny. “Inevitability is at the same time threat and reprieve. It suppresses and liberates time. Timely being, that is, a being which is doomed to death, but still has some.