The Boundless and the Infinite in Kant’s and Levinas’s philosophy

Abstract

The boundless and the infinite, delineating limits of thinking by the elemental-substantial and the deontological, set the space in which reflexion is only possible. In connection with these extremes, this research clarifies the transcendental background of Levinas’s post-phenomenological philosophical project, which returns to the Kantian approach as a kind of model for raising the question of how the noetic and dianoetic levels in cognition are transcendentally connected. Special attention is paid to the ambiguity of the thing-in-itself, functioning simultaneously as if below and beyond the logos, uniting the boundlessness of the element and the infinity of the Other. Kant’s dual interpretation of the reality an sich allows us to reveal the illusory nature of the authentic, which from a genetic and teleological point of view appears both as war and peace. Following the interpretation of the first Kantian mathematical antinomy, it is explained why Levinas stops at the eschatological demand for peace, which implies the intersection of metaphysics and semiotics. In this regard, this study seems essential to clarify key aspects of the Derridarian grammatology related to the Levinasian notion of the trace.