Abstract

Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology can be seen as a specific reduction of meaning to its temporal constitution . Temporality as the universal horizon of Being makes any transcendence and meaning beyond time impossible. Levinas opposes such reduction of sense to finitude and historicity for ethical reasons. However, in his attempt to overcome Heidegger's primacy of time and transcend its totality, he must look for a completely different conception of significance which goes hand in hand with a new, "diachronic" understanding of time