ABSTRACT
To discuss the question of truth in Levinas’ thought, it is necessary to search first its fundament which, in a philosophy which claims ethics as first philosophy, is Justice. Second, it is necessary to make the same way done by Levinas’ phenomenology in dialogue with Husserl and Heidegger, beside taking also into consideration the way Kierkegaard comprehends ethics. This article shows Levinas’ search for the meaning of meanings, taking distance from Husserl for whom the subject is the source of all meanings, but also taking distance from Heidegger’s ontology which operates the reduction of all to being, suppressing Other´s exception. If Kierkegaard discovered interiority as a characteristic of subjectivity which refuses to get lost in the work of totalization, he cannot escape of another violence that does not comprehend exteriority as coming from dehors of all system, letting ethics get lost in the general. Ethical relation, is, on the contrary, a relation of an unique to an unique. The first truth, then, belongs to ethics that offers itself as a first signification and cannot be understood but in relation with Justice which ontology will translate too late as truth that will show itself in being. The first signification, for Levinas, is then ethical.
Keywords:
truth; justice; ethics; ontology; Levinas