
Where
Nietzsche
set
himself in our time as a fully modernized Pre-Socratic visiting on
us visionary Heraclitean fragments,
Levinas calls on us in the chords
of Biblical
prophecy, as if his one voice had to suffice to rebalance the
scales of our entire
Judeo-Greek
civilization from the massive Hellenic bias it has accumulated.
Levinas,
like Nietzsche,
is
very up-to-the-minute and beyond: his mastery of
Husserl's and
Heidegger's
phenomenological apparatus disappears
into literary expressions which give phenomenological evidence only
as they charge his readers with interpreting the crosscurrents and
recoils of the evanescent apprehensions he evokes.