 Totality and Infinity was written as Levinas’ Doctorat  d’État.[15]  His concept of transcendence provides us a useful point of departure in Totality and Infinity, provided we understand his debt to Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl understood transcendence in several ways, of which one significant dimension was that typical of consciousness extending toward, and encountering, the worldly objects at which it aims. After Husserl, Heidegger will define transcendence as the essence of our existing in the world; Da-sein is always already in the world among things, according to a worldly transcendence or being out-there. Sartre followed Heidegger in this, urging that “transcendence is a constitutive structure of consciousness” (Sartre 1943 [1992: 23]), and his concept of consciousness is similarly in the world and ingredient in our actions.