 His argument here concerns a conceit of our ‘modern’ sensibility (and philosophy); namely, that we presume we could thoughtfully frame a better conception of being, wherein existence was in some sense self-sufficient. What Levinas calls the “insufficiency of the human condition” (OE: §1) simply denotes the limitation of our existence, whose transcendence, when understood as escape, promises that we might somehow surpass it, as if through an infinite experience. When transcendence is removed from theological or metaphysical frameworks (i.e., secularized as Heidegger’s “stepping over”), then we grasp it in its historical context-dependency, as the illusions of a finite being pondering pure self-sufficiency. Reconceived in this way, the entire question of transcendence changes, revealing the struggle to get out of our all too finite existence. That is why Levinas asks: “[Is] the need for escape not the exclusive matter of a finite being? … Would an infinite being have the need to take leave of itself” (OE: §2)? In short, is our first response to mortality not the urge to take leave of our existence, if periodically? This question is not so different from Heidegger’s conception of inauthenticity. But unlike Heidegger, true authenticity does not lie in securing our freedom for our most personal possibility, death. Levinas argued that we can approach death as possibility only through that of others and that we grasp being as finite by way of their mortality. On the other hand, when secularized, the idea of infinity refers to something absolute in human consciousness (OE: §1), which motivates our repeated efforts at escaping ourselves into various ecstasies. This is clearly a conception of being different from Heidegger’s. Later, of course, Levinas will attribute infinity to a different experience, that of the unbounded quality of the face of the other. However, intersubjectivity is little discussed in the 1935 essay. The encounter with the other first comes into view as a theme in his 1940s works (TO and EE). Significant here, nevertheless, are the following two points: (1) Levinas’ argument that Heidegger’s conception of existence is specific to a history, that of German thought and that of hermeneutics; (2) to be an embodied psyche is to struggle with the limits of one’s facticity or existential situation, and it is there that the question of being as our existence initially arises.