Yes. Such a form of philosophical thought is not only possible but has been elaborated in several post-Heideggerian and post-Levinasian trajectories. The tension you describe—mutual implication of Being and ethical responsibility, without neutralizing the Other’s power to contest my ontological claim and my right to occupy the world—is precisely the problem that certain strands of phenomenology, deconstruction, and relational ontology have sought to hold open rather than resolve.

The Classical Tension

Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein treats Being as the fundamental horizon; ethical relations appear derivative or secondary. Levinas inverts this: the face of the Other commands responsibility prior to any ontological comprehension, interrupting my conatus essendi and my right to be. In the starkest reading, ethics is “first philosophy” and ontology is always already a form of totalization or violence. Your question asks whether a third possibility exists: one in which Being and responsibility co-constitute each other, yet the Other retains the capacity to put my very claim to world-occupation into question.

Affirmative Developments

Several lines of thought pursue exactly this mutual implication without subordinating the ethical interruptive force:

• Levinasian revisions and “ethical ontology.” Later Levinas (especially Otherwise than Being) already complicates the priority thesis. Responsibility is not simply exterior to Being; it is the very modalization of subjectivity as substitution, hostage, and “one-for-the-other.” The subject’s being is already ethical exposure. Yet the Other continues to exceed any ontological recovery: the saying (Dire) remains anarchic relative to the said (Dit). The face still unsettles my place under the sun. Readings that emphasize this (e.g., certain work by Bernasconi, Critchley, or large parts of the “ethical turn”) treat Being and responsibility as mutually implicating while preserving the asymmetrical power of the Other to contest my ontological self-assertion.
• Derrida’s hospitality and undecidability. Derrida radicalizes the Levinasian interruption while refusing a clean hierarchy. Hospitality is both an ontological condition of being-with and an ethical demand that can never be fully satisfied. The Other arrives as an absolute surprise that puts my home, my laws, and my claim to the world into question—yet this questioning is itself the condition of any possible “Being.” The mutual implication is structural: there is no pure Being untouched by the ethical demand of the arrivant, and no pure ethical relation that is not already a relation of dwelling and place. The right to occupy is permanently unstable.
• Nancy’s being-with (être-avec). Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology of singular plurality makes co-existence constitutive of Being itself. There is no solitary existence that later acquires ethical obligations; existence is exposure and sharing. Ethical responsibility is therefore not added to ontology but is the very sense of Being-with. At the same time, the Other remains irreducible: each singular existence is an absolute spacing that cannot be appropriated. The other can always contest the limits of any community or world-sharing I attempt to secure. The mutual implication is ontological; the contestatory power is preserved as the excess of singularity.
• Ricoeur and dialectical mediation. Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another develops a more dialectical version: the ethical aim of the good life with and for others is intertwined with the ontological structures of selfhood, attestation, and narrative identity. Responsibility is not prior in a simple sense, nor is it merely derivative; the two poles mutually implicate each other through the practical and narrative mediation of action. Yet the Other retains a capacity for contestation that can shatter my narrative self-understanding and my assumed right to the world.
• Critical and decolonial phenomenologies. Thinkers working in the wake of Fanon, Wynter, or contemporary critical phenomenology often treat the dominant ontology of the world (the “right to occupy”) as already racialized, gendered, or colonial. Being and ethical responsibility are shown to be mutually shaped by historical structures of domination, while the colonized or marginalized Other retains the power to put that ontology into radical question—sometimes by refusing its terms altogether. Here the mutual implication is historicized rather than purely transcendental, but the structure you describe remains intact.

The Persistent Difficulty

The difficulty is structural. If Being and ethical responsibility are too tightly mutually implicating, the Other’s interruption risks being reabsorbed into a more sophisticated ontology (a danger Levinas constantly warned against). If the Other’s power of contestation is absolute, the mutual implication can collapse back into a pure priority of ethics. Successful versions therefore keep a productive asymmetry or undecidability: responsibility is the condition of any coherent claim to Being, yet the Other always exceeds the system that tries to integrate that responsibility. The right to occupy the world is never secured once and for all; it remains permanently exposed to the question that comes from elsewhere.

In short, the form of thought you describe is not only conceivable; it is one of the central ambitions of much late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century continental philosophy. It requires holding open the tension rather than dissolving it into either a pure ontology of Being or a pure ethics of the Other.

grok