Emmanuel Levinas (; French: [ɛmanɥɛl ləvinas];
12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was
a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish
ancestry who is known for his work related
to Jewish philosophy, existentialism, ethics,
phenomenology and ontology.
== Life and career ==
Emmanuelis Levinas (later adapted to French
orthography as Emmanuel Levinas) was born
in 1906 into a middle-class Litvak family
in Kaunas, Lithuania. Because of the disruptions
of World War I, the family moved to Charkow
in Ukraine in 1916, where they stayed during
the Russian revolutions of February and October
1917. In 1920 his family returned to Lithuania.
Levinas's early education was in secular,
Russian-language schools in Kaunas and Charkow.
Upon his family's return to Lithuania, Levinas
spent two years at a Jewish gymnasium before
departing for France, where he commenced his
university education.
Levinas began his philosophical studies at
the University of Strasbourg in 1923, and
his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher
Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to the
University of Freiburg for two semesters to
study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl.
At Freiburg he also met Martin Heidegger,
whose philosophy greatly impressed him. Levinas
would in the early 1930s be one of the first
French intellectuals to draw attention to
Heidegger and Husserl by translating in 1931
Husserl's Cartesian Meditations (with the
help of Gabrielle Peiffer and with advice
from Alexandre Koyré) and by drawing on their
ideas in his own philosophy, in works such
as La théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie
de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's
Phenomenology; his 1929/30 doctoral thesis),
De l'Existence à l'Existant (From Existence
to Existents; 1947), and En Découvrant l’Existence
avec Husserl et Heidegger (Discovering Existence
with Husserl and Heidegger; first edition,
1949, with additions, 1967). In 1929 he was
awarded his doctorate (Doctorat d'université
degree) by the University of Strasbourg for
his thesis on the meaning of intuition in
the philosophy of Husserl, published in 1930.
Levinas became a naturalized French citizen
in 1939. When France declared war on Germany,
he reported for military duty as a translator
of Russian and French. During the German invasion
of France in 1940, his military unit was surrounded
and forced to surrender. Levinas spent the
rest of World War II as a prisoner of war
in a camp near Hannover in Germany. Levinas
was assigned to a special barrack for Jewish
prisoners, who were forbidden any form of
religious worship. Life in the Fallingbostel
camp was difficult, but his status as a prisoner
of war protected him from the Holocaust's
concentration camps. Other prisoners saw him
frequently jotting in a notebook. These jottings
were later developed into his book De l'Existence
à l'Existent (1947) and a series of lectures
published under the title Le Temps et l'Autre
(1948). His wartime notebooks have now been
published in their original form as Œuvres:
Tome 1, Carnets de captivité: suivi de Écrits
sur la captivité ; et, Notes philosophiques
diverses (2009).
Meanwhile, Maurice Blanchot helped Levinas's
wife and daughter spend the war in a monastery,
thus sparing them from the Holocaust. Blanchot,
at considerable personal risk, also saw to
it that Levinas was able to keep in contact
with his immediate family through letters
and other messages. Other members of Levinas's
family were not so fortunate; his mother-in-law
was deported and never heard from again, while
his father and brothers were killed in Lithuania
by the SS.After the Second World War, he studied
the Talmud under the enigmatic Monsieur Chouchani,
whose influence he acknowledged only late
in his life.
Levinas's first book-length essay, Totality
and Infinity (1961), was written as his Doctorat
d'État primary thesis (roughly equivalent
to a Habilitation thesis). His secondary thesis
was titled Études sur la phénoménologie
(Studies on Phenomenology). After earning
his habilitation, Levinas taught at a private
Jewish High School in Paris, the École normale
Israélite orientale (Paris), eventually becoming
its director. He began teaching at the University
of Poitiers in 1961, at the Nanterre campus
of the University of Paris in 1967, and at
the Sorbonne in 1973, from which he retired
in 1979. He published his second major philosophical
work, Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence,
in 1974. He was also a Professor at the University
of Fribourg in Switzerland. In 1989 he was
awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy.
According to his obituary in The New York
Times, Levinas came to regret his early enthusiasm
for Heidegger, after the latter joined the
Nazis. Levinas explicitly frames several of
his mature philosophical works as attempts
to respond to Heidegger's philosophy in light
of its ethical failings.
His son is the composer Michaël Levinas.
Among his most famous students is Rabbi Baruch
Garzon from Tetouan (Morocco), who learnt
Philosophy with Levinas at the Sorbonne, and
later went on to become one of the most important
Rabbis of the Spanish-speaking world.
== Philosophy ==
In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle
of intellectuals surrounding Jean Wahl as
a leading French thinker. His work is based
on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas's
terms, on "ethics as first philosophy". For
Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot
be made into an object of the self, as is
done by traditional metaphysics (which Levinas
called "ontology"). Levinas prefers to think
of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather
than the "love of wisdom" (the usual translation
of the Greek "φιλοσοφία"). In his
view, responsibility toward the Other precedes
any "objective searching after truth".
Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics
from the experience of the encounter with
the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation,
the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter
with another, is a privileged phenomenon in
which the other person's proximity and distance
are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely
reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock
negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon
of gentleness." At the same time, the revelation
of the face makes a demand, this demand is
before one can express, or know one's freedom,
to affirm or deny. One instantly recognizes
the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other.
Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold
of this otherness.
While critical of traditional theology, Levinas
does require that a "trace" of the Divine
be acknowledged within an ethics of Otherness.
This is especially evident in his thematization
of debt and guilt. "A face is a trace of itself,
given over to my responsibility, but to which
I am wanting and faulty. It is as though I
were responsible for his mortality, and guilty
for surviving." The moral "authority" of the
face of the Other is felt in my "infinite
responsibility" for the Other. The face of
the Other comes toward me with its infinite
moral demands while emerging out of the trace.
Apart from this morally imposing emergence,
the Other’s face might well be adequately
addressed as "Thou" (along the lines proposed
by Martin Buber) in whose welcoming countenance
I might find great comfort, love and communion
of souls—but not a moral demand bearing
down upon me from a height. "Through a trace
the irreversible past takes on the profile
of a ‘He.’ The beyond from which a face
comes is in the third person." It is because
the Other also emerges out of the illeity
of a He (il in French) that I instead fall
into infinite debt vis-à-vis the Other in
a situation of utterly asymmetrical obligations:
I owe the Other everything, the Other owes
me nothing. The trace of the Other is the
heavy shadow of God, the God who commands,
"Thou shalt not kill!" Levinas takes great
pains to avoid straightforward theological
language. The very metaphysics of signification
subtending theological language is suspected
and suspended by evocations of how traces
work differently than signs. Nevertheless,
the divinity of the trace is also undeniable:
"the trace is not just one more word: it is
the proximity of God in the countenance of
my fellowman." In a sense, it is divine commandment
without divine authority.
Following Totality and Infinity, Levinas later
argued that responsibility for the other is
rooted within our subjective constitution.
It should be noted that the first line of
the preface of this book is "everyone will
readily agree that it is of the highest importance
to know whether we are not duped by morality."
This idea appears in his of recurrence (chapter
4 in Otherwise than Being), in which Levinas
maintains that subjectivity is formed in and
through our subjection to the other. Subjectivity,
Levinas argued, is primordially ethical, not
theoretical: that is to say, our responsibility
for the other is not a derivative feature
of our subjectivity, but instead, founds our
subjective being-in-the-world by giving it
a meaningful direction and orientation. Levinas's
thesis "ethics as first philosophy", then,
means that the traditional philosophical pursuit
of knowledge is secondary to a basic ethical
duty to the other. To meet the Other is to
have the idea of Infinity.The elderly Levinas
was a distinguished French public intellectual,
whose books reportedly sold well. He had a
major influence on the younger, but more well-known
Jacques Derrida, whose seminal Writing and
Difference contains an essay, "Violence and
Metaphysics", that was instrumental in expanding
interest in Levinas in France and abroad.
Derrida also delivered a eulogy at Levinas's
funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel
Levinas, an appreciation and exploration of
Levinas's moral philosophy. In a memorial
essay for Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion claimed
that "If one defines a great philosopher as
someone without whom philosophy would not
have been what it is, then in France there
are two great philosophers of the 20th Century:
Bergson and Lévinas."His work has been a
source of controversy since the 1950s, when
Simone de Beauvoir criticized his account
of the subject as being necessarily masculine,
as defined against a feminine other. While
other feminist philosophers like Tina Chanter
and the eminent artist-thinker Bracha L. Ettinger
have defended him against this charge, increasing
interest in his work in the 2000s brought
a reevaluation of the possible misogyny of
his account of the feminine, as well as a
critical engagement with his French nationalism
in the context of colonialism. Among the most
prominent of these are critiques by Simon
Critchley and Stella Sandford.
== Cultural influence ==
For three decades, Levinas gave short talks
on Rashi, a medieval French rabbi, every Shabbat
morning at the Jewish high school in Paris
where he was the principal. This tradition
strongly influenced many generations of students.Jean-Pierre
and Luc Dardenne, renowned Belgian filmmakers,
have referred to Levinas as an important underpinning
for their filmmaking ethics.
In his book Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption:
Time, Ethics, and the Feminine, author Sam
B. Girgus argues that Levinas has dramatically
affected films involving redemption.
== Published works ==
A full bibliography of all Levinas's publications
up until 1981 is found in Roger Burggraeve
Emmanuel Levinas (1982).
A list of works, translated into English but
not appearing in any collections, may be found
in Critchley, S. and Bernasconi, R. (eds.),
The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (publ.
Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 269–270.
Books1929. Sur les « Ideen » de M. E. Husserl
1930. La théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie
de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's
Phenomenology)
1931. Der Begriff des Irrationalen als philosophisches
Problem (with Heinz Erich Eisenhuth)
1931. Fribourg, Husserl et la phénoménologie
1931. Les recherches sur la philosophie des
mathématiques en Allemagne, aperçu général
(with W. Dubislav)
1931. Méditations cartésiennes. Introduction
à la phénoménologie (with Edmund Husserl
and Gabrielle Peiffer)
1932. Martin Heidegger et l'ontologie
1934. La présence totale (with Louis Lavelle)
1934. Phénoménologie
1934. Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie
de l'hitlérisme
1935. De l'évasion
1935. La notion du temps (with N. Khersonsky)
1935. L'actualité de Maimonide
1935. L'inspiration religieuse de l'Alliance
1936. Allure du transcendental (with Georges
Bénézé)
1936. Esquisses d'une énergétique mentale
(with J. Duflo)
1936. Fraterniser sans se convertir
1936. Les aspects de l'image visuelle (with
R. Duret)
1936. L'esthétique française contemporaine
(with Valentin Feldman)
1936. L'individu dans le déséquilibre moderne
(with R. Munsch)
1936. Valeur (with Georges Bénézé)
1947. De l'Existence à l'Existent (From Existence
to Existents)
1948. Le Temps et l'Autre (Time and the Other)
1949. En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl
et Heidegger (Discovering Existence with Husserl
and Heidegger)
1961. Totalité et Infini: essai sur l'extériorité
(Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority)
1962. De l'Évasion
1963 & 1976. Difficult Freedom: Essays on
Judaism
1968. Quatre lectures talmudiques
1972. Humanisme de l'autre homme (Humanism
of the Other)
1974. Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence
(Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence)
1976. Sur Maurice Blanchot
1976. Noms propres
1977. Du Sacré au saint – cinq nouvelles
lectures talmudiques
1980. Le Temps et l'Autre
1982. L'Au-delà du verset: lectures et discours
talmudiques
1982. Of God Who Comes to Mind
1982. Ethique et infini (Ethics and Infinity:
Dialogues of Emmanuel Levinas and Philippe
Nemo)
1984. Transcendence et intelligibilité
1988. A l'Heure des nations
1991. Entre Nous
1995. Altérité et transcendence (Alterity
and Transcendence)
1998. De l’obliteration. Entretien avec
Françoise Armengaud à propos de l’œuvre
de Sosno (»On Obliteration: Discussing Sacha
Sosno, trans. Richard A. Cohen, in: Art and
Text (winter 1989), 30-41.)Articles in English"A
Language Familiar to Us". Telos 44 (Summer
1980). New York: Telos Press.
== See also ==
Alterity
Authenticity
Face-to-face
Ethic of reciprocity
Ecstasy in philosophy
The Other
Jewish philosophy
Martin Buber
Knud Ejler Løgstrup
== References ==
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
Institute for Levinassian Studies. Complete
primary and secondary bibliography, a search
engine for Levinas's texts, and more
The Levinas Online Bibliography (Prof. dr.
Joachim Duyndam, editor-in-chief), levinas.nl
Hosted by the University of Humanistics, Utrecht,
the Netherlands.
Annual Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminar,
Director: Richard A. Cohen [1]* Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy: "Emmanuel Levinas," by Bettina
Bergo.
Books by a Levinas scholar
The Emmanuel Levinas web page by Peter Atterton.
Includes a short biography.
New York Times obituary.
North American Levinas Society: Resources,
Calls for Papers, Announcements
Levinas and Anarchism. Articles and Research
Tools by Mitchell Cowen Verter
Michael R. Michau. "On Escape," a review of
Levinas's De L'êvasion, Other Voices, January
2005.
A Century with Levinas: Celebration of Emmanuel
Levinas Centennial · January 1–December
31, 2006
Adeus: The Epiphany of the Other according
to Levinas at the Wayback Machine (archived
October 28, 2009).
Espacethique: Emmanuel Levinas and the ethic
of responsibility.
Institut d'études Lévinassiennes.
Levinas Studies: An Annual Review.
Société Internationale de Recherche Emmanuel
Levinas.
