Emmanuel Lévinas
Emmanuel Lévinas (IPA: [ˡlɛvɪnas]???, January 12, 1906 Kaunas, Lithuania - December 25, 1995 Paris) was a French philosopher and Talmudic commentator.
Life and Philosophy
Levinas received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania. After WWII, he studied the Talmud under the enigmatic "Monsieur Chouchani."
Levinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in 1923, where he began his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to Freiburg University to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met Martin Heidegger. Levinas became one of the very first French intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl, by translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existent, and En Découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.
According to his New York Times obituary, Levinas came to regret his enthusiasm for Heidegger, because of the latter's Nazism. Levinas wrote "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."
After earning his doctorate Levinas taught at a private Jewish university in Paris, the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale, 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 1973, from which he retired in 1979.
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' 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 "knowledge of love" rather than the love of knowledge (the literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). By his lights, ethics becomes an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; hence an ethics of responsibility 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."[1]. 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 accede or deny. One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronymy of the Other. Even murder would fail in any attempt to take hold of this otherness.
In Levinas's later thought following "Totality and Infinity", he argued that our responsibility for-the-other was already rooted within our subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the preface of this book is [paraphrase] "it is of the utmost importance to know whether or not we are duped by morality." This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence (chapter 4 in "Otherwise Than Being"), where Levinas maintained that subjectivity was formed in and through our subjected-ness to the other. In this way, his effort was not to move away from traditional attempts to locate the other within subjectivity (this he agrees with), so much as his view was that subjectivity was primordially ethical and not theoretical. That is to say, our responsibility for-the-other was not a derivative feature of our subjectivity; instead, obligation founds our subjective being-in-the-world by giving it a meaningful direction and orientation. Levinas's thesis "ethics is first philosophy", then, means that the traditional philosophical pursuit of knowledge is but a secondary feature of a more basic ethical duty to-the-other.
The elderly Levinas was a distinguished French public intellectual, whose books reportedly sold well. He had a major impact on the young Jacques Derrida, a fellow Jew whose seminal Writing and Difference contains an essay on Lévinas. Derrida also delivered a eulogy at Lévinas' funeral, later published as Adieu á Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy.
War experiences
Levinas became a naturalized French citizen in 1930. When France declared war on Germany, he was ordered to report for military duty. During the German invasion of France in 1940, his military unit was quickly 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. The Nazis respected the Third Geneva Convention, which forbade the practice of sending a prisoner of war to a concentration camp. Nevertheless, Levinas was assigned to a special barracks for Jewish prisoners, who were forbidden any forms of religious worship. Life in the camp was as difficult as might be expected, with Levinas often forced to chop wood and do other menial tasks. Other prisoners saw him frequently jotting in a notebook. These jottings became his 1948 treatises De l'Existence à l'Existent and Le Temps et l'Autre.
Meanwhile, Maurice Blanchot helped Levinas's wife and daughter spend the war in a monastery, thus sparing them 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 murdered in Lithuania by the Nazi SS.
See also
- The Other
- The Face-to-face Relation
- Authenticity
- Golden Rule
Selected writings by Levinas
Bibliography of English translations of Levinas's writings.
- 1930. The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology.
- 1948. De l'Existence à l'Existant. An appreciation and criticism of the philosophy of Heidegger.
- 1948. Le Temps et l'Autre.
- 1949. En Découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.
- 1961. Totalité et infini: essai sur l'extériorité.
- 1974. Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence.
The latter two books have been translated into English by the American philosopher Alphonso Lingis.
About Levinas
Bibliography of the secondary literature in English.
External links
- 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
- Web site of the Institut d'études lévinassiennes.
- Essays by Mitchell Cowen Verter:
- On Escape, a review of Levinas' De L'êvasion by Michael R. Michau, 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.
- Espacethique : Emmanuel Levinas and the ethic of responsibility.
- Emmanuel Levinas on the Mystical Site www.mysticism.nl
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- ↑ "Totality and Infinity", p.150
