Emmanuel Levinas(1906 — 1995)
Emmanuel Levinas
Lituanie, France
7 min read
A French philosopher of Lithuanian origin, Emmanuel Levinas is one of the great thinkers of ethics in the 20th century. Having introduced the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger to France, he made the relationship with the other the foundation of all philosophy.
Frequently asked questions
Famous Quotes
« The Other is what I myself am not.»
« Ethics is an optics.»
Key Facts
- Born in 1906 in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, into a Jewish family
- Studied in Strasbourg and then in Freiburg under Husserl and Heidegger in the late 1920s
- Taken prisoner of war in 1940; much of his family was exterminated during the Holocaust
- Published Totality and Infinity in 1961, a major work on the ethical relationship with the other
- Published Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence in 1974; died in 1995 in Paris
Works & Achievements
His doctoral thesis, which helped introduce Husserl to France; the young Sartre read it and discovered phenomenology through it.
A work drawn from his captivity notebooks, exploring the experience of anonymous existence, the famous “there is” (il y a).
A series of lectures in which he thinks about time starting from the relationship with others, rather than from a solitary consciousness.
His major work, which places the “face” of the other and ethics at the foundation of philosophy.
A collection bringing together his reflections on Judaism, freedom, and responsibility after the Shoah.
His second great book, more radical, which conceives of responsibility as prior to being itself.
Radio interviews with Philippe Nemo, an accessible gateway to his entire body of thought.
Commentaries on Talmudic texts read as a living source of ethical and philosophical reflection.
Anecdotes
Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, into a Jewish family, the young Levinas learned to read Hebrew before Russian and kept a lifelong passion for the great Russian novelists — Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy — whom he cited as a first initiation into the question of the other.
In 1928-1929, as a student in Freiburg, Levinas attended the lectures of Husserl and then Heidegger. He was even present at the famous Davos debate pitting Heidegger against Ernst Cassirer, and later recounted how, in a student skit, he had parodied Cassirer by powdering his hair white — a gesture he bitterly regretted after Heidegger's Nazi commitment.
Taken prisoner in 1940 as an officer in the French army, Levinas spent five years in a Stalag, a camp for prisoners of war. Shielded by his French uniform from the fate reserved for Jews, he secretly wrote notebooks there that would become the book *Existence and Existents*. During this time, his wife and daughter were hidden in a monastery in France thanks to Maurice Blanchot.
Almost all of Levinas's family who had stayed in Lithuania was murdered by the Nazis. This catastrophe runs through his entire body of work: he dedicated his great book *Otherwise than Being* “to the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists.”
Every week, for decades, Levinas studied the Talmud with an enigmatic master nicknamed “Monsieur Chouchani,” who was also the teacher of Elie Wiesel. From this teaching would come his famous *Talmudic Readings*, in which he reread the ancient texts as a living source of ethical thought.
Primary Sources
We name face the way in which the Other presents itself, exceeding the idea of the Other in me. The epiphany of the face is ethical.
The face is what forbids us to kill. The relation to the face is, from the very first, ethical.
Responsibility for the other is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence within it.
Monotheism is not an arithmetic of the divine. It is the perhaps supernatural gift of seeing one human being as absolutely like another.
Husserl's phenomenology made possible this breakthrough beyond the objectivism and naturalism in which philosophy had enclosed itself.
Key Places
Levinas's birthplace, at the heart of a rich Eastern European Jewish culture. There he received an education shaped by Hebrew, Russian, and the Bible.
Levinas arrived here in 1923 to study philosophy and struck up a friendship with Maurice Blanchot. It was the place of his French intellectual formation.
In 1928-1929, he attended the lectures of Husserl and Heidegger, discovering phenomenology at its source. This experience shaped his entire body of work.
A prisoner of war from 1940 to 1945, Levinas was interned in an officers' camp. There he secretly wrote the notebooks for his future books.
Appointed professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1973, Levinas taught there at the peak of his academic recognition.
The city where Levinas lived, headed the École Normale Israélite Orientale, and died in 1995. His eulogy was delivered by Jacques Derrida.
