Emmanuel Lévinas (January 12, 1906 - December 25, 1995) was a French philosopher born in Kaunas, Lithuania in a Jewish family. In his youth he had received a traditional Jewish education, and in his later years was introduced to the Talmud by the enigmatic "Monsieur Chouchani". Levinas became a naturalized French citizen in 1930.
Levinas was deeply influenced by the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, whom he met at the university of Freiburg, as well as by Jewish religion. He was one of the first intellectuals to introduce to France the work of Heidegger and Husserl, producing both translations of their work (e.g., Husserl's Cartesian Meditations) and original philosophical tracts.
War experiences
During the German invasion of France in 1940, Levinas was reactivated with his military unit, which was quickly surrounded and forced to surrender. Initially sent to a prisoner of war camp in France, he was soon transferred to a camp on German soil near Hannover, where he remained until the end of the war.
Although protected by the Third Geneva Convention from deportation to a concentration camp, Levinas was segregated in 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 into wood-chopping duties.
Other prisoners report seeing him make frequent jottings in a notebook, which would later be shaped into his treatises "De l'Existence à l'Existant," an appreciation and criticism of the philosophy of Heidegger, and "Le Temps et l'Autre" (both 1948).
In the meantime, his wife was shielded from deportation through the efforts of the philosopher Maurice Blanchot who also risked his own well-being seeing to it that Levinas was able to keep in contact with his immediate family through letters and other messages. Other family members were not so lucky: his mother-in-law was deported and never heard from again, while his father and brothers were murdered in Lithuania by the SS.
Philosophy
Some decades after the war, Levinas became a leading thinker in France, emerging from the circle of intellectuals surrounding Jean Wahl. His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas' terms, he argues "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 (called ontology by Levinas). Levinas prefers to think of philosophy as the 'knowledge of love' rather than the love of knowledge. In his arrangement, ethics become an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; because of this, 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 responsiblity 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 from "Otherwise Than Being"). Therein 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.
Among the many works of Levinas, key texts include Totalité et infini: essai sur l'extériorité (1961) and Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence (1974). Both works have been translated into English by the American philosopher Alphonso Lingis.
Influences
Lévinas had a great and noticeable 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 his moral philosophy which was a great influence on him.
See also
External links