Emmanuel Levinas

From the 1930s to the late 1980s Emmanuel Levinas (b. 1906–d. 1995) developed an original philosophy of ethics consistent with Jewish sources. This philosophy requires a fundamental reorientation of Western thinking and spirituality from ontology to ethics by uncovering the source of intelligibility in the imperatives of moral responsibility. Because the “for-the-other” has primacy—as obligation, as responsibility—over the “for-oneself,” Levinas is critical of both liberal philosophies which begin with isolated individuals and totalizing philosophies which reduce the human to a function of larger meaning-complexes such as reason, history, will or being. The import of Levinas’s contribution derives not only from his ethical teachings—kindness toward each, justice for all—which are already widely known, but from seeing in these teachings the basis of intelligibility, including science and art. Thus he is critical of the many classical and contemporary philosophies and theologies which in one way or another give primacy to the latter. Rigorously mining the epistemic resources of phenomenology, Levinas’s thought discloses the significance of embodiment, desire, worldliness, labor, language, time, and history, not as obstacles to morality, justice and truth, but as their very medium. For Levinas “revelation” and “reason” are not opposed, because both are aspects of the same wisdom of ethics. Contrary to the abstractions of today’s prevalent positivisms, for Levinas genuine thinking is akin to “Talmudic thinking” or “biblical humanism,” i.e., a concrete and compelling knowing, a wisdom, attached to virtue. Levinas does not reduce Judaism to formal propositions or aesthetic sentimentalism, or make philosophy handmaid to arbitrary faith. Wisdom allied to virtue escapes the ancient dualisms and their debilitating superstitious and mythological rationalizations. Levinas grew up in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, in a traditional but modern Jewish home. He matriculated in philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, France, also studying under Husserl and Heidegger at the nearby University of Freiburg, Germany, during 1928–1929. After his university studies, he married, moved to Paris, became a French citizen, and worked at the École Normale Israélite Orientale, where he became director after returning to Paris from four years of internment as a prisoner of war (in a camp unit reserved for Jewish soldiers) in Germany during World War II. His entire birth family was murdered by the Nazis in Kaunas. In France his wife and daughter were hidden in a convent and survived the Vichy-Nazi onslaught. When he was in his sixties Levinas became a university professor, concluding a brief academic career at the University of Paris-Sorbonne ending in 1976.