(Time and the Other contains a series of essays presented ...)
Time and the Other contains a series of essays presented as lectures in 1946-1947 at the Collège Philosophique in Paris, along with additional essays dealing with time, sociality, and ethics. This work represents, along with Existence and Existents, the first formulation of Levinas's own philosophy, later more fully developed in other works. Beginning with an analysis of existence without existents, Time and the Other then describes the origination of the subject and moves through its encounter with another person.
(Influenced in part by the dialogical philosophies of Fran...)
Influenced in part by the dialogical philosophies of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, Totality and Infinity departs from the ethically neutral tradition of ontology to analyze the "face-to-face" relation with the Other.
Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo
(A masterful series of interviews with Levinas, conducted ...)
A masterful series of interviews with Levinas, conducted by French philosopher Philippe Nemo, which provides a succinct presentation of Levinas's philosophy.
(The "Nations" are the "seventy nations": a metaphor which...)
The "Nations" are the "seventy nations": a metaphor which, in the Talmudic idiom, designates the whole of humanity surrounding Israel. In this major collection of essays, Levinas considers Judaism's uncertain relationship to European culture since the Enlightenment, problems of distance and integration. It also includes essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Moses Mendelssohn, and a discussion of central importance to Jewish philosophy in the context of general philosophy. This work brings to the fore the vital encounter between philosophy and Judaism, a hallmark of Levinas's thought.
("The Levinas Reader" collects, often for the first time i...)
"The Levinas Reader" collects, often for the first time in English, essays by Levinas encompassing every aspect of his thought: the early phenomenological studies written under the guidance and inspiration of Husserl and Heidegger; the fully developed ethical critique of such totalizing philosophies; the pioneering texts on the moral dimension to aesthetics; the rich and subtle readings of the Talmud which are an exemplary model of ethical, transcendental philosophy at work; the admirable meditations on current political issues.
(Published by a mature thinker between 1967 and 1989, thes...)
Published by a mature thinker between 1967 and 1989, these works exhibit a refreshingly accessible perspective that seasoned admirers and newcomers will appreciate.
(Contributes to a growing debate about the significance of...)
Contributes to a growing debate about the significance of religion - particularly Judaism and Jewish spiritualism - in European philosophy. An original philosopher who combines the insights of phenomenological analysis with those of Jewish spirituality, Emmanuel Levinas has proven to be of extraordinary importance in the history of modern thought.
Emmanuel Levinas was a Lithuanian-born French philosopher and thinker. His work was dedicated to existentialism, ethics, Jewish philosophy, phenomenology, and ontology.
Background
Ethnicity:
Emmanuel Levinas had Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks roots.
Emmanuel Levinas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, on January 12, 1906, into a traditional Jewish family. Lithuania was a part of pre-Revolutionary Russia and the surrounding culture "tolerated" Jewish people. He was the eldest child in a middle-class family and had two brothers, Boris and Aminadab.
In 1914 in the wake of the War, Levinas’ family emigrates to Karkhov, in Ukraine. The family returned to Lithuania in 1920, two years after the country obtained independence from the Revolutionary government.
Education
Emmanuel Levinas did his elementary and secondary studies in Jewish and secular subjects first in Lithuania and then, later, in Russia. At the age of 18, he went west to study at the University of Strasbourg, where he majored in philosophy both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 1928 he moved to the University of Freiburg to study with the great philosopher Edmund Husserl, the father of the so-called phenomenological school in modern philosophy. In Freiburg, he also encountered, for the first time, Martin Heidegger and was deeply influenced by his classic 1927 work Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1962). In 1930 he received his doctorate for a thesis on the Théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserls' Phenomenology) (1973).
Emmanuel Levinas became a naturalized French citizen in 1930 and subsequently a professor of philosophy and director of the Ecole Normale Orientale of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris. In 1964 he assumed a professorship in philosophy at the University of Poitiers, and later, in 1967, at the University of Paris at Nanterre, moving finally to a professorial appointment at the Sorbonne in 1973. He retired in 1979 but continued writing books, some of which sold over 200, 000 copies.
His work was influential even amongst Christians - Pope John Paul II often praised and quoted his writings. This latter concern, this concentration upon man's establishing a partnership with the Ultimate, reflects Levinas' preoccupation with traditional religious and especially Jewish categories. An observant and learned Jewish person, Levinas saw his philosophical work as consistent with his religious heritage, though not necessarily in the medieval harmonistic sense. Thus, in addition to technical works on the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy, he also wrote numerous papers and monographs on Jewish themes, especially as they are found, analyzed, and classified in the Talmud (rabbinic sources). Levinas died of heart failure on December 25, 1995, in Paris.
(This book consists of transcripts from two lecture course...)
2000
Religion
A strongly religious person, Levinas also wrote extensively on Jewish themes.
Views
Levinas' work is best understood as an attempt to proceed philosophically beyond the views of Husserl and Heidegger, concerned as they were with phenomenology and ontology, respectively, and to engage in more immediate and basic consideration of the nature and meaning of other persons. Such a focus reveals the Other-that is, the other person-as existing in his or her own right-that is, not subject without remainder to incorporation within the conceptual world of the subject-knower, nor, again, something whose essence can be captured by thought. Once the nature of this otherness is grasped, once the Other is appreciated as beyond the totality of ones' organization of the world as knowledge, as what Levinas called "non-synthesizable," the Other can be rightly understood as a window, access, through which to intuit the Infinite. In this connection, Levinas emphasized aspects of experience which he took to be beyond totality (conceptualization) yet, at the same time, which give access to the Infinite.
Among the salient items which he called to attention in this context are, for example, the philosophical significance of the Human Face, the mystery of human speech, the centrality of ethics, and the particularity of each human being's relation to God. Each of these elements in human experience defies categorization and systematization. Each is rooted in an act of intersubjectivity which recognizes the privileged position of the Other.
Moreover, Levinas insisted, contra both Husserl and even more especially Heidegger, that this fundamental intersubjectivity is essentially ethical in character. In doing so he inverted the relationship between ontology and ethics and made ethics primary. Levinas referred to this ethically charged intersubjectivity as characterized by responsibility for the Other. The Other, by his or her nature, makes an ethical demand upon oneself, and the self in response can only be the fully human personality that it is by assuming the moral responsibility demanded of it. Even when the Other does not respond at all, or responds unethically, the self is bound by its own moral imperatives, emerging from its own compelling subjectivity, to act with moral correctness. It is this demand and the behavior predicated upon it that makes one human. And it is in just this ethical modality that we glimpse the Infinite within our finite existence. In ethical action, we testify to the Infinite, and such testimony, in effect, brings into being a dialogue of man and Spirit, a dialogue in which the human testimony interiorizes and makes its own the previously exterior and distant "voice" of God.
His writings were filled with strikingly phrased insights and with key terms and concepts - reflections, for example, on the "face of the other," or on "exteriority" or "moral proximity" - that reverberated in other philosophers' writings.
He made some assertions, for instance, about "the masculine" and "the feminine," that stirred criticism.
Quotations:
"Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love without reward is valuable. "
"The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future."
"If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other."
"Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved. But love goes beyond the beloved... The possibility of the Other appearing as an object of a need while retaining his alterity, or again, the possibility of enjoying the Other... this simultaneity of need and desire, or concupiscence and transcendence, ... constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal par excellence."
"For others, in spite of myself, from myself."
"A miracle entails a degree of irrationality-not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it."
Personality
Liberation termed Emmanuel Levinas "a man of four cultures": Jewish, Russian, German, and French. The World Jewish Congress hailed him as a philosopher who "never ceased to pursue his quest for a world morality following the Holocaust."
Quotes from others about the person
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."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Martin Heidegger
Connections
Emmanuel Levinas was married to Danielle Cohen-Levinas. They had a daughter and a son.