Emmanuel Lévinas | Jewish Philosopher, Existentialism, Ethics (2024)

Emmanuel Lévinas (born December 30, 1905 [January 12, 1906, Old Style], Kaunas, Lithuania—died December 25, 1995, Paris, France) was a Lithuanian-born French philosopher renowned for his powerful critique of the preeminence of ontology (the philosophical study of being) in the history of Western philosophy, particularly in the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).

Lévinas began his studies in philosophy in 1923 at the University of Strasbourg. He spent the academic year 1928–29 at the University of Freiburg, where he attended seminars by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Heidegger. After completing a doctoral dissertation at the Institut de France in 1928, Lévinas taught in Paris at the École Normale Israelite Orientale (ENIO), a school for Jewish students, and the Alliance Israelite Universelle, which tried to build bridges between French and Jewish intellectual traditions. Serving as an officer in the French army at the outbreak of World War II, he was captured by German troops in 1940 and spent the next five years in a prisoner-of-war camp. After the war he was director of the ENIO until 1961, when he received his first academic appointment at the University of Poitiers. He subsequently taught at the University of Paris X (Nanterre; 1967–73) and the Sorbonne (1973–78).

The principal theme of Lévinas’s work after World War II is the traditional place of ontology as “first philosophy”—the most fundamental philosophical discipline. According to Lévinas, ontology by its very nature attempts to create a totality in which what is different and “other” is necessarily reduced to sameness and identity. This desire for totality, according to Lévinas, is a basic manifestation of “instrumental” reason—the use of reason as an instrument for determining the best or most efficient means to achieve a given end. Through its embrace of instrumental reason, Western philosophy displays a destructive and objectifying “will to domination.” Moreover, because instrumental reason does not determine the ends to which it is applied, it can be—and has been—used in the pursuit of goals that are destructive or evil; in this sense, it was responsible for the major crises of European history in the 20th century, in particular the advent of totalitarianism. Viewed from this perspective, Heidegger’s attempt to develop a new “fundamental ontology,” one that would answer the question of the “meaning of Being,” is misguided, because it continues to reflect the dominating and destructive orientation characteristic of Western philosophy in general.

Lévinas claims that ontology also displays a bias toward cognition and theoretical reason—the use of reason in the formation of judgments or beliefs. In this respect ontology is philosophically inferior to ethics, a field that Lévinas construes as encompassing all the practical dealings of human beings with each other. Lévinas holds that the primacy of ethics over ontology is justified by the “face of the Other.” The “alterity,” or otherness, of the Other, as signified by the “face,” is something that one acknowledges before using reason to form judgments or beliefs about him. Insofar as the moral debt one owes to the Other can never be satisfied—Lévinas claims that the Other is “infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign”—one’s relation to him is that of infinity. In contrast, because ontology treats the Other as an object of judgments made by theoretical reason, it deals with him as a finite being. Its relationship to the Other is therefore one of totality.

Although some scholars described Levinas’s philosophical project as an attempt to “translate Hebrew into Greek”—that is, to reconfigure the ethical tradition of Jewish monotheism in the language of first philosophy—he was a relative latecomer to the intricacies of Jewish thought. When in midlife Levinas steeped himself in Jewish learning, he was both probing the meaning of Jewish identity in the Galut (Hebrew: “Exile”), or Jewish Diaspora, and searching for remedies for the ostensible deficiencies of mainstream Western philosophy, with its orientation toward theoretical reason and absolute certainty. During the late 1940s Levinas studied the Talmud in Paris with the enigmatic figure Monsieur Chouchani (a pseudonym), about whom very little is known. Levinas’s formal reflections on Jewish thought first appeared in a collection of essays published in 1963 as Difficile liberté (Difficult Freedom). In his interpretations of the Talmud, he seemed to be searching for what he called “a wisdom older than the patent presence of a meaning…[a] wisdom without which the message buried deep within the enigma of the text cannot be grasped.”

Lévinas’s other major philosophical works are De l’existence à l’existant (1947; Existence and Existents), En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (1949; Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger), and Autrement qu’être; ou, au-delà de l’essence (1974; Otherwise than Being; or, Beyond Essence).