LÉVINAS, EMMANUEL (1906–1995)

French philosopher.

Born in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, on 12 January 1906, the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas responded to the violence of the twentieth century by promoting ethics to the status of philosophy, in dynamic tension between the Jewish Bible and ancient Greek philosophy.

Lévinas enjoyed a happy childhood rudely interrupted by the First World War and revolution. His father's profession as a bookseller secured a comfortable existence for his family outside the old Jewish quarter. His mother tongue was Russian, but he learned Hebrew early. Lévinas grew up surrounded by books, including the Torah and the great classics of Russian literature. After he passed the entrance examination linked to the numerus clausus (a quota that limited the number of Jewish students), he attended the lyceum in Kharkiv (Kharkov), Ukraine, where the family moved during the war years.

In 1923 Lévinas registered as a philosophy student in Strasbourg, France, where he first met Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), who would become a lifelong friend. His teachers at Strasbourg, notably Maurice Halbwachs, Charles Blondel, and Maurice Pradines, left a permanent mark on him. He proceeded to the University of Freiburg, Germany, to study phenomenology, then known as the "new thinking," and was present in 1929 at the celebrated "Davos encounter" in Switzerland, when Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) clashed philosophically. In 1930, now in Paris, he defended a thesis published as The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology (English translation, 1973). He was a prime mover in the introduction of phenomenology into France, and important articles of his in this connection were collected in En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (1949; Discovering existence with Husserl and Heidegger). He had close relationships with the French philosophers Léon Brunschvicg (1869–1944), Gabriel Marcel (1888–1973), and Jean Wahl (1888–1974). He joined the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a French international Jewish organization founded in Paris in 1860 to protect Jewish rights as citizens and to promote education and professional development among Jews around the world. Lévinas awoke very early to the threat of Nazism. Though he continued to admire Heidegger, he contested his thinking as early as 1935 in De l'évasion (On Escape, 2003). He was naturalized as French in 1931 and thanks to his classification as a prisoner of war escaped anti-Semitic persecution. His family, still in Lithuania, were murdered as early as 1941 by the Nazis and their allies. Thereafter Lévinas lived with what he calleda"tumoronthememory."

After the war, Lévinas contributed much to the reconstruction of French Judaism, assuming the directorship of the École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO) of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. He welcomed the creation of the state of Israel. Beginning in 1947, he studied the Talmud under a somewhat enigmatic teacher known as "Monsieur Chouchani." He was inspired by such great Lithuanian figures as the Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna; 1720–1797) and Rabbi Chaim of Volozin (1759–1821), who worked out a "rational traditional system" in opposition to the Jewish enlightenment and to Hasidism. The Talmudic teaching Lévinas offered at gatherings of French-speaking Jewish intellectuals after 1957 constituted a major dimension of his work, in which he uncovered a forgotten tradition that had much light to shed on the modern world. In Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaisme (1963; Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 1990), Lévinas described Judaism as a mature religion and argued that the fact of having been chosen merely added to the responsibility of the Jews. This ethical Judaism was directly inspired by the nineteenth-century philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918).

Two years after defending a second thesis, Totalité et infini (1961; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 1969), Lévinas took up university teaching, first in Poitiers, then at Nanterre, and finally at the Sorbonne. Totalité et infini was a kind of palimpsest of Der Stern de Erlösung (1921; The Star of Redemption, 1971), the main work of the German Jewish religious thinker Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), begun in the Balkan trenches in 1917. This time philosophy collides with the violence of the Second World War and the experience of Auschwitz. In Totalité et infini there is again a protest of a singularity against the totality, clearly expressing an ontology of war in which the other is reduced to the same, and an eschatology of messianic peace. Rosenzweig and Lévinas criticize the Hegelian philosophy of history. How is inhumanity to be averted? asks Lévinas. The "epiphany of the face" reveals at once the temptation to murder and its impossibility. But the relationship to the other man leads also to politics. A "third party" interposes itself between me and the other and demands justice and universality.

Autrement qu'être; ou au-delà de l'essence (1974; Otherwise than Being; or, Beyond Essence, 1998), dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust, represents a radicalization of Lévinas's philosophy. The subject now becomes hostage to the other. My neighbor "assigns" me; I am obliged to substitute myself for him and cannot escape. The interpersonal relationship is dissymmetrical. The face of the other embodies that trace of the infinite which Lévinas calls illeity. The parting words of this philosophy occur in De Dieu qui vient à l'idée (1982; Of God Who Comes to Mind, 1998): we must "hear a God uncontaminated by being." Lévinas died in Paris on 25 December 1995.

As heir of the Judeo-German philosophical synthesis effected by Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, Lévinas supplied French philosophy with a grammar of ethics nourished by Talmudic teachings. As the exponent of a twentieth-century return to Judaism, he strove to reveal Judaism's universality. He was a profound influence on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).

See alsoDerrida, Jacques; Holocaust; Phenomenology .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chalier, Catherine, and Miguel Abensour, eds. Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris, 1991.

Poirié, François. Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris, 1987. Reprint, 1994.

Margaret Teboul