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Emmanuel Lévinas (January 12, 1906 - December 25, 1995) was a Jewish philosopher and Talmudic scholar from Kaunas in Lithuania, who moved to France, where he wrote most of his works. He was naturalized in 1930.
Levinas was deeply influenced by 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, by translations (for example of Husserl's 'Cartesian Meditations') and original philosophical tracts.
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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 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 breakthrough treatises "De l'Existence à l'Existant," a landmark 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. 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.
Later philosophy
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. The Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object, 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, 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 face-to-face encounter with another human being is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's promixity and distance are both strongly felt. Upon the revelation of the face a person's first natural desire is to murder the Other. At the same time, the revelation of the face forces the immediate recognition of one's inability to do so. One must instantly recognize the inviolability and autonomy of the Other. One must then place himself in the position of a student, and the Other is recognized as a teacher. Ultimately, morality is recognized through one's relation 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.
See also
External links
- See a webpage giving brief details of his life and writings (http://home.pacbell.net/atterton/levinas/)
- On Escape (http://othervoices.org/2.3/mmichau/index.html), a review of Levinas' De L'êvasion by Michael R. Michau, Other Voices (http://www.othervoices.org), January 2005.de:Emmanuel Lévinas
he:עמנואל לוינס ja:エマニュエル・レヴィナス sr:Емануел Левинас sv:Emmanuel Levinas