emmanuel Levinasquotes

It was his critique of Western philosophy’s failure to engage ethics that Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), the Lithuanian born, Jewish-French philosopher is best known for. He found fault with ontology (the study of being) because, he stated, it was responsible for inspiring totalitarianism since it reduces anything that is different to sameness, and views humans as finite objects of judgment. Inherently, he found that the search for the “meaning of Being” led to destructive and misguided philosophies if not balanced with ethics.

His reasoning dealt mostly with our beliefs toward our encounters with “the Other.” Man’s relationship to another reveals itself to be infinite, and therefore, divine. He begs of man to do no harm, and brings the challenge of ethics out in the open for philosophy to wrestle with in his opus, Totality and Infinity.

As a student of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger during the 20s in Germany, he later wrote Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger, which is one of his most important works, along with Existence and Existents. The latter was written while he was imprisoned, as an officer for the French army, in a Nazi labor camp.

Some have called him a postmodern Rabbi for his open-ended views and new interpretations of Jewish texts (Difficult Freedom). He thought these could help dissolve the problematic thoughts toward Judaism still reflected in Europe after the war. With original thoughts that balanced phenomenology, existentialism and Jewish tradition, Levinas left a legacy reminding humankind that all are connected and responsible for each other.