Published: 9 February 2016
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Welcome to Levinas: Philosopher, Talmudic commentator the Other; the Stranger
by
Dr Devorah Wainer
The University of Sydney, Australia
Until Levinas, philosophy was about asking oneself big questions and thinking to arrive at answers.
The father of modern philosophy, French philosopher Descartes (1596 – 1650) had introduced thinking as the method of philosophical inquiry. His answer to the big question “How can I know that I am (I exist)?” is well known: “cogito ergo sum”. “ I think – therefore I am”. ( More accurately, Descartes’ full conclusion was “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”.) Once a philosopher arrives at an answer to a question, that answer then is generalised as knowledge. Descartes gave to the West the trajectory of reasoning to generalisations that are “truths”— that in turn are accepted as knowledge.
Levinas intercepted this method of inquiry and changed the concept of knowledge. His original contribution to philosophy introduced relating as primary, before thinking. Thinking is just that—thoughts in the head of one person. Regardless of brilliance or influence, thinking—reasoning with logic—cannot be generalised into knowledge.
I would like to share some of the terms and ethical concepts developed by Levinas through his lived experience, philosophical scholarship and study of Torah and Talmud.
As a naturalised French citizen captured during World War Two, Levinas was interned in Fallingbostel which was within the Bergen-Belsen complex of camps. His entire family, who had remained in Lithuania, were eradicated in the Shoah. Although his ideas about ethical philosophy began forming before the War, after 1945 Levinas’ life project connected Judaism with phenomenological philosophy (1). His critique challenged the prevailing concept of knowledge as reality. theory
Born in Kaunas (Kovno), Levinas’ formative years were spent surrounded by some of the largest yeshivot in Lithuania and amongst the books in his father’s bookshop (2). Many years later, when asked about his experience of growing up in ‘the Jerusalem of the East’. The philosopher’s response was that it was ‘like having two ears and a nose’ (Levinas, 1984).
During the First World War, the family left Lithuania for the Ukraine. Young Emmanuel’s experience of the upheaval caused by the revolutions in 1917, together with his attendance at a Russian gymnasium, influenced the future philosopher. Here he was introduced to the Russian greats such as Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well as Shakespeare. He also found his love of philosophy.
At the age of 16 Levinas travelled to the University of Strasbourg in France to study Philosophy. Henceforth Emmanuel Levinas introduced a new philosophical project that offers us a different way of living, and a different approach to the seemingly intractable issues of today. (Wainer, 2015, p. 51)
Levinas and Ethics
For Levinas there is no separation between Judaism and philosophy. He renews the message of Judaism for post-Shoah Jews by raising to ethical responsibility the inescapable importance of each unique individual. This position he takes from the Torah and Talmud ‘where there are enclosed an infinite number of meanings that require a plurality of people in their uniqueness, each one capable of wresting meanings from the signs (the Torah), each time inimitable’ (Levinas, 1990, p. xvi).
As every one of us has a valuable part to play in life, it becomes our responsibility to keep each person alive. This is the ethics Levinas teaches after the devastation of the Second World War. ‘Thus ethics is no longer a simple moralism of rules which decree what is virtuous. It is the original awakening of an I responsible for the other; … the uniqueness of the I … for the other’ (Levinas, 1984, p. 182).
Writing within the context and conventions of Western(3) philosophy, Levinas offers a Jewish vision to a shattered post-Holocaust Europe. The contemporary American scholar, Steven Kepnes, says with reference to Levinas that ‘the response of post-Shoah Jewish philosophers to suffering has been an intensification of ethics and responsibility … to protect others from suffering’ (Kepnes, Ochs, and Gibbs, 1998, p21).
Levinas brings the topic of inter-human relations to the forefront. With his emphasis on relating as ethics, Levinas introduced the concept of ‘the Other’, now popularised, into philosophy for the first time. In so doing, he lanced the trajectory of philosophy that had Heidegger reasoning that the Other is just one of many. Such reasoning claimed that one can know all about the Other because they are all around us.
Knowing in this way is based on thinking about another, rather than relating with the Other. Levinas brings to our attention that thinking about leads to generalising— that in turn deprives an individual of their unique self. There is no longer respect and dignity for an individual.
Unless our social interactions are underpinned by ethical relations to other persons, as unique, then the worst might happen, that is the failure to acknowledge the humanity of the other (Wainer, 2015). ‘The worst’, for Levinas is what took place in the Shoah. It persists today when someone’s life or death is a matter of indifference. Where the other person becomes a faceless face, when a passer-by simply passes by, we have the progeny of the philosophy that generalises the human and has no concern or responsibility for the Other. The Nazi Holocaust, and all global genocides, fail to acknowledge the humanity of certain groups of humans, removing them from their humanity and human-relating.
Close to home is the dehumanisation of the asylum seeking refugee who is made invisible and silenced on Manus, Nauru, Christmas Island or in an onshore Australian detention centre.
Vis-à-vis: The Primacy of the Face
Levinas was the first phenomenologist (or philosopher) to give ‘the Face’—the primacy of the individual—a philosophical category. In defiance of indifference to a faceless Other, Levinas raises the necessity of responsible communications with the Other. Once I see the Face(4) of the Other it is my responsibility to reach out. My ability to respond—action—more than the rational thought of Western philosophy, is Levinas’ conception of philosophy as ethics.
The ethical relationship is open. Being open and responsible is, according to Levinas, true humanity and spirituality. Responsibility to the Other, relating to the Other, albeit a stranger, acknowledges the individual person who has a unique face. Levinas speaks from his personal experience of suffering the strangeness of the stranger, and being ‘othered’ (Wainer, 2015). This recurring theme in his life started when his family were refugees in Ukraine and later when he was a foreigner in France. While in Fallingbostel he felt himself to be ‘no longer part of this world’ and after the war he wrote, ‘wherever I am I feel like I’m in the way’ (Levinas, 2001).
Philosophical Dialogue
Levinas entered the vibrant intellectual life of Paris making little concession to mass opinion or taste. He wrote with all of Western civilisation’s greatest contributors and interlocutors in mind (Cohen, 2010). Before World War Two he won early acclaim for his Strasbourg thesis titled The theory of intuition in Husserl’s phenomenology. This prize winning book plus a few other publications created interest in the lofty circles of Parisian philosophers like Sartre.
After the war he frequented the philosophical circles of Marcel and Wahl, later joining Ricoeur at the University of Paris-Nanterre in 1967. His first magnum opus, Totality and Infinity ((Levinas, 1961), was partially in response to the philosophies of Rosenzweig and Buber. Levinas’ second magnum opus, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas, 1991), was considered to be in part a response to conversations with Derrida.
Most important to Levinas, though, was Heidegger, his primary adversary. ’I always recall with the greatest emotion my studies with Heidegger. Whatever the reservations one might formulate about the man and his political engagement at the side of the Nazis, he was incontestably a genius, the author of an extremely profound philosophical work which one cannot dismiss with a few sentences’ (Levinas, 1984).
Levinas broke with Heidegger for whom the fundamental relation is with the self—the subject—and not with others. By contrast, Levinas’ ethics of intersubjective responsibility and justice—the ethical relation of unique being to unique being— allows us to go beyond the possibility of ‘the worst’ happening again.
More than a moral prescription, the philosopher of ethics, Emmanuel Levinas, offers a prayer with the aim of tikkun olam (bettering the world). By speaking to the Other, an act which I must initiate (5), I enter into relation with that individual. Rather than thinking about, it is ethical to engage in living dialogue in which ‘it is more important to find out who is speaking and why, than merely to know what is said’ (Levinas, 1961). It is as if Levinas parts the waves in the oceans of hate, fear and confusion so that all humans can cross on safe land to a place they know not—or vaguely remember.
1 Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy developed largely by the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, which is based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events ("phenomena") as they are perceived or understood in one’s consciousness. Levinas, still a young student, introduced the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger to France by translating their work from German to French.
2 The bookshop was located on the main street of Kaunas and his aunt was the director of the Russian library in Kaunas.
3 Here Western is not geographical. It is the genre of philosophy with which we are most accustomed that values rational thought, logic, thesis and conclusions.
4 Levinas’ thinking about the face is also taken from receiving Torah at Mount Sinai, discussion of which is outside the scope of this article.
5 In Beyond the Wire (Wainer, 2015) I show that the act of initiating a welcome to the Other… the Stranger … is to be read in B’reishit / Genesis 18: 1 – 8 that tells of Abraham running to greet the Strangers approaching his encampment.
Cohen, R. (2010). Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion (Paperback): Duquesne University.
Levinas, E. (1961). Totality and Infinity
an essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pennsylvania, USA: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (1984). Is it righteous to be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (J. R. a. T. Loebel, Trans. English ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Levinas, E. (1990). Difficult Freedom (S. Hand, Trans.). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Levinas, E. (1991). Otherwise than Being (A. Lingis, Trans. 2nd ed.). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publisher.
Levinas, E. (2001). Of God who comes to mind (B. Bergo, Trans. 2nd ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Wainer, D. (2015). Beyond the Wire: Levinas vis-à-vis Villawood (L. Diggle Ed.). Cronulla, Australia: Book Boffin.
This The Jewish Independent article may be republished if acknowledged thus: “This article first appeared on www.thejewishindependent.com.au and is reprinted with permission."
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