Emmanuel Levinas

Seán Hand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415402767
• eBook ISBN: 9781134142699
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Best known for his theories of ethics and responsibility, Emmanuel Levinas was one of the most profound and influential thinkers of the last century. In this clear, accessible guide, Seán Hand examines why Levinas is increasingly fundamental to the study of literature and culture today. Exploring the intellectual and social contexts of his work and the events that shaped it, Hand considers:

• the influence of phenomenology and Judaism on Levinas's thought
• key concepts such as the 'face', the 'other', ethical consciousness and responsibility
• Levinas's work on aesthetics
• the relationship of philosophy and religion in his writings
• the interaction of his work with historical discussions
• his often complex relationships with other theorists and theories

Emmanuel Levinas's unique contribution to theory set an exemplary standard for all subsequent thought. This outstanding guide to his work will prove invaluable to scholars and students across a wide range of disciplines - from philosophy and literary criticism through to international relations and the creative arts.

KEY IDEAS

1

BIOGRAPHY

KAUNAS

From the beginning, Emmanuel Levinas's life was affected by dramatic alternatives that had huge political as well as intellectual implications. He was born into a Jewish family in Lithuania, on 30 December 1905 according to the Julian calendar that was still used in that part of the world at this time, that is to say on 12 January 1906 in our contemporary Gregorian calendar. His home town in Lithuania was Kaunas, which at that time was still part of the Russian Empire. It was therefore known also as Kovno to Russian speakers and as Kovne to many Jewish inhabitants, who formed roughly a third of the local population. Daily life was often rather traditionally sectarianized, with Russians generally administering authority, Lithuanians running agricultural production and Jews engaged in commerce. His family were rather middle-class but still observantly Jewish, and as his father ran a bookshop that catered for local government officials and the grammar school, there was daily contact with non-Jewish clients.

The Jews of Lithuania (or ‘Litvaks’ as they were sometimes termed) were generally mitnagdim,or ‘opponents’ of a mystical approach to religion, subscribing instead to a more sober, intellectual Judaism that placed a high value on education and study. Russian-language culture dominated this world of educational improvement with imperial force: Levinas's mother apparently could recite by heart one of the founding classics of modern Russian literature, Eugene Onegin, by the Romantic poet Pushkin, while Jewish parents looking to the future would often speak Russian to their children. But German was also publicly present (including via Yiddish), and Hebrew was studied in a traditional manner by the young Levinas, as part of a standard religious upbringing. It is worth bearing in mind, then, that the French language of his philosophy was a fourth form of communication, which he perfected only during his student years.

At the same time, Levinas was born on the cusp of revolutionary change. While he could later recall hearing about the death of the nineteenth-century literary giant Tolstoy, in 1910, or the tri-centennial celebrations of the last imperial dynasty of Russia, the House of Romanov, he was also fundamentally a child of the 1905 Russian revolution, which the revolutionary leader Trotsky was to describe as a ‘revolutionary prologue’. In 1915, when Kaunas was taken by the Germans during the First World War, Levinas's family fled to Karkhov, in the Ukraine, where he moved to a non-Jewish secondary school (to which five Jews maximum were permitted entry). However, the 1917 October Revolution then created dangerous conditions for the family there, leading them in 1920 to flee back to Kaunas, which became in that year the temporary capital of a newly independent Lithuania. It was from here that Levinas eventually graduated from a Jewish secondary school. Our first picture of Levinas, then, is of an intellectually gifted, multi-lingual, Jewish boy whose early experiences of world war, proletarian revolution, precarious belonging and persecution were filtered through the particular circumstances and priorities of Jewish life inside a changing Lithuania. This initial experience of extreme events, mediated and transformed by intellect and endurance, would undoubtedly influence Levinas's eventual philosophical vision.

STRASBOURG

It was educational ambition and the freedom which it represented that led Levinas out of Lithuania. He eventually opted to study at the University of Strasbourg, arriving in 1923. Along with the rest of Alsace, this city had been returned to France from Germany at the end of the First World War, and its university was now consciously engaged in reasserting ‘French’ ideas, with the help of an ambitious new generation of scholars, whose generally republican and avant-garde tendencies somewhat set them apart from the surrounding region's Christian conservatism.

Levinas studied philosophy under a number of respected teachers who left their mark in small but telling ways. One such was Maurice Pradines, who had strikingly illustrated the purpose of ethics to Levinas's class by recalling the Dreyfus affair. This would have been a hugely provocative gesture in 1924, and an exciting example of philosophy to a young Jewish intellectual recently arrived in France. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer from Alsace, in his day had been the highest ranking Jew in the French army. Falsely accused of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in 1894, he endured a long-drawn-out appeal and eventual exoneration. Indeed, although Dreyfus had returned to the army and had fought in the First World War, the French army itself did not formally acknowledge Dreyfus's innocence until 1995! The Affair, as it was known, was one of the most serious scandals of the French Third Republic and shook French social hierarchies definitively. Its repercussions led among other things to a 1905 French law separating Church and State, the more rapid emergence of a new intelligentsia in France and a radicalization of French nationalism that would carry on into the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Second World War. By the same token, however, it also contributed to the creation of the World Zionist Organization in 1897 by the young reporter Theodor Herzl, who had covered the affair and reached the conclusion that Jews could never receive proper justice in European society. So Pradines's illustration would have brought home to Levinas, in a way that appealed to personal experience as well as general intellect, how ethics could be both fundamental and immediately relevant.

The most decisive and lasting influence on Levinas from his student years, however, was undoubtedly his 1925 encounter with the critic and journalist Maurice Blanchot. This was, on the face of it, an unlikely pairing, given that at the time Blanchot affected monarchist political leanings and indeed was to write for right-wing nationalist publications which endorsed a politics of force right up to the defeat of France in June 1940. But as early as 1927, Blanchot introduced Levinas to the French literature of Proust and Valéry, while Levinas for his part explained to Blanchot the phenomenology of Husserl and, later, Heidegger. After the defeat of France, during which Blanchot helped to save Levinas's wife and daughter from the Nazis, Blanchot's subtle and profound writings undertook to elaborate a deep and fundamental abandonment of the aesthetics connected to the disastrous dream of a new French nationalism. This huge transformation was to parallel in certain key respects Levinas's own critique of Western philosophy from the late thirties on. In the post-war period, then, the two thinkers continued to build a deep philosophical dialogue in their respective works that lasted right up to Levinas's death. In the late sixties and beyond, for example, Blanchot's writing develops post-Holocaust concerns and resonances that are impregnated with key Levinasian notions like responsibility and passivity. For his part, nine years before his death, Levinas was to describe their friendship as being no less than a ‘moral elevation’ (IRB 29).

FREIBURG

One of Levinas's most exciting intellectual moments at Strasbourg came when he read for the first time the Logical Investigations (1900–01) by Edmund Husserl. Considered one of the founding texts of phenomenology, the work seeks to present philosophy as the science of consciousness rather than of empirical things. In other words, phenomenology will not look at how we collect data and then arrive at a theory, but rather at the essential nature of perceptual experience itself. Fired by this new philosophy for a new age, Levinas promptly went to Freiburg to study under Husserl himself in 1928–29, before writing his thesis on Husserl's theory of intuition, which he defended on 4 April 1930 and published immediately afterwards. At the same time, he co-translated Husserl's Cartesian Meditations into French, which was published in 1931, thus they appeared in France twenty years before they saw the light of day in Germany. With these publications, Levinas effectively introduced phenomenology into France at the ripe age of 26.

Yet this intellectual development in itself immediately became part of a dynamic duality. In Levinas's notable phrase: ‘I went to see Husserl and I found Heidegger’ (IRB 32). Martin Heidegger had been proposed by Husserl himself as his successor at Freiburg, and indeed inherited the latter's chair in 1928. His Being and Time, published the previous year, presented a dramatic new articulation of modern humanity's loss of authentic Being, with the philosophically strange notions of authenticity, anxiety, being-in-the-world and destiny assuming a defining status. While championing Husserl's work, then, it is ironic that Levinas also participated in its immediate demise in more ways than one. Not only did Levinas give the final exposé in the last tutorial of Husserl's final course prior to retirement, but his eventual thesis significantly opened up criticisms of Husserl from a distinctly Heideggerian ‘historical’ perspective, which he described himself as ‘post-Husserlian’ (TIHP 130). Prior to this, Levinas had attended classes taken by Heidegger, who also supported Levinas's application to attend a conference at Davos, held in March 1929. Levinas's earliest articles offered excited endorsement of Heideggerian being, and the conference itself was to confirm the almost revolutionary impact of Heidegger's thought on a young generation of thinkers.

PHENOMENOLOGY

Twentieth-century field of philosophical speculation closely associated with Husserl. Developing out of Kant's distinction between consciousness and content, and Hegel's dialectical view of how self-consciousness forms fully, phenomenology elaborates a complex investigation of the relationship between the act of consciousness itself and the objects or phenomena towards which consciousness is directed.

EDMUND HUSSERL (1859–1938)

German-language mathematician and founder of phenomenology, who wrote the massive Logical Investigations first published in 1900-01. He brings the Kantian division between mental processes and things into the modern age by investigating how the content of thought exists intrinsically within the mental act. His phenomenology therefore advances a reflective study of the very essence of consciousness.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889–1976)

German existentialist educated at Freiburg under Husserl, whose university chair he inherited. Regarded as one of the most radical philosophers of the twentieth century, but tainted by his association with Nazism. His dense and ambitious Being and Time (1927) argues that philosophy needs to return to the essential question of being, and focuses on Dasein or the temporal being for whom existence itself is a question. Heidegger's later work, after the war, included a fatalist and critical view of the modern world, with its democratic and technologically driven modes of being.

DAVOS

The Swiss ski resort of Davos is today best known perhaps as the location for the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum. In 1928, however, it was the significantly ‘neutral’ site for a more intellectual rapprochement between France and Germany, in the aftermath of the First World War. This first Davos conference featured the presence of such representative and fundamentally modern figures as the German theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and the French sociologists Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Mauss. But in the following year of 1929, at the conference attended by Levinas, these humanitarian efforts were dramatically tested by the starkly competing views of Kant presented by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, on the one hand, and by Heidegger on the other hand. Levinas later sought to convey the full historical weight of this event with an ambiguous description: ‘[a]t the time, it probably represented the end of a certain humanism, but perhaps today a fundamental antinomy and profound antiquity, of our civilization and of humanity’ (IRB 34).

Cassirer was a former student of Hermann Cohen, the first Jew to hold a professorship at a German university. By 1929 Cassirer himself had become the first Jewish rector of a German university, until he was forced to resign his position at Hamburg in 1933, with the rise to power of the Nazis. Cassirer referred to Heidegger's Being and Time while essentially reiterating his own work on The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to argue for the existence of objectively valid, necessary and eternal truths. By contrast, Heidegger (taking Cohen as his target as much as Kant) presented the existential situation of Dasein, or temporal being for whom existence is a question, in a way that looked to make science derivative to the understanding of being. To the impressionable students, Cassirer represented the past, and Heidegger the exciting future. In Levinas's own recollection, this judgement was delivered playfully but cruelly in the form of a review performed by the students and attended by Heidegger and Cassirer, in which the latter, played by Levinas himself, was made to reply weakly to Heidegger's repeated attacks: ‘I'm a pacifist’ (IRB 187).

Levinas's recollections of the Davos conference obviously go well beyond the details of an academic debate and the pranks of callow youth. He retrospectively locates in this one moment the demise of an entire thinking inspired by Kant and the Enlightenment (IRB 187), and an advance warning of the rise of National Socialism with which Heidegger was to be formally associated in the early thirties (IRB 35). While this may sound excessive, it is clear that, beyond the actual debate itself, Levinas takes Cassirer to be symbolically representative here of Husserl, philosophies of intellectual freedom and even perhaps all Jewish intellectuals, and that Heidegger's intellectual position therefore somehow prefigures the imminent rise of irrationalist evil and anti-Semitism. Levinas undoubtedly has in mind here a number of facts: how Heidegger had dedicated Being and Time to Husserl on its publication, and removed this dedication when it was reprinted in 1941; how in April 1933 Husserl was temporarily banned by racial laws from using the university library at Freiburg, while Heidegger in the same month became rector of that same university; and how Heidegger wrote to Husserl on 29 April, joined the Nazi party on 3 May and on 27 May made nationalistic exhortations in his traditional rectorship address. For Levinas, this goes beyond hypocrisy and grubby ambition. War, anti-Semitism and the ominous rise of an intolerant and seductive philosophy of force become combined in Levinas's recollection of the Davos conference.

IMMANUEL KANT (1724–1804)

German Enlightenment philosopher who wrote Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Critique of Judgement (1790). His massively influential work looks to reconcile idealism and materialism. Kant believes that knowledge is not just the accumulation of encounters with the material world, but instead depends on the conceptual process of our own understanding, which itself is not derived from experience.

HERMANN COHEN (1842–1918)

Described as one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the nineteenth century, and a founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, which generally emphasized scientific readings of Kant's ideas, with a stress on concepts rather than intuition. Politically, some of his ideas became associated with socialism. Author of Kant's Foundations of Ethics (1877) and Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919).

ERNST CASSIRER (1874–1945)

German-language philosopher, originally trained by the Marburg School, is considered a major intellectual historian as well as neo-Kantian philosopher. His Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), which looks to reconcile scientific and non-scientific modes of thought, is regarded as a classic text in the philosophy of culture. Went into exile in 1933 and eventually emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Yale and Columbia. His final work, The Myth of the State (1946), written in English and published posthumously, traces the irrationalism of Fascism back to philosophical roots.

FALLINGBOSTEL

Levinas became a French citizen in 1931 and did his military service the following year. He remained proud of both facts. In 1934 he accepted a job as administrator in the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an organization seeking to secure the emancipation of Jews in the non-European countries of the Mediterranean basin where they enjoyed no citizenship rights. The Alliance's modernizing work had an important educational dimension, and Levinas was to become director of its teacher-training programme, the Paris-based École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO), after the war. This essentially bureaucratic work gave Levinas the basic security and means to get married (in 1932) and to begin a family (a daughter was born in 1935). But nonetheless he tried to continue with philosophy, even though he soon had to digest the implications of Heidegger's endorsement of Nazism, which he reflected in a 1934 article on the philosophy of Hitlerism (produced presciently a year before Hitler actually became Führer) as well as in a short work of anguished revolt entitled On Escape, which he later described as written ‘on the eve of great massacres’ (OE 1). By now political events in Europe were deteriorating rapidly. When Heidegger resigned his rectorship on 23 April 1934, the Gestapo had already been formed, books by Jews had been burned, the Nazis had been declared the only pa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Why Levinas?
• Key Ideas
• 1 Biography
• 2 Phenomenology
• 3 Totality and Infinity
• 4 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence
• 5 The Artwork
• 6 Talmudic Readings
• 7 Politics
• After Levinas
• Further reading
• Index