Continental · 1906–1995
Emmanuel Levinas
Lithuanian-born French philosopher of ethics as first philosophy
Levinas argued that the face of another person makes an ethical demand on me before any knowledge or theory, so responsibility for the other, not ontology, is philosophy’s starting point.
Life and thought
Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) was born into a Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania, studied in Strasbourg and then in Freiburg with Husserl and Heidegger, and helped introduce phenomenology to French readers. A naturalised French citizen, he served in the army and spent the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp, while most of his family in Lithuania was murdered in the Holocaust. Afterwards he directed a Jewish teachers’ school in Paris and gave Talmudic readings, becoming a professor only later, at Poitiers, Nanterre and the Sorbonne.
Levinas argued that Western philosophy, Heidegger’s included, tries to fit everything into a totality of being and knowledge, and so reduces the other person to something understood. But when I meet another’s face, its exposure and vulnerability say “do not kill me” before I have formed any theory; the other is infinite, beyond my grasp. Ethics, the responsibility this face lays on me, is therefore “first philosophy”, prior to ontology. His work reshaped ethics, theology and political thought.