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Emmanuel Levinas
A 20th-century philosopher whose Jewish sensibility influenced his encounter with Western
thought and ethics.

BY BENJAMIN A. W URGAFT

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YO U MI G HT AL SO L I KE
Jewish Thought and Philosophy 101
JEWISH THOUGHT

Martin Buber
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Emmanuel Levinas’ centennial was commemorated in 2006 at conferences throughout the world.
The retrospectives were well-warranted. The Lithuanian-born Jewish philosopher was a major
figure in 20th century thought, taking Western philosophy to task for its failure to engage ethics.
Indeed, Levinas’ writings take the ethical encounter with other persons–rather than abstract
questions about knowledge or meaning–as the point of departure for all philosophical work.

Early Years
Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was born in Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania to a family rich in
Jewish cultural traditions. Hebrew was the first language he learned to read, and his parents were
Yiddish speakers, but Russian was their spoken language of choice and the Russian novel was
Levinas’ first object of intellectual love. Following their displacement during World War I, the
Levinas family immigrated to France, where Levinas would later become a citizen, and for
whom he would fight in World War II.

Levinas entered the University of Strasbourg in 1923. It was here that philosophy, especially the
thought of Edmund Husserl, became Levinas’ true passion. Soon, he traveled to the University of
Freiburg, in Germany, to study with Husserl, but he also became a student of Martin Heidegger.
Levinas was present at the famous Davos disputation of 1929: a meeting between Heidegger,
who represented the existentialist revolution in philosophy and Ernst Cassirer, the Jewish neo-
Kantian, who favored the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Levinas supported Heidegger against Cassirer, choosing existentialism over Kant, but after
Heidegger joined the National Socialists, Levinas had some regrets. Levinas continued to see
Heidegger’s philosophy as a crucial turn in European thought, one that made his own philosophy
possible. And yet, as he would later explain, he saw Heidegger’s political misdeeds as evidence
that the man’s philosophy lacked ethical content. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s influence on Levinas
remained. One commentator even called him “Heidegger made kosher,” for it was Levinas who
introduced German phenomenology to France and later contributed to the effort to rehabilitate
phenomenology and existentialism after Heidegger’s misadventures in the Nazi party were fully
publicized.
A European and A Jew
In the 1930s, Levinas continued his philosophical studies, publishing a book on Husserl (The
Theory of Intuition in the Phenomenology of Husserl, 1930). Though he had not yet begun the
engagement with traditional Jewish texts that would mark his post-War work, he read Franz
Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, along with Protestant theological sources.

At this time, the idea of God and the problem of the human experience of revelation grew in
importance in his thinking. Perhaps just as importantly, Levinas deepened his association with an
organization he had joined upon moving to France, the Alliance Israelité Universelle, which
celebrated the compatibility between French and Jewish culture, and attempted to provide
financial aid and (French-style) education for Jews all over the Middle East and North Africa.
Levinas worked within the organization in several capacities, and while he endorsed its vision of
Jews remaining Jewish while living as citizens in liberal European states, in a number of essays
written for the organization’s journal, he expressed his desire to rethink the relationship between
Jewish and European identities.

In a sense, Levinas began to develop the same longing that had led the German-Jewish
Rosenzweig “back” from German philosophy to Judaism, a desire to make Jewish identity a
primary part of one’s engagement with philosophy. Philosophy might aim for a universal mode
of “Greek” thought, but it would always be as Jews that Jews encountered the universal. Levinas
thought that the idea of a “chosen people,” the religious particularity of the Jews, contained a
lesson for all peoples: universal traditions, including the ethical traditions of the Western world,
always have to be encountered through particular–meaning culturally specific–pathways.

Levinas’ Jewish education began in earnest when he undertook studies with a

mysterious Talmud teacher, Monsieur Chouchani, who would appear, give instruction, and then
vanish for months without a trace. Levinas studied with him between 1947 and 1951, and his
eventual Talmudic lectures–which he began to give in 1963–bore the impress of Chouchani’s
instruction.

The Other
Levinas’ general philosophical efforts remained impressive during this period, as he published
two more important studies, Existence and Existents (1947) and Discovering Existence with
Husserl and Heidegger (1949). Levinas also published work in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les
Temps Modernes, but as Richard Wolin has noted, Levinas’ work was often intended to counter
Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism: “With Sartre, it is the ‘For-Itself,’ or consciousness, that
constitutes philosophy’s Archimedean vantage point. For Levinas, conversely, it is the
‘Other,’ l’Autrui, in all its uncanny metaphysical strangeness.”

Levinas was troubled by the same thing in Sartre’s thought that had troubled him about
Heidegger: the focus on the experience or consciousness of the self did not provide an account of
ethics, which for Levinas meant the way we encounter other people.

It was in his opus, Totality and Infinity (1961), that Levinas brought his ethical challenge to
philosophy out into the open. The book is dense, even maddeningly so, with philosophical
technicalities, and yet the theologies of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber also influenced the
work. Here Levinas draws on the metaphors of human-divine encounter, which overwhelms our
faculties and reveal our fundamental fragility and limitations.

He establishes a parallel between these encounters and the experience of other persons, arguing
that there is something inherent in the experience of “otherness”–the difference between you and
me, say–that reminds us of the fragility of both ourselves and of others, and imposes the ethical
imperative to do no harm. The encounter with a human “other,” then, is likened to the religious
encounter with the Divine Other. Levinas would continue to elaborate this idea, for which he is
perhaps best known, in his running project of reconstituting philosophy using ethics, rather than
speculation about the nature of “being” and knowledge. This project would occupy him for the
remainder of his career and is reflected in Otherwise than Being, his last major philosophical
work, which shines the light of Levinas’ critique on the tradition of Western metaphysics.

Talmudic Readings
Beginning in 1963 Levinas engaged with Jewish sources through a series of “Talmudic
readings,” combining the insights of Western philosophy with rabbinic interpretive methods. He
sometimes referred to this in terms of translation: Hebrew sources were to be translated into
“Greek,” meaning the language of the European philosophical tradition, but also meaning
something more ambitious: Levinas sought to find lessons within Talmudic literature that might
shed light on unresolved problems remaining in European thought.

Furthermore, and more controversially, Levinas thought that reading both the Bible and the
Talmud in the light of contemporary political problems, might help us to interpret those texts
themselves. He once said: “The translation of the Septuagint [the first translation of the Bible
from Hebrew to Greek] is not yet complete,” implying that Jewish texts had to be continuously
“re-translated,” in his metaphorical sense, to remain relevant. The idea that Levinas’ “post-
Heideggerian” reading of the Talmud could somehow be superior to previous rabbinic
approaches has earned Levinas detractors within Jewish thought, but also many devotees eager
for a new conversation between “Athens” and “Jerusalem.”

Levinas’ Legacy
In part because of his friendship with major figures such as Jacques Derrida and Maurice
Blanchot, Levinas has become a truly influential figure in continental philosophy, sometimes
grouped with Derrida and other “postmodern” philosophers. Interestingly, Levinas has also
become one of the voices in the contemporary conversation between philosophy and theology
(both Jewish and Christian), valued for his arguments that both religion and philosophy can
contribute to our running conversations about human values.

Levinas has been accepted–perhaps inappropriately–by some postmodernists as a sort of

“Rabbi,” an authoritative speaker on matters of Jewish tradition, because he provided readings of
Jewish texts that are agreeable to a postmodern sensibility. Levinas argued for the open-
endedness of texts, the importance of interpretation, and the relevance of biblical and Talmudic
religion, offering a philosophical account of ethical responsibility in both philosophy and
Judaism. Still, many of Levinas’ interpreters attempt to disentangle these two strands from one
another, but while he wrote for different audiences during his lifetime, it has become
increasingly clear that neither “side” of his intellectual project is entirely comprehensible without
the other.

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