The face
The face of the other is not an image I see but something that speaks to me. Naked and defenceless, it nonetheless commands: thou shalt not kill.
The Twentieth Century to Today · 1906 – 1995
Emmanuel Levinas
列维纳斯
Ethics is first philosophy: the face of the other person commands me before all knowledge, 'thou shalt not kill', and I bear an infinite, asymmetrical responsibility for the Other.
The face speaks.
Source: Totality and Infinity, section 1
Levinas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, to a Jewish bookseller's family, reading the Bible and the Russian novelists from childhood; Pushkin and Dostoevsky were lifelong companions. The family fled to Ukraine during the First World War and returned in 1920; in 1923 he went to Strasbourg to study philosophy and met Blanchot, a friend for life. In 1928–9 he heard Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg and attended the Davos debate between Heidegger and Cassirer, siding with Heidegger.
Naturalised French in 1930, he wrote a doctoral thesis, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, that was the first French study of phenomenology; Sartre went to Berlin only after reading it. He taught at the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, was called up in 1939, captured in 1940, and spent five years at forced labour in a German camp for French prisoners of war; his status as a French soldier kept him from the death camps, but his parents and two brothers in Lithuania were all murdered. He rarely wrote directly of this, yet it shaped all his thought.
After the war he directed the Alliance's teacher-training school and studied Talmud with a mysterious Jewish scholar, thereafter giving Talmudic readings each year at the colloquium of Jewish intellectuals. His state doctorate, Totality and Infinity (1961), argued that Western philosophy is a history of 'totality' reducing the Other to the Same, and that from Parmenides to Heidegger ontology has been a philosophy of power; but the face of the other person breaks totality: it is not a phenomenon I can grasp but speaks to me from the 'infinite', naked and vulnerable yet commanding 'thou shalt not kill', and the ethical relation precedes all knowledge and all ontology.
Only in 1964 did he become professor at Poitiers, then at Nanterre and the Sorbonne until his retirement in 1976. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974) answered Derrida's criticism, distinguished the 'said' from the 'saying', and described the subject as 'hostage for the Other', responsibility preceding freedom, myself responsible for the Other before ever being chosen. He was widely recognised in old age, and Derrida delivered his funeral address, Adieu. His thought has influenced theology, psychoanalysis, political philosophy and every contemporary discussion of the Other.
Key Ideas
Ethics as first philosophy
Before knowledge and ontology I am already in responsibility for the Other. Philosophy begins not with 'what is' but with 'here I am'.
Totality and infinity
Western thought always seeks to gather everything into a graspable totality. The Other is infinite, exceeding my grasp, and that excess is what makes ethics possible.
Asymmetrical responsibility
My responsibility for the Other is not conditional on his for me. I answer for him, even for his responsibility. 'We are all responsible for everyone, and I more than the others.'
The said and the saying
The 'said' is fixed content; the 'saying' is the very exposure to the Other. Ethics lives in the saying, which philosophy keeps turning into the said and must keep unsaying.
Influenced by
- Edmund Husserl
In 1928 he went to Freiburg for Husserl's last semester; his doctoral thesis of 1930 and his French translation of the Cartesian Meditations brought phenomenology to France, and Sartre began with his book.
- Martin Heidegger
He called Heidegger one of the greatest philosophers since Plato and said he had spent his life 'leaving the climate of Heidegger': ontology reduces the Other to the understanding of Being, and ethics must come before ontology.
- Plato
He returned again and again to the Republic's 'the Good beyond being', reading it as the one testimony in the Western tradition to the priority of ethics over ontology.
- René Descartes
The idea of the infinite in Descartes' Third Meditation was the text he prized most: a finite mind containing an idea that exceeds it is the very structure of the Other's entry into the self.
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Henri Bergson
Influenced
- Jean-François Lyotard
- Jacques Derrida
'Violence and Metaphysics' (1964) was at once the deepest homage to Levinas and the sharpest questioning; their friendship lasted forty years, and he delivered the address at Levinas's funeral.
- Judith Butler
After 2000 she turned to an ethics of vulnerability and mourning, and Levinas's 'face' became a resource for asking whose lives are grievable.