Emmanuel LevinasThe Philosophy of Ethics

DESCARTES – 1596 - 1650

• “Cogito ergo sum” - I think – therefore I am.

• Truths = knowledge.

• Levinas – relating as thinking.

EMMANUEL LEVINAS

• Born Kaunos – Lithuania – 1906.

“It was like having two ears and a nose”

• Studies in Freiburg under Husserl

“I came to see Husserl, and what I saw was Heidegger.”

• Being and Time – published 1927

• Sent to Stalag XIB at Fallingbostel, near Hanover, where he was stamped Prisoner 1492.

• Wife and daughter hidden in a monastery.

• Died 1995

Levinas' work is best understood as an attempt to proceed philosophically beyond the views of Husserl and Heidegger, concerned as they were with phenomenology and ontology, respectively, and to engage in a more immediate and basic consideration of the nature and meaning of other persons.

Inverted the relationship between ontology and ethics and made ethics primary.

• “Philosophy is derived from religion. It is called into being by a religion adrift, and probably religion is always adrift.”

‘the response of post-Shoah Jewish philosophers to suffering has been an intensification of ethics and responsibility … to protect

others from suffering’ (Kepnes, Ochs, & Gibbs, 1998).

• 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).

• He is for an open life, eager to try everything, to experience everything, ‘in a hurry to live, impatient to feel.’ In this respect, we Jews all try to be Westerners” We want a knowledge completely tested through our own evidence. We do not want to undertake anything without knowing everything, and nothing can become known to us unless we have done and seen for ourselves, regardless of the misadventures of the exploration. We want to live dangerously, but in security, in the world of truths. Seen in this manner, the temptation of temptation is philosophy itself…. the solid basis of our old Europe.

THE JEW ---

• The Bible, or, if you prefer, the Judeo-Christian source of our culture, consists in affirming a primordial responsibility “for the other,” such that, in an apparent paradox, concern for another may precede concern for oneself. Holiness thus shows itself as an irreducible possibility of the human and God: being called by man. An original ethical event which would also be first theology. 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 accession of my person to the uniqueness of the I called and elected to responsibility for the other . (182, emphasis added)

Loving the Torah, even more than God means precisely having access to an even more personal God against whom one may

rebel, that is to say, for whom one may die.

The Biblical teaching does not consist of praise for a model people, it consists of invectives – Israel’s sole worth lies perhaps

in having chosen this book of anger and accusation for its message – having made this book its own, Israel is not a model

people but a free people.

• Holiness is nevertheless the supreme perfection, and I am not saying that all humans are saints! But it is enough that, at times, there are saints, and especially that holiness always be admired, even by those who seem the most distant from it. This holiness which cedes one’s place to the other becomes possible in humanity. And there is something divine in this appearance of the human capable of thinking another before thinking of himself. With humanity, holiness thus comes to transform the being of nature by constituting this opening of which I was speaking earlier. Very briefly stated, this is what, in the formula from which we started, ‘the bible’ designates.

THE THREE TRUTHS

• “people need infinitely fewer things than they dispose of in the magnificent civilizations in which they live”

• “in crucial times, when the perishability of so many values is revealed, all human dignity consists in believing in their return. The highest duty, when ‘all is permitted,’ consists in feeling oneself responsible with regard to these values of peace. In not concluding, in a universe at war, that warlike virtues are the only sure ones…”

• “we must henceforth, in the inevitable resumption of civilization and assimilation, teach the new generations the strength necessary to be strong in isolation”

• The fact that settled, established humanity can at any moment be exposed to the dangerous situation of its morality residing entirely in its ‘heart of hearts,’ its dignity completely at the mercy of a subjective voice, no longer reflected or confirmed by any objective order-that is the risk upon which the honor of humankind depends. But it may be this risk that is signified by the very fact that the Jewish condition is constituted within humanity. Judaism is the humanity on the brink of morality without institutions. (Levinas 1996, 122)

• “God” invokes an original covenant that then conditions Judaism-Jewish ethics and Jewish education. That is, it is not God who gives moral authority. Rather, God stands in the background of the acceptance of the original covenant.

ETHICS OF RESPONSIBILITY

• Basic.

• The rights of others have supremacy over our own.

• “The others material needs are my spiritual needs.”

• Humanism

• Radical differences do exist.

• Seeing the “face” of the other.

• Dialogue.

• Essence of humanity.

• Transcendence.

TOTALITY AND INFINITY• Relationship with Heidigger.

“I can forgive many Germans for what happened but find it difficult to forgive Heidigger”

• Primal relationship.

• Not – “Equality for all / women” etc.

• Totalising of the other.

• Incomprehensible relationship.

• Infinity.

‘it is more important to find out who is speaking and why, than merely to know what is said’ (Levinas, 1961)

ENCOUNTERS WITH OTHERS

• Discourse.

• Alterity – difference.

• “Do not kill me”

• Tribal

FAITH

• Correct way of behavior.

• Faith in others.

• Love

• Open ourselves to others.