Emmanuel LEVINAS, the responsible man

by Hubert Hannoun

One cannot confine the life of Emmanuel Levinas within a prison of words unless one makes of each of them the springboard toward an elsewhere.

A life of an exiled Jewish intellectual

He was born in Kovno, in Lithuania, in 1906, within a community in which Jewish culture is deeply anchored in people’s minds. He first learned Hebrew and read the Bible, then went on to classical studies, and, as a young adolescent, discovered with delight the great Russian authors. He found himself in Ukraine during the Revolution of 1917.

In 1923, he left for France and began studying philosophy in Strasbourg. It was in Freiburg, later, in 1928, that he worked alongside two philosophers who would mark him for the whole of his life, Ed. Husserl and M. Heidegger. He returned to Strasbourg shortly afterward to defend a thesis on Husserl, which would be published in 1930.

He was naturalized French in 1930 and, as such, was mobilized at the start of the Second World War, in 1939. He was taken prisoner in 1940 and would thus spend the entire duration of the war in captivity, in Germany. He soon learned that his whole family, who had remained in Lithuania, had been massacred by the Nazis. His wife, in France, was taken in by various figures who would protect her, both from the authorities of the Vichy regime and from the Nazi occupier.

At the Liberation, in 1946, he was appointed director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale. It was from this period that he undertook the study of the Talmud in the company of M. Chouchani, an apparently extraordinary figure in whom he would recognize an exceptional mastery of Jewish texts. In 1961, he became a university professor at Poitiers, then at Nanterre, in 1967, and finally at the Sorbonne in 1973. From 1976 until his death, in 1996, he was professor emeritus, preserving close ties with the world in general and with the world of Jewish thought in particular.

“It is only in approaching the other that I attend to myself”

This is the central theme of one of Levinas’s best-known works, Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity), written in 1961. To the philosophies for which being reveals itself as war, which deal only with cold totalities, he opposes an ethical thought, that of a man capable of speech, that is to say, of peace.

This speech reveals man to himself as a finite being capable of apprehending the infinite — a profound idea he had no doubt encountered in many a Jewish philosopher of the golden age such as, among others, Yehuda Halevi or Maimonides. How, Levinas asks, are we to conceive that a being might contain more than it is possible to contain? How can the finite embrace the infinite? The answer lies in the face of the other. This face is the signature of my power to be able insofar as I can destroy it. But this possibility then refers me back to the commandment of the Decalogue that says to me “Thou shalt not kill” — a universal, infinite commandment that makes of me a finite human being, to be sure, but before whom, through the other, a window opens onto the infinite. This revelatory contact with the other, this surplus of consciousness, shows me the path toward the overcoming of my egoism. Thanks to the other, I understand that well-ordered charity begins with the other.

I am thus fully responsible for the other, with an absolute responsibility that does not even require reciprocity. The meaning of my life lies in the fulfillment of my being for the other. The being of life is ethical.

An election for duty

This is the deep theme of a work by Levinas written during the years that followed the Shoah, Difficile liberté (Difficult Freedom), published in 1963. The Nazis attempted the extermination of a people whose election, however, is made not of privileges but of responsibilities. The Jew, indeed, is, above all, a “man of duty.” Drawing on the Bible and the Talmud, Levinas shows that man’s relation to God is not a relation of submission nor of mysticism, but a relation of a moral order, the one lived in fulfilling one’s duties toward the other, toward his face, toward his misery. It is in this moral conduct that respect for God is situated. The infinite, he writes, is given only to the moral gaze. In this sense, religion teaches nothing other than the irreplaceable responsibility of each of us before the other. The religious man is the one who agrees not to evade the burden imposed by the suffering of others. The Jewish people has no other mission: it must preserve this sense of responsibility and transmit it to the other nations.

“Not to be able to evade — that is the self”

This title is drawn from Totalité et infini but points to the theme taken up in another work by Levinas, published in 1974, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence). What must this self be that, if it would be human, cannot evade its responsibility before the other? Totalité et infini defined the other as my face-object. Autrement qu’être attempts to define me as the subject responsible for that face. And here Levinas discovers the terrifying contradiction upon which, for a time, he arrives. I am responsible for the suffering of the other. This fact, for him, is an extraordinary event. For this other, of whom I am responsible, is, like me, a being of freedom, of which I prove responsible — a responsibility answering for the freedom of the other. Yet the other, as freedom, exceeds my power to grasp him and to act upon him, his freedom allowing him, at every instant, to escape my hold, whether of thought or of deed. Under these conditions, can I take responsibility for what inevitably and logically escapes my action and my understanding? My responsibility toward the other is thus as if paroxysmal: it is a responsibility at once impossible and necessary.

This difficult exercise finds, in Levinas, a solution in his analysis of the origin of the self itself. There does not exist, initially, a distinct Self, external to the Other whose responsibility it would live from the outside. There exists, from the origin, a presence of the other in the very genesis of the Self. The latter forms itself, in parallel with the birth within it of the Other, which thus becomes its contemporary producer. In this sense, the responsibility for the Other and the responsibility for the expression of self by self are but one. Within the same being, the finite-self coexists with the infinite-other. The contradiction raised by the apprehension of the infinite by the finite can be overcome by their coexistence.

“Israel is in covenant with the universe of nations”

This is a passage from Levinas’s work À l’heure des nations (In the Time of the Nations), which appeared in 1968. It gathers together several Talmudic studies and a few texts on Jewish thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment.

The alterity here is no longer that of the individual other but that of the nations, the goyim.

Belonging to humanity passes through the duty of assuming a responsibility. A responsibility that gives all its meaning to morality and to religion: the duty toward God passes through the duty toward men. One is moral and religious only on the basis of the awareness of the infinite that the face of the other reveals to me. To be moral, religious, human, is to be responsible for the other, for the world. The election of the Jewish people is situated at this level: it is accountable for the future of humanity because it is essentially conscious of its responsibility toward it. This perspective makes of the Jewish people a militant people, bearer of a message in the form of a hand held out toward all.

H.H

A few works by Emmanuel Levinas:

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