There have been a great many articles, broadcasts, and lectures devoted to this great philosopher — a Jew, what is more — that set out, too late for my taste, to acknowledge his originality. He knew how to find, as Bergson puts it, “that unique and infinitely simple point” around which a great philosophy is articulated. For Levinas, this point is the Other and the Responsibility that each of us bears for the other, which from the outset imposes the ethical dimension and demand.
Before developing and explaining this humanism of the other, let us submit it — in order to grasp the philosopher and his work — to the question: “who are you?” He answered a journalist who interviewed him at length and gathered his words in a celebrated collection, Éthique et Infini (Ethics and Infinity): “I am a Jew and a philosopher.”
He was born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1906, into a family of the petty Jewish bourgeoisie. His native culture, let us note carefully, is twofold: Hebraic, through an early initiation into the Bible, and secular, through a classical Russian education. From it he would retain a demanding rationalism and a wariness toward Hasidism and popular pietism. He is, moreover, a pure product of that East European Jewish civilization that was a civilization of inwardness — which helps make better sense of his philosophy. He experienced the Russian Revolution in Kharkov, in Ukraine, where his family had moved. In 1923 he left for France and began his studies in philosophy at Strasbourg. In 1928, at Freiburg im Breisgau, he attended the courses of Husserl, a German Jew, to whom he says he owes his entire method of thought. He also attended Heidegger’s seminar, whose philosophical genius he would acknowledge; but he would never forgive the man his compromise with Nazism and his racist commitments. Back in Strasbourg, he obtained his naturalization. In 1940 he was taken prisoner and would spend the entire war in various stalags, where the French uniform protected him against Hitlerian violence. His wife was taken in by friends in France, but his family, who had remained in Lithuania, was massacred almost in its entirety. He began writing his works as early as 1947. He led a bourgeois life in Passy and met the figure of his life, an extraordinary character, Monsieur Chouchani, an inspired and brilliant rabbi, half-vagrant, half-scholar, whose portrait Elie Wiesel sketched in his novel Le Chant des Morts (The Song of the Dead), and whose biography Salomon Malka wrote in 1994. Under his direction, Levinas studied the Talmud and would become one of those able to reopen, for a few Jews and non-Jews, these long-closed volumes of the tradition. From then on he was one of the architects of the astonishing revitalization of Jewish studies and of the renewed interest in the sacred texts that has given French Judaism of recent decades its singularity. But — a rare phenomenon — Levinas’s thought is a crossroads where the religious and the secular meet. He also directed the École Normale Israélite Orientale, which trained the teachers of French for the schools of the Alliance Israélite throughout the Mediterranean Basin.
In 1969 he published his doctoral thesis in letters, Totalité et Infini (Totality and Infinity); he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Nanterre, and in 1979 at the Sorbonne. Each year, at the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de France, he conducted much-awaited Talmudic lessons, which were later published. It was said of him that he was the most secular of religious thinkers and the most religious of secular thinkers.
How did the philosopher Levinas come to leave the domain of reflection on being and on knowledge in order to approach the zone of subjectivity and morality? It is an interesting trajectory if one wishes to understand anything of his philosophy.
In Éthique et Infini, he himself recounts his philosophical path and first poses the question, “How did I begin to think?” This passes first through books, and above all through the Book of Books, the Bible, where the first things are said — those that had to be said for human life to have meaning. “It thus played for me,” he writes, “an essential role in my way of thinking philosophically, that is, of thinking by addressing all men” (Éthique et Infini). But at the same time he discovers Russian literature — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin — but also Shakespeare, whose heroes question themselves tirelessly about the famous “meaning of life,” the meaning of the human. Then he moves on to the Western philosophical tradition and appreciates the clarity and elegance of French thought in Durkheim and Bergson. He reflects on time, which is the very texture of our being and our freedom. And then comes the encounter with two German philosophers, Husserl first, then Heidegger. With Husserl it is a method of thinking, of giving oneself a meaning, that he discovers. This method is phenomenology, which describes being in its manifestations and first of all consciousness and its qualities: it is intentionality, that is, a tension toward, toward the things of the world, toward others; it is dynamism and aim, it is always consciousness of something — there is no empty consciousness. It is by turning toward the world and what constitutes it that man will define himself. It is this attitude of consciousness that Levinas will keep in order to arrive at his own definition of what man truly is: a being turned toward something other than himself.
As for Heidegger, whose L’Être et le Temps (Being and Time) he admires, he retains above all his profound analyses of affectivity, of care, of the objectless anguish that is a direct access to nothingness. There he discovers, for his own conception of man’s subjectivity, the notions of finitude, of what he calls “being-there” (here and now), of the “being-toward-death” that we all are. Thus, in his first work, De l’existence à l’existant (Existence and Existents), written in the stalag and published in 1947, Levinas attempts to strip himself of being and already alludes to what lies most deeply within us, most unqualifiable, most impersonal — what he calls the il y a (the “there is”). He describes it as a kind of rustling of silence in the bedroom of a child alone and frightened by it, that same rustling of a seashell held to the ear, and there is. In the absolute void before creation, too, there is. Pascal had written, “the silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” for there is. And in insomnia too, the il y a, the “it,” keeps watch within me. In fatigue, in idleness, Levinas sees a retreat before being, an evasion in which the shadow of the il y a takes shape. To emerge from this state, one must set down one’s cumbersome self and go toward the other. For the responsibility one has for the other, which he calls “being-for-the-other,” replacing “being-for-oneself,” does seem to halt “the anonymous and senseless rustling of being.”
In another of his works, Le Temps et l’Autre (Time and the Other), published in 1979, he asks once more how to get out of oneself and one’s isolation. Certainly not through knowledge, nor even through the communication of knowledge, both sterile, since it is still I who give myself my knowledge and the object of my knowledge. Only sociability, the discovery of the Other, draws one out of oneself. Two privileged examples are poetically described to us: love and filiation.
In love, or Eros, the neighbor is the Other, the other than me. For Levinas, the feminine is other, because of a different nature. Contrary to knowledge, which wants to reduce the non-identical to the identical in order to know it better, in the love relationship duality and the identical are always there, they do not disappear. Here, no more romantic idea of a love that fuses or confuses two beings. The pathos, in the love relationship, is to be two, and that the Other there is absolutely other. In what is called “the mystery of the Other,” one cannot foresee what the relationship to the other will be over time and in duration. Nothing is foreseeable for tomorrow. Everything is unforeseeable, for there are two freedoms present.
Filiation is more mysterious still. It is a relationship with the other, in which the other (the child) is radically other, yet is in some way me: it is neither possession nor property. For example, a child represents for its parents possibilities that are impossible for them and that nonetheless come in a sense from themselves. Through biological filiation, there is of course a future beyond my own being, which prolongs time. But spiritual filiation is as important as biological filiation.
In Totalité et Infini, his doctoral thesis, published in 1961, Levinas took on the totalitarian conception of thought that claims to reduce all knowledge of the world to a system by which consciousness embraces, as in Hegel’s philosophy, every aspect of the world in order to know it better. Levinas, already forewarned against this rational totalitarianism, had discovered in Franz Rosenzweig, a Jewish philosopher of the early twentieth century, a reaction against the totalitarian vision then current in late nineteenth-century German philosophy — an original experience of the anguish of death and of man’s renunciation of his particular destiny. For Levinas, every globalizing vision of the world found in the great Western philosophical systems seems to do violence to an irreducible experience: the face-to-face of human beings in sociality, what he calls their “living-with.”
To better grasp his thesis, for which “first philosophy is ethics,” let us evoke with him Hegel’s contempt in the Phénoménologie de l’Esprit (Phenomenology of Spirit), which speaks dismissively of the “secret of subjectivity,” in which each person has his own life. That, supposedly, was good for romantic thought, and hence contemptible. We find the same contempt, moreover, in the totalitarian universe imagined by Orwell in his novel 1984. The secret is unbearable to the Prussian State so dear to Hegel, unbearable to the fascist State or the Marxist State, where a single way of thinking reigns. For Levinas, what is unique is man and respect for each person’s freedom. What grounds his search for an ethics is responsibility for the other. He develops this theme at length, passing through other very moving themes that we encounter in the Talmud (for example, that of the face). Access to the face of the other is from the outset ethical; the face is signification, it is a meaning all by itself, it says “thou shalt not kill.” There is a loftiness, an elevation in the face of the other; it is higher than I. The other is face, but he speaks to me and I speak to him. Face, responsibility, and discourse are linked. I do not remain there contemplating the face; I answer it. Besides, “it is very difficult to remain silent in someone’s presence.” One must speak, answer him, and answer for him. It is with Autrement qu’être (Otherwise than Being), published in 1974, that we approach the hard core of his morality, Responsibility for the Other, defined as the essential structure of the subject (in Kant, the “Thou shalt”). Responsibility is an obligation. As soon as the other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having — and even before having — to take on responsibilities toward him. His responsibility falls to me from the outset. Usually one is responsible for what one does oneself. Here, Responsibility is initially a “for-the-other.” The bond with the other is tied only as responsibility, whether that responsibility is accepted or refused by the other. Responsibility is an obligation, a categorical imperative. To say “here I am,” for I am summoned by the other — to do something for an other — to give — to be human spirit, to be responsible: that is what it is, says Levinas.
And even if I am obliged, for the face asks of me and commands me, I do not expect reciprocity in return. Responsibility is a non-symmetrical relation in Levinas (this has seemed difficult for certain philosophers to accept). Even if it should cost me my life, I am responsible for the other. Reciprocity is his affair. Dostoevsky had already written in Les Frères Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov): “We are responsible to all for all and for everything, and I more than the others.”
This ethical relation draws us out of the solitude of being. Before the other who obliges me, there is no more indefinite rustling of being. The more just I am, the more responsible I am, for the ethical demand is insatiable. It is the manifestation of the infinite, for “God comes to mind” when I look upon the human face, higher than I and exterior to me. Finally, one can grasp this notion of responsibility by telling oneself that one always and constantly bears the gravity of having to carry the burden of a foreign existence. Thus, in maternity, we could speak of a substitution for the other.
One finds oneself obliged, commanded, contested, called. Levinas then goes beyond everything one can conceive about responsibility for the other — and this was held against him — in saying that to be responsible is to be the hostage of the other. It goes so far as to expiate for others, even for the murderer. One may regard this attitude as inhuman or, in any case, as otherwise than human. This is the theme of Autrement qu’être. The human psyche, according to Levinas, is the being that undoes its condition as being; it is the putting-into-question of our being. I am myself only insofar as I am responsible. Responsibility is the only truly human dimension. And to round things off, it remains for us to indicate how Levinas arrives at God. The demand of ethics is insatiable, we have said, and it is the manifestation of the Infinite, or of God. The face, moreover, signifies the Infinite. The more just I am, the more responsible I am. The ethical demand, insatiable, is a demand for holiness. No one can say: I have done all my duty. I must sacrifice everything to the other, even unto holiness. In the presence of the other, I must say “here I am” and thus bear witness to the infinite and to the glory of God. It is the divine Spirit, it is prophetic inspiration that speaks within me; it is a voice that, from the innermost depths of myself, makes a sign to the other. This ethics of sacrifice subjects man “to an assignation to answer for the other to the point of emptying himself of his being.” Here we find again the extreme of the prophets and the mystics, who are no longer themselves, but for the other, or, even more, subject to the infinity of God.
In a philosophy so indefinitely open, it is very hard to detach oneself from such loftiness of thought. Catherine Chalier, a very close disciple of Levinas, does not hesitate to call it a utopia of the human.
What therefore characterizes Levinas’s work is its moral dimension, with the essential notion of Responsibility for the Other. Through it he raises morality to the height of an absolute that governs existence with implacable rigor and demand. Some critics, indeed, have been able to contest this implacable character of the moral obligation to be responsible for the other and thus to be the hostage of the other. They fear, in fact, that the subject, obsessed by the Other — possibly cruel or merciless — may remain passive before him. They fear too that the “I” may be exposed to the Other to the point that the “I” no longer belongs to itself and that, in the end, by dint of stripping itself of itself, nothing remains of this subject one wishes to bring to the perfection of morality, and that by dint of holiness, by dint of playing the angel, one ends up playing the beast.
In any case, it is a philosopher from Nice, Monsieur Janicaud, who has best described the grandeur of this ethics for the present time, a time when all sufferings — crimes, attacks, sexual abuse, and so on — are better known and known more quickly. And so we must, most urgently, evoke and take up for ourselves, as Levinas did, the suffering body, maternity, the dwelling, work, but above all the face and the secret of the other in their fragile singularities. And in Levinas, the rediscovery of loftiness came about thanks to emotion ceaselessly sustaining intelligence.
In Difficile Liberté (Difficult Freedom) in particular, we find that tolerance which I believe to be very Jewish, for it is turned wholly toward the recognition and respect of the other. And, in a poetic language that touches us, one reads at the end of Autrement qu’être, “a voice comes from the other shore”; it is perhaps the voice of the Stranger that he was, of that Other who calls and whom we must hear, for we have all been strangers in the land of Egypt.