Philosopher · Contemporary
Emmanuel Levinas
1906–1995 · Phenomenology; ethics as first philosophy
A Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher and Talmudist who took part in John Paul II's Castel Gandolfo seminars and whom the Pope cited in Crossing the Threshold of Hope; his thought has been received by Catholic phenomenologists and theologians from Marion to Purcell.
Trained under Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas spent the war in a prisoner-of-war camp while most of his family was murdered in Lithuania, and afterward studied Talmud with the enigmatic Monsieur Chouchani. Totality and Infinity (1961) argued that Western philosophy has been an ontology that reduces the other to the same, and that the face of the other person breaks every totality with a command, “you shall not kill,” that precedes my freedom; Otherwise than Being (1974) pushed this into a substitution and responsibility for the other that is prior to being. God is not an object of knowledge but is “passed” in the trace left in the face; religion is the ethical relation, and the Talmudic readings and Difficult Freedom present Judaism as a “religion for adults,” suspicious of mysticism, the sacred and enthusiasm, devoted to study and justice.
Why he matters: John Paul II, Marion and the theologians of the gift all learned from him that the other comes first; his account of the face underlies much of what the Church now says about human dignity, and his insistence that ethics precedes ontology is the strongest modern challenge to Thomism's order of being and good, which Catholic philosophers must answer rather than ignore.
Where to be careful
He denies that God can be known by reason or spoken of by analogy (against Dei Filius and CCC 39–43), reduces religion almost wholly to ethics, has little room for grace, worship or the body's resurrection, and his separation of the good from being inverts the convertibility of the transcendentals that Catholic metaphysics holds. His doctrine of the person as unique and irreplaceable, called by a command he did not author, is deeply close to the Church's teaching on dignity and conscience.
Reading
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Totality and Infinity: An Essay on ExteriorityEmmanuel Levinas · The face, the infinite and the ethical relation; Section III is the core.
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Difficult Freedom: Essays on JudaismEmmanuel Levinas · “A Religion for Adults” and “Loving the Torah More than God,” his Judaism in short compass.
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Levinas and TheologyMichael Purcell · A Catholic priest-theologian's assessment of what theology can and cannot take from him.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.