The Other as Trace of Infinity: Phenomenology and Religious Experience in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Lévinas, the philosopher of ethics par excellence in the twentieth century, and by own merit one of the most important ethical philosophers in the history of western philosophy, is also the philosopher of the Other. Thereby, it can be said that no thought has deepened like his in the ups and downs of the ethical relationship between subject and otherness. The general objective of this work is to expose in a simple and understandable way some ideas that tend to be quite dark in the philosophical work of the author, since his profuse religious production will not be analyzed here. It is expected to show that his ideas about the being and the Other are relevant to better understand interpersonal relationships in times of 4.0 (re)evolution. As specific objectives, this work aims to expose in chronological order the main works of the thinker, with special emphasis on his ethical implications: Of the evasion (1935), The time and the Other (1947), From the existence to the existent (1947), Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (1961) and, last, Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (1974). In the judgment of Lévinas, history of western philosophy starting with Greece, has shown an unusual concern for the Being, this is, it has basically been an ontology and, accordingly, it has relegated ethics to a second or third plane. On the other hand and in a clear going against the tide movement, our author supports that ethics should be considered the first philosophy and more, even previous to the proper philosophize. This novel approach implies, as it is supposed, that the essential question of the philosophy slows down its origin around the Being in order to inquire about the Other: it is a philosophy in first person. Such a radical change of perspective generates an underlying change in how we conceive interpersonal relationships, the complex framework of meanings around the relationship Me and You, which also philosopher Martin Buber had already spoken of. As Lévinas postulates that ethics is the first philosophy, this involves that the Other claims all our attention, intellectual and emotional, to the point of considering that the relationship with the Other is one of the measures of our identity. Thus, “natural” attitude –husserlian word not used by Lévinas- would be to be in permanent disposition regarding to the meeting with the Other, to be in permanent opening state to let ourselves be questioned by him. Ontology, as the author says, being worried about the Being, has been likewise concerned about the Existence, when the matter is to concern about the particular Existent that every otherness supposes for us. In conclusion it can be affirmed that levinasian ethics of the meeting with the Other, particular Face, irreducible to the assumption, can contribute with an innovative looking to (re)evolving the interpersonal relationships in a 4.0 context.

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Emmanuel Levinas: Um estudo sobre a ética da alteridade

10.31012/978-65-5861-006-9 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Abimael Francisco do Nascimento

Keyword(s):

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

Transcendental Philosophy ◽

The Other ◽

New Thought ◽

Philosophical Criticism ◽

The Face ◽

The Subject ◽

Theoretical Foundations ◽

First Philosophy

The general objective of this study is to analyze the postulate of the ethics of otherness as the first philosophy, presented by Emmanuel Levinas. It is a proposal that runs through Levinas' thinking from his theoretical foundations, to his philosophical criticism. Levinas' thought presents itself as a new thought, as a critique of ontology and transcendental philosophy. For him, the concern with knowledge and with being made the other to be forgotten, placing the other in totality. Levinas proposes the ethics of otherness as sensitivity to the other. The subject says here I am, making myself responsible for the other in an infinite way, in a transcendence without return to myself, becoming hostage to the other, as an irrefutable responsibility. The idea of the infinite, present in the face of the other, points to a responsibility whoever more assumes himself, the more one is responsible, until the substitution by other.

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God Below: A Faith Born in Hell—Life and Fate and the Otherwise Than Being

Humanities ◽

10.3390/h10020084 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 84

Author(s):

Karl Shankar SenGupta

Keyword(s):

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

Problem Of Evil ◽

The Other ◽

French Army ◽

Holy Fool ◽

The Holocaust ◽

The Problem Of Evil ◽

Utopian Thought ◽

Primary Focus

This essay examines the idea of kenosis and holy folly in the years before, during, and after the Holocaust. The primary focus will be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, though it also will touch upon Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons and the ethics of the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, speaking to their intersecting ideas. Dostoevsky, true enough, predates the Shoah, whereas Grossman was a Soviet Jew who served as a journalist (most famously at the Battle of Stalingrad), and Levinas was a soldier in the French army, captured by the Nazis and placed in a POW camp. Each of these writers wrestles with the problem of evil in various ways, Dostoevsky and Levinas as theists—one Christian, the other Jewish—and Grossman as an atheist; yet, despite their differences, there are ever deeper resonances in that all are drawn to the idea of kenosis and the holy fool, and each writer employs variations of this idea in their respective answers to the problem of evil. Each argues, more or less, that evil arises in totalizing utopian thought which reifies individual humans to abstractions—to The Human, and goodness to The Good. Each looks to kenosis as the “antidote” to this utopian reification.

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The Law Challenged and the Critique of Identity with Emmanuel Levinas

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique ◽

10.1007/s11196-021-09845-7 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Susan Petrilli

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

Object Relation ◽

Legal Order ◽

The Other ◽

Ethical Orientation ◽

New Humanism ◽

Present Essay ◽

The Face ◽

The Subject

AbstractIdentity as traditionally conceived in mainstream Western thought is focused on theory, representation, knowledge, subjectivity and is centrally important in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. His critique of Western culture and corresponding notion of identity at its foundations typically raises the question of the other. Alterity in Levinas indicates existence of something on its own account, in itself independently of the subject’s will or consciousness. The objectivity of alterity tells of the impossible evasion of signs from their destiny, which is the other. The implications involved in reading the signs of the other have contributed to reorienting semiotics in the direction of semioethics. In Levinas, the I-other relation is not reducible to abstract cognitive terms, to intellectual synthesis, to the subject-object relation, but rather tells of involvement among singularities whose distinctive feature is alterity, absolute alterity. Humanism of the other is a pivotal concept in Levinas overturning the sense of Western reason. It asserts human duties over human rights. Humanism of alterity privileges encounter with the other, responsibility for the other, over tendencies of the centripetal and egocentric orders that instead exclude the other. Responsibility allows for neither rest nor peace. The “properly human” is given in the capacity for absolute otherness, unlimited responsibility, dialogical intercorporeity among differences non-indifferent to each other, it tells of the condition of vulnerability before the other, exposition to the other. The State and its laws limit responsibility for the other. Levinas signals an essential contradiction between the primordial ethical orientation and the legal order. Justice involves comparing incomparables, comparison among singularities outside identity. Consequently, justice places limitations on responsibility, on unlimited responsibility which at the same time it presupposes as its very condition of possibility. The present essay is structured around the following themes: (1) Premiss; (2) Justice, uniqueness, and love; (3) Sign and language; (4) Dialogue and alterity; (5) Semiotic materiality; (6) Globalization and the trap of identity; (7) Human rights and rights of the other: for a new humanism; (8) Ethics; (9) The World; (10) Outside the subject; (11) Responsibility and Substitution; (12) The face; (13) Fear of the other; (14) Alterity and justice; (15) Justice and proximity; (16) Literary writing; (17) Unjust justice; (18) Caring for the other.

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Excès du témoignage, déhiscence du témoin. Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Louis Chrétien

Studia Phaenomenologica ◽

10.5840/studphaen2021217 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 ◽

pp. 129-151

Author(s):

Rodolphe Olcèse ◽

Keyword(s):

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

Soren Kierkegaard ◽

The Other ◽

Subjective Truth ◽

Important Extension ◽

The Voice

This text articulates the concept of subjective truth developed by Søren Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, in connection to a conception of testimony which both exceeds and reveals the possibilities of thinking and acting of the witness. This imbalance between the testimony and the witness finds an important extension in the distinction between the Saying and the Said made by Emmanuel Lévinas in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This distinction opens up an understanding of thought as affectivity and allows witnessing to be viewed in the light of responsibility to the other. By being part of this philosophical heritage, Jean-Louis Chrétien shows how the testimony of the infinite is also phenomenalized in the experience of a chant that discovers its own modalities in this excess of beauty on the voice that tries to say it.

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BORDERCROSSINGS: LEVINAS, HEIDEGGER, AND THE ETHICS OF THE OTHER

Modern Intellectual History ◽

10.1017/s1479244306001144 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 205-217

Author(s):

CHARLES BAMBACH

Keyword(s):

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

The Other ◽

Cornell University

Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)

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If One Does Not Have the Spirit of Christ, One Does Not Belong to Him

Having the Spirit of Christ ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300245622.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 134-166

Author(s):

Giovanni B. Bazzana

Keyword(s):

Religious Experience ◽

Moral Agency ◽

Spirit Possession ◽

Ways Of Knowing ◽

The Other ◽

Social Structures ◽

Western Modernity ◽

The Past ◽

The Social ◽

Productive Role

This chapter attends to the social and ethical functions of the religious experience of possession in the Pauline groups. Recent ethnographic literature has illustrated how spirit possession can have a truly “productive” role in shaping social structures, ways of knowing, moral agency, and even the formation of individual subjectivities. This chapter shows that these same traits are recognizable in the Pauline Christ groups. Specific attention are given to the forms in which possession enables a poiesis of the past. The sense of temporality underlying such an experience is remarkably different from the archival and academic study of history typical of western modernity. Through his very embodiment of the πνεῦμα‎ of Christ, Paul (and arguably the other members of his groups) could make the person of Christ present in a way that affectively and effectively informed not only their remembrance of and interaction with the past but also their moral agency and even their subjectification as Christ believers.

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Justiça porvir e o tempo do outro: derrida leitor de Levinas [Justice to come and the time of the other: Derrida reading Levinas]

Revista Ágora Filosófica ◽

10.25247/p1982-999x.2013.v1n2.p57-76 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

pp. 57-76

Author(s):

Manoel Uchoa ◽

José Tadeu Batista De Souza

Keyword(s):

Jacques Derrida ◽

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

The Other ◽

To Come

Discorrer sobre a proximidade entre os trabalhos de Jacques Derrida e Emmanuel Lévinas perpassa pela amizade e a interlocução que mantiveram durante toda a vida. Como um referencial caro a Derrida, a ética levinasiana surgiu como uma alternativa a tradição ﬁ losóﬁ ca do Ocidente. Assim, nos caminhos heterogêneos que suas obras traçaram, pode-se marcar uma profunda intercessão: a alteridade é constitutiva no pensamento. Logo, o último moralista de nossa época tem uma contribuição pertinente ao pensador da desconstrução. Pretende-se nesse artigo analisar a relação do pensamento desses ﬁ lósofos em relação à categoria de Justiça a partir da alteridade.

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The Stranger as Friend: The Poetics of Friendship in Homer, Dante, and Boccaccio

10.36253/978-88-6655-361-8 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Franco Masciandaro

Keyword(s):

Jacques Derrida ◽

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

Natural Extension ◽

Divine Comedy ◽

The Other ◽

Maurice Blanchot ◽

Philosophical Method ◽

The Divine Comedy ◽

The One ◽

The Stranger

The principal aim of this study is to participate in the current renewed discourse on the meaning of friendship, initiated in 1994 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida with his Politics of Friendship, by combining the philosophical method of inquiry with the hermeneutical approach to poetic representations of friendship in the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and the Decameron. It examines friendship not only as the unique love between two persons based on familiarity and proximity, but as the love for the one who is far away, the stranger, for this is a natural extension of the implicit love of the distant other, of the other-as-stranger – what Emmanuel Levinas has called "the infinity of the Other" – which is concealed in our friend, and which, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, puts us "authentically in relation" with him or her.

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