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Emmanuel Levinas

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Emmanuel Lévinas

Also known as Emmanuel Lévinas

1906 – 1995 · Kaunas, Strasbourg, Freiburg, Paris

Traditions: Jewish

Schools: Phenomenology

In brief

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) was a Lithuanian-born French philosopher who argued that ethics, not the study of being, is ‘first philosophy’. Trained in the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, he came to see much of Western philosophy as an effort to fit everything into one system, a ‘totality’. Against this he set the encounter with another person’s face. The face, naked and defenceless, makes a demand on me before I have chosen anything; as the SEP puts it, it signifies ‘Do not kill me’. My responsibility for the other comes first. His main books are Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974). He also wrote commentaries on the Talmud and essays on Judaism.

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Paris taughtFreiburg im Breisgau studied
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JewishPhenomenology
Influences
7 sourced relationships

Life

Levinas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, on 12 January 1906 (30 December 1905 in the Julian calendar then in use there). He was the eldest of three sons in a middle-class family. The family moved to Kharkov in Ukraine in 1914 and returned to Lithuania in 1920. In 1923 he went to Strasbourg to study philosophy, and there met Maurice Blanchot, who became a close friend. In 1928–29 he studied with Edmund Husserl in Freiburg and attended Martin Heidegger’s seminar. His thesis on Husserl’s theory of intuition (1930) was, the SEP says, the first book-length introduction to Husserl in French, and in 1931 he co-translated Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. In 1939 he became a French citizen and joined the officer corps. Captured in 1940, he was held in a labour camp for officers at Fallingbostel; Larousse says he spent five years in captivity. His family in Lithuania was murdered, while his wife Raïssa and daughter Simone survived in hiding in Orléans. From 1947 he directed the École Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris. After his State doctorate in 1961 he taught at Poitiers, then at Nanterre from 1967, alongside Paul Ricœur, and at the Sorbonne from 1973. Larousse dates his retirement to 1976. He died in Paris on 25 December 1995.

Problems

  • What comes first in philosophy: knowledge of being, or responsibility to another person?
  • Can another person ever be fully understood, or do they always exceed my grasp?
  • What is it like simply to exist, before there is a self?
  • How does my responsibility to one person fit with justice for everyone?
  • Can language express a demand that comes before anything is said?

Core ideas

Ethics as first philosophy

‘First philosophy’ is the part of philosophy on which the rest depends. Levinas gave that place not to metaphysics or ontology, the study of being, but to ethics. He did not mean a theory that tells us which acts are right. He meant something earlier: the encounter with another person, which, the SEP explains, gives rise to responsibility at a level prior to knowledge, rooted in our bodily sensitivity. Before I decide anything, I am already answerable to the person who faces me. His method is to describe this encounter, using the phenomenological method, the careful description of experience, that he learned from Husserl. A general objection is that this leaves ethics without guidance: if responsibility comes before any rule, how am I to know what to do?

The ‘there is’

In Existence and Existents (1947), which Larousse says he wrote mostly in captivity, Levinas describes bare existence without anyone who exists. He calls it the ‘there is’. Think of lying awake at night: the SEP points to ‘the dark turmoil that we experience in insomnia’. Night reveals an indeterminate, anonymous presence that is not pure nothing. Out of this neutral being a self awakens and takes its stand, which Levinas calls ‘hypostasis’. In Totality and Infinity he adds that this self first lives by enjoyment. We live from goods such as air and light, and we take joy in living and making a home, which is more than the ‘thrownness’ Heidegger stressed (SEP). An open question is how far this early account of a self-centred, enjoying self fits with his later stress on responsibility.

Totality and infinity

By ‘totality’ Levinas means any all-embracing system that leaves nothing outside it. The SEP names the systems of being, the State and Hegel’s dialectic. ‘Infinity’ names what exceeds every such grasp. He found it not in a distant object but in the other person, whose expression has no limit. Transcendence, going beyond oneself, means for him exteriority: what lies outside me and escapes my comprehensive knowledge. Older ideas of transcendence, such as Descartes’ infinite substance or Plato’s Good beyond being, he treats as acceptable but not primary (SEP). The book thus opposes philosophy’s urge to understand everything with a relation that cannot be turned into knowledge. A general question is whether this does justice to Hegel and to the need for shared institutions.

The face

Levinas’s best-known idea is the face of the other. He does not mean eyes, nose and mouth as things I might describe. The face is the way another person presents themselves beyond any idea I have of them. In the SEP’s words, ‘naked and defenseless, the face signifies, with or without words, “Do not kill me”’. It works as a command and a summons at once. It interrupts my freedom and calls me to account, and I answer ‘here I am’. Responsibility, Larousse notes, precedes and founds freedom. Yet the face is never just one person: as the SEP reports, in Totality and Infinity ‘the third party (humanity) looks at me through the eyes of the other’. Gillian Rose objected that this universal responsibility lacks the social and political links needed to become justice.

Against Heidegger’s ontology

Levinas learned much from Heidegger, including his account of being-in-the-world (SEP). But he came to reject Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’, the attempt to make the question of being the base of philosophy. Britannica describes his thought as a critique of the preeminence of ontology, especially in Heidegger. According to the SEP, Levinas found Heidegger’s account too centred on a solitary self, Dasein, facing its own death, and blind to the encounter with another person. For Levinas, the other’s death is not merely unknown but unknowable. As early as 1934 he wrote reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism. Readers continue to ask whether Levinas’s picture of Heidegger is fair, and how far his own thinking still depends on Heidegger’s.

Otherwise than Being: Saying and Said

In Otherwise than Being (1974) Levinas reworked his ideas in a darker tone. The SEP notes that conversation and teaching, central in Totality and Infinity, recede, and the body as vulnerable flesh comes forward. A new pair of terms appears. The ‘Said’ is the content of what we say: statements, themes, claims. The ‘Saying’ is the prior exposure to the other that makes speech possible at all, the fact that I am speaking to someone before I say anything. Responsibility now takes the form of ‘substitution’, which Levinas calls ‘the one-for-the-other’: a passive giving of oneself for another. A general difficulty follows: philosophy works in statements, in the Said, so it is unclear how a book can express the Saying without turning it into one more theme.

Works

  • The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl) 1930His thesis; the first book-length introduction to Husserl in French (SEP).
  • Existence and Existents (De l’existence à l’existant) 1947On the anonymous ‘there is’ and the rise of the self; written largely in captivity, according to Larousse.
  • Time and the Other (Le temps et l’autre) 1947Lectures on time, death and the other. Larousse dates it 1948.
  • Totality and Infinity (Totalité et infini) 1961His first major work: the face, exteriority and the critique of totality.In the Book corner
  • Difficult Freedom (Difficile liberté) 1963Essays on Judaism.
  • Four Talmudic Readings (Quatre lectures talmudiques) 1968Commentaries first given at the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, where he spoke over many years (SEP).
  • Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence) 1974His second major work: Saying and Said, substitution, the one-for-the-other.
  • Ethics and Infinity (Éthique et infini) 1982Conversations that give a short introduction to his thought. Larousse dates it 1981.

Influences and relationships

7 sourced relationships. Open one to read why, and the source.

Shaped Emmanuel Levinas 3

Emmanuel Levinas shaped or answered 4

  • CriticisedMartin Buber1878 – 1965

    Levinas held that Buber stayed caught in an ‘aestheticizing’ attitude rather than treating ethics as first philosophy; Buber replied, as the IEP reports, that Levinas had misunderstood him.

    Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · stated on the profile of Martin Buber

    Levinas held that Buber remained caught in an ‘aestheticizing’ attitude rather than treating ethics as first philosophy; Buber replied, as the IEP reports, that Levinas had misunderstood him.

    Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · stated on the profile of Emmanuel Levinas

    Martin Buber’s relationships

  • CriticisedMartin Heidegger1889 – 1976

    His most sustained criticisms target Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, which he found too centred on the solitary Dasein and blind to the encounter with the other.

    Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · stated on the profile of Emmanuel Levinas

    Martin Heidegger’s relationships

  • InfluencedJacques Derrida1930 – 2004

    Derrida’s long essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (1964) showed great sympathy for Levinas’s thought of otherness while taking some distance from it; it began a lifelong friendship, and Derrida later wrote Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1997).

    Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · stated on the profile of Emmanuel Levinas

    Jacques Derrida’s relationships

  • InfluencedEnrique Dussel1934 – 2023

    Dussel read Levinas's Totality and Infinity in 1971. The IEP says Levinas influenced his 'analectical' ethical method, and Roberto Follari shows how Dussel, drawing on Levinas's idea of the Other, set 'exteriority' against totality.

    Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy · stated on the profile of Enrique Dussel

    Enrique Dussel’s relationships

Reception

Derrida’s long essay on Levinas, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (1964), is in the SEP’s view a leading candidate for Derrida’s most important early essay; it combined sympathy for Levinas’s thought of otherness with critical distance. After Levinas’s death, Derrida published Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1997). In Jewish philosophy, the SEP on Buber notes, the names of Rosenzweig and Levinas have since eclipsed Buber’s. Alongside his philosophy, Levinas gave twenty-three Talmudic readings (SEP). Current scholarship, surveyed in the SEP, debates how his ethics of the single other can lead to politics and justice, and how his philosophy relates to Judaism.

Disputed interpretations

From the face to justice

Gillian Rose argued that Levinas universalises responsibility without the social and political institutions that would turn it into justice. Others disagree: the SEP reports Elliot Wolfson’s view that the split between responsibility and mediation is a false dichotomy and Ernst Wolff’s account of how Levinas moved towards universal justice, and the SEP’s authors suggest Rose’s Hegelian objection may be misguided.

Asymmetry or mutual relation?

Levinas stresses the priority of the other over the self, a priority the SEP calls ‘alien to Buber’, for whom the I–Thou relation is mutual. Levinas found Buber’s view ‘aestheticizing’; Buber replied that making the other transcendent leaves the self straining towards an infinite other and so back in solitude.

Primary texts

  • Totality and Infinity: An Essay on ExteriorityIn copyright; no free legal full text. The English translation is published by Springer in the Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Texts series.
  • Otherwise than Being or Beyond EssenceIn copyright; no free legal full text. An English translation is available in print.
  • Ethics and InfinityIn copyright; no free legal full text. A short set of conversations, often used as an introduction.

Sources

Scholarly sources and reference works, free to read online.

Guides

In the Book corner

  • Totality and Infinity 1961 · Advanced
    Emmanuel Levinas's first major work, presented as his state doctoral thesis and published in 1961 with the subtitle An Essay on Exteriority.…

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Cite this page

Written and kept up to date by the Coordinates of Thought editors. Each statement was checked against the sources listed above before publishing; this page is not peer-reviewed. Last updated 28 October 2026. How to cite this site.

APA (7th edition)

Coordinates of Thought Editors. (2026, October 28). Emmanuel Levinas. Coordinates of Thought. Retrieved [date accessed], from https://coordinatesofthought.com/thinker/emmanuel-levinas/

MLA (9th edition)

“Emmanuel Levinas.” Coordinates of Thought, 28 Oct. 2026, coordinatesofthought.com/thinker/emmanuel-levinas/. Accessed [date accessed].

Chicago (17th edition)

Coordinates of Thought Editors. “Emmanuel Levinas.” Coordinates of Thought. Last modified October 28, 2026. https://coordinatesofthought.com/thinker/emmanuel-levinas/.

BibTeX

@misc{cot-emmanuel-levinas-2026,
  author       = {{Coordinates of Thought Editors}},
  title        = {Emmanuel Levinas},
  howpublished = {Coordinates of Thought},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = oct,
  url          = {https://coordinatesofthought.com/thinker/emmanuel-levinas/},
  note         = {Last updated 28 October 2026}
}

RIS

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TI  - Emmanuel Levinas
T2  - Coordinates of Thought
PB  - Coordinates of Thought
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/28
UR  - https://coordinatesofthought.com/thinker/emmanuel-levinas/
LA  - en
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