December 25 1995 – 2 Tevet 5756
Emmanuel Levinas died.
Born in 1906, the French Jewish philosopher grew up in Lithuania and Ukraine, where he received a secular education and upbringing, and moved to France to study philosophy at the university of Strasbourg in 1924. While there, he struck up a lifelong friendship with the influential French literary theorist Maurice Blanchot. After a short interval studying at the University of Freiburg under the founder of the German school of phenomenology, Edmond Husserl, and his assistant, Martin Heidegger, Levinas returned to a teaching position in Strasbourg, where he drew attention to Husserl and Heidegger’s work. a step he claimed later to regret, after Heidegger joined the Nazi party.
A naturalized French citizen, Levinas joined the French army in 1940. He survived German captivity as a prisoner of war thanks to the Geneva convention; his wife and daughter were saved in France by Blanchot, but the rest of his family perished in the Holocaust.
After the war, Levinas studied Talmud in France under a mysterious teacher named Monsieur Chouchani, who taught a number of leading Jewish intellectuals of his generation including Ellie Wiesel. After a period as director of a private Jewish school in Paris, Levinas returned to university teaching at a number of European universities including the Sorbonne.
Levinas’ philosophy is based on the ethics of the “other” – the encounter with whom can never be fully known or anticipated but which opens up the self to understanding and moral responsibility. He redefined philosophy as the “wisdom of love” rather than the “love of wisdom,” and used the tools he brought from his philosophical and intellectual world to bear on his analysis of Talmudic discourse.
Feel free to share
