Emmanuel Levinas Biography

The American Institute for Levinassian Studies provides a brief biography of Emmanuel Levinas on this page, but various activities of the Institute are devoted to more comprehensive research work.

Hebrew and Russian

Emmanuel Levinas was born on January 12th, 1906 in Kovno, Lithuania, home of the highest Jewish intellectuality since the Vilna Gaon "the last great Talmudist of genius" (François Poirié-Emmanuel Levinas, p. 63) who had lived and taught there two centuries earlier.

Jewish life is a matter of course for everyone. The community lives at the rhythm and according to the precepts of the Jewish tradition.

« Without having to make a special decision for that, of course. » (François Poirié-Emmanuel Levinas, p.66)

Emmanuel Levinas' father has left the Jewish quarter, where the grandparents live. He runs a bookstore. The future of the children - Emmanuel Levinas has two brothers - is said to be in Russian, the language spoken at home. For Hebrew, a private teacher comes to teach it according to innovative pedagogical methods. Text studied: the Bible, without the commentators. The Hebrew teacher « first element of comfort »  (Emmanuel Levinas) is found at each stage of the family peregrinations.

In 1914, when war was declared, the family fled the advance of the German armies, eventually settled in Karkhov, Russia, until they returned to Lithuania in 1920, after the war ended and after the first threatening demonstrations against the Jews of the young Bolshevik revolution.

In Karkhov, despite the numerus claususus (only 5 Jews are admitted), Emmanuel Lévinas enters high school.

« High school entry[was] celebrated at home as a real family celebration and promotion! Like a doctorate! » (François Poirié-Emmanuel Levinas, p. 67)

He does all his high school studies there.

The reading of the great Russian writers – Pouchkine, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenyev and especially Dostoyevsky - opens him to metaphysical questions.

« Books crossed by anxiety, by the essential, by religious anxiety, but readable as a quest for the meaning of life. » Emmanuel Levinas

Strasbourg: the entry in French language - Equality - Fraternity

« It is the soil of this language that is for me the French soil. »

In Strasbourg, Emmanuel Levinas experiences French in its excellence, its nobility. He meets, with his professors, the young elite through his university education (the Ecole Normale Supérieure), through his ethical concerns - they were teenagers at the time of the Dreyfus affair.

« They remembered less that in the midst of civilization an injustice was possible than the triumph of justice... From their face emanated like a radiance. » Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom.

Maurice Pradines, Professor of General Philosophy, studies the relationship between ethics and politics. He gives « the Dreyfus affair as an example of the ethics that wins over politics. » (Emmanuel Levinas).

Charles Blondel, professor of psychology, anti-Freudian.

Maurice Halbwachs, sociologist; he was murdered during the First World War.

Henri Carteron, professor of ancient philosophy, succeeded by Martial Guéroult.

He discovers:

- Henri Bergson's new philosophy – « all the novelties of modern and post-modern philosophy of time, and in particular Heidegger's venerable novelty, would not be possible without Bergson... »

- the companionship, and especially the friendship with Maurice Blanchot. He admires his elegance, his aristocracy of sensitivity, of thought; his demand, his refusal of ease. Due to Blanchot, his philosophy mentor, Emmanuel Levinas reads Marcel Proust and Paul Valéry.

Constant companionship and intellectual exchanges beyond Maurice Blanchot's shattering political positions in the 1930s and 1968.

Phenomenology: a detour to Germany

At the Institute of Philosophy in Strasbourg, on the advice of Gabrielle Peiffer, Emmanuel Levinas reads "Recherches logiques" by Edmund Husserl. He felt as if he had « accessed new possibilities of thought. » To dig his furrow, he followed the courses of a former student of Husserl, Pastor Jean Héring, at the Protestant theological faculty, and then decided to go back to the very source of this thought, Husserl. He therefore went to Freiburg in Bresgau in 1928 where Professor Husserl was professing.

He spent two semesters there, March-July 1928 and October-February 1928/1929, attending classes and attending the master's house. When, during the winter of 28-29, Husserl interrupted his teaching to devote himself to the development of his works, Emmanuel Levinas enrolled in the class of his successor, Martin Heidegger, of whom he had already read - in German, of course - Sein und Zeit.

Encouraged by Heidegger, supported by Charles Blondel, Emmanuel Levinas can participate in the Davos meetings.

On the French side, Léon Brunschvig, among others, are teaching, as students Maurice de Gandillac and Jean Cavaillès; on the German side, professors Ernst Cassirer, neo-Kantian, close to L. Brunschvig and M. Heidegger. Emmanuel Levinas is « a defender of Husserl and Heidegger, a Lithuanian who will publish an article on Husserl in the Philosophical Review. » (J. Cavaillès - letter to his sister - in Marie-Anne Lescourret-Emmanuel Levinas). Foreign, but what signals it, what matters is its philosophical posture. He has an equal part in exchanges, walks and even jokes.

The result of this period of intense study, a first paper by Emmanuel Levinas, a critical summary of Mr. Husserl's ideas published in the Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Etranger.

He defended his doctoral thesis in 1930 in Strasbourg: « Theory of intuition in Husserl's phenomenology. » Maurice Pradines is directing his thesis. Crowned by the Institute, on the recommendation of L. Brunschvig, it was published by Vrin.

During this whole period when, with serious enthusiasm, he assimilated the most recent methods and thoughts for himself and the French public, he reserved the part of the Jew in him: every year he found his family in Lithuania and his Hebrew books.

Paris 1930, installation, construction of a Jewish house and philosophical rumination

Like his teachers and classmates, Strasbourg is only a milestone before Paris. After defending his thesis, he joined the school administration of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, created in 1860 to help Jews in any country where they did not have the status of citizens, countries of the Mediterranean basin, Europe (Poland) or Asia: his role essentially consisted in creating French schools in these countries. He thus remains in contact with the « Jewish test ». In connection with Jews everywhere, their concrete problems in each particular social or political situation. He settled near the school with his wife whom he knew in Kovno and married in 1932.

In his philosophical exploration, he has two concerns: to approach the highest, the aristocracy; to search where the new is being developed.

At the Sorbonne, he studied with Léon Brunschvig, « the pope of philosophy in France » (Marie-Anne Lescourret-Emmanuel Levinas). L. Brunschvig, Frenchman of the Israelite faith, born in Paris in 1869, Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1888, aggregated in 1891, Doctor in 1897. Professor at the Sorbonne in 1909. Cayman of philosophy in 1922 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where his students were Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan and Raymond Aron.

At the French Society of Philosophy he meets Jean Wahl, and participates in Gabriel Marcel's « avant-gardist » evenings. He may hear a presentation by Sartre.

A period when Emmanuel Lévinas recorded, but produced only a few texts - a translation of E. Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, in collaboration with G. Peiffer in 1931.

1933: Rise of Nazism

« This evil of being ».  « This kind of uninterrupted despair that was the Hitler period of Europe rising from the depths of this so fundamental Germany, this Germany of Leibniz and Kant, Goethe and Hegel. »

Martin Heidegger, the so much admired teacher, proclaims his faith in Hitler.

The friend Maurice Blanchot, carried away by a certain idea of France, also vituperates Jews in the french nationalist press.

Against the backdrop of this distress, there is no new type of relationship with the wave of philosophers who came from Russia such as Levinas, via Germany: Kojève, Koyré; Jacob Gordin especially, in whom Western knowledge and orthopraxic Judaism are joined. The same alliance with Franz Rosenzweig, whom he read at the same time, in German (Der Stern der Erlösung).

All this period, with the exception of « De l'évasion » published in Recherches Philosophiques in 1935, he wrote articles in Jewish magazines, analytical articles on the Jewish fact and the situation created by Hitlerism.

« Hitlerism is the greatest test - the incomparable test - that Judaism has ever had to go through.... What gives Hitler's anti-Semitism a unique focus and in some ways constitutes its originality is the unprecedented situation in which it has placed the Jewish conscience... The pathetic fate of being Jewish becomes a fatality... The Jew is inevitably stuck to his Judaism. » Emmanuel Levinas in Peace and Law, 1935

Captivity (1939-1945)

When war was declared, Emmanuel Levinas was mobilized as an interpreter for the Russian language. Naturalized in 1931, he had immediately completed his military service. Taken prisoner and sent to Germany in captivity, he was protected, albeit Jewish, by the status of a prisoner of war. He reads a lot and starts writing "From existence to the existing".

After the Shoah, how can we dare to survive?

Levinas' entire family, who had remained in Lithuania, was massacred. His wife and daughter were able to take refuge with the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul, near Orléans (France).

Survive? By resurrecting Jewish texts. He receives the support of Dr. Nerson, a very close neighbour and friend, who came from Alsatian Judaism, still very much alive, with whom he is in « daily communion ».

In Strasbourg, Nerson had known Chouchani, a strange and mysterious man, a genius Talmudist.

He became Emmanuel Levinas' demanding teacher, teaching him how to « blow » on the « ashes of texts » to make their meaning flare up. It is then that he « begins to devote much more time to these texts, to[take] an interest in them in a much more direct way. Never like an object, always like[its] own substance. » (Emmanuel Levinas)

By the same sense of sharing that, to young Jews facing discrimination in various regions of the Western and Arab world, had made him provide the resources of French culture from which he himself had benefited, Emmanuel

Levinas made his discoveries of Talmudic wisdom shine through: - during the Sabbath morning lessons at the Ecole Normale Israëlite Orientale, of which he became director in 1946. - in the Colloquiums of the annuals of Jewish intellectuals, from 1957 onwards - in Jewish publications

 These writings and communications were then collected and published in volumes: - Difficult Freedom (1963) - Four Talmudic Readings (1968) - From Sacred to Holy, Five New Talmudic Readings (1977) - Beyond the Verse, Talmudic Readings and Discourses (1982) - In the Time of the Nations (1988) - New Talmudic Readings (January 96).

This foundation found in the Jewish text coincides with a fruitful philosophical elaboration: - From existence to the existing (1947) - Time and the Other (1947) - Discovering existence with Husserl and Heidegger (1949)

He wrote a state thesis, following Jean Wahl's advice, published in 1961: Totalité et Infini, which opened the doors of the university to him and brought him fame.

In 1963, he was a lecturer in Poitiers (France). From 1968 to 1972, lecturer in Nanterre University, near Paris, where he attended, from a distance, and a little suspicious, the events of 1968, where his friend Blanchot, on the other hand, plunged alongside the protesters.

Finally, as a final consecration, he was appointed professor at the Sorbonne Paris from 1973 to 1976. He actually retired in 1979. A teacher who prefers text-based teaching to lectures.

During this period, he made it appear: - The Humanism of the Other Man (1972) - Other than being or beyond gasoline (1974) - Proper names (1976) - On Maurice Blanchot (1976)

Thinking-of-God

To think of one, from the heart of Jewish philosophy and experience. Emmanuel Levinas' latest writings reflect this effort: - From God Who Comes to the Idea (1982) - Ethics and Infinity (1982) - Transcendence and intelligibility (1984) - At the time of the nations (1988) - Between us (1991)

Emmanuel Levinas was reunited with his Fathers on December 24, 1995.