15 - Emmanuel Levinas

Summary

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) is best known for his insistence that ‘ethics is first philosophy’. While the majority of critics of the so-called postmodern or post-metaphysical philosophy condemned its passage beyond good and evil, and the majority of its devotees celebrated this same liberty, Levinas sought a position that cut across these options. He stood almost alone, until perhaps the last decade and a half of the twentieth century, in insisting that postmodernity and the end of onto-theological metaphysics were not incompatible with morality and ethics, but in fact offered a unique opportunity for awakening our ethical regard for the Other. After the Nietzschean diagnosis of the death of God (see Vol. 4, Ch. 18, “Friedrich Nietzsche”) and after the end of metaphysics had put an end to transcendental grounds for moral obligation, Levinas found an injunction whose source survived. This was the face of the Other. The face of the human other issued an undeniable obligation, which Levinas often formulated in the ethical injunction ‘thou shalt not murder’, and the hearing of this command altered the very subjectivity of man, leaving behind the self-grounding, autonomous subject of onto-theological metaphysics for a relational subject not determined by representational consciousness.

While this might represent the most important reception of Levinas, one could, with perhaps a bit more precision, also consider Levinas as the third of the great twentieth-century phenomenologists.