Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics

by Samuel Moyn

The French-Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) is today remembered as the central moralist of the twentieth century and remains a major presence in the contemporary humanities. In this book, written in lucid and jargon-free prose, Samuel Moyn provides a first and controversial history of the makings of his thought, and especially of his trademark concept of "the other." Restoring Levinas to the intellectually rich and combative atmosphere of interwar Europe, Origins of the Other overturns a number of views that have attained almost stereotypical familiarity. In a careful overview of Levinas's career, Moyn documents the philosopher's early allegiance to the great German thinker Martin Heidegger. Showing that Levinas crafted an idiosyncratic vision of Judaism, rather than returning to any traditional source, Moyn makes the startling suggestion that Protestant theology, as it spread across the continent in new forms, may have been the most plausible source of Levinas's core concept. In Origins of the Other, Moyn offers new readings of the work of a host of crucial thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, Karl Löwith, Gabriel Marcel, Franz Rosenzweig, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Wahl, who help explain why Levinas's thought evolved as it did. Moyn concludes by showing how "the other" assumed an ethical bearing (long after its first invention) when Levinas's thought crystallized in Cold War debates about intellectual engagement and the relation of morality and politics. An epilogue relates Levinas's Totality and Infinity to current philosophical discussions in Europe and America and reflects on the difficult relationship between philosophy and religion in the modern world.

Genres: Philosophy, History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Samuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Harvard University. He is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, and Christian Human Rights (2015), among other books, as well as editor of the journal Humanity. He also writes regularly for Foreign Affairs and The Nation.

Reviews

[Caleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moyn does a really nice job of situating Levinas in the intellectual moment that created him, at the intersection of phenomenology and theology in the pre-WWII era. He pitches Levinas's ethical turn as the product of an urge to come up with an alternative to Heidegger's account of humanity in Being and Time, and he locates the raw materials that Levinas draws on in the reaction against humanist and rationalist theology of the 19th century: namely Karl Barth and Rosenzweig. The downsides are that Moyn stops short of really engaging with Levinas's writing itself, and he tends to repeat the same ideas across chapters (lending itself to the sense that the book was written as several essays and then stitched together). His thesis is that Levinas's thought has a theological foundation, and it therefore cannot be treated as "pure" (secular) philosophy in the way that Levinas says it should be. But, despite demonstrating the theological heritage of Levinas's ideas, it would require more actual engagement with the philosopher's writing directly to fully support this thesis. The historical itinerary of an idea doesn't necessarily reveal its logical basis, and it is this latter aspect that is most crucial for figuring out what can be kept and what must be discarded for moral philosophy.

[Juan Agustín Otero · Rating 5 out of 5]

To Emmanuel Lévinas, Martin Heidegger was the genius philosopher—the one who restored the world of things to philosophy after Kant had taken it away. Among Heidegger’s disciples, many of them Jewish, Lévinas was the most orthodox, the most loyal to his teachings. In 1932, he was preparing a guide to Being and Time for the French public, eager to spread his master’s ideas.

In 1933, just six weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. He was appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg, where he expelled his own teacher, Edmund Husserl, along with other Jewish faculty.

At first, Lévinas thought this was a passing matter, nothing too serious. Soon, however, he realized that Heidegger’s philosophy paralleled Hitler’s politics, and that Hitler's politics were not a banality of the times. Listening to the Führer’s voice on the radio, he heard echoes of his old teacher’s charismatic lectures—lectures that had once drawn students from across Europe to hear Heidegger explain what being truly meant. He was haunted by it. Only a few years earlier, Lévinas had watched Heidegger crush Ernst Cassirer in debate, announcing that the world was about to be thrown into confusion. Later, he would recall that moment as the one in which he became enthralled by Heidegger—and also the moment when he first sensed something deeply dangerous about him.

After 1933, Lévinas spent the rest of his life resisting Heidegger’s philosophy. Yet he could never fully rid himself of him: Heidegger remained, in a sense, his philosophical father, and Lévinas felt guilty about it. In 1982, decades after the Holocaust and the war, he still admitted that Heidegger “was the greatest philosopher of the century, perhaps one of the very great philosophers of the millennium.” But he added: “I am very pained by that, because I can never forget what he was in 1933.” The fact that he didn’t say “is,” and that he specified “in 1933”, shows how difficult it still was for Lévinas to acknowledge the evil in his first teacher.

Reading this excellent philosophical biography has helped me understand Lévinas much better. Moyn has deepened my reading of Totalité et Infini, but he has also moved me to grasp something more personal, something critical for everyone—or at least for me.

We do not choose our fathers. But we do choose what we make of them.

[Orest Mercator · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moyn historicist interpretation of Levinas’s philosophical development seems largely accurate to me—especially his unusual focus on the 1934 article “Remarks on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” I think he gets a few details wrong here and there, but maybe I’m off the mark. Either way, it’s an excellent work of scholarship that I’m surprised doesn’t have a bigger share of contemporary conversations about Levinas (especially in comparison to Butler and Moten).

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting historicization of Levinas' thought, although not unproblematic. Moyn asserts that there is, indeed, a moment when Levinas "discovers" the ethical.