Emmanuel Levinas Quotes on God
Levinas's Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974) develop an ethics-as-first-philosophy that displaces the totalizing ontology Levinas associated with Heidegger and the Western philosophical tradition more broadly. The face of the other — the irreducible exposure through which one human being encounters another — issues an asymmetric ethical demand prior to any theoretical comprehension and prior to any free choice on the part of the subject so addressed. The God of the philosophers is reached through this ethical relation rather than through metaphysical or cosmological argument: the trace of the infinite in the face of the neighbor opens, in Levinas's late vocabulary, the dimension of the holy that ontology cannot capture.
Quotes
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Attributed to Emmanuel Levinas:
“Religion is the bond between the same and the other without constituting a totality.”
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Attributed to Emmanuel Levinas:
“The face of the other is the trace of the infinite.”
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“To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods.”
A Religion for Adults (1957) -
“A Religion for Adults (1957)”
To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods. -
“The comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because participation is a denial of the divine , and because nothing is more direct than the face to face , which is straightforwardness itself.”
Totality and Infinity (1961) -
“The ego involved in responsibility is me and no one else, me with whom one whould have liked to pair up a sister soul, from whom one would have substitution and sacrifice.”
The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 116