Emmanuel Levinas Quotes on Knowledge
Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), the Lithuanian-French phenomenologist whose Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974) gave late-twentieth-century continental philosophy its most influential reframing of the relation between knowledge and ethics, defended the case that ethics is first philosophy. The framework treats the cognitive grasp characteristic of thematizing thought as a posterior achievement built upon — and in important respects unable to capture — the more fundamental encounter with the face of the other person, whose ethical claim interrupts the totalizing operations of theoretical reason before any concept can subsume the other under a general category. Knowledge for Levinas is therefore subordinate to a responsibility older than cognition.
Quotes
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Attributed to Emmanuel Levinas:
“Ethics is first philosophy.”
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“On the doctrine of prefiguration.”
If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme? -
“Persons or Figures (1950)”
If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme? -
“Totality and Infinity (1961)”
The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed. -
“Totality and Infinity (1961)”
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. -
“The Theory Of Intuition In Husserls Phenomenology 1963, 1995 p. 9”
By asserting the objectivity of the physical world, naturalism identifies the existence and the conditions of existence of the physical world with existence and the conditions of existence in general. It forgets that the world of the physicist necessarily refers back, through its intrinsic meaning, through the subjective world which one tries to exclude from reality as being pure appearance, condi