Emmanuel Levinas Quotes on Virtue
Levinas's ethics — developed across Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974) — locates the moral life prior to the freedom of the deliberating self in the face-to-face relation with the other, in which the other's vulnerability addresses an asymmetric demand the self can refuse but never neutralize. The cardinal virtues of the Levinasian framework — responsibility, substitution (in the technical Levinasian sense in which the self's responsibility for the other extends even to the other's own responsibilities), patience, hospitality — are not chosen excellences in the Aristotelian sense but the ethical responses elicited by the prior ethical demand. The framework reads the Western philosophical tradition's privilege of autonomy and self-presence as a sustained evasion of the more primordial heteronomy of ethical responsibility for the other.
Quotes
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Attributed to Emmanuel Levinas:
“Ethics is first philosophy.”
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Attributed to Emmanuel Levinas:
“The face of the Other commands me to responsibility.”
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Attributed to Emmanuel Levinas:
“The face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation.”
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Attributed to Emmanuel Levinas:
“To be I is to have responsibility, as if I were the elected one.”
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Attributed to Emmanuel Levinas:
“The other is not me, and I am responsible for him.”
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“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)