Emanuelis Levinas – a World-Famous Philosopher From Kaunas

Emanuelis Levinas is a world-famous philosopher of Lithuanian origin. He spent his life seeking to know and understand the world around him and other people. He was especially interested in what makes a relationship with another person good or ethicalThis is why Levinas is known as a philosopher of ethics or morality. Ethics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the issues of good and evil, good and bad behavior.

Levinas was born in 1906 in Kaunas to a Jewish family. At that time, Lithuania was occupied by the Russian Empire, so it’s not surprising that the future philosopher, who knew Lithuanian, Russian and Hebrew from an early age, was greatly influenced by Russian culture and especially literature. Levinas’ father was the owner of a bookstore, so he read a lot as a child. He himself said that it was classic literature – especially the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy – that led him to take an interest in philosophy and the search for the meaning of life.

Levinas spent his academic career in France and Germany. He studied philosophy at the University of Freiburg (Germany) with the famous twentieth century German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the pioneer of phenomenological philosophy. Phenomenology looks for ways to explore human consciousness, specifically the process of perception. The main question phenomenologists are interested in is how a person understands and experiences their environment or the world more broadly. Phenomenologists say that humans are always in the world and think about the world, but they see the world through themselves, through their own consciousness. In other words, the outside world is reflected or unfolded in our unique consciousness and thus becomes understandable and familiar to us.

Levinas taught at various French higher education institutions, including the famous Sorbonne University. He received French citizenship in 1939. However, he didn’t forget Lithuanian: in 1933, whilst living in France, he published an article in the Lithuanian magazine Vairas [Eng. The Steering Wheel] entitled Understanding Spirituality in French and German Culture. He died in 1995 in Paris.

What is special about Levinas’ philosophy? The scientist agreed with Husserl, his teacher, that we constantly experience – hear, see, touch – the world and think about it, in other words, our consciousness is always directed towards the world and its objects. But Levinas thought his teacher was wrong in saying that the world could be known completely. He contradicts this idea by saying that, whilst things and objects can be known, another person always remains mysterious, no matter how much we would like to understand them. Levinas uses the face as a symbol to describe this complex relationship. According to him, the face of another person is always different.

Levinas’ idea of ethics is very important: although we constantly feel responsible for other people, we cannot expect the same from them. This is how free will, without which ethics is impossible, manifests itself. An ethical person who chooses to do good to others and the world keeps what Levinas regarded as  the most important precept, “Do not kill”, and doesn’t ask for anything in return.