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Humanism of the Other
Levinas on the possibility and need for humanist ethics In Humanism of the Other, Emmanuel Levinas argues that it is not only possible but of the highest exigency to understand one's humanity through the humanity of others. In paperback for the first time, Levinas's work here is based in a new appreciation for ethics and takes new distances from phenomenology, idealism, and skepticism to rehabilitate humanism and restore its promises. Painfully aware of the long history of dehumanization that reached its apotheosis in Hitler and Nazism, Levinas does not underestimate the difficulty of reconciling oneself with another. The humanity of the human, Levinas argues, is not discoverable through mathematics, rational metaphysics, or introspection. Rather, it is found in the recognition that the other person comes first, that the suffering and mortality of others are the obligations and morality of the self.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
136 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
21 people are currently reading
411 people want to read
About the author
Emmanuel Levinas
150 books408 followersEmanuelis Levinas (later adapted to French orthography as Emmanuel Levinas) received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania. After WWII, he studied the Talmud under the enigmatic "Monsieur Chouchani", whose influence he acknowledged only late in his life.
Levinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in 1924, where he began his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to Freiburg University to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met Martin Heidegger. Levinas became one of the very first French intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl, by translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existant, and En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.
According to his obituary in New York Times,[1] Levinas came to regret his enthusiasm for Heidegger, because of the latter's affinity for the Nazis. During a lecture on forgiveness, Levinas stated "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."[2]
After earning his doctorate Levinas taught at a private Jewish High School in Paris, the École Normale Israélite Orientale, eventually becoming its director. He began teaching at the University of Poitiers in 1961, at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in 1967, and at the Sorbonne in 1973, from which he retired in 1979. He was also a Professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. In 1989 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy.
Among his most famous students is Rabbi Baruch Garzon from Tetouan (Morocco), who learnt Philosophy with Levinas at the Sorbonne and later went on to become one of the most important Rabbis of the Spanish-speaking world.
In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals surrounding Jean Wahl as a leading French thinker. His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas' terms, on "ethics as first philosophy". For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (which Lévinas called "ontology"). Lévinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom (the literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). By his lights, ethics becomes an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; hence an ethics of responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth".
Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness."[3]. At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one's freedom, to affirm or deny.[4] One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold of this otherness.
In Levinas's later thought following "Totality and Infinity", he argued that our responsibility for the other was already rooted within our subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the preface of this book is "everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."[5] This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence (chapter 4 in "Otherwise Than Being"), where Levinas maintai
Levinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in 1924, where he began his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to Freiburg University to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met Martin Heidegger. Levinas became one of the very first French intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl, by translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existant, and En Découvrant l’Existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.
According to his obituary in New York Times,[1] Levinas came to regret his enthusiasm for Heidegger, because of the latter's affinity for the Nazis. During a lecture on forgiveness, Levinas stated "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."[2]
After earning his doctorate Levinas taught at a private Jewish High School in Paris, the École Normale Israélite Orientale, eventually becoming its director. He began teaching at the University of Poitiers in 1961, at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in 1967, and at the Sorbonne in 1973, from which he retired in 1979. He was also a Professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. In 1989 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy.
Among his most famous students is Rabbi Baruch Garzon from Tetouan (Morocco), who learnt Philosophy with Levinas at the Sorbonne and later went on to become one of the most important Rabbis of the Spanish-speaking world.
In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals surrounding Jean Wahl as a leading French thinker. His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas' terms, on "ethics as first philosophy". For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (which Lévinas called "ontology"). Lévinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom (the literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). By his lights, ethics becomes an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; hence an ethics of responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth".
Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness."[3]. At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one's freedom, to affirm or deny.[4] One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an attempt to take hold of this otherness.
In Levinas's later thought following "Totality and Infinity", he argued that our responsibility for the other was already rooted within our subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the preface of this book is "everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."[5] This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence (chapter 4 in "Otherwise Than Being"), where Levinas maintai
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August 18, 2020
This short collection of three essays (along with a useful contextual introduction by Richard Cohen) is worth reading for the longest of its pieces, "Signification and Sense," alone. This essay is necessary reading for a proper understanding of Levinas' thought as it moves through the phenomenology of both Husserl and Heidegger before rupturing from them in his thinking of the other. Sense, as fundamental relation of orientation, is contemporanious with the exposure or explication of the world, anterior to it yet also essentially bound to its experience as responsive act. Said otherwise, sense always exceeds any worldly determination, just as, in his later thought, the saying ever exceeds any said. Sense, then, in a disorienting orientation (a detour, perhaps), finds us always already marking the trace of the other, their passage, as it is expressed in the transience oscillating between the finite and the infinite.
The two other essays, shorter in length but still rich in layers and folds, are focused more on the question of humanism, which Levinas notes, at the close of the 60s and the opening of the 70s, was already an outdated or untimely question, seemingly buried in the past by structuralism. But in rethinking the human, l'homme, not qua the genre of anthropos but rather as the subjectivity prior to egoity, the passivity of a life and a dying exposed and vulnerable to the other, and thus as bound to an ineluctable responsibility for every other who calls to us in the singular cry of their own exposure.
The only real fault of this work lies in Poller's translation, which is at times a bit too loose or free for a translation of Levinas (for whom language, the said which bears the silent saying beyond representation, is of the highest import), and can at times obscure or stray from Levinas' original French.
The two other essays, shorter in length but still rich in layers and folds, are focused more on the question of humanism, which Levinas notes, at the close of the 60s and the opening of the 70s, was already an outdated or untimely question, seemingly buried in the past by structuralism. But in rethinking the human, l'homme, not qua the genre of anthropos but rather as the subjectivity prior to egoity, the passivity of a life and a dying exposed and vulnerable to the other, and thus as bound to an ineluctable responsibility for every other who calls to us in the singular cry of their own exposure.
The only real fault of this work lies in Poller's translation, which is at times a bit too loose or free for a translation of Levinas (for whom language, the said which bears the silent saying beyond representation, is of the highest import), and can at times obscure or stray from Levinas' original French.
September 22, 2024
In the translator's note it says that "you don't read Levinas, you meditate on him" and that felt very true for this book. Levinas' Humanism of the Other tries to create a new ethics rooted in phenomenological thought while criticizing on the one hand the self-centeredness of Sartrean existentialism and on the other hand Heidegger's concept of Being, which he thinks loses sight of the individual and explains how Heidegger could turn to Nazism.
In terms of comprehensibility, it's probably the hardest book I've ever read. Levinas routinely uses specific philosophical terms without mentioning who he is referencing, making the text impossible to grasp fully unless you are deeply knowledgeable in philosophical thought. Merlau-Ponty, Kant, Heidegger, Cassier, Plato and the structuralist left are a few examples of thinkers and thought movements that routinely come up and that you need to have some knowledge of to be able to grasp these essays. Luckily, if you don't, the book does come with a well written introduction. The introduction is also is a hard read but certainly easier than Levinas himself, and that helps you fill in some of the contextual gaps. That said, this book is not for beginners. But if you think you are up for it, I do recommend it. Levinas ideas of moving beyond the self and attempting to find an almost religious veneration for your fellow man is a radical and creative idea that makes him one of the most interesting ethical thinkers of the 20th century in my opinion.
In terms of comprehensibility, it's probably the hardest book I've ever read. Levinas routinely uses specific philosophical terms without mentioning who he is referencing, making the text impossible to grasp fully unless you are deeply knowledgeable in philosophical thought. Merlau-Ponty, Kant, Heidegger, Cassier, Plato and the structuralist left are a few examples of thinkers and thought movements that routinely come up and that you need to have some knowledge of to be able to grasp these essays. Luckily, if you don't, the book does come with a well written introduction. The introduction is also is a hard read but certainly easier than Levinas himself, and that helps you fill in some of the contextual gaps. That said, this book is not for beginners. But if you think you are up for it, I do recommend it. Levinas ideas of moving beyond the self and attempting to find an almost religious veneration for your fellow man is a radical and creative idea that makes him one of the most interesting ethical thinkers of the 20th century in my opinion.
October 12, 2024
Philosophy study group read
Immensely difficult, immensely rewarding read.
Emmanuel Levinas's attempt to situate humanism in ethics is admirable, topical. In the beginning - confusing, because a simplistic reduction of the book could just be "be empathetic". That would entirely miss the point, but to climb to a place where I wouldn't I had to labour.
Levinas is attempting to create an ontological and metaphysical position for ethics. Coming as I was to this book with little formal background in ontology (I had a little bit more in metaphysics), I had to unlearn the old ways of thinking. (Isn't ethics an entirely different school of philosophy? What does all that mean - the ontological position?) This book can be read as an extended critique of Heidigger's project of Being, which is explicitly ontological. (I've dodged that monstrous project before, but I could no more.)
As I understand it, Heidigger is attempting to define what is the nature of a human being. An answer that you might proffer to that might be a description in biological terms - a bidepal ape. But is that what a human being is? With our historical desires for religion, country, love, poetry, freedom, safety, power, happiness, dancing, elaborate food, and what have you - that is utterly insufficient. What is a human being, as a kind of thing, that is fundamental? That's an ontological study. Heidigger talks of authenticity, but his usage is tricky. It squirms out of my grasp as I try to study it. It's a sort of openness to history that's explicitly non-ethical.
The introduction to the book is valuable because it sets up the sometimes unnamed interlocutors that Levinas is responding to. There's Heidigger - but there's also Cassirer - his great opponent, and defender of human striving within culture against Heidigger's historical determinism. Levinas thinks Cassirer too doesn't quite get it, and neither does Merleau-Ponty and Husserl the great phenomenologists, and neither do the economists who see humans as utility-satisfaction instruments, and neither do the technologists who might see humans as comfort-seeking, labour-saving optimisers, and of course neither do the scientists who box humans in neat bio-psycho categories.
It's not that Levinas thinks all these ideas are wrong. He praises the economic-technological model as a noble attempt to stave off the relativism of Cassirer. He uses Cassirer's defence of cultural symbols - and all its artifacts like art, poetry, literature, music - as a starting point of his own philosophy of signification. He acknowledges the brilliant work of the phenomenologists who restored the importance of the subject, the psyche.
No, Levinas's work is so rewarding because he is addressing all these ideas while formulating his own. He doesn't dismiss Heidigger's work as "language run amok" like Russell but engages with it as a worthy adversary. But that's what makes it so dense, so hard to read. When Levinas uses the words, he's using them as they truly are - embedded in a framework of meaning that envelops all of human civilization. Words like 'ego' - and its history all the way to Freud, 'intentionality' - deeply significant in phenomenology - and of course Being - Heidigger's creation.
Amidst that, when you manage to catch the gleam from Levinas's project, it is blinding, alluring. It resists summarisation, and it resists simplification, because it has emerged from an inseparably fused dialetic with so many ideas from Western philosophy. Now when we return to our attempt to reduce his work as merely saying "be empathetic", we see that it doesn't work. To Levinas, the encounter with the Other, with its vulnerable, naked face, exists "before" will. "Be empathetic" is an active phrase, it needs free will to make sense, it is an act, but Levinas is situating the encounter to the Other before will, before consciousness, before the existence of existentialism, before the systematisation and mathematisation of science.
The Other may seem to us merely an odd phrasing to speak of someone that's not you. At one level it is, but you've to read the book to see the work Levinas does to place to bring out the significance of something seemingly apparent. Let me try to evade some simple reductions to make the point. One may frame the encounter with another human in the language of evolutionary psychology - this is two mammals affirming their respective social status. But this misses the raw truth of the hole in the internal universe that the Other is - all of science and mathematics and Heidiggerian ontology and Cassirer's cultural symbolism at your fingertips, and you've systematised and understood the whole world - but there is the Other, a hole in that perfect web, because they too have just as big an internal universe that will never be accessible.
And that - Levinas says - is imbued with a fundamental responsibility. You may describe it in the language of empathy, or in the language of science, you may ignore it as an illusion, but Levinas's project is to challenge that.
Oh, what an effort.
As the introduction says - you don't read Levinas, you meditate on him. I certainly will.
To wrap this ramble up - who Levinas was cannot be distanced from his ideas. We try to separate the philosophers from their ideas, but can we? Truly, fully? Levinas - the Jew who suffered greatly during the War, and still insists on the fundamental primacy of the responsibility for the other. Heidigger - who joined the Nazi party, while positing a shocking ethical indifference. Cassirer - who gave up his home to fight the Nazis, and argued for the significance of culture. These great interlocutors and their ideas are imbued with the colours of who they turned out to be. Perhaps that's just as it would be, Levinas would say.
On a final note, I've slowly been fumbling my way towards my own articulation of the encounter with the Other, in the context of animal welfare. All the systematisation of behaviorism, and biology, and the calculus of utilitarianism, and the conviction has grown in me that it's only an encounter with the mind of a sentient seen clearly, like the life you share with a pet dog, that fills you with inescapable responsibility. (It's certainly escaped often - but at the cost of dissonance perhaps.)
Immensely difficult, immensely rewarding read.
Emmanuel Levinas's attempt to situate humanism in ethics is admirable, topical. In the beginning - confusing, because a simplistic reduction of the book could just be "be empathetic". That would entirely miss the point, but to climb to a place where I wouldn't I had to labour.
Levinas is attempting to create an ontological and metaphysical position for ethics. Coming as I was to this book with little formal background in ontology (I had a little bit more in metaphysics), I had to unlearn the old ways of thinking. (Isn't ethics an entirely different school of philosophy? What does all that mean - the ontological position?) This book can be read as an extended critique of Heidigger's project of Being, which is explicitly ontological. (I've dodged that monstrous project before, but I could no more.)
As I understand it, Heidigger is attempting to define what is the nature of a human being. An answer that you might proffer to that might be a description in biological terms - a bidepal ape. But is that what a human being is? With our historical desires for religion, country, love, poetry, freedom, safety, power, happiness, dancing, elaborate food, and what have you - that is utterly insufficient. What is a human being, as a kind of thing, that is fundamental? That's an ontological study. Heidigger talks of authenticity, but his usage is tricky. It squirms out of my grasp as I try to study it. It's a sort of openness to history that's explicitly non-ethical.
The introduction to the book is valuable because it sets up the sometimes unnamed interlocutors that Levinas is responding to. There's Heidigger - but there's also Cassirer - his great opponent, and defender of human striving within culture against Heidigger's historical determinism. Levinas thinks Cassirer too doesn't quite get it, and neither does Merleau-Ponty and Husserl the great phenomenologists, and neither do the economists who see humans as utility-satisfaction instruments, and neither do the technologists who might see humans as comfort-seeking, labour-saving optimisers, and of course neither do the scientists who box humans in neat bio-psycho categories.
It's not that Levinas thinks all these ideas are wrong. He praises the economic-technological model as a noble attempt to stave off the relativism of Cassirer. He uses Cassirer's defence of cultural symbols - and all its artifacts like art, poetry, literature, music - as a starting point of his own philosophy of signification. He acknowledges the brilliant work of the phenomenologists who restored the importance of the subject, the psyche.
No, Levinas's work is so rewarding because he is addressing all these ideas while formulating his own. He doesn't dismiss Heidigger's work as "language run amok" like Russell but engages with it as a worthy adversary. But that's what makes it so dense, so hard to read. When Levinas uses the words, he's using them as they truly are - embedded in a framework of meaning that envelops all of human civilization. Words like 'ego' - and its history all the way to Freud, 'intentionality' - deeply significant in phenomenology - and of course Being - Heidigger's creation.
Amidst that, when you manage to catch the gleam from Levinas's project, it is blinding, alluring. It resists summarisation, and it resists simplification, because it has emerged from an inseparably fused dialetic with so many ideas from Western philosophy. Now when we return to our attempt to reduce his work as merely saying "be empathetic", we see that it doesn't work. To Levinas, the encounter with the Other, with its vulnerable, naked face, exists "before" will. "Be empathetic" is an active phrase, it needs free will to make sense, it is an act, but Levinas is situating the encounter to the Other before will, before consciousness, before the existence of existentialism, before the systematisation and mathematisation of science.
The Other may seem to us merely an odd phrasing to speak of someone that's not you. At one level it is, but you've to read the book to see the work Levinas does to place to bring out the significance of something seemingly apparent. Let me try to evade some simple reductions to make the point. One may frame the encounter with another human in the language of evolutionary psychology - this is two mammals affirming their respective social status. But this misses the raw truth of the hole in the internal universe that the Other is - all of science and mathematics and Heidiggerian ontology and Cassirer's cultural symbolism at your fingertips, and you've systematised and understood the whole world - but there is the Other, a hole in that perfect web, because they too have just as big an internal universe that will never be accessible.
And that - Levinas says - is imbued with a fundamental responsibility. You may describe it in the language of empathy, or in the language of science, you may ignore it as an illusion, but Levinas's project is to challenge that.
Oh, what an effort.
As the introduction says - you don't read Levinas, you meditate on him. I certainly will.
To wrap this ramble up - who Levinas was cannot be distanced from his ideas. We try to separate the philosophers from their ideas, but can we? Truly, fully? Levinas - the Jew who suffered greatly during the War, and still insists on the fundamental primacy of the responsibility for the other. Heidigger - who joined the Nazi party, while positing a shocking ethical indifference. Cassirer - who gave up his home to fight the Nazis, and argued for the significance of culture. These great interlocutors and their ideas are imbued with the colours of who they turned out to be. Perhaps that's just as it would be, Levinas would say.
On a final note, I've slowly been fumbling my way towards my own articulation of the encounter with the Other, in the context of animal welfare. All the systematisation of behaviorism, and biology, and the calculus of utilitarianism, and the conviction has grown in me that it's only an encounter with the mind of a sentient seen clearly, like the life you share with a pet dog, that fills you with inescapable responsibility. (It's certainly escaped often - but at the cost of dissonance perhaps.)
July 30, 2018
En este libro se recogen tres ensayos de Emmanuel Levinas: La significación y el sentido, Humanismo y an-arquía y Sin identidad. Los tres se inscriben perfectamente bien al amparo del título de la obra, ya que Levinas lleva a cabo aquí una dura crítica a todo Humanismo que no esté asentado, antes incluso del advenimiento mismo de la Esencia, en la figura del Otro.
Para Levinas, quien nunca ocultó su deuda con la tradición judeocristiana, así como la importancia e influencia de los textos talmúdicos y bíblicos en Occidente; la única oposición, genuina y honorable, que podemos hacer ante la Angustia existencialista (presente ya en el propio Kierkegaard de Temor y temblor) es asumir la responsabilidad, irrevocable e irrenunciable, que viene dada por el Otro.
El otro (y su revelación) es la única vía que nos permitirá replantear un sentido legítimamente subjetivo y humanista para la Libertad, como algo que anteceda a la manifestación misma del Ser y la Ek-sistencia en el "atropello" (palabra del propio Levinas) efectuado por Heidegger o la aparición avasalladora de la Conciencia en la fenomenología trascendental de Husserl: tareas indispensables para la llevar cabo una reivindicación urgente de un Humanismo "que se preocup[e] más del hambre y la miseria de los otros, que de resguardar la propiedad, la llibertadvy la dignidad de la misma subjetividad."
Lo anterior será posible siempre que dilucidemos críticamente (en mi caso, que no el de Levinas) o que aceptemos, como verdad revelada, la "pasividad más pasiva que toda pasividad: [...] en esta pasividad el Bien es el que, para hablar con propiedad, no tiene ser y no es, sino por la bondad."
(Huelga decir que este Bien, que escapa a toda bipolaridad axiológica y que está más allá de todo abuso del lenguaje que trate aun de nombrarlo, resultará ser Dios).
Addendum: Puedo no estar de acuerdo con la filosofía de Levinas, pero reconozco que su escritura es de una inteligencia deslumbrante. El regocijo será mayor (querido lector) si logra sortear su camino a través de todas las erratas que plagan la ¡novena reimpresión!, de la (segunda) edición de los amigos de siglo veintiuno editores.
Para Levinas, quien nunca ocultó su deuda con la tradición judeocristiana, así como la importancia e influencia de los textos talmúdicos y bíblicos en Occidente; la única oposición, genuina y honorable, que podemos hacer ante la Angustia existencialista (presente ya en el propio Kierkegaard de Temor y temblor) es asumir la responsabilidad, irrevocable e irrenunciable, que viene dada por el Otro.
El otro (y su revelación) es la única vía que nos permitirá replantear un sentido legítimamente subjetivo y humanista para la Libertad, como algo que anteceda a la manifestación misma del Ser y la Ek-sistencia en el "atropello" (palabra del propio Levinas) efectuado por Heidegger o la aparición avasalladora de la Conciencia en la fenomenología trascendental de Husserl: tareas indispensables para la llevar cabo una reivindicación urgente de un Humanismo "que se preocup[e] más del hambre y la miseria de los otros, que de resguardar la propiedad, la llibertadvy la dignidad de la misma subjetividad."
Lo anterior será posible siempre que dilucidemos críticamente (en mi caso, que no el de Levinas) o que aceptemos, como verdad revelada, la "pasividad más pasiva que toda pasividad: [...] en esta pasividad el Bien es el que, para hablar con propiedad, no tiene ser y no es, sino por la bondad."
(Huelga decir que este Bien, que escapa a toda bipolaridad axiológica y que está más allá de todo abuso del lenguaje que trate aun de nombrarlo, resultará ser Dios).
Addendum: Puedo no estar de acuerdo con la filosofía de Levinas, pero reconozco que su escritura es de una inteligencia deslumbrante. El regocijo será mayor (querido lector) si logra sortear su camino a través de todas las erratas que plagan la ¡novena reimpresión!, de la (segunda) edición de los amigos de siglo veintiuno editores.
April 12, 2018
Very good foreword that puts the argumentation in some historical "light". If humanism is only something we must intend or something born in reason, there could only be responsibility where it is taken. However, if we claim that there is no humanism, responsibility seems to fall back to the thinking self and its maintenance as an existing being. As a response to the problematic, Levinas tries to see if there is a way to prove that subjectivity is already conditioned by a humanism not intended.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 7, 2023
THE IDEA OF INFINITY IS DESIRE
January 24, 2026
If any philosopher will make me religious, Levinas will be the one to do it. Super excited to work more in depth with him.
8.3/10
8.3/10
November 25, 2018
As is remarked in the introduction - one does not read Levinas, one meditates upon him. If you are attempting to pin down this philosophy you will find yourself in a never ending quest. Levinas is notorious for alluding to myriads of other philosophers and philosophies within his own text without hardly ever being explicit as to what those may be. However, I would say if one is not at least familiar with Husserl and Heidegger one will be lost. I have always been partial, if not fanatically so, for Heidegger. But there have long been implications of his philosophy that I cringe at and have always justified to myself that they were not explicit aspects. I am attempting to overcome this stage of my intellectual development though with Levinas. I have studied him prior to this but not to a great extent. This was a great first book for that mission because in it Levinas is attempting to recover a sense of subjectivity lost in structuralist and postmodern thinkers. He is attempting to assert almost an a priori indebtedness to the Other. The three essays in this work do a good job of highlighting that mission but hardly come close to resolving it. Consider this book a primer on a much larger journey.
February 2, 2010
A new translation (by Nidra Poller) of Emmanuel Levinas' 1972 collection of essays entitled Humanisme de l'autre homme. The essays/chapters included are "Signification and Sense" (first published in 1964), "Humanism and An-archy (1968), and "Without Identity (1970).
The first chapter, one of Levinas' major considerations of language and method, is by far the most important text of the three. It has been previously translated and published (under the title "Meaning and Sense") in two prior collections of Levinas' writings--the Collected Philosophical Papers, and the Basic Philosophical Writings. The essay moves adroitly though a quasi-historical analysis of the signifier, considered first as a linguistic term inadequate to the task of fully expressing the signified, and second, as a saturated signifier, expressing a super-abundance of significations, and finally, as the face of the other person, whose signification belongs to another, primordial order of meaning--and thereby, opens upon another sense of language. The essay is also noteworthy for its parallel development of methodological differences between Levinas and other major phenomenologists, especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
The last two essays in Humanism of the Other also appeared in the Collected Philosophical Papers (translated by Al Lingis), and are remarkable primarily for articulating Levinas' response to the (primarily) French debates over humanism and culture during the 1960s. They are not among his better essays, however.
The new translations by Nidra Poller correct some inaccuracies in the earlier Lingis translations (though the Lingis renderings are still more readable, in many places, than are Poller's), but none of those corrections are as significant as the "Introduction" to the text, written by Richard Cohen, would have readers believe. Cohen's essay (some 35 pages in length) is longer, in fact, than any of the Levinas essays it ostensibly introduces. It does provide an interesting account of the 1929 Cassirer/Heidegger encounter in Davos, but it suffers in both tone and content from what are becoming somewhat tiresome and formulaic criticisms of Heidegger.
The first chapter, one of Levinas' major considerations of language and method, is by far the most important text of the three. It has been previously translated and published (under the title "Meaning and Sense") in two prior collections of Levinas' writings--the Collected Philosophical Papers, and the Basic Philosophical Writings. The essay moves adroitly though a quasi-historical analysis of the signifier, considered first as a linguistic term inadequate to the task of fully expressing the signified, and second, as a saturated signifier, expressing a super-abundance of significations, and finally, as the face of the other person, whose signification belongs to another, primordial order of meaning--and thereby, opens upon another sense of language. The essay is also noteworthy for its parallel development of methodological differences between Levinas and other major phenomenologists, especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
The last two essays in Humanism of the Other also appeared in the Collected Philosophical Papers (translated by Al Lingis), and are remarkable primarily for articulating Levinas' response to the (primarily) French debates over humanism and culture during the 1960s. They are not among his better essays, however.
The new translations by Nidra Poller correct some inaccuracies in the earlier Lingis translations (though the Lingis renderings are still more readable, in many places, than are Poller's), but none of those corrections are as significant as the "Introduction" to the text, written by Richard Cohen, would have readers believe. Cohen's essay (some 35 pages in length) is longer, in fact, than any of the Levinas essays it ostensibly introduces. It does provide an interesting account of the 1929 Cassirer/Heidegger encounter in Davos, but it suffers in both tone and content from what are becoming somewhat tiresome and formulaic criticisms of Heidegger.
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March 18, 2007I'm still not sure that I actually understood this. I think I was on the cusp, and then it was time to move on to the next book for class, and all was lost.
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