Emmanuel Levinas quotes

Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher best known for his work on ethics and the philosophy of the Other. His writings profoundly influenced continental philosophy, especially in the areas of ethics, phenomenology, and Jewish thought. He emphasized the primacy of ethical responsibility in human relationships. Here are 11 of his quotes:

The transition of the subject-object relation to that of the I-Thou implies a passage of consciousness to a new sphere of existence, viz, the interval, betweenness or Zwischen; and this is a passage from thought to Umfassung.

Emmanuel Levinas

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.

Emmanuel Levinas

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?

Emmanuel Levinas

The theory of transparency was set up in reaction to the theory of mental images, of an inner tableu which the perception of an object would leave in us. In imagination our gaze always goes outward, but imagination modifies and neutralizes the gaze: the real world appears in it as it were between parenthesis or quote marks.

Emmanuel Levinas

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.

Emmanuel Levinas

The mores I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution, of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialistic subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible' the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am 'in myself' through others.

Emmanuel Levinas

The detour to ideality leads to coinciding with oneself, that is, to certainty, which remains the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual adventure of being.

Emmanuel Levinas

Fear for the Other, fear for the other man's death is my fear, but is in no way an individual's taking fright.

Emmanuel Levinas

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, conditioned by the empirical nature of man, which is incapable of reaching directly to a world of things in themselves. But while the world of the physicist claims to go beyond naive experience, his world really exists only in relation to naive experience.

Emmanuel Levinas