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Emmanuel Levinas Quotes

Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work related to Jewish philosophy, existentialism, ethics, phenomenology and ontology. Wikipedia  

✵ 12. January 1906 – 25. December 1995
Emmanuel Levinas photo

Works

Totality and Infinity
Emmanuel Levinas
Totality and Infinity
Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas: 11 quotes4 likes

Famous Emmanuel Levinas Quotes

“The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity.”

Emmanuel Levinas book Totality and Infinity

Context: 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 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 Zwichen; and this is a passage from thought to Umfassung.”

Emmanuel Levinas

The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 73

“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

On the doctrine of prefiguration.
Persons or Figures (1950)

“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 book Totality and Infinity

Totality and Infinity (1961)

“To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods.”

Emmanuel Levinas

A Religion for Adults (1957)

“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 Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 134

Emmanuel Levinas Quotes

“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 Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 116

“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 Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 102

“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

The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 89

“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

The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 84

“By asserting the objectivity of the physical world, natuaralism 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

The Theory Of Intuition In Husserls Phenomenology 1963, 1995 p. 9

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