Emmanuel Levinas — philosopher with roots in the Russian Empire
Emmanuel Levinas was born in Kovno, in the Russian Empire, now Kaunas in Lithuania, on 12 January 1906 (30 December 1905, Old Style), the son of a bookseller. The family was Jewish and Russian-speaking, and the boy also learned Hebrew and read the Bible and the Russian classics, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky among them.
In 1915, as the German army advanced into Lithuania, the family moved east to Kharkov, in Ukraine, where Levinas was admitted to the Russian gymnasium despite the quota on Jewish pupils. He was there during the revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War. In 1920 the family returned to Lithuania, now independent, where he finished school at a Jewish gymnasium.
In 1923 he went to France to study philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Maurice Blanchot. In 1928-29 he studied at Freiburg with Edmund Husserl and heard Martin Heidegger lecture. His thesis on Husserl's theory of intuition, published in 1930, and his share in the French translation of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations in 1931 helped introduce phenomenology to France; Jean-Paul Sartre was among its readers.
Naturalised French in 1939, he joined the army that year and served as an interpreter of Russian and German. Captured in 1940, he spent the rest of the war in the Fallingbostel camp near Hanover, where his status as a French prisoner of war protected him from the concentration camps. His family in Lithuania was murdered in the Holocaust. After the war he directed the École normale israélite orientale in Paris, a school of the Alliance israélite universelle, and from 1957 gave annual Talmudic readings at the colloquium of French-speaking Jewish intellectuals.
Totality and Infinity, published in 1961, placed ethics before all other philosophy: the encounter with another person's face, he argued, comes before any theory and imposes an obligation that cannot be reduced to knowledge. He taught at Poitiers, from 1968 at Paris-Nanterre and from 1973 at the Sorbonne, and published Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence in 1974. He died on 25 December 1995, aged eighty-nine, in Paris according to most obituaries and in Clichy according to Wikipedia.
Tracing the roots — Kovno, Kovno Governorate (now Kaunas, Lithuania); Kharkov 1915–1920
Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire in 1906 into a Russian-speaking Jewish family, he spent the First World War and the Revolution in Kharkov, where he attended the Russian gymnasium, before the family returned to independent Lithuania in 1920.
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Kovno, Kovno Governorate (now Kaunas, Lithuania); Kharkov 1915–1920. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation."