The Baltzan Prize for Humanities and Natural Sciences

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995): A Baltzan Prize Winner

In the year, 1989, Emmanuel Levinas was awarded the coveted Baltzan Prize, by the International Balzan Prize Foundation.

This remarkable philosopher was born in Kovno, in the Russian Empire (now Kaunas, Lithuania), on December 30, 1906. His original name was Emanuelis Levinas. He grew up in Lithuania, where he received a Jewish education. After World War II, Levinas studied the Talmud under Monsieur Chouchani. He is regarded as a French philosopher and a commentator on the Talmud.

Levinas entered Strasbourg University in the year 1924 and became friends with Maurice Blanchot, a French philosopher. From there he attended Freiburg University, in 1928 and under the tutelage of Edmund Husserl, studied phenomenology. Here, he also met Martin Heidegger. (2)

Levinas took out his French citizenship in the year 1930. In 1940, he was forced to join the military and during the German invasion of France that same year, his unit was taken into captivity. He became a prisoner of war, assigned to barracks for Jewish prisoners, in Hannover, Germany. His wife and daughter spent the war at a monastery; his mother-in-law was deported and his father and brothers were murdered in Lithuania, by the Nazi SS. (3)

As a prisoner of war, Levinas was not allowed to practice his Jewish religion, but with the assistance of Maurice Blanchot, he managed to stay in contact with his immediate family. He was forced to submit to menial tasks, like chopping wood. Other prisoners became aware that he was making notes, which later became "Existence and Existents", a book published in 1947. He also wrote a series of lectures published as "Time and the Other", in 1948. (4)

In the 1950's, Levinas emerged as a leading French thinker, in his work on "ethics of the Other", (5) and "ethics as first philosophy". (6)

To Levinas, "the Other is not knowable in terms of subjectivity". Philosophy, he regarded as "the wisdom of love", not "the love of wisdom", as the traditional philosophy of the Greeks suggested. (7)

Levinas experienced an epiphany, or a "face-to-face" encounter with the Other. This was probably the reason for his passionate pursuit of ethics, as first philosophy and his stand for a person's ethical duty to the other, as a fellow human being. (8)

Levinas obtained his doctorate and taught at a Jewish High School in Paris, called the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale and became the director. He taught at the University of Poitiers in 1961, the University of Paris in 1967 and at the Sorbonne in 1973. He retired in 1979. He was also a professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. (9)

Levinas was a prolific writer with a number of other major works including "Totality and Infinity" and "Otherwise Than Being and Beyond Essence". Emmanuel Levinas passed away on December 25, 1995, six years after receiving the Baltzan Prize. (10)

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_L%C3%A9vinas

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Ibid.

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid.

(10) Ibid.