“I’m a Pacifist”: Peace in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas

Sean Lawrence

doi:10.3390/rel10020084

Abstract

This paper develops and examines the idea and importance of peace in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, starting from an anecdote regarding his parody of Ernst Cassirer during a student performance in Davos. It examines Levinas’s stated views on peace from across his career, arguing Levinas should be viewed as a pacifist, albeit a highly original one, who shows that political structures are characterized by violence but reveal their origins in the radical peace of the face-to-face encounter.

Highlights

This paper develops and examines the idea and importance of peace in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, starting from an anecdote regarding his parody of Ernst Cassirer during a student performance in Davos
We know that the memory of his performance later embarrassed Levinas, and he even expressed regret that he had failed to contact and apologize to Cassirer’s widow during a trip to the United States (Malka 2006, p. 52). Did his younger self dismiss pacifism as a part of “the thinking inspired by Kant and the Enlightenment heritage which Cassirer principally represented” (Levinas 2001b, p. 187)? Did he wish, in retrospect, to have made a forceful argument in favor of pacifism to Heidegger’s face? Did he regret his mocking of the master, and his failure to defend Cassirer’s humanism against Heidegger’s existentialism and incipient Nazism? The meaning of the event changed with time for Levinas himself
Levinas condemns the notion that political concerns dictate thought in the first sentences of Totality and Infinity, where he distinguishes his own philosophy from the extravagant respect accorded to war and violent contestation: Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality

Summary

Introduction

This paper develops and examines the idea and importance of peace in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, starting from an anecdote regarding his parody of Ernst Cassirer during a student performance in Davos. Against this tendency of western thought, Levinas champions not the neo-Kantianism of Cassirer, but a renewed emphasis on peaceful sociality, identified towards the end of Totality and Infinity with the relation to the face of the Other.

Results

Conclusion