Emmanuel Levinas's Totalite et Infini (Totality and Infinity), published in 1961, is the most significant work of Continental philosophy to emerge from a direct engagement with the biblical and Talmudic traditions since Kierkegaard's Works of Love. Its central claim - that ethics, understood as the infinite responsibility encountered in the 'face of the other,' precedes and grounds ontology - reversed the dominant priority of Western philosophy from Plato through Heidegger, which had made the question of being fundamental and derived ethics from it. The work transformed Continental philosophy and had far-reaching effects on liberation theology, medical ethics, feminist philosophy, and interfaith dialogue.
The Thinker and His Work
Levinas (1906-1995) was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, into an Orthodox Jewish family that had given him a thorough grounding in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud before he went to Strasbourg and Freiburg to study phenomenology under Husserl and Heidegger. His early work introduced Heidegger's phenomenology to France. After the war - during which he was a prisoner of war while his family in Lithuania was murdered by the Nazis - Levinas turned with new urgency to the question of ethics: what does philosophy have to say about the moral catastrophe of the twentieth century? His answer was that the entire tradition of Western philosophy, in its preoccupation with Being and totality, had provided no resources for stopping the murder of the other - and had in fact philosophically enabled it through the subordination of the particular to the universal.
Totality and Infinity was Levinas's doctoral thesis, submitted when he was fifty-five, and it is one of the most ambitious works of philosophy written in the twentieth century. Its style is deliberately non-systematic, circling around its central insights in a way that resists the kind of totalizing comprehension it is criticizing.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Exodus 33:20 - 'you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live' - provides Levinas with the philosophical structure of the face encounter. God's face cannot be seen directly; the divine is encountered only in trace, in the withdrawal that leaves a mark. Levinas reads this theologically precise observation as a philosophical one: the Other's face is not an object of comprehension or possession. It is an infinite demand that exceeds every attempt to grasp or totalize it. The Other's face says 'thou shalt not kill' with a force that transcends all philosophical argument.
Leviticus 19:18 - 'you shall love your neighbor as yourself' - is the Talmudic commandment that grounds Levinas's ethics. But Levinas radicalizes it: the obligation to the neighbor is not a symmetrical 'as yourself' but an asymmetrical infinite - I owe the other more than the other owes me, because my responsibility for the other is not conditioned by reciprocity. The Talmudic reading of this verse (particularly the discussion of who counts as 'neighbor') provides the content that Levinas's phenomenological analysis aims to articulate philosophically.
Matthew 22:39 - 'you shall love your neighbor as yourself' - appears in Levinas's engagement with Kierkegaard, whose Works of Love he knew and respected. Levinas's own account of neighbor-love is both dependent on and critical of Kierkegaard: he agrees with Kierkegaard that the commandment's unconditionality is essential, but he resists Kierkegaard's grounding of it in an I-God relationship, preferring to ground it in the face-to-face encounter itself.
Core Argument
Levinas's fundamental claim is that the face of the other person interrupts my self-sufficient existence and places on me an infinite, non-reciprocal obligation. The face is not a visual datum - I do not first see a face and then infer an obligation from it. The face speaks: 'thou shalt not kill.' This command is prior to all my choices; it constitutes me as a moral subject before I have chosen anything. Ethics is not a domain that I enter from some prior neutral position; it is the structure of existence as constituted by the other's address to me.
This is Levinas's critique of Heidegger: Heidegger's Dasein (being-there) is fundamentally a solitary individual who encounters others as part of 'das Man' (the anonymous public). Ethics, for Heidegger, is derived from ontology - from the structure of Dasein's being-toward-death. Levinas inverts this: the other's face comes before my own self-understanding; I am constituted as a subject by my response to the other's address before I am constituted by my relationship to my own death.
Intellectual Context
Levinas was working in the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology, but radicalizing it in a direction Husserl had not anticipated. Husserl's phenomenology had bracketed the question of the other's existence and analyzed the structures of pure consciousness; Heidegger had moved beyond solipsism by making being-in-the-world (with others) fundamental to Dasein. Levinas argues that even Heidegger's 'being-with' (Mitsein) subordinates the other to the categories of one's own being. The other's genuine otherness - irreducible to any category I supply - is what Western philosophy has most consistently failed to honor.
Reception and Critique
Jacques Derrida's essay 'Violence and Metaphysics' (1964) was the first major philosophical response to Levinas, arguing that Levinas's very attempt to speak about the other in language - even phenomenological language - inevitably totalized what he claimed to respect as infinite. This deconstructive reading has generated enormous discussion about whether Levinas's project is philosophically coherent. Derrida's subsequent work 'At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am' (1980) offered a more sympathetic reading.
Feminist philosophers including Luce Irigaray and Adriana Cavarero have argued that Levinas's account of the other is implicitly masculine - the face that commands is a figure of authority - and that a genuinely feminist account of alterity would need to begin from sexual difference rather than from the face's command.
Legacy
Totality and Infinity transformed the central question of Continental philosophy from 'what is being?' to 'who is the other?' This shift has had consequences for every domain in which the question of the other is ethically pressing: medical ethics (the patient's irreducible otherness against the physician's totalizing diagnosis), refugee ethics (the stranger's face as infinite demand), environmental ethics (the other species as a face that commands), and interfaith dialogue (the other tradition as genuinely other rather than a lesser version of one's own).
Key Passages
'The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation. No one can refuse the voice of the face; to do so is already to have heard it.' (Totality and Infinity, Part III, trans. Lingis)
'The Other is the only being I can wish to kill. I can wish to kill only an existent absolutely independent, which exceeds my powers infinitely.' (Part II, Section D)
Contemporary Relevance
Levinas's ethics has acquired enormous practical relevance in contexts where the other's face is most pressing: immigration and refugee ethics, biomedical practice, restorative justice, and the ethics of artificial intelligence (can a machine have a face?). His insistence that the commandment 'thou shalt not kill' is encountered before philosophy - in the face of the other - provides a foundation for moral obligation that is independent of any particular religious tradition, though it is deeply rooted in the Jewish and Christian reading of Leviticus 19 and Exodus 33. The dialogue between Levinas's philosophical ethics and the biblical tradition of neighbor-love remains one of the most productive sites of contemporary philosophical theology.