"Here I Am." A Call for Ethics in Hebrew Emmanual Levinas's Ethical/ Political Thought through the Lens of Hebraic Transcendence

Date of Award

2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Flakne, April

Keywords

Emmanuel Levinas, Hebraic, Ethics, Ontology, Talmud, Philosphy

Area of Concentration

Philosophy

Abstract

This thesis undertakes an analysis of Levinas�s thought, as it specifically relates to his ethical/political formulations. I attempt to defend the idea that Levinas's first and last thoughts are political, that his ethics were inspired by a political reality, and will find their concretization in the political. I argue that the Holocaust, representing the dead end of political ontology, incited Levinas towards what he located as �otherwise than being.� He found what was otherwise to Western ontology in the �Hebrew,� whose texts teach an ethics that is based upon the being of the other. Levinas then uses the �Hebrew� ethic, in contrast with �Greek� ontologizing, to describe a fundamental ethic that places knowing before doing. Yet, Levinas desires to make the movement from an-archical ethics of the other to that of the Third, or a political realm that is mediated by Justice, rather than ethics alone. Levinas introduces the state of Israel as the political manifestation of the �Hebrew� and I examine the question of whether the state's construction as that which is both ethical and political is sustainable given the ever-present oscillation between ethics and politics.�

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