I. Five Years in the Stalag

June 1940. Rennes, France.

The French defense was collapsing.

One of the French army’s interpreters was thirty-four and wore glasses. He spoke several languages: a Lithuanian-born Jew who had become a French citizen in 1931.

His name was Emmanuel Levinas.

The Germans captured him as a French soldier. He was later held in Germany under Stalag XI-B. POW status provided a crucial layer of protection, not a universal guarantee: the Nazis segregated, humiliated, and exploited Jewish prisoners, and treatment varied drastically with nationality. In his case, that status helped keep him from the deportation and extermination inflicted on civilian Jews.

Meanwhile, another fate overtook his relatives in Lithuania.

His father. His mother. His two brothers. All were murdered in the Holocaust. After the German occupation in 1941, Lithuania’s Jews suffered mass shootings. The Kovno ghetto endured massacres, forced labor, and deportations until its final destruction in 1944.

Levinas was cut off in captivity. He performed forced labor, including forestry work. Jewish prisoners were set apart. The gaze of those around them could treat living human beings as though they were not human at all. The system had left him alive; it had not thereby respected his full dignity.

He was held there for five years.

Almost five years. Some eighteen hundred days and nights.

Through those days he continued reading, Proust as well as philosophy, and filling notebooks. The captivity notebooks were eventually published separately. Thinking developed during imprisonment also entered Existence and Existents in 1947. It was not his first book: his doctoral study of Husserl had appeared in 1930.

The path ran from his prewar reflections on Hitlerism through captivity and onward after the war. Experience did not hand him a ready-made answer. It made certain questions impossible to put aside.

But the question that gradually became clearer can be put this way—

A powerful strand of Western philosophy had placed the question of being at the center. From the Greeks to Heidegger, understanding the world and human existence could appear to be the condition for asking anything else. Levinas had been trained within that tradition.

This appears to be the highest question of philosophy.

Levinas would ask whether something had already happened before I began to understand you.

I do not yet know who you are. I have not classified you. But you are already here. What responsibility do I have toward you? Can that question wait until my knowledge is complete?

Being is not the center. The other is the center.

This does not mean that studying being inevitably produces Nazism, or that Western philosophy as a whole ordered the murders. Levinas challenges a different confidence: the belief that, once I have explained the world, other people can safely be accommodated inside my explanation. If someone can appear only as a part of my world, where can that person challenge it?

His subsequent work repeatedly brought philosophy back to that question.

II. Home

May 1945. Germany surrendered.

Levinas emerged from five years of captivity. He was thirty-nine.

Freedom returned. The life he had known did not simply return with it.

Where was home?

Kaunas was the city of his childhood. It had undergone Soviet occupation, German occupation, segregation, shootings, and deportations. The Seventh Fort, the Ninth Fort: places around a city had become sites of mass death.

His father. His mother. His two younger brothers.

Those particular people would not return. People who could once speak to him could no longer answer. A city can be rebuilt, its streets inhabited again. The person who knew him as a child does not thereby resume a place at the table.

His wife Raïssa and their daughter Simone survived. His friend, the writer Maurice Blanchot, helped them evade persecution; their daughter also found shelter in a convent. Their survival was not an abstract system functioning automatically. People had reached out under dangerous circumstances.

Levinas returned to Paris. He saw his wife and daughter again.

He had lost the closest members of his childhood family. He also resumed life with his wife and daughter, and later had a son. The new daily life did not compensate for the old loss. Mourning and carrying on could happen together.

He later wrote about captivity. In “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” Bobby greets the prisoners: where surrounding people withhold recognition, an animal approaches them affectionately. Human dignity is no longer only a solemn phrase. It also appears in a greeting withheld by people and offered by a dog.

But recollection was not all he did.

From Existence and Existents through Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence in 1974, his thinking kept changing. The dedication of the last of these remembers his murdered loved ones among the six million Jewish dead and the other victims of hatred.

Those closest to him were not swallowed by the total count of humanity.

The dedication also preserves family names in Hebrew. Before a number in the millions, almost impossible to imagine, names keep particular, irreplaceable people present.

Here mourning and philosophy meet. The point is not to turn his parents and brothers into material for an argument. It is to prevent philosophy, while discussing humanity, from losing the person who once lived.

An argument cannot bring back the dead or guarantee an end to future violence. It can ask, when someone announces that a person is expendable: what gives you that authority? Before your objective, before your calculation, this person was already not yours.

He spent more than forty years writing this argument out.

III. The Face

The central concept of Levinas's philosophy is the face — visage in his French.

It is not the sum of a person’s features, nor a technique of staring into someone’s eyes for a few seconds. It names the way another person presents themselves and makes a claim upon me.

A person can be observed and described without becoming an accessory to the description. They can address me; they can interrupt my conclusions about them.

This is hard to put clearly, because it is so basic that there are no more basic things to explain it from.

Let us try.

You see a stranger. Age, clothes, expression, a guess about his work: information is quickly filed. A man in his thirties, apparently waiting for the subway. Classification is not necessarily wrong. The question is whether you now believe there is nothing about him beyond your file.

But —

Perhaps he asks for help. Perhaps he rejects your judgment. Perhaps you pause and recognize that your categories cannot substitute for him. This is an entry into the idea of the face, not a psychological experiment guaranteed to produce an effect.

That person is himself.

A man in his thirties may be a correct description, but it is not the whole person. A doctor needs age, medical history, test results. Needing those records does not mean that nothing but records is lying in the bed.

What is the real him?

An existence that cannot be fully described by your language. An existence with his own interior life, his own past and future, his own pains and joys, his own present experience — an existence like yours, but not yours.

The "not yours" is the key.

He is not your extension. He is not your object. He is not your tool. He is not something you can pick up and use.

He is himself.

Levinas says: this fact, that he is himself, shows itself to you through the face.

Not simply endorsing respect for everyone in the abstract, but finding my freedom called into question before a particular person. They do not first have to prove themselves useful, lovable, or clever in order to have a claim against being destroyed. Levinas concentrates that demand into a command—

Thou shalt not kill me.

It is an ethical demand, not a sound made by facial muscles.

Infants, old people, strangers, enemies, people I love: my preference does not decide whether they count. Someone who cannot see, speak, or return my gaze is not thereby faceless. Eye contact and cognitive performance are not entrance examinations.

Yet people can murder people they know.

Enemy, heretic, obstacle, collateral damage: labels can help people evade the life before them. Propaganda, orders, and distance can make harm easier. But it does not follow that every murderer failed to see the victim’s face.

The face is not bulletproof.

The resistance Levinas describes is precisely not a force greater than the gun. A vulnerable person may be unable to stop me, yet still calls my violence into question. You ought not does not become you may merely because I can.

Levinas turns this around:

Ethics cannot start only with a self-sufficient rulebook and then find somewhere to place the person before us. It must keep rules answerable to that person.

The other is not an extra considered after the system has finished operating.

This does not abolish law, rights, or institutions. Beyond the person before me there is a third person, and others equally in need of protection. Conflicting claims and limited resources still require public judgment. The face reminds us whom judgment is for; it does not release us from judging.

This is why Levinas says ethics is first philosophy.

Knowledge is not useless. It simply cannot authorize unlimited power over another person. This priority is ethical, not a timetable asserting that everyone first experiences encounter and only afterward learns to think.

IV. Heidegger

In 1928 and 1929, Levinas was at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

He was twenty-two and had studied philosophy in Strasbourg. He came to Freiburg to learn phenomenology from Husserl. There, a philosopher seventeen years his senior was changing the direction of the subject.

His name was Martin Heidegger.

Levinas attended his lectures and read Being and Time, published in 1927. Its effect on him was profound. It was not merely a doctrine to put on a shelf: it changed the way he thought about living in the world, time, and death.

Back in France, he became an important interpreter of Husserl and Heidegger. Through writing and translation, he brought that path of thought into French philosophical debate.

Then, in 1933, something happened.

May 27 of that year. The rectoral address at the University of Freiburg.

Heidegger stood at the lectern.

He had joined the Nazi Party on May 1.

He delivered his rectoral address, The Self-Assertion of the German University (Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität). He spoke with learning. He cited Greek words. He spoke of knowledge service, labor service, defense service — the "three services." He said the German university was to serve the destiny of the German people.

An important philosopher was publicly lending his authority to the Nazi regime.

What happened in that moment?

Let us use this series’ bridge to imagine that choice. The road that follows is not a record of his inner deliberations.

The far end of the bridge has always been distant. Kant stands there. But the bridge is not the only direction. Across from the bridge, there is also a road. On that road, too, people are walking.

On the road outside the bridge, people turn difference into an obstacle and elimination into a solution. They may claim to defend a faith, obey orders, or fulfill history. However grand the justification, it cannot answer on behalf of those they injure.

The road leads toward a place where anyone can be reduced to a means. Other people have not literally vanished. What is vanishing is the willingness to acknowledge: you are not merely my tool, my obstacle, something I can remove.

That place is called the kingdom of means.

There, relations increasingly take the form of use, command, and removal. Those who take that road may themselves be consumed by its power. But no automatic justice is at work: perpetrators can escape, and innocence does not protect victims from suffering.

We picture that deterioration of shared life as weather.

It is a storm that is always falling.

Heidegger was walking, and he stopped.

He had read Kant and could explain difficult philosophy. Human dignity was not an idea he had never encountered. Knowledge did not take the necessary step for him.

He paused.

On that road there was a man with his right arm raised, gesturing for him to come over quickly.

The figure has no particular name. He represents a recurring invitation: join us and stop listening to the inconvenient people. The arm is held high, as though pointing out a road without hesitation.

Heidegger stood between that man with the raised arm, and the bridge.

He hesitated.

He knew particular Jewish people. His teacher Husserl and his student Levinas were not an abstract set of terms in a book.

Knowing them still did not prevent his public choice.

In the imagined scene, the arm rises.

We do not know whether the real man hesitated in this way. We know what he joined.

Returning to the record: Heidegger resigned the rectorship in 1934 without leaving the Nazi Party. After the war he gave no adequate public reckoning with his political responsibility. The dedication to Husserl disappeared from the 1941 edition of Being and Time. Intellectual inheritance and political choice did not automatically keep pointing in the same direction.

His Black Notebooks — his private philosophical journals, made public only beginning in 2014 — contain structural antisemitic statements. Not the temporary remarks of a man swept up by his time. Considered positions, thought through.

Here we have to do something difficult.

We have to acknowledge that both things are true.

First: Heidegger made major philosophical contributions. Being and Time transformed many twentieth-century debates; his writing on technology, language, and truth remains influential. This does not make every proposition true, still less allow intellectual achievement to offset political responsibility.

Second: his Nazi commitment was real. Party membership, the rectoral address, and antisemitic thinking in his notebooks cannot be erased by saying that those were the times.

Both things are true. Both things happened in this one man. This is his fate.

That choice can and should be judged. Public actions injure others; they are not merely a private path.

Judging someone’s actions does not require reducing the person to a single word. Acknowledging their thought does not require their victims to forgive them.

The storm outside the bridge pictures a kind of relation in which anyone can become disposable. Actual victims bore something much heavier than a metaphor. Their suffering must not be rewritten as a drama inside a philosopher’s mind.

This is his choice. This is the weather of that storm.

And Levinas — that Jewish student who in 1928 had sat in Heidegger's seminar, listening attentively, full of admiration — would spend his whole life of philosophical work answering this choice.

He criticized Heidegger while continuing to work under the pressure of his questions. This was not simply a change of signpost. He asked after something that road of thought had not adequately accommodated.

Heidegger asks about the meaning of being. Levinas places the ethical claim of the other before that inquiry.

In the first inquiry, my situation, possibilities, and finitude are central. Levinas does not simply deny them. He asks whether I can understand another person solely by starting from myself.

Confronting my death and being troubled by another person’s death are not the same experience. Levinas brings in the weight of the second: not only how I shall die, but what the other’s death has to do with me.

It is not a mechanical reversal of every proposition.

Nor does placing being at the center inevitably produce a Nazi choice. Levinas poses a severe question to philosophy: how can a profound body of thought still fail to prevent someone from abandoning the other?

His response is to move philosophy’s center of gravity. Thought cannot guarantee goodness, but it must remain answerable to ethics.

Move to where? Move to the face of the other.

V. Infinite Responsibility

Levinas's ethics has a feature that, at first hearing, sounds excessive —

He says the responsibility the other puts on me is infinite.

Not "reasonable" responsibility. Not "responsibility within your capacity." Not "proportional" responsibility. Infinite.

What does infinite responsibility mean?

When you see the face of an other, what that face asks of you cannot be "completed" by any specific response. You give the hungry one food. You point the lost one in the right direction. You care for the sick one. These are responses, all good. But none of them "completes" what that face is asking of you.

After you have done all that you can do, you still owe.

It sounds excessive, even frightening. Levinas does not make responsibility easy; he uses language as severe as hostage. We need not pretend that the position is uncontroversial.

What he first refuses is responsibility understood as a contract that takes effect only after the other person signs. When someone asks for help, I cannot first demand proof that they will repay me with an equivalent service.

Nor does one act of help purchase a permanent declaration that I have paid in full. This is not an infinite invoice deduced from someone’s complexity. It means that the other’s claim cannot be conclusively settled by my satisfaction with myself.

This is what infinite means.

Not that you must achieve perfection. Not that if you fail you are a sinner. The structure of the demand itself is open. It does not close.

What I can actually do must nevertheless return to circumstances. Carers need rest. A person being harmed can leave. Someone may need to protect themselves and their children. Such boundaries do not cancel the other into an It.

Levinas himself speaks of the third party. There are not only two of us. Another person needs help and may be suffering at the hands of the person before me. Responsibility therefore requires comparison, justice, law, and institutions—not unlimited compliance with one individual’s demands.

A ward has one empty bed. Seeing one person first cannot consign everyone else outside forever. Allocation needs rules; the rules must not turn the patient into nothing but a number.

The tension does not readily disappear: irreplaceable people, and public decisions that nevertheless have to be made.

Levinas makes it harder to end the question with all procedures were followed. That is his force. We also have reason to ask how infinite responsibility can avoid becoming infinite extraction from those most willing to care.

A bridge is not a place where one person is crushed to give another somewhere to stand. Making room for the other must also reckon with the presence of many others.

Infinite responsibility is not a badge of moral superiority. It leaves a question that cannot be conveniently switched off.

VI. Judaism

Levinas did not only read philosophy. All his life he also read the Talmud.

The Talmud includes the Mishnah and discussions around it: law, stories, interpretation, and argument. It is not an endless commentary that never decides anything. It judges, while also preserving many dissenting opinions.

From 1960 onward, Levinas delivered Talmudic readings at gatherings of French Jewish intellectuals. The work continued over many years and was collected in several books.

What does the Talmud have to do with his philosophy?

For him, reading was not merely converting an ancient sentence into a contemporary slogan. Another interpreter’s voice could interrupt my certainty.

Some discussions preserve views that did not become the accepted ruling. Later readers can see the objections a conclusion had to face. Reaching a decision is not the same as deleting disagreement from memory.

We can hear an ethical practice in that kind of reading.

I have an interpretation, but another person’s question remains present. It need not make me abandon judgment; it may make me state it more carefully. All voices added together do not automatically equal truth. My voice simply does not monopolize the last word.

That differs from making disagreement disappear. It does not make an entire tradition a perfect world without authority, exclusion, or final rulings. Respect for a tradition includes refusing to invent its perfection.

Diaspora, persecution, and minority life are central experiences in Jewish history. They make the need for safety urgent. They do not guarantee that any people will never harm others. Those who have suffered also have to ask how to act when they acquire power.

Levinas supported Israel. The relation between his philosophy and particular political judgments was not always smooth.

In a radio interview after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, he was asked whether the Palestinian was precisely the Israeli’s other. His response turned toward enemies, people who injure others, and judgments of justice. The answer has provoked lasting criticism and dispute. It cannot be rewritten as an untroubled universal embrace.

Nor should we claim that he declared a people inherently faceless. The difficulty is sharper: when a particular person is identified as an enemy, how much of the irreducible demand survives political judgment?

We can keep reading him with that question open, rather than assuming that writing about the face proves he saw it fully in every situation. A great philosophy must face the test it sets for others.

Make room for someone unlike yourself, especially when you have the power to injure them. That demand addresses the writer as well as the reader.

VII. The Kingdom of Ends

Let us say something now.

This is something we have not said directly in the previous three essays, because the timing was not yet right. We have let one figure stand always at the far end of the bridge, but we have not said what the place where he stands is called.

Now we will.

That place is called the kingdom of ends.

Kant developed the concept in his Groundwork of 1785: rational beings joined through common laws, each treated also as an end, never merely as a means. Duties and rules are not abolished. The question is what laws could deserve to be shared.

Treat every person always as an end. Never merely as a means.

In this kingdom of ends, people still cooperate, help, and serve one another. What is rejected is not every useful relation, but reducing someone’s entire standing to their usefulness to me.

It is not a description of an existing state or a timetable history is guaranteed to follow. It gives us a direction for judging reality: the more efficient an institution becomes, the more we should ask whom it treats as someone who can be omitted.

The professor who lived in Königsberg left that direction in philosophy. We place him at the far end of the bridge not to make every later thinker report to him, but to let each life cast light on the question.

The marker he placed there has stood, for over two centuries, in the distance.

The 108 lives in Great Lives span many ages. Hypatia, Aquinas, and Bergson approach from different places: learning among different faiths, thought acknowledging its limits, a person responding to persecution. None needs to have done everything perfectly. They do not belong to a single doctrine.

Levinas gives that question a weight we cannot easily put aside.

Kant asks that I never treat a person merely as a means. Levinas asks what the person I have not yet understood is already demanding of me.

They can illuminate one another without becoming the same statement.

Kant emphasizes autonomy, universal law, and the shared legislation of rational agents. Levinas’s infinite responsibility refuses to make you owe me equally a precondition of my response. That asymmetry cannot be erased.

One reminds us that no one should be governed by another’s arbitrary will; the other interrupts our self-sufficiency, reminding us that responsibility does not always begin with my prior consent. The disagreement remains with us.

Placing them on one bridge is this series’ interpretive comparison, not an equation in the history of philosophy.

The shared direction that concerns us is this: one person’s life cannot be exhaustively arranged around another’s purposes.

That place has its own weather — not a storm. Clear sky and gentle wind.

There will still be illness, death, loss, conflicting interests, and difficult decisions. Making room for one another does not ensure that no one gets hurt. It means that when harm occurs, the other can still refuse, and routes to correction and accountability remain open.

Such weather is not a reward earned by good conduct. It pictures conditions of life we hope to make together.

If everyone asks only what use are you, the air grows narrower. If someone can say I do not want to live this way without losing the right to be heard, a little space opens.

This is the weather of an essay, not a climatic law guaranteeing that history improves.

Kant writes of ends and laws; Levinas of the face and responsibility. We borrow wind and rain to bring the question back into the felt world of daily life.

Each generation says the same thing in its own language, because each generation needs to hear it again.

VIII. The Bridge

We return to the imagined bridge. It was night when Levinas approached.

He was not tall. He wore glasses and a dark suit. We let him approach with the quiet of old age. So many faces had passed before him; seeing was still not something he considered finished.

He reached the middle of the bridge.

Hypatia was there, still holding her astrolabe. Aquinas stood across from her, empty-handed. Bergson leaned on a stick and nodded.

Levinas nodded back to Bergson. Then to Hypatia, then to Aquinas. He did not approach closely. He found a place in the middle of the bridge and stood.

At the far end of the bridge, Kant was standing. Tonight Kant was a little clearer than before — you could see his outline, his approximate figure. He still did not come over. He would not come over. But he was there.

On the other side of the bridge — on that road across from the bridge — you could see a sky that had darkened. Lightning.

There were people on that road, walking.

The ones walking fastest were already out of sight — they had gone too far, deep into the storm.

Closer in, on that road, you could see a man in a professor's robe, who would stop, then walk, then stop again. He did not look toward the bridge.

That man was Heidegger.

A figure on the road raised an arm, beckoning him onward. In the darkness there was no name to read, only the movement urging someone to join.

Heidegger stood between the man with the raised arm and the bridge.

He hesitated.

He looked over at Levinas.

Levinas stood in the middle. He had not canceled Heidegger’s responsibility or declared him no longer human. The bridge could leave room for a renewed response to others; it could not require victims to bring him back, much less forgive him first.

Heidegger looked at Levinas for several seconds.

Then he turned back. He walked toward the man with the raised arm.

He walked a little slowly. He hesitated with each step. But he was walking.

The storm was falling on that road. The rain had already begun to fall on him.

Levinas did not call out his name. Levinas did not turn away either. Levinas only watched.

Aquinas walked over from the other side and came to stand beside Levinas. He said nothing. The two of them looked in Heidegger's direction. Neither of them called out to him.

Hypatia also looked over once. The angle of the astrolabe in her hand did not change.

Bergson stood a little closer. He too looked toward Heidegger, neither nodding nor shaking his head. The rain continued. No one treated another person’s choice as a clock whose hands he could adjust.

The middle of the bridge was quiet for a moment.

Then Levinas turned back. The astrolabe in Hypatia's hand caught the moonlight in the wind. The moonlight was mild.

At the far end of the bridge — where Kant stood — the wind was blowing. A mild wind, slow.

On the other side of the bridge — on that road — the storm was falling.

In the middle, the wind was quieter; the moonlight was gentle.

Levinas reached Hypatia and stood beside her. He said something to her — perhaps in Hebrew, perhaps in Greek, perhaps in some language only the two of them could understand. Hypatia gave a small smile. She tilted the astrolabe so that the moonlight fell more precisely across the markings.

Aquinas, on the other side, said something quietly — in Latin. Bergson caught half of it and answered in French.

The figure who had always been looking into the distance, the one at the far end of the bridge, looked at Hypatia, at Aquinas, at Bergson.

This time he was looking at Levinas.

Levinas noticed and looked back. Their eyes met briefly. Neither became an accessory to the other.

The figure at the far end nodded, lightly.

Levinas nodded, lightly.

Then both of them turned back to their own directions — Kant continuing to look into the distance, Levinas continuing to look at the middle of the bridge.

Heidegger, on that road, was walking further away. The storm was still falling there. The moonlight on the bridge was still mild.

Levinas stood there. His parents and brothers had not returned. His wife and daughter had survived the war; life had continued, bringing further losses in old age. Writing, teaching, and reading scripture had not removed the storm from the world. Nobody on this bridge had arrived only after completing everything.

What he faced was infinite — he knew.

What he did was finite. He did not use that finitude to silence the call from across the way.^[1][2][3]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives