Levi ben Gershom See GERSONIDES. Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–95), Lithuanian-born French philosopher. Educated as an orthodox Jew and a Russian citizen, he studied philosophy at Strasbourg (1924–29) and Freiburg (1928– 29), introduced the work of Husserl and Heidegger in France, taught philosophy at a Jewish school in Paris, spent four years in a German labor camp (1940–44), and was a professor at the universities of Poitiers, Nanterre, and the Sorbonne. To the impersonal totality of being reduced to ‘the same’ by the Western tradition (including Hegel’s and Husserl’s idealism and Heidegger’s ontology), Levinas opposes the irreducible otherness of the human other, death, time, God, etc. In Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (1961), he shows how the other’s facing and speaking urge philosophy to transcend the horizons of comprehension, while Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974) concentrates on the self of ‘me’ as one-for-the-other. Appealing to Plato’s form of the Good and Descartes’s idea of the infinite, Levinas describes the asymmetrical relation between the other’s ‘highness’ or ‘infinity’ and me, whose self-enjoyment is thus interrupted by a basic imperative: Do not kill me, but help me to live! The fact of the other’s existence immediately reveals the basic ‘ought’ of ethics; it awakens me to a responsibility that I have never been able to choose or to refuse. My radical ‘passivity,’ thus revealed, shows the anachronic character of human temporality. It also refers to the immemorial past of ‘Him’ whose ‘illeity’ is still otherwise other than the human other: God, or the Good itself, who is neither an object nor a you. Religion and ethics coincide because the only way to meet with God is to practice one’s responsibility for the human other, who is ‘in the trace of God.’ Comprehensive thematization and systematic objectification, though always in danger of reducing all otherness, have their own relative and subordinate truth, especially with regard to the economic and political conditions of universal justice toward all individuals whom I cannot encounter personally. With and through the other I meet all humans. In this experience lies the origin of equality and human rights. Similarly, theoretical thematization has a positive role if it remains aware of its ancillary or angelic role with regard to concern for the other. What is said in philosophy betrays the saying by which it is communicated. It must therefore be unsaid in a return to the saying. More than desire for theoretical wisdom, philosophy is the wisdom of love.
See also HEIDEGGER , HUSSER. A.T.P. Lewin, Kurt (1890–1947), German and American (after 1932) psychologist, perhaps the most influential of the Gestalt psychologists in the United States. Believing traditional psychology was stuck in an ‘Aristotelian’ class-logic stage of theorizing, Lewin proposed advancing to a ‘Galilean’ stage of field theory. His central field concept was the ‘life space, containing the person and his psychological environment.’ Primarily concerned with motivation, he explained locomotion as caused by life-space objects’ valences, psychological vectors of force acting on people as physical vectors of force act on physical objects. Objects with positive valence exert attractive force; objects with negative valence exert repulsive force; ambivalent objects exert both. To attain theoretical rigor, Lewin borrowed from mathematical topology, mapping life spaces as diagrams. For example, this represented the motivational conflict involved in choosing between pizza and hamburger: Life spaces frequently contain psychological barriers (e.g., no money) blocking movement toward or away from a valenced object. Lewin also created the important field of group dynamics in 1939, carrying out innovative studies on children and adults, focusing on group cohesion and effects of leadership style. His main works are A Dynamic Theory of Personality (1935), Principles of Topological Psychology (1936), and Field Theory in Social Science (1951). See also KÖHLER, MOTIVATIONAL EXPLANATIO. T.H.L.