Emmanuel Levinas and the Value of Life

Abstract

The author sets out from the insight that, at least indirectly, the value of life is one of the fundamental values of the whole of Levinas’s ethics. Therefore, the article analyzes the possible connection between the undeniable dignity of the life of the other and of his face and Levinas’s indirect and direct experience of the Holocaust and the resulting guilt of the survivor. The author finds arguments in support of this hypothesis not only in the biographical details of Levinas’s life, but also in the key pages of his main work, Totality and the Infinity, as well as in his later works. Based on the arguments presented, the author concludes that, in the background of the fundamental ideas of Levinas’s ethics, lies the hypothesis of the guilt of the survivor and that it cannot be ruled out.