During the German invasion of France in 1940, Levinas was reactivated with his military unit, which was quickly surrounded and forced to surrender. Initially sent to a prisoner of war camp in France, he was soon transferred to a camp on German soil near Hannover, where he remained until the end of the war.
Although protected by the Third Geneva Convention from deportation to a concentration camp, Levinas was segregated in special barracks for Jewish prisoners, who were forbidden any forms of religious worship. Life in the camp was as difficult as might be expected, ...
After the war, Levinas became a leading thinker in France, emerging from the circle of intellectuals surrounding Jean Wahl. His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas' terms, he argues "ethics as first philosophy." For Levinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics (called ontology by Levinas). Levinas prefers to think of philosophy as the 'knowledge of love' rather than the love of knowledge. In his arrangement, ethics become an entity independent of s ...
