Ciężar zła – cierpienie, a odpowiedzialność w filozofii Emmanuela Levinasa

• Authors: Kamiński Łukasz

Title variants

EN

The weight of evil: sufferring and responsibility in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

This text is an attempt at interpreting the main elements of Levinas’s philosophy in the context of evil. I try to show what evil is and what meaning it has in Levinasian ethics. For Levinas and for other contemporary thinkers, the main point of reference in ethical considerations was the Holocaust. After surviving these horrible events, the author of Totality and Infinity kept asking the question: Are we deceived by morality? Levinas points out both the temptation of theodicy and its collapse. The temptation of theodicy in its general shape refers to the negation or justification of evil, especially when it comes to the suffering of the Other. Behind the justification there is always the threat of the kind of moral indifference which supports the distribution and production of evil. In fact, Levinas’s entire philosophy may be treated as an ethical response to evil, achieved by providing an explication of responsibility as the primal ethical structure. Against this background, I provide a characterisation of evil based on the Levinasian considerations about pain. The key concept of this text is the relationship between evil and being and the formation of the self. Another important issue is the question of linking evil with responsibility and one’s relation with the Other. The main theses of the article are: Evil meant as useless suffering contained in the very structures of being, and also Evil as a phenomenon which designates the domain of ethics.

Keywords

EN

evil; ethics; theodicy; suffering; egoism; responsibility

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Umiejętności / Uniwersytet Jagielloński
• Journal: Kwartalnik Filozoficzny
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 49
• Issue: 1-4
• Pages: 95-118

Contributors

author

Kamiński Łukasz

• Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Instytut Filozofii, ul. Grodzka 52, 31 - 044 Kraków, Poland