In a certain respect, one can say that Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, as asserted mainly in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, but also partially in Existence and Existents and Time and the Other, constitutes a rebuttal of Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics. Levinas offers a succinct account of his thinking on this issue in Totality and Infinity, at the end of a section called “Separation and the Absolute,” which concludes the first part of the book “The Self and the Other”: “Thought and freedom come to us from separation from the consideration of the Other — this thesis is at the antipodes of Spinozism” (TI 105). In all likelihood,what has provoked him at such a moment would have to be Spinoza’s pretense to reach the infinite by means of understanding, while for him, Levinas, the essence of created existence consists in its separation from the Infinite (in other words, as especially his later philosophy begins to make clear, from “God”). Let us nonetheless begin with the question itself: Why this intolerance toward Spinoza?

Discussions of the sources for Levinas’s philosophy have tended to focus on Greece and the Bible to the neglect of his Russo-Lithuanian cultural heritage. Almost no work has been done examining the impact of Russian literature on Levinas’s thinking. The present essay seeks to overcome this neglect by examining the influence that Dostoyevsky in particular exerted on the development of Levinas’s philosophy. I am aware that the notion of “influence” is philosophically vague, and not something whose truth can easily be ascertained. Might there be nothing more than simply a confluence between the thinking of Dostoyevsky and that of Levinas? Could it be that Levinas was attracted to the work of Dostoyevsky because he found there what he was already looking for? Although Levinas credits Dostoyevsky with introducing him to philosophy, it would be facile to draw the conclusion that St. Petersburg occupies as important a place in Levinas’s intellectual itinerary as Athens or Jerusalem. Dostoyevsky provided neither an ontology nor any of the “pre-philosophical experiences” (EI 24) on which, according to Levinas, all philosophical thought rests. But he did give Levinas a way to think about art, religion, and, most importantly of all, ethics after the Holocaust, an event that more than any other, according to Levinas, demonstrated the absolute failure of philosophical theodicy. It was Dostoyevsky, I submit, rather than the Bible, the Greeks, or Kant who taught Levinas that the moral imperative, addressed to the singular existing individual, supersedes the religious imperative, whose validity is placed in question by the suffering of innocents and the absence of the all-powerful and providential God of theism.