Emmanuel Levinas trained under both Husserl and Heidegger and then turned phenomenology's own method against an assumption both men shared, that philosophy properly begins with a solitary consciousness making sense of its world. Levinas argued that the most basic human experience is not a self encountering objects but a self encountering another person, and that this encounter, given phenomenological attention rather than assumed away, does not present the other person as one more object for consciousness to constitute at all. The face of another person, in Levinas's technical use of the term, resists being reduced to a concept or a category; it makes a demand, do not kill me, before any reasoning about rights or duties gets underway to justify that demand, and Levinas concluded from this that ethics, not epistemology or ontology, is first philosophy, prior to any question about what exists or how we know it. He read this structure as carrying a trace of the divine that formal theology could not capture directly, an infinity glimpsed in the finite face of another person, a transcendence that shows up in ethical obligation rather than in mystical experience or philosophical proof. Levinas, a Jewish philosopher who lost family in the Holocaust and spent the war in a German prisoner of war camp, developed this account specifically against systems, Heidegger's included, that he judged capable of subordinating the individual other person to a larger totality, a history, a nation or a system of Being.