Out of Control

Richard A. Cohen

Description

After the end of superstitious religion, what is the meaning of the world? Baruch Spinoza's answer is truth, Emmanuel Levinas's is goodness: science versus ethics. In Out of Control, Richard A. Cohen brings this debate to life, providing a nuanced exposition of Spinoza and Levinas and the confrontations between them in ethics, politics, science, and religion.

Spinoza is the control, the inexorable defensive logic of administrative rationality, where freedom is equated to necessity—a seventeenth-century glimpse of Orwellian doublespeak and Big Brother. Levinas is the way out: transcendence not of God, being, and logic but of the other person experienced as moral obligation. To alleviate the suffering of others—nothing is more important! Spinoza wagers everything on mathematical truth, discarding the rest as ignorance and illusion; for Levinas, nothing surpasses the priorities of morality and justice, to create a world in which humans can be human and not numbers or consumers, drudges or robots.

Situating these two thinkers in today's context, Out of Control responds to the fear of dehumanization in a world flattened by the alliance of positivism and plutocracy. It offers a nonideological ethical alternative, a way out and up, in the nobility of one human being helping another, and the solidarity that moves from morality to justice.
Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction

1. Levinas, Spinozism, Nietzsche, and the Body

2. Prophetic Speech in Levinas and Spinoza (and Maimonides)

3. Levinas and Spinoza: To Love God for Nothing

4. Levinas and Spinoza: Justice and the State

5. Spinoza’s Prince: For Whom Is the Theological-Political Treatise Written?

6. Levinas on Spinoza’s Misunderstanding of Judaism

7. Thinking Least about Death: Mortality and Morality in Spinoza, Heidegger, and Levinas

8. Spinoza’s Spleen: “Babies, Fools, and Madmen”

Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophie de la religion
• Philosophy of religion
• Judaism
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438461113
• Langue: English

Extrait

Out of Control
SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Thought
——————
Richard A. Cohen, editor
Out of Control
Confrontations between Spinoza and Levinas
Richard A. Cohen
Cover photograph, “Stairs on Pylimo Street in the Year 2015,” by Jolanta Saldukaityte, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2015
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohen, Richard A., 1950– author.
Out of control : confrontations between Spinoza and Levinas / Richard A. Cohen.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary Jewish thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-6109-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-6111-3 (e-book)
1. Jewish philosophy. 2. Philosophy, Modern. 3. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677. 4. Lévinas, Emmanuel. I. Title. B5800.C65 2015 199'.492—dc23 2015030785
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
If anyone were to say that I could not have done what I thought proper if I had not bones and sinews and other things that I have, he would be right. But to say that those things are the cause of my doing what I do, and that I act with intelligence but not from the choice of what is best, would be an extremely careless way of talking. Whoever talks in that way is unable to make a distinction and to see that in reality a cause is one thing, and the thing without which the cause could never be a cause is quite another thing.
—Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedo (99a–b)
Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them, is truly impious.
—Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus
Comprehending God as the one substance outraged the age in which this definition was proclaimed. … this was due to the instinctive recognition that self-consciousness was only drowned in it and not preserved.
—Hegel, preface to Phenomenology of Spirit
To love a person is to help that person. … If he becomes so wise that he overcomes his nature and neither loves nor hates, he is no longer a man but a flint-stone.
—Samuel David Luzzatto
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter One
Levinas, Spinozism, Nietzsche, and the Body
Chapter Two
Prophetic Speech in Levinas and Spinoza (and Maimonides)
Chapter Three
Levinas and Spinoza: To Love God for Nothing
Chapter Four
Levinas and Spinoza: Justice and the State
Chapter Five
Spinoza’s Prince: For Whom Is the Theological-Political Treatise Written?
Chapter Six
Levinas on Spinoza’s Misunderstanding of Judaism
Chapter Seven
Thinking Least about Death: Mortality and Morality in Spinoza, Heidegger, and Levinas
Chapter Eight
Spinoza’s Spleen: “Babies, Fools, and Madmen”
Works Cited
Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
W hat are the origins of this book? Can they be traced, disentangled, or even identified? Surely, it has little to do with the Latin I barely studied in junior high! Or the French I later did learn. But who knows? Beyond the unilluminating truism that one’s entire life stands behind the present moment, I can say that the volume at hand is the labor of several decades. Not the exclusive labor but an ever-present one. A long germination, a long growth, with fruits from several seasons. Let me start its story with my encounter with philosophy proper.
My initiation and apprenticeship in philosophy began in the long 1960s, when I was an undergraduate. Three initiations. One, a first book—to discover novel thoughts, novel arguments, the work of reason, the discovery of this strange unexpected discipline “philosophy” in a philosophy book, a philosopher’s book. For me it was Bergson’s Time and Free Will. What a propitious beginning! I remain convinced of Bergson’s genius to this day. Two, the happy chance of tutelage in a university department of philosophy not only bearing the name “philosophy,” as if a label could guarantee anything in this regard, but comprised of the real thing, vigilant and intelligent souls, seekers in the heights and depths, lovers of wisdom, professors dedicated in all seriousness to the grand tradition of philosophy, from the Argonauts of old to the most contemporary French and German explorers. Penn State, what a happy chance for me that its philosophy department—assembled by John Anderson—was just at that time one of the very best in America, faithful still to the Western heritage of perennial questions, questionable and fundamental questions with no answers, or too many. Three, and no less fortuitous, a teacher—noble calling—and not only a scholar, someone whose wide erudition and high intelligence nourished a philosophical life, ideas tested beyond the web of mere logic, faced deeply, intensely, experimentally, personally, with the whole of his being. Alphonso Lingis—whatever his ideas, here came inspiration. Here I learned of the philosopher not a profession or career, but the more dangerous and rewarding calling of a vocation, the philosopher as free variable. Of course, too, it was also because of Lingis that I encountered so early the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. It changed my life to this day. Perhaps only then did my true apprenticeship begin. For these initiations, and for so much else that came from “the sixties,” I remain always grateful. Through them I awakened to the challenges of philosophy, seduced into its love of wisdom.
One concrete result: In 1980 I received my PhD in philosophy, my dissertation written on Levinas’s social theory of time. In those days Levinas was barely known outside of Paris and the Low Countries, and his theory of time was even less known, if known at all. This even though his theory of time offered—and still offers—the only radical alternative to then-dominant “ecstatic” theories of temporality of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger. The latter, to be sure, had only recently toppled the previous long-standing theory of discrete time, “clock time,” the time of the specious present, of instants somehow succeeding and separated from one another by non-being—the time Zeno’s paradoxes incisively deconstructed, setting the longest-standing unsolved problem for philosophy in its millennial history. Levinas’s “diachronic” conception of time, as I tried to show, had not only grasped time more deeply than discrete time but also went beyond and exposed the limitations of its critics’ then current—and still current—ecstatic theories of time. What a sharp contrast to Spinoza, adherent of discrete time, who prolongs the classic tradition of philosophy and theology—silencing but not answering Zeno—by subordinating time to eternity. It is no exaggeration to say that all of contemporary philosophy begins by taking time seriously.
In my studies I had read Spinoza along with the other “great philosophers.” In 1978 I translated the central chapter, “La philosophie,” of Gilles Deleuze’s slim 1970 volume entitled Spinoza (not his larger 1968 book, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza ). Deleuze, for all else that he became, began as a great expository and interpretive scholar. Because this chapter was short, I sent my translation as an article to two journals, both of which rejected it (though the editor of one, Marx Wartofsky of The Philosophical Forum , praised the translation, much to my pleasure). This small effort has gathered dust on my bookshelves ever since; clearly, I had jumped the Deleuze gun, for the entire little Spinoza book was later published in a translation by Robert Hurley in 1988 under the title Spinoza: Practical Philosophy .
My non-publication translator’s relation to Spinoza actually began earlier, and in relation to Levinas. I attended Levinas’s classes at the Sorbonne during the 1974–1975 academic year, his penultimate there. At that time I proposed and obtained his permission to translate into English all of his separate pieces on Spinoza (three articles and a book review of Harry Austryn Wolfson’s Spinoza book). This, I thought and apparently Levinas thought so too, would make a small but interesting volume in English by Levinas exclusively devoted to Spinoza. I can no longer remember why this nice book proposal did not come to fruition, but it did not.
In any event, I began teaching Spinoza’s Ethics and Theological-Political Treatise in the 1980s after I began my academic “career.” I ended up teaching the Theological-Political Treatise on a regular basis—almost once every year—starting in the fall of 1994. I would on occasion teach Spinoza’s Ethics , but less often, since my classes—with the exception of those at the University at Buffalo—were offered in undergraduate programs.
My work on Levinas—Levinas’s work on me!—continued unabated. Besides translating collections of essays and books by Levinas, and editing some volumes on his work, over the past two decades I have published three of my own books on Levinas, in 1994, 2001, and 2010, collecting together my own essays. Call it “secondary,” and it is, but to this day I do not believe Levinas’s thought has been sufficiently appreciated and needs to be read more and more deeply, despite the many alleged and ambitious “criticisms” that have appeared—with increasing frequency keeping pace with Levinas’s increasing “fame”—and that to my mind have missed the mark. 1
During the past two decades, I have also published essays and articles on Spinoza and Levinas. In anticipation of