THE SELF AND THE OTHER IN LEVINAS AND SPINOZA
Keywords:
Conatus Essendi, Ego, Holiness, Individual, Other, Self, Substitution, VirtueAbstract
Emmanuel Levinas in his ethics elucidates his key concept of the other-directed self by opposing it to the wholly self-interested self, as he interprets it, in the ethics of Baruch Spinoza. However, when we consider the Spinozan self within the context of his own ethical system, we find that it also ultimately is other-directed, but in a manner quite distinct from that of the Levinasian self. The contrasting ethical selves of Levinas and Spinoza provide alternative models of existing ethically in the world, both of which are in insistent opposition to the modern humanist valorization of the autonomous egoistic individual as a valid ontological concept and worthwhile ethical ideal.
References
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” trans., Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, in The Provocation of Levinas, ed., David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, New York, NY: Routledge, 2014, 168-179, 175, 172.
Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, trans., Michael B. Smith, New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2000, 229.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans., Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pa: Duquesne UP, 1998, 124.
Richard Cohen, Out of Control: Confrontations between Spinoza and Levinas, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016, xviii.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans., G. H. R. Parkinson, Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2000, 136
Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2005, 184.
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans., Robert Hurley, San Francisco, Ca: City Lights Books, 2001, 13.
Spinoza, Complete Works, trans., Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael Morgan, Indianapolis, In: Hackett, 2002, 686.
Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011, 32.
Antonio Negri, Spinoza for our Time: Politics and Postmodernity,” New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2013, 17.
