Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Nietzsche and Levinas: "After the Death of a Certain God"

Nietzsche and Levinas: "After the Death of a Certain God"

Stauffer, Jill
Bergo, Bettina

Paperback

PhilosophyReligion General

ISBN10: 0231144059
ISBN13: 9780231144056
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: Dec 1 2008
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.54 Width: 6.28 Depth: 8.92
Language: English

The essays that Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo collect in this volume locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Levinas. Both philosophers question the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the death of God. While Nietzsche poses the dilemmas of a self without a ground and of ethics at a time of cultural upheaval and demystification, Levinas wrestles with subjectivity and the sheer possibility of ethics after the Shoah. Both argue that goodness exists independently of calculative reason--for Nietzsche, goodness arises in a creative act moving beyond reaction and ressentiment; Levinas argues that goodness occurs in a spontaneous response to another person. In a world at once without God and haunted by multiple divinities, Nietzsche and Levinas reject transcendental foundations for politics and work toward an alternative vision encompassing a positive sense of creation, a complex fraternity or friendship, and rival notions of responsibility.

Stauffer and Bergo group arguments around the following debates, which are far from settled: What is the reevaluation of ethics (and life) that Nietzsche and Levinas propose, and what does this imply for politics and sociality? What is a human subject--and what are substance, permanence, causality, and identity, whether social or ethical--in the wake of the demise of God as the highest being and the foundation of what is stable in existence? Finally, how can a God still inhabit philosophy, and what sort of name is this in the thought of Nietzsche and Levinas?

Also in

Philosophy

View All