Eric S. Nelson

_Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy's most pressing issues._ Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple-and accurate-oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection _between_ Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.

Eduard von Hartmann was one of the most influential public philosophers of his era, known primarily through his Philosophy of the Unconscious. A conservative nationalist in politics, he positioned himself as a cultural and religious reformer and modernist ad­vocate of a “religion of the future” of self-redemption (autosoterism), one that reconciled pessimism and a panpneumatic impersonal unconscious with rationality and individu­al responsibility. This paper traces how Buddhism served as a primary albeit imperfect exemplar in his thought, how his ethical and symbolic interpretative strategy, based on the unconscious, drew him into proximity and conflict with esoteric spiritist discourses, and how this context informed his Daodejing interpretation. German Idealism disclosed the unity of reason, will, and nature, while Buddhist teachings demonstrated the world’s fundamentally contradictory and illusory character through nothingness (emptiness), nir­vāṇa, and objective illusionism and phenomenalism. Hartmann’s secularized moral and symbolic adaptation of Buddhism entailed a resigned yet heroic embrace of suffering life rather than what he deemed ascetic and quietist acquiescence. His hermeneutics reveal his modernizing vision of Buddhism as an exemplary model (if suitably reformed to ac­centuate a heroic response to suffering and karma) for the future.

This chapter offers an outline of how the Yijing 易經 informed interpretations of nothingness and perfection in Chinese and early modern European discourses. Part one briefly traces the priority of nothingness in the Yijing commentaries of Wang Bi 王弼 and the later Neo-Confucian dyadic dynamic of limitless nothingness (wuji 無極) and the supreme ultimate (taiji 太極). Following Song-Ming era compilations, early modern European missionaries and intellectuals interpreted the Yijing in relation to their own cosmological, metaphysical, and theological models. Part two reexamines Leibniz's growing engagement with the Yijing and Chinese philosophy as a discourse on nothingness and perfection and its theological, ontological, and mathematical significance. Although Chinese influences in the formation of Leibniz's binary mathematics and first metaphysical principles of God and nothingness should not be exaggerated, they became interculturally entangled. Leibniz determined that ancient Chinese wisdom was closest to the truths of natural philosophy and theology because it conceived of the world not through matter but through the fundamental principles and dynamics of perfection and nothingness, expressed by 1 and 0. Leibniz identified his binary arithmetic, and specifically his metaphysical-theological interpretation of its meaning, with the dyadic progression of the Yijing’s hexagrams. Leibniz remained committed to a Christianizing interpretation. Since nothingness could not be generative by itself, it required a transcendent and active principle of perfection that he construed as the hidden truth of Chinese philosophy.

Critics have argued that Husserl’s analysis of Europe, rationality, and the lifeworld in his groundbreaking 1936 work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is ultimately Eurocentric. Others defend Husserl’s articulation of the cosmopolitan universalist aspirations of philosophy and a lifeform of individual autonomy and free rational inquiry in the context of his response to growing irrationalism and fascism. Both perspectives have their validity: Husserl’s genealogy addressed a unique Occidental history and ideal of rationality, identified with the idea of “Europe” in contrast to specific national identities, and his analysis retained Eurocentric elements that restricted its universalist cosmopolitan intentions. The present contribution outlines a more comprehensive perspective by differentiating Eurocentric, cosmopolitan, and intercultural moments in Husserl’s works in a liberalizing or pluralizing immanent critique that interculturally modifies Husserl’s phenomenology of rationality, history, and the lifeworld. By drawing on modern Chinese philosophy, his contemporaries such as Georg Misch, and Husserl’s phenomenology, I critically reconstruct how Husserl’s philosophy already indicates a more pluralistic and critically intercultural understanding of the lifeworld and reason beyond the dialectic of pseudo-universalism and ethnocentric particularism that continues to confront contemporary thought.

As a contribution to a critical yet responsive materialist ethics of environments and animals, I reexamine the significance of nature and animals in the critical social theory of Theodor Adorno. In response to the anthropocentric primacy of intersubjective discourse and recognition in recent figures associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Habermas and Honneth, I argue for the ecological import of the aporetic dialectic of nature and society diagnosed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s later works. Adorno’s continuing confrontation with the “domination of nature” traces the tensions between the ideological construction and resistance of “nature” as well as the instrumentalization and implicit disruptive promise of sensuous life. It indicates the material and bodily bonds between human and animal happiness and suffering, the ambiguous role of mimesis in domination and emancipation, and the critical prospect of an unforced and non-coercive freedom toward the object and answerability toward socially and historically mediated yet non-identical natural life.

PDF with introduction and front and back materials. Abstract: A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book unfolds a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” material others such as environments and animals; the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. “This is an extremely impressive, original, and thorough treatment of two key twentieth-century thinkers and their applicability to the most pressing social and political issues of our time.” — Jeffrey A. Bernstein, author of Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History “This book is an excellent and timely contribution to political and environmental philosophy, located around a nuanced historical and philosophical approach to Levinas and Adorno. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with these figures or with the current moment.” — Martin Shuster, author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity

Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the myriad things, and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology. This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history.

PDF includes the introduction. Abstract: In this wide-ranging and authoritative volume, leading scholars engage with the philosophy and writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a key figure in nineteenth-century thought. Their chapters cover his innovative philosophical strategies and explore how they can be understood in relation to their historical situation, as well as presenting incisive interpretations of Dilthey's arguments, including their development, their content, and their influence on later thought. A key focus is on how Dilthey's work remains relevant to current debates around art and literature, the biographical and autobiographical self, knowledge, language, science, culture, history, society, and psychology and the embodied mind. The volume will be important for researchers in hermeneutics, aesthetics, practical philosophy, and the history of German philosophy, providing a valuable introduction to Dilthey's work as well as detailed critical analysis of its ongoing significance.