Out of Control, livre ebook

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