LEVINAS’S REJECTION of “Spinozism” means far more than a rejection of the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Spinozism certainly includes the philosophy of Spinoza, but it also includes the thought of such apparently disparate figures as Hegel, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and, as I shall argue, Nietzsche. What then does Levinas mean by “Spinozism”? What is his argument against it? And how does Spinozism—and hence Levinas’s radical opposition to it—manifest itself in Nietzsche’s philosophy? These questions guide the present inquiry.
Levinas’s Rejection of Spinozism
Levinas’s opposition to Spinozism and his reasons for it are summed up in the final sentence of the first part—entitled “Separation and Absoluteness”—of Totality and Infinity: “Thought and freedom come to us from separation and from the consideration of the Other [Autrui]—this thesis is at the antipodes of Spinozism” (TI 105).
Spinozism denies the transcendence of thought and freedom because, first, it denies “separation,” the independence of the human subject. It is thus “monist” or “pantheist,” a philosophy of “immanence” and “totality.” Ethics, in contrast, is based on separation, the “autonomy” of the “subject,” and out of this independence of one subject from another it is based on “the consideration of the Other.” For Levinas the irreducibility of the human and, based on this, the inter-human, constitutes the very “humanity of the human.” Spinozism denies the legitimacy of the independence of these dimensions of signification. It denies freedom and humanity in the name of a greater totality. It is precisely this denial that prevails in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, though by embracing the body in contrast to the mind it takes a new and distinctive form beyond the Spinozism of Spinoza.
By separation Levinas means the independence of the human subject’s interiority from both the amorphous anonymity of what Levinas calls the “there is” (“il y a”), an apeiron of be-ing, which threatens the subject’s distinctiveness with dissolution from below, as it were; and the radical transcendence of the other person, which calls to and calls forth the subject from above, from moral obligation. But inwardness must not be understood in an ethereal sense, as self-consciousness, say, or as an act of representational or judgmental negation. Levinas speaks of human subjectivity as “created,” not in the credulous religious sense of a miraculous existence posited ex nihilo but rather as embodiment beginning in the primitive “reflexivity” of self-sensing. The originary base of initiative, agency, and free will, then, occurs from out of an original circuit of sensing and sensations. “For an existent is an existent,” Levinas writes in the paragraph before the one in which he announces his opposition to Spinozism, “only in the measure that it is free, that is, outside of any system, which implies dependence” (TI 104). Separation, then, means “unconditioned,” an absolute, but an absolute that is nevertheless an embodiment and vulnerability whose contours are uncovered through phenomenological investigation.
Second, by “consideration of the Other” Levinas refers to another human being whose alterity is encountered only in the transcendence of moral obligations, that is, as moral imperative, from “above,” in an “asymmetrical” relation with a “you” who disturbs the self-enclosure or complacency of the “I,” giving rise to the responsible self, the self for-the-other. It is important to keep in mind that this structure emerges because the other person, too, is a separate being. And it is from the other’s separation, from the other’s independence, that the other transcends and “reconditions” the self.
The relation between these two terms, the independent subject and the transcendent other, occurs precisely and only as a moral relation, for it is only as a moral relation that radically separate selves can both be respected in their independence from one another and yet for all that also be in genuine proximity. The moral relation as moral cannot be looked at from the outside, however, but is a relationality within which human subjects are always already implicated—commanded—in the first-person singular. These two aspects, morality and singularity, are indeed the central “theses” of Levinas’s entire philosophy, and they are central not as theses or themes but as impositions, provocations, imperatives. “Here,” Levinas writes, “the relation connects not terms that complete one another and consequently are reciprocally lacking to one another, but terms that suffice to themselves” (TI 103). As we shall see, this means that Levinas’s opposition to Nietzsche is based not on some a priori or idealist metaphysics, as one might imagine, but rather on a different conception of the nature and meaning of the human body and embodied sociality. Unlike Levinas’s opposition to Spinoza’s Spinozism, then, which is an opposition to an abstract or intellectualist rationalism, Levinas’s opposition to Nietzsche’s Spinozism meets Nietzsche on his own grounds, on the terrain of the body.
Spinozism, in any case, is constituted by the rejection of both points: separation and transcendence. It does this in one fell swoop by affirming the primacy and totality of context over terms—in Spinoza’s case the systematic universal and necessary knowledge of modern science, and in Nietzsche’s case the differential play of will to power. Here lies the meaning of Spinoza’s famous refusal in his Ethics “to conceive man in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom.”1 Spinoza will treat humans as he treats everything: as objects subject to a strict “geometrical” logic. To deny that humanity is a kingdom within a kingdom, Spinoza must and does at once deny the independence of the self and the transcendence of the other. In other words, he denies the reality, as opposed to the ignorant person’s illusory or imaginary belief, of both free will and morality. Heir to the rationalist tradition of Western thought, Spinoza bases his denial on the root affirmation that “Will and intellect are one and the same thing” (E 2: “Proposition, Corollary” 49, 96). For Nietzsche, as we know, the independence of the subject, its alleged freedom, is an untruth, an error, a “seduction of language” (GM 1: §13, 45).
How does Levinas respond to such thought? The crux of Levinas’s argument depends, contrary to what many commentators have suggested, not on the transcendence or Infinity of the other person but rather on the independence of the self—a self that in the other person is indeed encountered as transcendence. How, then, without arbitrary fiat, does Levinas defend the all-important notion of the subject’s independence?
Self-Sensing
That subjectivity emerges as self-sensing, as an embodied way of being both engaged and disengaged in elemental sensations, is perhaps the earliest theme of Levinas’s own thought. It appears already in 1935 in his article “On Escape,” when Levinas was fresh from his training in Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. There Levinas speaks of the existent’s embodiment in terms of the unity of a dual movement or restlessness, at once, on the one hand, entrapment, enclosure, and self-compression, freighted with its own materiality and backed up against being, and, on the other hand, rebellion, a desire to escape, an urge to get out of this circuit of its own immanence. “The necessity of fleeing,” he writes, “is put in check by the impossibility of fleeing oneself . . . precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself” (OE 64). “In nausea,” he continues, “which amounts to an impossibility of being what one is—we are at the same time riveted to ourselves, enclosed in a tight circle that smothers” (OE 66). In critical contrast to the Heideggerian analysis of Dasein opened up by and to being in an “ecstatic” subjectivity anxious before its own death and as such already a form of self-understanding as the revelation of being, for Levinas it is precisely the unbearable but inescapable self-compression of embodiment that “is the very experience of pure being” (OE 67).
After the war, Levinas will again return to this theme, the “solitude” of the self unhappily trapped in itself, extending his reflection with more precise phenomenological analyses that are found in his first two books, Existence and Existents and Time and the Other, both published in 1947. In Existence and Existents he will speak of the self’s embodied self-enclosure as “fatigue and indolence” (EE 24): “There exists a weariness,” he writes, “which is a weariness of everything and everyone, and above all a weariness of oneself” (EE 24). “Indolence makes one prostrate, idleness weighs us down, afflicts us with boredom” (EE 28). Or writing in a more traditional philosophical language: “There is a duality in existence, an essential lack of simplicity. The ego has a self, in which it is not only reflected, but with which it is involved like a companion or a partner; this relationship is what is called inwardness” (EE 28). This book goes on to describe the efforts of such a self to escape itself into the world through the ecstatic time (projective and retentive)—“temporality”—of labor, action, and representation, and finally, successfully, in the transcendent time of sociality. Time and the Other covers this same ground, ending also in the liberation afforded from immanence—whether of embodiment or worldliness or knowledge—by the only relation whose transcendence breaks being’s adhesion to itself: the transcendence of the other person.
It is only after these careful phenomenological studies that in Levinas’s masterwork, Totality and Infinity, the transcendence of the other receives its full articulation beyond the epistemological confines of phenomenology, as an ethical transcendence. Yet here, too, the entire second part, “Interiority and Economy,” is devoted to what are now even more careful, closer, and more precise phenomenological analyses of the self as embodied and of the embodied self’s futile efforts to escape its self-enclosure, its immanence, through the world, through labor, activity, and representational consciousness. After once again having laid the groundwork of the independence and solitude of the embodied self, Levinas then turns to consider “Exteriority and the Face” (title of section 3), that is, the transcendence of the other person encountered as moral imperative.
Levinas’s second major work, Otherwise Than Being; Or, Beyond Essence, also returns to the embodied self, but this time to examine and elaborate its new way of being—shamed and responsible—responding to and suffering for the other. Thus the deepening or refinement of Levinas’s thought follows the progression of ethics itself: beginning in embodied solitude, jolted by the face or transcendence of the other, and responding as an embodied responsibility for-the-other before itself. It is not a chronological movement, to be sure, but rather one of conditioned and conditioning, where the unconditioned solitary self is “re-conditioned,” or decommissioned, per impossibile for rational thought, by the noncondition of the other person. Here, too, in the moral structure of being for-the-other, the language and impact of embodiment remains: the self is “turned inside out” by and for the other, “as though its very skin were still a way to shelter itself in being, exposed to wounds and outrage, emptying itself in a no-grounds, to the point of substituting itself for the other, holding on to itself only as it were in the trace of its exile” (OB 138). The passivity of the body is not surpassed or overcome, but now as responsibility the self is a body responsive to—because “pierced” by—the imperatives of the other, in a “suffering for the other” that holds a place higher than the self-initiated freedom of activity and reflection (Sartre) or the other-initiated freedom of being (Heidegger) or nature (Jonas). Such is the moral elevation Levinas calls the “humanity of the human,” a life nobly lived, “loving the neighbor as oneself.” Morality is not enacted as a disembodied spirituality but as a giving, and first, prior to a giving of things, it is a giving of oneself to the other.
The True and the Good: “Dangerous Life”
The true self, for Levinas, is therefore not literally true, a function of knowing, but good. By “good” Levinas does not mean an innate inclination, a predilection, or a graced disposition, which certain philosophers and theologians have posited but never proven and which certain horrible events of the last century and our own clearly belie. Rather, the good is the self’s responsiveness to others, its interpersonal and social responsibility. “No one,” Levinas has written, “is good voluntarily” (OB 11). One’s nobler self is good, a being for-the-other more deeply—higher—than its ownmost being-for-itself. At the same time, it is by means of the self’s goodness understood in these terms, and only by means of its goodness, that there is access to and, indeed, demand for the true, that is, for knowledge. The issue of the relation of the good to the true is complex, and all of its nuances cannot be presented here, but because it is important in terms of Levinas’s critique of Spinozism generally and to Nietzsche’s reevaluation of the value of knowledge, the following brief remarks must suffice to indicate the relation of the true to the good.
Truth, in contrast to opinion, is justified knowledge, propositions supported by appropriate and sufficient evidence. Beyond the confines of coherence and correspondence theories of truth, proposition candidates for truth must be validated by an intersubjective community. Levinas draws our attention to the fact that statements neither come out of the sky nor are confined to “minds.” Whether they are proposed as truths or intended for different purposes, statements are first of all enunciations, significations said by persons to other persons. There is a saying that underlies and charges the said. It is to the ethical character of this order that Levinas calls attention. Enunciation or saying, the discursive character of speech as communication—what Levinas calls its “accusative” dimension—is the source of what is said, even if it does not appear as a thesis or theme within what is said. The inaccessibility of saying, which always transcends and yet brings forth the said, functions therefore as a sort of “paralogism,” to use Kant’s term, except that its orientation is not logical or epistemological but moral, a matter of ethics, of the other’s elevation and the self’s ennoblement. That the “saying” that is absent from the “said” is not and cannot become a theme is certainly a difficulty for philosophical reflection and perhaps explains its neglect, but this difficulty in no way justifies the exclusion or occlusion of its primacy in the upsurge of meaning.
Communication is not, however, simply a matter of making private thoughts public, as if everything is already accomplished within the confines of one’s mind and then empirically made public to another. Enunciation is elicited. Why speak at all if everything is really said and done within one’s own mind? Communication, in other words, is not simply added to signification. I will cite Levinas at some length on this point because it is both subtle and crucial if we are to understand how ethics is “first philosophy” and the source of truth.
Those who wish to found on dialogue and on an original we the upsurge of egos, refer to an original communication behind the de facto communication (but without giving this original communication any sense other than the empirical sense of a dialogue or a manifestation of one to the other—which is to presuppose that we that is to be founded), and reduce the problem of communication to the problem of its certainty. In opposition to that, we suppose that there is in the transcendence involved in language a relationship that is not an empirical speech, but responsibility. . . . Communication with the other can be transcendence only as a dangerous life, a fine risk to be run. . . . Here there is proximity and not truth about proximity, not certainty about the presence of the other, but responsibility for him without deliberation, and without the compulsion of truths in which commitments arise, without certainty. . . . The trace in which a face is ordered is not reducible to a sign. . . . To thematize this relation is already to lose it, to leave the absolute passivity of the self.
(OB 119–20)
The other as other, an alterity beyond what is said, signifies prior to empirical speech, solicits our saying, which is also beyond what is said, in a communication that leaps, as it were, “as a dangerous life,” to use Levinas’s formula (one frontally challenging Nietzsche’s “live dangerously”), from one interiority to another, a communication in which one responds to another prior to the certainties of truth, responds to the other as other, that is, takes responsibility for the other first. It is in the risk of this moral responsibility—solicitation and response, the “saying of the said”—wherein lies the source of signification, including the rigorously controlled significations that constitute truth, and as such are demanded by the larger project of human justice.
Nietzsche’s Spinozism
It is profoundly revealing that Nietzsche, despite his fundamental criticisms of Spinoza’s rationalism, enthusiastically embraces Spinoza as his “precursor.” This self-declared genealogy finds its clearest and fullest articulation in a postcard of July 30, 1881, that Nietzsche wrote to his close friend and former colleague at Basel, Professor Franz Overbeck. Here is the postcard in full:
I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his over-all tendency like mine—making knowledge the most powerful affect—but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself: this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergences are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and made my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange.2
The five points of agreement Nietzsche names can be summed up in one: a denial of the metaphysical underpinnings of morality. It is morality, of course, that requires a human will or agency that can be evaluated, that is to say, a will or decision-making process in some significant sense free, unconditioned, uncompelled. And it is morality, too, that affirms purpose, the aim of doing good rather than evil, opposing evil, promoting goodness and justice, and toward this end it is morality that exhorts the superiority of selflessness to selfishness. In his Ethics Spinoza had clearly argued for the falseness, indeed the illusoriness of all the metaphysical notions upon which morality is based. In his epistemology they are the product of imagination, not reason. They are unscientific, subjective rather than objective, and only hold sway for the ignorant masses driven by their passions, their bodily desires. But they have no truth-value for the few, the scientists and philosophers who know better, who, driven by their intellects (amor intellectualis), know scientifically (ratio and scientia intuitiva) the truth that the universe unfolds by strict and unbreakable necessity. A decade and many books after his postcard, in Twilight of the Idols, published just weeks after his own mental breakdown in early January 1889, hence in one of his last and one of his most unrestrained (if not exaggerated) books, Nietzsche formulates in his own name, and as his own, Spinoza’s position as follows:
One knows my demand of philosophers that they place themselves beyond good and evil—that they have the illusion of moral judgment beneath them. This demand follows from an insight first formulated by me: that there are no moral facts whatever. Moral judgment has this in common with religious judgment that it believes in realities which do not exist. Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely a misinterpretation. Moral judgment belongs, as does religious judgment, to a level of ignorance at which even the concept of the real, the distinction between the real and the imaginary, is lacking: that at such a level ‘truth’ denotes nothing but things which we today call ‘imaginings.’
(TL 55)
While still agreeing with Spinoza’s writings of more than two centuries earlier, Nietzsche has here conveniently forgotten his name. Of course, in a few days Nietzsche will also forget his own name, or rather, famously, he will embrace “every name in history.”3
Nietzsche’s Differences from Spinoza
Keeping in mind their fundamental agreement to reject the several metaphysical principles that underlie morality (and religion), it is time to look more closely at the divergences of Nietzsche’s Spinozism from Spinoza’s. In this we are again guided by Nietzsche’s postcard: “Even though the divergences are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science.” Though there are many divergences in this regard, here I have space enough only to mention two, namely, the shift from a theological world to a secular world and the rise of scientific historiography and historical consciousness, in order to more closely examine the third, which is also the most decisive, namely, the shift from a mechanistic to a vitalist model in the modern scientific worldview. Indeed, Nietzsche’s much vaunted appreciation for historical consciousness is itself oriented by this third shift, as one sees already in the title and content of his early “untimely” study of history, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life—history, like everything else, is of value to Nietzsche only to the extent that it serves life.
From Mechanism to Vitalism
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in 1859, and The Descent of Man in 1871. The influence of these books, not simply their theses regarding the origin of humanity and the development of species—Nietzsche never accepted Darwin’s doctrine of natural selection and considered it slavish, relying as it did on a quantitative rather than a qualitative standard of success—but their general outlook, their biological rather than mechanistic perspective, had the profoundest influence on the spiritual life of Europe in general and on Nietzsche’s thought in particular. Despite his specific rejection of Darwin, there is no question that it is now biology and more specifically physiology that provide the dominant medium of Nietzsche’s thought.
Nietzsche insists repeatedly that in contrast to the deathless abstract ideas of previous philosophers, his own thought is a “philosophy of life.” In The Gay Science, for instance, he writes the following against Spinoza:
These old philosophers were heartless; philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism. Looking at these figures, even Spinoza, don’t you have a sense of something profoundly enigmatic and uncanny . . . mere bones, mere clatter . . . I mean categories, formulas, words (for, forgive me, what was left of Spinoza, amor intellectualis dei, is mere clatter and no more than that: What is amor, what is deus, if there is not a drop of blood in them?).
(GS 333)
Nietzsche’s thought is from the start and throughout always and self-consciously a philosophy of life, of health and sickness, strength and weakness, growth and decline, self-preservation and disintegration, a thought of instincts and organisms.
Spinoza and Nietzsche are both elitists, dividing humanity between the approved few and the disparaged many. Given his commitment to science, for Spinoza the few are those for whom the mind is primary, hence those who are intellectually active, who know the truth and conform to it, while the many are those for whom the body is primary, hence are passive, driven by their emotions and faulty imaginations. Nietzsche will both reverse this priority, recognizing the body as the genealogy of the mind, and alter the meaning both of the mind, now a derivative function, and the body, no longer an abstract mechanism but a vital multiplicity of forces in contention. Thus Nietzsche’s decisive evaluation of humanity is no longer determined by mathematics but by biology—or more precisely by “life”—as a contest between strength and weakness, health and sickness: “Everywhere,” he writes, “the struggle of the sick against the healthy” (GS 3: §14, 123).
While he often characterized himself as a psychologist to distance himself from what he took to be the ersatz objectivity of previous philosophers, his thought is more profoundly—and Nietzsche explicitly recognized this—that of a physiologist, a knowledge piercing and breaking up the surface of cognition and consciousness to uncover the underlying but ruling drives of the body. This reversal and revaluation of the mind-body relation accounts for Nietzsche’s high-spirited style, his dashes, his exclamation points, his ego, and his tempo—what Nietzsche calls “dancing.” He wants the body to speak or to sing. It is no accident, then, that while for Spinoza, with his mechanistic model, the basic character of all things is “conatus essendi,” perseverance in being, inertia, for Nietzsche, in contrast, the basic character of all things is “will to power,” a dynamic, aggrandizing play of forces. It is on this basis, making the will primary and interpreting the will as will to power, that Nietzsche criticizes Spinoza (and Darwin). In The Gay Science he writes:
The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation. It should be considered symptomatic when some philosophers—for example, Spinoza who was consumptive—considered the instinct of self-preservation decisive and had to see it that way; for they were individuals in conditions of distress.
That our modern natural sciences have become so thoroughly entangled in this Spinozistic dogma (most recently and worst of all, Darwinism with its incomprehensible one-sided doctrine of the “struggle for existence”) is probably due to the origins of most natural scientists. . . . The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life. The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power—in accordance with the will to power which is the will to life.
(GS 5: §349, 292)
We see in this citation the grounding of Nietzsche’s thought in life, life interpreted as will to power, as will to expansion, and its contrast to both Darwin’s survival of the fittest and Spinoza’s conatus essendi, both of which Nietzsche critically reinterprets accordingly as expressions of will to power, namely, as expressions of a physiology declining and distressed.
Will, for Nietzsche, is the universal character of all things, organic and inorganic. And this is why Nietzsche remains, no doubt despite himself, a metaphysician. He claims to know and evaluate the whole, even if, unlike Kant and Schopenhauer, and contradicting himself, he explicitly denies the possibility of such a claim and evaluation. His affirmations nevertheless betray him. Everything for Nietzsche is a gigantic struggle, an ever-changing provisional arrangement of striving forces, “individuals” (at whatever level) being but temporary nodes of power relations, temporary configurations of multiple forces in passing differential relations of dominance and submission (in contrast to Spinoza’s mechanistic characterization of individuals as ratios of motion and rest). How Nietzsche knows this one cannot say, but it is what he repeatedly claims—or rather proclaims.
Nietzsche does not ask what morality or politics or religion or philosophy is, but rather who believes this or that. The strong believe one thing, the weak another. Nietzsche’s well-commented-upon “perspectivism,” then, must be understood not simply as the claim that truth is the expression of a finite point of view, a claim made by many philosophers before and after Nietzsche, but also, more profoundly and in a more Nietzschean vein, the claim that perspective follows physiology, that perspective is the conscious expression of a certain biological state of health or sickness, strength or weakness. Nietzsche’s attacks upon Christianity, science, morality, and so much else in high European culture are at bottom a rebellion against the asceticism that protects and preserves an “impoverishment of life” (GM 3: §25, 154). In contrast to all asceticism, Nietzsche demands greatness: “great health” in individuals and “grand politics” for nations. Nietzsche’s philosophy is therefore an aesthetics: a philosophy of the body, and on top of this it is a pagan or Greek aesthetics: the celebration of victory, superiority, domination—hegemony as greatness.
And this is why Nietzsche supports art, the artistic life, with its “will to lie,” against religion, morality, and science. As early as 1872, in an unpublished work entitled “The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge,” he had written: “History and the natural sciences were necessary to combat the middle ages: knowledge versus faith. We now oppose knowledge with art; return to life.”4 The artistic life, the willful lie, the display, the show, is closest to the will to power, and this is why Nietzsche affirms it.
A question arises: By affirming the artistic life does not Nietzsche also affirm a freedom of will? Would not such an assertion conflict with his fundamental agreement with Spinoza that there is no free will, that free will is a lie that only the ignorant and deluded masses believe or, in Nietzsche’s case, that only the weak and sick masses believe? It is a tricky question and is perhaps without a fully satisfactory answer because both Nietzsche and Spinoza are caught in a bind when they deny free will and yet recommend that others should deny it also. In what, after all, lies the superiority of Spinoza’s scientists over the ignorant masses? All one can say, perhaps, is that knowing is less painful than ignorance. Spinoza promises “beatitude” to the man of science. Nietzsche resorts to the same justification. To discover that all is will to power, that consciousness itself is simply an aftereffect of will to power, is to discover the necessity of the universe, even if that necessity is no longer the causal or deductive necessity of Spinoza’s rationalism—and such a discovery, so Nietzsche asserts repeatedly, is “joyful.”
Nietzsche thus mimics Spinoza’s recommendation regarding causality and deduction: one must conform to its necessity. Freedom lies in conformity. Freedom is necessity—again, philosophy’s oldest conceit. To discover will to power is to embrace necessity, but now as what Nietzsche calls amor fati, “love of fate”—to the point that one accepts one’s life without moral or metaphysical judgment, to the point that one accepts one’s life and all of reality even if it were to recur eternally. “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati,” Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, “that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity” (EH 258). Again, Spinoza: eternity, but now the eternity of the ephemeral! Again, too, the promise of pleasure. Here is Nietzsche’s highest desire and highest joy: “to will eternity.” “Joy,” his Zarathustra declares, “does not want heirs, or children—joy wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants everything eternally the same” (TZ 4:434).
A life of complete conformity to will to power, without judgment, without regret, willing all and everything to the point that one would will it to recur again eternally, such is the life of the Overman, “beyond good and evil,” beyond the history of ascetic humanity and its antinatural ideals. “Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, wants deep eternity” (TZ 4:436). In contrast to the conformity recommended by Spinoza’s Spinozism of the mind and intellect, grounded upon and bound within substantial being, Nietzsche’s brand of Spinozism demands a conformity of the body to the body, and hence exalts imagination, which is a closer expression of the body than rationality, “liberated” to the nonprinciple of multiplicity, the production of masks of masks without end.
Levinas Contra Nietzsche’s Spinozism
It goes without saying that regarding the points upon which Nietzsche and Spinoza agree, their mutual denial of “freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil,” Levinas stands at their antipodes. The new question before us is whether Nietzsche’s divergences from Spinoza deriving from changes in “time, culture and science” introduce differences that somehow buttress and justify Spinozism in Nietzsche’s case and enable Nietzsche to succeed, vis-à-vis Levinas’s opposition to Spinozism, where Spinoza’s Spinozism failed. Does Nietzsche’s biological-physiological model deriving from the body succeed in creating a new form of amoralist naturalism impervious to Levinas’s ethical challenge? The confrontation is important not simply as a scholarly exercise but because Levinas and Nietzsche are both philosophers of embodiment and as such square off against each other at close quarters and as our contemporaries, rather than across the mind-body divide that separates Spinoza’s idealism from them both and no doubt from us all.
Responsible Body
Just as Nietzsche’s adoption of the body in its vitality—interpreted as will to power and multiplicity, in contrast to Spinoza’s attachment to the mind and its representation of the world in terms of substantial being and conatus essendi—stands as the greatest difference separating Nietzsche’s Spinozism from Spinoza’s, so, too, Levinas’s notion of the obligated body elevated by moral responsibilities stands at the farthest antipode challenging the hegemony of the Nietzschean body.
Starting with the body, Nietzsche uncovers a philosophy of fragmentation, of various forces each pulling in its own direction to establish provisional moments of stasis, reflected as symptoms—ideas, images, or desires—in consciousness. The imperative of his philosophy is to continually pass beyond such derivative unities by opening up and accepting the creative, form-giving play of the forces that temporarily sustain them. “The whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—must be kept clear of all great imperatives” (EH 254). To “love one’s fate” is to give oneself over to the evanescent play of will to power, whose mobility is the becoming of what is. The Nietzschean self is thus constantly reinventing itself, releasing new energy configurations. Its “overcoming” is a constant shattering of the “idols” of pretended unity. It is in this sense that Nietzsche famously labels himself “dynamite” and “philosophizes with a hammer”—to undo the lies of consciousness, its denial of its physiological roots, to be sure, but more deeply to undo the lie of consciousness itself, to break up a surface that is always only a prison. Thus for Nietzsche the philosopher is “a terrible explosive, endangering everything” (EH 281). Nietzsche thus does not aim for progress in the Enlightenment sense of the term, as a cumulative movement toward greater self-consciousness with an attendant increasing responsibility in the face of greater self-knowledge, but rather provokes a release of the body into its own vital dynamism as an open and endless play of possibilities that consciousness can only grasp retrospectively—always too late—as a “schizoid” activity (to use Deleuze’s felicitous term). “The last thing I should promise,” Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, “would be to ‘improve’ mankind. No new idols are erected by me. . . . Overthrowing idols (my word for ‘ideals’)—that comes closer to being part of my craft” (EH 217–18).
But Levinas, too, is a philosopher of the body. As we have seen, his philosophy begins with the emergence of the existent from anonymous existence as an “enjoyment,” a “self-sensing,” a sphere of immanent sensations content with themselves and “bathing” in an elemental sensuousness. Such a description is true to the phenomenological origin of selfhood as independent being, and Levinas’s philosophy remains faithful to the findings of his phenomenological investigations. He avoids, as Spinoza and Nietzsche do not, importing theoretical constructions—presuppositions, really—such as “substance” or “will to power” into his analyses. Levinas detects within the body’s self-sensing not only enjoyment and contentment but dissatisfaction, disturbance, desire for escape. Levinas discovers that nothing bodily or worldly liberates the self from its own self-enchainment—not labor, not representation, not even being-toward-death. The only “answer” to this aspect of its desire must come from an outside truly exterior, beyond itself and beyond its worldliness, whether practical or theoretical. That exteriority, as we know, arrives with the face of the other person. Not the face as phenomenon, however, but as “enigma,” an absolute transcendence sustained in its exteriority as moral imperative.
We should not forget, then, that the moral encounter with the other, the famous Levinasian “face to face,” is not some idealist or ethereal revelation. It is a bodily event: an internalization of the suffering, needs, and destitution of the other person. It is the “other in me,” to use Levinas’s formula, or the self “for the other.” This transformation of the immanent body, the spontaneous body, the body as a play of vital forces, into the body for- the-other is, as I have indicated, the central topic of Levinas’s second major work, Otherwise Than Being; Or, Beyond Essence. In Totality and Infinity Levinas had focused primarily on the otherness of the other person, on the absolute transcendence of the other as moral imperative. In Otherwise Than Being, in contrast, his primary goal is to show that and how such otherness “transubstantiates” or “de-nucleates” the embodied subject into responsible being—responsible body.
Levinas’s language, even when speaking about morality, indeed, especially when speaking about morality, therefore remains visceral. In Otherwise Than Being, for example, he writes:
The tenderness of skin is the very gap between approach and approached, a disparity, a non-intentionality, a non-teleology. . . . Proximity, immediacy, is to enjoy and to suffer by the other. But I can enjoy and suffer by the other only because I am-for-the-other, am signification, because the contact with skin is still a proximity of a face, a responsibility, an obsession with the other, being-one-for-the-other.
(OB 90)
And:
It is the passivity of being-for-another, which is possible only in the form of giving the very bread I eat. But for this one has to first enjoy one’s bread, not in order to have the merit of giving it, but in order to give it with one’s heart, to give oneself in giving it.
(OB 72)
And thus, too, when speaking of moral subjectivity Levinas invokes the image of the “skin turned inside out” for-the-other. The responsibility of the responsible self, the responsive self, too bodily, too passive to evade responsibility, lies in “its vulnerability, its exposedness to the other” (OB 74). Morality is carnal rather than ethereal being-for-the-other. The other’s requirements make the self suffer. One does not approach the other with empty hands. In this way Levinas is certainly free of a Nietzschean charge that might apply to Spinoza, to have overvalued the mind, the intellect, “ideals,” at the expense of the body. But of course, too, Levinas sees in responsiveness the true greatness—the glory—of humanity, whereas Nietzsche detects only weakness, sickness, hypersensitivity, and the inability not to respond.
But what does it mean when Nietzsche criticizes pity? What is the significance of demeaning moral responsibility for one’s neighbor and the ceaseless sacrifice of creating a just world? Is a “revaluation of all values” really accomplished in the destruction of all values for the sake of a private self-glorification absorbed in and reflecting a multiverse of will to power and more power? Why call this “revaluation”? Where is the “value”? By what imperative should human beings become events of nature? Is this not once again to be caught in the abstractions of rationalism and its partner materialism, even if now energized by siding with the body instead of the mind? Is not “revaluation of all values” rather found, as Levinas teaches, in the never-fulfilled and hence never-ending task of uplifting values to their proper height, incarnating and institutionalizing them? Who can say that humanity has accomplished the values Nietzsche wants already to destroy? Who, in the face of constant outrages, has the temerity to say that our world is just or that justice is not worth valuing?
Is it not rather the case that Levinas is right about our noblest task? Do we really need to be nudged, no less harangued, toward our animal natures, toward more selfishness? Nietzsche was certainly right that we must not flee the body and desire. But he was wrong about shame and the alleged desirability of a “new innocence.” We are not innocent. Shamelessness requires no additional advertising from philosophers. Levinas is far more right that we must not lose sight of—must not lose heart for—what is most desirable, that our real nobility lies in the most “difficult freedom,” that in the risks of embodying moral responsibilities, in compassion for others, in daily acts of kindness, and by embracing all others by struggling for a just world here and now, in these great risks lies the true revaluation of all values.
NOTES
1. Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1992), vol. 3, preface, 102. Henceforth cited as E.
2. Nietzsche, “Postcard to Overbeck” (1881), in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 92.
3. Nietzsche, letter to Jacob Burckhardt, January 6, 1889, in The Portable Nietzsche, 684.
4. Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 14.