Metaphysics, War And The Critique Of The Conatus Essendi In Emmanuel Levinas
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Hasan, Aminah Amatullah
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 10, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Robert Lambert Bernasconi, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Robert Lambert Bernasconi, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Leonard Richard Lawlor, Committee Member
Emily Rolfe Grosholz, Committee Member
Benjamin Jared Schreier, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Levinas
french philosophy
phenomenology
early modern
20th century philosophy
17th century philosohphy
spinoza
Heidegger
metaphysics
ethics
politics
war
peace
conatus
philosophy
17th/18th century philosophy - Abstract:
- This dissertation concerns Emmanuel Levinas’ critique of the conatus essendi. I will argue that Levinas’ critique of the conatus is indispensable to understanding his engagement with Western metaphysics and its relation to the subject of war. The problem of war is not defined by the actual violence of war but by the ways in which we are conditioned for war and are consequently susceptible to mobilization. According to Levinas, the susceptibility to war or mobilization is the direct result of thought or thinking of being in general. I contend that the connection of thought to war is articulated in his critique of the idea of the conatus. The conatus is the tendency towards self-preservation and for Levinas it represents the positing of being as war or a struggle-to-be. However, the relation between the conatus, metaphysics, and war is absent from many interpretations of Levinas. This is because Levinas is best known for his ethics. The ethics of responsibility or the face-to-face and the ethics that will develop later in his account of substitution overshadow his work as a whole. The overemphasis on his ethics often results in the under-examination of his metaphysics and political thought, specifically his revision to the ways in which we think of both together. I contend that although the present analysis does not directly take on the question of the ethical in Levinas’ work, the introduction of the critique of the conatus deepens the role of ethics within his metaphysics. This, as I will demonstrate, is due to that fact that Levinas’ engagement with the idea of the conatus is not just that of critique but also of revision. Levinas’ notion of the conatus existendi, which is found in his late works, reverses the meaning and utility of the idea of the conatus in the history of philosophy and its bearing on how we conceive of the body, time, and existence.