Reviews for Ultimate Reality and Spiritual Discipline

The average rating for Ultimate Reality and Spiritual Discipline based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-03-10 00:00:00 Frances Tedeschi Levinas's provides an interesting reversal to the Heideggerian diagnosis on Death. Through a survey of other thinkers like Kant,Bergson,Fink and Bloch, Levinas posits an escape from the vision of Death as inalienable angst of Da-sein(Being-There). Instead, Levinas turns towards a communal direction, The Other. The critique is laid bare, Death only exists in submerging into the experience of the Other's death, the possession and emotion which the "I" arrives at in the death of loved ones creates the relation outside the order of Being. This relation of spontaneous affectivity constitutes the entrance of Ethics, The infinity in our finitude. The heart of this relation in absolute difference being the idea of God as such. One can see Levinas valuable insight as an escape from the silent anti-ethics at the heart of any questioning of Being presents. Here the idea of God as what cannot be ever expressed properly(yet must be expressed), the excess that constitutes all testimony and genuine questioning with no answers in sight, enters the picture. Through this, Levinas answers the Heideggerian aversion to God as the symbol of the metaphysics of present ontic beings. Being isn't the term that has been defaced by the idea of God, it is the very opposite. As valuable as criticizing Heidegger's individualistic escape from community and obligation are. I feel that Levinas's return to an almost Romantic conception of Alterity constitutes his own escape from history. His exploded Kantian subjectivity can only go as far as a Justice that is always to come, a Justice that has to come by virtue of our dealings with others. All in all, I just wish Levinas took a more radical approach to Ethics than just an obligation outside the rational metaphysics of presence. What is missing is the element of universality(which he dismisses in Hegel). For all of the radical demeanor at the surface, there looms a paralyzing conformism in our transcendent ethical nature, an almost puzzling refusal to engage with History, a trait that will carry over into another thinker in the Deconstructionist vein, Derrida.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-27 00:00:00 Deborah Carr A wonderful text. Highly recommended to...well, everyone.