Stephen Minister

In Praise of Wanderers and Insomniacs: Economy, Excess, and Self-Overcoming in Nietzsche and Lévinas

Friedrich Nietzsche, the champion of Will to Power, and Emmanuel Lévinas, the defender of radical ethical obligation, are, for good reasons, not usually regarded as having much in common. Nonetheless, both exhibit concern for the ‘sleepy ones,’ those who sleep well and deeply because they feel at home in the world. This paper will explore this parallel metaphor in the texts of Nietzsche and Lévinas, arguing that their diagnoses of and remedies for good sleep attain significant formal resemblance, despite their increasingly divergent content. To this end, I will consider three key moments in their accounts of human life. The first is the moment of economy, that is, the way in which one structures the world in order to be at home in it. The second is the moment of excess, or that which is subversive of all economic endeavors. The final moment is that of self-overcoming which, as the life of gratuity beyond economy, is characterized as wandering and insomnia. The consideration of these three moments will create a framework for bringing Nietzsche and Lévinas into dialogue, recognizing the confluence of their concerns and approaches for addressing them, while also indicating their ultimately divergent exhortations. This framework will also allow Nietzsche’s and Lévinas’s concerns with the sleepy ones to be distinguished from other articulations of the concern with complacency found in the philosophical tradition.

To the People Themselves: The Value of Phenomenology for Global Ethics

The twenty-first century calls for ethical reflection on global issues with a depth and breadth heretofore unknown. Yet such reflection has lagged behind professional and political discourses, which are dominated by economic and nationalist rationalities. This chapter argues that the phenomenological tradition has valuable resources to support this much needed ethical reflection. To justify this claim, this chapter critically applies phenomenological understandings of embodied subjectivity, intersubjectivity, alterity, and deconstruction to philosophical, professional, and political discourses around global issues. Because of the complexity of the issues involved and the depth of the phenomenological tradition, this chapter can only offer a sketch of the value of phenomenology for global ethics. Nonetheless, its author hopes this sketch will be sufficient to spark further inquiry.