How to Think Origins, or On the Origin of Thinking

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Acknowledgment

I want to thank Jason Harman and Jason Hoult for reading my review-essay and for providing me with critical comments on it.

Notes

1. Devisch notes that Nancy is “a fervent democratic” who remains, always, politically self-critical (133).

2. In a Bibliography of just over twenty pages, Nancy’s works take up nearly eight pages (including translations and a half-page or so of co-authored works).

3. See my book, Rethinking Philosophy.

4. I want to point out that Devisch does not discuss Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure. In his ambiguously entitled book, Nancy does argue that the modern world represents the unfolding of Christianity yet not, in my judgment, in a truly comprehensive, consistent way.

5. See my Shakespeare and Interpretation.

6. Thus, Nancy silently repudiates Heidegger who frames his essay on metaphysics with the question: Why is there something instead of nothing?

7. All emphases in citations are in the original.

8. Spinoza, Ethics, part 4, prop. 18.

9. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 207. Kant writes further that, unlike “the most austere of all [philosophers], the Stoics [who] have ushered in moral enthusiasm instead of a sober but wise moral discipline... one can, without hypocrisy, say quite truly of the moral teaching of the Gospel that, by the purity of its moral principle but at the same time by the suitability of this principle to the limitations of finite beings, it first subjected all good conduct of man to the discipline of a duty laid before his eyes, which does not allow them to rove among fancied moral perfections, and set limits of humility (i.e., self-knowledge) to self-conceit as well as to self-love, both of which are ready to mistake their boundaries” (209).

10. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 15, 147, 166, 167–68. I cite Hobbes’s quirky yet pithy English according to the text. For a comprehensive study of Hobbes, see Zagorin, Hobbes; and my review of Zagorin’s book, “Hobbes.”

11. Hobbes, the first of our four great social contract theorists (followed by Spinoza, Locke, and Rousseau), is, in his pioneering role, not unlike Descartes, the father of modern philosophy. Just as Descartes left obscure the ethical (and political) implications of the ontological argument—I think, ergo I am—Hobbes advanced his concept of the social compact in support of absolute monarchy (but not of the divine right of kings). He failed, however, to realize that, in basing the civil state on the law of nature commanding love of the other, he fundamentally wrote in support of the democratic rule of all. It is Spinoza who shows that ontology is social, to recall Nancy, and that theology (the ontological argument) is political: there is one thing that cannot be conceived (by us) without existing necessarily and that is the other, the neighbor, whom we are commanded to love as ourselves.

12. Kant, “Ideal of Pure Reason,” 555.

13. It is characteristic of this study that only two works by Hegel are given in the Bibliography (The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Philosophy of Right). Omitted are his truly significant works in social ontology: The Logic and The Philosophy of Spirit (Parts 2 and 3 of The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences), and his four great lecture series, above all, the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.