O filosofickém eskapismu

Abstract

The study is concerned with the issue of philosophical pessimism and escapism in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Arthur Schopenhauer. I start from Levinas’ early texts On Escape (De l’évasion), Existence and Existents (De l’existence à l’existant ) and Time and the Other (Le temps et l’autre), in which the French phenomenologist holds a strongly pessimistic point of view and where he also formulates a metaphysical need for an “escape from being.” That same tendency – i.e. the need to escape from an inhospitable existential situation – is then examined in Schopenhauer’s seminal work The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt Als Wille Und Vorstellung). In the first part of the study (i), I thematize the moods of boredom (Schopenhauer) and anxiety (Levinas), in which being appears to both authors as inhospitable. I then examine (ii) the metaphysical assumptions of Schopenhauer’s and Levinas’ pessimism and escapism, or more precisely the non-theistic starting points of their philosophical concepts. In the third part (iii), I focus on experiential assumptions, specifically on negative forms of the subject’s experience with the world – i.e. the experience of physical and psychological suffering, existential loneliness and aimlessness. The last part of the study (iv) briefly outlines the various “escape vectors” from being that both philosophers offer: Schopenhauer demarcates the way out of being – towards nothingness – through asceticism, through the gradual mortification of all bodily and spiritual desires; Levinas, to the contrary, holds in his early texts onto the emotion of pleasure [plaisir], whose ecstaticity pointing to transcendence seems to be for him – however inadequate it remains – a pathway towards the exit from being; in his late work, Levinas then finds a solution in the turn towards ethics.

Keywords

• emmanuel levinas
• arthur schopenhauer
• phenomenology
• escapism
• pessimism