Abstract
John Stuart Mill records in his Autobiography that in the autumn of 1826 he asked himself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ To this question, he also records, ‘an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered “No!”’
At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing to live for.1
This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
The subject has no recourse in itself that does not dry up under the intelligible sun.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
The fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me, as completely as those of benevolence.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
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Notes
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1924) p. 113.
Richard Price, A Review of the Principle Questions in Morals, ed. D. D. Raphael (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) p. 149.
Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943) p. 228
Jean Wahl, Existence humaine et transcendance (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1944) p. 37.
Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967) p. 163
Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941) p. 350.
Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
Martin Luther, Works, Lectures on Romans, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1972) p. 513.
Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, I, 26, 27, cp Sermo 179A, 4. See Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-love in Augustine (Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 1980) p. 130
John Calvin, ‘Catechism of the Church of Geneva’, in Calvin: Theological Treatises, trans. J. K. S. Reid (London: SCM, 1952) p. 117.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I, 2, trans. G.T. Thomson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1956) pp. 451–2.
S. G. Smith, The Argument to the Other: Reason beyond Reason in the Thought of Karl Barth and Emmanuel Levinas (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1983).
Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, ed. H. V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–75) vol. I, No 944.
Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (London: Oxford University Press, 1946) p. 74.
Levinas refers to the descriptions of the il y a in Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l’Obscur (Paris: Gallimard, 1941, 1950).
Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres (Paris: Hachette, 1925), Vol XIII
In an interview with François Poirié in Emmanuel Lévinas: Qui êtes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), p. 103
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© 1991 John Llewelyn
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Llewelyn, J. (1991). Introduction to Metaphysics. In: The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21624-6_1
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