It may seem strange to associate the name of Jan Patočka with artificial intelligence. Neither a mathematician nor a logician, the phenomenology he espoused, with its emphasis on lived experience, seems worlds apart from the formalism associated with the discipline. Yet, as I hope to show, the radicality and depth of Patočka’s thought is such that it casts a wide net. The reform of metaphysics that Patočka proposed in his asubjective phenomenology also affects artificial intelligence. It shows that what philosophers (...) take as its most difficult, yet primary problem may well be the result of a category mistake. (shrink)
When we take the term literally, “aesthetic education” refers to the senses. The etymological root of “aesthetic” is, aesthesis (ai[sqhsi"), the Greek word signifying “perception by the senses.” The corresponding verb is aisthanomai (aijsqanovmai), which means “to apprehend by the senses,” i.e., to see, hear, touch, etc.1 What does it mean to educate the senses? The senses, as Aristotle noted, are what we share with animals.2 The question of their education, thus, involves the notion of our “animal” nature. We see (...) the animals about us. We note our similarities. We assert that that part of them is within us. Doing so, we draw a line between our animal and human nature. The question of aesthetic education concerns this line, both the line and its trespass. The line is between the educator and the educated, the human and the animal. The human, in educating the senses, we could say, educates the animal within it. It humanizes it. It extends its territory. The human, however, includes the animal. Could we not also see this education as the advance of the animal to the human, the extension of its territory? To answer such questions we must come to terms not just with the animal but also the human. Without this, we cannot know the role of humanistic education, understood literally as the” education of the human.” What I propose in this paper is suggest some answers to the question of the relation of the animal to the human. The claim I will be making is that aesthetic education, the education of our sensibility, is humanistic education in the etymological sense of the word, “e-ducate.” It is what first “leads or draws out” the human. It is the condition of the possibility of the being of.. (shrink)
Since the original UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights1 laid out the general principles of human rights, there has been a split between what have been regarded as civil and political rights as opposed to economic, cultural and social rights. It was, in fact, the denial that both could be considered “rights” that prevented them from being included in the same covenant.2 Essentially, the argument for distinguishing the two concerns the nature of freedom. The civil rights to the freedoms of (...) speech, religion, assembly, association, and so on do not specify the content of the speech, the theology of the religion or the purpose of the assembly or association. 3 Freedom in such cases is necessarily value-neutral. In leaving the choice up to the individual, these rights purposefully abstract from the content of this choice. The case is quite different for economic, cultural and social rights. All of these necessarily express values with regard to the forms of our social organization. This is because they move beyond individual choices to consider the purposes or goals of our existence together. Thus, the rights to the cultivation of a cultural identity necessarily impact more than the individuals exercising them. As collective, they affect the society as a whole. The same holds for the UN sponsored rights of a person “to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”4 For a society to honor these rights involves specific choices with regard to its social content and collective organization. Such choices embody a particular value—in the UN’s words, that of the “social security” of the individual.5 Freedom, here, is freedom for specific social goals. Since these goals are collective, they.. (shrink)
In a world shaken by terrorists’ assaults, it can seem as if no one is in control. Political leaders often appear at a loss. They cast about for opponents, for those on whom they can exert their political will. The terrorists, however, need not identify themselves. If they do, the languge they use may be messianic rather than political. Rather than indicating negotiable political solutions, it points to something else. Coincident with this, is the pursuit of terror dispite the harm (...) it causes to a given political agenda. The extreme form of terrorism does not speak at all. It bombs and kidnaps, not to negotiate, not to use its victims as pawns to gain a political advantage, but simply to terrorize, to involve innocent bystanders in its own suicidal acts. How does politics confront the absense of negotiable demands? By seeing terrorist’s acts as a “declaration of war?” War, however, has its goals. It is, Clausawitz teaches, a continuation of politics by other means. Yet in the absence of any clear statements, can we know what someone who mails anthrax has in mind? Can we tell what would actually satisfy those who use passenger planes as missiles to kill themselves and thousands of others? Terrorism, here, represents, not politics, but its breakdown. It is not some state power in control of a political process. It cannot be characterized as a political opponent. It is, rather, a method. By implying a way to achieve a political goal, even the word, “method,” says too much. As a sign of the breakdown of politics, it should rather be called a symptom. It was Freud who first introduced the notion of “symptoms” and “breakdown” to describe the loss of control. In what follows, I will apply his insights to Melville’s tale of revolt on a.. (shrink)
Our past century was exemplary in a number of ways. The advances it made in science and medicine were unparalleled. Also without precedent was the destructiveness of its wars. In part, this was due to an increasing technological sophistication. The time lag between a scientific advance and its technological application was, in the urgency of the century, constantly diminished. Modern weaponry combined with mass production, communication and mobilization to produce what came to be known as “total war.” This was a (...) war without any of the limits that characterized the conflicts of the previous centuries. It was this lack of restraint that, perhaps more than anything else, led to the terrible excesses of this century: its war time terror bombings, deportations, and genocidal slaughters. It also led to the chief problem this century presents to ethics: that of the grasp and comprehension of collective evil. This problem is not just theoretical. An inability of those involved in its collective processes to take thought-- to actually apprehend the evil they were engaged in--characterized the disasters of our century. At least in part, the participants’ lack of restraint was based on a lack of recognition. (shrink)
What is the origin of ethical responsibility? What gives us our ability to respond? An ethical response involves responding to myself: I answer the call of my conscience. It also involves answering to the Other: I respond to the appeal of my neighbor. Is one form of response prior to the other? Contemporary thinking about these questions has been largely taken up by the debate between Levinas and Heidegger. Responsibility, according to Heidegger, begins with our concern for our being.1 The (...) “call of conscience” originates in our responsibility for what we are. By contrast, Levinas sees this “call” as beginning, not with ourselves, but with our neighbor. Its origin is “the face of the other.” So framed, the debate can be expressed in the opposition: self-responsibility against responsibility for the other.2 My purpose in what follows is to establish two claims. The first is that behind this opposition, there is a fundamental agreement concerning the origin of our ethical obligations. Both philosophers hold that ethical responsibility ultimately springs from our encounter with death. Their real quarrel concerns its location. Where do we first confront death? Is the “first death” our own or that of the other person? Do I confront death in the anxiety I have over my own demise or does it make its primary appearance in what Levinas calls “the face as the very mortality of the other person”?3 My second claim is that, whichever we choose, we cannot really base ethical responsibility on this encounter. This is because death for both philosophers is nontransferable and, hence, ultimately isolating. Furthermore, to face it is a traumatic experience. A traumatised self, however, cannot act. It can only flee. Given this, the response death actually provokes is avoidance. To adequately ground ethical responsibility, we must, I conclude, turn from seeking its basis in death understood in terms of absence and passivity. We must rethink this ground in terms of life taken as presence and affectivity. §1.. (shrink)
Heidegger writes that “metaphysical thinking rests on the distinction between what truly is and what, measured against this, constitutes all that is not truly in being.”3 In the long history of philosophy, this distinction has been variously interpreted. Generally, however, it has involved taking the true world as invisible yet intelligible and the nontrue world as visible but not per se intelligible. To illustrate this point, four examples should suffice. I will limit myself to Plato’s, Descartes’, Berkeley’s and Kant’s expression (...) of this distinction. For Plato, “the very being of to be——is to be “always in the same manner in relation to the same things.” As Plato explains, this is to be “unchanging” and, thus, to remain the same with oneself. The ideas () “beauty itself, equality itself, and every itself” are.. (shrink)
How would we conceive a phenomenology that has been purified by a post-modern critique? Although the term “post-modernism” names an extremely varied phenomenon, two features seem especially relevant. The first is its distrust of meta-narratives or overarching accounts of the way things are. The second, which is closely related to this, is the deconstruction of the subject. By this is meant not just the deconstruction of the “author”—i.e., the undermining the notion of his/her subjective intentions as setting the parameters of (...) textual interpretation. At issue is the grand meta-narrative of modernity itself. This is the narrative of subjectivity. Beginning with Descartes, and continuing through Kant and Husserl, subjectivity has been central theme of modern philosophy. For Descartes, it provided the Archimedean point, the central focus of certainty. For Kant, subjectivity is the terminus of his Copernican turn. Rather than assuming that all our knowledge must conform to objects, let us, Kant suggests, turn and try the reverse. Let us see if the rules of our understanding make possible the experience of objects.1 Husserl, in radicalizing this position, takes these rules as rules of synthesis. He sees the world we experience as the “product” of the synthetic (or constitutive) activities of transcendental subjectivity. After pointing out the difficulties with this narrative, difficulties involving the inability of subjectivity sustain the normative role that modernity assigns it, my question will be: what remains of the phenomenological project? How can we think of phenomenology apart from the narrative Husserl inherits from his predecessors? In othe words: What is phenomenology’s self-understanding, once it admits the validity of the post-modern critique of the subject? Such an understanding, I shall argue, can be found in Patocka’s insight that that.. (shrink)
When one regards the conflicts of the past century, Hegel’s description of history as a “slaughter-bench” seems apt.1 The two world wars the century witnessed were extraordinarily violent. In the First, the combatants were subject to an industrial scale slaughter by being systematically exposed to machine gun fire, artillery bombardments and poison gas. The Second World War added to these horrors with its concept of “total war,” which was defined as a war directed against the totality of the enemy nation: (...) its schools, factories, cities, in short, the entirety of its civilian population. In pursuit of this policy, cities were firebombed, populations were deported or systematically starved, and non-combatants generally were subject to much the same violence as armies in the field. This extension of violence to civilian populations continued in the conflicts that followed. It was particularly marked in the liberation struggles and the civil wars that have extended from the post-war period to this day. While violence between nations has not been lacking, the organized intra-state violence of civil wars and the violence of “failed” states have come to the fore. Again and again, we witness outrages against defenseless populations, their robbing and murder by marauding bands. Such violence seems a continuation of the violence that arises whenever the withdrawal of the forces of civil order occurs. Whether this is occasioned by a natural disaster or by the fall of a dictatorship, looting and gang violence with its settling of scores seems inevitably to errupt. As the example of countries from Somalia to Iraq has shown, such violence only ceases when met by the counter-violence of the forces of public order. (shrink)
What is the relation of shame to guilt? What are the characteristics that distinguish the two? When we regard them phenomenologically, i.e., in the way that they directly manifest themselves, two features stand out. Guilt and shame imply different relations to the other person. Their relation to language is also distinct. Guilt involves the internalization of the other, not as a specific individual, but rather as an amalgam of parents, elders, and other social and cultural authority figures.i This amalgam of (...) authority figures becomes present as the inner voice of conscience. The sense of guilt arises when we violate its strictures. This occurs even when we are alone—that is, when we act in secret. Even then, there is a certain inner dialogue that occurs in our heads. It may be that we are trying to excuse our conduct or justify it to this voice. It may also happen that we give way to its demands. In either case, the presence of this “voice” of conscience indicates guilt’s dependence on language. With language we have the possibility of the spoken and written norms that formalize the admonitions of our internalized others. Shame, by contrast, usually does require a face-to-face. I am ashamed before the actual other, i.e., before his or her concrete presence. It is this presence, rather than any generalized other, that I internalize.ii There is here a primitive, immediate, pre-linguistic type of empathy at work, one where I regard myself through the other’s presently regarding me. This regard is painful. I do not want this other to see me in my present situation. In contrast to guilt, then, shame requires the real or, at least, the imagined presence of specific others to be activated. In the absence of such others, I can.. (shrink)
The word “theodicy” comes from the Greek words for God (theos) and justice (diké). Although coined by Leibniz, the attempt it represents is far older. In the Jewish tradition, it stretches to the beginning—that is to the stories of Genesis with their attempts to explain how evil could exist in a world created by God. God, after each creative act, sees that his creations are “good.” Women, however, bear their children in pain (Gn 3:16) and the ground, sprouting “thorns and (...) thistles,” can at times appears “cursed” to the farmer (Gn 3:18). How do we explain this? How is it compatible with God’s justice? Is it, in fact, possible to “justify God’s ways to man”? Beginning with Genesis’s account of man’s disobedience, there is a whole tradition of efforts to answer this question. It includes Isaiah’s notion of the “suffering servant”—the person who suffers for the sins of others—and the Maccabean notion of the “martyr”—the innocent and just sufferer who serves as a witness for the truth. As the philosopher, Hans Jonas, observes, the “event of Auschwitz” marks an important challenge to this tradition. “Auschwitz” names not just the setting in which over a million Jews, Gypsies and Poles perished. It also signifies the dehumanization of its victims. In the “factory-like working of its machine” for extermination, even the gesture of martyrdom and witness was not left to the dying. In Jonas’s words, “Not fidelity or infidelity, belief or unbelief, not guilt or punishment, not trial, witness and messianic hope, nay, not even strength or weakness, heroism or cowardice, defiance or submission had a place there. .... Of all this, Auschwitz, which also devoured the infants and babes, knew.. (shrink)
No one can turn on the news these days without hearing of fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalists form the fastest growing sect in the United States and are arguably the most politically potent. Both the president and vice-president, as well as prominent members of the Cabinet call themselves “fundamentalists.” In the Islamic world, fundamentalism has an equal currency. Everywhere ascendant, it has, since September 11th, become linked to terrorist attacks and the actions of suicide bombers. Among the Jews of Israel, it also (...) has a growing influence. The fundamentalist “settlers” of the West Bank, most observers agree, hold the political process hostage. What, then, is fundamentalism? What do Christian, Islamic, and Jewish “fundamentalists” have in common that makes them worthy of this name? One answer is that all three religions are “religions of the book.” They all define themselves in terms of a religious text.1 There is here a certain reciprocal constitution. What makes a person a believer in one of these faiths is that he holds a certain text sacred—be this the Christian Bible, the Koran, or the Torah. Reciprocally, what makes these texts sacred is just such belief. It forms the context, the constitutive medium which allows the sacred character of these texts to appear. When the belief goes, so does this character. No one, for example, takes the ancient hymns to the Latin Gods seriously. We use the names of Jupiter (or Mars or Venus) neither to swear nor to blaspheme. Lacking the ancients’ belief, such actions would be pointless. Of course, not every believer in the sacred character of a text is a fundamentalist. Something else must be added. The thesis I am going to defend is that 2 fundamentalism is a way of reading a religious text. Those who engage in it maximize the “staying power” of this text. The price they pay, however, is that of denying the transcendence that the religions of the book claim for their texts.. (shrink)
There is a striking scene from a Latin American movie where an inmate in an asylum is assisting in an autopsy. He takes the brain of the cadaver, begins to crumble it between his fingers, and remarks that within it lie all the person’s memories, hopes, and desires—in short, the person himself.1 Watching it, you want to protest, “This is not the self. The self is something more than this. To locate the self in this crumbling piece of matter is (...) to join in the madness of the asylum!” Immediately, however, the questions arise: “Where, then, is the self? “Where is our consciousness? If it is not in the skull, where is it?” If, however, we do open up and look inside the skull, all we see is a brain and the various sensory organs. As we part and slice the brain, we find no “self.” What we confront here is, of course, the classic mind-body problem. Ever since Descartes distinguished the mind from the body, declaring the mind to be nonextended and bodies to be extended, the relation of the two has been a puzzle.2 In material objects, as John Locke observed, we can grasp how a change in “the size, figure, and motion of one body should cause a change in the size, figure and motion of another body.”3 Their connection with the mind is, however, another matter. According to Locke, “there is no conceivable connection between the one and other.”4 We lack any concept—in David Chalmer’s phrase, any “explanatory bridge”—that would connect the two.5 Lacking this, we cannot see how the mind or self can be “within” the brain. The difficulty we face may be compared to the one that Derrida finds in his analysis of death. Normally, we think of death as a boundary separating this life from what lies beyond. Given, however, that we have no conception of the latter, the notion of a border between life and.. (shrink)
James Mensch, 1970 No philosophical activity is immune from the question of its grounds, its origin, its arche. Philosophizing is not carried out in a vacuum. The philosopher in any inclusive view cannot be seen to be a being set apart from the world about which he philosophizes. He is distinct neither from the world nor its history considered in its totality. A truth so obvious requires only a brief meditative reflection: A philosopher sits writing at his desk. Without (...) even raising his head, he directs his glance about him. What is the reality that appears? The most immediate objects of his perception, the pen, the paper, the desk, the printed book which lies open before him, even the words which he writes, all have a historical character. Paper, pen, desk and book, these objects are all the products of a historically defined type of work. They are the creations, the phenomenal manifestations of modern technological work.1 Even the words which he writes presuppose a history, a personal history insofar as these words are not empty signs but rather consist in meaningfully arranged characters, which he has learned to write and which someone has, therefore,. taught him to write. The meaning of words has to be won through a continuing encounter with reality, an encounter both personal and historically transcendent of the individual person, an encounter which is never the same, never repeated in an identical fashion. What is the reality that is present to him now, what is the totality of all that is now confronting us as beginning philosophers? As the above observations point out, the briefest of reflections leads us to the questions of the history and genesis of the things that confront us. But what is the condition of this confrontation, this encounter between the philosophizing subject and the world which he wishes to comprehend? Aristotle noted that all men naturally desire to know. Why? Our question is actually, “How does Being come to know itself?” This, of course, can be.... (shrink)
Since the close of the cold war, there seems to be a certain constant in the conflicts that have marked multi-national conferences. Again and again, we see the smaller states opposing the efforts of the larger to determine the structures of their relations. One of the factors of this opposition is their fear of losing their identity. In a world increasingly determined by global interests, cultural and economic particularity seems to be a luxury that few can afford. For many, the (...) name of this fear is “globalization.” They take the term as signifying a process that threatens to replace their individuality with an empty universality. Benignly regarded, globalization promises a world where we all drink the same soft-drinks, wear the same jeans, watch the same movies, and listen to the same music--all of it, presumably American. A darker vision sees within such homogeneity the dangers of totalitarianism. As Hannah Arendt noted, totalitarian systems presuppose a certain uniformity to achieve their effect. The ideal they tend to is that of reducing their subjects to a situation analogous to marbles on a table. The slightest tilt will make the marbles roll in the same direction. When citizens lose their individuality, when each is stripped of his particularizing relations to his neighbors, then the state gains the ability to apply a uniform power to produce a uniform effect. Here, the controllability of the response is directly proportional to the reduction of each of us to every one else. In this less benign view, the globalization that American capitalism promotes is actually a new form of totalitarianism. After the fascism and communism of the previous century, its third, capitalistic wave is now upon us. We need not accept this dark vision to feel uneasy about the emerging global community. At the root of our current disquiet is, I think, a sense that an aspect of our selfhood is under attack. The fear is that when we do become just like everyone else, we will lose our privacy.. (shrink)
Socrates taught that philosophy begins with conversation, with the questioning and response that marks dialectic. This book also developed through a serious of conversations. Thus, acknowledgment is above all due to those with whom I shared and developed the themes of the present work. I am grateful, first of all, to Dr. Barabara Weber of the University of Regensburg, with whom I worked out the conceptions of the central chapter of this book, “Public Space, during a daylong conversation in Strasbourg. (...) Dr. Michael Staudigl and I worked on the theme of violence during my stay at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. My gratitude goes out not just to Dr. Staudigl, but also to the Institute for its hospitality. I also would like to acknowledge Prof. Branko Kuln of the University of Ljubljana for the many insights he shared with me on the theme of politics and religion. I wish also to thank Prof. Ernst Hankammer of Bonn-Mehlen for his friendship and the many political discussions we have had over the years. Finally, I must express my gratitude to my wife, Josephine. Without her careful proofreading and suggestions for improving my text, it would not have reached its present form. (shrink)
It seems a function of normal human empathy for us to treat others as we would like to be treated. If, through empathy, we have the capacity of experiencing the distress of others, then we refrain from harming them. Our guide is the “golden rule,” variations of which occur in all the world’s religions.[i] Yet despite apparent unanimity on the rule as “the sum of duty,” conceptions of justice, of how best to organize a state, differ widely. There is often (...) a surprising disjunct between the private ethical conduct of citizens and what counts as “just” or “fair” in the actions of the state. Victor Klemperer’s diaries of the Nazi years bear eloquent testimony both to the private decency of ordinary individuals and the brutality of the state that had at least their passive acquiescence.[ii] Such considerations prompt one to ask: how can we make the transition from ethics to justice? How do we keep intact our sense of empathy and decency when we move from the private to the public realm? How can the universal ethics implied by empathy take on a political presence? To attempt an answer, I am going to look at the nature of empathy to see how it relates to our having a conscience. I will then turn to Hannah Arendt’s account of the human condition to show how the structures implicit in empathy might be translated to society at large. (shrink)
A. M. Turing argued that there was ‘little point in trying to make a ‘thinking machine’ more human by dressing it up in ... artificial flesh’. We should, instead, draw ‘a fairly sharp line between the physical and the intellectual capacities of a man’. For over fifty years, drawing this line has meant disregarding the role flesh plays in our intellectual capacities. Correspondingly, intelligence has been defined in terms of the algorithms that both men and machines can perform. I would (...) like to raise some doubts about this paradigm in AI research. Intelligence, I believe, does not just involve the working of algorithms. It is founded on flesh’s ability to move itself, to feel itself, and to engage in the body projects that accompanied our learning a language. This implies that to copy intelligence--i.e., produce an artificial version of it--the flesh that forms its basis must also be reproduced. (shrink)
conciliation behind. How do the Ukrainians forgive the Russians for the famines they caused? How do the blacks reconcile themselves with the whites that were once their oppressors in South Africa? What of all the countries that suffered from German or Japanese occupation in the last world war: How do they forgive? How does one ask for forgiveness? These are the questions that occupied Derrida towards the end of his life. With the Pope asking forgiveness of the Jews and (...) Clinton in Africa apologizing for slavery, Derrida decried the inflation in the concept of forgiveness. He remarks that were we “to accuse ourselves, in asking forgiveness, for all the crimes of the past against humanity … there would no longer be an innocent person on earth.”[i] Given its essentially Christian origins, “the ‘globalization’ of the concept of forgiveness,” he writes, “resembles an immense scene of confession in progress … a process of Christianization which has no more need for the Christian church.”[ii] The religious basis implicit in this process becomes clear when we reflect that in many cases the victims are no longer alive. They cannot forgive. Yet forgiveness primarily involves the victim and the offender. It is a face-to-face encounter that becomes impossible with the loss of either. “This,” Derrida remarks, “may be one of the reasons … why forgiveness is often asked of God. Of God … because, in the absence of the singularity of the victim who is sometimes no longer there to receive the request or to grant forgiveness, or in the absence of the criminal or the sinner, God is the only name, the name of the name of … the absolute substitute. Of the absolute witness”[iii] The religious notion, then, is that of God as “the absolute substitute.” Even when the victim has died and the criminal and the surviving witnesses have passed on, God, “the substitute,” will forgive. (shrink)
The standard account of arousal seems on the surface relatively straight forward. Its basic meaning is to awaken someone, reading him for activity. Physiologically, this involves stimulating the cerebral cortex into a general state of wakefulness and attention. The aroused subject shows an increased heart rate and blood pressure. Psychologically, sensory alertness, mobility and readiness to respond all mark the aroused state. As all the experts agree, arousal involves more than the simple presence of an external stimulation. It requires impulses (...) that are external and internal to the body. To be effective, the external impulses must find a corresponding response. Thus, it is no good trying to wake someone up by a sound outside of the range of his hearing. Similarly, the genital displays of one species will not cause sexual arousal in another. In neither case, can the external impulses activate the inner impulses or drives. This requires the presence of appropriate stimuli. Thus, the sight and smell of food arouses appetite. It awakens the drive of hunger, which is directed towards the food. Similarly, the sight, odor and touch of the sexual partner brings about sexual arousal and activation of the corresponding sexual drive. Even in the case of arousal from sleep by such varied stimuli as a light being turned on, a noise, or the touch of a person fit into the pattern of an inner impulse or drive being activated by an external impulse. The drive in this case is towards the various stimuli that our senses prime us to receive. Our need for such is as basic as that for food. Placed in a situation of sensory deprivation, the mind attempts to make up their loss by generating hallucinations. The German phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, spoke in this context of “non-objectifying instincts.” They designate an instinctive “interest in the data and fields of sensation—before the objectification of sense data,” that is, before there is “a thematically actualizable object” for the drive to fasten on.[i] In each of these examples, hunger, sex, or simple sensation, the external stimuli trigger internal processes primed to response.. (shrink)
In our increasingly interdependent world, human solidarity has become a topic of general (and heated) discussion. It has been urged as an antidote to the competitive pressures of globalisation and to the threats of climate change. Others argue that the sense of belonging together, of sharing a common fate that it brings is essential for civil society. Without this, we will seek to avoid the burdens our governments impose on us, for example, taxes and the draft. This sense of belonging (...) facilitates our talking to each other and forming a democratically based consensus on such matters. A common history, language, religion, or ethnic identity can ground this sense of belonging. So can a feeling of shared danger. (shrink)
In a world shaken by terrorists’ assaults, it can seem as if no one is in control. Political leaders often appear at a loss. They cast about for opponents, for those on whom they can exert their political will. The terrorists, however, need not identify themselves. If they do, the languge they use may be messianic rather than political. Rather than indicating negotiable political solutions, it points to something else. Coincident with this, is the pursuit of terror dispite the harm (...) it causes to a given political agenda. The extreme form of terrorism does not speak at all. It bombs and kidnaps, not to negotiate, not to use its victims as pawns to gain a political advantage, but simply to terrorize, to involve innocent bystanders in its own suicidal acts. How does politics confront the absense of negotiable demands? By seeing terrorist’s acts as a “declaration of war?” War, however, has its goals. It is, Clausawitz teaches, a continuation of politics by other means. Yet in the absence of any clear statements, can we know what someone who mails anthrax has in mind? Can we tell what would actually satisfy those who use passenger planes as missiles to kill themselves and thousands of others? Terrorism, here, represents, not politics, but its breakdown. It is not some state power in control of a political process. It cannot be characterized as a political opponent. It is, rather, a method. By implying a way to achieve a political goal, even the word, “method,” says too much. As a sign of the breakdown of politics, it should rather be called a symptom. (shrink)
If post-modern philosophy has a spiritual father, this is surely Nietzsche. The great revival of interest in his thought parallels our period’s discomfort with foundational, “metaphysical” thinking. He appeals to our disquiet with talk of essences. Many find his “deconstruction” of science and morality liberating. Above all his doctrine of “perspectivism” has found a general appeal. The pluralism that is its apparent result is attractive to everyone from feminists to defenders of multiculturalism. There is, however, a darker side to Nietzsche. (...) There is the Nietzsche who speaks of the advance in women’s rights as “one of the worst developments in the general uglification of Europe.”[i] This is the same Nietzsche who teaches that “almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty,”[ii] the Nietzsche, who in answer to his question “whither must we direct our hopes,” speaks of preparing “for great enterprises and collective experiments in discipline and breeding so as to make an end of that gruesome domination of chance and nonsense which has hitherto been called ‘history’...”[iii] As much as we would like to forget the fact, this Nietzsche became the icon of the Nazis. (shrink)
Thesis: With the end of the cold war, ideological conflicts have faded. In their stead, we have witnessed the rise of cultural strife. On the borders of the great civilizations conflicts involving basic cultural values have arisen. These have given increased emphasis to the ethical imperative of cross cultural understanding. How do we go about understanding different cultures? What are the grounds and premises of such understanding? How does such understanding tie into the basic ethical theories that have marked the (...) West? The premise of this paper is that such understanding requires a new paradigm, one fundamentally different from that animating Western, scientific rationality. What is required is a rethinking of what constitutes our ethical selfhood. After proposing a concept of such selfhood, this essay shows that it is an implicit premise of Plato’s, Kant’s, Freud’s and Darwin’s thoughts about ethics. It makes some practical suggestions for increasing cross-cultural understanding and then concludes with a brief description of the normative, ethical ideal of such understanding. (shrink)
In a series of conversations recorded towards the end of his life, Husserl is quoted as saying, "Yes, I do honor Thomas ..." and "... certainly I admit Thomas was a very great, a colossal phenomenon."1 With this, however, is the assertion that one "must go beyond Thomas."2 What is this going beyond Thomas? The purpose of this essay is to explore this in terms of the distinction between existence and essence we considered in our first chapter when we inquired (...) into the ontological status of the ideas. Our claim is that on this point at least, Husserl is in agreement with Thomas Aquinas. The demand that we go "beyond" him does not concern this distinction. It rather amounts to an implicit call to bring Thomas’ epistemology--in particular, his view of consciousness--up to the level achieved by his metaphysical insights. (shrink)
Much of the current debate opposing empathy to rationality assumes that there are no universal standards for rationality. From the postmodern perspective, the “rational” does not just vary according to the different historical stages of a people. It also differs according the social and cultural conditions that define contemporary communities. What counts as reasonable in the Afghan cultural sphere is often considered as irrational in the Western European context. What Americans take to be rational modes of conduct are not considered (...) to be such in various African communities. For postmodern thinkers, these examples point to the failure of the universalist paradigm inherited from the 18th century. We no longer believe that there is a single paradigm of rationality—once seen as exemplified by philosophy—that is capable of crossing our cultural divides.[i] If appeals to reason cannot bridge cultures, what can? We were all moved by the plight of the victims of the tsunami that devastated the Java Peninsula. Showing their empathy, people around the world contributed to their relief. Doesn’t this exhibit a universal empathy, one capable of bridging the gaps between cultures? A similar argument can be made from the universal appeal of certain works of literature. Reading them, we imaginatively participate in their characters’ lives. We feel what they feel, seeing the world through their eyes. We exercise our empathy in its basic etymological sense of feeling in and through another person. If empathy rather than rationality is genuinely universal, then literature, rather than philosophy, becomes our common language. Similarly, empathy rather than rationality owns the public space uniting different cultures. Appeals to our human solidarity, through literature, movies, television reports and so on must be based on it. [ii] As for philosophy, it becomes relegated to the sphere of our private beliefs and personal convictions. Its sphere is reduced to that of the “true for me.” In what follows, I would like to argue against this separation of empathy and rationality. My position will be that their opposition presupposes a limited, Cartesian concept of rationality. Once we abandon this, we find that empathy and rationality are not, in fact, distinct.. (shrink)
I would like to thank Professor Rudolf Bernet, the Director of the Husserl Archives in Louvain, Belgium and Professor Dieter Lohmar, the Director of the Husserl Archives in Cologne, for permission to cite from the manuscripts of the Nachlaß. In particular, I would like to thank Professor Lohmar for the many helpful suggestions he made regarding Husserl’s positions on our apprehension of time. I continually benefited from his insights during my stay at the Archives. I would also like to express (...) my gratitude to Siefried Rombach who read my manuscript with great care and offered a number of suggestions for its improvement. I am also greatful to the members of the seminar at the Cologne Archives who participated in reading Husserl’s writings on time consciousness. Many of their insights have also found their way into my text. Without my wife, Josephine Mensch’s careful proofreading and suggestions for improving my text, it also would not have reached its present form. (shrink)
A constant theme in human self-reflection has been our ability to escape the control of nature. As Sophocles remarks in his Antigone, “Many are the wonders, none is more wonderful than what is man. He has a way against everything.”[1] A list follows of the ways in which man overcomes the limits imposed by the seas, the land, and the seasons. We do this by creating new environments for ourselves. These environments condition us. Thus, we do not just escape nature (...) by building cities. We, in turn, become city dwellers. The fact that we determine ourselves by determining our world has led thinkers like Hannah Arendt to describe us as conditioned beings. In her words, “Men are conditioned beings because everything they come into contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.” This includes “the things that owe their existence exclusively to men.” They too “constantly condition their human makers.” [2] Since Hegel’s time, such self-conditioning has been understood to include our very nature. Our ability to determine our environments, i.e., escape being determined by nature, has been taken to mean that our nature is our own creation. There are, in other words, no external limits to the freedom we have to determine who and what we are. This freedom, to put it paradoxically, is ground-less. There is nothing prior to it that determines it. “Freedom,” here, does not signify some nature or essence, but rather the lack of such. As Heidegger writes, “Freedom is the abyss (Ab-grund) of human existence (Dasein).” It is our character as ground-less beings. (shrink)
The question of the imagination is rather like the question Augustine raised with regard to the nature of time. We all seem to know what it involves, yet find it difficult to define. For Descartes, the imagination was simply our faculty for producing a mental image. He distinguished it from the understanding by noting that while the notion of a thousand sided figure was comprehensible—that is, was sufficiently clear and distinct to be differentiated from a thousand and one sided figure—the (...) figure could not be clearly pictured in our mind. The representation of its sides exceeded our powers of imagination.[i] This view of the imagination as our ability to produce a mental image fails, however, to distinguish it from remembering. Let us say that I see an object and then I close my eyes, maintaining the image of the object. Is this imagining or short term memory? What about the case when I recall this image an hour later? Am I imagining or remembering it? Such examples make it clear that imagination, as distinct from memory, implies something more than the ability to produce a mental image. It involves, as Sartre pointed out, a certain attitude towards this image. Engaging in it, we deny its reality. In Sartre’s words, imagination “carries within it a double negation; first, it is the nihilation of the world (since the world is not offering the imagined object as an actual object of perception), secondly, the nihilation of the object of the image (it is posited as not actual) ...” (BN, p. 62). Imagination, then, represents the imagined as nonactual. (shrink)
Since the original UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights[i] laid out the general principles of human rights, there has been a split between what have been regarded as civil and political rights as opposed to economic, cultural and social rights. It was, in fact, the denial that both could be considered “rights” that prevented them from being included in the same covenant.[ii] Essentially, the argument for distinguishing the two concerns the nature of freedom. The civil rights to the freedoms of (...) speech, religion, assembly, association, and so on do not specify the content of the speech, the theology of the religion or the purpose of the assembly or association. [iii] Freedom in such cases is necessarily value-neutral. In leaving the choice up to the individual, these rights purposefully abstract from the content of this choice. The case is quite different for economic, cultural and social rights. All of these necessarily express values with regard to the forms of our social organization. This is because they move beyond individual choices to consider the purposes or goals of our existence together. Thus, the rights to the cultivation of a cultural identity necessarily impact more than the individuals exercising them. As collective, they affect the society as a whole. The same holds for the UN sponsored rights of a person “to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”[iv] For a society to honor these rights involves specific choices with regard to its social content and collective organization. Such choices embody a particular value—in the UN’s words, that of the “social security” of the individual.[v] Freedom, here, is freedom for specific social goals. Since these goals are collective, they have an impact on our individual choices. Thus, while my right to expressing my opinion need not impact yours, this is not the case for the economic rights the UN covenant endorses. The question I want to explore is the nature of the relationship between these two types of rights.. (shrink)
Our past century was exemplary in a number of ways. The advances it made in science and medicine were unparalleled. Also without precedent was the destructiveness of its wars. In part, this was due to an increasing technological sophistication. The time lag between a scientific advance and its technological application was, in the urgency of the century, constantly diminished. Modern weaponry combined with mass production, communication and mobilization to produce what came to be known as “total war.” This was a (...) war without any of the limits that characterized the conflicts of the previous centuries. It was this lack of restraint that, perhaps more than anything else, led to the terrible excesses of this century: its war time terror bombings, deportations, and genocidal slaughters. It also led to the chief problem this century presents to ethics: that of the grasp and comprehension of collective evil. This problem is not just theoretical. An inability of those involved in its collective processes to take thought--to actually apprehend the evil they were engaged in--characterized the disasters of our century. At least in part, the participants’ lack of restraint was based on a lack of recognition. (shrink)
Last year a remarkable, but disturbing film won the Cannes Film Festival’s French Language prize. Using actual students as actors, Laurent Cantet’s “Entre les Murs” depicted the constant tug of war between them and their French teacher. Demanding respect, but often showing none, the teenagers made the simplest teaching task a difficult and drawn-out enterprise. The final dialogue of the film is the most disturbing. Let me quote a few lines in translation. A shy student, Henriette, is the last to (...) leave the classroom at the end of the year. She approaches the teacher and says: Sir? FRANÇOIS : Yes? What is it? HENRIETTE : I didn’t learn anything. FRANÇOIS : What? Why are you saying that? That doesn’t mean anything. (shrink)
Excerpts from THE JERUSALEM BIBLE, copyright (c) 1966 by Dalton, Longman and Todd, Ltd. and Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. are reprinted by permission.
Both in its methods and spirit, Kant’s critical philosophy seems the opposite of recent French philosophy. In its deductive approach, it exemplifies a severe rationality; its structures of argument and proof often abstract from our lived experience. The philosophies of Derrida and Levinas, however, attend to such experience. In particular, they are sensitive to precisely those aspects of it that seem to exceed our conceptual abilities. Thus, for Levinas the face of the other manifests an “inabsorbable alterity.” It cannot be (...) integrated.. (shrink)
In discussing the Bible as literature, I am simply going to assume that the Bible, particularly in the King James version, is great literature. I am also going to take for granted the fact that its stories and themes have continually sparked the literary imagination of the West. From the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden to that of the Resurrection we have a set of symbols, motifs, and themes whose reworking has been the subject of the bulk (...) of our literature. I am not going to discuss this influence, nor even discuss the Bible as a piece of literature, i.e., as a particular literary work. What I am going to do is to focus on what is involved in our taking it as literature. More particularly, I am going to look at how we approach questions of truth in a literary work. I am going to ask how far we can push this approach when we come to read the Bible. What are the limits in reading the Bible as literature? When does the notion of “truth” as it arises in a literary text begin to fail us. That it will fail us at a certain point is implicit in the Bible’s claim to be “sacred scripture” or “revelation.” If we take this claim seriously, we naturally have a special approach to the “truth” its text contains. But what precisely is this approach? This is what I want to explore. In other words, my goal in exploring the limits of the literary approach to the Bible is to gain some insights into the sacred character of its text and how we should approach it. §1. Truth and the literary text. The most common, if often overlooked feature of a successful literary work is that of presenting us with a world In a certain sense, it succeeds by having inherent standards for what can belong to it, of what fits in with its sense and what does not. Having such standards, it presents us with that unified sense that makes a world a world, that is, that makes it an ordered whole.. (shrink)
In the Author’s Note that introduces the Life of Pi, Yann Martel claims that he first heard of Pi in a coffee shop in India. A chance acquaintance tells him, “I have a story that will make you believe in God” (LP, vii).[i] The story concerns the life of an Indian boy who grows up surrounded by the animals of his father’s zoo. When Pi is sixteen, his family decides to emigrate. His father sells off the animals to an American (...) zoo and the family travels with them across the Pacific. The steamer sinks during a storm and Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger. The hyena attacks the zebra and then the orangutan, devouring both. He, in turn, is killed and eaten by the tiger. Pi stays alive by acting as the tiger’s zookeeper. Feeding it with the fish he catches and giving it water from the solar stills that he finds on the lifeboat, he survives until the boat, carried by the equatorial current, reaches the shores of Mexico. (shrink)
I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to Professor James Morrison of the University of Toronto for his encouragement and aid in the preparation of this work. His generosity is an example of the genuine philosophic spirit. I should also like to thank Ernie and Frauke Hankamer as well as Hugo and Ruth Jakusch whose kindness sustained us in Munich and Dieben. Finally, mention must be made of the Canada Council without whose financial aid this book would not have been (...) possible. (shrink)
Only rarely does life imitate art in the starkness and directness of its message. When that message is a tragic one the effect becomes indelible. Such was the impact on Peru of the events of Uchuraccay, a small village located in its central highlands. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called it “an emblematic referent of the violence and pain in the collective memory of the country” (TRC, 121). [i] In the twenty-year turmoil that engulfed Peru at the end of the (...) last century, 69280 violent deaths were recorded. What makes Uchuraccay emblematic of this carnage is not just its own destruction; it is the web of misunderstandings that entangled the participants. On January 23, 1983, eight journalists from Lima were caught in this web. Mistaken for terrorists, they and their guide were attacked by the natives of the village. Remarkably, one of the journalists left a photographic record of their slaughter. There also exists a photograph of the bodies of the journalists after they were exhumed a few days later. In it, their eyeless sockets are clearly evident.[ii] When I saw the photo in Lima, it reminded me of the moment in Greek tragedy that is called “recognition.” This is the point when the veil of illusion is stripped from the characters. The most striking example of this is Oedipus’ appearance after he has blinded himself. In his eyeless state, the audience recognizes his previous blindness to his unnatural condition. This moment of recognition is a public exhibition. It is a disclosure of the way things actually were during the events depicted. In what follows, I am going to take this final image of the journalists as a disclosure of the communal blindness that engulfed Peru. My aim is to relate this blindness to the violence that was its tragic correlate. (shrink)
Weil aber das volle Wesen der Wahrheit das Unwesen einschließt und allem zuvor als Verbergung waltet, ist die Philosophie als das Erfragen dieser Wahrheit in sich zwiespaltig. Ihr Denken ist die Gelassenheit der Milde, die der Verborgenheit des Seienden im Ganzen sich nicht versagt. Ihr Denken ist zumal die Ent-schlossenheit der Strange, die nicht die Verbergung sprengt, aber ihr unversehrtes Wesen ins Offene des Bergreifens und so in ihre eigene Wahrheit nötigt.
A striking feature of post-modernism is its distrust of the subject. If the modern period, beginning with Descartes, sought in the subject a source of certainty, an Archimedian point from which all else could be derived, post- modernism has taken the opposite tack. Rather than taking the self as a foundation, it has seen it as founded, as dependent on the accidents which situate consciousness in the world. The same holds for the unity of the subject. Modernity, in its search (...) for a single foundation, held the subject to be an indissoluble unity. Post-modernism’s position, by contrast, is announced by Nietzsche: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? ...My hypotheses: The subject as multiplicity.” Given this, there is a natural correspondence between the success of post- modernism and the current interest in multiple personality disorder. In the latter, we actually have the experience of a “multiplicity of subjects” in their interaction and struggle. The subject stands there before us “as multiplicity.” It gives us a concrete case, one which raises some of the pressing questions associated with the post-modern denial of the subject. Confronting it, we ask: how real are the personalities composing the multiplicity of this disordered self? What, in fact, does this multiplicity tell us about the self? about its genesis and status? What does it reveal about “our thought and consciousness in general”? I plan, in the short compass of this paper, to sketch some answers to these questions. §1. A brief description of MPD. The American Psychiatric Association gives two criteria for (MPD) multiple personality disorder. First, and most obviously, there is “the existence within the person of two or more distinct personalities or personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern. (shrink)
There is a famous passage in the Gospels, where a lawyer questions Jesus with regard to the command to love God with one's whole heart and to love ones neighbour `as oneself.' The lawyer asks, 'And who is my neighbour?' (Luke 10:2 [1]). Is he someone who lives close by or a co-religionist or is he a stranger, a follower of a different faith as Jesus suggests by answering with the parable of the good Samaritan? The 'religions of the book (...) [2],' Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have difficulties answering this question. As their respective histories show, they all manifest a double potential. They show themselves capable of promoting acts of love and extreme self-sacrifice in their followers. But they also have histories marked by religiously motivated struggles, intolerance and acts of brutality. What is the root of this double potential? How can they promote both love and violence? (shrink)
Is violence senseless or is it at the origin of sense? Does its destruction of meaning disclose ourselves as the origin of meaning? Or is it the case that it leaves in its wake only a barren field? Does it result in renewal or only in a sense of dead loss? To answer these questions, I shall look at James Dodd’s, Hegel’s, and Carl Schmitt’s accounts of the creative power of violence—particularly with regard to its ability to give individuals and (...) groups their sense of self-identity. I shall also follow up on Peg Birmingham’s suggestion that Socrates’ defense at his trial points to an alternate source of our self-identity—one that is ultimately less barren. (shrink)
Religion has been a constant throughout human history. Evidence of it dates from the earliest times. Religious practice is also universal, appearing in every region of the globe. To judge from recorded history and contemporary accounts, religious intolerance is equally widespread. Yet all the major faiths proclaim the golden rule, namely, to “love your neighbour as yourself.” When Jesus was asked by a lawyer, “Who is my neighbour?” he replied with the story of the good Samaritan—the man who bound up (...) the wounds and looked after the Israelite who was neither his co-religionist nor a member of his race. Jesus’ example has been rarely followed. What is it in religion—and not just in the Christian religion—that leads its members to limit their conception of their neighbour? How is it that, in preaching the universal brotherhood of mankind, religions so often practice the opposite? In my paper, I suggest some answers by focusing on the notions of faith, ethics and finitude. (shrink)
Jan Patočka appears as a paradoxical figure. A champion of human rights, he often presents his philosophy in quite traditional terms. He speaks of the “soul,” its “care,” and of “living in truth.” Yet, in his proposal for an “asubjective” phenomenology, he undermines the traditional notion of the self that has such rights. The question that thus confronts a reader of Patočka is how to reconcile the Patočka who was a spokesman of the Charter 77 movement with the proponent of (...) asubjective phenomenology. What, in fact, is the conception of selfhood that allows him both to affirm human rights and to deny what has been traditionally conceived as the subject of such rights? This conception, I argue, is that of the self as a specific “motion of existence.” By focusing on how, through motion, we actualize our humanity, he avoids both the naturalistic and the idealistic (subjective) conceptions of the self. (shrink)
In his last work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty explored the fact that we believe that perception occurs in our heads ( in the recesses of a body ) and, hence, assert that the perceptual world is in us, while also believing that we are in the world we perceive. In this article, I examine how this intertwining of self and world justifies the faith we have in perception. I shall do so by considering a number of examples. In (...) each case, the object in itself will turn out to be neither within us nor outside of us, but rather at the intersection set by the intertwining. I will then turn to what this disclosure of this object reveals about human temporality and, indeed, about human being as a place (or clearing ) that permits disclosure. (shrink)
The intertwining: the recursion of the seer and the seen -- Artificial intelligence and the phenomenology of flesh -- Aesthetic education and the project of being human -- The intertwining of incommensurables: Yann Martel's life of Pi -- Flesh and the limits of self-making -- Violence and embodiment -- Excessive presence and the image -- Politics and freedom -- Sovereignty and alterity -- Political violence -- Public space -- Sustaining the other: tolerance as a positive ideal -- Forgiveness and incarnation.
The intertwining: the recursion of the seer and the seen -- Artificial intelligence and the phenomenology of flesh -- Aesthetic education and the project of being human -- The intertwining of incommensurables: Yann Martel's life of pi -- Flesh and the limits of self-making -- Violence and embodiment -- Excessive presence and the image -- Politics and freedom -- Sovereignty and alterity -- Political violence -- Public space -- Sustaining the other: tolerance as a positive ideal -- Forgiveness and incarnation.
For phenomenology, the study of appearances and the ways they come together to present a world, the question of the ego presents special difficulties. The ego, itself, is not an appearance; it is the subject to whom appearances appear. As such, it cannot appear. As the neo-Kantian, Paul Natorp expresses this:“The ego is the subjective center of relation for all contents in my consciousness. . . . It cannot itself be a content and resembles nothing that could be a content (...) ofconsciousness.” Husserl will wrestle throughout the whole of his career with the issue of how to handle phenomenologically an ego that cannot be considered asa content of consciousness. In this article, I will outline the stages of his journey toward resolving this question. (shrink)
While the various forms of violence have been the subject of special studies, we lack a paradigm that would allow us to understand the different forms of violence (physical, social, cultural, structural, and so on) as aspects of a unified phenomenon. In this article, I shall take violence as destructive of sense or meaning. The relation of violence to embodiment arises through the role that the body plays in our making sense of the world. My claim is that violence is (...) destructive of this role. It undoes the role of the bodily “I can” in making sense of our surrounding world - be this its physical, cultural, or socialsignificance. (shrink)
“Public space” is the space where individuals see and are seen by others as they engage in public affairs. Hannah Arendt links this space with “public freedom.” The being of such freedom, she asserts, depends on its appearing. It consists of “deeds and words which are meant to appear, whose very existence hinges on appearance.” Such appearance, however, requires the public space. Reflecting on Arendt’s remarks, a number of questions arise: What does the dependence of freedom on public space tell (...) us about the nature of freedom? How does public freedom relate to the freedom of a private individual? Does the latter also depend on its appearing? Which is generatively prior: freedom or public space, i.e., the actions that publicly manifest freedom or the space required for their appearance? How does public power shape this space? In this article, I approach these questions through a phenomenological study of public space. (shrink)
Jan Patočka and Maurice Merleau-Ponty attempted to get beyond Husserl by focusing on manifestation or visibility as such. Yet, the results these philosophers come to are very different — particularly with regard to the a priori of the visible. Are there, as Patočka believed, aspects of being that can be grasped in their entirety, the aspects, namely, that involve its “self-showing”? Or must we say, with Merleau-Ponty, that being can only show itself in finite perspectives that can never be summed (...) to a whole? At stake in their attempts to speak of appearing as appearing is, I propose to show, nothing less than the question of the finitude of being. (shrink)
True freedom involves choices whose scope is not limited in advance by a particular dogma. When we attempt to understand it, a number of questions arise. It is unclear, for example, how the openness of real choice can fit into the organized structures of political life. What prevents the expressions of freedom from disrupting this life? What sets limits to their arbitrariness? The general questionhere concerns the adaptability of freedom to a political context. In this paper, I argue that freedom (...) is inherently political because its origin is social. It gains its content from the multiple interactions that make up social life. (shrink)
If we trace the word phenomenon to its Greek origin, we find it is the participle of the verb, phainesthai, “to show itself.” The phenomenon is that which shows itself; it is the manifest. As Heidegger noted, phenomenology is the study of this showing. It examines how things show themselves to be what they are.1 One of the most difficult problems faced by phenomenology is the mystery of our self-showing. How do we show ourselves to be what we are? How (...) do we manifest our selfhood to one another? To put these questions in the Husserlian context of intention and fulfillment is to ask: What do we intend when we direct ourselves to another person? What sort of fulfillment—i.e., what kind of givenness—satisfies this intention? Once we speak in terms of intention and fulfillment, we face a number of possibilities. The givenness of what we intend can exactly match our intentions. It can be other than what we intend—as is the case when we are simply mistaken. The givenness also can be less. It can, for example, not offer the detail that was part of our intentions. Finally, givenness can exceed our intentions. In showing itself, the object offers us more than what was intended. In this paper, I am going to defend the claim that this excessive givenness happens systematically when we intend another person. To intend another person is, paradoxically, to intend the other as exceeding one’s intentions. As such, the showing which manifests the presence of the other is a kind of “supersaturated givenness.” It is a givenness that makes us aware that more is being given than we can formulate in our intentions. This awareness points to the other’s freedom. It is also a moral awareness. Here, I will argue that our awareness of the other’s excessive givenness is our entrance into morality.2 I In continental philosophy, we have long been accustomed to thinking of the other, not in terms of givenness, but rather the reverse. We think of the other as not being able to be given.. (shrink)
This paper proposes an explanatory bridge between structures of processing and qualia. It shows how the process of their arising is such that qualia are nonpublic objects, i.e., are only accessible to the person experiencing them. My basic premise is that the subjective “felt” character of qualia is a function of this first-person character. The account I provide is basically Husserlian. Thus, I use Husserl’s analyses to show why qualia always refer to a single point of view, that of a (...) subjective “center” of experience. The very processes that set up this center yield qualia in their first-person quality. These processes involve the temporal sequencing of experience in the perspectivally arranged patterns that center experience about a given “here.” They also include the processes of retention and protention that center it about a given “now.” The paper concludes with a discussion of the ontological status of qualia. (shrink)
At first glance, a phenomenological account of the future seems a contradiction in terms. Phenomenology’s focus is on givenness or presence. Attending to what has already been given in its search for evidence, it seems incapable of handling the future, which by definition, has not yet been given since it not-yet-present. Thus, for the existentialists, in particular Heidegger, phenomenology misses the fact that the Da-, the “thereness” of our Dasein, is located in the future. It misses the futurity inherent in (...) our “being-there” in a world.[i] As part of this, it forgets that “values” are inherent in this world. Attending to the constitution of the thing as already given through its visible features, phenomenology leaves out the quality of its desirability, of its being a thing of value. Such desirability, however, is what moves us to possess it. Desire directs us towards attaining what we do not yet possess, i.e., what is not already given. In this sense, it presents the future. Value or desirability, then, must be thought of in terms of our inherent future directedness. Phenomenology, however, is incapable of this. In fact, its indifference to the future is nowhere more apparent than in its assumption that values are constituted after we grasp a sensuously appearing object. Taking them as something “tacked on” to the latter, it misses the role that futurity plays in our intentional life.[ii]. (shrink)
The post-modern, post-enlightenment debate on the nature of being begins with Heidegger’s assertion that the “ancient interpretation of the being of beings” is informed by “the determination of the sense of being as ... ‘presence.’”[i] This understanding, which reduces being to temporal presence, is supposed to have set all subsequent philosophical reflection. At its origin is “Aristotle’s essay on time.” In Heidegger’s reading, Aristotle interprets entities with regard to the present, equating their being with temporal presence. He also takes time (...) itself as a present entity--i.e., “as just one being among others.”[ii] In an interpretation that is essentially “oriented to the world,” Aristotle thus collapses being and temporal presence to the point that the countable nows are, in their presence, taken as entities. Aristotle’s essay, Heidegger claims, “has essentially determined every subsequent account of time--Bergson’s included.” Even “the Kantian interpretation of time” remains under its sway.[iii] Given this, the “destruction” of the tradition that Heidegger proposes[iv] is a destruction of this account.[v] Only through such a destruction can we uncover what the Aristotelian account conceals. In making time objective, it hides Dasein’s (or human being’s) role in temporalization. The project of Being and Time is to uncover this through “the repeated interpretation of the structures of Dasein ... as modes of temporalization.”[vi]. (shrink)
For over a decade John Searle's ingenious argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence has held a prominent place in contemporary philosophy. This is not just because of its striking central example and the apparent simplicity of its argument. As its appearance in Scientific American testifies, it is also due to its importance to the wider scientific community. If Searle is right, artificial intelligence in the strict sense, the sense that would claim that mind can be instantiated through a formal (...) program of symbol manipulation, is basically wrong. No set of formal conditions can provide us with the characteristic feature of mind which is the intentionally of its mental contents. Formally regarded, such intentionally is an irreducible primitive. It cannot be analyzed into non-intentional (purely syntactic, symbolic) components. This paper will argue that this objection is based on a misunderstanding. Intentionality is not simply something given which is incapable of further analysis. It only appears so when we mistakenly abstract it from time. When we regard its temporal structure, it shows itself as a rule-governed, synthetic process, one capable of being instantiated both by machines and men. (shrink)
One of the permanent factors driving philosophy is the puzzle presented by our embodiment. Our consciousness is embodied. We are its embodiment; we are that curious amalgam that we try to describe in terms of mind and body. Philosophy has sought again and again to describe their relation. Yet each time it attempts this from one of these aspects, the other hides itself. From the perspective of mind, everything appears as a content of consciousness. Yet, from the perspective of the (...) body, there are no conscious contents. There are only neural pathways and chemical processes. As thinkers as early as Locke and Leibniz realized, we may search the brain as thoroughly as we wish; within its material structure, we will never find a conscious content.[i] Both perspectives are obviously one-sided. We are both mind and body; we are determined by our conscious contents and our physical makeup. Husserl’s Logical Investigations takes account of this fact in speaking of the real and ideal determination of the subject. As embodied beings, we are subject to real causal laws. Such laws, insofar as the relate to our mental contents, take these as determined by the contents temporally proceeding them.[ii] As engaged in mind, we are also subject to the ideal laws of “authentic thought.” These are nontemporal, logical laws governing “the compatibility or incompatibility of mentally realizable contents.” In the Investigations, the problem of the mind’s relation to the body comes to a head in these two determinations. How can the same set of mental acts be subject to both causal and logical laws? How can a causally determined subject grasp an apodictically certain set of logical relations? As Theodor DeBoer puts this question: “on the one hand, these acts are empirically necessary and determined; on the other hand, an idea realizes itself in them through which they claim apodeictic validity. How can both these views be combined?”[iii]. (shrink)
One of the most remarkable developments of the past decade has been the attempt to marry phenomenology to cognitive science. Perhaps nothing else has so revitalized phenomenology, making it a topic of interest in the wider philosophical and scientific communities.[i] The reasoning behind this initiative is relatively straightforward. Cognitive science studies artificial and brain-based intelligence. But before we can speak of artificial intelligence, we must have some knowledge of natural intelligence, that is, understand our own cognitive functioning. Similarly, to understand (...) how the brain functions, we need to grasp the cognitive processes that such functioning realizes. This, however, is precisely what phenomenology provides. It studies the cognitive acts through which we apprehend the world, observes the constitutive build-up of such acts, and attends to the temporal constitution at work in the genesis of every act, every intentional relation we have to the world. Its results, which have been accumulating since the beginning of the last century, thus, offer cognitive science a trove of information for its projects. As obvious as this conclusion appears, it is not immune to some fundamental objections. The chief of these is that phenomenology does not concern itself with the real, psychological subject, but rather with the “transcendental” subject. By virtue of the reduction that reveals it, this subject, as Husserl writes, “loses that which gives it the value of something real in the naively experienced, pre-given world; it loses its sense of being a soul of an animal organism which exists in a pre-given, spatial-temporal nature."[ii] As such, the transcendental subject no longer has its sense of being causally determined by this spatial-temporal nature. Given this, how can such a subject serve as a paradigm for understanding either artificial or organic, brain-based intelligence? As part of the world, the latter are causally determined structures, but the transcendental subject, as Husserl asserts, has to be “considered as absolute in itself and as existing for itself ’before’ all worldly being” (ibid., p.. (shrink)
To say we are present to ourselves through our bodies is to express something so obvious that most people hardly give it a thought. Philosophers, however, came late to this recognition. The idea that our embodiment shapes our apprehensions seemed to Descartes to designate a problem rather than a topic of study. His effort was to overcome embodiment, that is, to reach a realm where the unencumbered mind could confront the world. The same prejudice informed the modern tradition he founded. (...) It took for granted that the mind, or self, was unextended. Since the nonextended could not interact with the extended, Leibniz assumed that the self was a “windowless monad.” God provided its impressions of the external world. The same position was embraced by Berkeley. Realizing that matter had entirely lost its function of supplying the disembodied self with impressions, he denied its existence altogether. Even Hume, the dedicated empiricist, refused to speculate on the origin of such impressions. They could as well come from God, the external world, or the mind itself. The latter, as disembodied, was a mere theater--a ghostly stage on which our impressions and ideas succeeded each other. Kant pushed this tradition to its logical extreme. The disembodied self, he declared, was entirely noumenal. It could not even appear. It was only with Nietzsche’s biologism that a break with this tradition appears. Nietzsche’s will to power, however, was something more than an organic will to life. Its appeal was ultimately to something beyond our bodily being. (shrink)
