This essay focuses on Mahmoud Darwish’s exilic experience as depicted in Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (1986). For Darwish, the siege of Beirut was a climactic moment in which he realized that he is stuck on a perpetual threshold. Imposed by the sovereign power, this exilic threshold characterizes the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon bereft of their rights as citizens and held outside their homeland and political domain. I wish to argue that, rather than being trapped in this (...) condition, Darwish takes it as a vantage point to critically reconstruct the notions of homeland and political belonging. This involves a contrapuntal approach to the notions of homeland, diaspora, and memory, and acts as a form of resistance. It converts the exilic threshold that keeps the poet neither outside nor inside the political domain into a site of worldliness in both the Arendtian and Saidian sense of the term. Elaborating on Judith Butler’s account of cohabitation and diasporic thinking, I argue that the exilic condition Darwish describes can give rise to a political ethic that resists the homogenization of spaces and temporalities, and allows for an alternative sense of political belonging. (shrink)

_Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint,_ by William V. Spanos, explores the affiliative relationship between Arendt’s and Said’s thought, not simply their mutual emphasis on the importance of the exilic consciousness in an age characterized by the decline of the nation-state and the rise of globalization, but also on the oppositional politics that a displaced consciousness enables. The pairing of these two extraordinary intellectuals is unusual and controversial because of their ethnic (...) identities. In radically secularizing their comportment towards being, their exilic condition enabled them to undertake inaugural critiques of the culture of the nation-state system of Western modernity. As variations on the theme of exile, the five chapters of this book constitute reflections on what is foundational and abiding in both Arendt’s and Said’s work. They not only document the heretofore unnoticed affiliation between the two thinkers. They also shed light on Arendt’s and Said’s proleptic activist explorations of the urgent “question of Palestine,” especially on the fraught present situation, which bears increasing witness to the irony that the Israeli nation-state’s “solution” has, from the beginning, systematically repeated the degradations the Jewish people suffered at the hands of German nationalism. (shrink)

W.G. Sebald’s literary output has consistently addressed the theme of exile, which is most fully explored in his last novel, Austerlitz. This article places Sebald’s literary output in the context of contemporary debate in the social sciences about memory and identity. It is argued that Sebald used the form of a biographical memoir to illuminate powerfully the ‘condition of exile’. His focus is the impact of the Holocaust on European Jews. As a self-conscious German writer possessed of a sense of (...) historical responsibility, he chose to treat this subject obliquely. Sebald used the device of the unreliable narrator. At least some of the disconcerting effect of his literary work lies in its playful use of an ethnographic style and method. It is argued that Sebald has developed a hybrid style, method and form that may be called ‘literary ethnography’. For Sebald, himself in self-exile, the recovery of memory and the seeking of one’s past do not – and cannot – ultimately resolve the problems of being in exile. Knowing one’s past has no ultimately redemptive qualities. The condition of exile remains irredeemably liminal and there is no repairing the damage. (shrink)

The development of a robust, holistic theological anthropology will require that theology and biblical studies alike enter into genuine interdisciplinary conversations. Depth psychology in particular has the capacity to be an exceedingly fruitful conversation partner for theology because of its commitment to the totality of the human experience (both the conscious and unconscious aspects) as well as its unique ability to interpret archetypal symbols and mythological thinking. By arguing for a psycho-theological hermeneutic that accounts for depth psychology's conviction that myths (...) about the origin of the world are always simultaneously myths about the origin and emergence of human consciousness, I demonstrate that the presence of numerous Jungian archetypes in Genesis 1–3 suggests that the narrative can be read from a psychological perspective without diminishing or marginalizing the dominant theological themes of exile and return. Furthermore, such a reading fundamentally suggests that the narrative is not about how sin entered into creation, but rather how consciousness emerged in human community. (shrink)

The early 20thcentury works of Kurdish Islamic thinker Said Nursî explore how cinema can provide access to the divine. Yet, considering the periods of Nursî’s life that were spent in prison, or in exile in remote locations, it is likely that the cinema he was discussing was, very specifically, the early silent cinema of attractions. Thus the distinctive format of this cinema can be uncovered in, and seen to structure, Nursî’s formulation of ‘God's cinema’. With this proposition in mind, this (...) article indicates something of the potential that an engagement with Nursî’s cinematic writing offers for reconsidering topics already much discussed in film-philosophy, such as that of time in the works of Gilles Deleuze. (shrink)

The development of a robust, holistic theological anthropology will require that theology and biblical studies alike enter into genuine interdisciplinary conversations. Depth psychology in particular has the capacity to be an exceedingly fruitful conversation partner for theology because of its commitment to the totality of the human experience as well as its unique ability to interpret archetypal symbols and mythological thinking. By arguing for a psycho‐theological hermeneutic that accounts for depth psychology's conviction that myths about the origin of the world (...) are always simultaneously myths about the origin and emergence of human consciousness, I demonstrate that the presence of numerous Jungian archetypes in Genesis 1–3 suggests that the narrative can be read from a psychological perspective without diminishing or marginalizing the dominant theological themes of exile and return. Furthermore, such a reading fundamentally suggests that the narrative is not about how sin entered into creation, but rather how consciousness emerged in human community. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christian Humanism in the Age of Critical Philology:Ralph Häfner's Gods in ExileMartin MulsowHäfner's book is a monumental study and a milestone of German-language research.1 He delineates, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of the Christian humanism of European philologists in the era of criticism. Recovering an immense wealth of forgotten sources, the book reveals the complex interaction and tension between pagan mythology and Christian culture in philological controversies. (...) Though authors might denounce the pagan histories of gods as fabulae, they were constitutive for the productive and emulative reception of ancient Greco-Roman patterns in Renaissance and Baroque culture. How could the peculiar logic of this paganizing be handled? Was it advisable to have faith in the integrative power of Christian truth, which was capable of finding precursors or even proofs of one's own truth in pagan patterns, or should the pagan be selectively separated from the Christian? And what was the role of philology in this process? Did the growing expertise in criticism advance the process of dissociation of paganism and Christianity? Did it further new possibilities of synthesis in the spirit of Apologetics? [End Page 659]The reconstruction of these processes involves much more than what the book's very specific title suggests. It is a large-scale history of scholarship written from the perspective of the most important tensions that Christian humanism had to overcome in its final stage. From an Anglo-American perspective, this book contributes to recent reconstructions of ideas of early modern men of learning, as well as the growing number of studies on antiquarianism and the history of religion.2 The final stage of Christian humanism, the period of time covered by the book, begins in the late sixteenth century and ends in the 1730s, a point in time which Häfner presents, with some justification, as the end of an era.Hymnology and PolymathyThe study consists of three basic parts. The first one is the "Persistence of Orphic-Platonic Hymnology in Christian Humanism" ("Fortleben der orphisch-platonischen Hymnologie im christlichen Humanismus"). This topic, apparently very specialized and marginal, proves to be a key arena of early modern scholarship, an arena traversed by the battle lines between pagan tradition and Christianity as well as between poetry and theology. Were hymns inspired poetry? What kind of inspiration could and should be conceded to hymns to Jupiter and the sun? Of course, those humanists who reappropriated Orphism and Neo-Platonism were interested in this genre. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and even into the mid-sixteenth century, this was not yet a problem. However, the more philological consciousness (and confessionalization) evolved, the more the genre's scope was delimited. What scope remained? Häfner relates the problem to the revival of an "eclectic Platonism" in the wake of the Second Sophistic. This "eclectic Platonism," which was particularly influential from 1500 on, combined Platonism with rhetorics, and the claim of comprehensive polymathy with the joyful presentation of the findings of reading. In this respect, Apuleius and Aulus Gellius were two model authors for early modern polyhistors. We must include Martianus Capella as a continuation of the "Renaissance of the Second Sophistic into Early Christian Encyclopedism" [End Page 660] ("Renaissance der Zweiten Sophistik bis in die frühchristliche Enzyklopädie hinein," p. 18).Häfner's approach is starkly original and, in my opinion, highly productive for the current debates about early modern encyclopedism and "cultures of knowledge" that are sometimes deadlocked.3 Too frequently, polymathy is used synonymously for encyclopedism, which is often associated with modern concepts of systematic classification. Yet, according to Häfner, this is a misunderstanding. It neglects the playful elements and skillful rhetorical options of throwing questions out into the open rather than narrowing them dogmatically. Perhaps the only addition to Häfner's sources could have been Louis de Cressolles's Theatrum veterum Rhetorum, which, according to Marc Fumaroli in L'age de l'éloquence, marked the return of the Second Sophistic.4 The analysis of the work of Gerhard Johannes Vossius, a classical philologist who resided in Leyden and Amsterdam, is the first test for Häfner... (shrink)

The paper is in itself a statement of facts: that the American has always been a “homo religiosus”, and that religion has shaped the American character starting with the early construction of America and until the current 21st secular century. America today is still indebted to the Puritans’ utopian consciousness of a divine call to restore Paradise on earth. Mircea Eliade helps this reading of America, he himself an exiled that experienced the quest for the Center of the world (...) and of the self. To the eyes of a Romanian, America of the past two decades has revealed a steady growing Eastern Orthodox Church rooted in unspoiled traditions and values, a path worthy of further exploring. (shrink)

During his period of exile in Scandinavia, Bertolt Brecht wrote “I don’t think the traditional form of theatre means anything any longer. Its significance is purely historic; it can illuminate the way in which earlier ages regarded human relationships […] [but] a modern spectator can’t learn anything from them”. To create a modern theatre fit for a modern audience, Brecht holds that not only would the content of plays have to change, but the experience of theatrical spectatorship itself. To fully (...) capture how Brecht’s work differs from that of previous playwrights, a close analysis of spectatorial experience and perception is required. In this paper, I compare the aesthetic techniques used in Brecht’s epic theatre to the genetic phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Reading Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt through a Husserlian lens, I argue that Brecht mobilizes phenomenological methodology in order to suspend the audience’s preconceived notions of theatre and to cultivate self-conscious, critically aware, and socially motivated spectatorship. Just as Husserl describes phenomenology as a presuppositionless science, so too does Brecht offer epic theatre as a way to free “[…] socially-conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity”. (shrink)

Ten years after his death, Vilém Flusser’s reputation as one of Europe’s most original modern philosophers continues to grow. Increasingly influential in Europe and Latin America, the Prague-born intellectual’s thought has until now remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. His innovative writings theorize—and ultimately embrace—the epochal shift that humanity is undergoing from what he termed "linear thinking" toward a new form of multidimensional, visual thinking embodied by digital culture. For Flusser, these new modes and technologies of communication make possible (...) a society in which dialogue between people becomes the supreme value.The first English-language anthology of Flusser’s work, this volume displays the extraordinary range and subtlety of his intellect. A number of the essays collected here introduce and elaborate his theory of communication, influenced by thinkers as diverse as Martin Buber, Edmund Husserl, and Thomas Kuhn. While taking dystopian, posthuman visions of communication technologies into account, Flusser celebrates their liberatory and humanizing aspects. For Flusser, existence was akin to being thrown into an abyss of absurd experience or "bottomlessness"; becoming human required creating meaning out of this painful event by consciously connecting with others, in part through such technologies. Other essays present Flusser’s thoughts on the future of writing, the revolutionary nature of photography, the relationship between exile and creativity, and his unconventional concept of posthistory. Taken together, these essays confirm Flusser’s importance and prescience within contemporary philosophy.Vilém Flusser was born in Prague and taught philosophy in Brazil. Andreas Ströhl is director of the film department at the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes in Munich. Erik Eisel works for a software technology company in Southern California. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch’s two unpublished texts bare witness to his uncompromising philosophical research carried out in exile. The text dating from 1937 (Leçon D) testifies to his reflections on constitutive phenomenology, while the second text, dating from the late 1940s or early 1950s (Outline of a project entitled “Phenomenology of Perception”) contains the sketch of Gurwitsch’s main contribution, the theory of the field consciousness.

Political Beckett? In September 1941, one of the twentieth century’s most apparently non-political artists secretly took up arms against fascism. Samuel Beckett, who with exquisite timing for a notorious pessimist was born on Good Friday 1906, had been living in Paris since 1937, self-exiled from his native country in the manner of many an eminent Irish writer. The Irish, unlike their erstwhile colonial proprietors, have always been a cosmopolitan nation, from the nomadic monks of the Middle Ages to the corporate (...) executives of the Celtic Tiger. If the oppressiveness of colonial rule turned some of them into nationalists, it turned others into citizens of the world. Joyce, Synge, Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy, men already caught between two or three cultures and languages, were to flourish in the rootless, polyglot, ambience of high-modernist Europe, rather as half a century later their compatriots were to embrace the European Union. It helped, in signing up to a linguistically self-conscious modernism, to stem from a nation in which language, as a political minefield, could never be taken for granted. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 83-104 [Access article in PDF] Reluctant Modernism: Moses Mendelssohn's Philosophy of History Matt Erlin In a well-known passage from the second section of Jerusalem (1784) Moses Mendelssohn takes his old friend Lessing to task for his recent treatise on The Education of the Human Race (1780). His respect for the author notwithstanding, Mendelssohn has little sympathy for Lessing's view of human (...) progress. Opposing the attempt to force the entire species into a single framework of linear development, Mendelssohn claims that, as a species, humankind has always oscillated between cultivation and barbarism. Borrowing the "ages of man" metaphor that Lessing employed in his own discussion, he writes that at almost any point in human history, man is "child, adult, and old man at the same time, though in different places and regions of the world." 1 Against Lessing's concept of global progress Mendelssohn proposes a model in which each individual follows his own trajectory of self-cultivation, a trajectory that begins before birth, intersects more or less briefly with the plane of historical time, and then continues after death into eternity.Mendelssohn's resistance to the Geschichtsphilosophie articulated here by Lessing and later appropriated by Kant, Schiller, and Hegel has been subject to a variety of interpretations. Not surprisingly, more recent commentators have stressed the philosopher's defense of particularity, his opposition to a totalizing theory of history that threatens to grant the individual nothing more than a bit part in the realization of some future state of human perfection. Norbert Hinske, for example, has argued that Mendelssohn's late writings engage in a conscious confrontation with Kant's understanding of historical progress. 2 [End Page 83]According to Hinske, especially Mendelssohn's short text On the Ideal Constitution indicates that the author "must have recognized spontaneously that Kant's proposed solution, whether intentionally or unintentionally, degraded the individual to a mere means of social progress...." 3Mendelssohn's concern for the individual is certainly central to his rejection of a species-based historical teleology, but one should also keep in mind the ethnic and cultural implications of such a model. As both Kant's and Hegel's later writings reveal, any attempt to understand human history in terms of a coherent, linear narrative, especially one that culminates in the rise of Christian Europe, is necessarily troubled by the continued existence of Judaism. In other words it is not just the individual who suffers an implicit reduction in status in late eighteenth-century theories of progress; entire cultures become vestigial once their historical function has been fulfilled. 4 Although the texts containing the most striking hostility toward Judaism were published after the appearance of Jerusalem, a somewhat surprising anti-Jewish bias is already evident in Lessing's explorations of the topic. Lessing does after all refer to the Jews in the period of Egyptian exile as "the most rude and the most ferocious" people imaginable. 5 Moreover, although he grants them a crucial role as educators of humanity, this role lasts only until the appearance of Jesus Christ, an event that simultaneously marks the end of the childhood of humankind. As Hans Liebeschütz has remarked, Lessing's adoption of this position must have been quite a blow to Mendelssohn. 6Each of these reasons for Mendelssohn's skepticism is significant in its own right; taken together, they also raise fundamental questions regarding his relationship to modernity and modern historical consciousness more generally. In one respect, of course, the topic of Mendelssohn's modernity has been much debated. Ever since Alexander Altmann's 1973 biography addressed the philosopher's complex relation to the "two disparate worlds of Judaism and modern Enlightenment," scholars have sought to untangle the strands of tradition and innovation in his work. 7 Most recently, Allan Arkush has depicted Mendelssohn as a radical deist whose observance of Jewish law was largely [End Page 84] strategic, while David Sorkin has emphasized the more conservative aims of his long neglected Hebrew works. 8In light of this interest... (shrink)

In the present work I study Daoist philosophy in conjunction with the radical new philosophy of antinatalism, spearheaded by South African philosopher David Benatar. Although I am not claiming equivalence between the two, a meaningful communication emerges between the classical Chinese sources used here and the modern doctrine of antinatalism. I argue that both visions partake in a radical critique of consciousness according to which this faculty of the human mind is far from what it is often held to (...) be. In fact, it is perceived as a destructive and disruptive element of, and in, existence. Moreover, both offer a praxis of return that seeks to undo this disruption. In the case of Daoism, consciousness pushes humans ever farther away from the Dao. It is imperative to return from this exile, and to return to the Dao. This can, radically, only be achieved by the return from ‘ordinary’ conscious existence. This is the prerogative of sagehood. It will be shown that the trajectory of sagehood shares important parameters with the antinatalist quest to significantly challenge human hubris in the cosmos at large, and to reinstate cosmic humility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Everything is Breath":Critical Plant Studies' Metaphysics of MixtureElisabeth Weber (bio)In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin W. Kimmerer contrasts two creation stories that are thoroughly incompatible. One starts with an all-powerful male creator calling the world and its vegetation and animals into existence through words, and forming the first human beings from clay; the other starts with Skywoman tumbling through the (...) air with seeds in her fist from the Tree of Life growing in Skyworld. One ends with the condemnation of woman to give birth in "very severe" pains, with the cursing of the ground ordered to "produce thorns and thistles" as punishment for man who will eat his food only after "painful toil," and the expulsion from the garden; the other ends in gratitude for the collective caring of the animals, with the creation of "a garden for the well-being of all." One includes an original fall from grace whose burden will be passed down from generation to generation; the other acknowledges suffering without a trace of the burden of unearned guilt. One predicts death as a return to the dust from whence mankind was created; the other imagines death as becoming plant and fruit, as becoming gift, a rejoining the spirits of all ancestors, human and others, who surround the living in everything that is. The threat of one is the inexorability of a trajectory "from dust to dust" and the latter's association, with Plato, of something so diffuse that it doesn't merit a concept or idea; the promise of the other is an abiding relationship with all that is, the reciprocity of giving and gratitude, and the gladly assumed responsibility for the "inspirited" land.Kimmerer comments:Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road [...].1 [End Page 117]Cosmologies express collective imaginairies that have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years. The Iroquois story recounted and rendered accessible by Kimmerer is one of countless creation stories that constitute an "important genre in many preliterate traditions" (Zolbrod 5). Kimmerer suggests that even though the Judeo-Christian creation story may have receded into the background of Western collective consciousness, it plays a role in the planet's devastation. What strikes the reader in the story of Skywoman is the centrality of reciprocity, of relation, and, as the woman's name indicates, the significance of the sky. While this might mean, on planet Earth, the atmosphere–the Earth's sky is blue because of the surrounding atmosphere–the implications of the sky's preponderance reach beyond the planetary into the cosmological. The "sky is not what is above. The sky is everywhere: it is the space and the reality of mixture and movement, the definite horizon starting from which everything has to draw itself" (Coccia 218-219) in order to breathe and live.In order to continue to breathe, breathe in the long-term, the long-term, that is, as Barbara Kingsolver put it in one of her poems, "from a tree's / way of thinking" (7), non-human kin's "way of thinking" will need to play a role in humans' self-understanding. Kyle Whyte underlines that it is not enough to respond with urgency to specific ecological crises (fires, flooding, etc.) alone, but, rather, "urgency must be aimed at addressing ecological and relational tipping points together":U.S. settler colonialism, for example, in a short period of time, inflicted displacement, drastic ecological changes, and lost or disrupted relationships with hundreds of species that indigenous peoples depended on through kinship ties for generations. These changes are more extreme than what many nonindigenous persons fear most about moving beyond... (shrink)

In James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, Catherine Flynn recovers the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity as the foundational context of Joyce's imaginative consciousness. Beginning with Joyce's underexamined first exile in 1902–03, she shows the significance for his writing of the time he spent in Paris and of a range of French authors whose works inflected his experience of that city. In response to the pressures of Parisian consumer capitalism, Joyce drew on French literature to conceive a (...) somatic aesthetic, in which the philosophically disparaged senses of taste, touch, and smell as well as the porous, digestive body resist capitalism's efforts to manage and instrumentalize desire. This book resituates the most canonical of Irish modernists in a European avant-garde context while revealing important links between Anglophone modernism and critical theory. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch’s two unpublished texts bare witness to his uncompromising philosophical research carried out in exile. The text dating from 1937 testifies to his reflections on constitutive phenomenology, while the second text, dating from the late 1940s or early 1950s contains the sketch of Gurwitsch’s main contribution, the theory of the field consciousness.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) v-vii [Access article in PDF] On Feminizing the Philosophy of Rhetoric Molly Meijer Wertheimer When asked to define his editorial policies in choosing articles to publish in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Henry W. Johnstone Jr. disavowed following any strict editorial guidelines; instead, he gave two examples to show how selection worked as a process. In one case, he agreed to publish an "off the wall (...) article" by a distinguished classicist; in another, he accepted an unusually long article--a "behemoth"--by an eminent rhetorician. These examples demonstrate what was to me one of Henry's most unusual and endearing traits as an editor and scholar: he was willing always to go wherever the argument led. It was probably in this spirit that he agreed to publish a special issue on "Feminizing the Philosophy of Rhetoric." I want to thank him posthumously for that decision. As "guest editor" of the issue, I feel privileged to present four well-written essays and two reviews that lead the readers of Philosophy and Rhetoric to consider some philosophical issues that emerge when we overlap concepts of "gender," "culture," and "rhetoric."The essays in this issue explore tactics women have used to get their messages across to others who would not--even could not--entertain speech seriously if presented by a woman. In the first essay, "Unveiling Esther as a Pragmatic Radical Rhetoric," Susan Zaeske reads the Book of Esther as a rhetorical manual of exile and empowerment. She traces features of the narrative that were useful as a model of rhetorical behavior early on, as well as appropriations that were made throughout the Middle Ages, Antebellum South, and even in our own day. Her essay emphasizes the riskiness to the speaker that is often entailed by the act of speaking, especially when the listener is "all-powerful" (199); when "his decisions are based not on careful deliberation, but on who influences him the most, usually by prodding his sense of power and manliness" (200). In the narrative, the speaker, Queen Esther, is depicted as utterly thoughtful, careful, well planned and well timed. She seems very much in control of an "indirect" rhetoric. Says Zaeske, "[T]he book teaches that direct, resistant rhetoric is ineffective, even dangerous, while clever, indirect, noncon- frontational methods will succeed in gaining the desired end--power" (202). [End Page v] This is a "conciliatory strategy wise women are forced to use in the patriarchal world" (qtd. on p. 202). And this kind of strategy is contrasted to the defiant rhetoric of Vashti, the former queen, Esther's predecessor, who was banished for saying no to one of the king's commands. Silence and supplication, according to Zaeske, when adopted self-consciously as strategies, are effective with hostile, neanderthal-type auditors. They are "radical," at least in the sense that they are "extreme."Nan Johnson, in her essay "Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America," furthers discussion of women's rhetorical options. In Zaeske's essay, women assume positions of supplicants or petitioners, or they stand defiant in the face of an oppressive listener (the king). The former are idolized; the latter are demonized. Centuries later, in the fifty years following the Civil War, similar representations of women appeared in conduct literature. Johnson describes a media blitz of ideas and images in etiquette and other self-help manuals that sought to define rhetorical behaviors and actions appropriate for men and women. Some of the writings idolized the "quiet woman" of the home, who reigned silently as queen stitching together via indirection a rhetoric of nurturance that moved beyond the home only through the actions of husbands and sons. This kind of rhetoric was viewed as a natural consequence of femininity. Other writings demonized the woman who spoke from the public platform as a teacher, preacher, and advocate, and who needed a rhetorical education to do so effectively. Many writings highlighted the negative consequences of rhetorical experience to women (who risked their femininity and the love of their families) and to their families (who risked the true source of... (shrink)

This article deals with the issue of innovation in church tradition, more specifically in Orthodoxy. Using as an example the admittedly untypical life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, an Orthodox nun living in France after the 1917 revolution in Russia, the article shows how the creative moments of her life, which shaped the church tradition in exile, can be also viewed from a psychoanalytical perspective. With the help of French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, the creative changes Mother Maria brought to church tradition (...) can be seen as the play of the semiotic and the symbolic within the Symbolic order: the maternal, imaginatively associative, less conscious and the paternal, regulated, structured and regulated. The subversive forces of the semiotic – madness, holiness and poetry – observed in Mother Maria’s life, brought new and living possibilities into the theology of Orthodox diaspora. (shrink)

Both Nietzsche and Lawrence have been identified as important fore- runners and progenitors in the development of an ecocentric, “posthumanist” worldview. Nietzsche suggested, and Lawrence developed, the notion of an anti-mechanistic “gay science”. Both writers rejected the Christian denigration of nature, the Romantic notion of a “return to nature” and the instrumentalisation of nature by industrial rationality in favour of a conception of the good life founded in the body and an almost utopian “ascent to nature”. However, since the ascent (...) to nature required an overcoming of existing humanity, both Nietzsche and Lawrence faced the task of articulating a conception of the Over-man – or post-human, as contemporary theory would put it – that is not merely a figure of authoritarian brutality. Deep ecologist Del Ivan Janik has claimed that Lawrence “saw man as part of an organic universe, living best by acknowledging its wonder and rejecting the temptation to force his will upon it. In this sense he stands at the beginning of the modern posthumanist tradition and of the literature of environmental consciousness.” 1 Accurate as this assessment is, however, the struggle with questions of power, gender, sexuality and religion that early posthu- manism involved has tended to be airbrushed out of the dark green reading of Lawrence. And Lawrence's personal spiritual and intellectual struggle was also a creative conflict with Nietzsche. A useful point of departure is Anna Bramwell's comment in Ecology in the Twentieth Century on the somewhat surprising ubiquity of Nietzsche in ecophilosophical works, as it might be applied with equal force to Lawrence: Nietzsche ... is frequently described as an important figure. Why should this be? In reality, he does not conform at all to the model ecologist ... Yet Nietzsche still hovers, worrying but relevant. I will get on to the worries in due course; for the moment, a few words on the relevance of Nietzsche might be in order. For one thing, Nietzsche was not much interested in nature per se; unlike Lawrence, he never concerned himself with either natural beauty or the threat posed to it by late 19th century industrialisation. This may be due in part to his actual environment, which was largely congenial, as Robert Solomon reminds us: From snatches of prose, one might well conclude that Nietzsche wants nothing more fervently than the life of Conan the Barbarian, a role for which he, in particular, was notoriously ill-suited. "Live dan- gerously" he tells us, from the posher resorts in Southern Europe. It seems reasonable to suggest that if Nietzsche was more fascinated by the Provencal art of the troubadours than by the resistable rise of the capi- talist machine economy, his convalescent exile by the Med, away from the industrial heartlands of Northern Europe, may be partly responsible. His chief concern is the overcoming of the Christian and moral misreading of nature – especially human nature – and the corresponding articulation of what HM Robinson calls a “somatic conception of the good life” to replace it. However, Nietzsche only calls for such a conception, rather than fully elaborating it – let alone living it – so he has “little to say about how human intelligence could be so immanent in our physical being as to make our articulation of our physical will to power something expressive of a properly human nature and not of brute strength.” 4 In short, the problem is how to distinguish the ideal, noble Overman from the mere thug. We should not expect to find the close and often reverent attention to the non-human world as such that is an attractive and central feature of Lawrence's writing; Nietzsche's interest is lively but essentially abstract. (shrink)

Place mouse over image continent. 2.1 (2012): 36–39. From an ethical and political perspective, people and property can hardly be separated. Indeed, the modern political subject – that is, the individual, the person, the self, the autonomous actor, the rational self-interest maximizer, etc. – has taken shape in and through the elaboration, institutionalization, and enactment of that which rightfully belongs to it. This thread can be traced back perhaps most directly to Locke’s notion that the origin of the political state (...) occurs when people rise above the state of nature by ceding the power to prosecute offenses. The rule of law begins then with a defense of the right to property. People become subjects by adhering to the social contract, which they do by deferring the defense of their own property to the state. In this light, the response of the United States federal government to the financial crisis of 2008 appears to many as a breach of the social contract. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” states the claim plainly. Why exactly did some subjects (e.g., the banks) have their property defended by the state (i.e., through the variety of programs including TARP, the discount window at the US Federal Reserve, etc.), when other subjects (e.g., homeowners) found themselves without protection of their property rights, forced to default on mortgage debts and face dispossession? Even if the rhetoric about “too big to fail” can be believed, and the collapse of the financial system would lead to negative consequences for people who had little or no connection to the activities that brought it about, such consequences need not call into question the notion that everyone stands equally before the law. To occupy, then, appears as a form of civil disobedience, an intentional, retaliatory breach of the social contract by those who feel that they have lost the support of the state to which they ceded their power as sovereign agents. The visible and the invisible The violation of property rights of people who have recognition, protection and power under the law destabilizes their very status as citizens and tests the limit of democracy. Does the financial system force the dematerialized victimization of individuals? Do people become numbers, or worse still, percentages of unemployed, tranches of defaulted mortgages and foreclosures? Are they perhaps instead disenfranchised prospectively from the privileged position occupied by virtual entities and actors such as those involved in the derivatives markets, always already exiled back into the physical, visible realm? The line of conflict appears to be drawn between invisibility/absence/deferral and visibility/presence/realization. The demonstrators occupy an excess property of those subjects, namely, the banks and financial elite, who did receive recognition and protection under the law. By domesticating this excess property, rendering its invisibility visible within the political economy, the protesters raise a new form of threat to the hegemonic order. To occupy, then, involves a rejection of the order under which the “99%” have been subjected to erasure. The occupation seeks creatively to establish a new means of communication and law for its subjects. In the face of an existing power structure that is increasingly disenfranchising the majority of people while consolidating nodes of power and influence, the “occupation”, or the work of the Occupy movement, involves seizing a space that refuses the rules of the existing, allegedly corrupt sovereign state. This refusal of governance extends even to include a steadfast refusal to articulate a strategy, to formulate a list of demands, to converse with the sovereign power on the grounds of its own conventions, to put forth a leader, to resolve the ambiguity of the movement into a discreet identity, face, or voice. Do these tactics provide a resolution to the problem that was its genesis? Not in such a direct and easily resolved manner, but it remains difficult to imagine a direct and simple resolution to the problematic of the breach of the social contract. The ambiguity of the situation has generated significant interest within the broader populace, though many people sympathetic to the cause appear to be frustrated because the movement has not simply put forward a short list of concrete demands, or even a set of leaders and spokespeople, much less a resolution. And yet, this lack of coherence appears as a resolution of a problem generic to protest movements in the past, where individual leaders can be removed or discredited, and lists of demands can be co-opted by others holding more political power. Meanwhile, the ambiguity has compelled imitations on a global scale, with the Occupy Wall Street participants consciously taking actions that can be replicated by anyone anywhere without significant cost. These actions have taken place not in a peripheral location such as a parking lot in New Jersey, but instead close to the centers of power and governance, adjacent to Wall Street, close to the White House, on college campuses, etc. This spontaneous archipelago of protests becomes an irritant, a negation of the accepted order of protests, but when the protesters themselves move outside of their encampments, they are escorted by the police, constantly monitored and maintained so that a permanent state of paranoid persecution takes hold. To occupy, occupying, occupation – these actions involve a variable degree of danger – are you willing to step into a different space, where the rule of law is unclear and evolving? Are you presenting yourself as a representative of the majority, the 99%? Who has a sense of belonging to the 99%? This previously invisible population becomes a focal point of political power, garners increasing public support, infects the public dialogue. The government recognizes this population by forcing it from the occupied space, removing the element of possession of property. It is at this point of conflict, in the struggle to hold the physical property, where the greatest friction and violence occurs. Scaling the rule of law While occupied, the property calls for a redress of grievances, a restoration of the rule of law. The Occupy movement does not select and put forward individuals or leaders, it puts forward places – the occupied property represents the point of conflict, not the individual. And it is this very property that the government then tries to reclaim. The movement remains faceless, anonymous, uncounted, or rather counted only as a mass, the self-labeled mass of 99%. These spaces are like refugee camps or favelas, but constructed to unite the political life and private life of the protesters. This objective is presented as a tactical necessity, as all other means of protest and communication have failed, leaving only the option of seizing, holding, occupying a property. But to what end, exactly? Can anyone deliberately return to the prior social contract, embrace, affirm, and govern in strict accordance with the earlier relationship to property, following the logic of Locke’s arguments? In this respect, the contemporary crisis indicates a new, transitional phase in the way that property operates, or rather, in the balance between real and virtual value. The roots of the crisis lay in the massive overvaluation of property caused by lax lending practices, as more people were encouraged to borrow more money, which drove up the prices of property. At the same time, these individual properties, these mortgages for homes actual families lived in and worked to support, were bundled into securities that could be bought, sold, and speculated on. The reduction of a physical house or piece of real estate to an almost incalculably small element in an investment vehicle appears as a scaling of the hedge that radically diminishes the value of any individually owned property. Moreover, a number of recently-innovated financial products allow investors to hedge in new ways, to deliberately spread risk around a portfolio in hopes of bringing returns even when the individual mortgage defaults. At the level of the ‘free’ market, these virtual negative valuations are designed to balance the physical positive valuation, though many of the biggest lenders are now being investigated for controlling both sides of this valuation, the positive and the negative, to facilitate both the creation and failure of the investments and to profit from both. The ability to benefit from both the negative and positive value of an investment is a result of a technologically enabled capacity to operate within a complex field. These layered and scaled investment vehicles and the simultaneous negation of their value together represent a commingling of the virtual and physical existence that is both complex and multiple. The valuation of a virtual property has tremendous power to change the valuation of the physical - either injecting it with or depriving it of funds, pumping in or draining life and energy. This situation has roots of its own – the notion of property advanced e.g., throughout the enclosure movement in Britain was, from the outset, an imposition of virtuality (i.e., the concept of law, the institutions associated with ownership, etc.) on the physical reality of land. 1 The difference today is that technological trading platforms combined with innovations within the financial services industry have enabled the reduction of each individual property receiving or losing value in scale to an almost atomic level. In turn, the number of properties held simultaneously and valued as a massive, multiple wholes – i.e., the derivatives market in mortgage-backed securities – is a new phenomenon made possible through the application of similar technologies and institutional structures. And those actors who can trade in these layers of complexity can then profit from the new phase of disassociation of the virtual and the physical – unconcerned with and operating at such a virtual distance from the individual residing physically on a particular piece of real estate that they no longer feel the tug of the physical tying them back to the physical, operating literally as in a video game, in a virtually distanced world. What can or should be done about this situation? Answers lie outside the scope of this current essay, but merit consideration in the near future… NOTE 1) Hernando de Soto has emphasized this dimension by empirically demonstrating its non-existence in many countries in The Mystery of Capital. (shrink)

This article analyses the central themes in the works of Claudio Magris through a critical reading of Danube, A Different Sea, Microcosms, Utopia e disincanto [Utopia and disenchantment], Blindly, Journeying, and Alfabeti [Alphabets]. Magris’s work, be it his fiction or essays, abounds with descriptions and narrations of spaces and places, which become central to his world-view as an author. These spaces and places, located primarily in Central Europe and in the surroundings of his own city, Trieste, inspired his turn to (...) Eastern Europe, including the Slavic countries. Conscious of the Western Europeans’ often condescending view of the East, Magris became a vocal critic of Western Eurocentrism, which he attributed to their insufficient familiarity with the cultures and histories of their Eastern neighbours. Magris’s primary interest has always been Europe’s ethnic and cultural coexistence, with a particular affinity with dissident, nationless, and exiled literary figures, in line with his notion of hybrid, fluid, and multiple identities. The works of Magris offer compelling reflections on a Europe viewed through the contradictory encounters between East and West. As such they have contributed to the gradual creation of hybrid identities, which, through their historical palimpsests, have become part of a broader cultural geography. (shrink)

This article discusses development of the content of the concept “Philosophy Steamer,” which refers to the 1922 expulsion from Russia of a group of intelligentsia who sharply criticized the authorities. The author shows that the group of exiled philosophers was united both by their previous philosophical and social activity and by their joint activity as émigrés. She analyzes the concepts of “historical collective individuality,” “collective person,” and “communal person” introduced by Lev P. Karsavin in order to determine the holistic nature (...) of this exiled social group and its characteristic self-consciousness, behavior, aspirations, and feelings (moods). Examining the event known as the “Philosophy Steamer” through the concepts listed above allows the author to cognize the historical, social, and cultural reality more broadly and productively. The article demonstrates that the concept of a collective person can also be applied to other social groups, thereby extending the methodology of human-studies cognition beyond the study of facts and statistical data. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article will examine the ways in which de-personalization of consciousness constitutes an unavoidable reading clue in order to understand the existential phenomenological conception of human freedom championed by Jean-Paul Sartre. Thus, the study of The Transcendence of the Ego, and of Being and Nothingness, among a few other of Sartre's writings from the thirties, will allow the reader to discover that the consciousness as an impersonal transcendental field is built as an onto-phenomenological foundation for the full (...) assertion of human freedom. Man is only free, by definition, when he is capable of exiling the ego from consciousness. RESUMEN En este artículo se examina cómo la despersonalización de la conciencia constituye una pista de lectura ineludible a efectos de comprender la concepción fenomenológico-existencial de la libertad humana defendida por Jean-Paul Sartre. Así, el estudio de La trascendencia del Ego, de El ser y la nada, entre otros escritos sartrianos del treinta, nos permitirá descubrir que la construcción de la conciencia como campo trascendental impersonal se erige a manera de fundamento onto-fenomenológico para la afirmación plena de la libertad humana. Exilando al yo de la conciencia, el hombre es, por definición, libre. (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: List of contributors; Acknowledgments; Introduction: the humanist tradition in Russian philosophy G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole; Part I. The Nineteenth Century: 1. Slavophiles, Westernizers, and the birth of Russian philosophical humanism Sergey Horujy; 2. Alexander Herzen Derek Offord; 3. Materialism and the radical intelligentsia: the 1860s Victoria S. Frede; 4. Russian ethical humanism: from populism to neo-idealism Thomas Nemeth; Part II. Russian Metaphysical Idealism in Defense of Human Dignity: 5. Boris Chicherin and human dignity (...) in history G. M. Hamburg; 6. Vladimir Solov'iev's philosophical anthropology: autonomy, dignity, perfectibility Randall A. Poole; 7. Russian panpsychism: Kozlov, Lopatin, Losskii James P. Scanlan; Part III. Humanity and Divinity in Russian Religious Philosophy after Solov'iev: 8. A Russian cosmodicy: Sergei Bulgakov's religious philosophy Paul Valliere; 9. Pavel Florenskii's trinitarian humanism Steven Cassedy; 10. Semën Frank's expressivist humanism Philip J. Swoboda; Part IV. Freedom and Human Perfectibility in the Silver Age: 11. Religious humanism in the Russian silver age Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal; 12. Russian liberalism and the philosophy of law Frances Nethercott; 13. Imagination and ideology in the new religious consciousness Robert Bird; 14. Eschatology and hope in silver age thought Judith Deutsch Kornblatt; Part V. Russian Philosophy in Revolution and Exile: 15. Russian Marxism Andrzej Walicki; 16. Adventures in dialectic and intuition: Shpet, Il'in, Losev Philip T. Grier; 17. Nikolai Berdiaev and the philosophical tasks of the emigration Stuart Finkel; 18. Eurasianism: affirming the person in an 'Era of Faith' Martin Beisswenger; Afterword: on persons as open-ended ends-in-themselves (the view from two novelists and two critics) Caryl Emerson; Bibliography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth by Paul WoodfordPanagiotis A. KanellopoulosPaul Woodford, Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth (New York, Routledge, 2018)This book is provocative. And challenging. It is written with passion, aiming to induce controversy. And with good reason. For we live in times when populism professes an illusionary sense of community, invoking a seemingly 'anti-systemic' but highly hypocritical, racist, and (...) sexist discourse;1 in times where "bullshitting"2 has advanced to the highest governmental levels in many countries; in times where "authoritarian neoliberal statism"3 becomes the new status quo, inducing a scandalous increase of economic inequalities, forcing large populations to live precarious lives; in times where privatization of educational services in the context of market-oriented practices impose restrictive and ultimately unjust politics of accountability and performativity;4 in times where instrumentalization of educational ends has taken the lead, assisted by a systematic co-option and misappropriation of notions such as excellence and creativity;5 in times, finally, where spaces that allow for "the sharing (out) of the incalculable,"6 forging unknown potentialities in education, life, and thought, are being destroyed. In such times, Paul Woodford has stepped in, reclaiming his right to speak uncompromisingly.Hannah Arendt has written that "[w]hen men [sic] are deprived of the public space--which is constituted by acting together and then fills of its own accord [End Page 108] with the events and stories that develop into history--they retreat into their freedom of thought."7 Woodford refuses to retreat. He writes as a public intellectual of the highest order, committed to upset and not please those in power. A great service that his latest book performs is that it speaks daringly, stirring a debate that helps us all to do away with fear. For as Bertrand Russell has aptly said quite a long time ago, "[I]f thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men [sic] back."8Resisting the "melancholy of inner exile,"9 but not immune to possible accusations of left melancholy, understood as "a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present,"10 the author wrote a book that provokes music educators to actively think beyond their sealed and safe world of convictions that is based on ideology-free conceptions of music teaching. Estelle Jorgensen has long ago brought to our attention the urgency of this task: "in an era in which the mindset and political reality have changed dramatically, … there is an urgent need to revisit the political character of music education and the ways in which it needs to address the cultural issues of our day."11Along this pathway, Woodford's book encourages music educators to live and teach as public intellectuals, forging "a democratic purpose for music education"12 that acts against the "anachronistic and formalist conception of music that reduces music education to supply-side economics as children are conceived as either future professional musicians or consumers and not as citizens to be prepared in schools to participate intelligently in the political life of society."13 Woodford articulates a vision of music education "as preparation for adulthood and democratic and global citizenship."14 He strongly advocates an approach that balances performance and creativity-based experiences with a socio-historical study of the social, ideological, and cultural workings of different musics in a wide variety of contexts. He encourages music educators to teach "how music's structural properties and qualities contribute to the shaping of people's perceptions and understandings of themselves and their world,"15 "asking the who, what, when, where, how, to, with, or for whom, and, most importantly of all, why of music."16 He envisions a music classroom that exercises social criticism "directly and self-consciously"17 both through "learning how to make music"18 and through thinking about music. He sees this approach as a tool for raising students' consciousness. Woodford's ultimate vision of music education is one that casts it as a means for cultivating "a justice-oriented" approach... (shrink)

As the institutionalization of the avant-garde took place, postmodern theory both reacted to and helped create the forces that eroded reason and even taste, labelled them quaint in the name of a postmodern theory, at the same time that mass commodity form was inscribing exchange value on all work of the imagination. In fact, the reality is that the system, the society of domination has enclosed discourse in such a way that, coupled to new social media and electronic platforms, all (...) radical, all working class or under class voices are pre vetted or erased, and only the most craven corporate financialized kitsch is validated. The collusion of galleries, collectors and curators, following the model of studio film and network TV, has equated popularity with quality. The problem then is to recuperate something of the lost radical conscience of art and culture. There is now an amnesia about the prehistory of society, of our own psyches, and of the imagination. The colonizing of consciousness has rendered the imagination of the west atrophied and almost inert. All art is a recreation of our own psychic formation (mimesis) as well as being shaped by its 'otherness', by a purposelessness. All stories are crime stories, all stories are about exile, and all stories are about homesickness. And all art contains a narrative. For only by having no purpose can the artwork posit the direction to which society must look to create an 'other' or elsewhere. To retain something of that utopian promise that is foundational in culture. The world is being dis-enchanted. The Utopian promise is not kept. (shrink)

This article summarizes and contextualizes the vast unpublished correspondence between Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller, two of the most prominent twentieth-century scholars of Renaissance Humanism. It details how Baron and Kristeller came to take their first steps in Renaissance scholarship in Germany before political circumstances forced them into exile; it recounts the story of their emigration and their strategies for survival in Italy, Britain, and the United States; it reveals the impact of the American academy on their intellectual journeys (...) and the extent to which they self-consciously stood for a methodology on the verge of extinction. Most important, the correspondence provides us with a personal etiology of the rebirth of Renaissance studies in the postwar period and of the concrete genesis of some of the books that brought it about. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to reflect on selected works of Aleksander Watt placed in the context of De imitatione Christi by Thomas à Kempis and to verify the view that suffering functions in the consciousness and poetic imagination of the writer as a value conducive to the spiritual development of the individual. The author analyzes the poet’s memoirs in order to show how reading the book he discovered during WWII, while exiled in Kazakhstan, influenced Wat’s choices and (...) attitudes, or his perception of the decisions he made. Then the article interprets the poetic texts that emphasize the theme of suffering and following Jesus Christ. The Wiersze somatyczne [Somatic Poems] cycle is discussed, on top of Wat’s works based on the symbolism of the crown of thorns and the death on the cross, the excerpts from his drama Kobiety z Monte Olivetto [The Women of Monte Olivetto], and the poem with the incipit “U szczytu antynomij….” [At the top of antinomies...], which is formed into the shape of the cross. The researcher reads them in a hermeneutical way in the course of which she analyzes the symbols and biblical allusions, associates literary metaphors with autobiographical traces of the poet’s experiences, and uncovers the connection between the texts of the two authors. The main thesis of the article is that in the discussed works, there is a dolorous theme – that is, one in which suffering is exposed and presented as an ethically valuable experience. A reading of a number of works in which pain, depicted in various ways, is at the same time a reminiscence of the poet’s own physical and mental anguish and a reference to the Passion of Christ, allows one to conclude that for the author of Wiersze śródziemnomorskie [The Mediterranean Poems], suffering is a state of spiritual transformation that brings man closer to the sphere of the sacred. The author ultimately concludes that, in light of the work of Thomas à Kempis, Wat’s dolorism appears as a modern interpretation of the idea of following Christ, marked by the necessity of being different from Him. (shrink)

The force of [Heinrich von] Kleist's story "On the Marionette Theatre" . . . derives from roots deeply sunk into the soil of the past. It is a novel variation on a theme the first author of which may well be Plato. For according to Plato the human mind has been in the dark ever since it lost its place in the community of Truth, in the realm, that is, of the Ideas, the eternal and eternally perfect forms, those now (...) unattainable models which man in his exile is able to see and recognize only as shadows or imperfect copies. And this Platonic parable of the damage suffered by man's soul and consciousness is not unlike the Fall as it is narrated in Genesis. The Fall was the consequence and punishment of man's free will that for the first time had asserted itself against the universal God and rejoiced in a consciousness and pleasure entirely its own—tragically its own; for man had to forsake the indwelling in the supreme Intelligence and thus the harmony between himself and Being as such. The reward for this betrayal was the embarrassment and shame of self-consciousness, the hard labor of maintaining himself in his state of separation, and, soon to follow, the murderous misdeeds of the self-will named Cain. Better to have no mind than a mind thus deprived and impoverished and cruel. Erich Heller, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, is the author of The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought; The Ironic Gentleman: Thomas Mann; The Artist's Journey into the Interior; and Franz Kafka. These books have also appeared in Germany in the author's own translations, and his Dir Wiederkehr der Unschuld [The return of innocence] was recently published there. See also: "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality" by Murray Krieger in Vol. 1, No. 2; "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" by Margret Schaefer in Vol. 5, No. 1. (shrink)

This book explores the religious experiences of two notable figures who endured severe trials under authoritarian regimes: Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1877–1960) within the Islamic tradition, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) within the Russian Orthodox Christian tradition. Against the tumultuous backdrop of the twentieth century’s spiritual, social, political, and intellectual upheavals, both Nursi and Solzhenitsyn grappled with immense hardships because of their beliefs. Despite immense tribulations, both individuals demonstrated unwavering faith and resilience in the face of adversity, continuing their scholarly and literary (...) activities. The current study centers on the dichotomy of spiritual confinement and expansiveness, illustrating how people can experience spiritual distress even without physical restraints. It explores the historical and conceptual aspects of imprisonment within Christian and Muslim perspectives, explores the reasons for Nursi and Solzhenitsyn's incarceration, examines their coping mechanisms in the face of hardship, and underscores the role of faith and spirituality. The author integrates personal experiences, particularly his own incarceration during the aftermath of the 2016 Turkish staged coup attempt, within the context of the narratives of Nursi and Solzhenitsyn. The book addresses court proceedings, release, departure from Turkey, and resettlement in Australia. Throughout, the author draws parallels between their own observations and those of Nursi and Solzhenitsyn, contributing to the broader discourse on individual spirituality and collective consciousness. The book offers insights into spiritual resilience in the face of adversity, utilizing the lives of these figures to illuminate shared human experiences. A unique collation of personal narration and scholarly reflection, it is relevant to academics and students in history, political science, sociology, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, and to social scientists researching the phenomenon of exile and prison in different countries across the world. It also speaks to the work of activists and policymakers in human rights. (shrink)

European writer of Romanian origin, Vintila Horia - Goncourt Prize in 1960 for the novel Dieu est né enexil - was a truly awakened consciousness of his time. Wherever he was - in Bucharest or Florence, Buenos Aires or Paris, Rome or Madrid - this “polyglot nomad” never left the unyielding values of the spirit and of knowledge. His work of literary epistemology, hisnovelistic creation - fed by exile, love and by the divine -, as well as the Journal (...) d’un paysan du Danube, stand as testimony. Focal point of my approach, this text sheds light on the metaphysical realm of a way of thinking in which the undivided man and the man to come are one and the same. Since for the exiled VintilaHoria,”the peasant from the Danube” is “celui dans lequel ce qui fut rencontre celui qui sera, dans un espace-temps non-euclidien”, and his journal emphasizes this “rediscovery”, in spite of the dark times of history; an encounter in, through and beyond the broken grounds of science, art and philosophy, but nevertheless, deeply anchored in philosophy, art and science. Apparently, rediscovery and isolation of the same proportion; in fact, we are talking about an anagnorisis: the inner man and the outer man have never separated, despite the “microbial fauna of Kali Yuga”. “Nomade polyglotte” through his evolution, a result of flawless reflexive stability, Vintila Horia proves himself to be, at the same time, animmobile nomad; “the peasant from the Danube” is the plenary expression of this unusual simultaneity. (shrink)

This article is an invitation to consider Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Question as a text that leads the reader to consider the possibilities offered by the post-Covid 19 resumption of daily school life with children as a political act. Based on a conversation that Freire had with Antônio Faundez in 1985, this text encourages researchers and educators to consider ways of returning to school life in ways that are welcoming, responsive and loving in the wake of the experience of (...) “almost-exile” undergone during the covid-19 pandemic. It becomes necessary to think school life again from where the children truly are, restarting in full awareness of the adventures, the pains, the losses they have undergone, encouraging them to ask the questions that the pandemic experience has produced them, and to recognize the new forms of consciousness it has inaugurated. This paper explores the implications of the ideas found in the Freire-Faundez dialogue for this moment of reconstruction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DIKTAT OR DIALOGUE? ON GADAMER'S CONCEPT OF THE ART WORK'S CLAIM by John Pizer How do we experience a work of art? Put another way, how does die work of art engage and address us? Hans-Georg Gadamer devoted much of his magnum opus, Truth and Method, to answering these questions, and he takes up the task again in a brief essay entided "Aesthetics and Hermeneutics" (1964). Earlier positions on (...) the nature of hermeneutical reflection, the historical context of aesthetic interpretation and the linguistic character underlying the apprehension of all modes of art are reformulated here. At first glance, the essay appears to be more the summary of a previous epistemology than a venture into new terrain. There is, in fact, almost nothing in this work which seems to contradict Gadamer's previous view. Nevertheless, the closing lines of the essay give his concept of art a dimension not directly perceptible in Truth and Method. This is the notion that the work of art challenges us, on a personal level, to change the course of our existence: "The intimacy with which the work of art touches us is at the same time, in enigmatic fashion, a shattering and a demolition of the familiar. It is not only the 'This art thou!' disclosed in ajoyous and frightening shock; it also says to us: 'Thou must alter thy life'!" {PH, p. 104).1 Whereas Truth and Method focuses on the heightened reflexivity gained in a dialogue with an aesthetic object, Gadamer's citation of Rilke's admonition would appear to turn the dialogue into a command, or at least an unmediated personal challenge, issued by the work of art. 272 John Pizer273 This is not to say that Truth andMethod is free ofpowerful, even violent language in its description of aesthetic experience. In discussing the concept of "Erlebnis" as it came to be the dominant term in phenomenological investigations ofconsciousness, Gadamer represents aesthetic experience as paradigmatic of all experience. Like the hermeneutic circle, consciousness is grounded in the interplay of discrete, individual experience and the experience oflife as a whole. Life as a whole consists of unique, episodic experiences, and yet these experiences only acquire meaning in the context of life in its totality. As Joel Weinsheimer puts it: "An experience is something the meaning ofwhich accompanies one through life, determining that life and being determined by it."2 An exceptional experience is an adventure, which gives a disruptivejolt to the even flow of life. But it allows one to experience life in its richness, fullness, and totality even as it tears one from life's quotidian context. In this, the aesthetic experience has the character ofan adventure: "The work of art seems destined to become an aesthetic experience. This means the person experiencing it is wrenched at one blow from the context of his life while at the same time he is related back to the whole of his existence" {WM, p. 66).3 But while Gadamer's terminology here in describing the experience of art is as violent as that of "Aesthetics and Hermeneutics," he does not suggest in Truth and Method that the work of art issues a command or injunction. Rather, by reflecting on the essence of experience as the dialectic of "exile and reunion," 4 our dialogue with the art work enriches our ability to understand and find truth in life as a whole. Of course, even in Truth and Method Gadamer distinguishes clearly between the silent dialogue between art work and spectator, particularly between reader and text, and the colloquy of individuals engaged in conversation. Nevertheless, he makes it clear that in both cases an openended dialectic ofquestion and answer motivates the engagement. Does the notion that a work of art "shatters" the familiar and admonishes us to change our lives contradict the earlier, seemingly more democratic parameters established by Gadamer as defining the search for ontological truth, and, more narrowly, the attempt at legitimate interpretation? The purpose of this paper will be to demonstrate that it does not. First ofall, we must note Gadamer's concept ofexperience {Erfahrung) in relationship to the text implies an openness to it rather than a detached, objective... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the SelfBrian KarafinMeeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self. By Anne Carolyn Klein. Boston: Beacon, 1995. 307 pp.“When the iron bird flies and carriages run on wheels, the dharma will come to the land of the red man”: this saying attributed to the semilegendary founder of Buddhism in Tibet, Padmasambhava, stands as (...) an oft-cited marker for the sense that the meeting between Tibetan Buddhism and North American culture was somehow a [End Page 227] fated one, a confluence emergent from some karmic relationship or mythical dependent-arising. Karmic connection or historical product of the near-simultaneous exile of Tibetans from their homeland in 1959 and the burgeoning of Western interest in Eastern religions and philosophies, the encounter of these two mutually and exotically other traditions is, nearing the second Christian millennium, proceeding apace. Especially since the 1989 awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetans—and now international pop icon—the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, the Western fascination for things Tibetan has exponentially increased, transforming what had been the preserve of scholars and eccentric spiritual seekers into a media sensation.The reception of Tibetan Buddhism in the West has proceeded in stages and phases that overlap and mutually affect each other, from pop phantasms of Tibet as a mythical Shangri-La (as in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon) and theosophical hopes in Tibet as the domain of the Wise Mahatmas overseeing the spiritual evolution of humanity to the relatively recent development of Tibetan studies as an academic discipline centered on the translation of texts, as well as the growing population of westerners practicing Tibetan Buddhist religion under the guidance of exiled lamas. With these latter two groups—scholars and practitioners who often overlap memberships—the phenomenon of Tibetan Buddhism in the West has reached a point where critical self-reflection is now possible. Donald Lopez’ recent Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West is the first full-length critical examination of the cultural confluence I’ve been noticing thus far. Lopez represents a movement in the field of Tibetan studies from philological scholarship of texts, in which the scholarly effort consists largely of translation along with commentary that closely follows the commentarial literature of the Tibetan tradition being translated, to cultural criticism of the underlying dynamics in the encounter itself.This critical self-consciousness in the field of Tibetan studies is likewise the motivating impetus behind Anne Klein’s recent work as represented by the book under review here. Klein, like Lopez, was a student of the dean of American Tibetan studies, Jeffrey Hopkins, at the University of Virginia. As such, her early work followed Hopkins in pursuing an essentially philological approach to Tibetan tradition with a focus on the philosophical scholasticism of the Gelukpa lineage. Klein’s three philological-philosophical books—Knowledge and Liberation; Knowing, Naming, and Negation; and Path to the Middle—are excellent examples of the genre of translation/commentary above mentioned, treating the Sautrantika and Madhyamika tenet systems in which the Gelukpa tradition systematized Indian Buddhist philosophy for the purposes of monastic study and debate. Meeting the Great Bliss Queen is something else entirely; in this work Klein blazes a trail out from recondite translation work toward cultural critique and psychosocial self-reflection in which the previously submerged subtext of the encounter between the Tibetan tradition and the Western psyche and society is allowed to surface and its issues probed and reflected upon.Klein frames her work in terms of a dialogue between Buddhism (by which she mainly means meditation practices and some associated philosophy) and feminism (by which she means both academic feminist theory and her own autobiographical [End Page 228] experience as a Western woman personally experiencing the confluence of Western and Tibetan exigencies). Klein is a salient example of a scholar-practitioner, someone who occupies positions both in the academic field of Tibetan studies and in the population of students of Tibetan lamas in exile. As such, she is exactly situated to embark on such a project of cultural and psychological reflection. She knows... (shrink)

This book contains the materials of the Fifth Rychyn Readings, held at the Kremenets Medical School, which bears them the glorious son of Ukraine, a fighter for her state and spiritual independence. which the Stalin-Soviet authorities sent for Ukrainians for life as early as 1939 for exile to foreign lands. Russian-Communist. immediately after the occupation of Volhynia, the chauvinists felt that in the person of Arsen Reinsky they had such a person who was able to resist the Moscow-Orthodox spiritual colonizers, (...) their scientific achievement to open people's eyes to what is the so-called "Third Rome". The reason for the detention was, first of all, the content of the book "Problems of Ukrainian Religious Consciousness" printed by a thinker as early as 1933. (shrink)

The era from the late fifties to the early seventies was marked in Africa and the Caribbean by a rush of newly articulated anticolonial sentiment that was associated with the burgeoning of both international back consciousness and more localized nationalist movements. Between 1957 and 1973 the vast majority of African and the larger Caribbean colonies won their independence; the same period witnessed the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, the latter phase of the Kenyan “Mau Mau” revolt, the Katanga crisis in (...) the Cong, the Trinidadian Black Power uprising and, equally important for the atmosphere of militant defiance, the civil rights movement in the United States, the student revolts of 1968, and the humbling of the United States during the Vietnam War. This period was distinguished, among Caribbean and African intellectuals, by a pervasive mood of optimistic outrage. Frequently graduates of British or French universities, they were the first generation from their regions self-assured and numerous enough to call collectively for a renunciation of Western standards as the political revolts found their cultural counterparts in insurrections against the bequeathed values of the colonial powers.In the context of such challenges to an increasingly discredited European colonialism, a series of dissenting intellectual chose to utilize a European text as a strategy for getting “out from under this ancient mausoleum of [Western] historic achievement.”1 They seized upon The Tempest as a way of amplifying their class for decolonization within the bounds of the dominant cultures. But at the same time these Caribbeans and Africans adopted the play as a founding text in an oppositional lineage which issued from a geopolitically and historically specific set of cultural ambitions. They perceived that the play could contribute to their self-definition during a period of great flux. So, through repeated, reinforcing, transgressive appropriations of The Tempest, a once silenced group generated its own tradition of “error” which in turn served as one component of the grander counterhegemonic nationalist and black internationalist endeavors of the period. Because that era of Caribbean and African history was marked by such extensive, open contestation of cultural values, the destiny of The Tempest at that time throws into uncommonly stark relief the status of value as an unstable social process rather than a static and, in literary terms, merely textual attribute. Rob Nixon is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University. He is working on the topics of exile and Third World-metropolitan relations in the writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is “No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida’s ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme’ ”. (shrink)

A term of relatively recent mintage, coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, ecology draws on ancient Greek to establish and consolidate its meaning. Although scholars all too often overlook it, the anachronistic rise of ecology in its semantic and conceptual determinations is noteworthy. Formed by analogy with economy, the word may be translated as “the articulation of a dwelling”, the logos of oikos. Here, I argue not only that a vast majority of ecosystems on the planet are subject (...) to environmental upheavals and ecological crises, but also that ecology as the crossroads of dwelling and articulation is in crisis, having come into its own and made explicit what was silently present in its historical enunciation. As a result, ecology needs to be deromanticized, decoupled from the bucolic and the picturesque, and dissociated from nativism and autochthony. Every organism, ecosystem, or place is affected by the forces of unsettlement and displacement; all dwellings and their articulations are shaken to the core and set in motion, rendering ecologies exilic. Ecologies today share the exilic condition, which also threatens to level the differences among them, without the chance of returning to a stable origin, itself nothing other than a theoretical fiction. In what follows, I propose to chalk out the outlines of exilic ecologies. (shrink)

What is consciousness? How does the subjective character of consciousness fit into an objective world? How can there be a science of consciousness? In this sequel to his groundbreaking and controversial The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers develops a unified framework that addresses these questions and many others. Starting with a statement of the "hard problem" of consciousness, Chalmers builds a positive framework for the science of consciousness and a nonreductive vision of the metaphysics of (...) class='Hi'>consciousness. He replies to many critics of The Conscious Mind, and then develops a positive theory in new directions. The book includes original accounts of how we think and know about consciousness, of the unity of consciousness, and of how consciousness relates to the external world. Along the way, Chalmers develops many provocative ideas: the " consciousness meter", the Garden of Eden as a model of perceptual experience, and The Matrix as a guide to the deepest philosophical problems about consciousness and the external world. This book will be required reading for anyone interested in the problems of mind, brain, consciousness, and reality. (shrink)

G.E. Moore alludes to a notion of consciousness that is diaphanous, elusive to attention, yet detectable. Such a notion, I suggest, approximates what Bina Gupta has called `witness-consciousness'--in particular, the aspect of mode-neutral awareness with intrinsic phenomenal character. This paper offers a detailed definition and defence of the appearance and reality of witness-consciousness. While I claim that witness- consciousness captures the essence of subjectivity, and so must be accounted for in the `hard problem' of consciousness, (...) it is not to be confused with the more commonly defended notion of `for-me-ness'. (shrink)

John Campbell investigates how consciousness of the world explains our ability to think about the world; how our ability to think about objects we can see depends on our capacity for conscious visual attention to those things. He illuminates classical problems about thought, reference, and experience by looking at the underlying psychological mechanisms on which conscious attention depends.

Lycan not only uses the numerous arguments against materialism, and functionalist theories of mind in particular, to gain a more detailed positive view of the ..

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism. Wallace's "special theory of ontological relativity" suggests that mental phenomena are _conditioned_ by the brain, but do not _emerge_ from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these dualities, (...) as proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. To test his hypothesis, Wallace employs the Buddhist meditative practice of _samatha_, refining one's attention and metacognition, to create a kind of telescope to examine the space of the mind. Drawing on the work of the physicist John Wheeler, he then proposes a more general theory in which the participatory nature of reality is envisioned as a self-excited circuit. In comparing these ideas to the Buddhist theory known as the Middle Way philosophy, Wallace explores further aspects of his "general theory of ontological relativity," which can be investigated by means of _vipasyana_, or insight, meditation. Wallace then focuses on the theme of symmetry in reference to quantum cosmology and the "problem of frozen time," relating these issues to the theory and practices of the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism. He concludes with a discussion of the general theme of complementarity as it relates to science and religion. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were major achievements in the physical sciences, and the theory of evolution has had an equally deep impact on the life sciences. However, rigorous scientific methods do not yet exist to observe mental phenomena, and naturalism has its limits for shedding light on the workings of the mind. A pioneer of modern consciousness research, Wallace offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physicists and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism. (shrink)

The Perennial Philosophy centres around what is said to be a recurring mystical insight: that our inherent nature is actually pure, unconditioned consciousness, identical to the ground of all being. Perennial Idealism, the name I give to a metaphysical system I have been building, extrapolates from the Perennial Philosophy to explain how the world could be configured if it were in fact true. Among the most serious challenges faced is that of articulating and defending the very notion that our (...) world is grounded in universal consciousness. This chapter further develops a line of reply to what I think are four major objections to the idea that universal consciousness grounds all being. I call these the Thales Objection, the Problem of the One and the Many, the Self-defeating Objection, and the Power Challenge. (shrink)