The terms immanence and transcendence have played a significant role in philosophical thought since its inception. Implicit in the notions of immanence and transcendence, as typified within the history of ideas, is often a separation and division between the human and the godly. This division has served to generate ontologies of isolation and set up epistemologies that can be both binary and divided. The terms immanence and transcendence thus sit at the heart of contemporary onto-epistemic accounts of the world. As (...) such, in seeking to examine the nature of what is, this paper traces a line through the history of ideas in an attempt to clarify the connections and dissonances in the notions of immanence and transcendence. This is done for the purpose of demonstrating what philosophical and religious accounts may offer in attempting to create a sound account of the godly and thus the world in a secular age. (shrink)

: ‘Ecological civilization’ has been put forward as a utopia, as this notion has been defended by Ernst Bloch and Paul Ricoeur. It is a vision of the future that puts into question that which presently exists, revealing its contingency while offering an inspiring image of the future that can mobilize people to create this future. Ecological civilization is a vision based on ecological thinking, seeing all life as interdependent communities of communities. Humanity’s place in nature is redefined as participating (...) in communities, both human and non-human, including the global ecosystem. From this perspective, the end of life in both ethics and politics should be to augment life through augmenting the conditions for life, that is, through ‘ecopoiesis’ or ‘home-making’. What is involved in this has been clarified by work in biosemiotics and biohermeneutics where life is identified with semiosis, the production and interpretation of signs. Advancing biosemiotics and biohermeneutics, I will argue that living processes can be understood as proto-narratives organizing living processes to advance the conditions for life. They are inchoate in Ricoeur’s sense because they are not reflectively formulated as such but are being lived out. Developing our understanding of the world involves understanding these inter-related proto-narratives, including the proto-narrative that has operated in the creation of the biosphere and semiosphere, and recognizing the potential of human culture as part of this semiosphere to make explicit and re-emplot these proto-narratives. Most importantly, it is to make explicit and further develop the proto-narrative of the global ecosystem to augment the conditions for life. This will involve articulating a new grand narrative of not only humanity but of terrestrial life, orienting human communities at all levels to create and sustain a global ecological civilization. (shrink)

Kant maintains that the only thing that is good in itself, and therefore good without limitation or qualification, is a good will. This is an objectionable claim in support of a controversial position. The problem is not just that the good will is not the only thing that is good in itself, which indeed it is not, but more importantly, that the good will is not so much a thing that is good in itself as it is the good kind (...) of a thing that is otherwise neither good nor bad in itself. The goodness of a good will is no more intrinsic than the goodness of a good act, good outcome, good attitude, good character, or good person. Nor is it even any more so than something as commonplace as a good laugh or a good cup of coffee. A good will, whatever else it may be, is a will that is good, much like how a good act is an act that is good, a good outcome is an outcome that is good, and so on with the other examples, not one of which is good for any reason other than the goodness predicated of the corresponding subject. This paper thus challenges Kant’s position on ontological grounds. It questions the validity of claiming intrinsic goodness for a complex construct whose goodness is, in fact, extrinsic to its substance. The objection is not that the good will might not turn out to be good after all, which is impossible by definition, designation, or stipulation, but that its goodness is axiomatic and derivative rather than intrinsic or fundamental. (shrink)

Debates about the planet’s recent entrance into an epoch of earth history now characterized by the destructive effects of humankind’s having become a planetary force to rival plate tectonics, supervolcanos and asteroid impacts should have the effect of placing Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin’s conception of natural history in a new light. For what it is perhaps most striking about this conception is not only its proximity to a present made newly aware of nature and history’s total interpenetration, but (...) just how precisely its understanding of natural history’s essential transitoriness accords with what is now everywhere observable: that ever-accelerating process of disintegration through which it becomes clear that the life of phenomena can only be known today if it is also known in terms of that reality of disappearance to which the current age daily testifies. For Adorno and Benjamin, such a conception of natural history had very real consequences for how philosophical cognition and construction would have to be remade, leading both to pursue far-reaching experiments in intellectual production that it is the task of this paper to reconstruct in the light of its possible relevance for the theory and practice of critical theory today. (shrink)

The split between the subject and object is the epistemological inheritance of modernity’s enchantment with substance, notably shown by the subjectivism in the Cartesian ‘cogito’ and Kantian ‘transcendental I’. In this paper, I will attempt to argue that despite Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics that eclipsed Descartes’ dualism and Kant’s transcendentalism, there is still a possibility of the return of both Subject and Object – exemplified even on ontological grounds in Žižek’s Subject-Oriented Ontology and Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology. Conveniently, I will situate the (...) two ontologies, dubbed respectively as SOO and OOO, in the recent Žižek & Harman Duel/Duet (2017). Further, I will rework the uses of two important notions found only in this debate – unhintergebar (the ‘unsurpassable’) and ostranenie (defamiliarization) – to explicate the transport from Heidegger’s metaphysical abyss to spectral abyss. Arguing from Heidegger’s ground (grund) and/or abyss (abgrund) that grounds possibilities of being, I will call this new ground for strange possibilities as spectral abyss (gespenstisch abgrund). To achieve this, I will do two things. First, I will briefly rehearse the epistemological split and Heidegger’s ontological turn. And second, I will resituate the debate by showing how Žižek and Harman’s ontologies can emerge from Heidegger’s spectral abyss. My ultimate goal is then to explicate not the return but the ground that makes it possible for a strange return. (shrink)