Memory, of course, is not a trivial or isolated act, and therefore truth or falsity in descriptions of memory will have consequences for large reaches of our philosophical theory. Memory at least purports to give us our only direct knowledge of the past. And our only indirect knowledge of the past, through inference, must credit some memories somewhere. If then our knowledge of the past is vitiated, what remains of our knowledge of the present, or our expectations for the future? (...) But if memory lives up to its pretentions of acquainting us with the past, then what sort of world is it where an existent mind now can become directly acquainted with what is no more existent, but passed away? What in other words, are the ontological presuppositions of the act of memory? (shrink)
Heidegger, Sartre and the later existentialist philosophers inherited a world, it has been said, from which "God is absent". Contemporary philosophy begins in the momentous questioning of the Christian experience by such nineteenth-century figures as Nietzsche and Dosteyevsky. But if existentialism is in some respects a beginning-again, it is in other respects linked to the classical world out of which Christianity arose and to certain themes in the writings of ancient and medieval Christians. Renewal and innovation converge. Addressing themselves to (...) the general reader, the three author-philosophers consider both the contemporary and the perennial. [Book jacket]. (shrink)
The arts were created from an appeal to freedom. There can be no general aesthetic that defines how that freedom must express itself. Movies offer a seductive example. Of all the major arts, cinema is the only one that was invented during the lifetime of some who are now living. From this perspective, Earle argues that filmmakers were far more inventive in their early days than now, when commercial film has settled into a realist routine with occasional and timid forays (...) into the personal and imaginative. Earle suggests that unsympathetic readers should look again at the possible sources of film poetry, sources that have almost dried up in the flood of boredom experienced nightly in theaters throughout the world. Surrealism in Film is largely a manifesto against realism; it ends in a clash of sensibilities. The book encourages new exploration of absolute poetry. The intention of these essays is to destroy the absolute authority of the realist sensibility. Within that sensibility is everything thought necessary to "sense": narrative plot, recognizable and nameable passions, continuity and integration within the film, a gist or moral for the whole affair, social commentary, and psychoanalytic depth-meanings. Earle argues for a self-critique that should be performed if movies are not to remain encapsulated within its own delusions. (shrink)
A philosophical consideration of political affairs has the disadvantage of being incapable, in and of itself, of implying any specific practical action or policy. It would, then, seem useless except for the accompanying reflection that specific policy undertaken without any attention to principles, is mindless; and mindless action can have no expectation either of practical effect or of intellectual defense. No doubt the relation of principles to action is complex indeed; but at least it can be said that practical principles (...) without reference to possible action are vacuous, and action which can not be clarified by principle is aimless commotion. Principled action offers us then the best that can be hoped for. That, however, is the work not of philosophy but of statesmanship, a faculty which is as theoretically clear as it need be but also skilled by experience in reading the existing political scene. Accordingly my present remarks aim only at some principles involved in the understanding of war, focusing on those which seem conspicuously absent in contemporary discussion, and not at defending any specific judgments about the current war. Examples of incoherent principles will be drawn from present discussions; but any other war might have served equally well. No judgment about the present war can be derived from these remarks on principles; and if most of the false principles are quoted from the antiwar side, it is only because that side has been more vocal. (shrink)
Today, happily, we have much less confidence than a Montesquieu or a Hegel in depicting the “spirits” of nations, times, and generations. The more intelligible such depictions are, and the more suitable for their role in world–historical drama, the less plausible they seem to those whose spirits they are supposed to be. For no matter how subtly drawn and with no matter how many reservations, they remain in the end categories. The application of categories to any living subject matter itself (...) generates a categorial malaise: the category is clear, but life while it illustrates that category, also illustrates its opposite, as well as an indefinite number of other categories not encompassed in either the one or the other. (shrink)
The I in the reflectively revealed "I think" has had, as we all know, a rather checkered career. For Descartes, it was a "thinking substance". For Kant it was a "transcendental unity of apperception," an empty, formal unifying function whose occupation was a priori synthesis, and which was sharply distinguished from anything which might be called a "soul." With Husserl the pure I was again an empty, formal source of all intentionalities, a pure transparency devoid of depth; at least this (...) was Husserl at the epoch of the Ideen I, although the Cartesian Meditations altered the matter in fundamental respects. But there has always been an opposing body of philosophers, empiricists, and now existentialists, for whom there is no I at all within consciousness; the Cartesian cogito ergo sum demonstrates, they maintain, only that "there is thinking," an impersonal stream of conscious acts which need no I as their source or support. And finally, there is a third group which holds that while there is most certainly an I, it is not formal, nor empty nor even fully transparent to itself; it has certain depths which are not accessible to its own direct reflection but can be "felt" or "touched" in certain experiences which engage the ego in its totality, or which shatter its own thin picture of itself. Jaspers and Marcel belong to this group. And so, while we began with a certitude, I think, we find at last that both the existence and character of this most certain of all things are questionable, or at least have been questioned. I propose then to reexamine the question, first briefly to ascertain that there is indeed an I or thinking subject; and then more extensively to follow certain clues as to its character in depth. (shrink)
