In his Ideas I (1913), with his thought experiment of world-annihilation, Husserl becomes persuaded that the beings of which we are conscious do not simply lie ‘out there’ in themselves, enjoying an independent (realistic) existence. Our experience of beings in a world, qua total horizon of beings, is the achievement of our intentional consciousness, which unfolds its overall constitutive possibilities. It is because of this that in our everyday meaningful comportments, we are always intentionally correlated with what is “Vorhanden” for (...) us. In what we know as Ideas II, Husserl sought to offer concrete analyses of such intentional constitutions. He distinguished three fundamental spheres of intentional objectities: inanimate material nature, animate or psychic nature, and spirit or culturality. These constitute, as Husserl puts it, three different regions of Being, comprising beings that are meaningfully given in the three corresponding kinds of intentional correlation. Thus, he divided the problem of intentional constitution into three corresponding sub-problems. Now, according to Husserl’s Phenomenology, some intentional interdependence holds between these three regions of Being. In the way the matter was approached in Chap. 5 of the present book, the region of inanimate material nature, which comprises the nature-things (Naturdinge), is presented as being the most fundamental. The constitution of animate-psychic nature is, in its turn, thought of as presupposing inanimate nature-thinghood as its intentional foundation. Spirit and culturality, finally, presupposes the first and, somehow, the second region. It is generally thought that Husserl was of the view that, for us, primordial consciousness is the perceptual experience of nature-things; simple sensory perceptual things. That is, on the lowest level of our conscious life, we are intentionally correlated with simple perceptually appearing things. Our experience of cultural beings or, more broadly speaking, things of value (goods) like tools, books, etc., is intentionally derivative and founded upon the former. In his Being and Time (1927), Heidegger, who had already been influenced by Husserl’s discussion of the aforementioned ontological regions, claimed that primordially, intentional experience presents us with a world where equipment and other beings like us appear. Moreover, the givenness of beings as nature-things, or simply as sensory perceptual beings, is the result of a theoretical construction. In what I would like to call “standard” or “received” Heideggerian criticism of Husserl’s Phenomenology, it is held that Husserl starts his analysis at a high level of theoretical intentionality. What Husserl takes as primordial intentionality, the story goes, is an experience that is possible only as attentive-observational and thematic givenness of beings; nature-things can appear only in ‘elaborate’ derivative experience of such a kind. In addition, in this judgmental constitution of nature-things, the properties attributed to them appear to belong to science. This thesis, Heidegger maintains, makes Phenomenology unfaithful to its very dictum that calls us to remain close “to the things themselves.” If Phenomenology were to stay close to how things indeed are, it would discover that primordially, we are not correlated with theoretically constituted vorhanden nature-things, but with zuhanden equipment of different kinds. Positing nature-things or perceptual things as the ultimate fundament of intentional givenness moves us away from the original sense of Phenomenology and accepts phenomenologically unjustified prejudices. (shrink)

This book deals with foundational issues in Phenomenology as they arise in the smoldering but tense dispute between Husserl and Heidegger, which culminates in the late 1920s. The work focuses on three key issues around which a constellation of other important problems revolves. More specifically, it elucidates the phenomenological method of the reductions, the identity and content of primordial givenness, and the meaning and character of categorial intuition. The text interrogates how Husserl and Heidegger understand these points, and clarifies the (...) precise nature of their disagreements. The book thus sheds light on the meaning of intentionality and of its foundation on pre-objective time, on the sense of the phenomenological a priori, on intentional constitution, on the relatedness between intentionality and world, and on Heidegger’s debt to Husserl’s categorial intuition in formulating the question regarding Being/Nothing. The author revisits these fundamental issues in order to suggest a general intra-phenomenological settlement, and to do justice to the corresponding contributions of these two central figures in phenomenological philosophy. He also indicates a way of reconciling and interweaving some of their views in order to free Phenomenology from its inner divisions and limitations, enabling it to move forward. Phenomenology can re-examine itself, its obligations, and its possibilities, and this can be of benefit to contemporary philosophy, especially with regard to problems concerning consciousness, intentionality, experience, and human existence and praxis within a historical world in crisis. This book is ideally suited to students and scholars of Husserl and Heidegger, to philosophers of mind, consciousness and cognition, and to anyone with a serious interest in Phenomenology. (shrink)

Is Orthodox Judaism committed to the existence of a Torah that pre-existed the world? This paper argues that Orthodoxy is so committed unless it can find compelling philosophical or theological reasons to reject the possibility of such an entity, and then to re-interpret allegorically all of the texts that speak of such a Torah. Providing an ontology of primordial texts, I argue that no compelling reason can be found to deny the existence of the primordial Torah.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE FOUNDING MURDER IN MACHIAVELLI'S THEPRINCE Jim Grote Archdiocese ofLouisville One ofthe doctors ofItaly, Nicholas Machiavel, had the confidence to put in writing, almost in plain terms, "That the Christian faitii had given up good men in prey to Üiose who are tyrannical and unjust." (Francis Bacon) A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian ofdie Cross calls the tìiing what it actually is. (...) (Martin Luúher) René Girard has written eloquently ofthe founding murder described by Friedrich Nietzsche in aphorism 125 from The Gay Science (Girard 1988). In aphorism 125, Nietzsche reflects on the modem prophecy that "God is dead." The crowd, who surrounds the Madman in this aphorism, assumes that God has died ofnatural causes. As Girard says: "Nietzsche is taken to be the great prophet ofthe natural death ofGod" (Girard 1988, 232). The belief in God remains in modernity as a vestige ofthat senility to which God succumbed a long time ago. Unlike the crowd, the Madman cannot keep from hysterical outbursts about the unnatural death of God. "We have killed Him—you and I! All of us are his murderers!" According to Girard, the Madman's ravings are clues to an original collective murder that human culture JimGrote119 has been unable to repress despite its artistic and philosophic endeavors to the contrary. In fact, this founding violence is the foundation ofculture itself. It is surprising that Girard has written little about another modem prophet, Niccolo Machiavelli. A comparison and contrast of Girard's thought with Machiavelli's sheds an interesting light on both ofthem. IfNietzsche is the modern prophet (however misunderstood) of the unnatural death of God, Machiavelli is the modem prophet concerning the unnatural death ofhuman beings. A recent translator ofMachiavelli's The Prince argues that the heart ofhis teaching can be summed up in die simple adage: "you can get away with murder."1 One might summarize Girard's thought in a similar manner: "You cannot get away with murder." In order to better understand the role of the founding murder in modem thought it is useful to turn to the thought ofNiccolo Machiavelli. According to the political philosopher, Leo Strauss, the modernity that culminated in the work of Nietzsche was bom in the work of Machiavelli.2 Strauss describes Machiavelli as the founder ofmodernity. For Machiavelli all foundings entail violence. No enduring society can come into being without the equivalent of Romulus' murder of his brother Remus. Political order is established by a crime that necessarily transcends the boundaries of that order because it creates that very order. Morality is founded by immorality. Girard articulates the founding violence as a cultural rather than a political phenomenon. Machiavelli's political foundings presuppose Girard's cultural founding. In Girard's view of the founding murder, the original chaos or Hobbesian war of all-against-all is replaced by the sacrificial order of allagainst -one. Consider Gil Bailie's description ofthe founding murder: Primitive religion is bom at this moment, the moment when, as Girard puts it, "the atmosphere of terror and hallucination that accompanies the primordial religious experience" reaches its climax, and "the detente that follows only heightens the mystery of the whole process." In the beginning was the hush. Human culture as such begins with 1 See Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.'s translation ofNiccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (vii). All quotations in the present essay cite both the chapter from The Prince and the page number from Mansfield's translation. Quotations from Machiavelli's Discourses are from Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov's translation, NiccoloMachiavelli: Discourses on Livy. 2 See Leo Strauss, "The Three Waves ofModernity" in Hilail Gildin, An Introduction to PoliticalPhilosophy: TenEssays byLeo Strauss. The three waves are Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. 120The FoundingMurder the community of victimizers looking at the corpse of its victim in solemn astonishment at the miracle of camaraderie that hasjust taken place. Whereas but a moment before strife had prevaüed, now there is a unanimous religious awe focused on the corpse ofthe victim. (22) This original sacrifice is not a rational decision or social contract. It is an unconscious mechanism. "There is no such thing as conscious scapegoating. Conscious... (shrink)

Leibniz’s question “why is there something rather than nothing?”, also known as the Primordial Existential Question, has often been the focus of intense philosophical controversy. While some authors take it to pose a profound metaphysical puzzle, others denounce the alleged lack of meaning or the inconceivability of the idea of nothingness. In a series of articles, Adolf Grünbaum develops an empirically informed critique with the aim to demonstrate that the Primordial Existential Question poses a “non-issue” which does not require explanation. (...) Grünbaum’s critique prompted heated debates in the recent literature. In this paper, I examine each step of Grünbaum’s reasoning and argue that it fails to show that the Primordial Existential Question is ill-founded. Moreover, I identify and rebut several strategies that one may employ to amend Grünbaum’s critique. In doing so, I address various issues related to the Primordial Existential Question, including the alleged need for its proponents to rely on contentious metaphysical presuppositions and the purported availability of empirical evidence which answers or dissolves such a question. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explain the relationship between Life-world (Lebenswelt) and the concepts of Originality (Originalität) and Primordiality (Primordialität) founded in Edmund Husserl’s philosophy developed in the 20’s. In order to achieve this goal, we need to begin with a transcendental phenomenological analysis to then gain access to Ontology of the World in general. Therefore, we must explain how Transcendental Philosophy relates to Transcendental Aesthetics and how it phenomenologically labels all that is outside of theory and reflection (...) (i.e., the Natural World) as a precondition to all theoretical classifications. This way the Life-world could explain the relationship between the Originality and Primordiality as proto-datum that is the base of all human acts genetically describable. (shrink)

_The Research Review for School Leaders, Volume III_ is specifically designed as a practical resource for school leaders whose schedules preclude opportunities to locate and review key research on every issue they must address. It places comprehensive, current, and accessible reviews of educational research at their fingertips, and is organized to make the research and practices it summarizes useful to them in their professional endeavors. This is the third volume of the _Review._ Although the title has changed, its purpose and (...) substance is continuous with the work of the earlier volumes. The first _Annual Review of Research for School Leaders_ summarized research on the status of public schooling, interdisciplinary curriculum, and educational applications of computers. The second volume addressed the topics of middle-level education, the extracurriculum, mathematics education reform, and drop outs. The present _Volume III_ offers educational leaders reviews of research on five timely educational issues: * citizenship education; * multicultural education; * gifted and talented education; * classroom assessment; and * scheduling. A basic premise of this volume is that, to make sound decisions, professionals need to be up to date on current research related to the problems with which they grapple. A second premise is that research cannot simply be imposed in a formulaic way on a local setting; the nature of the particular problem to be solved will always bear upon the relevance of research to a specific context. Thus, this volume is envisioned as a helpful resource for school leaders as they engage in important discussions of the research with teachers, school board members, parents, and other interested parties as they collaboratively seek effective resolutions to local educational problems. (shrink)

Rousseau’s founding critique of liberalism, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, takes the ambiguous form of a sweeping myth of civilization. Political theorists usually interpret the myth by reading it as a tale of passage from primordial nature to civil society, but what happens when we privilege another of the essay’s organizing devices, its symbolic depiction of the history of the species as the life of an individual? Interpreted through this metaphor, Rousseau’s myth becomes a charged tale of (...) a ‘life’ gone wrong, one that sheds interesting light on his critique of bourgeois society and selfhood. (shrink)

A common object found within medical museums is the developmental series: an arrangement of embryos depicting the transformation of an unremarkable blob into an anatomically organized and recognizable organism. The developmental series depicts a normative process, one where bodies emerge in reliable sequential stages to reveal anatomically perfect beings. Yet a century before the developmental series would become a visual model of embryological development, the very process of development itself was discerned through the comparative study of preserved human fetuses—specifically, those (...) deemed “monstrous” or characterized as “malformations.” This article examines how anatomically diverse fetal bodies were reformulated from singular curiosities into alternative developmental pathways whose characteristics testified to the laws of nature and to the primordial, physical relationship between humans and other species. In early nineteenth century Amsterdam, the father-son team of physicians Gerard and Willem Vrolik built up an internationally renowned anatomical museum famous especially for Willem’s collection of fetal malformations. Physical preparations of fetal malformations play a central role in Willem’s monumental handbook on developmental embryology: comparing human embryos against one another and the embryos of other species, Willem plots out a sequence of embryological development in which a body’s form marks its place within the ever-unfolding natural order. In conversation with the literature on model organisms, this article explores how the “monstrous” gets standardized and, in doing so, contributes to the scientific production of a normative physiological process. (shrink)

Contemporary literature includes a wide variety of definitions of empathy. At the same time, the revival of sentimentalism has proposed that empathy serves as a necessary criterion of moral agency. The paper explores four common definitions in order to map out which of them best serves such agency. Historical figures are used as the backdrop against which contemporary literature is analysed. David Hume’s philosophy is linked to contemporary notions of affective and cognitive empathy, Adam Smith’s philosophy to projective empathy, and (...) Max Scheler’s account to embodied empathy. Whereas cognitive and projective empathy suffer from detachment and atomism, thereby providing poor support for the type of other-directedness and openness entailed by moral agency, embodied and affective empathy intrinsically facilitate these factors, and hence are viewed as fruitful candidates. However, the theory of affective empathy struggles to explain why the experience of empathy includes more than pure affective mimicry, whilst embodied empathy fails to take into account forms of empathy that do not include contextual, narrative information. In order to navigate through these difficulties, Edith Stein’s take on non-primordial experience is used as a base upon which a definition of affective empathy, inclusive of an embodied dimension, and founded on a movement between resonation and response, is sketched. It is argued that, of the four candidates, this new definition best facilitates moral agency. (shrink)

In his Pramāṇaviniścaya 3, Dharmakīrti criticizes the view of the Sāṅkhyas that the word anityatva (“impermanence”) means a process of transformation ( pariṇāma ) of primordial matter ( pradhāna ). In this connection, he deals with the following two explanations of transformation: (1) the disappearance ( tirodhāna ) of the previous dharma of an entity ( dharmin/dravya ) and (2) the cessation ( nivṛtti ) of the previous state ( avasthā ) of an entity ( avasthātṛ ). In response to (...) these explanations, he proves that whenever a transformation takes place, the previous entity is destroyed, and therefore, impermanence does not mean transformation, but only destruction ( vināśa ). His criticism is basically along the same lines as Vasubandhu’s arguments found in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya . However, because of developments in the theory of transformation, Vasubandhu’s criticism allows room for a retort from the Sāṅkhya. For this reason, Dharmakīrti augments Vasubandhu’s theory in order to make it sustainable against the more developed Sāṅkhya theory. (shrink)

In this study, I clarify and defend the critique of the ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ that is found in the _Zhuangzi_. As detailed in Chapter 8 of the _Zhuangzi_, both the (non-Daoist) ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ are equally responsible for society’s ills. This is because both the ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ are perceptually alienated from nature. This perceptual alienation involves the inability to perceive nature as fundamentally indeterminate (_wu_, 無). The Daoist alternative to the ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ is to cultivate awareness of our (...) interdependence with nature. This study calls this process an ‘attunement to nature’ or, as Chapter 8 describes it, to not depart from ‘the actuality of their endowed circumstances’ (其性命之情) and to ‘see oneself when you see others/things’ (自見而見彼). Attunement involves an awareness of how nature primordially forms an indeterminate continuum (_wu_). (shrink)

Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι War is the father of all. New : Publication of my book : Histoire du libéralisme in Editions Ellipses, on Fnac or Amazon.1) HERACLITUS : 139 Fragments.a) Heraclitus (PDF) Original Greek text : Diels; English translation : John Burnet (1912), French translation of the English translation (1919), in PDFb) Heraclitus (unicode) : Parallel version or Interlinear version (Work in Progress) Original Greek text : Diels; English translation : John Burnet (1912), French translation of the English (...) translation (1919)c) Heraclitus : Original greek text : original pages of Hermann Diels edition (1912)2) The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911) : HERACLITUS (Ἡράκλειτος; c. 540-475 B.C.), Greek philosopher, was born at Ephesus of distinguished parentage. Of his early life and education we know nothing; from the contempt with which he spoke of all his fellow-philosophers and of his fellow-citizens as a whole we may gather that he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom. So intensely aristocratic (hence his nickname ὀχλολοίδορος, "he who rails at the people") was his temperament that he declined to exercise the regal-hieratic office of βασιλεύς which was hereditary in his family, and presented it to his brother. It is probable, however, that he did occasionally intervene in the affairs of the city at the period when the rule of Persia had given place to autonomy; it is said that he compelled the usurper Melancomas to abdicate. From the lonely life he led, and still more from the extreme profundity of his philosophy and his contempt for mankind in general, he was called the "Dark Philosopher" (ὁ σκοτεινός), or the "Weeping Philosopher," in contrast to Democritus, the "Laughing Philosopher." κακοὶ μάρτυρες Heraclitus is in a real sense the founder of metaphysics. Starting from the physical standpoint of the Ionian physicists, he accepted their general idea of the unity of nature, but entirely denied their theory of being. The fundamental uniform fact in nature is constant change (πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει); everything both is and is not at the same time. He thus arrives at the principle of Relativity; harmony and unity consist in diversity and multiplicity. The senses are "bad witnesses" (κακοὶ μάρτυρες); only the wise man can obtain knowledge. To appreciate the significance of the doctrines of Heraclitus, it must be borne in mind that to Greek philosophy the sharp distinction between subject and object which pervades modern thought was foreign, a consideration which suggests the conclusion that, while it is a great mistake to reckon Heraclitus with the materialistic cosmologists of the Ionic schools, it is, on the other hand, going too far to treat his theory, with Hegel and Lassalle, as one of pure Panlogism. Accordingly, when he denies the reality of Being, and declares Becoming, or eternal flux and change, to be the sole actuality, Heraclitus must be understood to enunciate not only the unreality of the abstract notion of being, except as the correlative of that of not-being, but also the physical doctrine that all phenomena are in a state of continuous transition from non-existence to existence, and vice versa, without either distinguishing these propositions or qualifying them by any reference to the relation of thought to experience. " Every thing is and is not'"; all things are, and nothing remains. So far he is in general agreement with Anaximander (q.v.), but he differs from him in the solution of the problem, disliking, as a poet and a mystic, the primary matter which satisfied the patient researcher, and demanding a more vivid and picturesque element. Naturally he selects fire, according to him the most complete embodiment of the process of Becoming, as the principle of empirical existence, out of which all things, including even the soul, grow by way of a quasi condensation, and into which all things must in course of time be again resolved. But this primordial fire is in itself that divine rational process, the harmony of which constitutes the law of the universe (see LOGOS). Real knowledge consists in comprehending this all-pervading harmony as embodied in the manifold of perception, and the senses are "bad-witnesses," because they apprehend phenomena, not as its manifestation, but as "stiff and dead." In like manner real virtue consists in the subordination of the individual to the laws of this harmony as the universal reason wherein alone true freedom is to be found." The law of things is a law of Reason Universal (λόγος), but most men live as though they had a wisdom of their own." Ethics here stands to sociology in a close relation, similar, in many respects, to that which we find in Hegel and in Comte. For Heraclitus the soul approaches most nearly to perfection when it is most akin to the fiery vapour out of which it was originally created, and as this is most so in death, " while we live our souls are dead in us, but when we die our souls are restored to life." The doctrine of immortality comes prominently forward in his ethics, but whether this must not be reckoned with the figurative accommodation to the popular theology of Greece which pervades his ethical teaching, is very doubtful. The school of disciples founded by Heraclitus flourished for long after his death, the chief exponent of his teaching being Cratylus. A good deal of the information in regard to his doctrines has been gathered from the later Greek philosophy, which was deeply influenced by it. BIBLIOGRAPHY.—The only authentic extant work of Heraclitus is the περὶ φύσεως. The best edition (containing also the probably spurious Ἐπιστολαί) is that of I. Bywater, Heracliti Ephesii reliquiae (Oxford, 1877); of the epistles alone by A. Westermann (Leipzig, 1857). See also in A. H. Ritter and L. Preller's Historia philosophiae Graecae (8th ed. by E. Wellmann, 1898); F. W. A. Mullach, Fragm. philos. Graec. (Paris, 1860); A. Fairbanks, The First Philosophers of Greece (1898); H. Diels, Heraklit von Ephesus (2nd ed., 1909), Greek and German. English translation of By water's edition with introduction by G. T. W. Patrick (Baltimore, 1889). For criticism see, in addition to the histories of philosophy, F. Lassalle, Die Philosophie Herakleitos' des Dunklen (Berlin, 1858; 2nd ed., 1892), which, however, is too strongly dominated by modern Hegelianism; Paul Schuster, Heraklit von Ephesus (Leipzig, 1873); J. Bernays, Die heraklitischen Briefe (Berlin, 1869); T. Gomperz, Zu Heraclits Lehre und den Uberresten seines Werkes (Vienna, 1887), and in his Greek Thinkers (English translation, L. Magnus, vol. i. 1901); J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892); A. Patin, Heraklits Einheitslehre (Leipzig, 1886); E. Pfleiderer, Die Philosophie des Heraklit us von Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee (Berlin, 1886); G. T. Schäfer, Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus und die moderne Heraklilforschung (Leipzig, 1902); Wolfgang Schultz, Studien zur antiken Kultur, i.; Pythagoras und Heraklit (Leipzig, 1905); O. Spengler, Heraklit. Eine Studie ilber den energetischen Grundgedanken seiner Philosophie (Halle, 1904); A. Brieger, "Die Grundzüge der heraklitischen Physik " in Hermes, xxxix. (1904) 182-223, and "Heraklit der Dunkle" in Neue Jahrb. f. das klass. Altertum (1904), p. 687. For his place in the development of early philosophy see also articles IONIAN SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY and LOGOS. Ancient authorities: Diog. Laert. ix.; Sext. Empiric, Adv. mathem. vii. 126, 127, 133; Plato, Cratylus, 402 A and Theaetetus, 152 E; Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 45, 48; Arist. Nic. Eth. vii. 3, 4; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, v. 599, 603 (ed. Paris). (J. M. M.) Copyright. (shrink)

Philosophers have postulated the existence of God to explain (I) why any contingent objects exist at all rather than nothing contingent, and (II) why the fundamental laws of nature and basic facts of the world are exactly what they are. Therefore, we ask: (a) Does (I) pose a well-conceived question which calls for an answer? and (b) Can God's presumed will (or intention) provide a cogent explanation of the basic laws and facts of the world, as claimed by (II)? We (...) shall address both (a) and (b). To the extent that they yield an unfavourable verdict, the afore-stated reasons for postulating the existence of God are undermined. As for question (I), in 1714, G. W. Leibniz posed the Primordial Existential Question (hereafter 'PEQ'): 'Why is there something contingent at all, rather than just nothing contingent?' This question has two major presuppositions: (1) A state of affairs in which nothing contingent exists is indeed genuinely possible ('the Null Possibility'), the notion of nothingness being both intelligible and free from contradiction; and (2) De jure, there should be nothing contingent at all, and indeed there would be nothing contingent in the absence of an overriding external cause (or reason), because that state of affairs is 'most natural' or 'normal'. The putative world containing nothing contingent is the so-called 'Null World'. As for (1), the logical robustness of the Null Possibility of there being nothing contingent needs to be demonstrated. But even if the Null Possibility is demonstrably genuine, there is an issue: Does that possibility require us to explain why it is not actualized by the Null World, which contains nothing contingent? And, as for (2), it originated as a corollary of the distinctly Christian precept (going back to the second century) that the very existence of any and every contingent entity is utterly dependent on God at any and all times. Like (1), (2) calls for scrutiny. Clearly, if either of these presuppositions of Leibniz's PEQ is ill founded or demonstrably false, then PEQ is aborted as a non-starter, because in that case, it is posing an ill-conceived question. In earlier writings (Grünbaum [2000], p. 5), I have introduced the designation 'SoN' for the ontological 'spontaneity of nothingness' asserted in presupposition (2) of PEQ. Clearly, in response to PEQ, (2) can be challenged by asking the counter-question, 'But why should there be nothing contingent, rather than something contingent?' Leibniz offered an a priori argument for SoN. Yet it will emerge that a priori defences of it fail, and that it has no empirical legitimacy either. Indeed physical cosmology spells an important relevant moral: As against any a priori dictum on what is the 'natural' status of the universe, the verdict on that status depends crucially on empirical evidence. Thus PEQ turns out to be a non-starter, because its presupposed SoN is ill founded! Hence PEQ cannot serve as a springboard for creationist theism. Yet Leibniz and the English theist Richard Swinburne offered divine creation ex nihilo as their answer to the ill-conceived PEQ. But being predicated on SoN, their cosmological arguments for the existence of God are fundamentally unsuccessful. The axiomatically topmost laws of nature (the 'nomology') in a scientific theory are themselves unexplained explainors, and are thus thought to be true as a matter of brute fact. But theists have offered a theological explanation of the specifics of these laws as having been willed or intended by God in the mode of agent causation to be exactly what they are. A whole array of considerations are offered in Section 2 to show that the proposed theistic explanation of the nomology fails multiply to transform scientific brute facts into specifically explained regularities. Thus, I argue for The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology in two major respects. (shrink)

This article is primarily concerned with Zygmunt Bauman's ‘adoption’ of Levinas's ethic of primordial responsibility, and his attempt to found a ‘sociological’ critique of postmodern ambivalence upon the erasure of the face and loss of moral proximity. I have argued that the reading of Levinas which Bauman presents in Modernity and the Holocaust and Postmodern Ethics is radically incompatible with the redemptive significance of the Levinasian commandment; and that consequently, his attempt to determine the cognitive and aesthetic forms involved in (...) the adiaphorising trend of postmodern societies is unable to salvage the ethical relation from its own comprehensive/totalising necessity. I have also suggested that Derrida's reading of Totality and Infinity, discloses a certain ‘provocation’ in Levinas's writing; one which gestures towards a conception of ‘the ethical’ as an unforeseen possibility deployed within the resources of social identity. Thus, the idea of ‘situating’ Bauman's thought refers to what I consider to be his ambiguous position with regard to the ‘reflective’ project of a critical theory, and the transcendent necessity of the Levinasian commandment. Ultimately, it is this ambiguity which structures Bauman's writing of the ‘postmodern condition’. For having described the overwhelming powers of cognitive and aesthetic ‘heteronomy’ in the postmodern world, his only recourse is to a ‘politics of distant consequences’ in which the absolute difference of the face would have its originary demand intensified and retransmitted. Such a programmatic demand, I have argued, is radically at odds with an ‘ethical’ reception of racial, sexual or cultural ‘otherness’. (shrink)

This volume goes beyond presently available phenomenological analyses based on the structures and constitution of the lifeworld. It shows how the science of history is the mediator between the human and the natural sciences. It demonstrates that the distinction between interpretation and explanation does not imply a strict separation of the natural and the human sciences. Finally, it shows that the natural sciences and technology are inseparable, but that technology is one-sidedly founded in pre-scientific encounters with reality in the lifeworld. (...) In positivism the natural sciences are sciences because they offer causal explanations testable in experiments and the humanities are human sciences only if they use methods of the natural sciences. For epistemologists following Dilthey, the human sciences presuppose interpretation and the human and natural sciences must be separated. There is phenomenology interested in psychology and the social sciences that distinguish the natural and the human sciences, but little can be found about the historical human sciences. This volume fills the gap by presenting analyses of the material foundations of the "understanding" of expressions of other persons, and of primordial recollections and expectations founding explicit expectations and predictions in the lifeworld. Next, it shows, on the basis of history as applying philological methods in interpretations of sources, the role of a universal spatio-temporal framework for reconstructions and causal explanations of "what has really happened". (shrink)

The course on nature coincides with the re-working of Merleau-Ponty's breakthrough towards an ontology and therefore plays a primordial role. The appearance of an interrogation of nature is inscribed in the movement of thought that comes after the Phenomenology of Perception. What is at issue is to show that the ontological mode of the perceived object - not the unity of a positive sense but the unity of a style that shows through in filigree in the sensible aspects - has (...) a universal meaning, that the description of the perceived world can give way to a philosophy of perception and therefore to a theory of truth. The analysis of linguistic expression to which the philosophy of perception leads opens out onto a definition of meaning as institution, understood as what inaugurates an open series of expressive appropriations. It is this theory of institution that turns the analysis of the perceived in the direction of a reflection on nature: the perceived is no longer the originary in its difference from the derived but the natural in its difference from the instituted. Nature is the "non-constructed, non-instituted," and thereby, the source of expression: "nature is what has a sense without this sense having been posited by thought." The first part of the course, which consists in a historical overview, must not be considered as a mere introduction. In fact, the problem of nature is brought out into the open by means of the history of Western metaphysics, in which Descartes is the emblematic figure. The problem consists in the duality - at once unsatisfactory and unsurpassable - between two approaches to nature: the one which accentuates its determinability and therefore its transparency to the understanding; the other which emphasizes the irreducible facticity of nature and tends therefore to valorize the view-point of the senses. To conceive nature is to constitute a concept of it that allows us to "take possession" of this duality, that is, to found the duality. The second part of the course attempts to develop this concept of nature by drawing upon the results of contemporary science. Thus a philosophy of nature is sketched that can be summarized in four propositions: 1) the totality is no less real than the parts; 2) there is a reality of the negative and therefore no alternative between being and nothingmess; 3) a natural event is not assigned to a unique spatio-temporal localization; and 4) there is generality only as generativity. (shrink)

This paper discusses the nature and limits of player embodiment within digital games. We identify a convergence between everyday bodily actions and activity within digital environments, and a trend towards incorporating natural forms of movement into gaming worlds through mimetic control devices. We examine recent literature in the area of immersion and presence in digital gaming; Calleja’s (2011) recent Player Involvement Model of gaming is discussed and found to rely on a probematic notion of embodiment as 'incorporation'. We go on (...) to further reflect on the nature of player involvement in digital gaming environments by applying insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It is argued that digital embodiment differs so significantly from primordial embodiment that any idea of total immersion is simply fantasy. We subsequently argue that digital game media nonetheless provide us with unique opportunities for exploring the nature of distinctively human forms of embodiment, and so we need more complete and more reliable phenomenological descriptions of the experiences associated with computer games. (shrink)

This essay considers the ‘limit’ in Derrida's work from the early consideration of linearisation in ‘Ousia and Grammē’ to the conception of limit as aporia in Aporias. Developing Derrida's tripartite definition of the limit via a reading of Being and Time as closure, border and demarcation, the essay then considers the earlier presentation of limit in Heidegger as temporal primordiality. Developing the metaphysics of line as presentation of presence in terms of Aristotle's aporetics of time as line, the circle is (...) then considered as representing the closed field of presence and its definition via the negation of being's other. This leads to Derrida's early, foundational definition of the law of metaphysics as submission-subtraction, and his proposal of the trace as an alternate way of thinking spatially about being, nonbeing and difference. The second half of the essay then proposes a series of alternative ways of thinking geometrically to those of the traditional metaphysics of point-line-circle topography. Thus topology is proposed as an alternate means of thinking field enclosure, similarity and difference. The figures of the double torus and mathematical limit are proposed as a potential alternative geometry for Western thought. Finally the essay concludes on the apotropaic logic of the problem which echoes that of the trace and is developed in contradistinction to the aporia. Proposing the edge as an interim state between the metaphysics of the line and the deconstructive impossibilities of the aporia, it suggests that the limits of metaphysics are to be found not merely in the apotropaic law of submission-subtraction, but also across alternate geometries which facilitate the bringing together of the two central elements of the totality of Derrida's thinking the limit: différance and singularity. (shrink)

A theory of the first-person plural occupies a unique place in philosophical investigations into intersubjectivity and social cognition. In order for the referent of the first-person plural—“the We”—to come into existence, it seems there must be a shared ground of communicative possibility, but this requires a non-circular explanation of how this ground could be shared in the absence of a pre-existing context of communicative conventions. Margaret Gilbert’s and John Searle’s theories of collective intentionality capture important aspects of the We, but (...) fail to fully account for this shared ground of communicative possibility. This paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intercorporeity helps reconcile the positive aspects of these accounts while also explaining how the genesis of the social world is continuous with perceptual life in general. This enables an account of the first-person plural as dependent on reciprocal communicative interaction without the need to posit a primitive or primordial “we-mode” of consciousness. “Intercorporeity” designates a bodily openness to others that is not fundamentally different in kind from the general style of bodily comportment found in Merleau-Ponty’s rich analyses of perceptual life. (shrink)

The first part of this essay relates a minimal and primordial concept of agency to be found in science and technology studies to an overall ontology of liveliness. The second part explores the relation between minimal and higher-level conceptions of agency concerning goal-orientedness and adaptation, and moves towards specifically biological concerns via a discussion of cybernetic machines.

What Heidegger means by “freedom” in Being and Time is somewhat mysterious: while the notion crops up repeatedly in the book, there is no dedicated section or study, and the concept is repeatedly connected to a new and opaque idea – that of the “choice to choose oneself.” Yet the specificity of Being and Time’s approach to freedom becomes apparent when the book is compared to other texts of the same period, in particular The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, The Fundamental (...) Concepts of Metaphysics, The Essence of Grounds, and The Essence of Freedom. Although there are some differences, the definition of freedom that can be found there identifies it with “existence” or “transcendence,” Dasein’s ek-static opening onto the world. Thus “being in the world must also be primordially bound up with or derived from the basic feature of Dasein’s existence, freedom… Dasein’s transcendence and freedom are identical! Freedom provides itself with intrinsic possibility: a being is, as free, necessarily in itself transcending” (GA 26: 238; Heidegger’s italics). Note the apodictic modality of the claim: it is not simply the case that Dasein, as transcending, is free. Anything that has the structure of being in the world must be free: freedom is co-extensive with Dasein. Yet Dasein is often pictured in Being and Time as anything but free: it “ensnares itself” (268), is “lost” (264), “alienated” (178), and needs to be “liberated” (264, 303). Thus comparison between Being and Time and other texts on freedom yields an important paradox: although by definition it transcends toward the world, the Dasein of Division I is deprived of freedom. It must be free, and yet phenomenological analysis shows that it is not free. To understand the specific meaning of freedom in Being and Time, one has to square this circle. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been defined by Husserl as “theory of the essences of pure phenomena,” yet the ontological status of essences in Husserlian phenomenology is far from a settled issue. The late Husserlian emphasis on genetic constitution and the historicity of the lifeworld is not immediately reconcilablewith the ‘unchangeable’ nature that is prima facie attributed to essences. However, the problem of the nature of ideality cannot be dropped from phenomenological accounts without jeopardizing the phenomenological enterprise as such. Through an immanent analysis (...) of Husserl’s meditation on essences a positive account of their ontological status is provided. Essences are interpreted as ontological thresholds, primordially rooted in our motivated confrontation with sensuous transcendence. Essences appear as emergent ontological features, which are not reducible to their particular realizations and which exhibit a fundamental continuity between consciousness and being. They manifest themselves as prospectively a priori (a precondition for further experiences), but retrospectively a posteriori (they are founded in experience). Finally, essences manifest the ‘co-essential’ nature of consciousness and sensuous transcendence: they are the way in which we are motivated and constitutively bound to articulate being, which in turn is apt to be thus articulated. (shrink)

'At last, a volume on civilization that truly reflects the complexity of multiple civilizations. The wealth of contributions Arjomand and Tiryakian have assembled demonstrates the value of an old concept for understanding the awful dilemmas confronting human kind in the global age. Its thoroughgoing renewal here establishes this book as the essential benchmark for future scholars of civilization' - Martin Albrow, Founding Editor of International Sociology and author of The Global Age - winner of the European Amalfi Prize, 1997 (...) 'In our tension filled world, many are heralding, and others fearing, a"clash of civilizations." The contributors to this volume provides a healthy and persuasive argument about why this clash need not, and certainly should not, take place. They do so, moreover, not by rejecting the concept of civilization, but by developing a less primordial, homogenous, and essentialist concept of it. An important collection that provides illumination in this sometimes frighteningly dark time' - Jeffrey Alexander, Professor and Chair of Sociology at Yale University 'The concept of civilization may well replace the notions of globalization and identity as the core component in the vocabulary of 21st century sociology. The authors contribute a great deal to the clarification of fashionable controversies around the "clash of civilizations" and "multiculturalism". They go a long way toward purging the concept of civilization of its ideological overtones, and they suceed admirably in turning it into powerful analytic tool of an emerging fleld of macrosociology, known already as civilizational analysis' - Piotr Sztompka, President, International Sociological Association Although the concept of 'civilization' has deep roots in the social sciences, there is an urgent need to re-think it for contemporary times. This book points to an exhaustion in using 'the nation state' and 'world system' as the basic macro-units of social analysis because they do not get to grips with the 'soft power' variable of cultural factors involved in global aspects of development. Also, globalization requires us to reconsider the link between civilization and a fixed or given territory. This book focuses upon the dynamic aspect of civilizations. Among the topics covered are: · Civilizational analysis and social theory · Global civilization and local cultures · Civilizational forms · Rationalization and Civilization · Civilizations as zones of prestige · Historical and comparative dimensions of civilization · The clash of civilizations. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 93-101 [Access article in PDF] A Political LifeArendtian Aesthetics and Open Systems Sue Spaid Since the 1990s, artists have broken ground by producing works that are "open systems." That is, they are incomplete, participatory, and elastic. In this paper, I will argue that open systems exemplify Hannah Arendt's conception of vita activa, in contrast to art's traditional role as inspiring vita contemplativa. Since (...) they do not explicitly affirm or refute political policies, such works are generally not considered "political" art. However, they accommodate Arendt's notion of the political life, since they incorporate process, durability, pluralities of spectators, and unpredictability. Furthermore, because they do not resemble what ordinarily passes for art, reflective judgment is required to engage them, and to determine whether they are art.Echoing Diotima's interest in immortality, Arendt links beauty to durability. Open systems are particularly durable because we remember them as a public experiences that include participants and spectators. Such performative and pleasurable worldly actions entail aesthetic engagements that are very much in line with Arendt's description of the political life. Critical Engagement In the sphere of fabrication itself, there is only one kind of object to which the unending chain of means and ends does not apply, and this [End Page 93] is the work of art, the most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce... It is the reification that occurs in writing something down, painting an image, composing a piece of music, etc. which actually makes the thought a reality; and in order to produce these thought things, which we usually call art works, the same workmanship is required that through the primordial instrument of human hands builds the other, less durable and more useful things of the human artifice. (Arendt 2000, 177-78) In a 1964 interview with Gunter Gaus, Hannah Arendt described herself as a political theorist, who though trained as a philosopher had "said good-bye to philosophy once and for all." In identifying the tension between philosophy and politics, she differentiated man as a thinking being from man as an acting being, and she identified with the latter. She found that, because philosophers cannot be neutral or objective with regards to politics, they share a certain enmity toward politics, and she sought to avoid that response. Not surprisingly, she named Kant as an exception, because he understood this enmity to lie in the nature of the subject itself. In The Critique of Judgement, experience precedes reflective judgement, thus affirming a place for each subject's particular experiences. Kant, too, was a man of action.Kant's aesthetic judgment of taste, which is a normative but non-prescriptive process, makes room for Arendt's notions of worldliness and unpredictability. Critics have decried Arendt's political theory for its anti-rationalism, political existentialism and "aestheticization of politics," yet much can be learned from her clear commitment to equality, and the way she trusted and perhaps even idealized humanity (Curtis 1999, 18). She wrote, "Only action and speech relate specifically to this fact that to live always means to live among men, among those who are my equals. Hence, when I insert myself into the world, it is a world where others are already present" (Arendt 2000, 179). Given her interest in freedom, active engagement, critical thinking, and anti-instrumentalism, it is perhaps not surprising that Arendt found inspiration in Kant's conception of aesthetic judgment as requiring only communicative sociability, the object's purposeless purposiveness, and the spectator's free play of imagination and understanding.I am interested here in Arendt's aesthetics of the political life in relation to recent art that unwittingly fosters an engaged and open conception of the political. The works in question are not necessarily conscious of their political capacity. Rather, their presence assumes that spectators are [End Page 94] equals, and facilitates an active life, what Arendt described as the vita activa, as opposed to the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life. An active life, which requires a public space, entails active... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 93-101 [Access article in PDF] A Political LifeArendtian Aesthetics and Open Systems Sue Spaid Since the 1990s, artists have broken ground by producing works that are "open systems." That is, they are incomplete, participatory, and elastic. In this paper, I will argue that open systems exemplify Hannah Arendt's conception of vita activa, in contrast to art's traditional role as inspiring vita contemplativa. Since (...) they do not explicitly affirm or refute political policies, such works are generally not considered "political" art. However, they accommodate Arendt's notion of the political life, since they incorporate process, durability, pluralities of spectators, and unpredictability. Furthermore, because they do not resemble what ordinarily passes for art, reflective judgment is required to engage them, and to determine whether they are art.Echoing Diotima's interest in immortality, Arendt links beauty to durability. Open systems are particularly durable because we remember them as a public experiences that include participants and spectators. Such performative and pleasurable worldly actions entail aesthetic engagements that are very much in line with Arendt's description of the political life. Critical Engagement In the sphere of fabrication itself, there is only one kind of object to which the unending chain of means and ends does not apply, and this [End Page 93] is the work of art, the most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce... It is the reification that occurs in writing something down, painting an image, composing a piece of music, etc. which actually makes the thought a reality; and in order to produce these thought things, which we usually call art works, the same workmanship is required that through the primordial instrument of human hands builds the other, less durable and more useful things of the human artifice. (Arendt 2000, 177-78) In a 1964 interview with Gunter Gaus, Hannah Arendt described herself as a political theorist, who though trained as a philosopher had "said good-bye to philosophy once and for all." In identifying the tension between philosophy and politics, she differentiated man as a thinking being from man as an acting being, and she identified with the latter. She found that, because philosophers cannot be neutral or objective with regards to politics, they share a certain enmity toward politics, and she sought to avoid that response. Not surprisingly, she named Kant as an exception, because he understood this enmity to lie in the nature of the subject itself. In The Critique of Judgement, experience precedes reflective judgement, thus affirming a place for each subject's particular experiences. Kant, too, was a man of action.Kant's aesthetic judgment of taste, which is a normative but non-prescriptive process, makes room for Arendt's notions of worldliness and unpredictability. Critics have decried Arendt's political theory for its anti-rationalism, political existentialism and "aestheticization of politics," yet much can be learned from her clear commitment to equality, and the way she trusted and perhaps even idealized humanity (Curtis 1999, 18). She wrote, "Only action and speech relate specifically to this fact that to live always means to live among men, among those who are my equals. Hence, when I insert myself into the world, it is a world where others are already present" (Arendt 2000, 179). Given her interest in freedom, active engagement, critical thinking, and anti-instrumentalism, it is perhaps not surprising that Arendt found inspiration in Kant's conception of aesthetic judgment as requiring only communicative sociability, the object's purposeless purposiveness, and the spectator's free play of imagination and understanding.I am interested here in Arendt's aesthetics of the political life in relation to recent art that unwittingly fosters an engaged and open conception of the political. The works in question are not necessarily conscious of their political capacity. Rather, their presence assumes that spectators are [End Page 94] equals, and facilitates an active life, what Arendt described as the vita activa, as opposed to the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life. An active life, which requires a public space, entails active... (shrink)

Of two contending models for eukaryotic evolution the “archezoan“ has an amitochondriate eukaryote take up an endosymbiont, while “symbiogenesis“ states that an Archaeon became a eukaryote as the result of this uptake. If so, organelle formation resulting from new engulfments is simplified by the primordial symbiogenesis, and less informative regarding the bacterium‐to‐mitochondrion conversion. Gradualist archezoan visions still permeate evolutionary thinking, but are much less likely than symbiogenesis. Genuine amitochondriate eukaryotes have never been found and rapid, explosive adaptive periods characteristic of (...) symbiogenetic models explain this. Mitochondrial proteomes, encoded by genes of “eukaryotic origin“ not easily linked to host or endosymbiont, can be understood in light of rapid adjustments to new evolutionary pressures. Symbiogenesis allows “expensive” eukaryotic inventions via efficient ATP generation by nascent mitochondria. However, efficient ATP production equals enhanced toxic internal ROS formation. The synergistic combination of these two driving forces gave rise to the rapid evolution of eukaryotes.Also watch the Video Abstract. (shrink)

Le;opold Se;dar Senghor (1906–2001) was a Senegalese poet and philosopher who in 1960 also became the first president of the Republic of Senegal. In African Art as Philosophy , Souleymane Bachir Diagne takes a unique approach to reading Senghor’s influential works, taking as the starting point for his analysis Henri Bergson’s idea that in order to understand philosophers one must find the initial intuition from which every aspect of their work develops. In the case of Senghor, Diagne argues that his (...) primordial intuition is that African art is a philosophy. _ To further this point, Diagne looks at what Senghor called the “1889 Revolution,” and the influential writers and publications of that time—specifically, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, as well as Bergson’s Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. The 1889 Revolution, Senghor claims, is what led him to the understanding of the “Vitalism” at the core of African religions and beliefs that found expression in the arts. _ This book offers a distinct, incisive look at an important figure in African literature and politics that will be welcomed by scholars in African Studies and philosophy. (shrink)

The micro-regional focus of bioregionalism is a small unit of physical space, typically a watershed region. In bioregional discourse, natural systems become metaphors for cultural coherence. However, when we look for laws embedded in the natural world, those that are found do not then reveal themselves as principles which apply to systems of culture. Further, within most individuals, the sense of regional identity spans several scales because our past narratives and present affiliations span several localities. Humans are not immersed in (...) singular niches, nor is the bioregionalist an existential, primordial localist, for his or her choice has been crafted. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

Phenomenology is one of the main currents of modern philosophy. Philosophers most often understand it from the perspective of Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) phenomenology as a concept of cognition and a method of viewing and describing what is directly given, i.e. a phenomenon. In addition, phenomenology is the fundamental science – prima philosophia that determines what and how is directly given. Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), a student of E. Husserl, was the first thinker in Poland who practiced philosophy in a phenomenological way. (...) R. Ingarden contributed to the dissemination of Husserl’s phenomenology in Poland and became an outstanding phenomenologist who developed an original phenomenological path proposing a creative reception of his teacher’s thoughts between World Wars II and I. Inagrden’s phenomenological path was different from Husserl’s. While Husserl developed a transcendental-idealistic form of phenomenology, Ingarden did not wholly abandon the transcendental path but went toward realism. The Polish phenomenologist did not want to question his master’s concept of the transcendental Self but only wanted to find a place for this Self in the real world. Polish thinkers who further deepened the creative reception of Husserl’s phenomenology have always gathered around Ingarden. One such person was Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (1923–2014). Their professor-student meeting occurred at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow just after the end of World War II. Husserl’s phenomenology inspired A.-T. Tymieniecka, but this was phenomenology understood by Ingarden, taking into account the realism of the world and the entire sphere of empiricism. We can assume that the scholar’s meeting with Ingarden allowed Tymieniecka to develop her phenomenological concept, which she called the concept of the phenomenology of life and the human creative condition. It is a phenomenology that rejects idealism and chooses the realism of the world and life in the cosmic dimension. The human being here is a living entity whose life is anchored in nature but ultimately evolves and develops in culture through scientific and technological activities. In this cosmological and dynamically changing perspective, the source experience of the subject – a living being – becomes the experience of being alive and living in the unity-of-erything-there-is-alive. Therefore, Tymieniecka rejected the primordial nature of the cognitive-constitutive act of the pure consciousness, which we deal with in classical phenomenology, favouring a creative act founded in man’s creative imagination and only secondarily reflected in the cognitive act. The Polish philosopher believed that only in such a case is there a possibility of freedom in the human world of life and, thus – authentic self-realisation and self-interpretation of man in existence. (shrink)

This study proposes a philosophical foundation for a Human Science research approach to psychological phenomena. The author examines the ground and origin of phenomenological thought by returning to the concept of Logos as founded by Heraclitus . The tensions between a descriptive and an interpretive approach to phenomenological research are exposed with the author arguing on behalf of the latter as more properly affirming the logic of "phenomenology" as rooted in the Greek terms . ;Heidegger's conception of language and hermeneutics (...) are examined with the author exposing Heidegger's "creative misreading" of Heraclitus' concept of Logos. The study suggests that a return to Heraclitus reveals Logos to mean "the hidden and logically structuring meaning" underlying a phenomenon. Arguing on behalf of the primacy of the hidden and latent as primordial to a phenomenological conception of Truth, the author suggests that a Human Science research approach to man must assign a key and central role to Freudian concepts and theory in order to do full justice to the human dynamism of man. ;Pondering phenomenological theory of language as developed by Heidegger, the author surveys the philosophical underpinnings of Jacques Lacan's "return to Freud." The author argues Lacan as most rigorously providing a philosophical framework for psychoanalysis and for affirming a phenomenological conception of language as rooted upon Heideggerian ontology and Heraclitus' concept of Logos Ricoeur's work is identified as setting the stage for a hermeneutical research praxis guided and informed by psychoanalytic theory. Ricoeur's theory of interpretation is analyzed, his neglect of the concept of the signifier as developed by Lacan highlighted. Lacan's reading of Freud in particular is argued as providing the Human Sciences with a valuable framework to better guide its research strategies. The author argues on behalf of the relevance of Lacan's conception of the signifier for a hermeneutical research praxis guided and informed by the notion of Logos. The author concludes by suggesting that the Human Sciences, and psychoanalysis and phenomenology by extension, should look to the concepts of lack, absence and death, in order to approach the Being and psychological life of man in a more genuinely depthful way. (shrink)

This article is concerned with two distinct corporeal logics. In the first, corporeality is founded on joints, tendons, and mobility; in the second, the envelope and its apertures are considered primordial. The first logic is extant in very few works. Although these texts (e.g. The Iliad, Beowulf) clearly share the same, very specific, conception of the body, they belong to different histories. The corporeal logic of the 'jointed body' (corps articulaire) cannot, therefore, be appraised in terms of longue durée. The (...) texts represent, instead, a moment of transition between the psychodynamics of orality and literacy. A problem correlated to this fact is that readers (ancient and modern) no longer think using the same logic as that pertaining to the jointed body. They tend to translate information regarding the logic of the jointed body into data meaningful in their own logic. (shrink)

As Husserl argues in the fifth Cartesian Meditation, the similarity of my Body (Leib) with the body (Körper) of another person is the founding moment of the experience of the other. This similarity is based on the previous objectivation of my Body. Husserl continuously worried to explicate this similarity-premise and by doing so, it appeared that this objectivation already presupposes intersubjectivity. By running into this problem, the Meditation actually fulfils its program by showing that the other is co-constitutive of (...) the world and more precisely of my existence as a worldly human being. At the same time he developed an alternative approach by identifying the original experience of the other as an expressive unity (Ausdruckseinheit) as the condition of possibility of intersubjective experience. By drawing on the relevant Forschungsmanuskripte in the volumes on Intersubjectivity and on Ideas II, it appears that the Meditation offers a naturalistic theory of intersubjectivity that results from the introduction of the reduction to primordiality. When one takes into account Husserl's analysis of the experience of an expressive unity, that is a defining characteristic of the personalistic attitude, one can clarify the derivative nature of this naturalistic approach. (shrink)

Few musical works loom as large in Western culture as Richard Wagner's four-part Ring of the Nibelung. In Finding an Ending, two eminent philosophers, Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, offer an illuminating look at this greatest of Wagner's achievements, focusing on its far-reaching and subtle exploration of problems of meanings and endings in this life and world. Kitcher and Schacht plunge the reader into the heart of Wagner's Ring, drawing out the philosophical and human significance of the text and the (...) music. They show how different forms of love, freedom, heroism, authority, and judgment are explored and tested as it unfolds. As they journey across its sweeping musical-dramatic landscape, Kitcher and Schacht lead us to the central concern of the Ring--the problem of endowing life with genuine significance that can be enhanced rather than negated by its ending, if the right sort of ending can be found. The drama originates in Wotan's quest for a transformation of the primordial state of things into a world in which life can be lived more meaningfully. The authors trace the evolution of Wotan's efforts, the intricate problems he confronts, and his failures and defeats. But while the problem Wotan poses for himself proves to be insoluble as he conceives of it, they suggest that his very efforts and failures set the stage for the transformation of his problem, and for the only sort of resolution of it that may be humanly possible--to which it is not Siegfried but rather Brünnhilde who shows the way. The Ring's ending, with its passing of the gods above and destruction of the world below, might seem to be devastating; but Kitcher and Schacht see a kind of meaning in and through the ending revealed to us that is profoundly affirmative, and that has perhaps never been so powerfully and so beautifully expressed. (shrink)

Physicist David Bohm and biochemist Ilya Prigogine began a dialogue that implied a deep, structuring, primordial harmony within life. In classical Chinese this harmony is referred to as Li, which also designates the elegant, natural pattern found in jade. This article emphasizes the ways that perception of primordial harmony gives way to a vision of possibility and to the creative intelligence and action necessary for meeting the challenges we face. Insights from Bohm, Prigogine, and others on releasing outmoded thinking and (...) actions are integrated with contemplative traditions, Eastern and Western philosophy, and pragmatic strategy making. (shrink)

The main thesis of this dissertation is that there is an intrinsic connection between Heidegger and Taoism, which may be called "the horizontal-regional way of thinking". This is a middle way extending "between and beyond" the conceptual and the perceptual, and through "pure images" or "techne", being essentially involved into an ontological horizon or region. The nature of this region is what Heidegger calls "appropriation" that is comparable to Chinese "Tao" and ancient Greek "logos". It signifies the primordially mirror-playing and (...) reciprocal belonging, through which opponents are opened to each other and thus win their "ek-sistential" ownership. In the text of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu , Tao is neither a law nor an isolated nothingness, but must be understood as the appropriational region of ch'i--the topological regioning and mingling of yin and yang. ;One crucial source in which Heidegger achieves this horizontal thinking is found in his interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Husserl's works on phenomenology. Thus, it can be seen that this non-conceptual thinking is relevant to the deepest concern of western philosophy. This ontological regioning is also the unbroken thread running through all of Heidegger's writings and is manifested in his techne-cal usage of language. Nevertheless, it is trans-formed and relies on various images in the different stages of his career. Similarly, the authors of Lao-Chuang found it necessary to be occupied by the "images without objects", in order to express the regional sense of Tao. It just makes no sense to assert that Taoism in its ultimate understanding of Tao discards language acts as a whole. Actually, by the time of Lao-Chuang's composition, "tao" had derived the meanings of "opening" and especially "saying" from its original meaning of "way". Heidegger's guess, out of the calling of pure thinking, that Tao as the topological Way giving all ways is the origin of "the thoughtful Saying" is anticipatorily accurate. His long-lasting interest in Taoism is profoundly built on thinking itself rather than on any incidental reason. (shrink)

If we follow a traditional reading of Descartes and throw in some of our favorite German philosophers (Kant, Husserl and Heidegger, for instance) we can isolate a doctrinal current that says that the pure intellect has no immediate access to the extra-mental world. This reduction of experience to reason forces the question of the external world’s existence, leading to Heidegger’s assertion that the scandal of philosophy was not that it had yet to furnish a proof for the external world’s existence, (...) as Kant thought, but that the question emerged in the first place. Prior to representing realities, the human being dwells in the world. Knowing is, thus, founded on Being-in-the-world. Once this is remembered, it seems quite extraneous to inquire about the existence of the external world, since it is given as part of the structure of human experience. But, if the question of the external world's existence arises when we reduce experience to rational experience, then we have learned something important about the structures involved in knowing the world. Knowing succeeds by breaking away from Being-in-theworld. As Levinas says, "it is still and always a solitude" (EI 60). Though knowledge might begin as a mode of Being-in-the-world, it succeeds by turning its back on these origins and entering upon another terrain. Thus, Heidegger's recourse to the external world could not be within knowledge. Instead, he grounded it in concern, the primordial way in which the human being dwells in the world. Knowing is but one way in which the human being exhibits this concern. Where Husserl showed the limits of representation to be within the parameters of the transcendental ego, Heidegger pushed the frontiers of the world down to another level, the level of function. On this level, the human being dwells as a worker; things are construed as implements for-the-sake-of something else. These implements refer to other implements in a referential totality guided by "circumspection." The world of function is held together as a totality by an intricate web of references, each pointing to others.. (shrink)

Charles Hartshorne is usually regarded as the developer of the theological approach initiated by Alfred North Whitehead. Justification for this view is to be found not only in the central focus of Hartshorne's voluminous writings, but also in his own references to Whitehead's accomplishments. He notes that Whitehead did not regard himself as a theologian, but rather saw his task as that of attempting to reconcile the professedly neutral burgeoning fields of science and the wider ideals necessary to civilized human (...) life. It is in the context of this pursuit that Whitehead makes his extremely suggestive, but tantalizingly vague, comments which provide a foundation for theological reconstruction. According to this approach, two dimensions, or natures, must be distinguished in God, a conceptual primordial nature which structures the possibilities for life and a concrete consequential nature which receives the actualities which result from the possibilities that are realized. (shrink)

As the world's literary, religious, and philosophical traditions attest, deficiency in the world is a matter of perennial human concern. Ontologically speaking deficient existence is a problem that has occupied metaphysical thinking from Heraclitus to Heidegger. What is it to exist deficiently? ;This dissertation addresses the question, first, through a survey of answers given by six ancient philosophers. Parmenides describes deficient existence as changing multiplicity; Plato, as being in an inferior world; Plotinus, as mis-seeing; Augustine, as disorderedness; Gregory of Nyssa, (...) as "nothingification" &parl0;`h e ,xoud e&d12;nwsi v&parr0; ; Dionysius, as failed participation. The dissertation then gives a more systematic answer through close study of the metaphysics of John Scotus Eriugena , who builds on the foundation established by these thinkers. ;The Eriugenian cosmos is a "theophanic" one. To be is to be the showing or expression of God. What exists, then, is divine and good. Furthermore, all deficiencies, such as they are, must be characterized as privations or impoverishments. ;What can deficient existence be in such a world? Eriugena's first answer is that it is existence on an inferior level of reality. This dualistic view must be rejected, however, because it is not consistent with the fundamental metaphysical principles that reality is an ontological unity and every being is divine. ;Two better descriptions of deficient existence can be found in his metaphysics. First, to be deficiently is to see the world deficiently; that is, deficient existence is a misunderstanding of reality. Second, deficient existence is metaphysically incomplete existence. Being as a whole is an ontological work in progress, a creatio ex nihilo that is a creatio ex nihilo hic et illuc et ubique ---here, there, and everywhere. ;Such a creation depends in part on human choice and is subject to the destructive influences of non-being. But rather than a fall from some primordial perfection, creation is a movement towards perfection. Hence the existence that it constitutes is an existence in the theophanic world. Moreover, creation is theophanic to the extent that it does exist, even though, as deficient, it does not yet fully exist. (shrink)

• Examines the Oldawan, the Ancient Soul of Africa, and its correlation with what modern psychologists have defined as the collective unconscious • Draws on archaeology, DNA research, history, and depth psychology to reveal how the biological and spiritual roots of religion and science came out of Africa • Explores the reflections of our African unconscious in the present confrontation in the Americas, in the work of the Founding Fathers, and in modern psychospirituality The fossil record confirms that humanity (...) originated in Africa. Yet somehow we have overlooked that Africa is also at the root of all that makes us human--our spirituality, civilization, arts, sciences, philosophy, and our conscious and unconscious minds. In this African-revisioned look at the unfolding of human history and culture, Edward Bruce Bynum reveals how our collective unconscious is African. Drawing on archaeology, DNA research, history, depth psychology, and the biological and spiritual roots of religion and science, he demonstrates how all modern human beings, regardless of ethnic or racial categorizations, share a common deeper identity, both psychically and genetically, connected with a primordial African unconscious. Exploring the beginning of early religions, spirituality, and mysticism in Africa, along with philosophy, art, and science, the author looks at the Egyptian Nubian role in the rise of civilization and the emergence of Kemetic Egypt, revealing how and why ancient Egypt was separated from the rest of Africa in the Western mind--despite it being the most sophisticated expression of the Mother Continent. He examines the Oldawan, the Ancient Soul, and its correlation with what modern psychologists have defined as the collective unconscious. Revealing the spiritual and psychological ramifications of our shared African ancestry, the author examines its reflections in the present confrontation in the Americas, in the work of the Founding Fathers, and in modern Black spirituality, which arose from African diaspora religion and philosophy. By recognizing our shared African unconscious, the matrix that forms the deepest luminous core of human identity, we can learn to see and feel that the differences between one person and another are merely superficial and ultimately there is no real separation between the material and the spiritual. (shrink)

Hume’s account of how the self enters the moral domain and comes to a consciousness of itself as a moral being is one which he superimposes upon his Treatise account of the constitution of the non-metaphysical self. This primordial self is for Hume constructed out of the passions of pride and humility which are themselves in tum constructed out of certain feelings of pain and pleasure, these feelings being worked on by memory and imagination, and converted back and forth into (...) series of ideas and impressions. In presenting this account of the way in which we achieve a coherent self-awareness and self-knowledge such that we ‘know our own force’, Hurne in fact employs a radical psychology which he must discard once the moral self comes into view. The use Hume makes of this psychology has gone unnoticed in the literature, but once we understand its implications we will be able to dispel the confusion that some have found in his story. (shrink)

One of the most important phenomenological problems that influenced Merleau-Ponty’s work is the idea of a comeback to the lifeworld like primordial ground as much of the individual philosophical reflection as of the intersubjective experience of knowledge. The aim of this paper is to highlight the character, in the same breath paradoxical and founding, of the otherness experience that, according to Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenological concept of intersubjectivity involves. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty radicalizes this husserlian concept with the notion of intercorporeity. In (...) this manner, what the French philosopher wants to carry out is not as much an external criticism to the phenomenology, but rather the radical phenomenological purpose to take phenomenology to its extremes limits. Questioning the dualism of empirical and transcendental, of sensible passivity and reflexive activity, of material exteriority and inner spiritual reality, the concept of intercorporeity refers to a kind of being that prevents from the pretension of a definitive foundation on the base of one of the two sides of this metaphysical polarity. In contrast with this dualism, and according to the Merleau-Ponty’s “new ontology”, the concept of intercorporeity has an outstanding relevance because announces the ontological co-existence of the human being with the Nature’s and Earth’s being. (shrink)

This study constitutes the first systematic consideration of the connection between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. The central event in this relationship is a debate between the two held in Davos, Switzerland in 1929. The protocol of the debate has yet to be fully translated into English and no extended study of the confrontation between these two major thinkers presently exists. In short, though acknowledged as a unique and important event in the history of philosophy, the debate has received little (...) in the way of sustained historical and critical treatment. ;This study first presents the historical context of the debate and surveys the range of interaction between Cassirer and Heidegger. It next focuses on the text of the debate and its themes--Neo-Kantianism, "life philosophy," philosophy as ontology, and freedom and fate--the question of the human being's relationship to and in the world. ;Subsequent chapters trace the line of reasoning found in the Davos debate into and through other exchanges between Cassirer and Heidegger. Heidegger's criticisms of Cassirer's Mythical Thought are examined and an interpretation of Heidegger's concept of primordial understanding in terms of Cassirer's conception of mythical thought is ventured. This is followed by a comparison and contrast of key concepts from Heidegger's Being and Time and Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms--e.g., for Cassirer: "symbolic pregnance," "symbolic form," "expressive understanding," and for Heidegger: "discourse," "thrownness," "Dasein," "understanding," "the 'they'." ;The study closes by addressing Cassirer's final "ethical" objections to Heidegger's philosophy, examining Cassirer's unpublished critique of Being and Time as well as scattered shorter passages critical of Heidegger in published works. Cassirer's concern is seen to be with a conception of Dasein that focuses on the thrownness and anxiety of human being. Cassirer's objection to a philosophy with the idea of fate and destiny at its center is presented, as is his conception of philosophy and philosophy's task, and his idea of "humanitas" and human self-liberation. Heidegger's statement on "humanitas," "philosophy," and "thinking" in the "Letter on Humanism" is considered for its potential to serve as a "response" to Cassirer's express concerns. (shrink)

The basic intention of this paper is to approach the phenomenon of violence from the perspective of Jan Patočka’s “a-subjective phenomenology.” As I argue, violence is a “boundary phenomenon” that has not yet been analyzed adequately in the phenomenological tradition. Its analysis requires a revision of phenomenology. However, such a revision can not only be found in recent positions, but already in Patočka’s conception. Thus, I propose to reassess his basic ideas that are derived from both a strong criticism of (...) Husserl’s subjectivism and Heidegger’s anti-intellectualism. In this context, I use Patočka’s respective insights concerning the “phenomenal field” and the “movement of human existence,” to develop a phenomenological analysis of the various ways violence affects our selves: As I argue, it does so by destroying incorporated patterns of understanding, by oppressing the meaningful frameworks of our pregiven life-world, and, finally, by undermining our primordial trust in the other. (shrink)