This paper focuses on the radiance of awareness.

In this ground-breaking work, Allan Combs presents a wide-ranging survey of the nature and origins of consciousness research, viewing consciousness as a dynamic and self-organizing process with evolutionary potential. Combs reviews the work of evolutionary theorists such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ken Wilber, Jean Gebser, and Sri Aurobindo. What emerges is a fascinating study of consciousness that discloses itself as a rich and ongoing act of self-creation, poised at the edge of chaos between past and future.

Radiance from Halcyon: A Utopian Experiment in Religion and Science by Paul Eli Ivey is the first full-length treatment of this Californian branch of Theosophy, known as the Temple. Ivey chronicles the history of the Temple from the group's origins in Syracuse through its establishment of an intentional community in Arroyo Grande, California, known as Halcyon. Ivey offers a depiction of the Theosophical movement that at times seems quite modern, highlighting the group's desire to harmonize spirituality, science, and health (...) within a globally connected world; however, the movement's naive eclecticism and rudimentary approach to health cures through electrical currents make its origins in the early twentieth century... (shrink)

This first anthology of the most important writings by Danny Siegel, spanning and modernizing fifty years of his insights, Radiance intersperses soulful Jewish texts with innovative Mitzvah ideas to rouse individuals and communities to transform our lives, communities, and world.

If one cannot establish givens, such as Platonic ideas, or determiners, such as Kantian categories, as a point of departure for philosophical inquiry, then how is philosophical inquiry to proceed in a non-question-begging manner? This, of course, is the familiar problem of grounding philosophical discourse. In this essay, I hope to offer a Zhuangzian solution—that is, a solution derived from analysis of the Zhuangzi 莊子 text—to this perennial philosophical problem. As a result, I hope to give the reader a critical (...) glimpse into a Zhuangzian philosophy without foundations, thereby providing a potential solution to the preceding problem while displaying the continued relevance of the Zhuangzi text. (shrink)

For Vajrayana Buddhism, the now is an interval, a boundary, a point of tension and suspension with an atmosphere of uncertainty. It is a bifurcation point of variable length; its name is “bardo.” The bardo is immersed in the conventional, or “seeming” reality. It emerges from what is called the “unstained” ultimate or primordial emptiness or “basal clear light.” Further, the ultimate is not the sphere of cognition. Cognition, including cognition of time, belongs to conventional reality. Buddhahood, in contrast, is (...) a condition of uncompounded knowledge where basic mind blossoms without temporal or other cognitive distinctions, unmade, unfabricated, luminous and pristine. Cyclical existence involves both the ultimate and the conventional as it moves through six bardos—all of which are the effulgent of the basal clear light—until Buddhahood. The six are: the bardo of this life ; the bardo of dream; the bardo of meditation; the bardo of dying; the bardo of dharmata ; and the bardo of existence. Each realm is both ultimate and conventional, and has specific initiation-based yogas to investigate these differences. The process of transition from one to the next involves at least three bodies, one mind, and aspects of speech. In each bardo, the character of the now as embodiment and temporal knowing varies yet a complete and consistent cross-bardo yogic wisdom leads to its total cessation in the basal clear light; the now is extinguished. The author presents, from the viewpoint of a knowledgeable practitioner of over 30 years, an essay on Vajrayana Buddhist time, drawing implications for Fraser’s time typology. The essay will draw from English translations of significant older, tantric texts on dream yoga, deity yoga, the Chod, tantric time, the bardo of death, and empowerment. Useful practices that can be applied by the audience to test the tradition and author’s assertions will be suggested. (shrink)

In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing (...) photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare. A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it—and to do that, we must begin to look. (shrink)

This article takes up film and imagination via the problem of empathy. Proposing a different entry into contemporary polemics over empathy, the ‘empathic imagination’ is reconceptualized as a problematic of form rather than psychological experience. That is, instead of adopting a pre-given notion of empathy to illuminate the relation between film and the spectator's moral imagination, this article considers how that imagination is constituted in and through the image to begin with. After tracing the genealogy of empathy in German aesthetics, (...) the concept is put into play through readings of ‘#Look Beyond Borders’, an online video produced by Amnesty International, and two documentaries by Johan van der Keuken – Face Value and Herman Slobbe. In these works, the facial image is read as the imaginary terrain in which to explore very different notions of what might count as empathy and the empathic imagination in film and media. (shrink)

This paper focuses on liberation as the experience of pervasive radiance.

The prolongation of lifetimes for an excited atom due to the presence of nearby atoms in the ground state is shown to follow simply from unitarity of the time evolution. We also discuss possible approaches to the detection and the overcoming of various technical obstacles.

Craig Nelson, the author of this unflaggingly engrossing book, comes from an impressive background in publishing, having been vice president and executive editor of Harper and Row, Hyperion, and Random House. In this respect, he reminds me of the better known Walter Isaacson, who was managing editor of Time magazine before turning his attention to writing biographies of Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Ben Franklin, and, most recently, a collective biography of the pioneers of the digital revolution. Although I reach this (...) conclusion on the basis of having read only one book by each, I would say that Isaacson’s oeuvre is more scholarly, Nelson’s more journalistic. A review in the New York Times of Nelson’s bestseller Rocket Men informs would-be readers that while the book “lacks the shapeliness and authority of some earlier lunar histories,…it ends up making an engaging contribution.” Comparing The Age of Radiance to the many similar histories of radioactivity and the making of the bomb that I .. (shrink)

Master teacher Mukunda Stiles offers 18 lessons in Tantra Yoga, a practice of transformational self-healing in which we can deepen awareness of our bodies, ...

Divided beauty (Dresden, 1764) -- Little gods of the street (Munich-Berlin, 1828) -- Plebeian heaven (Paris, 1830) -- The poet of the new world (Boston, 1841-New York, 1855) -- The gymnasts of the impossible (Paris, 1879) -- The dance of light (Paris, Folies Bergère, 1893) -- The immobile theatre (Paris 1894-95) -- Decorative art as social art: temple, house, factory (Paris-London-Berlin) -- Master of surfaces (Paris, 1902) -- The temple staircase (Moscow-Dresden, 1912) -- The machine and its shadow (Hollywood, 1916) (...) -- The majesty of the moment (New York, 1921) -- Seeing things through things (Moscow, 1926) -- The cruel radiance of what is (Hale County, 1936-New York, 1941). (shrink)

In his 1979 foreword to The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell remarks on the curiousrelationship between Heidegger and cinema . Cavell is inspired to do so byTerrence Malick's Days of Heaven , a film that not only presents us with images ofpreternatural beauty, but also acknowledges the self-referential character of thecinematic image . For Cavell, Malick's films have a formal radiance thatsuggest something of Heidegger's thinking of the relationship between Being and beings,the radiant self-showing of things in luminous appearance . (...) Days of Heaven doesindeed have a metaphysical vision of the world, but 'one feels that one has never quiteseen the scene of human existence-call it the arena between earth and heavenquite realized this way on film before' . As Cavell observes, however,the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and Malick's films seems to challengeboth philosophers and film-theorists. The film-theorists struggle to show how Heidegger isrelevant to the experience of cinema, while the philosophers grapple with the question ofcinema and aesthetics, precisely because film puts into question traditional concepts ofvisual art, as Walter Benjamin showed long ago .In what follows, I take up Cavell's invitation to think about the relationshipbetween Heidegger and film by considering Malick's 1998 masterpiece, The Thin Red Line.The question I shall explore is whether we should describe The Thin Red Line as'Heideggerian Cinema'. Along the way I discuss two different approaches to the film: a'Heideggerian' approach that reads the film as exemplifying Heideggerian themes; and a 'film as philosophy' approach arguing that, while the film is philosophical, we should refrain from reading it in relation toany particular philosophical framework. In conclusion, I offer some brief remarks abouthow The Thin Red Line can be regarded as 'Heideggerian cinema,' not because we need toread Heidegger in order to understand it, but because Malick's film performs a cinematicpoesis, a revealing of world through image,sound, and word. (shrink)

In his greatest work the greatest thinker of his era, if not of all time, Plato, writing in one of the greatest, if not even the greatest epoch in the intellectual, artistic, and literary history of mankind, held up a mirror not only to his own age but to every age, not least our own, in the glowing radiance of his unsurpassed genius. This essay is an attempt to look on the world around us with his searchlight. Addressing on (...) this subject a select company of educated and intelligent men and women, I discovered that several of them had attempted but had failed to read through The Republic . They could not see the wood for the trees, lost their way, and gave up the guest. (shrink)

It is a truism, that we are not self-created beings, that each of us has been singularly brought into the world by others, that we did not beget ourselves. From the Biblical image of the fall of humankind to Heidegger’s existential schema of the “fallenness” of human existence, what it is to be has been reflected upon in terms of what it is to have been not self-created. To have been marks our being, and yet, we only come to know, (...) or realize, our own created existence belatedly, after the fact, in a sudden awareness that we have already been before we have been for ourselves. This realization of having been born is often experienced in a register of emotional shock, as the trauma of creation. As a trauma, it is structured by the disjointed time of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit. The “shock” of having been born is only experienced as an affect after the fact, even as this fact must have occurred before; the affect is disjointed from the shock even as the shock can only affect us afterwards. Through an exploration of the literary writings of Clarice Lispector, this paper examines the philosophical significance of the “emotional shock” of having been born. In contrast to Heidegger’s emphasis on the anxiety of “being towards death” or Sartre’s nausea, I argue for the originality of Lispector’s conception of createdness in the radiance of its realization, as expressed in the pithy formulation: “the pain of creation, yet without the creation.”. (shrink)

Aims of education: historicism and In the castle of my skin -- The meaning of life and Black lightning -- The inner radiance of the shelf in Palace of the peacock -- Knowledge and human understanding in A house for Mr Biswas -- Existentialism and The children of Sisyphus -- Tragic vision in Wide Sargasso Sea -- African conceptions of a person and Myal -- The law of karma in Sastra -- The moralty of reparations in Salt -- Plato (...) versus Kincaid?: A reading of The autobiography of my mother. (shrink)

The One remains, the many change and pass;Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity,Until Death tramples it to fragments.At its widest, ‘pluralism’ signifies simply the variety of life, the teeming multitude of forms and entities, the many different properties that living beings manifest. Life is not everywhere the same but impressively differentiated, and without it eternity would be all of a piece, uniform. That is enough for life to (...) stain the white radiance of eternity. But within the multiplicity of specifically human life there are not merely differences. There are tensions, oppositions, conflicts. In contemporary philosophical debate ‘pluralism’ then comes to signify one problematic aspect of this. Groups of people have perhaps always subscribed to very different values, and in consequence favoured very different forms of behaviour from one another, at least on a global scale. But the groups are no longer geographically separated: we live in distinct but overlapping cultures, and get in one another's way to a far greater extent than previously. Shelley's ordered image of the dome may then seem inappropriate, and it may seem unnecessary for death to trample it to fragments. Life is already fragmented, and the practical problem facing us as living creatures is to go beyond the fragments, to achieve at least a modus vivendi in the light of all our differences and incompatibilities even if not the orderliness and cohesion of a dome. Somehow, we have to live together. That is a practical problem which confronts us at every level, as members of families, neighbourhoods, departments, countries and increasingly simply as members of a world-wide human race. (shrink)

This article explores the representation of the hand in three recent fiction films by Naomi Kawase: Sweet Bean (2015), Radiance (2017) and True Mothers (2020). Extending current scholarship that discusses the director’s use of haptic visuality, I argue that Kawase’s haptic cinema further exhibits its hapticity by framing the hand as both a Derridean trace and conduit that leaves behind traces in objects such as bean paste, letters, photo cameras, and photographs. Kawase’s framing of these objects in close-up shots (...) emphasizes not only their materiality and haptic texture but also their foreshadowed physical absence. By reading Kawase through Jacques Derrida’s notion of trace, the article highlights not only the relevance behind understanding Kawase’s recent fiction films through a Derridean lens but also how the director’s own attitude towards cinema, as one that aims to simultaneously frame absence and presence, can also be read as a Derridean approach to cinema. (shrink)

Bodily expression of affection through movement is both simple and complex: simple insofar as it puts us into immediate communion with the affective lives of others; complex insofar as it relies on rapid and subtle movements that generally escape explicit notice. The difficulty in understanding the bodily basis of intersubjectivity comes in understanding how in and through complex movement the simplicity of expression is possible. It is here that reflection on the arts proves valuable. Hans-Georg Gadamer points to the role (...) of art in contemplating the truth of appearance, and he observes that nature appears as self-renewing play. Drawing on these insights, this paper considers the treatment of bodily expression in the work of three artists: the portraiture of El Greco, a novel by Charlotte Brontë, and several poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. All three artists employ the imagery of fire to represent bodily expression. Fire recommends itself because of its subtle movement and its radiance. In light of these artists’ approach to the phenomenon, the paper argues that “radiant interplay” characterizes the how of bodily expressiveness. Our bodies radiate our felt affectivity through the play of our features, and this play is always reciprocally related to the play of others radiating their felt affectivity. Reflection on art enriches the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Ethics edifies to the extent it takes seriously the munus propheticum Jesu Christi. Though many assume ethical action indicates behaviour realising Jesus Christ, this is problematic because it implies he is otherwise mute and absent. Paul Lehmann offers a refreshing alternative when he argues that the principal concern of ethics is alignment with all that God in Christ is doing now to make and keep human life human. Lehmann thus recasts the question ‘What am I to do?’ by taking seriously (...) the presence and activity of the One who summons human beings to participate in his work. In a manner consistent with the christological foundations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics , Lehmann’s proposals evoke an ethic shaped by and subject to the self-disclosure and radiance of the triune God. (shrink)

We obtained an exact solution for a uniformly accelerated Unruh–DeWitt detector interacting with a massless scalar field in (3 + 1) dimensions which enables us to study the entire evolution of the total system, from the initial transient to late-time steady state. We find that the conventional transition probability of the detector from its initial ground state to excited states, as derived from time-dependent perturbation theory over an infinitely long duration of interaction, is valid only in the transient stage and (...) is invalid for cases with proper acceleration smaller than the damping constant. We also found that, unlike in (1 + 1)D results, the (3 + 1)D uniformly accelerated Unruh– DeWitt detector in a steady state does emit a positive radiated power of quantum nature at late-times, but it is not connected to the thermal radiance experienced by the detector in the Unruh effect proper. (shrink)

In liberal constitutional states and in increasingly secularized societies, the question arises as to the relationship of theological ethics to positive law and to philosophical ethics. In particular, the reference to transcendence in theological ethics triggers a reflection on the argumentative radiance and the plausible persuasive effect that theological ethics can develop, for example, on legal questions as well as on societal concerns of ethical relevance. Beyond that, is there also an area where secular ethics and positive law on (...) the one side and religious ethics on the other side come together? After brief definitions of basic terms, the article will then introduce human rights as an ethical reference point for theological ethics, philosophical ethics, and positive law, and show reasons for human rights in this function of orientation for theological and philosophical ethics as well as for positive law. Finally, the article ends with an outlook on the interplay of law and ethics in the service of guaranteeing a humane and sustainable future. (shrink)

One of the most important reasons for such a clearly distressed state of society was the decline of religion as a social force, the external manifestation of which is the weakening of religious institutions. "Religion," Baha'u'llah writes, "is the greatest of all means of establishing order in the world to the universal satisfaction of those who live in it." The weakening of the foundations of religion strengthened the ranks of ignoramuses, gave them impudence and arrogance. "I truly say that everything (...) that belittles the supreme role of religion opens way for the revelry of maliciousness, inevitably leading to anarchy. " In another Tablet, He says: "Religion is a radiant light and an impregnable fortress that ensures the safety and well-being of the peoples of the world, for God-fearing induces man to adhere to the good and to reject all evil." Blink the light of religion, and chaos and distemper will set in, the radiance of justice, justice, tranquility and peace. ". (shrink)

The death of Alfred North Whitehead late in 1947 was a double loss. Those who knew Whitehead, even slightly, feel keenly the loss of a warm and stimulating personality, which in the last years of his retirement had mellowed to a benign radiance. The wider circle of students and teachers of philosophy who knew him through his writing alone regret the passing of the man who, many thought, was the most capable cosmologist of our time.

The competing expressions of ideology flooding the contemporary political landscape have taken a turn toward the absurd. The Radiance Foundation’s recent anti-abortion campaign targeting African-American women, including a series of billboards bearing the slogan “The most dangerous place for an African-American child is in the womb”, is just one example of political "discourse" that is both infuriating and confounding. Discourse with these features – problematic intelligibility, disinterest in the truth, and inflammatory rhetoric – has become increasingly common in politics, (...) the press, and even the arguments made by ordinary folk. It is often criticized for its falsehood or its hurtfulness; however, these critiques tend to miss its pernicious potential. This essay characterizes this insidious discourse as purposeful nonsense. Part of the way that purposeful nonsense functions, we argue, relies on taking advantage of harmful stereotypes and denigrating narratives that are already present in our culture. Purposeful nonsense both draws upon harmful ideology and fortifies it. The effect is that members of oppressed social groups are confronted with disparaging ideology, while its authors are free to deny responsibility for it. Black feminist and intersectional analysis – particularly in the discussion of race, abortion, and reproductive justice – are useful in identifying and criticizing the harmful subtext in the Radiance Foundation’s billboard campaign. The notion of purposeful nonsense serves to extend the reach of these criticisms. Purposeful nonsense – disguised as merely logically confused discourse – is a key factor in maintaining an oppressive and unjust society; however, feminist, black feminist, and intersectional analysis contextualizes purposeful nonsense, potentially disrupting its harmful influence. We conclude that purposeful nonsense employs a variation on stereotype threat, a phenomenon in which being reminded of negative stereotypes about one’s social group causes stereotypical performance failures. We suggest that the notion of stereotype threat combined with intersectional analysis offers a fruitful avenue along which research on this sort of discourse might be expanded. (shrink)

Taking its point of departure in a childhood memory of Derrida around raising silkworms, this essay explores the urgency invoked in the same memory of ‘conjuring green’. Following the polysemy of the French verb ( conjurer means to ‘ward off’, ‘cause (a spirit or ghost) to appear’, ‘implore’, and literally, ‘swear together’), the conjured green binds the child and later the writer surreptitiously to both the community and language of Islam, in which the colour green evokes the gardens of paradise, (...) and the infinitely differentiated proliferation of plants whose anthology encroaches upon and undermines any ontology. Along the meandering lines of Derrida’s meditation on the conjured, warded-off, mourned and celebrated green, the Qur’anic Muslim’s joy and radiance whose roots are the same as those for ‘vividness’ and ‘flourishing’, are grafted onto Hildegard von Bingen’s viriditas, the greening power or force which the German mystic Hildegard von Bingen understood as the living soul of creation; and Darwin’s discovery of the movement of plans as ‘circumnutation’, a Derridian term avant la lettre, that captures the dynamic of plants in Derrida’s Glas. (shrink)

The status of beauty in Plotinus' metaphysics is unclear: is it a Form in Intellect, the Intelligible Principle itself, or the One? Basing themselves on a number of well-known passages in the "Enneads," and assuming that Plotinus' Forms are similar in function and status to Plato's, many scholars hold that Plotinus theorized beauty as a determinate entity in Intellect. Such assumptions, it is here argued, lead to difficulties over self-predication, the interpretation of Plotinus's rich and varied aesthetic terminology and, most (...) of all, the puzzling dearth of references, in the whole of the "Enneads," to a Form of Beauty. A detailed reading of VI.7.32 and 33 reveals that, in these two crucial passages at least, Plotinus adopts an aesthetic approach to the One and that, far from confining Beauty to Intellect, he equates the One, the Good and the Beautiful. This reading is here supported not only by an analysis of the text but also by a consideration of the semantic differences between μορφή and ε[unrepresentable symbol]δος, the inter-relatedness, in Plotinus' philosophy, of the concepts of love and value, and the exclusion of beauty from the πρ[unrepresentable symbol]τα γένη. In turn, the exegesis of VI.7.32 and 33 raises the issue of the significance for aesthetics understood in the narrow sense of the word, of Plotinus's ontology of beauty. It is here claimed that in so far as sensible beauty, both artistic and natural, can be nothing else than an effect of the shaping action of the Forms and a reflection of their radiance, singular or global, it should not be held that Plotinus had an aesthetics in the modern sense of this term. (shrink)

The rigid recoil of a crystal is the accepted mechanism for the Mössbauer effect. It’s at odds with the special theory of relativity which does not allow perfectly rigid bodies. The standard model of particle physics which includes QED should not allow any signals to be transmitted faster than the speed of light. If perturbation theory can be used, then the X-ray emitted in a Mössbauer decay must come from a single nuclear decay vertex at which the 4-momentum is exactly (...) conserved in a Feynman diagram. Then the 4-momentum of the final state Mössbauer nucleus must be slightly off the mass shell. This off-shell behavior would be followed by subsequent diffusion of momentum throughout the crystal to bring the nucleus back onto the mass shell and the crystal to a final relaxed state in which it moves rigidly with the appropriate recoil velocity. This mechanism explains the Mössbauer effect at the microscopic level and reconciles it with relativity. Because off-mass-shell quantum mechanics is required, the on-mass-shell theories developed originally for the Mössbauer effect are inadequate. Another possibility is that that the recoil response involves a non-perturbative effect in the standard model which could allow for a non-local instantaneous momentum transfer between the crystal and the decay, as proposed for example by Preparata and others in super-radiance theory. The recoil time of the crystal is probably not instantaneous, and if it could be measured, one could distinguish between various theories. An experiment is proposed in this paper to measure this time. The idea is to measure the total energy radiated due to bremsstrahlung from a charged Mössbauer crystal which has experienced a recoil. Using Larmor’s formula, along with corrections to it, allows one to design an experiment. The favored idea is to use many small nano-spheres of Mössbauer-active metals, whose outer surfaces are charged. The energy radiated then varies as the charge squared divided by the recoil time. This can then be measured with the extreme sensitivity available in Mössbauer experiments. If it turns out that experiments prove the need for off-mass-shell theory, then this would have profound implications for all of condensed matter physics. It would mean that an off-mass-shell theory like those considered by Stueckelberg, Horwitz, Piron, Greenberger, and many others are required to describe nature. The inclusion of these would be a major shift in the foundations. It would mean that there are new dynamic variables—the rest masses of particles. The ability to measure the diffusion relaxation time should prove useful also in chemical analysis, and provide a new class of analytical methods for material science. This problem is also interesting because the Mössbauer effect is a phenomenon where the solid-state environment dramatically and indisputably influences the probability of a nuclear process. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 99-113 [Access article in PDF] Philosophical Silence and Spiritual Awe Angelo Caranfa In the philosophical transcending of question and answer we arrive at...the stillness of being. 1 What interests me...[is] that which best permits me to express my almost religious awe towards life. 2"There exists a language of the intelligence, which has come down to us as the language of the word," (...) declares René Huyghe. "Art, however, is a language of the spirit, of our feeling as well as our thinking nature, our nature as a whole in all its complexity." 3 This essay addresses the education of intelligence or the word in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), and the instruction of the spirit in the art of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), so as to clarify human existence in its wholeness or totality. Jaspers and Matisse reject the split between the word and the spirit, and instruct us that the way to completion or self-realization is through a life lived in silence and in spiritual awe. Without silence, according to Jaspers and Matisse, it is impossible to philosophize or create, and therefore to learn.To integrate silence or solitude into human existence by weaving it into the whole approach to teaching the liberal arts or the humanities is the pedagogical concern of this essay. Its implications for students will be briefly discussed at the conclusion. But first, let me sketch the general movement of the basic ideas that the essay develops.The theme that connects the narrative is that artistic-aesthetic education alone can lead students along the path to self-completion by integrating silence or solitude into their life of learning. Jaspers and Matisse instruct that silence or solitude is the very source of philosophical knowledge and of artistic creation. When the human mind comes face to face with the mystery of existence, explains Jaspers, silence or solitude is there to lead it to perceive or understand this mystery. This understanding is not a truth of intellectual [End Page 99] or rational knowledge, but a truth of the spirit, which is the knowledge of art or the aesthetic, as Matisse illustrates. Thus the relationship between art and philosophy is one of enrichment and of completion, not of poverty and dilution of knowledge. What allows us to grasp or understand the mystery of existence is love, according to Jaspers and Matisse.Love, they claim, is born of the self's desire to complete itself, to root itself in a source outside itself, to overcome its limitations in pride, arrogance, selfishness, hatred, and deceit by submitting itself to humility, purity, sincerity, simplicity, truth, and a higher love: God's Love. Then, concludes Jaspers, the self rises above or beyond philosophical knowledge, just as God's love rises above all living beings, concludes Matisse, and it achieves wholeness in God's Love or Word or Spirit. But the Word of God can be heard only in silence, in peaceful contemplation and in emptiness of mind, so that both the senses and the soul can be absorbed totally and completely into the radiance and into the unspeakable Word of God. Thus Matisse uses light and colors in his art to express, reveal, make us see and hear God's voice in the world and in us. As Jaspers's philosophical transcending of question and answer is to lead us upward into the world of eternity, rooting ourselves, transcending ourselves, transforming ourselves, freeing ourselves, creating for ourselves an existence that is truly sublime, and therefore whole. Jaspers's Aesthetic of the Silence of Being Jaspers is not known for his contribution to philosophy of art. In fact, he does not discuss art or aesthetics per se. 4 Still, his aesthetics follows quite consistently and logically from his philosophy as outlined in Way to Wisdom. The desire to lead the philosophical life, says Jaspers, expresses itself through situations, thought or contemplation, or reflection, and through choices or inner actions. Jaspers maintains that the human self is "on-the-way" to self-completion, or self-awareness, or... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 99-113 [Access article in PDF] Philosophical Silence and Spiritual Awe Angelo Caranfa In the philosophical transcending of question and answer we arrive at...the stillness of being. 1 What interests me...[is] that which best permits me to express my almost religious awe towards life. 2"There exists a language of the intelligence, which has come down to us as the language of the word," (...) declares René Huyghe. "Art, however, is a language of the spirit, of our feeling as well as our thinking nature, our nature as a whole in all its complexity." 3 This essay addresses the education of intelligence or the word in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), and the instruction of the spirit in the art of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), so as to clarify human existence in its wholeness or totality. Jaspers and Matisse reject the split between the word and the spirit, and instruct us that the way to completion or self-realization is through a life lived in silence and in spiritual awe. Without silence, according to Jaspers and Matisse, it is impossible to philosophize or create, and therefore to learn.To integrate silence or solitude into human existence by weaving it into the whole approach to teaching the liberal arts or the humanities is the pedagogical concern of this essay. Its implications for students will be briefly discussed at the conclusion. But first, let me sketch the general movement of the basic ideas that the essay develops.The theme that connects the narrative is that artistic-aesthetic education alone can lead students along the path to self-completion by integrating silence or solitude into their life of learning. Jaspers and Matisse instruct that silence or solitude is the very source of philosophical knowledge and of artistic creation. When the human mind comes face to face with the mystery of existence, explains Jaspers, silence or solitude is there to lead it to perceive or understand this mystery. This understanding is not a truth of intellectual [End Page 99] or rational knowledge, but a truth of the spirit, which is the knowledge of art or the aesthetic, as Matisse illustrates. Thus the relationship between art and philosophy is one of enrichment and of completion, not of poverty and dilution of knowledge. What allows us to grasp or understand the mystery of existence is love, according to Jaspers and Matisse.Love, they claim, is born of the self's desire to complete itself, to root itself in a source outside itself, to overcome its limitations in pride, arrogance, selfishness, hatred, and deceit by submitting itself to humility, purity, sincerity, simplicity, truth, and a higher love: God's Love. Then, concludes Jaspers, the self rises above or beyond philosophical knowledge, just as God's love rises above all living beings, concludes Matisse, and it achieves wholeness in God's Love or Word or Spirit. But the Word of God can be heard only in silence, in peaceful contemplation and in emptiness of mind, so that both the senses and the soul can be absorbed totally and completely into the radiance and into the unspeakable Word of God. Thus Matisse uses light and colors in his art to express, reveal, make us see and hear God's voice in the world and in us. As Jaspers's philosophical transcending of question and answer is to lead us upward into the world of eternity, rooting ourselves, transcending ourselves, transforming ourselves, freeing ourselves, creating for ourselves an existence that is truly sublime, and therefore whole. Jaspers's Aesthetic of the Silence of Being Jaspers is not known for his contribution to philosophy of art. In fact, he does not discuss art or aesthetics per se. 4 Still, his aesthetics follows quite consistently and logically from his philosophy as outlined in Way to Wisdom. The desire to lead the philosophical life, says Jaspers, expresses itself through situations, thought or contemplation, or reflection, and through choices or inner actions. Jaspers maintains that the human self is "on-the-way" to self-completion, or self-awareness, or... (shrink)

CHAPTER IA SPECTRUM OF RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGIES * The philosophies, like a dome of many-colored glass, stain the white radiance of religion. ...

This article argues that the figure of Oedipus lies at the heart of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Oedipus is the prototypical Aufklärer as no one can rival him in his courageous attempt to employ his own autonomous reason `without direction from another'; yet self-knowledge remains beyond his grasp. Indeed, Oedipus' obsessive drive to bring the truth to light ultimately leads him to put out his own eyes because he is unable to bear the sight of the catastrophe that (...) this drive engenders. Oedipus' demise represents in allegorical form the self-destruction of enlightenment itself. Enlightenment is similarly driven to illuminate the world in its totality by reducing it to philosophical concepts. In the process, however, it becomes blind to the question of its dependence upon that which it purports to possess. In its attempt at total illumination, therefore, enlightenment does not effectuate an exit or Ausgang from the opacity of myth, as Kant had held, but rather is blinded, paradoxically, by the radiance of its own projections. Reading the dialectic of enlightenment through the tragedy of Oedipus leads back to the enigmatic question of art as the means by which the rationalization and disenchantment of the world can be reflected upon critically. (shrink)

In his greatest work the greatest thinker of his era, if not of all time, Plato, writing in one of the greatest, if not even the greatest epoch in the intellectual, artistic, and literary history of mankind, held up a mirror not only to his own age but to every age, not least our own, in the glowing radiance of his unsurpassed genius. This essay is an attempt to look on the world around us with his searchlight. Addressing on (...) this subject a select company of educated and intelligent men and women, I discovered that several of them had attempted but had failed to read through The Republic. They could not see the wood for the trees, lost their way, and gave up the guest. (shrink)

This article analyzes inscriptions cast on bronze mirrors of the Han dynasty to trace how the material property of brightness became emphatically aestheticized through an expressive rhetoric of radiance and brilliance, illumination and reflection. It argues that specular brightness as a defining feature of Han mirrors was exploited by artisans to attract potential buyers. In contrast to erudite philosophers who exclusively used the logograph ming 明 to modify the literary mirror in classical texts, artisans promoted their products by featuring (...) terms such as guang 光, zhao 昭, hui 輝, yao 耀, qing 清, and jiao 皎 in rhythmic proses of various lengths. Examining how artisans advertised their high-tin bronzes as embodiments of solar and lunar light, the study shows that specular brilliance was linked to a range of cosmetic, moral, and religious powers, from illuminating the individual and the physical world to revealing the invisible world, whether of human emotions or demons. The article further argues that the inscribed verses, while often formulaic and clichéd, were neither mere decorations nor generic blessings. In fact, they meaningfully structured and communicated a particular aesthetic appreciation shared by both Han artisans and users. This well-developed semantic fascination with specular brightness thus marks these metal discs as a distinctive genre of the decorative arts in early imperial China. (shrink)

This chapter proposes an extension of Georges Canguilhem's historical analysis toward contemporary concepts of milieu as flexible and dissipative territories, and as "adaptive landscapes" of living organisms such as the monarch butterfly and common swift. The chapter deploys and develops an understanding of certain vital processes in Canguilhem's account of milieu, by charting the experience to be found in various migration landscapes which cannot be understood independently of their taking place over time (and certainly not in abstraction). This is reflected (...) in the second section where an account of dissipative images is given as a way of thinking the ephemerality of structures whose ramifications occlude the ongoing radiance of their energy. This much can be seen, as the chapter concludes, in the work of Gemma Anderson whose drawings of mitosis and epigenetic landscapes contemplate, through a set of visual "notes," how we might begin to both think and render energy fluctuations. We can thus visualize migratory patterns not as a series of fixed points but in a way that might help us to see "sky" as a unique, dynamic milieu of lived time and space. (shrink)

This paper is a study of the place of luminosity in the films of Michael Mann and the way in which luminosity is not a tool of illumination but a radiance that signals the bodying forth of appearances. The event of luminosity in Mann's films is an attempt to re-imagine the conventional value structures that create a link between film and indexicality, as if his admiration for the photoreal effects of film belies an insistence that the advenience of an (...) appearance is what eventuates when objects ingress between reference and expression, between realism and dream. By using the most advanced high definition digital cameras to film his nightscapes - and his movies more generally - Mann defeats the illuminatory and transcriptual demands of a filmic iconography that rely on the power of light to tether a representation to a thing in the world. In doing so, however, he neither refuses nor rejects the power of representation as such. His picturing of luminous nightscapes in cities, for instance, transubstantiates the objecthood of urban spaces so that the iridescence of the lights makes the city feel at once vivid and unlike any object that might exist in the world. I conclude that Mann's commitment to filming luminosity presents a problem to the dominant methodologies for the analysis of aesthetics and politics that offer a moral theory of the image. Michael Mann's films, finally, offer an alternative to the moral theory of the image: a politics of appearances rooted in the experience of advenience. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 351 - 365 In his _Nietzsche_ lectures, Heidegger states that there is a concealed _discordance_ between beauty, semblance, and truth in Platonism. This paper explores this claim in detail to show how such a discordance haunts not only Platonism, but the beginnings and ends of Western philosophy. This commences with Plato’s claim that beauty’s radiance is both the reminder of the non-sensible εἴδη and a semblance belonging to the sensible world. This discordance (...) is not overcome in the ensuing Western tradition, however, but made more _dreadful_. This is because in Nietzsche’s anti-platonic retrieval of sensible beauty over non-sensible truth, the platonic reminder of the εἴδη is transformed into the dangerous production of new forms of power. In both cases, however, Heidegger proposes that this metaphysical thinking of Being-as-form conceals the early Greek insight that beauty’s tragic radiance lets Being appear _as_ both truth and semblance. (shrink)