Chapter 1: An Introduction: The ‘Semantic Sting’ Argument Describes Dworkin’s theory as concerning the conditions of legal validity. “A legal system is a system of norms. Validity is a logical property of norms in a way akin to that in which truth is a logical property of propositions. A statement about the law is true if and only if the norm it purports to describe is a valid legal norm…It follows that there must be certain conditions which render (...) certain norms, but not others, legally valid. Hence it also follows that there can be two types of disagreement over the truth or falsehood of propositions about the law. People can disagree over the question ‘What are the conditions of legal validity?’, in which case their disagreement is a theoretical one. Or they can agree on the conditions of validity, and disagree as to whether or not those conditions actually obtain in a given case or not.” Argues that the best way to interpret Dworkin’s ‘semantic-sting argument’ is as a general argument against conventionalism in legal positivism. Summarizes the outcome of Dworkin’s argument as follows: “[I]f Dworkin is right about the legal reasoning of lawyers and judges, conventionalism would be self-defeating: if lawyers and judges recognize as legally binding not only those norms which are uncontroversially identifiable under the Rule of Recognition, that is, if what they recognize as binding is not only source-based law, then conventionalism turns out to be false on its own terms. In other words, either law is not what lawyers and judges think that it is, in which case law is not a matter of conventions, or – if it is what lawyers and judges think – conventionalism is false, as they do not see the law as purely a matter of conventions.” Dworkin’s theory, then, is a new conception of jurisprudence aiming to present itself as a rival to conventionalism. The book will be concerned with re-examining positivism in light of the interpretative challenge. Chapter 2: Meaning and Interpretation “[R]oughly, interpretation can be defined as an understanding or explanation of the meaning of an object.” Interpretation in this narrow sense is distinct from a less formal and broader use of interpretation that makes it equivalent to explanation. “Hence also, only those objects which are capable of bearing some meaning qualify as objects of interpretation.” [Why shouldn’t we think of interpretation as object-identification? This seems to be closer to what Dworkin has in mind.] Thus, a consideration of the philosophical work on meaning is appropriate. First, a consideration of Davidson on interpretation. The thesis is that Davidson’s “radical interpretation” can only account for sentence meaning and not for linguistic interpretation in general. Davidson cannot account for the non-rule-governed aspects of communication. “Semantics, as opposed to interpretation, concerns those aspects of communication which are rule or convention governed…but such rules are normally unavailable as reasons or justifications for an interpretation. On the contrary, interpretation is usually required because the issue is not determined by rules or conventions.” Interpretation, rather, is parasitic with understanding the meaning of an expression and not equivalent with it. As Dummett notes, any reflection on the meanings of words assumes prior knowledge of ordinary meanings. “This leads to the conclusion that understanding or explaining the meaning of an expression and interpreting it, are two conceptually separate things. It also indicates that seman ics can only be employed, if at all, to elucidate the concept of interpretation by way of contrast: interpretation concerns those aspects of communication which are under-determined by semantic rules or conventions.” Pragmatics, the study of problems posed by discrepancies between utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning, would seem to be closer to inquiry into interpretation. Both are concerned with understanding how meaning is possible where conventional rules leave off. Contemporary pragmatics, moreover, recognizes the logically indeterminate character of communicative inferences beyond conventional meaning and that the contextual conditions that account for the possibility cannot be realized in the semantic structure of the sentence. However, different criteria of success may be at work in pragmatics than interpretation. Pragmatics is concerned with how communication is achieved and thus the criteria of success would be grasping a speaker’s intentions. Many think, however, that communication is unimportant in certain spheres of communication, e.g. artistic interpretation, and that in these cases the aim of interpretation is not to uncover the actual artist’s intentions. What kind of meaning is interpretation aimed at then? It cannot be the meaning the object has for the interpreter. “Interpretation purports to be a statement about the object interpreted, not about the subject who offers the interpretation…it is crucial to remember that not everything we say about a work of art, or any other text, amounts to an interpretation of it. Only those aspects of a text which can shed light on its meaning form part of the text’s interpretation. What the text means for someone rarely entails anything about what the text means.” [This is puzzling to some extent for it remains somewhat ambiguous what it means to talk of subject-independent meaning.] Interpretive meaning attribution is, rather, counterfactual. “In general, I will suggest that the answer to this question consists in the fact that meaning is assigned by a counterfactual statement. Given that x is the meaning attributed to, for instance a text T, and x is not the literal meaning of T, nor is it the meaning of T intended by its author, then the attribution of meaning x to T can only be understood as the contention that on the basis of certain assumptions a certain fictitious or stipulated speaker would have meant x by expressing T.” Thus, on this account, interpretation, when it does not concern an actual speaker, turns out to be a kind of counterfactual intention attribution. Twofold point: “First, that interpretation is essentially a matter of attributing intentions, that is, in the pragmatics sense of ‘meaning’, namely, meaning that such-and-such by an act or expression. At the same time, interpretations need not be based on the intentions of actual authors; the meaning of an act or expression is understandable in terms of counterfactual intentions.” [Are we really restricted to understanding the coherence and integrity of meaning in such a way? Presumably the author is a kind of device for organizing meaning, much like Dworkin’s integrity, but need it take that format?] The logic of interpretation is typically reducible to intention attribution. [What role does the counterfactual author play in structuring meaning?] The criteria of interpretive success will depend upon the object, whether it is the real author or the counterfactual author. If the former, success will depend upon the retrieval of the author’s actual intentions. “Likewise, if the author is characterized in terms of some ideal representative of a certain genre, for instance, the presumptions which are taken to determine this c aracterization would provide the criteria of success for the particular interpretation offered.” [The criteria of success would seem, then, to be the principles, ideals, etc. that we attribute to the counterfactual author. These attributed qualities would be doing all the work – is the attribution of intention to the hypothetical author, then, really necessary at all?] [Does this account presuppose a weird dichotomy between what an object is and what it means? This dichotomy is different, if present at all, in Dworkin.] Chapter 3: Dworkin’s Theory of Interpretation and the Nature of Jurisprudence Three main insights of Dworkin’s theory of interpretation: “First, that interpretation strives to present its object in its best possible light. Second, that interpretation is essentially genre-dependent. And third, that there are certain constraints that determine the limits of possible interpretations of a given object.” Why the best light? Dworkin doesn’t really address this question in depth but claims that otherwise we are left with no way of justifying and choosing an interpretation or we are left with the author’s intention model, which we should reject. [Marmor doesn’t seem clear on what precisely it means to present something in its best light – seems to conflate it with most appealing light which, I take it, is different than what Dworkin has in mind.] “Dworkin is quite right to maintain that without having some views about the values inherent in the genre to which the text is taken to belong, no interpretation can take off the ground. The values we associate with the genre partly, but crucially, determine what would make sense to say about the text, what are the kinds of meaning we could ascribe to it.” There is no necessity for an interpretation to present an object in its best light with regards to the genre it is taken to be part of. Interpretations “could simply strive to present it in a certain light, perhaps better than some, worse than others, but in a way which highlights an aspect of the meaning of the text which may be worth paying attention to for some reason or another.” [What kind of reasons would count in choosing to present it in one light rather than another?] There is simply zero grounds for Dworkin’s assertion that we have no reason to pay attention to an interpretation that does not present it in its best light. Take a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet, for example – not the best light, but a legitimate one. [This seems related to the next criticism – clearly Dworkin would have to loosen his insistence on the best, though not to detriment.] Moreover, especially with regards to art, it doesn’t appear possible to make an all things considered judgment about the best interpretation given the incommensurability of different values that are taken to inhere in a given genre. [Dworkin can respond here that we may have different available interpretations that could be justified with respect to the relevant value. Moreover, a lack of common denominator does not prevent any comparison whatsoever.] Constructive interpretation concerns social practices constituted by norms – it imposes a purpose or value rendering intelligible the normative character of the practice. There is a separate aspect of constructive interpretation that maintains that elements of the practice are sensitive to the point of the practice. It is important to note that different social practices will institutionalize themselves in different ways – thus, different practices will establish varying conditions on how the practice can be altered. The position of the positivists is that evaluative judgments concerning what the law should be are insufficient for determining what the law is given the nature of law’s institutionalization.&nb p; [This would seem to reside on a certain conception of law, i.e. an interpretation about where the value of law lies.] “[T]his being one of the main points of dispute between Dworkin and his positivist opponents, Dworkin cannot at this initial state presume law to be sensitive to its value in the manner that other, non-institutional practices might be, without incurring the charge of having assumed the very point at issue.” The upshot for Dworkin is that any explanation of a social practice such as law requires the same kind of reasoning as participation in that practice. This will be called the hermeneutic thesis. We can try to reconstruct a justification for this view based on the necessity of shared background assumptions – but this will not do since Dworkin’s claim is stronger: it contends that participants’ and theorists’ must “adopt one and the same normative point of view.” [The sense of normative here is unclear. It is true, though, that shared background assumptions do not imply viewing the law as valuable in any particular way, or at least it does not imply this in any strong sense.] Dworkin makes two distinct points with the hermeneutic thesis: “First, that the explanation of a social practice, like law or the arts, is essentially interpretative, and as such, necessarily value laden. Second, that the interpretation of such social practices, which Dworkin calls ‘argumentative’, is unique in the sense that the practice itself is an evaluative enterprise, and that therefore the interpreter of such a practice must form an evaluative judgment of her own about those values which are inherent in the practice that she purports to interpret.” [As stated, the first thesis is terribly ambiguous – for Dworkin, it clear implies a commitment to constructive interpretation. For Marmor, who accepts it, it is totally unclear what commitment he intends to make. He seems to mean simply that we have criteria for success concerning what counts as a successful explanation.] Mamor denies the second thesis. “What Dworkin seems to ignore here is that there is a crucial difference between forming a view about the values which are manifest in a social practice, like law, and actually having evaluative judgments about them.” [The problem, however, it that it is a contentious matter what values are part of the law – a theorist’s account of what values are constitutive of a particular legal system must rely on the kind of arguments which participants rely on. Of course, a theorist might simply note a debate about values and attempt to remain agnostic, but this will fail to be a full theoretical account of what law is!] Dworkin’s thesis seems to depend exclusively on his account of constructive interpretation. [This seems exactly right.] Chapter 4: Coherence, Holism, and Interpretation: The Epistemic Foundation of Dworkin’s Legal Theory Begins with discussion of Rawls’ reflective equilibrium. Sums up dual criticism as follows: “[T]he assumption that intuitions are independently true and the converse one, that their truth depends on fitting a coherent scheme, both seem to yield paradoxical results.” Dworkin, in his article “The Original Position”, claims that Rawls cannot commit himself to ethical realism. “[T]he natural model presupposes some form of ethical realism, while the constructive model does not. One important difficulty arising from an attempt to apply the natural model to Rawls is, that under the natural model, any theory which dopes not account for an intuition, at least for one which is held firmly, cannot be wholly satisfactory, just as scientific theory which does not account for certain observational data it is supposed to cover, would not be satisfactory in a familiar way.” Rawls, rather, is committed to a constructivist view of morality. Moreover, the reason we value coherence epistemically in moral theory is that it itself is a value of political morality – fairness requires consistency and publicity in the application of moral standards. Marmor notes the following problem with such a view: “[I]f coherence is justified, as it is here, with reference to certain moral values, that is, a specific conception of fairness, then we face the following problem: the presupposed values of fairness must themselves be based upon intuitive convictions, in which case the question of their truth cannot be ignored. If they are taken to be true…we are driven back to the perplexities of the natural model.” Discusses, helpfully, the Fish/Dworkin debate. The upshot is that Dworkin’s interpretive model is best off if it commits itself to a Quineian holism. However, this undermines his distinction between internal and external skepticism since holism must deny that moral judgments constitute a closed system. [This analysis seems exactly right.] Endorses Simmonds view that Dworkin’s theory does not meet the requirements of complexity he identifies as necessary to avoid vicious circularity in interpretive judgments of fit and identity. Coherence is doing the work through and through and therefore the interpretive theory of law is circular. [Will require further investigation, though it is unclear how coherence is doing any work in the pre-interpretive stage. At this stage, the judgments, if interpretive, seem to be derived from different sources. In any case, using coherence as a value seems to be highly suspect.] Why doesn’t Dworkin just reject Fish’s assumptions: because of his jurisprudence. “If legal texts can have a meaning that is not entirely dependent on a process of interpretation, then it is at least sometimes the case that the law can simply be understood, and applied, without the mediation of interpretation. And if that is the case, then the argument from interpretation against legal positivism collapses. It is no longer the case that every conclusion about what the law is, depends on evaluative considerations about what it ought to be.” Chapter 5: Semantics, Realism, and Natural Law Assessment of Michael Moore’s legal realism and its implications. [The final criticisms of Moore are not decisive.] Chapter 6: Constructive Identification and Razian Authority A consideration of Dworkin’s denial that the communication model of interpretation is appropriate for legal interpretation. Marmor argues that intentions do play a crucial role in the identification of legal norms in a way that is incompatible with Dworkin’s “coherence thesis”. Marmor takes Dworkin to be committed to the constructive identification thesis: that the identification of something as part of the legal, artistic, etc. genre can be done sufficiently by evaluative considerations. “Here, one must maintain that evaluative considerations are sufficient to determine whether something is a legal norm or a work of art”. [Fit, however, constrains possible evaluative considerations – thus evaluative considerations are not sufficient in themselves.] “Now the crucial point here is this: if you maintain the possibility of constructive identification in art, you must assume that works of art can be identified as such on the basis of certain features they happen to possess, features which contain no reference to any particular intention to create a work of art…unless we take intentions into account, how can we discriminate between the concept of an aesthetic artifact and the con ept of a work of art?” [It is unclear, and I think false, that constructive interpretation of anything requires identifying something irrespective of an artificers intentions. Those intentions may be relevant, dependent upon the genre under which we are trying to classify the object. Nothing, seemingly, about constructive interpretation in general excludes this possibility.] Marmor’s point is that it turns out to be impossible to identify art as art without reference to an artist’s intentions – especially given the state of contemporary art. [It is notable that Marmor’s response to counterexample implicitly depends upon a fully developed theory of aesthetics. His cursory comments on the matter of identifying art seem insufficient to say the least.] The rest of the chapter considers the incompatibility of Raz’s account of authority with constructive interpretation. The incompatibilities mentioned do not move beyond what Raz identifies in his article “Authority, Law and Morality”, but a defense of this notion of authority is defended in several [inconclusive] respects. [Raz and Marmor want to separate identification from content. This is not clearly a defensible separation.] Chapter 7: No Easy Cases? Chapter defends notion that there is a distinction between easy and hard cases in the positivist sense. Takes a Hartian approach and ultimately defends the distinction by associating it Wittgenstein’s conception of rule following. The point is that one need to look the purpose of rule in order to understand what the rule requires. Chapter 8: Legislative Intent and the Authority of Law Examines the following doctrine concerning the role of legislative intent in adjudication: “[F]irst, it would hold that laws, at least in certain cases, are enacted with relatively specific intentions, and that this is a matter of fact which is discernible through an ordinary fact-finding procedure. Second, that in certain cases the presence of such a fact, namely, that the law was enacted with a certain intention, provides judges with a reason to decide the legal dispute in accordance with the relevant legislative intent.” [It is important that for Marmor, interpretive strategies are only appropriate in hard cases. However, we should wonder what grounds positivism can offer for deciding a hard case in any manner which is not the morally best manner according to the judgment of the judge. There are no legal grounds, by definition, in hard cases and so what justificatory strategy would endorse any judicial decision except for the morally best one?] We can ascribe intentions to a legislative body, when this is possible at all, by taking the shared intentions of the majority, rather than some group intention, to be the significant intentions. Moreover, we should expect a good deal of consensus about intentions for otherwise it is hard to explain how legislative bodies are able to produce so much legislation. Discussion of kinds of intentions concludes as follows: “I have distinguished between three main types of intention that are potentially relevant from the legal point of view. Apart from the intentions that are manifest in the language of the law itself, legislators typically have further intentions in enacting a given law, and sometimes they would have certain intentions bearing on its proper application. I have also suggested that some of these further intentions may be essentially non-avowable, in which case they are rendered initially irrelevant. Finally, I have pointed out that considerations of consistency require that the legislator’s application intentions be taken into account only if, and to the extent that, they are in accord with his further intentions.” The manner in which intentionalism is to be justif ed relies on the distinction, Marmor maintains, between expert and mere collective action authority. “The point I wanted to make is strictly conditional: if, and only if, a certain law is justified on the basis of the expertise branch of the normal justification thesis, would it make sense to defer to the legislature’s intentions in the interpretation of the law, that is, to the extent that there is, in fact,; such an intention and it can clarify something that needs clarification.” Insofar as a legislature can be considered an expert on the matter requiring adjudication and interpretation should the body’s intention be taken into account. Chapter 9: Constitutional Interpretation Begins by laying out general necessary features of a constitution. Then Marmor moves on to consider general questions of constitutional legitimacy. First, he considers what grounds might be offered for the legitimacy of a constitution at all. He notes that the central question is what permits a single generation to bind future generations. He then examines four arguments to avoid this problem. The first is based on the moral legitimacy of the constitution; Marmor rejects this solution for the [truly dubious] reason that the constitution would make no practical difference because it would not supply reasons in addition to those provided by morality [but, presumably, the point is that these legally valid rules would be institutionally enshrined]. The second is based on the moral authority of the framers and Marmor rightly rejects this on the basis of the idealization of the framers it requires and less rightly on the basis that there cannot be moral authorities. Third is the “argument from interpretation” which claims that “as long as the particular content of the constitution is determined by its interpretation, and the authoritative interpretation at any time correctly instantiates the values which ought to be upheld in the community, the constitution would be morally legitimate”. The fourth is Raz’s which argues that a constitution is valid so long as its constraints are morally permissible because conventions of this type might aid the continuity of the legal system, i.e. it is important to have a convention of this type and the constitution is a kind of this type. Marmor appears to endorse these two approaches and concludes: “The conditions for the legitimacy of a constitution must comprise the following conditions. First, the values and principles enshrined in it must be morally permissible…Second, when certain choices are made in particular cases, they would be legitimate if they are either morally underdetermined, or else, morally correct…It follows from this that both arguments must assume that at least in those areas in which the constitution would make a moral difference, it can be interpreted to make the difference that it should, that is, according to the true moral principles that should apply to the particular case...the moral legitimacy of constitutions very much dependent on the practices of their interpretation. In other words, a great deal of the burden of moral legitimacy is shifted by these arguments to the application of the constitution, thus assuming that the constitution is legitimate only if the courts are likely to apply the constitution in a morally desirable way.” [This implies that the only significant value constitutions have is in providing a conventional practice where some such practice is required.] Moves on to argue that courts typically rely, and rightly so, on moral considerations when deciding constitutional issues because typically, in cases of the kind that reach the supreme or constitutional court, there is no law on the case. Much of this relies on his earlier discussion about the nature of interpretation in the law – that legal interpretation is always a matter of cha ging the law. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has (...) no image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

The traditional divide between nature and culture restricts to the latter the use of information. Biosemiotics claims instead that the divide between nature and culture is a mere subdivision within the living world but that semiosis is the specific feature which distinguishes the living from the inanimate. The present paper is intended to reformulate this basic tenet in information-theoretic terms, to support it using information-theoretic arguments, and to show that its consequences match reality. It first proposes a ‘receiver-oriented’ interpretation (...) of semiosis. This interpretation implies that the means for recording, storing and processing information exclusively reside in the living world (extended so as to include the artefacts it produces). Then it may be argued that the main difference between the inanimate world and the living one lies in the fact that the very existence of the latter relies on information, which on the contrary is not relevant to the former. Thus, besides matter and energy, information is an entity irreducible to them which must be taken into account in any attempt for describing and understanding life. Information can interact with the real world only provided it is borne by some physical support: it must be ‘physically inscribed’. Contrary to matter and energy, information can be shared, not necessarily exchanged, so a same information can be borne by a number of distinct supports. Any living thing possesses means for recording, storing and processing information which are necessary for keeping it alive and securing its progeny. In particular, its genome contains hereditary information, can be replicated, and instructs the construction and maintenance of a phenotype. The simultaneous existence of a phenotype and of a genome, where the latter bears the symbolic description of the former, is mandatory for enabling the self-reproduction of an organism. Bearing and using information then endows a living thing with the ability to decrease the physical entropy, hence to act as Maxwell’s demon. Not only its own life is maintained against physical entropy, but its self-reproduction multiplies clones of the demon. Taking information as the entity which differentiates the living from the inanimate also supports Rovelli’s ‘relational’ interpretation of quantum physics. Experimental apparatuses then appear as information-theoretic channels from the inanimate world to a living observer. Besides having its own perspective (as stated by Rovelli), each of these channels has its own horizon because its capacity is necessarily finite. As another consequence, we may assert that the physicists’ quest of a ‘theory of everything’ is doomed to failure since, for lack of considering information as a relevant entity, physicists deny the living world, hence themselves. (shrink)

In the fiqhī doctrine, the issue of nafy al-madārik does not find a place for itself with this very nomenclature, and in the classical approach, it is often referred to by different names, but we have found it appropriate to use this term in order to make the subject more understandable and to lead to a more practical use of the expression rather than a sentence. One of the main reasons why we find the subject worthy of research is that (...) there are almost no independent and original studies on it. Another reason was to determine the relationship between the two, since those who frequently and openly do not give it a chance examine it under the title of istishāb. In the process, our multidisciplinary reading tendency led us to realize how similar some of the terminological expressions that appear in modern logic are. In Islamic legal methodology, the method of “absence of evidence/nafy al-madārik”, which plays an important role in the knowledge of basic methods for experts who will deduce religious rulings from the relevant sources, is mostly discussed together with the evidence of istishāb and not analyzed in a separate context. In the absence of evidence that would constitute the ruling on any subject, jurists have mentioned this method, which states that there is no ruling because there is no evidence. The issue of the absence of evidence, which is usually analyzed by the Hanafīs under the heading of fasid evidence, was occasionally used by other jurists. If the absence of evidence does not result in the absence of the ruling, the scholars have resorted to the evidence of istishāb, which is the opinion that the ruling continues to exist. However, as we have mentioned, the mixed treatment of both methods has led to the problem of where they should be positioned in the hierarchical evidence platform and how they should be perceived. The fact that a sixth prayer was not commanded upon the necessity of the existence of the five daily prayers is one of the main examples of the method of nafy. Accordingly, it is possible to rule that the sixth prayer does not exist in the absence of any evidence showing that the legislator did not impose a new one on top of the five rak'ahs and vice versa. In terms of its scope, the issue of the absence of evidence is not only used in classical fiqh. In fact, the breadth of this subject should not be limited to Islamic sciences. In fact, the method of absence of evidence also guides the modern understanding of science. The method in question, which is mostly expressed as the absence of evidence, is rejected by a considerable number of popular acceptance. Science, so to speak, does not see the absence of evidence as a correct approach. A famous and striking example of the absence of evidence is as follows: “There is no evidence for the existence of aliens on Earth, therefore there are no aliens, or aliens do not exist, based on the lack of evidence for this”.In this study, first of all, the elements constituting the phrase “absence of evidence” are analyzed. The method of absence of evidence is discussed together with its debates and parties in terms of the meaning formed as a result of the examination. Its relationship with istishāb has been analyzed in terms of its relevance. In doing so, we have also included whether it is sufficient for the person who claims that the ruling does not exist due to the absence of the relevant evidence to prove his claim in a mere way. While trying to reveal all these, we have also tried to address how correct it is for the person who claims that there is no evidence for the relevant ruling in the method of absence of evidence to make a decision based solely on this. In addition, we have discussed the issue of absence of evidence together with some issues of various disciplines such as kalam and logic due to its relevance. As a result of the discussions, we tried to show that the method of nafy and istishab are not the same thing. Following these, some evaluations were made about the theory of nafys. Among these evaluations, there are some interpretations that are close to the Hanafīs' stance on this issue and some determinations about the fallacy of nafy in terms of the science of logic. As a result, an independent study on nafy al-madārīq has been presented to you, the reader, based on a logical approach to it. However, this attempt will not completely fill the gap in the literature on the subject. We hope that this study will serve as an opportunity for further research to fill the aforementioned gap, and that the subject will reach a wider audience. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Ethics by Thomas SternMattia RiccardiThomas Stern, Nietzsche’s Ethics Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 69 pp. ISBN: 9781108713320. Paper, $22.00.Thomas Stern sets out his approach in this “Cambridge Element” on Nietzsche’s ethics in a bold and straightforward way: “My own intention is to stay very close to the texts, to read them in light of what we know about Nietzsche’s intellectual background, and to present the philosophical ideas (...) found in them as clearly, neutrally and thoroughly as possible” (3). As a result, Stern guesses, the “Nietzsche on display in these pages may seem, in places, dated, wrong-headed and extremely unappealing.” In my case, the guess is mostly correct. Fortunately, there are reasons to doubt that Stern’s Nietzsche is also the “real one,” contrary to what is claimed. (I don’t mean to suggest Nietzsche is never “dated,” “wrong-headed,” or “extremely unappealing.”)Stern, who focuses on the ethics of the late Nietzsche—roughly, from BGE onward—claims it consists of two basic claims. The first claim is a descriptive one—the “Life Theory”—to the effect that striving for power is an essential feature of life as such: “Living and power seeking cannot be pulled apart” (6). Power seeking, in turn, is manifested in behaviors that could be generically described as aggressive. A suggestive passage: “life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting” (BGE 259; if not otherwise indicated, Nietzsche’s works are quoted from the Cambridge University Press translations). The second claim—the “Normative Command”—is directly derived from the descriptive one: “it is ethical to further the goals of Life and it is unethical to impede them” (11). On this reading, Nietzsche turns out to defend a version of metaethical realism: the very nature of (biological) reality gives us an objective criterion for what is ethical. As Stern puts it, “His ethics track what he takes to be a deep, fundamental fact about living things, the Life Theory, which applies at all times and in all places” (23). [End Page 226]In my view, there are many problems with this reading, both interpretive and conceptual. To start with, although Nietzsche often supplies characterizations of life like the one in BGE 259, it is not clear that they should be understood as (merely) descriptive. BGE 22 makes explicit that a claim to the effect that nature (considered here as the object of physics) is a “tyrannically ruthless and pitiless execution of power claims” cannot count as part of a description of the (physical) world. Of course, Nietzsche is not talking here about life. But that he explicitly classifies a will to power claim as “interpretation,” and not as part of (physical) nature’s “text,” should warn readers from taking such claims to be (merely) descriptive (even if they often look like that)—a point already made by Maudemarie Clark in Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 222–23). A similar worry also applies to the idea, at the heart of the Normative Command, that life has certain goals. For although there are passages where Nietzsche talks of life’s goals, the problem is again whether they are about “goals” that “life” really has. Sometimes Nietzsche writes that nature lacks any goal whatsoever—it is “indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard” (BGE 9). And sometimes he writes that goals (and values) are a human product. (See, for instance, TI “Errors” 8: “We have invented the concept of ‘purpose’: there are no purposes in reality”; on values, see Z I “Thousand and One Goals.”) Thus, the very status of Nietzsche’s claims about the essence of life and its goals is not as straightforward as Stern suggests.Another kind of textual evidence points in the same direction. For although it is true that Nietzsche often describes life as such as power seeking, as in BGE 259, this is not always the case. In the very late writings from which Stern draws a great deal of the textual evidence to back up his... (shrink)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims of a (...) wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

Citing works by Marcel Duchamp and others, this article argues that the transformation of what Danto termed a mere real thing into an artwork, and of an artwork into a mere real thing, are not symmetrical operations. It argues that mere real things and artworks not only belong to different categories, but that these categories are themselves of different kinds—the former being closed, and the latter open. Viewing mere real things through the lens of art leads (...) to confusion. Amending Goodman’s question, ‘When is art?’, this article suggests that one can only arrive at working definitions of what constitutes both an artwork and a mere real thing on the basis of contingent function. The adequate analysis of any given thing or action necessitates viewing it in accordance with an appropriate paradigm, whether that of an artwork, a thought experiment, or even a prank. Adequate analysis requires disciplinary dexterity, deference when appropriate, and multi-disciplinary attention best achieved through collaboration. (shrink)

Education is essential to life, and the epidemic affected everything. Parents want to get their kids the most important teaching. However, since COVID-19 has affected schools and other institutions, providing education has become the most significant issue. Online learning pedagogy uses technology to provide high-quality learning environments for student-centered learning. Further, this study explores the experiences and challenges faced by Filipino tertiary students regarding the lack of gadgets amidst online learning. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study (...) were: Some college students still have difficulty with online learning. Attending online classes is difficult, especially for students with limited resources. Smartphones, other gadgets, and internet connections play a significant role in online classrooms because they are the ones that students utilize while learning online, which is essential for successful participation in online higher education as well as for solving a variety of other difficulties in the new normal. Further, College students face similar health challenges. Having an online learning setup is not just about students' struggles with learning resources but also about their health issues. When our respondents used their smartphones for an extended period, they reported eye aches and blurred vision. They also said that some of their body parts, such as their legs and back, are aching, and feel pressured because they tend to overthink things in their surroundings, which causes them incredible difficulty in performing their best in attending online classes. Even though college students continue to suffer from a lack of learning resources during online sessions, they do their best to manage their needs and the scarcity of learning resources. Students have unique coping methods for dealing with difficulties in online classes. (shrink)

The central thrust of Platonic poetics - for Plato had no aesthetics - is not the outright abolition of poetry, nor merely a relocation of it in view of recent acquisitions in the scientific knowledge of the day. Rather it is the quest for an authentic poetry and for ways of differentiating true from false poetry. The experience of transcendence through poetic symbols - of insight into ultimate reality - cannot be explained on the basis of the mimetic theory. The (...) world as a totality, its origin, the gods in the heavens, the shades and shadows of Hades, the tragic Destiny of the dramatist, and their interplay: these are crucial to the Greek experience of reality as voiced by the poet, but for none of them is there any possible model in the visible world, natural or craft-produced.23 Consequently these can never be imitated, and thus too the traditional vocation of the poet as the namer of the holy is precisely what gets eliminated in the last book of the Republic, and in Aristotle's refurbishment of mimēsis.Plato takes poetry seriously both for the polis and in the polis because it poses a serious danger. Poetry threatens “the safety of the city which is within us” (Rep. 608). Yet with Hölderlin he could agree that “Where there is danger there also lies salvation,” and so recognize the veridicousness of poetry, its truth-bearing power. At the basis of every life-form, every political order, there lies a poetic projection. The work of philosophical criticism and dissent can therefore not but enter into the quarrel with poetry. For Aristotle on the other hand, poetry, its meaning transvaluated, has been removed from the precinct of conflict. To put the point dramatically: one could never imagine Aristotle expelling the poets from any state, real or ideal. That would be a category-mistake since the worst that poetry can do is to turn into a catharsis interruptus.Although we have no unmediated experience of Being, the theory of inspiration points in such a direction. Yet even for the poet, it must be stressed, poetic inspiration must not be torn from the process of its self-realizing production or technē. Nor is the Heraclean metaphor fully adequate to critical interpretation, for it emphasizes sensitive conformance to the word at the expense of the distance required for proper engagement. The missing dimension is hinted at in the interrogative approach of Socrates, in his concern for the discovery and preservation of truth. Poetic inspiration, but also poetic interpretation, will not be poetic unless it is, as Heidegger says, a coming-to-work, whether that means a work of art or work of thought. Poetic inspiration must be an eventuation of truth in the work; as distinguished from mystical inspiration, it seeks embodiment and mediation. In other terms, for there to be an artwork both the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension of craft must intersect. The eventuation of truth in the work must be fitting, due and opportune; the intersection must have its proper measure (summetria, Phil. 643). This alone constitutes the genuine necessity of the work, and only when this character prevails can the eventuation of truth take place. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 60-67. At the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being,” presented to the University of Freiburg in 1962, he cautions against, it would seem, the requirement that philosophy make sense, or be necessarily responsible (Stambaugh, 1972). At that time Heidegger's project focused on thinking as thinking and in order to elucidate his ideas he drew comparisons between his project and two paintings by Paul Klee as well with a poem by Georg Trakl. In front of Klee's (...) Saints from the Window and Death of Fire —though we wouldn’t absolutely understand what we were seeing—he writes, “we should want to stand…a long while.” In a similar manner, of Trakl’s poem “Septet of Death”—although it is likely we are unsure in what we hear—Heidegger states that, “we should want to hear…[it] often.” Heidegger further states that in appreciating these, “we “should abandon any claim that [they] be immediately intelligible” (1). So also we must we approach, Heidegger continues, the realm of theoretical physics, in which the difficult work of Werner Heisenberg, be listened to “without protest” and without “any claim that he be immediately understood.” These works, like his own project, merit the time they take to be originally (mis)understood. But this is not necessarily true for philosophy, Heidegger advises, because, “That thinking is supposed to offer ‘worldly wisdom’ and perhaps even a ‘way to a blessed life’” (1). Philosophy is in the unique position of being both abstract (what do we talk about when we talk?) and at the same moment, useful. There are demands that it make sense, that it be, grounded, immediate, and most importantly, rational. Heidegger draws these comparisons between the works of Klee and Trakl and Heisenberg not to claim that philosophy is totally irresponsible. He does not claim that the poet, the painter, nor the physicist have acted irresponsibly. Rather, he would say, they are rising to the highest levels of intelligibility, though it is perhaps an intelligibility that is commonly unavailable to us. In Trakl’s case, as we shall see, mastery is the end result of difficult words. Instead, Heidegger seems be making pleas: for a period of uninterrupted unintelligibility (pure unintelligibility); and that there is a time (that time is now) when, “thinking is…placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom” (1-2). Heidegger argues that philosophy requires a period of time in which, instead of focusing on the practical—or even on the worldly—the discipline draw its “determination” instead from the place of painting and poetry and physics. In doing so, “we should have to abandon any claims to immediate intelligibility” (2). But Heidegger doesn’t offer this as a way out. We still have to turn up, we “still have to listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary” (2). The point for Heidegger, is not to listen to a series of propositions, but instead to “follow the movement of showing” (2). I. … Maybe we're here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most: pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.… Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” There is little more fundamental, preliminary, in the world than language. We use language, in the form of speech, constantly, whether we are saying anything or not. “Man speaks,” Heidegger writes, and goes on to describe in his essay “Language” (2001) the constant speaking that we do. “We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly speaking or listening but are attending to some work or taking a rest” (187). Speaking is expression, an utterance of something internal. It is a recognition of a world. It is a way of communicating thought and it is an activity that we all do, inevitably. Speaking separates the human from the animal world, and despite advances in primatology that seek to give ‘voice’ to primates and other non-human animals, it can safely be said that our form of communication—what we call speech and know as language—is the most advanced, the most complicated. We use it to present and represent the world around us; through actual utterances (vocalization) or through the written word or through ‘unvoiced thoughts’ and dreams. We use language, but more specifically speech—naming—to transmit moods, thoughts, desires, aversions, and feelings. These expressions, mere utterances, nearly always find a source in words, whether spoken or not. Heidegger writes that this common view of language means “that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as the one who speaks that man is—man” (187). Speaking then—utterance—surrounds us constantly, whether in the form of careful thought—in the form of an academic paper, say—or in the half mutterings and forgotten thoughts of a nearly remembered dream. Like scaffolding, the apparatus of speech sustains and explains the world, making, in a sense, the world rational, making it apparent. When we speak, we describe, and in doing so, name the world. We use words, through this process of naming, to interpret and sustain the world we see, and the world we imagine. Like Rilke’s naming of jug, and bridge, and window, and stream, we describe—and inscribe upon—the world through an activity of naming. Are we here, perhaps, to name? Is it possible not to name? Is it possible to regard and to view and to look around without naming what we see? Is it possible to feel—to experience—world without giving utterance to that feeling, that process? Sadness, grief, joy, ecstasy, hunger, thirst. Desk, light, room, pen, book, world. White, black, tomorrow, today. Each of these words is a name given to a thing I see in front of me, or a concept that I imagine (in the case of tomorrow or world). What arises in my mind has already existed. If I imagine it, it is named. The word for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘desk’ and ‘light’ precedes me, and precedes my concept of it. The idea of it is already pre-informed, and I must, in a certain sense, bend my ideas to it. When I imagine a table, I imagine my own table (or I imagine an idea of table) but that imagining must follow certain general rules; while, perhaps, it might not always require four legs and a horizontal surface, it must, at least not be, say, a pool of water, or a pile of excrement. It must have some tableness to it to be a table. It must, with Heidegger, table. Otherwise, speech is reduced to gibberish. For Heidegger however, the discussion of language points to something deeper than its “scientific and analytic” study as a communicative device. Indeed, Heidegger seeks to understand language not in reference to man or woman, not as an utterance of humanity, but in reference to itself. In doing so he abandons the conversation—that is, he casts away the traditional arguments surrounding philosophy of language; that it is a means of expression; that it is a human activity; and that it is somehow a representation of something that is—in order to seek to understand language as language, on its own terms. Heidegger is not a philosopher of language, but a philosopher of world, of being. Despite these “correct ideas” holding sway “over the whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language…they ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language” (191). What is this “oldest natural cast of language? It is the act of language itself. Language is language and language speaks. “Most often,” Heidegger writes, “and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past” (195). Speech, as we normally encounter it, is like Echo herself calling out to Narcissus, doomed to repeat what has already been said, a mere remnant of what was once language, a trace left behind in the gathering silence of becoming. In both the essay “Language” and in his three lecture course “The Nature of Language” (1982), Heidegger attempts to unpack the seeming tautology of language as language. In each, he focuses on poetry as a way out, or into, a true discussion of the oldest natural cast of language. Poetry is pure speech. In poetry, language is brought to language and language speaks ( Die Sprach spricht ). In the act of poetry, the act of pure speech, the poet names (on the surface not different from how I name this table, this computer) but in the poet naming, the naming does not “hand out titles,” “apply terms,” but rather the naming is a call, a calling forth of entities that bring them into their own, allow them to take their place purely, without compromise. This calling, Heidegger (2001) states, “here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefor always here and there—here into presence, there into absence” (196). II. Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine. Georg Trakl “A Winter Evening” Heidegger is often given short shrift as an abysmally difficult writer, as one that makes no sense and is needlessly difficult. In doing this though, we forget sometimes his eloquence, his simple beauty in writing. Of the above opening stanza, “Window with falling snow is arrayed/ Long tolls the vesper bell.” he writes (2001), This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197). The speaking names the winter evening time. It is almost impossible to comment on that one line by Heidegger. It is as though it must exist on its own completely, without elucidation—as though in front of it we must stand as we do in front of a painting by Klee, that is, we must abandon any claim . Silent and devoted. The speaking of the poem here is not clearly different from common speech ( rede ) yet there is, via Heidegger, an invitation to experience that auracular quality of light and stillness that a gentle, dusk tinged snowfall gives; words evoking a quality so clear, so poignant that, in a sense, Heidegger’s work, at this moment, has been done. But what does this naming accomplish? What does the call call? Remember, it is not the poet that calls, but the naming which calls. The poet has only brought the words forward; it is now the words— snow, vesper bell, window— that take new life in the pure language of the poem. Entities are called forth into presence, like the speaking that names the winter evening time. Not to be present amongst us now, however; naming ‘table’ in the poem does not place it in front of us in this room. Rather, the naming places entities into a gathering which is also a sheltering. The naming brings them to be. In an act of appropriation, things come to be purely as their own, unimpeded by a predetermined expectation. They are called to themselves into an arrival. In Being and Time (1962), Heidegger famously describes the movement between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand in his analysis of the hammer, and of equipment in general. This analysis is already known, if not always clear, to most readers of Heidegger. Briefly, a hammer is ordinarily zuhanden or ready-to-hand; it is part of the background of the world, equipment used and never thought about, like this desk, this sheet of paper, this room. Our interaction with it is temporary and it is historically different for each entity and each relation. We need a hammer, we use a hammer. If all goes according to plan, the hammer remains ready-to-hand; it remains, in a sense, undisclosed and certainly unobtrusive. Our world is undisturbed by the hammer. Only when the hammer or the car or the computer is broken (or sometimes unused or unrecognized or missing) does it intrude into our world, become conspicuous as an object present-at-hand, or vorhanden . In this case, we reach for the hammer, it is broken and we suddenly notice it’s being, broken though it is. The thing which was always ready to hand—handy—is suddenly abstract, something to be examined, if only in its absence or disfunction. This can be exhibited for all entities, and it is important to note that in this analysis the zuhanden / vorhanden split is not restricted to a specific form of constructed material; zuhanden does not refer to the car, and vorhanden the sunset. No entity is ever exclusively ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; they are instead, interpenetrated with each others mode of being, one informing the other in a way that both brings things forth into the world—discloses is the word Heidegger chooses—and at the same time conceals them. As one mode is coming to be so another mode is withdrawing. This flux and movement between modes is precisely what brings the world forward, and what makes it manifest. It exists beyond where we tread and before man took dubious control of the world. We go to find a book or turn on the computer and it is missing or broken and we become aware of the object, as though for the first time. We walk to the water to glimpse the sunset and miss it, or it is less than stellar; in the sunset’s grayness, we become aware of it’s being sunset. The thing is disclosed in its withdrawal. Echoing Heraclitus, we can say that as something is coming to be, it is already becoming something other. Of similar importance to the fact that things are never all of one, or all of the other, they are also never alone. The hammer is never a single object, but is in relation always to the whole. Heidegger (1962) states, Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves…What we encounter as closest to us…is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical, spatial sense, but as equipment for residing…it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before its does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (97). Equipment resides—dwells—in its relations, in its proximal being to other beings. Within the structure of totality, a series of relations is always occurring. The hammer is on the workbench in the carpenter’s hand in the workshop in the village under the sky and under the sun. It doesn’t stop there. Equipment surrounds us and the focus is not on what it does, or what one does with it—the carpenter with the hammer, the writer with laptop—but with the fact that it is. Equipment occurs in relation and is always occurring around us overhead, underfoot, by the stream and in the city. There is a constant exchange of relations happening, and as this occurs, so the world occurs, so the world both discloses and withdraws, into and out of itself. In a very real sense, language is also equipment. It is the thing that we use most often without thought, it is ready-to-hand (except when it’s not.) As we re- cognize the world around us, as we offer names for things and make lists, we are using language much like we might use a hammer, that is, bluntly. Most of the time it is invisible and we draw on it without wondering how we are going to say something. When language does intrude, it does so in an awkward moment, that moment when we can’t remember the right word, when we forget a phrase. At that second, it “speaks itself as language,” it reveals itself as malfunctioning equipment, and we “undergo” an experience with language, in Heidegger’s famous formulation. Language is not a tool anymore that we use to bludgeon an object, but something instead that we submit to, that we experience. In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger (1982) writes, But when does language speak to us as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it a thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being (59). The poet’s words become themselves, become appropriate, only when they no longer function in the prosaic world; they instead intrude as they come to be. Language itself brings itself to language. Names, like the entities they indicate, are always becoming something else. As noted above, language, through the poet, has brought forth entities from words previously “known.” I thought that I knew snow, but through Trakl’s re- presentation of the word, language calls forth a new image of snow, indeed calls forth snow itself. The vesper bell tolls longer, the table is for many laid. In bringing forth things , language has brought the world to presence. In everyday naming, word occludes world, preventing, in its everydayness, its coming forth, its disclosing. But what is this world that word has been brought forth into? In the same way that language speaks, world worlds. World, left alone, un-interfered with, comes into itself. It worlds. Again, this sounds like a tautology, but it is essential to Heidegger’s thought (and in my mind is more of a “god killer” than Nietzsche.) One of the most overlooked (and under-appreciated) aspects of Heidegger is his later examination and enthusiasm for the “fourfold,” or the system through which things come to be, through which things thing in a world worlding. The fourfold is the interaction of earth and sky, mortals and gods. Things come to be in the interstices and gathering of the fourfold. The fourfold provides both a place of being, and a sheltering, a place to dwell. Heidegger writes that “the things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The four are united primally in being toward one another, a fourfold.” The poet has called, through the act of pure naming, things to come forth. In the purity of the fourfold—that is, when that is all that there is, when there are no other distractions, definitions, things—entities themselves can come to be. It is important to note that Heidegger is not saying that there are four formal things in the world, autonomous entities unto themselves. He is not evoking a pre-Socratic formula as to what makes up the world; instead, the four mirror each other constantly. (Heidegger calls this the ‘mirror-play.’) They interpenetrate in the same way that the modes of being of things interpenetrate themselves. There is no discrete exclusivity in being or the fourfold. What makes up things is not a precise recipe of the four main components; what makes up things is the action of the fourfold coming together, the movement of the fourfold which is a becoming. Heidegger (2001) writes that “this gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things.” And he later adds that “thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture—gestate—world” (197). Language brings the world to be. It works not again as a recipe added to things, but instead it is a bridge, or more precisely, a relation. Language relates world to thing, brings world to thing. In a sense, it does not say anything; rather it allows, or calls in its movement. Heidegger (2001) writes that, The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference (199). It is in this inter that language prevails. Language is difference, it is the differential aspect between world and thing that brings world to thing. In the final stanza of Trakl’s poem “The Winter Evening,” Trakl evokes this difference in the second line when he writes, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.” Christopher Fynsk, in his essay “Noise at the Threshold,” draws attention to this point when he writes “it is the figure of the threshold that is language itself, inasmuch as language is defined as the articulation of difference by which difference comes about” (25). Language, as used in the pure language of the poem, draws together world and thing, bridging relation between entity and world. The calling of language calls world to thing, world to being. Heidegger (2001) describes this difference as unique; “of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things are at one with each other” (200). III. Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking—and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone (99). Maurice Blanchot The Writing of Disaster So far, we have allowed Heidegger to put forward what language does, how it functions as a relation and how it operates as a threshold, as a bridge. What interests me is what happens beyond language, beyond the relation. What happens to the thing without the naming, without the poet, or even without the everyday chatter—Fynsk calls this ‘noise’—intruding on being? If language allows things to become by bringing thing to world, what happens when we remove this bringing, this threshold turned to pain? In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger examines the work of the poet Stefan George, specifically “The Word”: Wonder or dream from distant land I carried to my county’s strand And waited till the twilight norn Had found the name within her bourn— Then I could grasp it close and strong It blooms and shines now the front along… Once I returned from happy sail, I had a prize so rich and frail, She sought for long and tidings told: “No like of these depths unfold.” And straight it vanished from my hand, The treasure never graced my land… So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be. That final line, “Where word breaks off no thing may be” is evoked on nearly every page of Heidegger’s essay. It is the line to which he returns over and over and bears repeating. Where word breaks off no thing may be. Where naming ends, no thing. We can interpret this in two ways (at least.) Where word—naming—breaks off, then there is nothing . Or, as I choose to read it, where word breaks off no thing may be. In this I see a hint forward, a marker left behind by Heidegger. What could this look like? What does no thing look like? Like a zen koan ( there is no mirror ) it is as thrilling and horrifying as contemplating what preceded the Big Bang. Because language as naming wasn’t always here; we weren’t always here. One or maybe two aspects of the fourfold (depending on your view of gods) were not always here, and there is no guarantee that we will always be around. What then? Heidegger (1982) describes the landscape that the poet finds, “It names the realm into which the renunciation must enter: it names the call to enter into that relation between thing and word which has now been experienced” (65). The poet, in renouncing, allows for the “may be” of “where word breaks off no thing may be.” This “may be” becomes “a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it from then on.” No thing is lacking. Where word breaks off, there may be, a totality, a completion. If we place the emphasis on may be , we make it affirmative, make it positive. One allows it. No thing is where the word, that is the name, is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where no thing may blossom, enrich, belong, become. What is no thing? Heidegger writes that “thing is anything that in any way is.” And just after this he writes that the “world alone gives being to the thing.” But what happens if there is no word? Word, in this formulation can be seen as an enframing, a challenging of language. By naming, by drawing a perimeter around an object, we hold it, by its definition (that is a brick) to an ordered future. If we borrow from Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1993) the idea of this standing-reserve of an ordered future, we see that “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (322). What happens if there is no naming of the thing? Silence perhaps. Stillness. We can name—and do name—that which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name of something. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing, not as thing thinging in the fourfold, but as blunt object apparent. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills its destiny, its being, its brickness, it bricks . But what happens when we remove the name for this brick. We no longer know what to call this no-thing (if indeed we can even arrive at the point of uncalled calling.) In fact the it (this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not naming—by removing the name—it still occupies the same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. It simply is , un-reliant, un- needed by me. By removing the subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the object—or at least the duality objectifying it? Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed any thing , per se . The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the word (the bridge, according to Heidegger) and in this (again, if this is even possible) there is something vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. Like the poet who calls the thing forward, by refusing to name, by avoiding any thing that demands me to name it, I release the thing into the fourfold. I am no longer challenging the thing to be there for me ; I do not en frame it through language. Rather I, in an act of extreme responsibility, am refusing the challenge. By refusing the name (refusing to name) one allows, (or no one allows no thing) the brick to be all things , to manifest its manifold being, to incorporate all things into its thinging . It becomes, quite literally, every thing . Because, in its infinite manifestness, it incorporates everything; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud, the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again, water and sun and stars and universe in an endless, infinite cycle of coming to be some thing (else). Perhaps this is what Heidegger is suggesting when he talks about the stillness at the end of his essay, “Language” (2001): The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the dif-ference is itself the stillness (206). It is in this stillness that I can imagine a gellasenheit (here I mean both “releasement in the Heideggarean sense, as well as Meister Eckhart’s use of the term meaning “letting the world go and giving oneself to God”) of thing and world, a releasing into the stillness and silence of no thing beyond where word breaks off. It is here where I may no longer be, and yet no thing is, but may be. (shrink)

This paper aims at giving a brief historical survey of the growth and development of the meaning attributed by the ancient Indians to the term maya. In studying this term we must not lose sight of the fact that it is very often used in various texts without any bearing upon the great problem of the,reality' of the phenomenal world as compared with brahman. In a large number of texts originating in pre-or non-Vedantic circles the word occurs in a great (...) variety of connotations : « power, wisdom, subtle device », and, especially, « incomprehensible power enabling its possessor to create something » ascribed to mighty beings. In the Vedic period there is no basis for any conception of the unreality of the phenomenal world in the use of the term. It does not mean « chimera, illusion, fascination, delusion, fata morgana, etc. ». It refers to a reality of an artificial or misleading character, to phenomena produced by a special ability or imagination ; it can often be translated by a locution beginning with pseudo —, or by the Engl. craft in one of its connotations. It can also mean « fraud, deception ». Philosophers often referred to these common meanings of the word in discussing the,relation' of brahman and the phenomena which essentially are brahman. Svet. Up. 4, 9 and 10 nature is called maya : in this upanûad the germs from which the various views or doctrines of the generations to come were to develop had already reached the first stage of growth without differentiating in any considerable degree. Here maya does not express the unreality of the world, but the impossibility of man's understanding its character and the power of its creator. Nor does the Bhagavadgita question the reality of the world either. Deussen and other scholars were wrong in following Sahara's school of thought which interpreted these texts from its own particular point of view. In the history of Indian thought Buddhism is of outstanding importance. According to the ancient Buddhists the world and the individuals are real, but unstable, of a comparatively insignificant,metaphysical dignity'. The Madhyamika's and Nagarjima's relativistic school prepare the way for the idealistic Vijnanavadins who, founding their ontology on the psychology of yoga, hold the view that only vijnana « mere consciousness » exists. Any pretended,reality' outside this reality is to be regarded as dependent on a wrong interpretation of our inner experiences. The,causally dependent aspect', a determined,form of reality' reflects the,absolute aspect'; the lower constructed aspect' or,wrong ideation', the sphere of the concrete phenomena, however, is to be compared to a snake the presence of which we incorrectly assume when, at dusk, we find a cable.In this connection the term maya is also used : a rope may appear in the shape of a snake, or a maya in the shape of a man and other objects which do not really exist in themselves. This maya is void, non-substantial; in the same way the, wrong or constructive ideation' which appears in the, aspect of subject and object' is called non-substantial. In the process by which the reality of consciousness is transformed into the aspect of wrong ideation maya plays an important rôle : it is the power or factor producing the differentiation of the homogeneous consciousness which results in the pseudo-existence of the phenomenal world. Gaudapada, the earliest exponent of the view of pure non-duality writing at a time when the influence of these idealistic Buddhists was predominant, availed himself of the results of their speculative endeavour. On the other hand he made sure of the sanction of the traditional brahminical circles by expounding his views in the form of an expatiation on the Mandukya. Upanmd. The universum, he holds, is like a dream, like a maya ; « it is not actually so ». All phenomenal beings are dreamlike projections of the Divine Self, which is by its very maya able to make itself assume this projected form. But in his book maya also serves to indicate that any relation at all between the world and the Ultimate cannot be rationally sustained, for this,relation' is inexplicable. Maya, inherent to brahman is the condition underlying the,Origin', the pseudo-existence of this world ; but our lack of understanding is also maya. Our empirical knowledge, which makes us believe that things come into being is would-be knowledge. Maya is the hypothesis needed to express in a formula that the diversity of the phenomenal world is neither identical with atman-brahman nor existing by itself. Sawkara likewise regards the world as,pseudo' ; but in contradistinction to Gaudapada who focusses attention on the maya formula and the character of the phenomena, he emphasizes the sole reality of brahman, avoiding any suggestion as to the world's being void, non-being or unsubstantial. This formulation holds good from the higher point of view, viz. that of the supreme reality, into which empirical knowledge cannot penetrate. For practical purposes the world may be considered as really existing. The ignorance which conceals our true character from us and makes us perceive a world which from the standpoint of the Supreme does not exist is maya. Maya hides the reality and projects a pseudo-reality. It is undefinable and inexplicable ; it is neither being nor non-being. Maya is the postulate needed to account for the phenomenon called universe, for the existence of the diversity, though it is only the One which exists. Finally the maya theories of Saktas and Visnuite schools are briefly discussed. According to the former mayasakti is the power of the Supreme to veil itself without ceasing to be what it is ; they emphasize the point of view that « this all is brahman », accusing Sankara of admitting a principle beside brahman. Ramanuja who basing himself on the conviction that Brahman in the first place is God, defends the thesis that the world and the souls are real, and attacks Sankara's maya theory ; according to this great exponent of Visnuite thought maya symbolizes the wonderful and miraculous in God's creation and creative power. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 286—310. This mad play of writing —Stéphane Mallarmé Somewhere in between mathematics and theory, light and dark, physicality and projection, oscillates the poetry of Alessandro De Francesco. The texts hold no periods or commas, not even a capital letter for reference. Each piece stands as an individual construction, and yet the poetry flows in and out of the frame. Images resurface from one poem to the next, haunting the reader with reincarnations of an object lost in the (...) grass or a representation of a pear in a Dutch still life, embedded in cycles of cinematic close ups and multiple dimensions. As a whole, De Francesco’s oeuvre suggests, to use the title of one of his works, a redefinition —linguistic, epistemological, personal. The poem The End (un’agenda) (The End (an agenda)) opens with a quote by literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, which may be translated as follows: Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from this optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated out approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence.[1] In writing, De Francesco seeks to redefine our approach to things. His poems, like Blanchot’s writings, speak to both illuminate and to obscure. The reader hangs in an absence of reality within language that necessitates an attempt at interpretation, yet renders such a search ultimately futile. De Francesco draws the anonymous images that appear in this poem from the city of Paris, his current home. The fragmented narrative depicts an inner doubt of realness, calling for a confirmation of a physical existence beyond verbalization and cogitation. Cyclical references to film throw into question the reliability of the reality he creates. The light, sometimes red and safe, other times absent and murky, cannot necessarily be trusted as a guaranteed means of illumination. Blanchot’s distinction between language and visualization, and the relationship of each to reality, though linked specifically to The End (un’agenda) , can be a lens through which to read any of the three works that follow. assente obliqua (absent oblique) is composed of descriptions of six still life paintings, ranging from Dutch masterpieces of the seventeenth century to 1960s minimalism. The actual images of the paintings are absent, and the text is the sole source and object of a virtual reality created around the artwork. “Absent oblique” refers to the light source placed outside of the frame, which both informs and distracts viewing of the scene. Although mere description can be unreliable and unsatisfying in its necessary limitation, the representational act of description is shown as more than just a human want. It is a need, a means by which to grapple with an unsure reality. As the illustrations progress, they descend into abstraction and chaos. The precariously placed plate triggers the movement: the bottle bursts and the objects collapse into the movement of a tracking film camera. corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale (foreign body in ascending motion) is prose poetry in action. Its objective tone of description is skewed by the subjectivity of the narrative as horrific images are relayed in fragmented but matter-of-fact manner. A “foreign body” is both a mass of cancerous cells, and a corporeal description, and the poem takes the reader on a journey back and forth between the two, destination unclear. Beyond a questioning of the real, corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale is an examination of the possible. De Francesco’s poetry becomes a camera obscura through which to observe the constant flux of light and dark that blurs our reality. His work is colored by the idea of apo koinou , a Greek term meaning “from the common” that involves a construction of two clauses with a shared word or phrase. Through such melting of meaning, De Francesco creates a fluid ambiguity that is nonetheless grounded in bodily concepts. In assente obliqua , the reader is confronted with a description of a still life that rapidly transforms into a more chilling scene: the membrane of the mushroom in the basket emerges behind the white cloth a body could hide itself that asks for help In the realm of pure description, there is a mushroom that peeks out from behind a white cloth in a basket. Behind the white cloth, too, there could be a body, hiding, asking for help. Such an elision elicits disorienting mistrust in temporality, but also expands the planar possibilities of syntactical meaning. A white cloth is not merely a construct in still life painting, but veil that both shields and reveals potential mysteries. It is a proposed alternative to a traditional Western binary of subjectivity and objectivity. The apo koinou construction is rare in modern English, having slipped out of use after its resurgence in Old English poetry. De Francesco reintroduces this blur of object and subject relations into a modern light. He draws inspiration from a device used by Gruppo 63 founder and avant-garde poet Antonio Porta tended toward repetition of phrases in third person perspective. In Italian, it is perfectly grammatically correct to omit the subject, including only a verb conjugation. Gender, even humanity unknown, the subject dissolves into the action, thus giving to the poetry the power to change the reader’s perception of who or what is actually acting. To further push the relative boundaries of experience, De Francesco expands his written poetry into what he calls “reading environments.” In these sound experiments, De Francesco’s voice reading his poetry is manipulated by real time digital voice processing. The written is transformed to the spoken, and then injected with currents of electric sound. “At each activation of word in the darkness,” (from The End (un’agenda) ) language is permutated into a nonphysical yet all-encompassing being. In these projects, realized all over Europe, De Francesco continues his examination of the word’s potency beyond the page and into an “n-dimensional space,” where the lines between nature and affect are intertwined. To publish excerpts of De Francesco’s oeuvre is to show screen shots of full-length film, to read pull quotes from a philosophy treatise. In these poems, there are questions, not to be answered, but to be questioned again. The words will oscillate in and out of the square construction found in his poems, out of the borders of the page, out of the rectangle of the laptop screen. NOTES (1) Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation . Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 27. EDITORS' NOTE The .pdf above contains about twenty pages of translation and the original Italian poetry. Below we provide only a brief account. The End (an agenda) Parler, ce n’est pas voir. Parler libère la pensée de cette exigence optique qui, dans la tradition occidentale, soumet depuis des millénaires notre approche des choses et nous invite à penser sous la garantie de la lumière ou sous la menace de l’absence de lumière. —Maurice Blanchot in this n-dimensional space i could spy on myself from the cracks while going back and forth from the summer to the wardrobe from the night to the parking lot but something filters in through the half-closed shutters becomes an event enunciation we stay without explanation like parallel curves on the back of a solid growing older she enters the garden always repeats certain phrases the elevator to be redone the neighbor’s music the steps the pavement furls like the leaves of a fern when touched she is framed from behind while she moves rocking she covers distances slowly a bag overflows from the wardrobe something stirs inside but then the suitcase comes open not even by my hand it’s the objects that are starting to filter out the little red haired monster watches idling the appointments written on one of your agendas two years old still seem urgent each letter holds itself upright on the page with flourishes and arabesques each angle has its own geography i’m trying to describe the path the fingers trace on the carpet the zipper takes the opposite route we are suspended on the stairs above the water in the center is the summer seen from above the darkness of the city passes from one headlight to the next the surfaces of our arms cohere and are shiny underneath the blinking of a sign each pore is an open expanse the body dreams the hair gives form to the possible some daring swimmers were throwing themselves into the seine they swam upstream up to the first quay look there could exist behind the screen a room where even when the lamp is out and the curtains drawn even when the suitcase wasn’t closed everything seemed red everything calm construction of a four-dimensional tetrahedron by R. Courant – H. Robbins, What is Mathematics? Oxford University Press, 1941  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phenomenalistic Interpretation of Kant's Theory of Knowledge PAUL MARHENKEt Introduction THw FOLLOWINGARTXCLEwas one of two previously unpublished papers found in the effects of the late Paul Marhenke (1899-1952), who was a professor at the University of California from 1927 until his death. Because of the intrinsic interest of the paper, the editors of the Journal o/the History of Philosophy have kindly consented to publish it. I have made (...) a few revisions in the manuscript in order to prepare it for publication. These revisions do not affect the sense of the argument in any way, being confined mainly to the expansion of abbreviations, the correction of typographical mistakes, and so on. It is not known when this paper was written, or for what occasion. Professor W. R. Dennes, who wrote the biographical sketch of Paul Marhenke which is included in the In Memoriam volume published by the University of California, informs me that he was unaware of the existence of this paper. Professor Dennes writes in this connection: I can only say that ever since our year of graduate study together (1919-19207) Paul and I often discussed the question how far Kant's apparatus of Categories and so on merely expressed a strong confidence in various sorts of regularities in phenomena; and if the apparatus really grounded the confidence, did it do so by a question-begging procedure of, for example, assuming causal regularity, and then grounding and guaranteeing such regularity by a "deduction" of the category of causation. In our discussions that went on, off and on, for thirty years, Paul at various times took various positions--all interesting-and I often urged him to write out his views on the matter. I wish I knew at which stage he did write them out, but I do not. This was one subject upon which I think Paul changed his mind a good deal in the course of his years of study and teaching. Paul Marhenke's main interests in philosophy lay in epistemology and particularly in the realist-phenomenalist issue which he here discusses in the context of Kant's philosophy. For those readers who will be making their [47] 48 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY first acquaintance with his work, this paper will provide an impressive illustration of the subtlety of his mind and of the care with which he drew distinctions. For those of us who were familiar with the cast of his mind, former students and colleagues alike, it will evoke the man himself, with his insistence upon rigor and precision as viae mediae toward an understanding of philosophical issues--AvRuM STROLL Two CURRENTSRUN through the Kantian theory of knowledge, one subjective, the other objective. These two currents follow very often in extreme proximity, so that we find Kant speaking in the same paragraph or even in successive sentences of the object of knowledge as being nothing but a synthesis of representations, i.e., sensations, and as being distinct from those sensations and merely represented by them in the individual mind of the perceiver. The former position is indistinguishable from Berkeleyan subjectivism as far as the existential status of the objects of immediate awareness is concerned; the world perceived is merely a subjective representation of the real world of things in themselves. The argument by which this position is reached presupposes, however, the truth of the realistic assumption which is denied in the conclusion based on the argument. For the argument presupposes the causal theory of perception with its realistic presupposition of real objects, sense-organs, nerves, a brain, etc. According to Kant sensations arise in the mind due to the impinging of physical stimuli on our senseorgans. Henceforth, however, it is denied that we perceive anything but these sensations and the truth of the realistic premises on which the conclusion is based must therefore be denied. The manifold of sensations constitutes the originally given material of the mind. The question to which Kant now attempts to give an answer is how this manifold becomes organized into a world of objects. This answer is given in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. The Kantian solution of the problem is a failure if for no... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phenomenalistic Interpretation of Kant's Theory of Knowledge PAUL MARHENKEt Introduction THw FOLLOWINGARTXCLEwas one of two previously unpublished papers found in the effects of the late Paul Marhenke (1899-1952), who was a professor at the University of California from 1927 until his death. Because of the intrinsic interest of the paper, the editors of the Journal o/the History of Philosophy have kindly consented to publish it. I have made (...) a few revisions in the manuscript in order to prepare it for publication. These revisions do not affect the sense of the argument in any way, being confined mainly to the expansion of abbreviations, the correction of typographical mistakes, and so on. It is not known when this paper was written, or for what occasion. Professor W. R. Dennes, who wrote the biographical sketch of Paul Marhenke which is included in the In Memoriam volume published by the University of California, informs me that he was unaware of the existence of this paper. Professor Dennes writes in this connection: I can only say that ever since our year of graduate study together (1919-19207) Paul and I often discussed the question how far Kant's apparatus of Categories and so on merely expressed a strong confidence in various sorts of regularities in phenomena; and if the apparatus really grounded the confidence, did it do so by a question-begging procedure of, for example, assuming causal regularity, and then grounding and guaranteeing such regularity by a "deduction" of the category of causation. In our discussions that went on, off and on, for thirty years, Paul at various times took various positions--all interesting-and I often urged him to write out his views on the matter. I wish I knew at which stage he did write them out, but I do not. This was one subject upon which I think Paul changed his mind a good deal in the course of his years of study and teaching. Paul Marhenke's main interests in philosophy lay in epistemology and particularly in the realist-phenomenalist issue which he here discusses in the context of Kant's philosophy. For those readers who will be making their [47] 48 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY first acquaintance with his work, this paper will provide an impressive illustration of the subtlety of his mind and of the care with which he drew distinctions. For those of us who were familiar with the cast of his mind, former students and colleagues alike, it will evoke the man himself, with his insistence upon rigor and precision as viae mediae toward an understanding of philosophical issues--AvRuM STROLL Two CURRENTSRUN through the Kantian theory of knowledge, one subjective, the other objective. These two currents follow very often in extreme proximity, so that we find Kant speaking in the same paragraph or even in successive sentences of the object of knowledge as being nothing but a synthesis of representations, i.e., sensations, and as being distinct from those sensations and merely represented by them in the individual mind of the perceiver. The former position is indistinguishable from Berkeleyan subjectivism as far as the existential status of the objects of immediate awareness is concerned; the world perceived is merely a subjective representation of the real world of things in themselves. The argument by which this position is reached presupposes, however, the truth of the realistic assumption which is denied in the conclusion based on the argument. For the argument presupposes the causal theory of perception with its realistic presupposition of real objects, sense-organs, nerves, a brain, etc. According to Kant sensations arise in the mind due to the impinging of physical stimuli on our senseorgans. Henceforth, however, it is denied that we perceive anything but these sensations and the truth of the realistic premises on which the conclusion is based must therefore be denied. The manifold of sensations constitutes the originally given material of the mind. The question to which Kant now attempts to give an answer is how this manifold becomes organized into a world of objects. This answer is given in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. The Kantian solution of the problem is a failure if for no... (shrink)

It has been shown that quantum mechanics in its orthodox interpretation violates four different formulations of causality principle endowed with empirical meaning. The present work aims to highlight how even a realistic non-standard interpretation of the theory conflicts with causality in its Cartesian formulation of the principle of the non-inferiority of causes over effects. Such an interpretation, which attributes some form of weak physical reality to the wave function (called empty wave, regarded as a zero-energy wave-like phenomenon), is a (...) sort of precursor of the more recent so-called wavefunction realism. We also discuss a more radical realistic interpretation according to which physical properties can also be assigned to non-metaphysical relative nothing, seen as the simple absence of a particle such as a photon, but not of its corresponding state (no-photon), which is considered real. By interpreting the wave function collapse as a consequence of an interaction with empty waves or of a detection of the no-photon, we will highlight how more real physical effects can derive from lower causes, including relative nothing. Finally, we will show how these interpretations, while violating Cartesian causality in its two variants, do not seem to affect the validity of the principle of a rational explanation that nothing can derive from (absolute) nothing, which does not seem satisfied by the orthodox interpretation. (shrink)

The common opposition between the imaginary and the real prevents us from genuinely understanding either one. Indeed, the imaginary embodies a certain intuitive presence of the thing and not an empty signitive intention. Moreover it is able to compete with perception and even to offer an increased presence, a sur-real display, of the things, as shown by Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of art in Eye and Mind. As a result, we have to overcome the conception according to which the (...) imaginary field is a mere figment of my imagination, a mental entity that I could still possess in the very absence of its object. On the other hand, the presence of reality is never complete or solid: “The transcendence of the far-off encroaches upon my present and brings a hint of unreality even into the experiences with which I believe myself to coincide.” Therefore, first, the imaginary has to be redefined as a special hovering modality of the presence of the beings themselves. Second and furthermore: is not the imaginary always intertwined with perception? Merleau-Ponty advocates the puzzling thesis that there is an “imaginary texture of the real.” What is the meaning of this assertion? To what extent will it be able to blur the classical categories without arousing confusion? Can we avoid reducing reality to illusion? Lastly, consistently followed, this reflection leads as far as to discover, in the imaginary mode of being, an ontological model, the canon enabling Merleau-Ponty to think Being, an “Oneiric Being.” Thus we will venture the apparently paradoxical contention that the imaginary is the fundamental dimension of the real. The notion of “fundament” becomes indeed problematic and receives an ironical connotation, however this is precisely what is at stake in a non-positivist ontology. Existence “lies” in a ghost-like, sketchy and unsubstantial ground, in a restlessly creative being that is open to creative interpretations. And there it finds the principle of the ever-recurring crisis that both tears it apart and makes it rich in future promise. (shrink)

in his characteristically generous and searching discussion of my book, Spinoza, Daniel Garber rightly points out that I structure my interpretation of Spinoza’s system around the principle of sufficient reason. This is the principle that, as I and others sometimes put it, each fact has an explanation and is thus not brute, or the principle that each thing has an explanation. The ‘or’ will soon be important. Indeed, it might seem that I am too focused on the PSR—certainly I seem (...) that way to Garber1—for I seek to use the PSR to unlock any number of problems that interpreters of Spinoza have faced over the last three centuries. Garber does a great job of conveying the range of uses to which I put the PSR.. (shrink)

The Gricean paradigm in pragmatics has recently been attacked for its alleged lack of explanatory import, based on the claim that it does not seek accounts of how utterance interpretation actually works, but merely of how it might work. This article rebuts this line of attack by offering a clear and detailed account of the explanatory project of Gricean pragmatics according to which the latter aims for rationalizing explanations of utterance interpretation. It is shown that, on this view, Gricean (...) pragmatics seeks psychological explanations of utterance interpretation that are “cognitively real” in a perfectly clear and robust sense. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

The most glamorous and even glorious moments in a legal system come when a high court recognizes an abstract principle involving, for example, human liberty or equality. Indeed, Americans, and not a few non-Americans, have been greatly stirred--and divided--by the opinions of the Supreme Court, especially in the area of race relations, where the Court has tried to revolutionize American society. But these stirring decisions are aberrations, says Cass R. Sunstein, and perhaps thankfully so. In Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict, (...) Sunstein, one of America's best known commentators on our legal system, offers a bold, new thesis about how the law should work in America, arguing that the courts best enable people to live together, despite their diversity, by resolving particular cases without taking sides in broader, more abstract conflicts. Sunstein offers a close analysis of the way the law can mediate disputes in a diverse society, examining how the law works in practical terms, and showing that, to arrive at workable, practical solutions, judges must avoid broad, abstract reasoning. Why? For one thing, critics and adversaries who would never agree on fundamental ideals are often willing to accept the concrete details of a particular decision. Likewise, a plea bargain for someone caught exceeding the speed limit need not--indeed, must not--delve into sweeping issues of government regulation and personal liberty. Thus judges purposely limit the scope of their decisions to avoid reopening large-scale controversies. Sunstein calls such actions incompletely theorized agreements. In identifying them as the core feature of legal reasoning--and as a central part of constitutional thinking in America, South Africa, and Eastern Europe-- he takes issue with advocates of comprehensive theories and systemization, from Robert Bork to Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, and Ronald Dworkin, who defends an ambitious role for courts in the elaboration of rights. Equally important, Sunstein goes on to argue that it is the living practice of the nation's citizens that truly makes law. For example, he cites Griswold v. Connecticut, a groundbreaking case in which the Supreme Court struck down Connecticut's restrictions on the use of contraceptives by married couples--a law that was no longer enforced by prosecutors. In overturning the legislation, the Court invoked the abstract right of privacy; the author asserts that the justices should have appealed to the narrower principle that citizens need not comply with laws that lack real enforcement. By avoiding large-scale issues and values, such a decision could have led to a different outcome in Bowers v. Hardwick, the decision that upheld Georgia's rarely prosecuted ban on sodomy. And by pointing to the need for flexibility over time and circumstances, Sunstein offers a novel understanding of the old ideal of the rule of law. Legal reasoning can seem impenetrable, mysterious, baroque. This book helps dissolve the mystery. Whether discussing the interpretation of the Constitution or the spell cast by the revolutionary Warren Court, Cass Sunstein writes with grace and power, offering a striking and original vision of the role of the law in a diverse society. In his flexible, practical approach to legal reasoning, he moves the debate over fundamental values and principles out of the courts and back to its rightful place in a democratic state: the legislatures elected by the people. (shrink)

What is the relationship of “strong evaluation” and self-identity? What exactly is personal identity? Does identity consist of interpretations or facts? Do strong evaluations have a constitutive role in identity-formation? If there is no given individual essence or true self waiting to be found, but identity is dialogically construed in self-interpretation, then can identities be criticized at all, when there is no pre-given true self, which would serve as the basis of criticism? I follow Charles Taylor in defending an (...) interpretational and evaluational conception of self-identity, but I hope to be more precise in distinguishing several meanings of “identity” and correspondingly several different roles that strong evaluation has for identity in different senses. Further, I try to show that identities are criticizable despite the lack of pre-given essences. I will first differentiate between various meanings of identity: idem-identity, ipse-identity, collective identity and species identity (4.1). Then I take a closer look at ipse-identity in four different meanings: practical identity, biographical identity, qualitative identity and “singularity” (4.2). This survey tries to capture the most important meanings of the concept, but the concept of identity is used in philosophy, social psychology and human sciences in so many different ways that a comprehensive survey is probably impossible. However, this survey may help to sort out what sense of identity is relevant for strong evaluation, or for what “identities” strong evaluations are crucial. Having distinguished these several meanings, I turn to the formation of identity in self-interpretations. Charles Taylor has been (wrongly) accused of presupposing a pre-political identity that persons or groups are supposed to have, and for which they want recognition. That would overlook the way in which identities are constituted dialogically, and in interpretations. I will defend the view that personal identity is a matter of self-interpretation, and collective identity is a matter of collective selfinterpretations. While dialogues and recognition by others plays a crucial role in the formation of one’s identity, the views of others are not directly constitutive of a person’s identity, unless the contents are known or accepted by the person herself. Being a person or a self is an active business. Having a self in a fullfledged sense means having a conception of oneself, and having conceptions is an active business. People don’t have beliefs like things have properties. As Sellars (1963) has stressed, the relation of two mental episodes has to be normative if it is to count as knowledge; it cannot be merely causal. And as the “transcendental tradition” from Kant onwards has stressed, being a subject is not merely a matter of having mental contents (which could possibly be caused by the world) but being aware of the reality, taking the mental contents to be about the world.144 In addition to normativity and intentionality, the activity of self-defining is one aspect of the spontaneous activity of the subject. One’s self-identity does not rest simply on having features, but on one’s activity, on identification with some actual or possible features. In this sense, everyone’s identity is self-made. The point in saying this is not to overlook the cultural and social mediations that are intertwined in this self-definition, but to stress the fact that one’s identity is not a matter of natural features. Self-identity is a tentative result of an ongoing process of self-interpretation. Depending on the precise meaning of self-identity, strong evaluation has a more or less central role (4.3). In the last section I ask whether identities can be criticized, or whether (in the absence of pre-given true selves) self-interpretations are the ultimate “court of appeal” not only in the sense of what constitutes identity, but also in questions about their ethical and existential worth, or coherence, or authenticity or epistemic adequacy. I hope to show that self-interpretations stand open for criticism in these respects, even though self-interpretations are directly constitutive of one’s identity (4.4). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 170-174 [Access article in PDF] A Buddhist History of the West: Studies In Lack. By David R. Loy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 244 pp. The religious and philosophical situation of our time seems polarized between resurgent fundamentalisms and a cosmopolitan awareness bridging heretofore separated traditions. Even a few decades ago the notion of a dialogue between East and West was a (...) novelty in which demarcated traditions and cultures (say the Buddhist East and the Christian West) experimented with attempts to find a common language to speakacross the boundaries between their respective identities. In such a context,"Western Buddhists" were those pilgrims of the counterculture who "went East" in search of some civilizational and spiritual other; the West, abjected to the realm of soulless scientism or outdated religious authoritarianism, was left behind. The situation is different at the beginning of the twenty-first Christian century. The dialectical complexities, both inwardly in the soul or mind of seekers, and outwardly in the strange twists of contemporary history, emerge to forbid any simple assessments of what can be left behind or indeed what the use can be of what seekers have found in the "non-West." People of Western background begin to realize and consciously address the [End Page 170] karmic-historical presuppositions of their search, which continue to constitute a kind of historical unconscious to the formulation of any possible "Western Buddhisms." Meanwhile, while fundamentalists of many backgrounds posit "clashes of civilizations" that assume an absoluteness of traditional distinctions, cosmopolitans realize that, for all the particularity of their respective starting points, the global situation is inextricably a shared one. In such a context, what canWestern Buddhist intellectuals, cognizant of their own starting points but having learned some things along the Way that are perhaps of universal relevance, speak to our common condition?The "Buddhist History of the West" that David Loy provides is less a historical narrative of the events constitutive of the societies descending from Greco-Roman civilization through European epochs and American empire into the age of globalization than a form of psychoanalytic anamnesis of those societies' cultural constructions of reality. Loy's psychoanalytic interpretive frame is composed of Buddhist insight into the human mind's deep-seated grasping for solidity and certainty in the face of a reality fundamentally characterized by impermanence and ungroundedness (the "Lack" of the subtitle, our simultaneous awareness of death, impermanence, andontological emptiness and the ego's wish for eternal selfhood in an endless but impossibly fulfilling world). Loy's Buddhism is combined with the existential psychology of Ernest Becker and the revisionist Freudianism of Norman O. Brown called on as Western resources for the spiritual therapeutics "the West" seems to need as it enters the third Christian millennium both triumphant and in despair of any meaning to accompany its economic and pop-cultural hegemony.Seven anamnestic chapters take us through twenty-five hundred years of Western cultural constructions, from the Greek and Roman philosophical inquiries into Freedom, a kind of origin-tale of Humanism seen as a "religious" (religion for Loy being the way humans attempt to answer the problem of Lack as if to ground our groundlessness) vision of meaning as the development of human capacities for rational thought, through the intertwining of classical and Christian constructions in medieval and Renaissance periods, through the Protestant Reformation into the political and ideological space of modernity, culminating in a vision of the globalizing West as purveying a "Religion of the Market," an ironically meaningless (centered on the symbolic code for Value—Money—as a displacement of Value itself) system of meaning. This last, our contemporary situation, would perhaps be simply a problem of aesthetic tastelessness (American pop culture performing the dissolution of all surviving traditional sacred orders following the description of capitalism by Marx as causing "all that is sacred" to "melt into air") were it not for the massive social injustice and environmental devastation it structurally produces. Loy's therapeutic vision, following the Buddhist deconstruction of the demarcated "self" and Becker and Brown's cultural-historical or collective... (shrink)

The term "interest" lacks a precise antonym. In English, we have "disinterested" and "uninteresting," but we want for a term that denotes robust opposition to interest. The same appears to hold true in every other language (as far as we know). Interest's missing antonym reflects not merely a widespread lexical oversight, but a misrecognition of interest's complete and exact meaning. More importantly, the idea that interest has no opposite expresses a certain refusal to acknowledge the power of the impulse (...) to extinguish interest, for the self and for others. Why then do we foreclose interest's possibility, degrade our (and others') capacities to experience interest, and destroy interest's objects? Why do we decline what interest proffers - which includes creative and subjective being, thinking, and relating - in favor of more primitive modes of survival, thoughtlessness, and nonbeing? Why do relationships - with ourselves, with others, with objects - toward which genuine interest draws us seem sometimes, if not often, unbearable? These questions are difficult. Their answers, even more so. Misinterest: Essays, Pensées, and Dreams attempts to approach them in an honest way, without making them fascinating, mysterious, boring, obscurantist, or fascinatingly mysteriously boringly obscurantist. Outwardly, Misinterest is concerned with dreams and forgetting and Eros and soaring dogs and groups and suicidal suburban teenagers and sex and jury duty and Nazis and fathers and hatred and holy parrots and fundamentalists and plagues and other things that may or may not be interesting. Ultimately, however, it seeks, like Jules Renard, "en restant exact" (in remaining true/real), to shed light on the establishment of misinterest, missingness, and mystery where and when they need not be, and, thus, on the psychic, familial, and political forces that compel us not to be when and where we ought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whose Red Garments?Which Divine Warrior? Thomas Aquinas on Isaiah 63 and the Literal Interpretation of the Old TestamentJoshua MaddenIntroductionIn attempting to discern the principles by which St. Thomas Aquinas offers a literal interpretation of the Old Testament, this essay will serve to highlight the tension between various periods and methods of biblical exegesis in the hope that it will allow a more fruitful engagement with the conclusions (...) of both St. Thomas and modern biblical commentators. In order to make this discernment, we begin first by addressing the concept of literal interpretation as a whole, as significant misunderstandings can arise in any discussion of what a "literal" reading of Scripture actually is. This exploration will serve our project well by allowing us to pin down precisely what is meant by this term, as well as why it should be important in any mode of theological exegesis (especially that of the Old Testament). When we are able to parse out the exact nature of literal interpretation and the implications of taking such an approach with regard to St. Thomas, we will then be capable of examining a particular instance of Thomas's exegesis by offering a test case of his methods in the reading of Isaiah 63, in which Isaiah prophesies the future appearance of a heavenly warrior who will bring both judgment and salvation to Israel.To sum up, we have two goals: to show that St. Thomas's understanding of the literal sense is both logically coherent and perennially illuminating, and to highlight a particular instance in which St. Thomas's exegesis and literal interpretation is employed in an insightful and creative manner. The conclusion of such an investigation will demonstrate that Aquinas is a [End Page 1201] valuable resource for the science of biblical exegesis precisely because of his philosophically robust methodology and his commitment to the grounding and foundational importance of the Old Testament's historical, literal sense.The Nature of Literal InterpretationAt the very outset of the Summa theologiae, St. Thomas deals with the issue of biblical interpretation and the various senses of Scripture. First, he clarifies what it means to speak of a literal sense of Scripture: "that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal."1 Having established what he means by the literal sense, he goes on to speak of the various spiritual senses—allegorical, moral, anagogical—and the way in which they are to be parsed out, but he is careful to note that a multiplication of senses does not necessitate equivocation in meaning: "Thus in holy Scripture no confusion results [from the multiplicity of senses] for all the senses are founded on one—the literal—from which alone can any argument be drawn, and not from those intended in allegory."2 To sum up: the literal, historical sense of Scripture is that meaning which is intended by the words themselves, and it is upon this understanding alone that any argument (and thus any theology) can be founded.3Now one should not take this definition of the literal sense as somehow historicizing or demystifying the text of Scripture, as though St. Thomas were concerned merely with what the words of the human authors mean. First, it is not merely the intention of the human author that must be ascertained, for the human author is not the only author: "The author of holy Scripture is God."4 In the preface to the Super Isaiam he says the same: "the author of Sacred Scripture is the Holy Spirit," and it is "the prophet's tongue" (lingua prophetae) which acts as the divine instrument (organum spiritus sancti).5 So [End Page 1202] here we have a necessary condition for literal interpretation, that it must treat God as the primary author of Scripture. Therefore, a literal exegesis of any particular text must take into account not only the intention of the human author, but the divine author as well.Let us proceed. It is a particularly modern approach to couch this search for the literal sense of the text as the search to ascertain "what the author meant." For St. Thomas, this is a... (shrink)

The sci-fi premise of the 2002 film Solaris allows director Steven Soderbergh to tell a compelling and distinctly philosophical love story. The “visitors” that appear to the characters in the film present us with a vivid thought experiment, and the film naturally prods us to dwell on the following possibility: If confronted with a duplicate (or near duplicate) of someone you love, what would your response be? What should your response be? The tension raised by such a far-fetched situation reflects (...) a tension that exists in real life: that between an attraction to qualities possessed by a person and attraction to the person in a manner that transcends such an attachment to qualities. In short, this cinematic thought-experiment challenges us to reflect on what we really attach to when we fall in love: is it the person, or is it merely the cluster of characteristics the person manifests? Which sort of attachment is appropriate? Which is philosophical defensible? The protagonist Chris Kelvin’s ambivalence at encountering this bizarre possibility is gripping because it tracks our own ambivalence about such matters. Frankly most of us don’t know just how we would react to such a situation. The thought that accepting and embracing such a “visitor” involves a violation to the original person is natural and pervasive, especially if the acceptance comes with a failure to acknowledge the distinction between the original person and the “visitor”. At the same time, a deep attraction to such a person would surely also be entirely natural and perhaps even inescapable. We, like Kelvin, are torn in different directions by this (thankfully) far-fetched possibility. One philosopher who affirms that accepting a duplicate as though it were the original is the rational thing to do is Derek Parfit. His argument for “the unimportance of identity” is both powerful and radical, and though I’ll be critical of his approach, in the final section of the paper I suggest that it does offer up the resources for an intriguing interpretation of the end of this complex and ambiguous film. (shrink)

The thesis provides a new interpretation of Kant's claims for the epistemological significance of aesthetic judgment. I argue that the harmony of the imagination and the understanding in aesthetic judgment consists in a potentially unending activity of mental modeling, or "exhibiting," of figures corresponding to possible conceptual determinations of the perceptual form of a beautiful object. Since Kant holds just this capacity to exhibit concepts as figures in intuition to be a prerequisite to empirical conception, judgments of taste are based (...) on an activity underlying all cognition. ;I then turn to another area in which Kant claims a close connection between reflection and conception--his analysis of empirical concept formation and application. Kant states that we must presuppose a principle of reflective judgment in order to insure the discoverability of natural regularity. Kant recognizes that transcendental under-determines empirical law, but determining the extent to which Kant thinks this is true is of the utmost importance. Untempered, Kant's broad claims that the principle is necessary for the capacity to form and apply empirical concepts commits him to the un-Kantian position that a reflective principle is constitutive and not merely regulative. I find, however, that the principle is not required for the formation and application of any empirical concepts, but rather for those that purport to correspond to empirically real properties of things. ;Last, I place Kant's theory of reflection in a historical context, considering one Idealist criticism of it--that of Hegel in Faith and Knowledge. I argue that Hegel's Kant critique is best understood as an attempt to overturn the delicate balance Kant sought to strike in according a transcendentally necessary principle merely regulative status. (shrink)

The question „what is reality?“ that opens Realontologie (1923), the establishing book in Hedwig Conrad-Martius’s (CM) oeuvre, establishes her realistic metaphysics. In her opinion, the firmly established „blinding insight“ in modern philosophy regarding the unfathomable contrast between the ideal and the real blocks any access to the question of reality. Her realontological philosophy seeks the „gate of reality“, meaning the datum-point where things „elevate“ themselves from non-existence or mere ideal existence but do not yet arrive at „operative Being“ or (...) realistic fulfillment. CM identifies three characteristics of the real by which it meets the „task of Being“ imposed upon it to personally describe and fulfill the essence inherent in it: formationality (Leibhaftigkeit), self-standing and primordiality. The suggested interpretation of each of these three seeks to unravel the seeming contrast between the real and the ideal in favor of what she regards as the only genuine and primordial opposition that separates the real from nonexistence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in LackGereon KopfDavid R. Loy. A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack. SUNY Series in Religious Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 244.David Loy's most recent work, A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack, constitutes an intellectual history of Europe from what he calls a "Buddhist perspective." His obvious goals in (...) this book are (1) to develop a heuristic device, if not a mature methodology, out of the Buddhist intellectual tradition and to apply it to matters that are not necessarily related to the Buddhist tradition, and (2) to reread European history from a new standpoint. I have to confess that I am not a historian and thus cannot evaluate Loy's historical claims; however, from my perspective as a scholar of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, it seems to me that not only does Loy succeed on both counts but his study of European history from what he calls the perspective of lack reveals astonishing yet previously barely highlighted insights into European thought. It also undermines, in a methodological slight of hand that at times evokes Michel Foucault's approach, the conventional assumptions about the dominant paradigms of the generally accepted periods of European history. I do not want to claim that Loy's methodology resembles Foucault's "archaeology" in any way; however, it does demonstrate that discourses and time periods are fluid rather than static and that their paradigm depends on, and changes in accordance with, the perspective of the historian.For example, seen from Loy's perspective of lack, the central and most formative event of European history was neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment, but the Papal Revolution of the late eleventh century. In general, Loy's book is filled with observations and indictments of common myths that are not only provocative in nature but sure to challenge many of the presuppositions that the proponents of the so-called Western World hold dear. In concrete terms, Loy seems to focus on and examine not so much European intellectual history but the myths that are used to argue for the superiority of the "West": freedom, progress, romantic love, the sanctity of the nation-state, and free-market capitalism.Loy chooses as his standpoint "a Buddhist perspective," namely the "perspective of lack." He takes as his basic assumption the dictum he borrows from early Buddhism and, as he adds, psychotherapy, namely that humans have to live with the basic frustration-Loy's translation of dukkha, which is usually rendered as "suffering"-that reality does not conform to our innermost desires. We desire immortality but cannot avoid the impermanence of all living beings. The awareness of our impermanence not only shatters our sense of and quest for a self, but it also [End Page 580] arouses the "immediate and terrifying (because quite valid) suspicion... that "'I' am not real right now" (p. 3).This frightening sense of lack propels humans onto what Norman Brown calls the Oedipal project, that is, the attempt to create oneself. This sense of lack, Loy remarks, is common to all religions, but what separates Buddhism from most other religious traditions is that it does not offer a self and some kind of immortality, on the one hand, and refrains from reifying this sense of lack as, for example, "sin," on the other. Rather, Buddhism, to Loy, can be "understood as a way to resolve our sense of lack" (p. 6). With regard to his present project, Loy asks, "[i]f that (the sense-of-the-self's sense of lack) gives us insight into the individual human condition, can it also shed light on the collective dynamics of society and nations?" (p. 8). In other words, Loy asks how the interpretation of European history would change if one were to choose the primary Buddhist assumption, namely the deep anxiety over one's future death and present-day insignificance and groundlessness, as one's starting point.However, Loy is quick to argue that this standpoint is not unique to Buddhism, and he corroborates his perspective on lack with the findings of psychotherapy, mostly the... (shrink)

Kerstin Thomas revaluates the famous dispute between Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida, concerning a painting of shoes by Vincent Van Gogh. The starting point for this dispute was the description and analysis of things and artworks developed in his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In discussing Heidegger’s account, the art historian Meyer Schapiro’s main point of critique concerned Heidegger’s claim that the artwork reveals the truth of equipment in depicting shoes of a peasant woman and (...) thereby showing her world. Schapiro sees a striking paradox in Heidegger’s claim for truth, based on a specific object in a specific artwork while at the same time following a rather metaphysical idea of the artwork. Kerstin Thomas proposes an interpretation, which exceeds the common confrontation of philosophy versus art history by focussing on the respective notion of facticity at stake in the theoretical accounts of both thinkers. Schapiro accuses Heidegger of a lack of concreteness, which he sees as the basis for every truth claim on objects. Thomas understands Schapiro’s objections as motivated by this demand for a facticity, which not only includes the work of art, but also investigator in his concrete historical perspective. Truth claims under such conditions of facticity are always relative to historical knowledge, and open to critical intervention and therefore necessarily contingent. Following Thomas, Schapiro’s critique shows that despite his intention of giving the work of art back its autonomy, Heidegger could be accused of achieving quite the opposite: through the abstraction of the concrete, the factual, and the given to the type, he actually sets the self and the realm of knowledge of the creator as absolute and not the object of his knowledge. Instead, she argues for a revaluation of Schapiro’s position with recognition of the arbitrariness of the artwork, by introducing the notion of factuality as formulated by Quentin Meillassoux. Understood as exchange between artist and object in its concrete material quality as well as with the beholder, the truth of painting could only be shown as radically contingent. Thomas argues that the critical intervention of Derrida who discusses both positions anew is exactly motivated by a recognition of the contingent character of object, artwork and interpretation. His deconstructive analysis can be understood as recognition of the dynamic character of things and hence this could be shown with Meillassoux to be exactly its character of facticity – or factuality. (shrink)

Since the 1950s, Lee Joseph of Zhu Xi of the Road, learn to criticism that many aspects of Taoism is similar to Whitehead's qualification process philosophy, which Zhu large amount of philosophical comprehensive work is the right assessment, triggering In order to controversy . This paper argues that there are many real reason is that Zhu and Whitehead都qualification processes philosopher. According to Whitehead's thought, emphasizing the role or function of qualifications process description is the qualification process may philosopher. (...) Zhu Xi said in his clear emphasis on learning裡qualification process, change, transformation and innovation of other concepts. Description of this method less controversial, but the problem is in the end "qualification process" concept in terms of how important Zhu? He has "qualification process" concept is obvious? Over the past eight hundred years have an ongoing controversy, Zhu Xi Road School for the qualification process as the subject is so obvious? Zhu Xi describes the nature of the universe is life and life does not interest, is well known. However, many scholars have argued Zhu Xi's description of the main school - "Management", or the original management, channel management, pattern, or order, in fact, is a static concept. If "management" is static or just the original order or pattern in the form of management, it is difficult to establish qualification process is a description of the key themes of philosophy. Like a dead Yuzhe how it is possible to control a horse living ? This is a serious topic, in fact, followed by South Korean scholars to discuss the subject, which launched the great "forty-seven Debate." This article will certainly "reasonable" can indeed be interpreted as a life principle of management by a manager or management Concept. Really the case, said Zhu Xi's learning can rightly be regarded as a strongly significant qualification process philosophy, such as Whitehead and Lee Snow and other scholars advocated. Zhu Xi to provide In order many of the "reasonable" interpretation, possible these things in the world or the events of the original treatment or reason, interpreted with the qualification process in nature, even creative, with its complex of Taoist system role. This will be Chen Chun highly influential book of the "North Creek word meaning" to prove the wisdom of philosophy of Zhu Xi's disciples will be the most "reasonable" as a "way of qualifications." Therefore, based on an important school of Zhu Xi's interpretation of Taoism, we can agree and support the Joseph Lee, Zhu Xi Neo-Confucianism as the philosophy of the Core see qualification process. Ever since Joseph Needham in the 1950s made the comment that in many ways the daoxue of Zhu Xi resembled the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead there has been a debate on whether or not this is an accurate assessment of the Master Zhu's massive philosophical synthesis. This paper argues that there are substantive grounds to suggest that both Master Zhu and Whitehead are process philosophers. Based on Whitehead's observation that some philosophers emphasize the role or function or process as a key element of their philosophical vision and hence can be deemed 'process' philosophers, it is clear that Zhu certainly affirmed a central place for notions of process, change, transformation and creativity within his daoxue or Teaching of the Way. In many ways there is little argument about the general nature of this comment: the problem is, just how central to Zhu's daoxue is the notion of process? Is process more apparent than real? There has been a constant debate for the last eight hundred years as to whether or not Zhu Xi's commitment to process as a central theme or motif of daoxue is as strong as it appears at first glance. Zhu was famous for saying that the nature of the cosmos is, for instance, constant generation or shengsheng buxi life and life does not interest rates. Nonetheless, many competent scholars have argued that Zhu's crucial notion of li management or principle, rationale, pattern, or order might actually be a static concept: hardly the kind of key theme to build a process philosophy around if indeed it is the case that principle is a static or merely a formal principle of order or pattern . One of the best ways of putting the question was, how can a dead rider ride a live horse ? This is a serious question, and in fact later Korean scholars debated the issue with great subtlety in the great Four-Seven Debate. This paper will defend the notion that li can indeed be interpreted as a living principle or rationale. If this is the case, then Zhu's daoxue can be rightly deemed a process philosophy in the strongest sense of the term as defined by scholars such as Whitehead and Nicholas Rescher. Although Zhu Xi offered a number of different interpretations of li, it is entirely plausible that principle or the rationale for the things and events of the world can be construed as processive, even creative in terms of its role in the complex daoxue architectonic. For instance, the influential Beixi ziyi [or Neo-Confucian Terms Explained as translated by Wing-tsit Chan] of Chen Chun proves that one of Master Zhu's most philosophically astute disciples understood li to be proccessive. Therefore, based on one important stream of exegesis of Zhu's daoxue, we can agree with and support Joseph Needham's insight that daoxue is a form of process philosophy. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 208-212. … intervals of destructuring paradoxically carry the momentum for the ongoing process by which thought and perception are brought into relation toward transformative action. —Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation 1 Facing a blank canvas or blank page is a moment of pure potential, one that can be enervating or paralyzing. It causes a pause, a hesitation, in anticipation of the moment of inception—even of one that never comes. The implication is that (...) the blank is yours in that moment, and it calls on you to act on it, to think into it, to create on it. Each blank canvas gives you time, of an undefined length, to transform that canvas’ inherent potential into a work. This two-dimensional plane of potential can be projected into a space, which the body can then occupy. When you “destructure” a space in the same way, prepare it to be a blank, much as you build a canvas, you allow your entire body to enter the space of potential, and you rest in anticipation of work, like the hand poised above the page. Artists have found that the deliberate creation of that space of potential through sealing the space and painting it white, thereby erasing details and distractions, can be such a transformative experience as to help define their whole practice. The cessation of distraction, the absence of indicator that a “blanked” workspace provides allows for a new presence of mind, it gives them the room, literally, to move into their work, and from there to move their work into the world. The workspace for the artist, the studio, is often perceived as a lab-like condensation of the gallery or museum, the traditional and idealized white cube. Similarly, with the blank page, a concrete relation between space and time comes forward as the intentional simplification of the architecture changes behavior and perception within the space. The work of “blanking” the studio space is a meditative reduction, an erasure, and in a way, an attempt at drawing away from the world beyond the studio - the sealed space is meant to recede from reality, to become abstracted by its willed lack of details and distractions. Within that space the time for a new beginning is made more present, more attainable, and the focus it fosters becomes another tool to aid creation. At the formative moment of his artistic practice, Tom Friedman used the blank of his studio, saturated in white, sealed off from the world, to fight velocity. He describes how he projected his vision of the end goal, the museum - a place he believes to be defined by slow contemplation - onto his own studio experience. He then sat and reflected on common objects, one by one, framed by the blank box he had created. The domestic objects he brought into the space to study foreshadow his mature works, where often the quotidian object has a single additional element – his intense labor. Friedman makes discrete objects through absurdly intense and focused labor, epitomized, perhaps by his 1,000 hours of Staring , made from 1992-97: Tom Friedman. 1000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997) His labor, to use his own words, is his way to “bring all of who you are to the experience.” Friedman shares his labor, allows the slow, deliberate pace of his work born in the studio to penetrate the museum. Nothing seems effortless, or a gesture, the labor is apparent, displayed, and tangible. He gives us the labor, the personal investment in the physical that saved art for him, that divorced the work from the language he cites as a factor of alienation. When we see his work we do not see words, we see acts, we see objects. He has forced the studio as workspace into the exhibition space, as he stuffs hundreds of more hours of labor into his shows with each new piece, filling the space with material and labor, material and labor – his involvement, his investment, is his gift to us as the viewers, as he introduces the laborious and contemplative pace he feels belongs to the museum. He saves us also from the alienation of language, which first drove him into the sealed studio and away from the discourse of his school. He presents us with his real, the object which stands in stark contrast to the white slate of the studio, the sealed white box he started from, where his individual, self-contained objects begin and end, completed through the intensity of isolation, first of the individual artist, and then of the material he chooses to slowly, slowly, slowly work: Tom Friedman. Untitled (1992) In his in-depth analysis of galleries as a blank white cube, Brian O’Doherty emphasizes the religious connotations implied in the strict laws of the exhibition space and the valuation, aesthetics and elements of control he feels it imposes upon the work. Like Friedman, he recognizes the power of the restricted space – indicating the “perceptual fields of force” – that act on any object introduced into it. Going beyond Friedman’s assessment of the space as highly utilitarian for focusing his perception, O’Doherty emphasizes the rejection of the physical body of the artist or observer, saying that the cube allows for only observation - eyes and mind. He later parallels the picture frame as a psychological container for the artist with the room as the same for the observer. In both cases, this is an emphasis on the alienating nature of the relationship – just as the artist is kept out of the frame by the picture, in the gallery the art forces the body of the spectator out, calling for a self-referential purity. Patrick Ireland. White Cube (1998) O’Doherty makes a point of saying that the installation shot of the gallery without figures is “one of the icons of our visual culture.” In recent years, however, installation shots have begun to include figures, in some cases they are essential to understanding the scale and even the nature of the work, specifically with work that captures the experience of the space and the way that it varies from a white cube. The work of Olafur Eliasson is a case in point, as the Danish artist uses elements of scientific and natural phenomena to alter perception within the controlled gallery environment, tweaking and redirecting O’Doherty’s “perceptual fields of force” to make points about the act of seeing, or seeing yourself seeing, to quote the artist. This indicates a shift in the role of the artwork, not to exclude the body and stand discretely and self-sufficiently, but to include it, to manipulate it and to make the observer aware of the nature of that manipulation and the work’s ability to manipulate. Olafur Eliasson. 360º room for all colours (2002) So though in O’Doherty’s analysis, the intense blankness of the gallery pushed the observer out in favor of the artwork’s isolation, artists can replicate this inhumane sterility in their own workspace to focus their work on the influence of the gallery right from inception. This can be interpreted as an almost opposite understanding of the purpose of sealing and whitewashing the workspace as stated by Friedman. He sought a refuge from the critical language of the art school, and a space that, like the museum, gave him a protracted sense of time, and, he felt, welcomed him in, “to bring all of who you are,” as opposed to O’Doherty’s feeling that the museum was asking you, at least in body, to leave, and allow the work to take on its own life. Friedman does not seem to imply the tension with the cube and critical stance that O’Doherty prioritizes. Where Friedman finds a refuge, O’Doherty defines an opponent. In a third position, Robert Irwin describes his sealed studio space as “the world.” Though he made the same effort as Friedman to seal out all influences and distractions, he implies that he is in dialogue with the world through his own concentration and perception. This is reminiscent of the nature of the monad, as interpreted by Deleuze, a unity that envelops a multiplicity, a sealed container that contains the universe. He went through the same ritual described by Friedman, sealing up the space, painting it white, and then forcing himself to remain inside, staring at his own work, training his concentration relentlessly. But he found that the room became the distraction: …he became aware that a thin crack along the wall a few yards away from the canvas likewise exerted its presence; that when he plastered that crack over and repainted the wall, the canvas itself presented an entirely new aspect.2 The context was in a relentless dialogue with the work, and trying to neutralize that dialogue, to mute the conversation between space and object, became part of his ritual as he “fixed” his space each day in the hope of total concentration on the work. Ultimately, Irwin shaped the trajectory of his art by relinquishing the studio, establishing a post-studio practice, where the work is conceived and created out in the world, in dialogue with the world and reflective of the conditions it finds surrounding it. The white cube failed to ever achieve neutrality, his heightened concentration prevented him from ever neutralizing the space, so, instead of continuing to try to maintain the charade of a perfect blank, he acknowledged the unstoppable voice of place and turned all his efforts onto the object and the world, as a constant dialogue. Some artists push their studio space far from purity, domesticating it like a lair or a living room, and others destroy it, fill it with chaos or detritus, blacken or clutter it so as never to be starting from a blank, and thereby try to avoid the anxiety of facing that void. Similarly artists may never prepare a white canvas, a clean page, a marble block, or other form that is intentionally lacking, in order to try to escape the dialogue with emptiness. But Irwin, like O’Doherty, found an opponent in the white cube, and he learned not to fight it, rather he ended the conflict by making it an ally, an interlocutor, a collaborator. We can vainly strive to start from nothing, to find the lull, the clearing, and to always consider what we do in balance with the empty set. Somehow that intangible cloud of hazy nothingness, that softness of a lapse continually offers a place to bounce off of, to react to, to wrestle with, to rest with, in tension, or a place to begin. Robert Irwin. Excursus: Homage to the Square3 (1998) NOTES 1 Massumi. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. p271. 2 MOMA, NY. Eliasson, 360 ? Room for All Colours . Installation. 2002. (shrink)

Through the voice of the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust observes of the painter Elstir that the paintings are bolder than the artist; Elstir the painter is bolder than Elstir the theorist. This book applies the same distinction to Proust; the Proustian novel is bolder than Proust the theorist. By this the author means that the novel is philosophically bolder, that it pursues further The task Proust identifies as the writer's work: to explain life, to elucidate what has (...) been lived in obscurity and confusion. In this, the novelist and the philosopher share a common goal: to clarify the obscure in order to arrive at the truth. It follows that Proust's real philosophy of the novel is to be found not in the speculative passages of Remembrance, which merely echo the philosophical commonplaces of his time, but in the truly novelistic or narrative portions of his text. In Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust sets forth his ideas about literature in the form of a critique of the method of Sainte-Beuve. Scholars who have studied Proust's notebooks describe the way in which this essay was taken over by bits of narrative originally intended as illustrations supporting its theses. The philosophical portions of Remembrance were not added to the narrative as an afterthought, designed to bring out its meaning. What happened was the reverse: the novel was born of a desire to illustrate the propositions of the essay. Why then should we not find the novel more philosophically advanced than the essay? Reversing the usual order following by literary critics, the author interprets the novel as an elucidation, and not as a simple transposition, of the essay. The book is not only a general interpretation of Proust's novel and its construction; it includes detailed discussions of such topics as literature and philosophy, the nature of literary genres, the poetics of the novel, the definition of art, modernity and postmodernity, and the sociology of literature. (shrink)

The text is divided into four chapters: 1.0 Metaphysics, transcendental philosophy and analytic philosophy; 2.0 The senses of being ; 3.0 Being and existence ; and 4.0 Modalities. After a defense of contemporary analytic philosophy against the usual charge of its supposedly superficial character and its lack of philosophical significance, Llano offers a thoughtful reading of Wittgenstein against his ancient, medieval and Kantian scholastic background. Following Gilson's historical analysis, Llano diagnoses a "tendency to reflect upon concepts with the risk of (...) forgetting the real things whose natures these concepts represent.... While the scholasticism most directly bound to Aristotle kept the consideration of real, concrete being firmly in view, Duns Scotus--in a direction already pointed out by Avicenna--was completely occupied with the concept of pure being ; a concept which, by being abstract, was understood as univocal. This perspective led him to 'prescind' from the actual reality of things, i.e., from their real existence; because, although existence itself is a notion or ratio knowable in the object, it is nevertheless required as actually belonging to the object in so far as it is knowable: 'existentia non est per se ratio obiecti, ut scibile est'". Against this background, being is taken as intelligibility, involving a relationship to the understanding that logicizes the meaning of being itself so that "the formal-essential dimension takes unto itself the whole weight of reality" and "esse is reduced to a quasi-accidental mode of the essence", which comes to be thematized in its own right as "the real modality, until a linguistic analysis, which can accept only the logical modality, passing through the logico-transcendental mediation of the gnoseological modality". Being is accordingly progressively "reabsorbed into human thought and later into various anthropological dimensions ". Section 1.3, "Toward a realist semantics," starts from Frege's attack on psychologism in the Foundations of Arithmetic and leads to a reinstatement of Aristotelian semantics in section 1.4, "Word and concept." Chapter 2 deals with the standard topics: 2.1, Predication, identity, existence; 2.2, being in propositions and being in reality; 2.3, accidental being ; and 2.4, being as it pertains to truth. Chapter 3 on being and existence suggests the thought-provoking comparison: as natura is to suppositum in Aquinas, so is Begriff to Gegenstand in Frege. Chapter 4, on the modalities of being, gets to the heart of the metaphysical issue of what happens when one of the modalities of being is substituted for being as the foundation of metaphysics. In Section 4.1, on actuality and facticity, Llano deftly centers attention on Heidegger's Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, where Heidegger maintains that the Thomistic notion of actus essendi is merely another instance of the forgetfulness of being. Llano rightly judges that Heidegger's understanding of an opposition between essence as one thing and existence as another is derived from a position of Giles of Rome and has nothing to do with the position of Aquinas himself. Llano cites Avicenna roughly five times as often as he does Giles of Rome; Heidegger, apparently relying on hearsay reports, mentions Avicenna only once in the Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, without citing any text, and mentions Giles of Rome three times, citing only one text. Heidegger uses a late scholastic as his authority for discrediting Aquinas. Llano quotes some of the explicit Thomistic criticisms against Avicenna including one that Heidegger partially omits ; the passage Heidegger suppresses begins "Opinio Avicennae fuit...." Though rhetorically subtle, Llano's clearly and forcefully written book is loaded with philosophical insights, bridges conversational gaps between analysts and phenomenologists, and offers a glimpse at some of the most important medieval notions sedimented within contemporary philosophy.--E. M. Macierowski, Washington, D.C. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Franz Brentano and Intentional Inexistence LINDA L. McALISTER FRANZBRnrCrXr~O,in his important early work Psychologie vom empirischen Stand, punkt (1874), maintains that all human experience is divided into two classes: mental phenomena and physical phenomena,x It is then incumbent upon him to show how these two classes of phenomena are to be distinguished one from another. In Book II, Chapter 1, of the Psychologie, he devotes him.self to this task, (...) and in the course of the chapter he surveys several different ways of making out the distinction. After enumerating examples of men~l phenomena and of physical phenomena, he searches for defining characteristics of mental phenomena. He finds several charac, teristics which he thinks all mental phenomena have and all physical phenomena lack or vice versa, but far and away the most important of these, in Brentano's estimation, and the one whdch has aroused the most interest on the part of later philosophers, is what he calls "intentional inexistence," 2 (or merely "intentional existence"; the prefix "in-" does not indicate negation but rathor location, indicating existence in the mind). As examples of mental phenomena Brentano lists first ideas or presentations (Vorstellungen), whether sensory or issuing from the imagination, and by this he meam not the objects which are presented or which one has before one's mind, but rather the condition or, what Brentano; broadly speaking, calls the act of having such an idea or presentation.3 Thus the acts of hearing something, or seeing or perceiving something would be mental phenomena regardless of whether the object which is, e. g., seen, ds perceived through the visual organs or seen in the mind's eye, so to speak. Other examples are acts of judgment, amongwhich Brentano includes ~:emembering, inferring, believing, doubting; and emotions.such as being happy or sad, lovi~,g and hating, along with which Brentano includes such things as willing, intending, choosing, etc.4 i Oskar Kraus, e.d.,2nd ed. (Leipzig,1924),I, 109. Psych. I, 137. Psych. I, 111. " Psych. I, 112. [423] 424 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ExamFles of physical phenomena which Brentano mentions are "a color, a figure, a landscape which I see, a chord which I hear, warmth, cold, odor which I perceive; as well as similar images which appear in the imagination." s It appears from the examFles, then, that mental phenomena are all mental acts, in a broad sense, while physical phenomena are, strictly speaking, all instances of sensible qualities, the inclusion of "a landscape" being, apparently, a slip on Brentano's part, as his student, friend and editor Oskar Kraus points out. 6 As mentioned above, Brentano thought that there is one partieula~ mark of mental phenomena which characterizes them better than any other: Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (by which you should not take me to mean a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something in itself as an object, though they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affmned or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.7 Commentators, perhaps not surprisingly, have disagreed as to the precise nature of the view which Brentano is enunciating in this passage,s Some have supposed that since you can think of, hate, or judge, etc., things which do not exist, e.g., Pegasus, then the immanent object of which Brentano speaks i,s not Pegasus but a "thoughtof Pegasus" (gedachtes Pegasus) which exists in one's mind whenever someone th'mks of Pegasus. Apparently H6fler interpreted the doctrine in this way in a paper which he presented to the Fifth International Psychology Congress in 1905.9.In the light of some passages from Brentano's early writings it appears to be a plausible interpretation. Consider, for example, the following passage: There cannot be anyone who contemplates an A unless there is a contemplated A; and conversely.... The two concepts are not identical but they... (shrink)

The history of philosophical thought has often been compared to a comedy of errors, and is one of the most important dimensions of the intellectual history of mankind. Quests for a correct view of the world and tragic mistakes, the polarization of philosophy into mutually exclusive trends, which is sometimes thought of as a permanent scandal in philosophy — these are not merely the searchings and sufferings of individual thinkers. This is the intellectual odyssey of mankind, and those to (...) whom it appears a farce apparently interpret the tragic only as the idols of the theater. But the fact is that antinomies, crises, retracing of steps, the discarding of real truths in favor of erroneous concepts long since refuted but stubbornly taken as true — are these things characteristic of philosophy alone? Philosophy is the intellectual image of mankind, and the contradictions of its development are of no small importance to the intellectual biography of humanity. (shrink)

The first view I shall investigate holds that the art form of tragedy expresses or contains certain eternal, acultural, and ahistorical facts which are "tragic" and present as such in the real or extra-artistic worlds; these facts are merely composed in tragedy as its content such that tragedy may be said to embody some perennial statement or thought about the things that are. The assumption here is that "tragedy" is a noun which can literally be applied to (...) describe certain facts or events we encounter in the everyday world. This term has been more specifically understood to refer to the fact of death , to a way of existence or human existence generally, or to a relationship existing between man and the world, or man and other men, or man and himself . Though tragedy certainly has its preferred topics, and these have sources in a world outside any given world which the particular tragedy constructs, there is surely a distinction between the world in general, with its facts, relationships, significances, and interpretations, and the particular world created by a given tragedy. This purely aesthetical creation of its own facts, relationships, significances, and interpretations is what I shall henceforth call the worked world of tragedy. Leon Rosenstein is currently working on "Hegelian Sources of Freud's Social and Political Philosophy," a four-article series to appear during 1977. He is an associate professor of philosophy at San Diego State University. (shrink)

Imagine that the person you see through the looking glass is a real person, with her own experiences, living in an environment that is the mirror-reverse of yours. You look at your right-hand glove as you put it on your right hand; she looks at her left-hand glove as she puts it on her left hand. You feel your heart beating on your left side; she feels her heart beating on her right side. You hear a bird chirping out (...) the window to your left; she hears a bird chirping out the window to her right. Is there any difference between your experience—your what-it-is-like phenomenal character—and hers? She is looking at her left-hand glove, the mirror-reverse of you as you look at your right-hand glove. Does she see what you see, a right-hand glove, or the reverse of what you see, a left-hand glove? Since her environment is the mirror-reverse of yours, and she seems to get by in it just fine, you'd probably assume, if you had to guess, that she sees it correctly. She is looking at her left-hand glove, after all. So it stands to reason that she is having an experience as of a left-hand glove, not a right-hand glove. And it stands to reason—it seems obvious—that an experience as of a left-hand glove differs in what it is like from an experience as of a right-hand glove. In this paper, I will argue that this last presupposition, obvious though it may seem, is false. I'll argue that (unless dualism is true) there is no intrinsic difference between what it is like to experience a left-hand glove and what it is like to experience a right-hand glove: if there are any relevant experiential differences, these are either merely comparative (differences in what it is like to compare gloves) or cognitive (differences in what it is like to bring an experience of a glove under a concept like LEFT or RIGHT). So your mirror-reverse twin, who won't differ from you in what she is comparing or thinking, will have the same (type of) experience as you. I'll call the position I am arguing against orientation–experience categoricalism, and the position I am arguing for orientation–experience relationism. Orientation–experience relationism is a surprising thesis, one whose falsity you might take for granted. I will argue for it by cases. Things go wrong for the orientation–experience categoricalist in one sort of way if we imagine that you and your mirror-twin's experiences differ: basically, this leads to absurdity if we imagine that you and she both live at a world with a non-orientable spatial topology (in the sense in which a Möbius strip or Klein bottle are non-orientable). Things go wrong for the orientation–experience categoricalist in a different sort of way if we assume that you and your twin would experience the same, but that someone else might have the experience that we were just imagining that your twin might have. Under these assumptions, we have to accept the existence of partial zombies, who lack the relevant phenomenology but behave as if they have it, at very close, empirically possible worlds. In an appendix, I argue that property dualism is the best alternative for those who cannot bring themselves to accept orientation-experience relationism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:66 Discussion REJOINDER TO DEJNOZKA'S REPLY GARY OSTERTAG Philosophy/ New YorkU. New York,NY 10003, USA [email protected] It is common knowledge that Russell does not explicitly endorse modal logic in any of his major logical writings. Nor does my review of BertrandRusseli onModalityand LogicalRelevance' suggest that Jan Dejnozka denies or is somehow unaware of this. On the contrary, I assume it to be obvious that any commitment Russell may have (...) had to modal logic must be implicitin his writings, nor explicit. The real issue is whether there is evidence of any such commitment. I will state, briefly,why I remain sceptical. First, Dejnozka's book lacks any interpretive methodology. When the question arises, In whichcontextsis itpermissibleto translateRusseli's language(formal orinformal)intoa modalsystem?, we get the following: amibute a modal logic to Russell if "it is more reasonable than not to paraphrase Russell's thinking into the modal logic." This condition, we are told, "is met to the extent that acertain modal logic is logicallyimplicit in Russell's thinking." All of which goes without saying, but it simply delays the inevitable question: when is a modal logic logicallyimplicit in a text? Dejnozka's current answer: a modal logic is logically implicit in a text when the text logically implies the paraphrase.2 But the final suggestion is incoherent, since we cannot tell what a text logical1y implies until we have discerned its logicalform-i.e. until we havealready paraphrased it into some formal idiom or other. A related problem is that Dejnozka consistently failsto distinguish two sorts of claims: • Certain passagesin Russell lend themselves to a modal interpretationthey can be captured in a given system of modal logic, e.g. S13. • Such an interpretation reflects Russell'sintentions. That a modal system captures one or another of Russell's accounts of logical truth in itself entails nothing regarding Russell'sintentions. The modal system G described by George Boolos in a munber of publications provides an alterna- ' "Russell's Modal Logic?", Russelin.s. 20 (2000): 165-72. 2 "Reply to Ostertag", Russell, n.s. 21 (2001): 63-5 (at 65). Discussion 67 rive formalization of Peano Arithmetic, enabling the derivation of Godel's incompleteness theorems. Yet the fact that this is possible does not in any way suggest that Godel himself was implicitly committed to G. Unfortunately, Dejnozka often writes as if the mere possibility of a modal interpretation is genuinely revealing as to Russell's intemions. Bm it is just as implausible to maintain this as it is to claim that it was Gi:idel'sintention to present Boolos's G.3 Second, as I maintain in my review, Dejnozka fails to take seriously the many comexts in which Russell is explicitly critical of modality. Dejnozka responds that he has quoted these very passagesand that he "embraces them as half-but only half-of [his] basic message" ("Reply", p. 64). But citing contexts in which Russell appears to find modality congenial does nothing to mitigate the force of the contexts in which Russell explicitly repudiates modality. It is Dejnozka's responsibility to explain how the latter are to cohere with his interpretation. To avoid this issue is to skirt the real philosophical and interpretive challenge that the project entails. Finally, we come to Dejnozka's confusions surrounding MDL-the triad of equivalences that underwrite the interpretation of Principiaas a modal logic. In light of Dejnozka's steadfast refusal to formalize the various modal systems he amibmes to Russell, it hardly makes a differencewhether MDLis a modal logic or merely, to use his terminology, a "modal theory" (assuming that the latter ultimately amounts to something other than a modal logic).4What is importam is whether MDLis trivial. If it is, then it is quite beside the point to pursue the various extensions of MDL.Since I maimain that Russell is not commined, implicitly or otherwise, to a substantive reading of MDL-one in which the modal operators have their conventional meanings-then he is not committed to these extensions, so there is no need for detailed discussion. What remains central is my argtunent for the claim that MDL is trivial. Bm this argmnent (unacknowledged by Dejnozka) is there for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The World According to Kant: Appearances and Things in Themselves in Critical Idealism by Anja JauernigPatricia KitcherAnja Jauernig. The World According to Kant: Appearances and Things in Themselves in Critical Idealism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 400. Hardback, $105.00.After Peter Strawson's withering criticisms of the "Metaphysics of Transcendental Idealism" in The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), many Kant scholars devoted their labors to explaining and expanding (...) his project of transcendental epistemology. Recently, however, the tide has turned, and major Kant scholars have tried to fathom the intricacies of his metaphysical doctrines. With its new, systematic, and boldly idealistic interpretation of transcendental idealism, Anja Jauernig's The World According to Kant is an important contribution to this literature.Jauernig casts her reading of Kantian metaphysics in relation to two traditional accounts: the two-world interpretation that seemed obvious to Kant's first readers, and the two-aspect interpretation offered by Gerald Prauss (Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich [Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1974]) and Henry Allison (Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983]). On the second reading, there are not two sets of objects, one phenomenal and one noumenal, but just one set that can be regarded in two different ways. Jauernig effectively demolishes the original two-aspect reading, noting that it has the consequence that contradictory properties (being F and not being F) are attributed to the same thing (164). The serious competitor to her interpretation is a more recent reading that makes an analogy with secondary qualities. Rae Langton introduces this strategy in Kantian Humility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Lucy Allais offers a new version of it in Manifest Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On Allais's version, the properties of empirical objects are real, but unusual. As the redness of a rose depends not just on the existence of the rose, but also on the existence of perceivers with retinal cones, the properties of empirical objects depend on cognitive subjects as well on as things in themselves. Jauernig takes Allais's secondary quality analogy and a closely [End Page 160] related view of Tobias Rosefeldt's as her principal foils and marshals many texts to support her new view. To my mind, however, some of the cited texts seem ambiguous, for example, "our sensible representation is in no way a representation of things in themselves, but merely of the manner in which they appear to us" (Ak. 4:287, cited on 256n22). The second part of the citation seems to imply that sensible representations are how things in themselves are "manifest" to us, as Allais would put it.Jauernig would focus on the first part of the citation: a sensible representation in no way represents the thing in itself. In her view, empirical objects or appearances are fully mind-dependent: each of their "ontological ingredients" (elements that make up an object) is mind-dependent. Since empirical objects are fully mind-dependent and things in themselves are mind-independent, they have no "ontological overlap" (32). Phenomena and noumena are therefore numerically distinct things (32). Appearances or empirical objects are "empirically real" (as opposed to illusory), not merely because they agree with the formal conditions of reality, but because cognition begins with the receipt of sensations through the affection of human sensibility by things in themselves. (Here Jauernig's appearances that are grounded in real things but have properties that are "fully" mind-dependent seem similar to Allais's appearances.) Because objects of empirical cognition involve sensations caused by things in themselves, they should be understood as existents, even though they are not part of "fundamental ontology," whose denizens are mind-independent. Appearances exist or perhaps "in-exist" only as "intentional objects" of representations (33). On Kant's theory, as on Leibniz's, there are different levels of reality (39–40).Jauernig energetically engages challenges confronting her strongly idealistic reading. If empirical objects are fully mind-dependent, how do they differ from illusions and fictions? Since Kant anchors empirical reality to empirical intuition, the question becomes, how are appearances or empirical objects the referents of empirical intuitions? Appearances are... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Fictionalist Psychiatry?Sam Wilkinson, PhD (bio)I am deeply sympathetic to what Giulio Ongaro (2024a, 2024b, 2024c) writes in these three excellent interlocking papers. I will argue that there is a slightly more efficient way of approaching these issues. It involves adopting fictionalism rather than externalism (although fictionalism can accommodate externalist insights). Fictionalism is something that Ongaro briefly, and approvingly, mentions, in the final paper, but there is an (...) implicit realism in the initial approach. I am not sure there is much disagreement, however, and perhaps we end up in the same place, having approached from different starting points. The fictionalist approach is largely compatible with all of the substantive things Ongaro wants to say, but is, strictly speaking, in tension with the most natural interpretation of externalism, namely, construed as a form of descriptivism and realism (two notions I unpack later).Externalism, Evaluativism, and Social IntegrationA major theme of the first paper is that mainstream internalist Western psychiatry is bad at integrating the social dimension of mental illness. I agree. Furthermore, recent externalistic (enactive and predictive processing) approaches, while better, are still lacking in that they collapse the “social” into the “psychosocial.” Again, I agree. But my diagnosis (excuse the pun) is slightly different. The social dimension of illness concerns in large part the evaluative nature of illness, not the need to descriptively, causally capture a complex, objectively real phenomenon called “illness.”Having said this, in integrating this evaluative social dimension, we need to tread carefully lest we fail to meet the “demarcation challenge” (Murphy, 2008). This concerns the challenge of demarcating different kinds of problem. Humans have always had problems, for which they have needed help, accommodation, allowances made, and so on, but how do you distinguish mental health problems, from other kinds of problems? How do you distinguish money woes, or marital strife, both of which certainly cause unhappiness, or even psychological states that look like psychiatric symptoms (e.g., anxiety, low mood), from properly mental health problems?The biomedical “internalist” says: Easy! Either there is something objectively wrong with you, or there is not. However, notice that this is exactly [End Page 337] what externalists can say too, to the extent that they are trying to describe and define disorder in value-free terms. The only difference is that the internalist will talk about what is wrong within the biological boundaries of the organism, whereas the externalist will go beyond that.Externalism about a particular phenomenon, if it is to be a non-trivial position, needs to be sensitive to the distinction between cause and constitution (or what Adams & Azaiwa [2001] call “coupling-constitution confusion”). We see this in externalism about the mind in general. In the Extended Mind Hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers 1998), the claim is not that Otto’s notebook causally contributes to Otto’s mind (his belief about where MOMA is). Nobody would deny that. The interesting claim is that the notebook is constitutive of his belief: it is literally part of his mind. Similarly, nobody is denying that external (e.g., social) factors cause mental health problems, the question is: Do they constitute those problems? Externalism takes this question seriously and answers in the affirmative, at least in some cases. But the articulation of this has to be nuanced.Suppose I have crippling anxiety over financial concerns. Anxiety can be a mental health problem, but if, in this case, you transferring money into my bank account makes my anxiety disappear, then one might think this is not a mental health problem. It is a money problem. Or is it? Enter fictionalism (Wilkinson, 2022).Fictionalism is the view that calling someone mentally ill is not describing them as having a particular property, but involves something like engaging in a fiction, a fiction that has been constructed in order to encourage certain courses of action. According to fictionalism, given the facts, there is a lot of wiggle room about how we are to think of, and respond to, people’s problems.To borrow some insights from meta-ethics, when we examine normative discourse (one canonical domain being ethics) we can ask: what does the discourse do? And what... (shrink)

Kant's understanding of two significant philosophical issues, the status of space and the nature of scientific explanation, can be illuminated by considering his reaction to the emergence of Newtonian gravitational physics. Although Kant accepts---with important provisos---the view that space bears an absolute status, he rejects Newton's philosophical interpretation of that status. Characterizing this rejection poses a problem. It is commonly thought that Kant's conception of space can be understood as a competitor to Newtonian absolutism and Leibnizian relationalism per se, but (...) Kant contends that these views commit a common mistake. Leibniz and Newton each picture space as real in a philosophically significant sense; Kant seeks to reject the reality of space in the Critique of Pure Reason. I argue that, from Kant's perspective, contending that space is absolute is compatible with thinking that it lacks reality. This illuminates, in turn, Kant's conception of things-in-themselves. ;In his work on scientific explanation, Wesley Salmon distinguishes an "ontic" conception, according to which explanations make reference to the cause of events or of phenomena; and an "epistemic" conception, according to which explanations make reference to covering laws. To begin with, I argue that Newtonian physics, which famously fails to discover gravity's cause, can be interpreted as providing nomological explanations of gravitational phenomena like the planetary orbits. Unlike Leibniz, who explicitly rejects the law of universal gravitation's explanatory status, Kant recognizes the significance of this notion for understanding the science of Newton's Principia Mathematica. In tandem, several puzzling aspects of the conception of spatial objects presented in the Critique of Pure Reason can be illuminated by considering Kant's adoption of a related Newtonian view: the content of the ascription of a force to a spatial object, or to a system of such objects, is exhausted by the physical law governing the operation of that force. In this respect, in rejecting a Leibnizian conception of force, Kant adopts an explicitly Newtonian conception; Kant's conception of spatial objects is closely linked with that adoption. Thus, important aspects of Kant's metaphysics can be illuminated by considering their relation to philosophical issues raised by Newtonian physics. (shrink)

Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace is a new theory of art, seeking to catch the flavour and essence of its contemporary phenomenology. It is obliged, however, to pit itself in toto against aesthetic philosophy, leaning on the derivatives from deuteropraxis and institutional definition while committing itself to a concept of arthood extracted from exoteric ideas, which are held to comprise the artworks’ individuation and identity. This paper examines the principal notions in support of his contentions and contrasts them (...) to the chief principles of aesthetic philosophy. In this juxtaposition, it transpires that conviction eludes Danto, as his suppression of aesthetic criteria yields unsuspected aporias from a disconjugate amalgam of inherence, ontology, epistemology and concept integration. Thus the leap from “mere real things” to the plateau of arthood is never accomplished, as it falters at the step where a perceiving subject has a stake in, and the power of authorisation, of this co... (shrink)

This article strongly argues the priority of symbolic, especially discursive, action over the material order in the genesis of social things. What turns a piece of stuff into a social object is its embedment in a narrative construction. The attribution of an active or a passive role to things in relation to persons is thus essentially story-relative: nothing happens or exists in the social world unless it is framed by human performative activity. Drawing on Gibson's notion of `affordance', Harré affirms (...) that material things may be disposed towards many different usages, and may acquire multiple identities according to different narrative constructions, even though the range of their possible `existences' is constrained by certain material features. Objects acquire their full significance only if one takes account of their double role in both the `practical' order, which includes social arrangements for maintaining life, and the `expressive' order, which creates hierarchies of honour and status, and which enjoys priority over the former. Reasoning from a microsociological constructionist perspective, Harré restates his view that there is nothing else to social life but symbolic exchanges and joint management of meaning, including the meaning of things; the illusion that some thing is real is merely an effect of certain interpretational grammars which remain stable across the generations or even the centuries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Parmenides’ Lesson: Translation and Explication of Plato’s ‘Parmenides’ by Kenneth M. SayreHenry TelohKenneth M. Sayre, author and translator. Parmenides’ Lesson: Translation and Explication of Plato’s ‘Parmenides’. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996. Pp. xx + 383. Cloth, $50.00.Kenneth Sayre has written a masterful translation and commentary on Plato’s Parmenides. The translation is literal but readable, and the commentary is informative, challenging, and close to the text. (...) Sayre’s main concern, and what he takes to be the “main problem of interpretation” (xi) is “what to make of Plato’s treatment of the several hypotheses that constitutes the second portion of the dialogue.” Sayre devotes over half of his book to the second half of the Parmenides, and anyone who knows Plato’s text will infer correctly that this is not a book for novices, but rather one which will yield ample reward to serious students of Plato. The book would have benefited from signposts which would locate Sayre’s intricate analyses of passages within his larger scheme of Plato’s development, an account of Plato’s more mature theory of Forms, and a [End Page 524] discussion of how each section of the Parmenides connects or fails to connect with the later. (Granted that we can obtain Sayre’s views from his other works.)Sayre’s book is not only an analysis of Plato’s text; it is also an engagement with important commentaries on that text. He carefully outlines and criticizes Miller, Meinwald, Allen, and Cornford (being most indebted to Cornford’s statements about the Pythagorean elements in Plato’s mature theory). Sayre maintains that the first part of the Parmenides questions the immature theory of Forms which is found in the Phaedo and Republic (68). Sayre believes that this immature theory is in need of more careful articulation and revision, and that the Parmenides begins the process. (Note that Sayre does not worry about whether there are multiple theories of Forms, or developments and changes in a single theory.) The major tenets of the youthful theory are that Forms are: (1) real in that they are “themselves in themselves,” (2) the causes of determinate characteristics in sensible things, (3) paradigms for the naming of their participants, (4) directly known by mind or reason, and (5) absolute in the sense of being independent of their participants (75).Sayre argues that Parmenides’ arguments in the first part of the Parmenides show that (1)—(5) need more elaboration and interpretation. The sections on the sail, day, and participating in a part of a Form force revisions of (1) and (2); Forms must be free of contrary predicates, they cannot be divisible spatially, and hence Plato must rethink participation. The point of the third man argument is that since “.… Largeness has lost its self-determinate status by virtue of being 'demoted' (in thought) to an object of appearance, it is no longer capable of providing determination to the shared features of this augmented group of individuals” (81). Sayre claims that Largeness is no longer one, and that it is “indefinitely multitudinous” (82), and hence that Largeness lacks definite properties. I am unclear about what Sayre’s point is here. Does he mean that Forms come to have contrary predicates—Largeness is both one and many—and each of these predicates is definite enough, but confused when found in the same entity, or that these predicates are themselves indefinite, whatever that might mean? The first interpretation seems to fit Sayre’s overall theory best, and if this is correct, then the third man argument shows that Plato needs to reinterpret (1) and (2) above. The second third man argument shows, Sayre claims, that both participation and resemblance are unexplained in the immature theory, and thus that (3) needs work. The section on our knowledge of the Forms reveals that (4) and (5) must be rethought. Sayre states that Plato rejects radical separation for the position that forms are distinct from their participants. I concur with this last claim, but Sayre needs a sustained discussion of what this claim means. Sayre concludes that the point of the first part of the Parmenides is that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews St. Auc~stine and Being: A Me$aphyM,cal Essay. By James F. Anderson. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965.Pp. viii [i] + 76. Guilders 9.90.) Contemporary students of medieval philosophy, especially those influenced by the writings of Gilson, usually view Augustine as primarily an essentialist in metaphysics, while Aquinas is viewed as some sort of existentialist. This is taken to mean that, whereas Augustine seems to identify being with essence (...) or wha~ a thing is, Aquinas distinguishes between what a thing is and its act of existence. The major contribution of Aquinas to later philosophy is often depicted as this distinction between essence and existence. Perhaps the major interest and value of Professor Anderson's essay is that it contests this currently predominant opinion of the essentialist character of Augustinian metaphysics and calls for a re-evaluation of the supposedly revohi~ionary character of the Thomistic concentration upon the act of existence. It is quite evident that Augustine broke with Plotinus when he asserted that the first principle of all things was God, being itself (ipsum esse), rather than the One, which transcends being. The controversy arises over Augustine's view of the nature of being (esse). For Gilson the notion of being remained for Augustine Neoplatonic, while for Anderson Augustine introduced an existential aspect to the notion of being lacking in Neoplatonic thought. Citing the same texts for support Gilson maintains that Augustine interprets the name of God given in Exodus as "I am he who never changes," while Anderson maintains that Augustine interprets Exodus as asserting that God is being, in the sense of existence, itself. The major point of disagreement between Gilson and Anderson is not whether Augustine regarded being as pre~ dominant, but how Augustine interpreted the notion of being. In some texts Augustine maintsSns that being and immutability mean the same thing, in others he argues that a thing truly is 'because it is immutable, and in yet others he argues that a thing is immutable because it truly is. The first opinion seems to be the one frequently favored as an interpretation of Augustine by Gilson. The second is usually regarded as Neoplatonic. The third is the opinion which Professor Anderson argues was most accurately Augustine's. According to Professor Anderson the first two opinions reflect for Augustine a merely factual connection between being and immutability, whereas the third reflects a metaphysical entailment. I should like to mention three points in Professor Anderson's discussion which seem to me weak. Firstly, as Augustine remarks that being is the name for unchangeableness we cannot take this as asserting a merely factual relationship. Secondly, to say that 'being' and 'immutability ~mean the same thing to Augustine or that being and immutability are identical to him does not necessitate, as Professor Andersen claims, denying the primacy of being. If 'being' and 'immutability' mean the same thing, then it is very peculiar to ask which is primary. If it is remarked that 'triangleI means the same thing as 'three sided figure', what sense does it make to ask which notion is primary? I suspect that Professor Anderson's contention makes sense only if one believes that there is a difference in the meanings of 'being' and 'immutability ', but whether or not there was such a difference for Augustine is precisely the point at issue. Professor Anderson asserts that it would be a "metaphysical inconsistency" to claim that God is both being and immutability, but it is not clear why such a claim would be inconsistent if the two terms in fact mean the same thing (p. 30). Thirdly, if, as is in fact the case, Augustine's remarks on the relationship between immutability and being are inconsistent perhaps we should accept the possibility that Augustine himself never came to a clear view on this matter rather than attempt to surmise what Augustine "must have meant." Of course, such inconsistency in Augustine's writings would tend to support the thesis of Gilson that Augustine has difficulties reconciling his theology and metaphysics. Moreover, the analogy Professor Anderson suggests between the Augustinian mutability-immutability contrast and the Thomistic potency-act contrast could only be a very rough one... (shrink)

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was one of the most provocative and controversial philosophers of the past 50 years. He had a rare ability to combine sophisticated arguments with wit, charm, and humor. He was never dull – and he reached a wide public throughout the world. Originally trained in the history of philosophy and the grand tradition of metaphysics, he became fascinated with the linguistic turn in philosophy. During his early philosophical career, he wrote articles that were at the cutting edge (...) of analytic philosophy. He developed a new approach to the mind-body problem and raised troubling questions about the viability of the conceptual analysis of ordinary language. Soon, he began to question what he called the “Kantian foundations” of analytic philosophy. In 1979, he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a book that became an immediate sensation. Rorty, employing ingenious arguments, questioned the basis of analytic philosophy, and more generally the very idea of systematic philosophy. He called into question the Descartes-Locke-Kant tradition and claimed that the metaphor of the “mirror of nature” had misled philosophers into thinking that the task of philosophy is to “get things right” by representing objective reality. In the mid-twentieth century, the analytic-continental split in philosophy became bitterly entrenched. Many Anglo-American philosophers were convinced that linguistic analytic philosophy is “the only game in town.” They disdained what they took to be the lack of clarity and argumentative rigor among continental thinkers. The “compliment” was returned by continental thinkers who thought that much of analytic philosophy was trivial and insignificant. Rorty employed clever analytic techniques to challenge the pretentions of analytic philosophy. Many of his professional colleagues were furious. At the same time, Rorty engaged thinkers like Sartre, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Derrida, and Foucault. This delighted aficionados of continental philosophy – although they frequently judged his interpretations of these thinkers to be distorted caricatures. Rorty was one of the rare philosophers who transcended the analytic-continental split. At the same time, Rorty increasingly identified himself with the American pragmatic tradition. He entitled his 1982 collection of essays, “Consequences of Pragmatism,” which included his famous 1979 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association: “‘Pragmatism’ is a vague, ambiguous, and overworked word. Nevertheless it names the glory of our country’s intellectual tradition. No other American writers have offered so radical suggestion for making our future different from the past, as have James and Dewey” (Rorty 1982, p. 160). Rorty helped to revive a serious interest in James and Dewey. In the Introduction to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he declared that the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century were Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey. Analytic philosophers might agree about the importance of Wittgenstein; continental thinkers might acknowledge the importance of Heidegger; but virtually no professional philosopher (except devotees of Dewey) would have ranked Dewey with the other two. Rorty claimed that each of these three thinkers had originally sought to find a new way to make philosophy “foundational,” but they came to realize that their earlier work was self-deceptive and they spent the rest of their time warning us against the temptations to which they had succumbed. “Their later work is therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to make the reader question his own motives for philosophizing rather than supply him with a new philosophical program.” (Rorty 1979, pp. 5–6) Rorty acknowledged that Dewey lacked Wittgenstein’s “dialectical acuity” and Heidegger’s “historical learning,” but Dewey articulated a vision of a new type of society. “In his ideal society, culture is no longer dominated by the ideal of objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement. In that culture, as he said, the arts and sciences would be the ‘unforced flowers of life.” (Rorty 1979, p. 13) This was also Rorty’s vision of a liberal utopia. He developed this vision in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where the central figure becomes the liberal ironist. Whereas Philosophy and the Mirror and Nature was filled with brilliant (although controversial) arguments, Rorty now debunked the role of argument in philosophy. “On the view of philosophy which I am offering, philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the ‘intrinsic nature of reality’.” (Rorty 1989, p. 8) He favored redescription rather than argument. “I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may redescribe a variety of topics.” (Rorty 1989, p. 9) Interesting philosophy is not really a matter of argument at all but rather “a contrast between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed vocabulary which vaguely promises great things” (Rorty 1989, p. 9). Rorty deflated what many philosophers took to be the central concerns of philosophy, the nature of truth, reality, objectivity, knowledge, and morality. He sought to replace the appeal to objectivity with the appeal of solidarity. He is famous for his slogan “Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself” (Rorty 1989, p. 176). Even admirers of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature were distressed by the radical turn of Contingency where he suggested that novels, journalism, and literary reflection might be more effective than philosophical argumentation in bringing about his liberal utopia. Some of his fiercest critics claimed that Rorty could no longer be taken seriously as a philosopher. Contingency was savagely criticized and ridiculed, so much so that Rorty was provoked to write his revealing and delightful autobiographical sketch, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” “I am sometimes told, by critics from both ends of the political spectrum, that my views are so weird as to be merely frivolous. They suspect that I will say anything to get a gasp, that I am just amusing myself by contradicting everybody else. This hurts. So I have tried, in what follows, to say something about how I got into my present position—how I got into philosophy, and then found myself unable to use philosophy for the purpose I had originally in mind.” (Rorty 1999, p. 5) What follows is an account of how Rorty grew up in a family that was deeply committed to furthering social justice. (“Trotsky” is a synecdoche for social justice.) Rorty also tells of his early nerdish love of the wild orchids of New Jersey. (“Wild orchids” is the synecdoche for private pleasures.) When Rorty became interested in philosophy, he wanted to find some intellectual or esthetic framework that would hold reality and justice in a single vision – one that would integrate social justice and private idiosyncratic pleasures. He tells the story of his eventual discovery that there was no such overarching framework and his growing realization that there was no need for such a framework. As a public citizen, one can be deeply committed to advancing social justice and at the same time, as a private person, enjoy idiosyncratic pleasures. There is no need to reconcile or synthesize these two incommensurable dimensions of human life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Memoriam: Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996), An Unended QuestElías José PaltiAt 76, after a long intellectual career spanning more than thirty years, first as Professor of Philosophy at Giessel, then at Bochum, and finally at Münster until his retirement in 1985, Hans Blumenberg has died.1 He leaves behind an incredibly vast oeuvre2 covering the most diverse subjects, from an interpretation of Bach’s The Passion of St Matthew to the history (...) of different terms, concepts, and metaphors (such as shipwreck, the book, and the cave).3 His three major books—The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975), and Work on Myth (1979)—are already classics and constitute true landmarks in the contemporary historiography of ideas. Yet so varied and extended an intellectual production revolves around a single concern: the origins and legitimacy of the so-called Modern Age. Moving back and forth from different angles and perspectives toward the same core—as in a prolonged assault—in order to test the different edges and explore all the potential implications of his own inquiring, men and gods, science and myth, from antiquity to the present day, all are invoked in his work for a concerted [End Page 503] attack aimed to shed new light into that enigma called the “Modern Age.” His multifaceted approach is thus only an expression of the multifold nature of his own subject matter.However, the unity of this quest is more apparent than real. His line of questioning moved progressively from the problem regarding the legitimacy of the modern age to that of its origins and specific nature, and in this very process not only did his approach vary but his very concept of that age changed. Here I will trace the main investigative lines that Blumenberg followed through his three major works4 to uncover how his view of the modern age was modified and became more and more complex over time. I will also show how, in fulfilling his project and in the consequent growing sophistication of his perspective, Blumenberg actually discovered a number of unsuspected problems that derailed him from his original endeavor, forcing him to reformulate some of his conceptual tools, and indeed to redefine the ultimate object of his undertaking.Modernity and the Problem of Its LegitimacyThe Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966)5 was first in a trilogy of major works reviewed here. Its title formulates concisely Blumenberg’s original concern. In it he focussed his discussion on the “theory of secularization,” originally formulated by Carl Schmitt in Political Theology (1922) and later developed by Karl Löwith in Meaning and History (1949).For Löwith there were only two authentically original traditions in Western historical thought: the Ancient (based on the notion of cyclical time) and the Medieval/Modern (founded on the idea of a linear, future-directed pattern of human development).6 The philosophy of history that originated in the eighteenth century is nothing else but a result of the secularization of the eschatological Christian motif of the fall and subsequent redemption. Such a revelation would unmask, according to the author of this theory, the myth of modernity’s origins as representing a radical rupture from its immediate past and the final consecration of the absolute reign of reason. This would deprive modernity of the grounds upon which it legitimizes itself. “Illegitimacy,” then, is here identified with “heterogony” (the lack of authentic, proper sources). “Seen from the point of view of secularization,” remarks Blumenberg, “the false conflict of the medieval and the modern age can be reduced to a single episode in the interruption of the human connection to the cosmos” (28). [End Page 504]For Blumenberg, on the contrary, “secularization” did not necessarily constitute an anathema. The fact that the notion of “secularization”—originally conceived as merely a descriptive term—came to involve pejorative connotations resulted from the Platonic assumption that a derivative truth is only a degraded form of the primitive, authentic Truth, so that any kind of intellectual acquisition becomes suspect (73). This is not actually the case. In a purely descriptive sense, Blumenberg argued, one can cite almost any philosophy... (shrink)