Bangladesh emerged as an independent country in the South Asia in 1971 after being separated from Pakistan. In 1971 it was a very poor country. The general people had a hope and dream that the political parties will develop the country and will eradicate poverty gradually, will provide jobs to the 50% unemployed people, will educate the 60% illiterate people; but their holy hope and dream have not been fulfilled due to frequent hostile political culture, beating, killing among the political (...) party members, no patriotism among the political leaders, massive corruption, unnecessary frequent strike, unnecessary opposition to the government policy etc. This paper has narrated the past and current social and political situation in Bangladesh briefly with the help of data collected from newspapers and statements given by intellectuals and political leaders. Descriptive and analytical research methodology has been applied in this paper to narrate the situation. (shrink)

Explore, as few have intimately done, the Big Bend Ranch State Park and the Chinati Mountains State Natural Area. Trust Wyman Meinzer to see as no one ever has the desert sanctuaries of the vast Big Bend and to pay tribute to their best-kept secret, the twin canyons of the Chinati Mountains, San Antonio and Los Pelos. Trust, too, that the images he delivers are as true as his eye, that the light bathing cholla at sunrise, on the eastern rim (...) of San Antonio Canyon, is unfiltered. Meinzer is one photographer who still waits for and catches the light, even if he has only a thirty-second window.?Placing a border around the vastness of the Big Bend is typically an invitation to disappointment. Reducing its depth to a medium of two dimensions tends to flatten a landscape known to be anything but flat. Catching the ever-changing moods of light and color in fractions of a second normally embalms the scene. So how does Wyman give us photos full of expansive depth and color? His skill is his passion for the beauty of Texas and his unwavering will to get to the toughest spots. He is an adventurer first and a photographer second. Wyman feels the land and sky. He becomes a part of the terrain, and his photos make you part of the scenery.” From the Introduction. (shrink)

We consider breath as a vast prospect that includes actions and traces of them, that builds images and texts, that involves the human being and the extra-human context; we call this great scenery ‘breathscape’. We then study how breathscape interacts with the human apparatus of the face, both giving rise to signs, but also giving rise to a liminal zone of extremely intriguing interpretative processes on a mereological scale. How and where do the territory of breath and the body (...) interact? Which processes of signification do they give rise to? And which signs are created in their phenomenal and semantic encounter? Art is certainly the most appropriate language for studying this process, as well as for letting opacities emerge and exploring outstanding contrasts. There are various concepts of ‘breathscape’ that, grounded in different cultures, are immediately associated with ancient and contemporary philosophies. As a reverberation from a semiotic interaction and through the discretization and identification of semantic fields relevant to the concerned scenario, and introducing textuality, a phenomenon seen as a crystallization of the transition between outer text (the text of reality) and text (subject/object), we consider those visual texts which are crossed by a common faculty that is both descriptive and inventive: by approaching some inferential and cultural regimes and analysing their specific enunciative practices, we then contribute to their renovation. The texts related to the practices as part of the narratives intrinsic to cultural semiospheres underline the insatiable vastness of epistemological content to be dealt with, and the functional reductionism of the corpus is only a first approach to the field that is intended to shed light on the general panorama and to stimulate subsequent debate and insights. (shrink)

A reviewer of the original edition in 1970 of "The Perfectibility of Man" well summarizes the scope and significance of this renowned work by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century: "Beginning with an analytic discussion of the various ways in which perfectibility has been interpreted, Professor Passmore traces its long history from the Greeks to the present day, by way of Christianity, orthodox and heterodox, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, anarchism, utopias, communism, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary theories of man (...) and society. Both in its broad sweep and in countless supporting reflections, it is a journey through spiritual scenery of the most majestic and exhilarating kind." Thoroughly and elegantly, Passmore explores the history of the idea of perfectibility--manifest in the ideology of perfectibilism--and its consequences, which have invariably been catastrophic for individual liberty and responsibility in private, social, economic, and political life.John Passmore served for many years as a Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University. (shrink)

This article introduces the unique Asian film technique of the “empty shot” from the perspective of Chinese philosophical thought and aesthetics. In Chinese cinema, the “empty shot” is understood as a shot comprised of nonhuman subjects, distinct from both the establishing shot and the cutaway. Perhaps due to the lack of understanding of its philosophical grounding, the “empty shot” has not received much attention in Anglophone film studies, and has been criticized as an overgeneralised concept. This article first relates the (...) “empty shot” to the more widely accepted “pillow shot” in Anglophone studies of Japanese cinema. This article aims to make visible a non-anthropocentric worldview conveyed through the “empty shot”, and to make space for the potentialities of this film device, which may also be found in non-Chinese cinemas. It explains the “empty shot”’s central features: firstly, its visible scenes are imbued with invisible emotion, leaving space for the audience to feel what the characters are feeling. Second, it facilitates the generation of qi or “air” in a film, indicating the circulation of qi in a process of dynamic transformation between “actual” and “virtual”. Thirdly, the “empty shot” communicates with the audience, allowing them to more fully experience natural scenery and to encounter other beings while suspending everyday experiences, existing biases, and the separation between self and other. (shrink)

Two essential components make up the semantic information that was used to pinpoint the video events. They consist of: (a) A spatial component of a video frame, such as the scenery, visible people, and visible objects. (b) A temporal component that is represented by a series of video frames across time, such as the actions of a character or the movements of an object. The video's audio, video, and text components are examined in order to provide the higher-level semantic (...) data. The semantic structure of the movie is discovered using a variety of cues from many modalities, such as auditory and visual elements, bridging the gap between high level semantic notions and low level qualities. A video contains three distinct modalities. The three are as follows: (1) Visual modality, which refers to the scene seen in the video; (2) Auditory modality, which refers to spoken words, background music, and other noises; and (3) Textual modality, which refers to written materials that describe the subject matter of the movie. There are numerous video databases and a sizable amount of video data in general. Even while there are tools for maintaining and exploring these collections, many decision-making applications increasingly require tools to extract the critical information hidden in the video data. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophers' Walks by Bruce BaughTim IngoldBaugh, Bruce. Philosophers' Walks. Routledge, 2022. 252pp.Yesterday evening, much to my satisfaction, I finished reading Bruce Baugh's Philosophers' Walks. The author ends by putting down his pen. It is time, he declares, "to put my boots on and walk out into the world" (236). For me, it was bedtime, but knowing that I was to write this review, I resolved to sleep on (...) it. On waking, I set out, as is my wont, for the short walk I take every morning before breakfast. The walk itself is nothing special: it takes in the streets of my neighborhood and a nearby park. Yet every day is different as the weather changes, trees come in and out of leaf, blooms flourish and wilt in front gardens, children on their way to school throng the streets in term-time only to vanish in vacations. Lately, a nineteenth-century fountain in the park has been lovingly restored, and every morning I am refreshed by its water-jets and tinkly sound. Most days I am writing in my head, on whatever I have on the go at the time. Walking briskly and on my own, I find that words that had tied me in knots the day before miraculously straighten themselves out with a rhythm and fluency matching my pace. I cannot, however, walk and write at the same time. It is physically impossible. So as the words come, I have to keep repeating them to myself, until I make it home. With no time to lose, I seize notebook, pencil, and spectacles to jot them down. Only when I have done so can I finally sit down to breakfast. And that's exactly what happened this morning. With my hastily scribbled notes, some good words, and the odd finished sentence, I am ready to write this review.I am not, of course, the first to have discovered the benefits of thinking-while-walking. Countless predecessors have done so before me, including some of the most celebrated figures of the past four centuries of European intellectual history. And so has Baugh. The idea behind his book is that if by walking, philosophers have arrived at many of their most cherished insights, then perhaps we could better take the measure of these insights not merely by reading their words but by retracing their steps, walking the same paths as they did. And this, precisely, is what [End Page 131] Baugh, often accompanied by his wife Diane Lindsay, set out to do. Each chapter, barring the introduction and conclusion, is devoted to one or sometimes two characters, and each blends reflection on their ideas and life-histories of walking with the author's recollection of attempting to follow in their footsteps, and of the experience and even self-knowledge gained from doing so. Some walks are in verdant countryside, or more spectacular Alpine scenery, others are in big cities like London and Paris. Baugh does not pretend that the walks of his chosen characters can be replicated exactly when so much has changed, in both rural areas and the urban fabric, since their heydays. Nor can we ever know exactly what was going through their heads at the time. It is nevertheless surprising how many echoes you can pick up from the past, so long as you keep your ears to the ground, and Baugh is an astute listener. For us, his readers, the book is an invitation to join in his travels, albeit at a distance, and by doing so, to enrich our understanding not only of his characters and of how they thought, but of ourselves as well.Though the book is called Philosophers' Walks, Baugh has cast his net wide to include characters for whom the epithet "poet," "artist," or "writer" might sooner come to mind than "philosopher." No matter: all such labels are a touch arbitrary, and it's the thought that counts. So here they are, in chronological order (not the order in which they appear in the book): Pierre Grassendi, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de... (shrink)

This paper presents a pilot study that explores instances of objectless awareness during sleep: conscious experiences had during sleep that prima facie lack an object of awareness. This state of objectless awareness during sleep has been widely described by Indian contemplative traditions and has been characterised as a state of consciousness-as-such; while in it, there is nothing to be aware of, one is _merely_ conscious (cf. Evans-Wentz, 1960 ; Fremantle, 2001 ; Ponlop, 2006 ). While this phenomenon has received different (...) names in the literature, such as ‘witnessing-sleep’ and ‘clear light sleep’ among others, the specific phenomenological profile of this state has not yet been rigorously studied. This paper aims at presenting a preliminary investigation of objectless consciousness during sleep using a novel tool in qualitative research that can guide future research. Five participants experiencing objectless consciousness during sleep were interviewed following the _Micro-phenomenological Interview_ technique (MPI; Petitmengin, 2005, 2006 ). All participants reported an experience they had during sleep in which there was no scenery and no dream. This period labelled as ‘No Scenery/Void’ was either preceded by the dissolution of a lucid dream or by other forms of conscious mentation. The analysis of the results advances four experiential dimensions during this state of void, namely (1) Perception of absence, (2) Self-perception, (3) Perception of emotions, and (4) Perception of awareness. While the results are primarily explorative, they refer to themes found in the literature to describe objectless sleep and point at potential avenues of research. The results from this study are taken as indications to guide future operationalisations of this phenomenon. (shrink)

La concepción de Derechos Humanos se ha desarrollado a lo largo de la historia con diferentes modalidades transformándose en un campo de acción con fundamentación propia. Este artículo analiza el fundamento de los Derechos Humanos como un accionar en sociedad conformado por un macroescenario institucional constituído para su ejercicio así como de los microescenarios donde variados actores desempeñan roles, defienden intereses distintos, engendrando ópticas que alcanzan finalmente soluciones concretas que inciden directamente en nuestra vida cotidiana.The conception of the human rights (...) has developed throughout history in different modes thus becoming an action field with its own foundations. This article analyses the foundations of the human rights as a way of acting in society, conformed by an institutional macro scenery constituted for its exercise, as well as by micro sceneries where a variety of actors perform roles, defend different interests, thus generating a number of perspectives that finally achieve concrete solutions that impact directly on our everyday life. (shrink)

This book addresses the philosophical question of "What is landscape?" From the birth of the genre of "landscape painting" in the 16th century, Western culture has valued landscapes in terms of their "picturesque" or "painterly" qualities. The creation of the "English landscape garden" was influenced by landscape painting, and "picturesque travel," which became popular in England in the 18th century, sought to recreate the experience of viewing landscape paintings in nature. 1. The book labels this view of landscape that seeks (...) the epitome of landscape in "picturesque" images reminiscent of landscape painting as "the aesthetics of spectacular scenery," traces its genealogy from the late 16th century to the early 19th century, and reveals its "anti-modern" character. 2. It asserts that the "aesthetics of spectacular scenery" is a dystopia of "hortus conclusus," drawing upon John Ruskin's criticism of the "picturesque." 3. The book then clarifies that landscape must be defined not as an "image," but as the "horizon." The "horizon" is the periphery of our consciousness, always present yet somehow perceived. However, certain stimuli draw our attention to this non-thematic object of consciousness. When the non-thematic becomes unexpectedly thematic, the landscape appears to us as the very "thing that was the horizon." The landscape is not an image or a physical structure. To experience a landscape is to receive "what was the horizon" exactly as it is given and to experience it in the context of the world as a whole. (shrink)

My paper draws on examples from molecular biology, the details of which I have developed elsewhere (Rheinberger 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997). Here, I can give only a brief outline of my argument. Reduction of complexity is a prerequisite for experimental research. To make sense of the universe of living beings, the modern biologist is bound to divide his world into fragments in which parameters can be defined, quantities measured, qualities identified. Such is the nature of any "experimental system." Ontic complexity (...) has to be reduced in order to make experimental research possible. The complexity of the research object, however, is epistemically retained in the rich context of an experimental landscape, where the eruption of "volcanic systems" can change the scenery dramatically as the result of particular, unprecedented findings. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to analyse the teachings of religious moderation contained in the Wawacan Babad Walangsungsang script. This research employs a qualitative method with philology as the main analysis of the data, namely manuscript inventory, script description, script transfer, and language translation. The script shows the story of Prince Walangsungsang’s journey in search of spirituality, specifically Islam. Interestingly, he learned his spirituality through many non-Muslim teachers until he finally met Sheik Datuk Kahfi in Bukit Amparan Jati. The (...) result of this study shows that upon his spiritual journey while gaining knowledge he experienced magical scenery. The conclusion is the willingness of prince Walangsungsang to learn knowledge and ajimat from Budhaprawa teachers, the openness and support of Budhaprawa teachers about the Prophet’s shari’a and the explanation of Sheikh Datuk Kahfi (Muslim) for the religious search conducted by Prince Walangsungsang shows the beauty of speech that is rich with nuances of religious moderation. Contribution: This research is important as a basic reference for religious moderation, which is rooted in the local wisdom of the Sundanese culture and tradition and can be adopted to spread those in our interaction with other religions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Selected Letters by William, Henry JamesWilliam James EarleWilliam and Henry James. Selected Letters. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Introduction by John J. McDermott. Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Pp. xxxi + 570. $ 39.95.Almost fifty years of letters to and from the very diversely brilliant James brothers: in this volume a generous, and probably ample, selection of 216 from a total of (...) 740 surviving letters or postcards, from an original total, according to the present editors, of twice as many. This volume of correspondence reflects the deep, unquestioned, unshakable familial (and virtually statutory) closeness of William and Henry who happened, as adults, to be seldom in the same place. There is, it must be said, very little explicit philosophy, narrowly or broadly defined, in these letters, but the philosophical reader will—or ought to—find much raw material for philosophical reflection. For example, a reasonable historicist thesis of how brotherhood, or family connection generally, plays itself out is supported by these documents. The nineteenth century is not the same as the twentieth. For example, here is William’s comment on the will of his sister, Alice, who left more to her companion and care-giver, Katherine Loring, a [End Page 479] women of extraordinary virtue and burden, than to her brother Robertson: “I can well sympathize with Alice’s desire to leave her something handsome; but I must say that her own consent (being apparently privy to the will) strikes me as tant soit peu lacking in delicacy. Surely no one of us would like to be in such a position in her family or any other” (271). This would be, in 1998, a rather unenlightened and ungenerous attitude, but is natural enough in 1892, even if not quite inevitable, not being shared by Alice herself. There is, incidentally, much discussion of wills and bequests, for the Jameses were of the genteel class, people with small family money and modest private incomes for whom the wherewithal to maintain homes with servants and to provide themselves with country houses and recuperative European vacations was always a faintly embarrassing, and occasionally a pressing, problem.It is probably also true that the much-discussed question of Henry’s homosexuality has, somehow, to be recast in historically relative terms. Here is an early report—1869—of Henry’s from Oxford: “As I walked along the river I saw hundreds of the mighty lads of England, clad in white flannel & blue, immense, fair-haired, magnificent in their youth, lounging down the stream in their punts or pulling in straining crews & rejoicing in their godlike strength” (41). This could not, the point is, be said by anyone, gay or straight, in 1998. Yet Henry is neither generally naive nor uncritically anglophile. He says of the Warwickshire scenery, which in a way he likes, that it is “too monotonously sweet & smooth—too comfortable, too ovine, too bovine, too English in a word.” And he adds, a little surprisingly: “It seems like a vast show region kept up at the expense of the poor” (41). This is only one of many appealing comments not sparsely scattered, but unpredictably, in letters of more ordinary news. Here’s one I liked occasioned by seeing theater in Paris: “We talk about it & write about it & criticize & dogmatize & analyse to the end of time: but those brave players stand forth & exemplify it & act—create—produce!” (66).Of course the “wit and wisdom” are not the monopoly of Henry. Here is William being wise: “We all learn sooner or later that we must gather ourselves up and more or less arbitrarily concentrate our interests, throw much overboard to save any” (55–56). Again: “It is a sweet world, in the interstices of its bedevilment & brutality” (321). And William being funny: “Boils are surely the most slowly evolving things in nature—Christian doctrine is nothing to them” (393). He is talking about his own boils and was subject, at every period, to ailments and infirmities: “Since writing to you, I have been swimming in deep seas of influenza, gout and Erysipelas of the face” (443). Or as he, in 1900, sums it up: “My... (shrink)

Summary According to Gestalt theory the impact of arts is not adequately described as a transfer of an artist’s message into a recipient’s state of mind. As a matter of fact (and effect) art represents complex fields of meaning (figurations) rooting in the specific conditions of art creation and proceeding to the concrete effects of art reception. From a psychological point of view artefacts cannot be reduced to static objects, nor are the recipients to be seen as passive spectators of (...) the scenery. Aesthetical experience is an action field from which the material of art and its reception emerge. In my contribution the relationship of subject and object in art is modelled in terms of Victor von Weizsäcker’s Gestaltkreis of perception and action. For this purpose, I will refer to the favourite subject of art coaching: the Moses of Michelangelo in Rome. (shrink)

In this paper, I am trying to reconstruct Shaftesbury’s views on natural beauty, writing and painting. Thus, the term ‘aesthetics’ I am using refers to both aesthetic experience and artistic creativity, to both natural and artistic beauty. As, however, in Shaftesbury’s work aesthetics cannot be considered irrespective of his overall philosophy, I am obliged to examine in parallel with aesthetics Shaftesbury’s ontology and moral theory. It is the concern for this last one that gave the occasion for the emergence of (...) an aesthetic theory in Shaftesbury’s work. My argument is that Shaftesbury’s view on natural beauty and his deep appreciation of natural scenery opened extremely fertile prospects for aesthetics, prospects that were meant to give their seeds both in enlightenment and in romanticism The concepts of disinterestedness, of natural sublimity and genius, for example, are some of Shaftesbury’s main contributions to the newborn discipline of aesthetics that were to have great future in the relevant conversation. In the case of writing, while the paradigm Shaftesbury uses comes undoubtedly from Horace and his advice to the poets to study philosophy, the place reserved for the true poet, his apotheosis indeed, anticipated the romantic appreciation of artists. The analysis of painting, finally, retains the strong link between art and morality and is based mainly on the Aristotelian concepts of unity and probability. It is thus undoubtedly a typical example of neoclassical analysis. It remains, however, a strong testimony of Shaftesbury’s pertinent commitment to empiric reality against those views that would present him as a high-flown Neoplatonist metaphysician. (shrink)

Evoluvation is one of the badly over worked words, like “ force,” “ instinct,” and “ value.” It means a process of Becoming. but it is applied to various orders of facts which have very little in common, either as regards the material evolving or in the way in which the evolution comes about. We hear of the evolution of a solar system, the evolution of matter, the evolution of religion, the evolution of the chemical elements, the evolution of man, (...) the evolution of language, the evolution of scenery, the evolution of the horse, the evolution of mind, the evolution of plants, the evolution of sex, the evolution of society, the evolution of species, the evolution of evolution theories, and so on. When processes that are different are called by the same name, there is bound to be confusion; and it is more than verbal. We venture to make some simple suggestions which, if accepted, would lessen the confusion. (shrink)

In this article the background, development, therapeutical value and praxis of film therapy in Christian counselling will be addressed. The second part of the article shows what the scenery beyond film therapy may look like and how this form of therapy may extend to other areas of digital and electronic media in the current counselling and pastoral care praxis. Postmodernity, as the context within which the society finds itself, is discussed, as well as the place of films in postmodernity. (...) The important use and application of narratives in the postmodern era is discussed. Film therapy’s development as an outgrowth of bibliotherapy is explained. It is further shown how film therapy as a tool in the praxis of therapy may provide the ideal atmosphere for learning, enjoyment and edification. The scope of the article also reaches beyond the current use of film therapy by suggesting the use of other social and electronic media in a therapeutical way as an ever-increasing possibility. The article ends with some pointers in the use of film therapy. (shrink)

We present a scientific analysis of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings and show that his patterns are fractal. The analysis also shows that he refined the fractal content of his paintings over the period 1943 -- 1952. We present a novel interpretation of Pollock's work described as Fractal Expressionism -- a direct expression of the generic imagery of nature's scenery.

The chapter details Lewis's ideas on perception, the capacity to see, and hallucinations. The chapter also provides counterarguments and commentaries on identified weaknesses of this work. The concept of hallucinations throws a monkey wrench into the supposedly straightforward definition of seeing, in that the visual experience is markedly different from the actual environment. The chapter then ascribes two conditions—multi-tracking and multi-adherence—to the capacity to see, which distinguishes hallucinations from actual seeing. In the former, a person “sees” if he is capable (...) of tracking various actual scenes with matching visual representations, as opposed to hallucinations, where, even if one changes the scenery, the visual representation remains the same. The chapter refutes the necessity of these conditions for seeing, because of factors unrelated to a person's capacity to see. In the last part of the chapter, an alternative theory is provided, in response to the identified loopholes in the discourse discussed here. (shrink)

This paper presents a pilot study that explores instances of objectless awareness during sleep: conscious experiences had during sleep that prima facie lack an object of awareness. This state of objectless awareness during sleep has been widely described by Indian contemplative traditions and has been characterised as a state of consciousness-as-such; while in it, there is nothing to be aware of, one is merely conscious (cf. Evans-Wentz, 1960; Fremantle, 2001; Ponlop, 2006). While this phenomenon has received diferent names in the (...) literature, such as ‘witnessing-sleep’ and ‘clear light sleep’ among others, the specifc phenomenological profle of this state has not yet been rigorously studied. This paper aims at presenting a preliminary investigation of objectless consciousness during sleep using a novel tool in qualitative research that can guide future research. Five participants experiencing objectless consciousness during sleep were interviewed following the Micro-phenomenological Interview technique (MPI; Petitmengin, 2005, 2006). All participants reported an experience they had during sleep in which there was no scenery and no dream. This period labelled as ‘No Scenery/Void’ was either preceded by the dissolution of a lucid dream or by other forms of conscious mentation. The analysis of the results advances four experiential dimensions during this state of void, namely (1) Perception of absence, (2) Self-perception, (3) Perception of emotions, and (4) Perception of awareness. While the results are primarily explorative, they refer to themes found in the literature to describe objectless sleep and point at potential avenues of research. The results from this study are taken as indications to guide future operationalisations of this phenomenon. (shrink)

What is sophistics ? What are the genuine reasons of philosophers'hostility, from Plato and Aristotle to Habermas and Badiou ? This text offers a new definition of sophistics as critique of mainstream ontology and a description of the efficiency of such a critical view, through a comprehensive explanation of the primitive scenery between Parmenides'Poem and Gorgias' Treatise of Non-being, and Aristotle's settlement of the principle of non-contradiction in book Gamma of Metaphysics.

Is cinematicity a virtue in film? Is lack of cinematicity a defect? Berys Gaut thinks so. He claims that cinematicity is a pro tanto virtue in film. I disagree. I argue that the term “cinematic” principally refers to some cluster of characteristics found in films featuring the following: expansive scenery, extreme depth of field, high camera positioning, and elaborate tracking shots. We often use the word as a term of praise. And we are likely right to do so. We (...) are right if we mean that the film does well what movies often do well. We are wrong if we mean that the film is good for doing what is merely distinctive of film. This issue has important implications for understanding the role of the medium in artistic evaluation. I argue that we should reject Gaut’s claim because it entails an implausibly strong medium specificity thesis. (shrink)

Human aesthetic experiences are pervasive; they are triggered by faces, art, natural scenery, foods, ideas, theories, and decision-making situations, among many sources, and seem to be a distinctive trait of our species. Our moral sense, understood as our capacity to judge events, actions, or people as good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, also seems to be an exclusively human endowment (Ayala 2010). As part of the scientific efforts to characterize the biological foundations of our human uniqueness, recently there has (...) been interest in the brain’s underpinnings of aesthetic reactions to art on the one hand, and in the neural correlates of moral judgment and decision-making on the other (Greene and Paxton .. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

During the last few decades there has been an enormous increase in locally based historical plays in Norway. These are staged by amateurs, although professionals may hold important positions both on and behind the stage. The dramas have their origin in actual or invented historical events located in the area, and the stage is carefully selected to create an aura of authenticity to the performance. The environment creates dramatic scenery as they are mostly staged outdoor, and the audience frequently (...) have to make an effort to travel to the site of the performance. As the plays are staged annually or biennially, they constitute a regular ritual performance in the community. At the same time, minor changes are allowed for from year to year, and which are widely discussed and appraised by the audience and others. Although these dramas claim to represent historical events and period pictures, their underlying message is of current interest. They become mediums whereby the past is seen through the ideological and moral lenses of the present, and are also catalysts for creating selected memories for the future. As such, they should also be considered on the background of the wider social dramas surrounding the actual plays. (shrink)

In late August 2012, artist Paul Thomas and philosopher Timothy Morton took a stroll up and down King Street in Newtown, Sydney. They took photographs. If you walk too slowly down the street, you find yourself caught in the honey of aesthetic zones emitted by thousands and thousands of beings. If you want to get from A to B, you had better hurry up. Is there any space between anything? Do we not, when we look for such a space, encounter (...) a plenitude of other things —a slice of plaster, an old vinyl record, a flattened piece of aluminum, painted metal surfaces, nameless interstitial powder, the reflection of sky, some letters of the alphabet, roughened concrete. Between what we take to be things there exist other things, as if the universe were jammed with entities like clowns in a crowded Expressionist painting. An abyss of things that emanates from them, not a yawning void that threatens to engulf them, but a sunlit nothingness filled with dust that seems to spray out of them like dry mist sparkling with firefly swarms. In these so-called spaces, we encounter the work of causality. Look: someone painted over this crack, some sunlight rippled in a mirage, a hole appeared. When we look for causes and effects, we don't encounter a basement of efficiently whirring machinery. Rather, we encounter these in-between spaces, where we had not thought to look. What we see are stage hands moving the scenery about—they are doing it in plain sight, the best place to hide, right in front of you, in the place we call the aesthetic dimension . In Tibetan Buddhism these spaces are called bardo , which just means the between. There is no such thing as a moment of your life that is not a between, according to this view. There is the between of living. There is the between of dying. There is the between of the transition between lives. There is the between of dreaming. There is the between of meditation. There is the between of two humans holding cameras walking down a street in Sydney. The between of two buildings, a space bursting with objects as if a billion jack in the boxes had exploded at once. Some of the lids are stuck, sometimes a nose bursts out and the hinge won't open any further; at other times, the jack in the box flies right out and pulps against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Time opens up. Each surface is a poem about the past. A myriad stories begin to proliferate, as if a thing were a crisscrossing of books, a whole library of them, each page whispering parts of paragraphs and broken pieces of word. The stories tell us things—they are quite literal, look, this guy painted part of this wall, then they came and stripped off the panel and touched up the holes. Form is the past. When you look at appearance, you are looking at the past. Where is the present? And essence is the future. The hints of unknown, unseen things, the absolute impossibility of grasping everything about this plastic pipe, the way photons entering the camera lens obey a speed limit and splash onto receptors, going into and out of coherence. At the electronic level, it's quite clear that causality is aesthetic. I can't see an electron without deflecting it. Everything is a refrigerator with a light on—or off—inside. For me, for you, for this arrangement of tiles sandwiched between a door and a slab of marble. To a photon, an electron is a refrigerator with a closed door, and a light that might be on—or off—inside. How can you know whether the light is on inside? Why, you open the door of course. But then you are looking at the past. You never see the light in the refrigerator before you open the door. This future is not a predictable future that is a specific number of now-points away. You will never reach it. You will never be able to sneak up from the side and see through the refrigerator. Nor can a photon see through the refrigerator of an electron. Nor can paint see through the refrigerator of this plastic pipe. You take a photo—click—the past appears, another open refrigerator. But the thing you have just made, the photograph, the graphing of the photons—it is another thing, another story. You can read the words, but the meaning always eludes you. It always lurks just off the edge of the sentence, just at the very edge of this ragged slice of paint, just at the edge of this building, between this one and that one. Thousands of secrets, everywhere. Masks that lie and tell the truth at the same time: this pink paint is not blue paint, that's true. But the thing, the thing in itself, that paint sliding off a brush onto that pipe—it is nowhere to be seen, like a light behind a closed door. When you walk too slowly down the street, you start walking into millions of levels of pastness, levels emitted not just by the humans or the dogs and cats, but also by this garbage can, this mottled pink surface pockmarked with nail holes. You walk surrounded by as many futures as there are things. You walk, or rather you occupy a peculiar shifting ground of nowness, created by the relative motion of the past sliding against the future, not touching. You begin to realize that the present does not exist. A thing is a train station where one train is always arriving and one train is always leaving. Hundreds of train stations everywhere, hundreds of relative motions. The idea of a universal, regular, atomic sequence of instants that contains everything is absolutely ludicrous, the philosophers have known this for thousands of years, and to hide the absurdity, to get from A to B, Houston to Sydney, crossing the International Date Line without too much laughter, you have embedded piezoelectric devices in as many pieces of hardware as possible, devices in which quartz talks to electrons, making train stations where the trains seem to run on time. When you walk too slowly down the street, you begin to realize that Zeno had a point. You can seemingly divide each moment, each step, infinitesimally. So perhaps there are no moments, no steps. Or perhaps time is not a box that everything goes in. Perhaps time is, as Einstein argued after all, a way that things send out ripples. Where one house touches another house, there arise hundreds of things, hundreds of meeting places (Old English thing , meeting place). Hundreds of times. I have a thing for you. Come over here, let's do a thing. Stay in the sunlight and shadow between worlds, in the sunlit canyon between this building and that building. See how paint touches this pipe, caressing then leaving, no one will notice if a surface is left exposed, not quite filled in. See how shadows are reflected in pale cream glass—see the luminous abyss of causality spreading out before your very eyes, right in front of security. All kinds of beautiful crimes are committed right here, and as American cars keep telling you, and you never notice, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. They are here, or rather, here is them, and now is them. Kissing in the shadow. Tim Morton Rice University. (shrink)

Inscriptions of Assyrian kings disclose that these rulers maintained and improved the land near the palace. This paper brings together the pictorial versions of what may be described as the “Assyrian royal landscape,” that is, outdoor scenery designed for royal purposes and represented on the stone panels that lined the walls of the palaces at Nimrud, Nineveh, and Dur-Sharrukin. The royal landscapes differ from reign to reign, since they each reflect some aspect of the particular king’s rule. The description (...) and discussion of the individual scenes also take into account the rationale behind their creation. Textual and archaeological data are supportive additions, and the previous studies of other scholars are also considered. The discussion of scenes carved on the stone panels follows in chronological sequence the reigns of four Assyrian kings: Ashurnasirpal II, Sargon II, Sennacherib, and Ashurbanipal. The chronological presentation demonstrates that royal landscape imagery in the sculptural arts progressed as a method of documentation by the Assyrian kings. (shrink)

Growing evidence suggests that natural environments – whether in outdoor or indoor settings – foster psychological health and physiological relaxation, indicated by increased wellbeing, reduced stress levels, and increased parasympathetic activity. Greater insight into differential psychological aspects modulating psychophysiological responses to nature-based relaxation videos could help understand modes of action and develop personalized relaxation interventions. We investigated heart rate variability as an indicator of autonomic regulation, specifically parasympathetic activity, in response to a 10-min video intervention in two consecutive studies as (...) well as heart rate. We hypothesized that a nature-based relaxation video elicits HRV increase and HR decrease, with response magnitude being affected by aspects of early life adversity and trait mindfulness. In Study 1, N = 60 participants watched a relaxation video intervention depicting different natural scenery. We analyzed changes in HR and respiratory sinus arrhythmia as a standard HRV measure, both based on 3-min segments from the experimental session, in multiple growth curve models. We found a decrease in HR and increase of RSA during the video intervention. Higher paternal care and lower trait mindfulness observing skills were associated with higher RSA values before but not during video exposure. In Study 2, N = 90 participants were assigned to three video conditions: natural scenery from Study 1, meditation video, or short clip from “The Lord of the Rings.” Again, HR decreased, and RSA increased during video segments, yet without expected group differences across different video types. We found higher parental care and lower parental overprotection to predict higher RSA at different times during the experiment. Interestingly, lower paternal overprotection predicted overall higher RSA. These results suggest a generic relaxation effect of video interventions on autonomic regulation that we discuss in light of different theories mapping restorative effects of natural environments. Further, psychological characteristics like aspects of early life adversity and trait mindfulness could contribute to individual differences in autonomic regulation. This study contributes to a better understanding of autonomic and psychological responses to relaxation videos. (shrink)

Nos interesa analizar las claves que la hermenéutica de Ricoeur arroja en el campo de la ética para hacer frente a los dilemas que enfrenta el hombre en su modo de habitar en el mundo, como fruto de la transformación científico-técnica de la acción. El examen intenta hacer fructíferos los aportes del filósofo focalizando algunos cambios esenciales a nivel de las variables espacio-temporales, las cuales expresan de manera ejemplar el nuevo escenario humano. Bajo la dirección de la ética de la (...) solicitud desarrollada por Ricoeur en Sí mismo como otro, nos proponemos mostrar los cauces creativos de la acción que, basados en la interpretación de las capacidades del hombre, abren salidas posibles para hacer frente a su ser expuesto al padecimiento ante los conflictos inevitables de su tiempo. We are interested in analyzing the key insights of Ricoeur's hermeneutics for ethics, to confront the dilemmas faced by human beings when inhabiting the world, as a result of the scientific-technical transformation of action. The survey seeks to underline Ricoeur's contribution focusing on certain key changes in the spatial-temporal variables, which depict the new human scenery. Starting from the éthique de la sollicitude developed by Ricoeur in Oneself as Another, we aim at showing the creative strands of action that, based on the interpretation of man's capacities, open possible ways to confront his own being in the face of the inevitable conflicts of his time. (shrink)

The standing screens on the title is the oldest work extant of KANO Motonobu's work as folding screens of thick colored flowers and birds with golden background. This thesis designates that the scenery and the motif of the work are in correspondence with both descriptions of the scenery of Pure Land in several Buddhist scriptures and the design of actual gardens. Firstly, a peacock on the right hand screen is focused to indicate the bird connotes the elements of (...) auspicious birds in Buddhism, such as Mahamayuri and Kalavinka.Secondly, the elements of the scenery in the work, such as the four seasons at the same time ∼ the depiction of perpetuity ∼ and the existence of a pond, are identified with the description of Pure Land in Kwan-mu-liang-shou-ching and Ta-wuliang-shou-ching. These elements of the garden in the work are placed similarly to the Pure Land style gardens, which are illustrated in "Center and Surrounds of Kyoto" 's. In consideration of the above factors, the conclusion that, in the work, KANO Motonobu succeeded to portray the ideal garden by combining the scenery of Pure Land and that of actual gardens, is drawn. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Difficulties with periodization are often symptoms of internal diseases affecting the history of philosophy. Renaissance scholars and historians of early modern philosophy represent two scholarly communities that do not communicate with each other, as if an abrupt change of scenery had taken place from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, from the age of Campanella to the age of Descartes. The assumption of an arbitrary division between these two periods continues to have unfortunate effects on the study of the (...) history of philosophy. This chapter provides a diagnosis of this problem by looking at the way in which periodization crystallized in the history of philosophy. It then lays a foundation for attempting a new approach to this issue, which consists in mapping direct connections and conceptual links of seventeenth-century philosophers with the philosophies of the Renaissance. We intend to shift the weight from the problem of assessing the ‘modernity’ of Renaissance philosophers to the creation of a space of interaction between Renaissance and early modern thinkers in the spirit of ‘conversation’, with special attention to tracing sources, direct allusions, confutations and continuities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Proust and the Phenomenology of MemoryThomas M. Lennon"I still believe that anything that I do outside of literature and philosophy will be so much time wasted." Thus did the twenty-two year old Marcel Proust (1871–1922) write to his father, reluctantly agreeing to consider a career in the foreign service as an alternative to the legal profession otherwise being urged upon him. ("I should vastly prefer going to work for (...) a stockbroker," was his comment.)1 Happily for us all, Proust was obliged to do neither, and in fact was able to do both philosophy and literature. As André Maurois puts it, "[Proust's] great novel is philosophy incarnate."2 Certainly, In Search of Lost Time is saturated with philosophy, the appreciation of which cannot help but enhance our understanding of this great work. The thesis here will be that a loosely phenomenological account of the work's central concept of memory gives us the structure of the work as a whole.The biographical facts suggest such an approach. Proust received a license from the Sorbonne in 1895, and, more importantly, had previously been a student of the philosopher Alphonse Darlu at the Lycée Condorcet. Although he published very little, Darlu was a charismatic, inspirational figure for his students—not least of all for Proust himself, who described him as "the great philosopher whose inspired words, more certain to last than any writing would, gave birth in me as in so many others to thought itself."3 A touching artifact of Proust's time with Darlu is his report card, preserved in the Proust Museum at Illiers-Combray. Not incidentally, it shows a concentration on the classical authors who will be deployed here. We also have a wonderful little text that argues a kind of phenomenalism influenced perhaps by Hume, and certainly by Kant.4 The one author important to our account whose name does not figure as such in any of this material is Malebranche; but we know [End Page 52] that Proust was familiar with the great Oratorian since he quotes him.5 In fact, the only author appearing below who could not have been on Proust's shelf is Kundera, the most philosophical and Proustian of all recent novelists.We begin with a text; it is the most famous of all in French literature, the episode of the madeleine from the Search. The text has become so well known—through hearsay more than from having been read, no doubt—that it has invited "kitchification."6 Even so, it is an exquisite piece of writing, which, in any case, is essential to the thesis here.Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray... had any existence for me, when one day in winter as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing that I did not ordinarily take.... She sent out for one of those plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines'.... I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body.... And suddenly the memory [le souvenir] returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of 'madeleine' which on Sunday mornings at Combray... my Aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flower tea.... Immediately the old grey house upon the street rose up like the scenery of a theatre... in a moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.7There are other such episodes of the past springing into being, but not many, and they occur but infrequently, until the very end of this vast work, when they come upon the narrator rapidly and almost... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger by David W. JohnsonLaÿna DrozDavid W. Johnson, Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019.Recently, Watsuji Tetsurō’s work has drawn wide interest, in particular around his concept of fūdo and his approach to ethics. The word fūdo (風土) is composed of the Chinese character for the wind, and the character (...) for the soil. It attempts to grasp the relation between humans and their environment while recognizing the essential subjectivity of the relation itself. David W. Johnson’s book is thus timely. In Watsuji on Nature, Johnson focuses on what he refers to as “Watsuji’s philosophy of nature” (3). Thanks to his interpretation of Watsuji’s idea of fūdo, Johnson aims at “reenchanting nature” and at giving us “the possibility of finding ourselves at home in the world once again” (49). This quest already sets the stage for Johnson’s argument that seems to be addressed to an English-speaking audience and to attempt to reconcile a particular Western conception of nature with Watsuji’s concept of fūdo. Within these parameters, his reasoning flows clearly and Johnson guides us elegantly through his interpretation of Watsuji across the eight chapters of his book.In the first chapter, Johnson traces the history of the concept of fūdo, and the difficulties it presents for translation. He briefly discusses ongoing conflicts of interpretation, namely the tension between nature and culture, and the issue of natural determinism. Johnson rejects the “equation of fūdo with everything that environs a human being” (31), for fear that it might reduce its explanatory power and “render this notion almost useless” (32). Instead, Johnson proposes to follow two criteria to clarify what the philosophical concept of fūdo entails. The first criterion “comes from nature itself, which is a kind of given that presents certain regions as articulated wholes around which boundaries can be drawn” (34), which Johnson claims is found in Watsuji’s “taxonomy of basic types of fūdo.” With the second criterion, Johnson aims at distinguishing “nature from artifice,” and draws the line as follows: “A newly created species of crop and a reservoir count as constituents of a fūdo; the installation of telephone poles and the erection [End Page 129] of skyscrapers do not, even though they affect the space and scenery of a landscape” (37). Johnson insists that the plant and the river are a “sheerly given self-unfolding of things.” This particular Heideggerian interpretation of Watsuji’s fūdo is the cornerstone of Johnson’s reasoning and of his description of Watsuji’s philosophy of nature.Arguably, more philological references would have been beneficial to defend such a controversial interpretation of the concept of fūdo. For example, Watsuji writes in the first line of the first chapter of Fūdo that fūdo is a “general term including for a particular region, climate, weather, geology, soil quality, geographical features, landscape (keikan 景観) etc.”1 Later, in Rinrigaku (倫理学), he defines and discusses the landscape as “an internal scene in the human existence; it is not an environment which surrounds from the outside human beings.”2 Furthermore, he insists that far from being a given, “the environment or natural region” is changed by human activities3 throughout history—which contrasts with Johnson’s first criterion that characterizes fūdo in terms of natural regions that appear as “a given” from nature. Watsuji also specifies that in this “environment or nature,” we have “cultivated countryside, planted mountain areas, towns lined with water streams, and villages scattered across the plains,” which are nothing but the “shape” of the human groups. Thus, Johnson’s second criterion that draws a line between human-made artifice and nature seems to conflict with Watsuji’s recurrent emphasis on the dynamicity and inseparability of human activities and their landscape, which includes villages, and thus would probably include telephone poles and skyscrapers. Moreover, Johnson’s distinction between artificial and natural does not evade central problems that have been lengthily discussed in the interdisciplinary field of environmental philosophy, such as the difficulties of defining... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews 137 The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice BY KENNETH R. OLWIG London: Routledge, 2019 REVIEWED BY TIMM SCHÖNFELDER Landscape is more than spatial scenery that meets the eye: it is an anthropogenic artefact, an intellectual construct, a mirror of culture; it even has its own language.1 This broadness is reflected in the compilation of nine authoritative essays by the geographer and (...) professor of landscape architecture Kenneth R. Olwig that were published during the past quarter of a century and are now molded into a more coherent whole. In this regard, the present volume can be considered the pinnacle of Olwig’s intellectual oeuvre. In a fervent foreword, the anthropologist Tim Ingold sets the tone when he urges the reader to shed the contemporary notion of what he terms “topophobia”—­ a lack of bond betweenpeopleandplaces—­andtoreinstatephilologyasacentralfield of interest after it was “relegated by techno-­ science to the margins of scholarship” (xv). To achieve this, the essays deal with an eclectic set of themes ranging from Ptolemy’s notion of “choros” as something similar to today’s understanding of landscape, to the humanistic geographer Yi-­Fu Tuan’s concept of “topophilia,” which is hailed as a guiding ideal for much of Olwig’s work. The articles are bound together by an introduction that quickly transcendsthegeometricallimitationsoflandscape,ontologicallyquestioning whether these can be representative of the world itself at all (3). The first chapter thus delves right into the etymologies of “landscape” and its historical implications in the Nordic countries and England with detours through Italy and the German lands. In a cursory, highly associative manner Olwig fathoms the respective cultural implications. Central is the idea that the concept of landscape is more than the mere scenicrepresentationofspaceitcametobeknownasinRenaissance art and culture.2 Rather, the Nordic variants of the word, like the Swedish landskap, are used to denote natural regions with their own polity that were then gradually subjected to a monarchic state, not least through the surveying and mapping of their territory (see also chapter two). ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 13 / ISSUE 2 / 2021 138 At times, Olwig’s philological musings appear rather stretched, as when he associates the German word Grundgesetz (the “basic/­ fundamental law” of 1949, which until today serves as Germany’s constitution ) with a biopolitical dimension of “ground” as in “soil” (41).3 In cases like this, his use of literature is selective. This culminates in a problematic assessment of Nazi ideology as being motivated by a specific understanding of landscape. Statements like “there can be no doubt that the modern German conception of Landschaft was implicated in the promotion of blood-­ and-­ soil fascist ideology” (42) neglect important literature on the topic.4 Such generalizations are owed to the author’s sweeping tour de force approach. The reviewer would have preferred more guidance through the theoretical thickets by way of a clear, chronologically ordered argument. This is not helped by the occasional seeming inconsistency, as in the claim that the U.S. “inherited the British scenic idea of landscape” as a former colony while also being “very much the inheritor of German romantic ideas concerning the relation of culture to nature as expressed in the physical landscape” (45), which, in turn, showed parallels to “fascist landscapes” in the “attempt to cleanse geography of its environmentalist taint by making it a science of space” (42). This truly is a lot of ground to cover for one essay. The ensuing chapters, however, try to disentangle this inspired jumble. The second article, “Landscape, Place, and the State of Progress,” identifies a switch since the Renaissance from the idea of circuitous development to linear progress towards utopia. For Olwig, there is a “darker, Faustian side” to it that he identifies as the “dialectic of modernity,” which “opposes cosmic dreams of a utopian future to the topian exigencies of present and past”: to advance, the path had to be cleared of traditional elements (52). This materialized in courteous theatre as well as in Shakespeare’s popular plays, and in the new architecture of parks where landscape was symbolic for cultural and social progress (64). “Choros, place, and the spatialization of landscape” traces important theoretical threads within geography... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tokyo School of Philosophy? A Preliminary ReflectionThomas P. KasulisIntroductionPhilosophical circles worldwide have recognized the so-called Kyoto School for decades. Can we also speak of a modern Tokyo School and, if so, of its distinguishing nature? That question drives most articles in this journal’s special issue. Before beginning my inquiry, however, I have two preliminary questions. First, why is it important to ask whether there is, was, or even ever (...) will be something legitimately considered a Tokyo School? Second, how do the Japanese think in terms of schools, and what words might specifically designate a school of philosophy? I will try to answer these questions, not in an abstract or general way, but one that uses the Japanese cultural context for its point of departure.Japanese Regionalism and Japanese PhilosophyLet us start with the first issue: why ask whether there is a Tokyo School? One possibility, of course, is regional bragging rights between Kansai and Kantō as we find in, for example, sumō rivalries. That may seem like a joke, but we need to go back only a couple of centuries for concrete evidence of just such a competitive spirit. Examine this broadside published in Japan during the height of the Edo period.1 [End Page 5] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.1.Gakusha kakuryoku shōbu tsuki hyōban (学者角力勝負附評判) (Standings Assigned to a Sumō Match of Scholars).As a sumō program, this banzuke divides the philosophical competitors between those from East Japan (Edo, today’s Tokyo) and West Japan (Kyoto-Osaka).2 Along the top are the typical sumō hierarchies of ranks (ōzeki, sekiwake, komusubi, etc.),3 but here they correspond not to wrestlers but philosophers. In this version, for example, Kumazawa Banzan 熊沢蕃山 is the ōzeki and Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 the sekiwake of the East, while the equivalents in the West are Arai Hakuseki 新井白石 and Itō Jinsai 伊藤仁斎.Such artifacts confirm a long history of East–West philosophical rivalries within Japan, but that hardly justifies our quest for a Tokyo School. Still, let us not too quickly dismiss the banzuke as simply an idiosyncratic curiosity; it has something more to teach us. If nothing else, it shows that at least in the Edo period, some intellectuals assumed a correlation between geographical location and philosophical perspective. That brings to light two common [End Page 6] present-day misconceptions, one about Japanese culture and one about philosophy.The first misconception is that Japanese culture is monolithic, or if it is not, that the Japanese like to think of their identity in that way. That mistaken view overlooks a potent force shaping Japanese identity: regionalism. The Japanese delight in celebrating the distinctive foods, crafts, scenery, dialects, festivals, and social customs of the different locales within the country. Even today, weeklong regional themes play out on morning TV shows as they broadcast on site from different locales throughout Japan. Undoubtedly a marketing ploy to encourage tourism, the shows also reinforce the Japanese sense of regional differences within their country. Grocery or department stores join in with weeklong “matsuri” campaigns dedicated to particular Japanese regions, highlighting sales of specialties in foods and crafts. If you go on a trip within Japan, your family and coworkers expect you to bring back omiyage as gifts—souvenirs or edibles distinctive to the place you visited. As a convenience for the harried traveler, train stations sell the omiyage associated with the specific locale.The recognition of regional differences within a single national identity traces back at least to the Nara period when the newly established central government began regularly compiling Fudoki 風土記 for each of the provinces. Those almanacs or gazetteers included details about the local demography, climate, agriculture, topography, dialects, local customs, festivals, folklore, and so forth. The East vs. West, Kantō vs. Kansai, or Tokyo (Edo) vs. Kyoto-Osaka contrast that interests us here became most prominent in the Edo period as Tokyo vied with Kyoto for prominence as the cultural center of Japan.4Centuries before anyone identified a “Kyoto School” of philosophy, the banzuke suggests that at least some intellectuals assumed that philosophizing in Kyoto-Osaka differed in some respects from philosophizing in Edo. This does not imply... (shrink)

What makes Nespolo’s Madama Butterfly so distinct? Not the fact that it is its unique exemplar, in fact artworks as grand operas are essentially repeatable. What does that mean? How could we then explain why Nespolo’s stage costumes and scenery perfecty fit? By clarifying the kind of object Madama Butterfly is.

Screenwriters and film directors have long been fascinated by the challenges of representing the listening experience on screen. While music has played a central role in film narrative since the conception of moving pictures, the representation of music listening has remained a special occurrence.In Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema, author Giorgio Biancorosso argues for a redefinition of the music listener as represented in film. Rather than construct the listener as a reverential concertgoer, music analyst, or gallery (...) dweller, this book instead shows how films offer a new way of thinking about listening as distributed experience, an activity made public and shareable across vast cultural spaces rather than an insular motion. It shows how cinema functions as not only a reservoir of established modes of listening, but also an agent in the development of new listening practices. As Biancorosso argues, many films have perpetuated a long-existing paradox of music as a means of silencing. Consider an aggressive score overlaying battle scenes or a romantic scene conveying unspoken intimacy. In the place of conversational exchange exists a veil of sound in the form of music, and Situated Listening explains why this function influences both the course of interpretation and empathy experienced by film spectators. By focusing on cinematic, physical, and emotional scenery surrounding a character, viewers can recognize aspects of their own lives, developing a deeper empathy for each fictional character through real and shared listening practices. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the changes in the theatrical space and artistic features of the two early court masks during the transition from the Renaissance theater system to the Baroque. The object of the study were two early court spectacles of the Stuart period in the context of Baroque aesthetics – "Hymen" and "Mask of Queens", the authors of which were the playwright Ben Johnson and the artist Inigo Jones. Special attention is paid to the scenic design of (...) both masks and the transformations of the theater space, in which the main role is played by the stage device – the turning circle. Its use in spectacles not only allowed the artist to change the whole design and express one of the main themes of the performance through the transformations themselves, but also combined stage transformations with the plot action of the mask. The research material is presented by the surviving texts of Ben Johnson's mask plays, letters from courtiers and ambassadors who were direct witnesses of court spectacles, as well as published sketches of costumes and scenery by Inigo Jones. The methodology of the work includes a cultural-historical approach, a descriptive method, a method of comparative analysis, as well as a reconstruction of a theatrical performance that has not yet been carried out in relation to both masks. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the first time in Russian theater studies, an attempt has been made to consider the aesthetic features of Inigo Jones' theatrical and decorative art in the context of Baroque aesthetics based on the material of two court spectacles. The main conclusion is the identification in the two early Stuart masks of the features of Baroque art and the transition to the formation of the English Baroque theater with its scenic metamorphoses, striking the viewer dynamics, the coverage of the universal expanses on stage and the synthesis of all the arts. (shrink)

The subject of analysis in the article is The Metamorphosis of Franz Kafka. The author attempts to capture various aspects of the Kafka space phenomenon in the context of the functioning of the wall / ceiling motif in this probably the most famous narrative of world literature. At the same time, the researcher treats Kafka’s work as an unsurpassed pattern of artistic scenery shaping: namely, which plasticity and concrete motifs and spatial relations make a kind of residuum of sublime, (...) symbolic meanings, realizing fully only through the imagination of the recipient, in the course of contemplative reading and accompanying it aesthetic experience. The argument leads to the conclusion that in his parabolic, absurd, full of understatement piece of work, Kafka does not reveal the sense of the story of a hero transformed into an arthropod, but allows us to experience this sense and presage it – as the content of our own lives. (shrink)

Herling-Grudziński suggests reading his short stories as a part of his Diary Written in Night. Nevertheless, Herling’s short stories may reveal their philosophical and artistic dimension without this interlextual dependency. Such an opportunity is offered by pointing out the main motives of Herling’s prose works. The writter frequently makes use of specific methods of creating the plot, scenery and characters. The typical first-person short story by Herling starts with a narrator’s journey, which turns into solving a mistery of a (...) main character. That human existence is constantly crushed by undiserved suffering. The action usually takes place in a symbolic scenery (an island, gloomy tower or mansion, abandoned house). The poetics of space indicates universal significance: phisical landscape is affected by human lonelyness, suffering or unfulfilled hopes. These experiences usually lead Herling’s hero to death, after which his shelter (or the place of existential banishment) finally gets ruinned. The narrator is not in possesion of sufficient knowledge about the tragedy. He gains necessary details from accidental informants or letters, diary notes left by the protagonist. This motif gives the reader a dual perspective onto the action. (shrink)

Recent challenges of the mechanistic world picture seem only to have strengthened the position of mathematics. So it continues to guarantee perfect predictability, the dream of physicalism. During recent decades, however, computer simulations have shown mathematicians that even simple sets of equations may have, not an exact, but a whole range of solutions. With some of their examples we demonstrate the unpredictable behavior of simple systems. As a result, the dream is over. On the other hand, mathematicians also discovered that (...) previously 'chaotic' phenomena could be represented by relatively simple formules. This leads to a dramatic increase in the explanatory power of mathematics. This change of the scientific scenery will have a profound methodological impact on the relationship between the natural and the other sciences. (shrink)

Abstract:This article is contextualised by the ideological implications surrounding the notion of landscape, including the relationship between its genre in painting and the development of European capitalism. It proposes the idea of the landscape fragment derived from the background scenery of early Italian painting, which stands in counterpoint to assumptions about the genre. These early landscape spaces are pertinent because they are not considered ‘landscape’ as such and are not constructed by entrenched Cartesian dualisms. I argue it is possible (...) to re-evaluate restrictive assumptions about perspective and landscape, in order to raise questions of translatability and difference so as to replace the dominating norms habitually associated with these terms. (shrink)

Advances in technology might seem to help to temper belief in the supernatural, but it turned out that they served, for example, to prove the existence of the otherworldly. The appearance of photography was perceived by spiritualists as a possible way to demonstrate the existence of spirits. The reusing of stacked plates, the duration of the exposure, illumination, etc. often added details to the new photograph, so unintentionally additional images fell into the photograph, causing confusion. The article considers cases of (...) falsification of collisions of people with supernatural forces, imprinted on photos of XIX, XX and XXI centuries. as well as videos from the 20th and 21st centuries. Only 37% of the photos and 63% of the videos were falsified intentionally – exposure, editing, counterfeiting, scenery or acting actors, while 53% of the photos and 29% of the videos were unintentionally. It was an accident, a game of light and shadow, spoiled photo/video. Presented as supernatural can have a resemblance to a human figure, or be a spot, a shadow. Most of the evidence of encounters is unintentional, in the daytime, outside. The article examines the progress of technologies through which you can create fake pictures. Especially in modern times, the development of digital technologies had reached a level where it was impossible to distinguish between real and edited images. (shrink)

Chapter 1, 2 of the Noctes Atticae reports how the orator and politician Herodes Atticus silences a boastful young Stoic by citing a diatribe of Epictetus. The article shows that Gellius – unlike his own assertion – does not describe a real experience. Instead he dramatizes the text, which is the origin of the citation. Comparing both texts one finds details of the scenery described, the characterizations of the protagonists as well as the themes discussed quite similar in both (...) the non-cited parts of Epictetus and the text of Gellius. Particularly interesting in that respect is how Gellius takes up citing and its various aspects as it can be found in his model. Epictetus deals with this theme in a critical way, because in his opinion citations of authorities say nothing about the philosophical qualities of the person who uses them. While Gellius' praxis of citation is formally modelled very closely on Epictetus' speech, regarding the content he by no means rejects the use of philosophical citations as weapon to beat an opponent in discussion. (shrink)

The Yuanming Yuan of the Qing dynasty was a magnificent imperial garden in Chinese history. The garden consisted of three Chinese gardens and a “Western-like garden” designed by the EuropeanJesuits. The garden encounter in the Yuanming Yuan provides a valuable case for studying cultural fusion in early modernity. This article redraws the traditional line of Daoist cosmology in Chinese imperial gardens by analyzing the fengshui layout of the Yuanming Yuan. Based on the Qing emperors’ writings, imperial archives, and the garden (...) representations, the research interprets the design distinction and its cross-cultural accommodation. The article concludes that the exotic depth produced by the linear-perspective views in the European portion demonstrated the typical Daoist attempt of preserving full brightness in one’s mind through seeking the remotest garden scenery, as stated in the Daoist scripture Laozi that “whoever knows his brightness veils himself in his darkness.” This Daoist paradoxical idea, best embodied by the Yuanming Yuan, opens up a comparative understanding of Heidegger’s concept “paradoxa.”. (shrink)

This essay traces the evolution of my thinking from ecological anthropology to a synthesis of linealogy and meteorology. As my ideas developed, via concepts of landscape and taskscape, I began to think of human lives as lived along lines, entangled in a meshwork. Yet every life is also lived on the ground, in the zone of interpenetration between earth and sky. And the sky is the domain of the weather. My challenge was then to understand the relations between lines and (...) the weather, or between the meshwork and the earth-sky world. This is where the atmosphere came in. Through a critique of the aesthetics of atmosphere, I argue for an approach that, in reintroducing the element of air, would fuse cosmos and affect. But this means undoing the inversion, characteristic of modernity, which turns the earth-sky world into landscape and scenery on which life is enacted. Ultimately, I find the relation between lines and the weather in the alternation of breathing in and breathing out. (shrink)

Chinese painting is dominated by landscape painting, which is a unique form of artistic expression for Chinese people, while landscape generally refers to nature. Wild natural landscape can be called “wilderness,” which embodies the vitality and upward vitality of nature, and also contains unique cultural characteristics. “Wilderness” is the most important “original ecological” environment in the natural environment. Its existence has natural, ecological, and aesthetic significance. It is nature in its primitiveness and ecology in its wildness; the aesthetic lives on (...) in it. Compared with Western landscape painting, it pays particular attention to realism, good at depicting beautiful natural scenery and recording the reality of scenery. On the other hand, Chinese landscape painting pays more attention to the expression of connotation. Chinese landscape painting focuses on nature, takes meaning as its purpose and pursues culture. Chinese landscape painting is the outstanding expression of wilderness spirit, which is mainly manifested in three aspects: Chinese landscape painting is of the same origin as “Tao” ; the “wilderness” in landscape painting has a strong vitality; “wilderness” has a special cultural connotation. China’s wilderness is not ecological, but is vibrant; not in the dust, but out of the dust; not in nature, but in culture. (shrink)