In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:From the Perspective of the Self: Montaigne’s Self-PortraitPatrick HenryFrom the Perspective of the Self: Montaigne’s Self-Portrait, by Craig B. Brush; 321 pp. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994, $32.50.In a note to Chapter One, the author explains that his is the third book to center on the self-portrait of Montaigne but, unlike one—Miroirs d’encre by Michel Beaujour—his deals only with Montaigne and, unlike both—the other is Montaigne’s Essays (...) as the Book of the Self by Richard Regosin—his is not geared toward literary theory and offers no theoretical approach to self-portraiture or autobiography. What we have, then, is a close textual analysis of the essayist’s self-portrait which is shown to coexist with the ubiquitous voice of the moraliste, whose subject is mankind in general, and a third voice, particularly pronounced in the 1588 and 1595 editions of the Essays, that of the “essayer,” “whose topic is his own book, its aim, its method of inquiry, and its production” (p. 120). Throughout his study, even as he scrutinizes the self-portrait, Brush demonstrates that these three voices are interrelated, interdependent, and virtually inseparable. [End Page 173]Brush’s exhaustive enterprise: to depict “how Montaigne came to the project [of self-portraiture], how he conceived it, how he practiced it, what he had to say about it, what he learned from the strange practice, how it became a way of life for him” (p. 8) takes him into areas that have been well-debated by Montaigne scholars. Thus we find lengthy discussions of the sense of the word “essay,” authorial modesty, the role of the reader, titles, beginnings, digressions, additions, endings, skepticism, nominalism, Catholicism, dialogue, ethics, evolution, the use of personal pronouns, the structure of individual chapters and of the book as a whole, the link between La Boétie’s death and the self-portraiture project, and the interplay between self and other.On each topic, however, Brush inevitably offers a fresh insight, a quirky intuition, or a new departure that makes the discussion worthwhile. He paints the history of both domestic and official portraiture at the moment when Montaigne began writing; he explains why a self-portrait is not an autobiography; he opposes the treatise and the essay; he differentiates clearly between self-study, self-knowledge, and self-portraiture; he depicts what is missing from the portrait that the essayist deemed relatively complete, and he weighs carefully the opposed proclivities of the essayist toward self-improvement and self-acceptance. In addition, he points out how the impossibility of finding a “pure self” forced Montaigne “to paint himself in context” (p. 107) and argues forcefully that the essayist’s “love of life was a profoundly religious experience” (p. 210). In a particularly rich commentary on “Of practice” (pp. 82–83), Brush stresses the importance of writing for the author of the Essays. In this case, the writing of the essay may in fact have been more significant for him than the event that the writing narrates, thus underscoring the essayist’s claim that this book has made him as much as he has made it. Finally, Brush’s tenth chapter, “Study Without a Book,” eloquently elucidates the originality that Montaigne brought to his reading of the ancient adage “Know Thyself.”It was inevitable that Brush would cover much familiar material but by keeping his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Montaigne criticism in the end notes and by rigorously analyzing the Essays, he has written an eminently readable, jargon-free study that will serve both the beginning student and the seasoned Montaigne scholar. Having no theory to impose, he is free to chart the amazingly rich variety and diversity of the Essays, aspects of the human condition that the essayist always underscored. His book, clearly the product of years of ruminating on the Essays, contains hundreds of quotations from Montaigne’s Travel Journal and from seventy-seven of the one-hundred-seven chapters penned by the essayist. By giving us, in the main, nothing but his own personal reflections on the Essays, he has also curiously and interestingly provided us with his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 465-468 [Access article in PDF] Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes, by Richard Watson; vii & 375 pp. Boston: David R. Godine, 2002, $35.00. Scholarly in what it delivers, but delightful in how it delivers what it delivers, Cogito Ergo Sum is highly informative and fun to read. Touching on all the key places, players and events in the philosopher's life, Watson (...) tells us (at least) everything we wanted to know about Descartes as he cuts through the myths that have been passed down to us about him. Cutting through the myths meant dissociating his biography ("the first biography of Descartes since 1920 that is based on substantial new research, and the only one ever written for general readers"; p. 23) from the two still-operative hagiographic traditions: the French Catholic apologetic tradition and the scientific apologetic tradition. The result is a skeptical biography, full of distrust toward tradition and authority, written very much in the spirit of methodical doubt practiced by its subject.Descartes emerged from a powerful family tradition of law and medicine but mentions his childhood only six times. With good reason. He didn't like either his father or his brother and his mother died thirteen months after he was born. He was considered the family failure, not only wasting time in philosophy but squandering his share of the family fortune. He received an excellent eight-year education at the outstanding Jesuit school at La Flèche where he was immediately attracted to the certitude that mathematics offered him. He earned a law degree in Poitiers, spent time in the Army, though not in battle, and refused a judgeship.It was Isaac Beeckman who radically influenced Descartes's future when he awakened him to the possibility of applying mathematics to the problems of natural science. Watson examines sympathetically Descartes's eventual revolt against this father figure. Watson humanizes Descartes greatly when he examines both his relationship with his daughter, Francina, who died of scarlatina at the age of five, and his relationship with the child's mother, Helena Jans. He also rehabilitates the reputation of Helena who has been traditionally maligned by biographers of the philosopher. Here, and elsewhere, he speaks out loudly and clearly against "the denizens of the Saint Descartes Protection Society" who purport that Descartes broke his celibacy just this once. "Actually," writes Watson, "I think Descartes was enough of a scientist that he would have repeated the experiment several times, if only to see if the experience was the same the second and a third time" (pp. 181; 182).In 1628, totally unwilling to get involved in religious squabbles in France and desiring to live in "joyful anonymity," Descartes takes off for Friesland. This constituted a flight from family, social responsibility, and royalist Catholic totalitarian oppression. He moved around often to situate himself at universities where he wanted to do research and to avoid the plague. This great mathematical genius and father of modern philosophy wanted to replace [End Page 465] Aristotelian philosophy and science and thought correctly that it would be easier to get his ideas accepted here. He became friendly with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia who spoke five languages and astutely critiqued his metaphysics. Despite the myths, neither was in love with the other. She inspired him to write The Passions of the Soul, which, oddly enough, he dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden. He did, however, dedicate his Principles to Elizabeth. Christina was a bookish intellectual who loved the theater. In 1649, even though he had exhibited a clear dislike of court life, he agreed to be her tutor. He died in Sweden in 1650 during one of the coldest winters ever recorded in Europe.Why did he go to Sweden? He was broke and had little chance for a pension in France. In addition, while he knew the value of his work, he began to think his life might have been a failure. Perhaps he might really enjoy being a courtier after all. Certainly he feared that he would end... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Crises of Memory and the Second World WarPatrick HenryCrises of Memory and the Second World War, by Susan Rubin Suleiman; x & 286 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. $29.95.This excellent study deals widely and deeply with the crises of memory and World War II but generally focuses on France, Vichy and the Holocaust. The author defines a crisis of memory as "a moment of choice and sometimes (...) of predicament or conflict, about remembrance of the past, whether by individuals or by groups" (p. 1). In the crises of memory she examines, "individual self-representation overlaps with... collective self-representation" in such a way that individual remembrance takes on collective significance. In nine rich chapters of textual analysis of mostly self-consciously literary texts, Suleiman deftly analyzes writers from the left and the right, two films of tremendous import, the nature of Holocaust memoirs, experimental writing and the concepts of trauma, amnesia, amnesty, testimony and forgiveness.In the first three chapters, Suleiman studies French memories of the Occupation, the collaborationist Vichy regime and the Resistance from 1945 to the present. These chapters depict the relations between history and memory and highlight the intriguing process of the evolution of public remembrance. Chapter one, "Choosing Our Past," surprises even the most careful reader of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays and novels, for it demonstrates brilliantly that, in several of his very early post-Vichy essays where he conveniently passes over in silence France's collaborationist past—even the major role played by Vichy police in the roundup and deportation of Jews—he helped create, along with de Gaulle and others, the myth of "Resistancialism," the founding myth of the post-Vichy [End Page 204] Period, the idea that all Frenchmen resisted the Nazis. In the words of Pierre Nora, Sartre and de Gaulle were "writing history from the point of view of the future" (p. 17).In chapter two, the author analyzes the 1997 "Aubrac Affair," exposing the problems that the Resistance heroes, Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, encountered when they were suddenly suspected of having betrayed Jean Moulin, whose 1964 enshrinement in the Pantheon is examined in chapter three within the context of the politics of national memory in France. Whereas Moulin's enshrinement marked the apex of the myth of "Resistancialism" in France, the "Aubrac Affair" comes fifty-four years after the betrayal of Jean Moulin and twenty-five years after the myth of "Resistancialism" began to fade. In treating the charges and countercharges in the "Aubrac Affair," which continues to fascinate because it illustrates "the problematic relation between public and private memory, and between history and fantasy in the construction of both an individual and a collective past" (p. 61), Suleiman highlights the problems of narrative verisimilitude and the narrative tendency toward heroic aggrandizement as well as its opposite, the desire to topple heroes.In chapter four, Suleiman studies Marcel Orphuls's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, a four-hour documentary of great significance that remains relatively unknown when compared with his earlier film, The Sorrow and the Pity. Barbie was the infamous Nazi war criminal, known as "the Butcher of Lyon," who tortured and deported hundreds of Jews and tortured to death the great French Resistance hero, Jean Moulin. He was extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983 where he was tried for crimes against humanity in 1987. Orphuls's film exposes the conflicted memories and partisanships produced by WWII and the Holocaust in public and private spaces throughout Europe and the Americas. This chapter will undoubtedly convince others of the film's importance. It will certainly convince the reader of Suleiman's ability to read film. She explains in detail Orphuls's method of "dialectical montage" (already evident in The Sorrow and the Pity) whereby he cuts up individual interviews and juxtaposes them with parts of others that often qualify or simply contradict what has been stated. This is why his films are "interactive documentaries" that "force the viewer into uncomfortable subject positions in relation to the material" (p. 87). No voice-over or "voice of God" commentary comes to aid the viewer who is forced to evaluate critically... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Shimmering Maya and Other EssaysPatrick HenryThe Shimmering Maya and Other Essays, by Catharine Savage Brosman; 149 pp. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994, $24.94.When the author was fifteen, she held the rank of “prospector” at Girl Scout Camp. Now, over forty years later, she is “digging down through the layers, sifting through the running stream of memory” (p. 14). Her art of prospecting affords the reader (...) a linear impression of a journey that begins with “The Shimmering Maya,” a recountal of a family move in August 1944 from Colorado to South Texas. “Desert Silvery Blue” describes life in Alpine, Texas, while “Leaving for Good” narrates her experience of displacement as she departs Alpine in 1951 to attend Rice Institute, known then as “the atheist school” (p. 37). From Alpine to Houston, she experiences the greening of America and the shock of Gulf Coast humidity, “a sensation of being hit in the face and smothered” (p. 42). At Rice, she finishes her degrees, travels to France, her intellectual home, and returns, in “Cherry Time”—“Yes, Virginia, there is a Virginia” (p. 52)—to describe her life in full bloom during this relatively short but intense period, spent in and around the state of Virginia, before her permanent move to New Orleans. Two essays conclude the volume even as they bend back toward its beginning. “Winter Light” narrates the life of her grandfather, Edward Hill, newspaperman, teacher, doctor, writer, and formidable learner whom she knew only in the winter of his life but whose light illuminated her being and “whose heir I feel, or wish, myself to be” (p. 130). “Turn My Face Out to the West” recounts a recent camping trip in New Mexico but, more profoundly, a return to the Western land of her youth. Like the Anasazi and Pueblo Indians, she too was born there and, reclaiming their heritage as partly hers, extols their solar-based science, courage, sense of community, independent spirit, and love and respect for the land.Brosman paints being, however, as well as becoming. Essays six through eleven focus more centrally than the others on her habitual self: her self-portrait as teacher, scholar, poet, traveler, and traditional woman. As a teacher of language, she offers “at once an end and a means” (p. 86) and, as literature teacher, not “entertainment chiefly but the pursuit of truth” (p. 88), undogmatically attempting to elicit self-awareness without imposing a single view. [End Page 136] A traditional woman who has never felt uncomfortable around men and doesn’t consider them her enemies, Brosman thinks Women’s Studies are “regressive” (p. 84), deplores language “barbarisms” such as “chairperson” and “herstory” (p. 75), and holds for a “nongendered intellectual patrimony of arts, letters, and science” (p. 84). While she admits that it’s a miracle that all marriages don’t simply fall apart, the differences between the sexes, she argues, constitute “the whole basis for attraction” (p. 70), and she prefers her cigar-smoking husband “to men who boast about their Hollandaise sauce” (p. 70). Not interested “in valorizing only the male principle” (p. 70), she seeks “vigor of mind” in all persons and considers herself a “feminist in the cupboard,” one who operates within the family but travels freely and enjoys a rich professional life. She links herself to her Aunt Margaret and other “closet feminists” (p. 100) in her family’s history who demonstrated self-reliance and a sense of their own value, and argues, against de Beauvoir’s thesis in The Second Sex, that female work for American women of the nineteenth century did indeed, like male work, go beyond biology “to remake the world through invention (production)” (p. 102).Brosman demands a metaphysical self-consciousness that recognizes unhappiness, anguish, and disorder but concomitantly posits the good life as the synthetic unity of the mind, body, and heart. This metaphysical consciousness is deeply rooted in the physical world—we are not only in the world but of it—and in a shared sense of place and a commitment to communal enterprises. Her thought is perhaps above all characterized throughout by a sense of “grace” and the “intimation of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Montaigne Among the Moderns: Receptions of the “Essais”Patrick HenryMontaigne Among the Moderns: Receptions of the “Essais,” by Dudley M. Marchi; xiii & 334 pp. Providence, Rhode Island: Berghahn Books, 1994, $49.95.This ambitious project is not a study of the Essais per se, but rather an analysis of their receptions from the seventeenth century to the present. Written by a comparativist with access to German, French, and English (...) literature and philosophy, it deals with authors from diverse backgrounds and time periods and pays careful attention throughout both to intertextuality and to the particular “horizons-of-experience” in which the Essais were received. “Reception” here does not mean some un-Mont aigne-like passive acceptance, but rather the assimilation and reactivation of the essayist’s concept of literature, writerly project, and theories of reading and writing in the works of later writers, mainly “premodernists” (Emerson and Nietzsche), “high modernists” (Pater and Woolf), and “postmodernists” (Butor, Chaillou, Sollers). In the most general sense, what Montaigne shares with all these authors is the need to make central in the form and substance of his work the paradox of a rupture with the pa st and its simultaneous continuation. Here modernism is less a period concept than a recurring literary phenomenon whereby the essayist not only influences the moderns and the postmoderns but is one of them. This enables us, finally, to perceive in the Essais a dialogical process that resists closure and reenacts the literary and philosophical debates of our own historical situation.Chapter One schematizes the history of the receptions of the Essais in France from 1580 to 1950 focusing mainly on the stylistic and religious readings of major figures in French literature. While much of this has already been done, Marchi syn thesizes well, makes his own original points, and offers us exceedingly interesting pages on the essayist’s covenant daughter and most active literary executrix, Marie le Jars de Gournay. Throughout he depicts how the shifting nature of the Essais’ textuality (their “hermeneutic undecidability” [p. 74]) allows them to assume various identities in the minds of different interpreters through the ages, thus problematizing the very act of reception and granting the reader a role in the production of me aning.The next chapters constitute the most original parts of the study and analyze the reception of the Essais in the works of Emerson, Nietzsche, Pater, Woolf, Butor, Chaillou, and Sollers. In Emerson and Nietzsche, we find reactivated the Montaig nean dialogue between the unique self and cultural tradition. Emerson read the Essais in the Cotton translation and wrote about Montaigne in Representative Men but only relied on the essayist to help him reach his own intellectual independen ce, finally moving from a more ego-centered position to the security of past models and rejecting skepticism in favor of dialectical resolution. Nietzsche read Montaigne in the original and knew him through Emerson. Marchi finds “an active inter textual Montaignean dimension” (p. 124) [End Page 140] in Nietzsche’s work and underscores their mutual preoccupation with radical skepticism, self-cultivation, self-portraiture, mutability, the instability of language, and the crisis of representa tion. He discovers two sides to Nietzsche’s reception of the Essais: the Apollonian “Socrantic optimism” and the Dionysian “libertine transgression” (p. 165) and indicates how the essayist’s concreteness and acceptance of human limitations tempered respectively Nietzsche’s propensity toward abstract metaphysics and Schopenhaurean pessimism.The third chapter unveils the aesthetic and thematic elements of the Essais in the critical and creative works of Pater and Woolf who went beyond the philosophical essaying of Emerson and Nietzsche, were the first to extend aspects of the E ssais in narrative works since Marie de Gournay, and created Montaigne the modernist “by insisting on the qualities of his textuality most akin to their own” (p. 186). The most interesting pages here delineate, on the one hand, Pater’s failed attempt to reconcile the religion of Pascal and the aesthetics of Montaigne and the essayist’s presence in Pater’s Gaston de Latour and, on the other, Woolf’s Montaigne-like essayistic techniques of weighing probabilities, suspending dogmatic judgment, and breaking of narrative sequentiality and her concomitant assimilation... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosopher’s Demise: Learning FrenchPatrick HenryThe Philosopher’s Demise: Learning French, by Richard Watson; 133 pp. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995, $22.50.An internationally known expert on caving and the life and works of Descartes, Watson writes traditional philosophical criticism as well as novels like The Runner (1981) and Niagra (1993). The Philosopher’s Demise, however, is the final part of a very loosely woven trilogy that is neither traditional (...) philosophical discourse nor fiction. These are certainly lighter texts than the ones on Cartesian metaphysics—indeed, they are all funny—but they also contain a good deal of practical philosophy.The Philosopher’s Diet. How To Lose Weight and Change the World (1985), for example, deals with the issue of fat, tells you how to get it off and keep it off but, in very lean prose, it also probes deeply into the form of commitment. It contains chapters on fat, food, and roughage but others entitled “Running,” “Sex,” “How to live,” and “How to die.” Fat functions here as a metaphor—it is “what clutters the unexamined life” (p. 26)—representing “the nagging triviality, the utter banality, and the inevitability of ordinary reality that separate us from what we think we want to be” (p. 145).With an occasional nod to Sartre (We are what we eat as we are what we do.) and Pascal (By altering our behavior, we can alter our beliefs.), Watson writes to provoke his readers to make a commitment to get the fat out of their lives, to take control of their actions and, perhaps, by changing themselves, to change the world. If we can, for example, “control [our] own eating habits apart from the norm imposed by society” (p. 75), we can begin to act as individuals in all other matters and completely transform our lives and, possibly, those of others. Watson, who contributed a chapter to World Hunger and Moral Obligation (1977) and who, during the 1960s, wrote a still unpublished volume entitled Sex and Revolution in which he claims that if people could revolt sexually against the [End Page 420] taboos of America, they could then perhaps be convinced to take control of the world’s food production, now remarks here, as if in passing, that if we fast for a day or two to make up for binges, we will get “a gut comprehension of what hunger really is for as many as a third of the world’s people” (p. 129). At its deepest level, The Philosopher’s Diet unveils an entire world obsessed with food—“the rich are worried about eating too much and the poor too little” (p. 56)—and underscores the immorality of not trying to change a system of food production and distribution in which we are overfed while millions are starving.The Philosopher’s Joke (1990) is a tougher book to get a handle on. It contains five chapters written in the dominant styles of philosophical writing popular in each of the last five decades. Two additional chapters complete the volume: “How to Die” which appeared almost verbatim in The Philosopher’s Diet and “A Pig’s Tail (The End of the Second Millenium).” As the book’s cover warns us, it is not always easy to ascertain the author’s position vis-à-vis the opinions reached in the specific essays. The first two chapters, though, are clearly parodies of purely formalistic writing, while the third is a skeptical but straightforward and serious attempt to establish that all interpretation is subjective. The fourth deals with deception in Kierkegaard and the themes of innocence sullied and human entrapment in Western culture. The main joke here has been played on Kierkegaard by God, “the original con man” (p. 87). Chapter six examines recent novels and films that treat the relationships between humans and apes and asks, seriously, what it would mean regarding animal rights and the place of human beings in the cosmos, if it could be shown that apes and humans can interbreed. Chapter seven brings the volume full circle. It shows how form carries content in its examination of the circular form, multiple circles, and epicycles of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789Patrick HenryCitizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789, by Daniel Gordon; viii & 270 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $39.50.Under examination here is the early modern period in France from Louis XIV to the French Revolution when kings ruled absolutely and citizens were without sovereignty. Discarding the traditional image of the Enlightenment as the absolute (...) enemy of absolutism, Gordon, in this sense, follows Norbert Elias and Robert Darnton who treat the Enlightenment as part of an elitist and hierarchical establishment. More specifically, as his subtitle indicates, Gordon portrays the invention of a “nonpolitical polis” (p. 6), an ideological social space where, despite political inequality, citizens could practice social equality in a hierarchical régime. The rise of this “nondemocratic egalitarian ethos” (p. 7) brought with it a new cult of sociabilité, a term invented in the eighteenth century to describe the idealization of the private sphere and the practice of social equality.The first chapter, then, ties sociability not to democracy, as in the Habermasian model, but to the absolutism that stimulated it and coexisted with it. A series of five ideal types of sociability depict how men and women, members of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, came together—in commerce, public welfare, scientific academies, salons, cafés, public libraries, and various other social situations not protorevolutionary in character—to create a bond among equals [End Page 279] under the ancien régime. In this framework, progress and modernity are born during the absolute monarchy where sociability suggests conviviality rather than class warfare. Every major French novel of the eighteenth century supports Gordon’s refutation of De Toqueville’s surprising statement that “noblemen and bourgeois never met except by chance in private life “in prerevolutionary France” (p. 27).In chapters two and three, Gordon examines the nature of the rules of sociability found in courtesy literature and their functioning as the imagined basis of the newly invented idealized space called société. In addition to analyzing in great detail the nature and frequency of the vocabulary invented to define and describe sociabilité, Gordon discusses sociabilité in the context of natural law theory in Hobbes, Bossuet, and among others, Pufendorf, who wanted to refute Hobbes by showing that self-interest leads humans to establish stable social relations even before government orders them to do so. Holbach surfaces here too for having amalgamated the older language of politeness and the newer language of natural law. In Holbach, as in the Encyclopédie, sociability, based on egalitarian premises of natural law, is nonetheless fully compatible with the hierarchical regime. Among other things, this shows clearly that the philosophes never preached the French Revolution. Striving to eliminate the abuses of despotism and establish equality in private life was not tantamount to working for political equality and the abolition of all rank. In this same vein, Gordon paints the apolitical essence of the private sphere and, by a rigorous study of the seventeenth-century manuals of polite living, shows convincingly (this time against Elias who saw the court as a model of refined behavior) that the salon was indeed a world unto itself, independent of preexisting social hierarchies. Rejecting Paul Hazard’s conception of absolute rupture between seventeenth-century culture and eighteenth-century thought, Gordon destroys the facile dichotomy between seventeenth-century hierarchy and eighteenth-century equality and, once again, admirably depicts the compatibility of Enlightenment and absolutism.If chapters one to three underscore a certain continuity between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chapters four and five explain important changes. It is not, for example, the mere preservation of the idea of sociable communication but rather its new use that is germane in understanding the Enlightenment. Now “conversation” and “civility” no longer had meaning only for an urban elite but had in fact become ideals in all philosophical endeavors including the writing of universal history. Sociable communication had become the defining characteristic of modern nations. In the fourth chapter, by analyzing in detail the works of Jean-Baptiste Suard, Gordon demonstrates the meaning that the writing of universal history in Scotland acquired within the French... (shrink)

La religion de la science et du progrès a déçu ses adeptes. Deux guerres mondiales, des crises économiques successives, elles aussi d'ampleur universelle, ont accéléré la démythisation de l'avenir. Ces oscillations de l'esprit humain face au futur montrent à l'évidence que, lorsqu'il s'agit de problèmes fondamentaux, les hommes sont plus guidés par le sentiment que par la raison. Pourtant, porter un regard lucide sur un lendemain possible s'impose à nos contemporains. Sans doute, plus encore, ont-ils besoin de trouver des raisons (...) d'espérer. Tout au long des pages qui vont suivre, nous allons accompagner un penseur de la modernité, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin sj, qui s'est efforcé de dissiper les brumes de l'avenir et de démonter les mécanismes d'un psychisme humain affronté à un futur qu'il ne peut plus mettre entre parenthèses dans sa vision du monde et dans la prospective de son action. Teilhard de Chardin prophète de l'espérance, tel pourrait être le titre de ce livre ; une espérance qui n'exige pas la fuite des réalités humaines et matérielles. Bien au contraire, elle s'enracine dans le dynamisme évolutif qui soulève la création et l'oriente vers une complexité et une conscience de plus en plus grandes ; surtout, elle se greffe sur les espoirs humains qui ont conduit l'humanité, depuis son émergence, par un continuel dépassement d'elle-même, sur la voie de la seule aventure qui vaille : la conquête de l'avenir. (shrink)

Psychologists have traditionally approached phenomenology by describing perceptual states, typically in the context of vision. The control of actions has often been described as 'automatic', and therefore lacking any specific phenomenology worth studying. This article will begin by reviewing some historical attempts to investigate the phenomenology of action. This review leads to the conclusion that, while movement of the body itself need not produce a vivid conscious experience, the neural process of voluntary action as a whole has distinctive phenomenological consequences. (...) The remainder of the article tries to characterise this phenomenology. First, the planning of actions is often conscious, and can produce a characteristic executive mode of awareness. Second, our awareness of action often arises from the process of matching what we intended to do with what actually happened. Failures of this matching process lead to particularly vivid conscious experience, which we call 'error awareness'. These features of action phenomenology can be directly related to established models of motor control. This allows an important connection between phenomenology and neuroscience of action. Third, whereas perceptual phenomenology is normally seen as caused or driven by the sensory stimulus, a much more fluid model is required for phenomenology of action. Several experimental results suggest that phenomenology of action is partly a post hoc reconstruction, while others suggest that our awareness of action represents an integration of several processes at multiple levels of motor processing. Fourth, and finally, studies of the phenomenology of action, unlike those of perception, show a strong linkage between primary awareness and secondary awareness or self-consciousness: awareness of action is specifically and inextricably awareness of my action. We argue that the concepts of agency and of proprioaction are fundamental to this linkage. For these reasons, action represents a much more promising field than perception for attacking the problematic question of the relation between primary and secondary consciousness. Some promising directions for future research are indicated. (shrink)

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual (...) virtues, editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 5, Page 32-42, September–October 2022.

Sometime during the summer of 1981, I received a note in the mail from Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature, stating that, due to severe financial constraints, the University of Michigan was going to drop its sponsorship of the journal. The letter had apparently gone out to all those who had either written for the journal or subscribed to it. I had published a short review of Philip Lewis’s book on La Rochefoucauld in the Fall 1978 issue.My family and (...) I were in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the time, where I was taking Arthur Kirsch’s illuminating NEH Summer Seminar on “Shakespeare, Freud, Montaigne, and the Bible.” I can remember calling Denis from an outdoor public phone and telling him that I .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 231-240 [Access article in PDF] Rescuing the Rescuers in Philip Hallie's Ethical Sublime Patrick Henry "Only stories or visions of transcending personal isolation and indifference can move me... hope, joy lie only in the transcendence of self-absorption—in expansion." —Philip Hallie I THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Philip Hallie expressed strong distrust for abstract philosophy. He wanted his own philosophy constituted of flesh and blood, (...) and he believed in the centrality of narration in ethical writing. The personality of stories, the irrefutable nature of the individual's account had to form the essential basis in the teaching of ethics. It is no surprise, then, that in his posthumous Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm 1 Hallie leaves us with a series of powerful stories, biographical and autobiographical, as the final expression of his lifelong agonizing struggle to come to terms with his own ethical beliefs. There are no general proofs here. No abstract principles. No definitions of goodness and evil. Only stories that depict the being referred to by e. e. cummings as "manunkind" mysteriously achieving the "realizable ideal" of rescuer of strangers.Given Hallie's major work on the rescuers of Jews in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There, 2 it seems appropriate that he begin this particular account of "tales of good and evil" in that same [End Page 231] village. Thus, the first biography he presents is that of Magda Trocmé, the wife of the pastor of the Protestant Church in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, André Trocmé, who, with his fellow pastor Edouard Theis, is said to have inspired the rescue mission in the village. Hallie underscores the communal nonviolent effort by clergy and villagers alike in this "city of refuge." While he admires both André and Magda as practitioners of the "great virtues," he more readily identifies with Magda's secularism than with her husband's piety. He celebrates her generosity, her refusal to turn anyone away from her door, her "quiet habit of efficacious compassion," and her terse explanation as to why the rescuers in the village did what they had done: "What do you mean? It had to be done, that's all."As much as Hallie related to Magda's secularism, he was unable to identify fully with her because he felt tainted by the killing he had done as an artillery man in the United States Army during World War II. "I was a helpful killer who violated the negative demand against killing ["Thou shalt not kill"] in order to obey the positive one to spread life. But Magda and her villagers! Their ethical purity was beyond me. They obeyed the negative demands of ethics by hating and hurting no one even while they obeyed the positive demands of ethics by saving [thousands of refugees]." Compared to Magda and the villagers, Hallie clearly saw himself as someone operating in the grey zone.With the introduction of Joshua James and the community of Hull, Massachusetts, we ascend from Hallie's personal quagmire of moral ambiguity to the realm of the "ethical sublime." Here the author relates the story of James, whose mother and sister died at sea in 1837 when he was 11 years old, and who would go on to a career of life-saving activity on the Massachusetts coast. James founded the Life-Saving Rescue Service, an organization that evolved into the Coast Guard (or more specifically The Search and Rescue Service of the Coast Guard). He spent his entire life in Hull (1826-1902) and over the course of nearly sixty years saved hundreds of sailor's lives and tens of thousands of dollars worth of property.Many coastal villages around the world, Hallie explains, profited greatly from shipwrecks. Their cargoes and the stuff the ships were made of were highly valuable to the generally poor people who inhabited such villages. Yet the village of Hull, the smallest village in the state, having roughly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Truth MattersOnce in a while stunning new ideas that energize a scholarly discipline—or even wreck it altogether—come from the outside. The most influential philosopher of science in the last generation was not a philosopher at all, but an historian and physicist, Thomas Kuhn. Ernst Gombrich, an art historian, has deeply informed the philosophy of art, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has affected the philosophy of language. And Jacques Derrida (...) continues to cast his stupefying spell over many a literature department, even if most philosophers remain unimpressed.In a minor but spectacular way (how else to describe an event first encountered on the front page of the New York Times?), Alan Sokal has barged in on this honorable tradition. As a physicist, he successfully placed a barely-coherent, factually ludicrous, jargon-ridden article in a major journal of cultural studies.When we caught up with Sokal’s hoax, our initial reaction was sympathy for the hapless editors of Social Text. They weren’t the first journal editors to be landed with a contribution that went sour (though the only other episodes we could recall were plagiarism, not parody). However, when one of these chaps, Stanley Aronowitz, reacted in the Times by calling Sokal “ill-read and half-educated” (May 18, 1996), editorial fellow-feeling began to evaporate. And when Stanley Fish, executive director of the Duke University Press, which publishes Social Text, launched a bitter counterattack on Sokal three days later, it was hard not to regard Fish’s indignation, as E. D. Hirsch described it in a subsequent letter to the Times, as “the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed.” [End Page 299]After some tedious preliminaries, Fish accused Sokal of failing to understand that the sociology of science is an enterprise “distinct” from science, “with objects of study, criteria, and goals all its own.” Sokal knows this, naturally, as he had already made clear in his Lingua Franca article on the hoax, and as he explains again in his afterword in this issue of our journal. But Fish went on to a more sweeping generalization. Imagining Sokal believed that cultural studies threaten the stability or integrity of the sciences, Fish said not to worry: “A research project that takes the practice of science as an object of study is not a threat to that practice because, committed to its own goals and protocols, it doesn’t reach into, and therefore doesn’t pose a danger to, the goals and protocols it studies.”With this account of a well-ordered academic world, Fish inadvertently reveals what some see as a serious failing of cultural studies and postmodern theory: it poses a threat to absolutely nothing. Leave science aside for a moment, and consider a sociology of, say, astrology, or medicine, or the fashion industry. Could we envision a proper sociology of astrology which posed no danger to “the goals and protocols” in using planetary/zodiacal patterns to predict the future or retrodict the characters of subjects? Hardly; it’s the business of the sociology of any human activity to identify and question the intellectual claims and practical ambitions of that enterprise. And that is exactly what Alan Sokal did: he invented a clever test of the intellectual rigor of cultural studies in general and its version of poststructuralist sociology of science in particular. He then subjected Social Text—and implicitly in many minds the intellectual standards of the field it represents—to the test. It failed.Sokal’s methodology was not unique; it can be applied in different ways to many other disciplines. If you want to evaluate, for example, the intellectual pretensions of astrologers there is a fine way to do it; it essentially adapts the double-blind placebo procedure used in drug research, another celebrated testing methodology. Allow a group of astrologers to agree on a set of character readings based on accurate birth charts. Give these back, shuffled, with identifying information stripped off, to the subjects of the astrological readings. If the subjects can pick out their own readings from character descriptions alone (descriptions created by astrologers on the basis of birth information only, without meeting the subjects in question), then astrology must possess... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Proceedings of the ALSC (1995 Convention)Patrick HenryGiven the oppressively politicized character of academic literary studies today, it took courage and conviction to found a new literary society in 1994. The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics is dedicated to the study of literature as a source of pleasure and insight. This would be banal were it not for the way in which culture wars, identity politics, and race (...) and gender issues have come to dominate university literature departments. More than merely a handful of scholars wish to reverse this trend: in less than two years, the ALSC has grown to 1800 members and its first conference, held in Minneapolis, September 22–24, 1995, was a notable success.Because we favor a true pluralism, and like many others are tired of the predictable posturing that permeates so much literary scholarship today, we invited the ALSC to publish its first conference proceedings in our pages. The meeting offered much variety, with classicists and modernists, poets, fiction writers, and critics trading ideas on literature and aesthetics. Despite worries by its detractors that the ALSC represents reaction or blind traditionalism, there was a refreshing openness to the proceedings, with lucid examples of critical reading and topics from metaphor in Dickens and Auden’s Alcaic stanza in “In memory of Sigmund Freud,” to the Islamic influence on Dante’s Commedia—a connection that belies the charge that the Western canon is inevitably Eurocentric. If the ALSC can revive a sense of wonder before the greatest works of literary art and provide an alternative to the complacency and pretentiousness of contemporary theory, it deserves support from us all.For twenty years it has said on our inside back cover that Philosophy and Literature “owes allegiance to no particular school or style of criticism or philosophy.” Our only loyalty is to literature and philosophy; they constitute our field of interest. It has never been our aim to adopt the correct ideology. We remain skeptical of ideological commitments and will continue to publish exciting jargon-free articles representative of the entire spectrum of approaches to literature and philosophy.Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The Orthodox Church teaches that the bodies of those in Christ are to be regarded as sanctified by the hearing of the Word and faithful participation in the Sacraments, most particularly the Holy Eucharist; because of the indwelling Holy Spirit the consecrated bodies of Christians do not belong to them but to Christ; with respect to the indwelling Holy Spirit there is no difference between the bodies of Christians before and after death; whether before or after death, the Christian body (...) is also to receive the same veneration; and notwithstanding the physical corruptions that the body endures by reason of death, there remains a strict continuity between the body in which the Christian dies and the body in which the Christian will rise again. That is to say, it is the very same reality that is sown in corruption and will be raised in incorruption. Given such considerations, the notion of “selling” an integral part of a human being is simply outside the realm of rational comprehension. Indeed, it is profoundly repugnant to those Orthodox Christian sentiments that are formed and nourished by the Church's sacramental teaching and liturgical worship. One does not sell or purchase that which has been consecrated in those solemn ways that the Church consecrates the human body. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Home Is Somewhere Else: Autobiography in Two VoicesPatrick HenryHome Is Somewhere Else: Autobiography in Two Voices, by Desider Furst and Lilian R. Furst; xv & 235 pp. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994, $14.95 paper.Published in the “Margins of Literature” series, Home Is Somewhere Else follows a family of three who, on the margins of the Holocaust, live for nine months in Nazi occupied Vienna before escaping illegally in early (...) 1939 into Brussels and then legally to England. The narration goes on to relate both the life of that family in England until the mother’s death in 1969 ended “the symbiotic threesome” (p. 203) and the subsequent emigration of the father and daughter to the United States where, with her retired father, the daughter pursues her career as professor of comparative literature. The final chapter, “As My Father Used to Say,” records the wisdom and witticisms of her father who died in 1985 leaving her alone, in mourning and still deracinated, having become “more [herself] and thereby more other” (p. 217). “My geographical roots are shallow; only those created by the brand mark of the red ‘J’ [meaning “Jew” and stamped on the family passport in Vienna in 1938] run deep into my being” (p. 217).The technical interest of the book resides in its dual autobiographies. Desider, the father, wrote his (entitled A Superfluous Man) in the early 1970s after his retirement and emigration to the United States. Lilian, the daughter, read it in 1983 and found it organized into chapters around places where they had lived. Without rereading it, she began her autobiography in 1991, deciding to write alternative chapters that would be centered on the same places her father had written about: Vienna, Cologne, Brussels, London, Bedford, and Manchester. In addition, he writes a chapter on the Isle of Man where he was interned for four months in 1941 and she on Chertsey where she spent a year alone. She also writes a chapter about her mother’s life and one on her life with her father in America. [End Page 156]Although both autobiographies are completely retrospective accounts composed, without diaries or notes of any kind, decades after the initial events they narrate, each reflects the preoccupations of the narrator at the time of the events being narrated. Thus Lilian’s, composed as “a tribute of [her parents] for bringing [her] through to safety” (p. xiv), contains the child’s impressions of family, friends, home, relatives, and nanny as well as her fear and terror as she experiences the Nazi entry into Vienna in 1938, Crystal Night, the train ride to Cologne, and the flight to Brussels. From Desider’s, on the other hand, emanates the broader vision of the responsible adult, parent and husband, conscious of the historical scope within which his particular drama unravels. He paints in vivid colors the happy decade in Vienna (1928–38), the descent into the hell of Nazism, the struggle to escape “this gigantic prison” (p. 47), and his appreciation and admiration for the British. He underscores the complexity of the situation by populating his account with scores of individuals—unfortunate Jews, sadistic Nazis, good Austrians, profiteers of all kinds—and by frequent conflicting references to Providence, destiny, luck, and the totally gratuitous nature of survival. Written as a memorial to his wife by a man who claims never to have wanted anything more than a normal life for himself and his family, his narration fittingly ends with her death in Manchester in 1969.The power of the book, however, springs as much from what unites the narratives, as from what divides them. I am not speaking of the similarity of events but rather of the deeply held human values (responsibility, courage, sacrifice, family union, interdependence, and love) that resonate powerfully throughout both accounts. Indeed, the intertwining of the two voices is poetically and umbilically linked to the hands of father and daughter that grip each other throughout the narrative. We find a father who risks everything to keep his family together, a mother who gives up her medical career for the same reason, and a daughter, full of gratitude, love, and an intense sense... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Gray ZonePatrick HenryThe Question of Jewish complicity during the Holocaust remains nuanced and troubling even if recent research has altered some earlier entrenched assumptions regarding its nature and extent. Hannah Arendt, for example, who saw the complicity of the Jewish Councils in the ghettos as part of the general "moral collapse" of the time, remarked famously that:Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost (...) without exception, cooperated in one way or another for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.1Thirty-eight years later, however, in Rethinking the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer points out that not only were the Jewish Councils "in many of the Polish and Lithuanian ghettos... not asked for and did not deliver lists of Jews," but also "many of the Soviet territories had no Judenräte and the destruction was even more efficient there than in Poland." Finally, as Bauer also reports, in many smaller places, the Judenräte refused to cooperate in any way whatsoever.2The Judenräte or Jewish Councils were Nazi-established executive committees throughout Occupied Europe at once fully responsible for the implementation of Nazi directives and in charge of the administration, labor, finances, cultural and health services, food supply, and policing of the Jewish community or ghetto. These councils were set up to force the Jews to do the work of the Nazis and to keep the Jews at odds with one another as the implementation of Nazi directives progressively and [End Page 150] inevitably undercut the councils' ability to provide for the basic physical needs of the Jewish community. How these councils acted under the pressure of deportation orders differed from ghetto to ghetto. For his part, although he speaks mainly about complicity in the camps, Primo Levi identifies a "gray zone" in the ghettos and the camps where some of the "privileged oppressed" became oppressors themselves, thereby blurring any simple all-encompassing distinction between victim and executioner.3IIn her "Postscript" to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt notes that in Israel in 1963 "the Jewish Establishment" was "bitterly divided on this issue" of the Jewish Councils.4 As the accounts of contemporaries attest, this division was already apparent in the Warsaw Ghetto more than twenty years earlier. There, Adam Czerniaków, a highly cultured 60 year-old Polish speaking Jewish engineer, neither a rabbi nor a believer, was the head of the 24 member Warsaw Jewish Council. He had many staunch supporters but others, particularly those involved in resistance movements, distrusted him and accused him of collaboration with the Nazis. In July 1942, he swallowed cyanide rather than sign the order to round up and deport all Jews, including children, from the ghetto.Emmanuel Ringelblum, whose extraordinary journal records events in Warsaw chronologically and meticulously from January 1940 to December 1942, notes that some considered Czerniaków "a martyr... honestly fulfilling his duty... an idol... [whose] word is command." Ringelblum himself, however, deemed him "incompetent" and "weak": "The suicide of Czerniaków—too late, a sign of weakness—should have called for resistance—a weak man."5 Janusz Korczak, on the other hand, who ran an orphanage in the ghetto for 200 children, was far more sympathetic toward Czerniaków, one of his close friends who also had a passionate interest in children's welfare. Korczak, whose diary, unlike Ringelblum's, is inward and abstract, does not speak openly about the Jewish Council. But Korczak was horrified by the death of children in the ghetto. Like Czerniaków, Korczak carried cyanide, but he chose not to take it. Unwilling to abandon his orphans and convinced of their individual dignity, he wanted to prepare them for their inevitable demise. To this end, just three weeks before they were all deported, Korczak had the children perform Tagore's The Post Office in the hope that they might thereby welcome death and not be afraid of it.6 Korczak's... (shrink)