It is shown by means of general principles and specific examples that, contrary to a long-standing misconception, the modern mathematical physics of compressible fluid dynamics provides a generally consistent and efficient language for describing many seemingly fundamental physical phenomena. It is shown to be appropriate for describing electric and gravitational force fields, the quantized structure of charged elementary particles, the speed of light propagation, relativistic phenomena, the inertia of matter, the expansion of the universe, and the physical nature of (...) class='Hi'>time. New avenues and opportunities for fundamental theoretical research are thereby illuminated. (shrink)

A monumental work on the flow of time, from the universe's creation to "Now," by the best-selling author of Physics for Future Presidents. "Now" is a simple concept--you're reading this sentence now. Yet a real definition of "now" has eluded even the great Einstein. We know that time stretches and is affected by gravity and velocity. Yet, as eminent physicist Richard A. Muller points out, it is only today that we have all the physics at hand--relativity, (...) entropy, entanglement, antimatter, and the Big Bang--to explain the flow of time. With these building blocks in place, Muller reaches a startling conclusion: our expanding universe is continuously creating not only new space but also new time. The front edge of this new time is what we call "now," and this moment is truly unique--it is the only moment in which we can exercise our free will. Muller's thought-provoking vision is a powerful counter to established theories in science and philosophy, and his arguments will spark major debate about the most fundamental assumptions of our universe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Miracle of MetaphorRethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig and SchmittBonnie Honig (bio)For the word is mere inception until it finds reception in an ear and response in a mouth.—Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of RedemptionThe legal anthropologist Carol Greenhouse opens her book on time, A Moment’s Notice, with a story recorded by Goethe, who, when traveling through Italy, observed a trial and took note of its peculiar (...) timekeeping practices. A man seated at a desk held in his hand a glass sand bottle, a timepiece. It was not immediately clear what his purpose was. But Goethe soon noticed that as the prosecutor spoke the man kept the bottle lying on its side, its sands inert, and whenever the defense began to speak the man would turn the bottle upright and restart its sand flow. When the state spoke, time stopped. The defense, however, was subject to time.The story accords well with the views of state sovereignty propounded by Carl Schmitt, who identifies sovereignty as such with the power to legally suspend law for a time by declaring a state of exception. For Schmitt, as for Giorgio Agamben, who works in his wake, the state of exception is that paradoxical situation in which the law is legally suspended by sovereign power. The ensuing condition is one in which we—or, rather, sovereign powers—are neither subject to law nor free of it but rather both, since the state of exception is itself a legal condition of alegality. Grounded in paradox—the legal suspension of law—and seeming well positioned to explain elements of the current political landscape that liberal and deliberative democratic theorists only criticize, Schmitt’s “state of exception,” I think it is fair to say, has captured the imagination of contemporary political theory.I seek to loosen its hold on our imagination by pluralizing the particular political theology on which Schmitt’s account is based and from which it draws sustenance. And I do so with the intent of highlighting the dependence of the so-called state of exception upon democratic energies and its vulnerability, therefore, to democratic action and resistance.I begin by devoting sustained attention to Schmitt’s metaphor for the state of exception—the miracle, noting that we may accept his metaphorization and yet be drawn by it to very different conclusions. Alternative conceptions of miracle, as we shall see, point not to singular sovereign ruptural power but rather to receptivity, popular power, and the importance of orientation in everyday life to divinity or sovereignty. For this alternative, I turn to Franz Rosenzweig’s theology. Another implication of the work begun here is to lay the groundwork for questioning contemporary identifications of action with event and politics with singularity. I ask whether the metaphor of miracle, normally taken to mark extraordinary, ruptural, or inaugurative politics (as, for example, by Hannah Arendt), might not license instead a turn to the ordinary, away from rupture to the everyday, from transcendence to immanence (though, as William Connolly points out, the immanent can also be ruptural [Pluralism] and, as Eric Santner points out, the rupture sought by Rosenzweig’s new thinking is one that would return us to a different ordinary [On the [End Page 78] Psychotheology of Everyday Life and “Miracles Happen”]). Motivating this exploration is an intuition: that contemporary political theory’s debates about whether political action is best seen as ordinary or extraordinary, ruptural or rule-governed, may be a reiteration of earlier debates in political theology about the status of the extraordinary—god and miracle or divine agency—in the ordinary human world. Mindful of that reiteration, and with the help of Rosenzweig’s “new theology,” we may rechart our course and see opportunities to rethink emergency politics in the state of exception in more democratic terms.A Secret Conversation?In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt, the soon-to-be-lapsed Catholic legal thinker who would later become jurist to the Nazi party in 1930s Germany, claimed that all significant political concepts are reinhabitations of theological concepts and should be treated as such. In The Enemy, an intellectual biography of Schmitt, Gopal Balakrishnan points out this is an overstatement... (shrink)

A vexing modern conundrum is to be solved. The use of oil, gas, and coal is extremely short-lived as a historical phenomenon: a mere blink of an eye at a little more than 1% of total urban history of 10,000 years to-date. Yet current urban civilization is almost entirely based on it. And the fossil-fuel economy poses not only a massive security risk, it also lies at the root of the vast majority of urban sustainability problems. Fresh water depletion, air (...) pollution, widespread human fatalities can be directly traced to the excessive use of these dirty energy sources. Climate change, predominantly triggered by fossil-fuel combustion, only deepens the very questions the impending petroleum peak raises about the survivability of the global urban system. The fossil disease is a complex global pandemic. To many, conquering this pandemic is an extraordinary challenge of technology: of reengineering the manner in which urban civilization is powered, advancing a future envisioned in numerous studies since the 1970s. Yet foremost, this is a cultural, psychological, and political challenge. The global economy is systematically identified with its underlying fossil supply frameworks—it is a fossil economy. It is marked by an incendiary illusion: the celebration of abundance promised as achievable by all, driving virtually all aspects of contemporary culture. Yet it is also marred with enormous pockets of deprivation, and deep cracks of disbelief, criticism, and dissent. Reinforcing this challenge is the psychoeconomical transaction cost of change, the sheer inertia of an infernal development system, however short-lived it inevitably is. Despite all lip service paid to ‘energy savings’ and ‘environmentally sustainable development’ in urban policy documents and brochures across the globe, dominant political and financial interests demand that as much fossil fuel as possible is used, and as quickly as possible, to secure the highest possible profits for the most powerful, and in the shortest period of time. Hence many national governments and international bodies find it so difficult to place fossil-fuel replacement on the global agenda. It is easier to avoid this topic and talk about buffering, mitigating what are little else than subsidiary, flow-on effects and collateral outcomes of an unsolved energy conundrum: air, water and soil pollution, public health problems, deforestation or fresh water depletion. Rarely, if ever, is petroleum abuse clearly noted as a root cause. A historical revolution is in progress: the move from fossil fuels, nuclear power, and other forms of unsustainable energy use generation to a renewable and sustainable power base for urban communities, cities, towns, and villages. Many examples of positive initiatives encourage, and are testimony to the ability of cities and towns to perform as communities, and evolve into settings of greater independence from fossil and nuclear power sources. They carry the promise of greater energy autonomy based on renewable energy, of recapturing regional productivity, advancing local resources, and enabling new industries and employment opportunities. (shrink)

At once provocative and inspiring_, Against the Flow_ is a work of polemic from an internationally respected writer and thinker on arts education. Peter Abbs argues that contemporary education ignores the aesthetic and ethical as a result of being in thrall to such forces as the market economy and managerial and functional dictates. He identifies the present education system as being inimical to creativity and authentic learning and instead, narrowly focused on the quantitative measuring of results. This absence of (...) a creative and ethical dimension in education has implications for art making in wider society. Art is shown as emerging from, and appealing to, the ironic postmodernist sensibility and mass media-led culture, while being devoid of philosophical significance. This book opens up a fresh and timely debate about the vital power of creativity in modern education. Drawing on examples from modern poetry, literature and visual art, it is an eloquent and passionate argument for the need to develop ethical and aesthetic energies to confront the growing vacuity of contemporary culture. (shrink)

A new, four-stage approach to the popular Buddhist practice known as loving-kindness meditation, with the aim of finding unconditional love in our own hearts, in our relationships, and in our perception of the world around us. The unconditional love that we all long for--in our own lives and in the world around us--can be awakened effectively with this unique approach to the Tibetan Buddhist practice of loving-kindness meditation. Tulku Thondup gives detailed guidance for meditation, prayers, and visualization in four simple (...) stages that can be practiced in as little as thirty minutes a session. The four-stage format is a brand-new approach being presented for the first time in English, distilled from the author's lifelong study and practice of authentic, traditional teachings. What if we could experience not only our own body, mind, and heart as a boundless source of loving-kindness, but every particle of the world around us as a beautiful realm filled with the blessing energies of the Buddhas and their celestial abodes? The whole environment would become a miraculous display of unconditional love, wisdom, and power, accompanied by the sweet music of holy prayers and inspirational teachings. This is not just a dream or a fantasy but an effective meditation practice that can bring relief from stress, healing to mind and body, healthier relationships, and a positive new outlook on the world around you. Loving-kindness meditations are a highly effective way to generate positive causation, bring true peace and love into our lives, and release ourselves from habitual suffering. When we train ourselves to desire the happiness and well-being of others, with the unconditional love of a mother who cares wholeheartedly for her little ones, we find our whole world pervaded by the positive qualities of joy, peace, and beauty. The training can be compared to sunbathing. As our body absorbs the sun's heat, it becomes warm and gradually emanates that warmth into our surroundings. In the same way, through devotion and trust in the Buddha of Loving-Kindness, we immerse our mind in his unconditional love, which we then radiate to those around us. The Heart of Unconditional Love presents this meditation in a new, four-stage format distilled from the author's lifelong study and practice of authentic, traditional teachings. The meditation can be practiced in as little as thirty minutes a session: In the Outer Buddha Stage, we open our heart with trust and devotion to the Buddha of Loving-Kindness and enjoy his unconditional love. In the Inner Buddha Stage, we experience the Buddha's unconditional love within and for ourselves. In the Universal Buddha Stage, we learn to see, hear, and feel the world around us as a blessed realm of unconditional love. In the Ultimate Buddha Stage, we rest in the awareness of unconditional love free from conceptual thinking. Designed to be accessible to newcomers as well as experienced meditators, this presentation is a brand-new approach to loving-kindness meditation, being published in English for the first time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:'You Belong Outside':Advertising, Nature, and the SUVShane Gunster (bio)And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists?—Theodor Adorno, Minima MoraliaImages of nature are among the most common signifiers of utopia in commercial discourse, tirelessly making the case that a certain commodity or brand will enable an escape from the malaise and (...) drudgery of urban existence. The invocation of natural themes has been especially prominent in the marketing and promotion of sport utility vehicles over the past decade. Speeding through deserts and jungles, fording raging rivers, and even scaling the heights of Mt. Everest, the SUV is routinely depicted in the most spectacular and remote natural locations. These fanciful themes now attract the scorn of many who draw upon them to underscore the rather glaring contradictions between how these vehicles are marketed and how they are actually used: the irony of using pristine images of a hyper-pure nature to motivate the use of a product that consumes excessive amounts of natural resources and emits high levels of pollutants lies at the core of the growing public backlash against the SUV. While generally sympathetic to this critical perspective, I argue that we need to think through the role of nature in constructing the promotional field of these vehicles in a more [End Page 4] rigorous fashion than is often the case. Otherwise, we risk failing to fully understand the complexity of the SUV's appeal; even worse, simplistic criticism can have the perverse effect of reinforcing the ideological conceptions of nature that constitute a cornerstone of that appeal. Through an examination of recent print and television advertising campaigns, I develop an alternative account of the significance of natural imagery based upon the dialectical relation between nature and society that dominates the SUV's promotional field.1 Instead of reifying the conceptual distance that divides these two categories, we must look to how they flow into and define each other, often blending together into a dense cluster of associations in which the images of one connote and invoke ideas of the other.Welcome to the (not So) Great Outdoors: The Many Faces of NatureSince the emergence of the automobile as a commodity in the early twentieth century, natural themes and imagery have been used to attach a utopian flavor to movement through space. From the 1920s onward, car advertising has often invoked the fantasy of leaving behind the constraints of a crowded, mundane, and polluted urban environment for the wide open spaces offered by nature. In words that have guided advertisers (and urban planners) ever since, Henry Ford once quipped, "we shall solve the city problem by leaving the city."2 Charting the evolution of automotive promotional discourse, Andrew Wernick argues that the reliance upon natural imagery intensified in the 1970s and 1980s as people grew disenchanted with technology (and its militaristic overtones) and expressed concerns over growing traffic congestion, energy consumption, and road construction. Among the easiest tactics for advertisers wishing to deflect the negative associations invoked by the car was, and remains, an image-based rearticulation of cars with nature.3 Invoking nature as the endpoint of vehicular travel affirms one of automobility's most precious and fiercely guarded illusions, namely, that spatial mobility offers access to places, experiences, and events that are fundamentally different from everyday life, that one can escape to somewhere other than where one is now. Furthermore, as Martin Green explains, the use of nature to frame flight to the countryside summons up a powerful nostalgia for the simpler times and lives connoted by idealized scenes of rural life.4Nevertheless, SUV marketing takes the appropriation of natural themes and imagery to new 'heights,' with epic campaigns that place vehicles atop [End Page 5] mountain peaks, in the midst of dense forests, or racing across vast deserts. Leading the way in this appropriation of nature has been the Ford Motor Company. Although its market share has suffered recently, Ford spearheaded the promotion of the SUV in the 1990s with the Explorer which quickly became the best selling family vehicle of the decade, producing immense... (shrink)

Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end (...) product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology. (shrink)

The issue of power has been addressed as part of human actions, which form the basis of the discussions of destiny in Islamic theology. Various schools of kalām have extensively discussed the issue of power throughout history. The locus of power is also one of the critical concerns that have been emphasized within these discussions. The schools of the Mu'tazila, al-Ashʿarī and al-Māturīdī have put forward different perspectives on whether the locus of power exists or not (...) and where it exists if it does so. Mutazilites are known to be in agreement with the view that te human body is the substrate of power. On the other hand, However, they hold different views, not only on the exact locus of power in the body but also on its type. While some argue that the locus of power in the body is the organs, others claim that it is not the organs. The schools of al-Ashʿarī and al-Māturīdī accept that there is no locus for power and emphasize that power is created by Allah the moment it would initiate action. When these views of the kalām schools are considered within the framework of the data from the modern science of anatomy, it is seen that what modern science has to say on this issue concurs well with the Mu'tazilite view that the locus of power is the body and that it creates the action by managing the organs from a single center. This is because, when considered from the lens of anatomy, what is meant by the schools of kalām with “power” is electrical activity (stimulus) that activates the muscles. Therefore, scientifically considered, for any movement to occur, an electrical activity must first begin in the brain and be transmitted to the muscles via motor nerves. If there were no electrical activity in the brain, the muscles and energy that make up the human movement system would not be active, so movement would hardly take locus. Therefore, the claim made some of the Mu'tazili scholars that the power is in the organs is scientifically not valid. As for the debates on whether the power in different organs is the same or different in terms of its type, the views of the scholars who argue that they are the same genus are apparently correct. This is because the electrical activity, which we accept as power, spreads to the organs after it is formed in the brain. This implies that the power which activates the organs is of the same type. However, it can be said that Mu'tazila’s idea of the constant presence of power in its locus conflicts with modern scientific data. The views of al-Ash'arite and al-Maturidite schools that power is free from being in a constant location are compatible with the findings of recent experiments on brain activities. That is, some experimental studies have indicated that the electrical activity that creates an act occurs in the brain before the act itself and outside the will of the human. In brief, the view of Ash'arite and Maturidite scholars that power is not constantly present in the body and that it is created by Allah each time it is needed is compatible with the creation of power, which we define as electrical activity. (shrink)

It is argued that the `problem of time' in quantum gravity necessitates a refinement of the local inertial structure of the world, demanding a replacement of the usual Minkowski line element by a 4+2n dimensional pseudo-Euclidean line element, with the extra 2n being the number of internal phase space dimensions of the observed system. In the refined structure, the inverse of the Planck time takes over the role of observer-independent conversion factor usually played by the speed of light, (...) which now emerges as an invariant but derivative quantity. In the relativistic theory based on the refined structure, energies and momenta turn out to be invariantly bounded from above, and lengths and durations similarly bounded from below, by their respective Planck scale values. Along the external timelike world-lines, the theory naturally captures the `flow of time' as a genuinely structural attribute of the world. The theory also predicts expected deviations---suppressed quadratically by the Planck energy---from the dispersion relations for free fields in the vacuum. The deviations from the special relativistic Doppler shifts predicted by the theory are also suppressed quadratically by the Planck energy. Nonetheless, in order to estimate the precision required to distinguish the theory from special relativity, an experiment with a binary pulsar emitting TeV range gamma-rays is considered in the context of the predicted deviations from the second-order shifts. (shrink)

To explain why cognition evolved requires, first and foremost, an analysis of what qualifies as an explanation. In terms of physics, causes are forces and consequences are changes in states of substance. Accordingly, any sequence of events, from photon absorption to focused awareness, chemical reactions to collective behavior, or from neuronal avalanches to niche adaptation, is understood as an evolution from one state to another toward thermodynamic balance where all forces finally tally each other. From this (...) scale-free physics perspective, energy flows through those means and mechanisms, as if naturally selecting them, that bring about balance in the least time. Then, cognitive machinery is also understood to have emerged from the universal drive toward a free energy minimum, equivalent to an entropy maximum. The least-time nature of thermodynamic processes results in the ubiquitous patterns in data, also characteristic of cognitive processes, i.e., skewed distributions that accumulate sigmoidally and, therefore, follow mostly power laws. In this vein, thermodynamics derived from the statistical physics of open systems explains how evolution led to cognition and provides insight, for instance, into cognitive ease, biases, dissonance, development, plasticity, and subjectivity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetorical Circulation in Late CapitalismNeoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective EnergyCatherine ChaputIn the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic agents, and more (...) generally, according to the rationality of the governed themselves. And it is all these different arts of government, all these different types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which, overlapping with each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate.Michel Foucault, The Birth of BiopoliticsCritical rhetoricians interested in the power dynamics between rhetoric and capitalism have established for themselves the ambitious task of explaining how multiple, intertwined rationalities govern individual and collective [End Page 1] behavior in relationship to the ever-shifting logics of capitalism. Approaches to this complicated directive frequently envision rhetoric as a mediating force among agentive subjects who act within well-defined political economic landscapes. Wedded to a political-communicative model wherein appropriate rhetorical choices persuade those with authority to distribute disputed political and economic rights, rhetorical theory becomes a sophisticated handbook for discovering topoi and executing decorous statements. This focus, according to Ronald Walter Greene, results in a "permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency" that positions rhetoricians as "moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic" (2004, 188, 189). Committing themselves to endless debates about correct responses in situated spaces, rhetorical theories that underscore agency lose site of the world in flux and of our participation in that world's unpredictable unfoldings. Alternatively, Greene suggests rethinking rhetorical theory through a materialist-communicative model wherein the immaterial labor of communication produces value. Conceptualizing discursive practices as a form of labor rather than a form of political signification sidesteps anxiety about well-chosen language and emphasizes the life-affirming activity involved in deciphering issues, inventing paths through those issues, and communicating new ideas to others. In short, Greene's materialist model challenges critical rhetoricians to end their perennial search for a discursive key to the storehouse of political economic goods (a practice propelled by liberal democratic hopes) so that they can begin to invent analyses and modes of production better suited to the contours of contemporary neoliberalism.Unlike liberalism's clearly assigned spaces for public life and private life or work time and leisure time, neoliberal spaces bear few obvious markers. The neoliberal landscape consists of blurred boundaries that fold into one another: information flows almost instantaneously, commodities and people transgress national boundaries, time accelerates, space collapses, and distinctions between such classic demarcations as agent and subject or politics and economics erode. Facilitated by dramatic changes in our sociopolitical boundaries, economic neoliberalism, what James Arnt Aune calls "economic correctness" (2001), reigns throughout vast uneven terrains opened up from the imploded borders of our liberal world. While economics does indeed rule the neoliberal landscape, it does not do so according to uncompromising rationalism. Political and cultural practices flowing into the previously segregated spaces of economics enable market rule through logics that operate entirely outside the rational-irrational divide. Economic neoliberalism moves from situation to situation, disregarding spatial boundaries between the political, economic, [End Page 2] and cultural realms as well as their attendant modes of persuasion, wearing away at the rhetorical linkages between appropriate discursive choices and agentive power.Regardless of the particularities of neoliberalism's spaces, structures, and governing practices, many rhetoricians continue to mediate among different worldviews based on outmoded liberal gauges. Some rhetorical theorists, for instance, maintain that the problematics of neoliberalism result from an imbalance between reason and passion. Even though the most ardent supporters of neoliberal practices hold firmly to a belief in its scientific rationality, rhetorical theorists often argue that passion overpowers reason in neoliberal discourse. The rhetorical form that sustains this disequilibrium is, according to Bradford Vivian, neoliberal epideictic. Based on an impassioned identification, epideictic texts "unite an otherwise fractured citizenry in a dynamic affective experience" (Vivian 2006, 15). Epideictic rhetoric functions didactically to unite the public... (shrink)

Schelling’s later philosophical thought and Schopenhauer’s philosophy undeniably have a Kantian pedigree. Their respective philosophies have had their major impact, however, in the late nineteenth century and twentieth century. For reasons that are both historical and systematical, the later Schelling (after 1809) and Schopenhauer were not deemed valuable interlocutors in the post-Kantian debates of the early nineteenth century. The reason for this, I argue, is that they go against the idealistic flow of the times. Instead of developing Kant’s positive (...) concept of autonomy as self-grounding reason (such as Hegel), they expand Kant’s notion of a free arbitrariness (Willkür; most often translated as power of choice). I wonder: When one goes against the flow, does one then not return to the source? In this paper, I show how Schopenhauer and Schelling (1809–1815) both start from Kant’s negative concept of freedom and develop a way to experience such freedom through a non-conceptual intimation. (shrink)

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

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 142-154 [Access article in PDF] Critical Discussions The Fortunes of Avant-Garde Poetry Mary Anne O'Neil Invisible Fences. Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature, by Steven Monte; xii & 298 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, $50.00. Modern Visual Poetry, by Willard Bohn; 321 pp. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000, $47.00. The situation of French poetry at the turn (...) of the twenty-first century is far different from what it was during the last fin de siècle. In 1900, poetry was a booming art, and France was home to numerous poets of varied inspiration and expression. The religious verse of Claudel and Péguy shared the attention of the reading public with the philosophical poetry of Valéry and the futuristic celebrations of Paris and modern life found in Apollinaire's Alcools and Calligrammes. Long poems, short poems, poems written in standard verse, free verse, prose, and even published as drawings, suggested that the golden age of poetry begun in the early nineteenth century by the Romantics and continued after 1850 by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, would not soon come to an end. This indeed proved to be the case, for the heirs of the Symbolist tradition of the first decade of the twentieth century were soon followed by the Surrealist revolutionaries of the 1920s and 1930s, many of whom directed their talents to the composition of political verse at the time of the Second World War. Political poetry by and large disappeared from France after 1950, only to be [End Page 142] succeeded over the next two decades by two very different types of verse. On the one hand, writers like St. John Perse and Pierre Jean Jouve produced difficult works whose appeal was limited to a sophisticated audience, while lyricists, such as Jacques Prévert and even the songwriter Georges Brassens, made poetry more accessible to the general public, often through popular songs. The fact that, during the days of May 1968, students scrawled verses of the Surrealist-Communist poet Paul Eluard on the walls of the Sorbonne to encourage efforts to bring down the social order attests to the power exerted by poetry on the intellectual life of France well into the second half of the twentieth century. Such, however, is no longer the case today. There are only two well-known living French poets, Francis Ponge and Yves Bonnefoy. While reviews dedicated to original poetry do still exist, especially in the south of France where the poetic arm of the French Resistance was most active in the 1940s, poetry attracts many fewer readers--and fewer writers--than it did even fifty years ago.Such a radical change merits some reflection. What has happened to French poetry since the mid-twentieth century? In a sense, all good things must come to an end sometime, and a century and a half of inventiveness and poetic energy may simply have run its natural course. French publishing houses, well aware that prose sells better than verse, have done little to encourage young poets. However, certain trends in the subject matter and form of contemporary French poetry have probably contributed to the current lack of interest. Since the end of the Second World War, French poets have concerned themselves almost uniquely with everyday life--common objects, geographical locales, and ordinary people. This obsession with the ordinary has produced some excellent poetry, especially René Char's evocations of Provençal landscapes and Yves Bonnefoy's treatments of childhood. Yet, this concentration on everyday life has severed poetry from the traditional subjects that have sustained it ever since classical antiquity, such as the celebration of heroic figures and heroic deeds, philosophical and religious inquiry, love, loss, prophetic vision. This very narrow range of subject risks consigning poetry to the status of a minor art. At the turn of the twenty-first century, French poetry also finds itself at the end of a very long period of formal experimentation that began in the second half of the nineteenth century and which includes... (shrink)

Since the nineteenth century, the problem of the arrow of time has been traditionally analyzed in terms of entropy by relating the direction past-to-future to the gradient of the entropy function of the universe. In this paper, we reject this traditional perspective and argue for a global and non-entropic approach to the problem, according to which the arrow of time can be defined in terms of the geometrical properties of spacetime. In particular, we show how the global non-entropic (...) arrow can be transferred to the local level, where it takes the form of a non-spacelike local energy flow that provides the criterion for breaking the symmetry resulting from time-reversal invariant local laws. (shrink)

In this course we will examine several philosophical puzzles concerning time. We all seem to experience time in a very fundamental and direct way. Yet once we begin to reflect on what time really is, it is easy to feel as puzzled as St Augustine was, who wrote: “If no one asks me, I know what [time] is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.” The first set of (...) issues we will discuss concern the question whether time is ‘real.’ Time appears to consist of past, present and future. But do the past and the future exist in the same way as the present or is only the present real? Does time ‘flow’? In what ways is time different from space? What would it be to ‘spatialize’ time? Next we will ask whether certain views of time imply that there can be no freedom of the will. One might worry that if facts about the future (including facts about what I will do tomorrow) already existed in the same way as facts about the present exist, then I could not be free to choose what I will do. After all, how can I be free to decide to skip class tomorrow, if it is ‘already’ a fact today that I will attend class? What, if anything, is the connection between various views of time and ‘fatalism’? The third topic we will discuss is time travel. First we will ask whether time travel is a conceptual possibility. As we will see, there are certain conceptual puzzles associated with the possibility of time travel. For example, one might think that if time travel is possible, then I should be able to travel back in time and kill my father before the date of my conception. But this scenario seems to lead to a contradiction. Some have taken considerations such as these to argue that the very idea of time travel is incoherent. Is this right? If not, why not? Then we will look at what the theory of relativity says about the nature of time in general and about the physical possibility of time travel more specifically. Finally we will examine several issues concerning the asymmetry of time.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Elvira Panaiotidi, “The Nature of Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts in Music Education”Wenyi W. KurkulAt the beginning, I would like to congratulate Elvira Panaiotidi on her interesting paper and on her proposal to move beyond the long-running debates that began in the mid-1990s between Bennett Reimer and David Elliott and their respective supporters. I also applaud her affirmation that, beyond the numerous debates within the music-education philosophy community, (...) the ultimate goal is to put the theories to work in schools or, in other words, to convert theories into operative paradigms.Echoing her affirmation, I shared her article with a class of my graduate students after I received the invitation to respond to this paper. All of my graduate students are current schoolteachers in the greater Washington, DC metropolitan area in the United States. Some of them are young teachers; others have decades [End Page 114] of teaching experience. As a university professor, I have always been thrilled by how much my thoughts are inspired by my students—by their stories, writing, discussions, dialogues, and sometimes very challenging questions in class. Their concern for their daily jobs and their students constantly remind me of our responsibilities to the children in the schools. However, with our schools and students in mind, I have to ask the music education philosophy community a question: Is "producing a unified concept of music," or "searching for a unified approach," or even aiming to "develop a unified approach in music education" as proposed by Panaiotidi what we truly need?In her paper, Panaiotidi discusses the debate over the approaches in music education by Reimer and Elliott in the context of paradigm shifts. The term, "paradigm shift," was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 in his highly influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn proposes that almost every significant break-through in the field of scientific endeavor is first a break with tradition, with old ways of thinking, with old paradigms. For example, until the germ theory was developed, there was a high percentage of deaths during childbirth and scientists were not sure why. Likewise, in military settings, more people were dying from small wounds and diseases than from the major traumas experienced on the frontlines. But as soon as the germ theory was developed, a whole new paradigm—a better, improved way of understanding what was happening—made dramatic and significant improvements in the practice of medicine possible.The United States today is the setting for another fruitful and powerful example of a dramatic paradigm shift. The traditional concept of government had been monarchical, based on the divine right of kings. It was not until centuries later that a significant break-through paradigm was developed: government of the people, by the people, and for the people. A constitutional democracy was born that unleashed tremendous human energy and ingenuity. This new paradigm, over time, generated personal empowerment, free enterprise, a higher standard of living, freedom and liberty, and influence and hope unequaled in the history of the world.Stephen R. Covey, the author of a popular book in the late 1980s, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, cites Kuhn's conception of paradigm shift to illustrate his own ideas. He describes an experiment at the Harvard Business School in which an instructor passed out a picture of a young woman to half of the class and a picture of an old woman to the other half. The students were asked to look briefly at the picture and pass it back. The professor then asked the class to describe the woman as he projected on a screen a picture of a woman that was a combined image of the "old" and "young" women. Needless to say, the students debated the age of the woman. If they had seen the "young" version, [End Page 115] they could see only a young woman now, and vice-versa. Each student was adamant about his or her position. They did not see the image in another way until the lines were pointed out to demonstrate the features of the old and young woman. Covey cites this exercise to prove the powerful conditioning effects of one... (shrink)

Bad philosophy is responsible for the climate and nature crises, and other global problems too that threaten our future. That sounds mad, but it is true. A philosophy of science, or of theatre or life is a view about what are, or ought to be, the aims and methods of science, theatre or life. It is in this entirely legitimate sense of “philosophy” that bad philosophy is responsible for the crises we face. First, and in a blatantly obvious way, those (...) institutions, organizations, corporations, businesses, endeavours, and activities of humanity that cause the crises and global problems we face, do so because of the aims they pursue (profit perhaps, or power, or heat and light for homes), and the methods adopted in pursuit of those aims – the philosophy in other words, built into the institution, organization, business, human activities, or whatever it may be. It is the philosophy of these institutions, organizations and activities that we need to change to put a stop to, or at least lessen the severity of, the crises we face, the global problems that confront us, above all the climate and nature crises. One institution has an especially crucial role in this respect: our universities. They are dominated in a multitude of ways by a particularly disastrous philosophy, a philosophy of inquiry which may be called knowledge-inquiry. This holds that the basic aim of the university is to acquire and apply knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; once acquired, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this philosophy of knowledge-inquiry is an intellectual disaster. As a result, universities are, in devastating and almost entirely unrecognized ways, humanitarian disasters too. Judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, the university shaped by the philosophy of knowledge-inquiry violates THREE of the four most elementary rules of rational problem solving conceivable in a wholesale, structural fashion, and it is this gross, wholesale, structural irrationality of the university, unnoticed by all but a few scientists and scholars, that is in part responsible for the creation of our grave global problems, and our current incapacity to learn how to solve them. The pursuit of knowledge, conducted in universities, within the framework of knowledge-inquiry over the decades and centuries, has produced much of great benefit to humanity. It has made the modern world possible. It has led to modern power production, modern industry and armaments, modern agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern travel and communications, and the internet. But these very successes have also created many of our most serious current global problems: the climate crisis; the destruction of natural habitats, the catastrophic loss of wild life, and impending mass extinction of species (the nature crisis); the lethal character of modern war; the impact on the natural world of the rapid growth of the human population; the menace posed by nuclear weapons; pollution of earth, sea and air; threats to democracy caused in part by the internet and social media. All these grave global problems have been made possible by modern science and technology, pursued largely in universities within the framework of knowledge-inquiry. Nevertheless, it is not science and technology as such that are the problem, but science pursued in a way that is dissociated from a more fundamental task of the university to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that progress may be made to a better world. Science and technology, pursued within the framework of knowledge-inquiry, create for some of us the power to act, but not the power to act wisely – not the power to learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. For that, we need our institutions of learning, above all our universities, to take as their primary task to help humanity learn how to do it. In order to do that, the philosophy of inquiry put into practice by universities needs to be dramatically transformed. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry – a revolution in the philosophy of the university, all around the world, wherever possible, so that the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, construed to be the capacity, active endeavour, and perhaps desire, to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom in this sense including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, but much else besides, methods being dramatically modified too so as to help achieve the new academic aim. The basic task of the university would be, not to solve problems of knowledge, but rather to help people in the social world beyond the university to resolve conflicts and problems of living so that what is of value in life may be realized by everyone, insofar as that is possible. The pursuit of knowledge would be vital, but not intellectually fundamental. The intellectual and institutional revolution we so urgently need in our universities would affect every discipline and aspect of the university; it would dramatically affect both research and education, and the whole way the university is related to the rest of the social world. The revolution, from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry would dramatically enhance the intellectual integrity and rationality of natural science, social inquiry, the humanities and technology, the character of these disciplines and the relationships they have with one another. University education throughout the university would be dramatically improved. And academic inquiry as a whole would do what, on the whole, it fails to do at present: it would help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational and, as a result, increasingly successful ways, progress at last being made to a genuinely good, civilized world – a world in which there is peace, justice, liberal democracy, individual freedom, education, reasonable equality, sustainable prosperity and worthwhile opportunities in life, all of these for everyone, insofar as this is possible. Why, it may be asked, has academic philosophy not noticed that we urgently need to transform the current bad philosophy of inquiry of knowledge-inquiry into the far more intellectually rigorous and humanly valuable philosophy of wisdom-inquiry, so that we can begin to do what so far we have failed to do so lamentably: learn how to avoid impending disasters, and even make progress to a better world, something that seems at present almost unthinkable given the horrors of war, poverty, political enslavement of the 20th century, and the horrors of this century so far too? The answer is that academic philosophy is in a particularly pitiful state, as philosophers themselves, are just beginning to realize and lament. That is why academic philosophers are blind to the intellectual and humanitarian disaster of the bad philosophy that dominates universities today, and inconceivable to them to them that they might have, as a disciplinary task, to ensure academic inquiry implements a good philosophy of inquiry, and advocate and argue for change if it does not. Once upon a time, in Europe at least, philosophy was an intellectual power in the world. In the 17th century it created modern science which massively increased and improved our knowledge and understanding of the world, which in turn led to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the modern world. Philosophy was once so intellectually powerful and influential that it changed the course of history. But philosophy also made in the past three disastrous intellectual blunders: the post-Cartesian blunder, the post-Newtonian blunder, and the Enlightenment blunder. Never acknowledged and corrected by subsequent philosophy right down to the present, these unrecognized intellectual blunders rendered academic philosophy the esoteric, pathetic, and powerless discipline it is today, so that throughout the last century and, so far, throughout this one, academic philosophy has remained blind to the intellectual disaster of knowledge-inquiry, and thus failed entirely to take up its proper disciplinary task of warning fellow academics of the structural irrationality of the philosophy that prevails in the university, and of proposing what steps need to be taken to put things right. Instead of performing such an urgently needed philosophical task, so-called analytic philosophy was reduced to analysing the meaning of words. Since then, there has been hardly any discernible improvement, even if analysis of concepts no longer dominates the scene. Bad academic philosophy is indeed responsible for intellectual and humanitarian failures of the university. What the three past intellectual blunders of philosophy are, why their persistence so dramatically reduces academic philosophy to a triviality, and why, furthermore, this results in the failure of scientists and scholars to see what is so blatantly bad about the philosophy prevailing in universities around the world – the failure to see what so urgently needs to be done to put right what has been wrong for so long: all this is made clear in this book. A new kind of philosophy emerges during the course of the argument, critical fundamentalism, which has as its task to keep alive imaginative and critical – that is rational – thinking about our fundamental problem: How can our human world, the world we experience and live in – the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That problem encompasses all others of life, science and thought. Critical fundamentalism tries to improve answers to aspects of this problem; but it also seeks to encourage everyone to think about the problem, from time to time, and think about how it interacts, in both directions, with more urgent particular and specialized problems of life and thought. Critical fundamentalism sets out to help improve bad philosophy wherever it is to be found: in social, political, commercial, legal, financial, and international life; and especially in academia, in institutions of learning, so that they become devoted to enhancing the capacity of people to learn how to achieve what is of genuine value in this brief life of a few decades if we are fortunate. Critical fundamentalism does everything it can to bring about the revolution in our universities we so urgently need. If taken up by mainstream philosophy, it might really have an impact, and begin to transform universities for the better, in both intellectual and humanitarian terms, and thus, enable humanity to learn how, after the grim failures and horrors of the last century and this one, to make progress to a better world. -/- . (shrink)

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

In several previous papers we have argued for a global and non-entropic approach to the problem of the arrow of time, according to which the “arrow” is only a metaphorical way of expressing the geometrical time-asymmetry of the universe. We have also shown that, under definite conditions, this global time-asymmetry can be transferred to local contexts as an energy flow that points to the same temporal direction all over the spacetime. The aim of this paper (...) is to complete the global and non-entropic program by showing that our approach is able to account for irreversible local phenomena, which have been traditionally considered as the physical origin of the arrow of time. (shrink)

The plane of the present is a concept that is useful for discussing the various paradigms of time. Here by ‘plane of the present’ we mean the temporal interface that represents the present instant and that forms the boundary between the past and the future. We use the geometrical term ‘plane’ to indicate an extended surface in the space-time continuum, as opposed to a ‘point’ on some time axis. This point/plane dichotomy is intended to raise issues of (...) extension and simultaneity and to examine the degree to which these are meaningful concepts from various physical viewpoints. We will show by example in the present work that the plane of the present is a pivotal concept that offers considerable power in differentiating between various views of the nature of time. The concept of time within the main stream of physics thinking has followed a rather convoluted path over the past three millennia. Anticipating the modern motion picture, Zeno of Elea (c.490-c.430 B.C) questioned whether time should appropriately be viewed as a continuously flowing river, or should more properly be considered as a rapid sequence of stop-motion ‘freeze-frames’, in effect rendering geometrical each instant as a separate infinitesimal point on the line of time. Adopting this view, he asked how physical motion could occur. He argued paradoxically that motion is not possible, since it appears to happen only between the frozen frames of time instants.1 From the viewpoint of Zeno, the plane of the present would be simply the last and most recent in this sequence of freeze-frames. It would be that frozen instant, spanning the universe, which changes progressively as the instant we call ‘now’ becomes the frozen past and future possibility freezes into the ‘now’ of present reality. We note that the plane of the present as a concept does not resolve the arrow paradox that Zeno raised. It only provides a way of thinking about it. (shrink)

This eighth volume in the highly praised Study of Time series presents articles that fall into three broad categories: life and time as they are understood in the biological, cognitive, and psychological dimensions; the experience of time and life in words, sounds, and images; and time and life as ordered according to sociological, historical, and anthropological perspectives. The International Society for the Study of Time (ISST) is largely composed of the very academics whose early training (...) and research have encouraged them to specialized in subjects of less and less scope. But the very interdisciplinary nature of a society of heterogenous scholars from over 30 countries in more than 20 disciplines committed to the study of time is bound to broaden the perspective of those who are thus engaged. Furthermore, the insistence on delivering papers in plenary session - and in a milieu which has always proved to be a delight to the eyes, the mind, and the body - invariably encourages highly productive, jargon free, and very profitable discussions throughout the day and in smaller groups often late into the night. How does time and life apply to music, technology, philosophy, physics, film, and so much more? The pleasant pain and the resulting creative energy that derive from being obliged to view one's subject in a newer and broader perspective produced the excellent papers chosen for presentation at the conference. And that same creative energy is presented here in the more Apollonian form of the papers selected by their external readers and the editors, as Dimensions of Time and Life. (shrink)

The problem of evil is the problem of reconciling the world's afflictions with the fundamental attributes and justice of God. Throughout their lives people encounter painful events originating from nature and other individuals. Furthermore, it is believed that God created everything, particularly in divine religions. Scholars and thinkers have debated for centuries why an omniscient, omnipotent, just, and compassionate God would create evil. The problem of evil is sometimes employed by atheists as evidence against religion, and at times as (...) philosophical proof for the absence of God. Nowadays, it exerts a profound impact on people's beliefs within social media platforms. This article aims to address doubts and objections surrounding the problem of evil. Numerous studies have been conducted on this current issue. The subject, which is basically examined as natural and moral evil in the philosophy of religion, has been examined under the titles such as justice and cruelty, goodness and evil, will and power in classical theology. In this study, the subject is examined in terms of the relationship between the subject of evil and its object, and attention is drawn to the role of man in the formation of evil. In this context, a general overview of the problem of evil is presented in the introduction. The second section delves into how the problem of evil is approached in philosophical and theological traditions, specifically examining the viewpoints of classical kalam schools. In the later parts of the study, the subject has been tried to be reinterpreted under different titles. Within this framework, it is suggested that some doubts and questions about the problem of evil arise from a lack of understanding of religion, while others stem from interpretations perceived as religious within the tradition. To propose a solution to the problem, the concept of God, known for its power and authority in classical times, should be reevaluated. In the context of Islam, God should be considered as an entity possessing complete knowledge, absolute will and power, and creating the universe for goodness, possesses justice and mercy and bestows numerous blessings upon humanity. This perspective finds ample support in the verses of the Qur'an. The problem of evil sometimes emerges from misconceiving the relationship between God and nature as equivalent to a God-human relationship. However, God designed the universe's order to support the emergence of life in nature and make it conducive to the lives of all living beings, particularly humans. Natural phenomena and events unfold by the laws set by Allah. Evils such as diseases, fires, earthquakes, floods, storms, volcanic eruptions, rain, and lightning are not events directly orchestrated by God to harm humans. The harm they cause is primarily a result of humans' negative interactions with nature. Precautions can mitigate these harms. Yet, humans who pollute air, water, and forests and build poorly located structures hastily attribute the resulting evils to God. A careful examination of the numerous blessings in nature underscores that the universe was created by God as a benevolent order. God created humanity to undergo tests within such a world, aiming for human happiness in both this world and the hereafter. Thus, the entirety of God's will be goodness. Evil, conversely, arises from humanity's exercise of free will and the potential to commit malevolent acts. Consequently, evil stems from human interactions with nature and fellow beings. Destiny is another frequently misconstrued aspect. It refers to the natural and moral laws established by Almighty Allah to govern the order of nature and human existence. Destiny presents a realm of possibilities and does not coerce anyone's actions. To address the problem of evil, the portrayal of God, whose sole intent is good, must be reconstructed. Additionally, concepts like testing, fate, death, and sustenance need to be reinterpreted in alignment with this conception. Furthermore, methods that facilitate the acquisition of accurate religious information through social media should be developed to suit contemporary requirements. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 22-25. The Author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento do Ensino Superior), Brazil. From the multifarious subdivisions of semiotics, be they naturalistic or culturalistic, the realm of semiotics of value is a ?eld that is getting more and more attention these days. Our entire political and economic systems are based upon structures of symbolic representation that many times seem not only to embody monetary value but also to determine it. The connection between (...) monetary and linguistic exchanges is self-evident: the former requires the latter and develops in direct relation to it. Creative experimentation and design of digital systems of value exchange are blossoming on the web. Dr. Gilson Schwartz, an economist turned media theorist and professor at the University of São Paulo, adopted the concept of Iconomics, originally created by Michael Kaplan, an author concerned with the linguistics of economic value. Empowering local communities and unlocking new levels of value creation and representation via digital technologies are the main goals of Dr. Schwartz’s projects, aiming at the re-designing of our relationship to the economic value of imagination and the social control of property. Schwartz is Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, a former Chief Economist at BankBoston, Brazil and Advisor to the President of the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). FURTHER READING: Kaplan, Michael. “Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation.” Public Culture . 15.3 (2003): 477-493. Renata Lemos-Morais: You have recently produced and directed a short documentary about Creative Currencies in Latin America. Could you tell us a bit about its process and its findings? Gilson Schwartz: The “Creative Currencies” project is a work-in-progress platform which unfolds as an action research agenda connected both to the production of audiovisual content and the development of social currency software. The initiative dates back to 2003 when I led an experimental project supported by the Presidency of Brazil. At that time, we issued paper currency in a small, touristic village in the Northeast Region which stimulated local cultural projects. But it was only in 2009 that the Central Bank of Brazil acknowledged “social currencies” as a legitimate economic agenda, calling for more debate at the I Financial Inclusion Forum. This year, the monetary authorities organized a second forum that also opened the room to discussions on mobile payment systems and new perspectives on poverty alleviation via State subsidies. The Ministry of Culture funded the “Creative Currencies” project in 2009-2010 and our next stage in this discovery process is to be supported by the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). In short, there is genuine interest among public officials in different areas and public funding for social currencies is on the rise in Brazil. However, after all these years we are still at a very early stage of research and practice. Some of the most successful initiatives (such as Banco Palmas) actually evolved out of local monetary creation to become correspondent banking operations for commercial banks and other financial groups. After eight years of price stability and social inclusion, Brazil stands out as a major opportunity for social experimentation, even the Grameen Bank is now entering the Brazilian market and many NGOs are geared towards different forms of entrepreneurialism in the base of the pyramid, riding solidarity economic models, microfinance and microcredit for local development. It is yet to be seen, however, whether these developments are just one more stage of “bankarization”, that is to say, an extension of regular banking services or actually a new form of social and symbolic self-determination at the local level. So far, the Central Bank of Brazil is open to new forms of credit and local finance as long as they are strictly territorial and very close to barter among the poor. In other words, whether the process of monetary creation could be made to fit an open source paradigm is yet to be seen. Community banking and social currencies might as well end up as just another channel for access to and use of banking services. The “Creative Currencies” project aims at promoting the discussion of more fundamental issues, such as the limits of central banking, the prospects for local financial development and the possibility of creating and managing financial icons as cultural assets. The purpose of this project is to produce short documentaries that will bear testimony to this evolving regulatory framework while inducing more discussion about the fundamental iconomic issues concealed in the process of money and wealth creation. RLM: What new potential is there in applying digital technologies to currency creation? GS: Globalization is a result of the virtualization of money, that is, the overcoming of illusions such as the “gold standard”. Money is an icon created by institutions, not on supposedly natural or material foundations but out of political and financial interests. The “dollar standard” is an outstanding evidence of this phenomenon and Kaplan´s paper, the first to use the expression “iconomics”, insists on the rhetoric and semiotic effects associated to a supposedly scientific model of money creation and management. This is a fundamental change that was perceived and discussed much before the digitalization of the world by unorthodox economists such as John Maynard Keynes since the early 20th century. The digitalization of global financial flows accelerated this immateriality and the creation of the Euro was yet another evidence of the political foundations of currencies. The banking establishment, however, is keen on the idea that scientific formulae hold the key to sound money creation. Keynesianism has been repeatedly associated to “inflationism” while the supposedly sound monetary policies of the Orthodoxy serve well the political and financial interests of a technocratic elite. Corporate media also serve this fictitious depiction of the monetary process despite the cyclical bust of monetary rules and financial regulations. The internet, however, has created numerous opportunities for the disintermediation in industries such as film, music and commodities. There is no reason to doubt that the financial industry can also be transformed by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructures. Money is media as well. Credit is but confidence. Once people realize that the distributed computing power of networks can also be the platform to weave new monetary and credit operations, there is room for grassroots emancipation out of the established owners of monetary institutions. So far, however, there has been a privatization of monetary management and there is not a clear path or model for the emergent (P2P) property democratization that is inherent to the internet. Digital assets, however, clearly have an inherent potential to escape central control and proprietary regulatory frameworks. RLM: How are social networks transforming the ways in which we exchange value? Do you believe that online influence and reputation might be translated into a new kind of currency? GS: The foundation for social currencies as envisaged by solidarity economics is the territory. Authorities are willing to concede local monetary creation as long as it is restricted to poor neighborhoods, as a proxy to barter. In this relevant but limited context, reputation, personal knowledge and informal ties form the matrix of local or “proximity” finance which are expected to keep credit and leverage to a sustainable level. Anything beyond that should and would lead to an integration of local finance into the established banking system. However, inasmuch as the internet promotes virtual territories and reputation is now subject to all sorts of digital manipulation and stardom becomes an everyday cultural process among teenagers and elders alike, the territorial “foundation” is substituted for more complex patterns of solidarity, cooperation and exchange that reach beyond the physical territory and even the “human.” Digital assets embody knowledge, technology, cultural and educational values that are exchanged at a global scale beyond the control of democratic States (Chinese-like intervention is the exception, not the rule). Hacktivism is unstoppable and so is monetary hacktivism. Especially in the Third World, mobile communications fast became conveyors of money transfers and other appropriation strategies. Banking and telecom sectors already battle for the control of these emerging markets and, as a matter of fact, have so far contributed to the containment of these processes. Governments serve these moguls and have usually adopted a wait-and-see attitude. If open source hardware and grassroots social movements combine to challenge these proprietary battles, then social networks may evolve into new forms of social capital and thus form the ground on which to design and implement social currencies. The global financial crisis, as well as the dollar demise, are an event of such a proportion that social networks may open the path for emancipator subjects to seize the opportunity. RLM: What are some of the social experiments that you think are revolutionizing the way in which value is exchanged? GS: There is a broad evolution of economic systems towards the valuation of intangible assets such as knowledge, reputation and sustainability. There are many examples of local as well as global events that call the traditional systems of exchange into question, from carbon credits to educational bonuses, digital barter frameworks and locally based solidarity and fair trade networks. These emerging examples, no matter how different in nature or scale, represent a challenge to the traditional value creation schemes and theories which are based on use and exchange value, supply and demand. This is not to say that utility and labour or scarcity are to be totally dismissed, but there is now an emerging perception that value is also a function of behavioral codes, symbolic patterns and the energy of institutional frameworks. The plasticity of digital platforms is relevant insofar as intellectual property becomes the central source of value creation. But when you discuss the property rights of public goods such as the environment or basic social rights (of minorities or localities), then a new paradigm seems to emerge. RLM: Are gaming and online storytelling digital practices that might have an impact on the way new currencies are created and developed? GS: “Play money” has been one of the early and most intriguing phenomena associated to the diffusion of virtual worlds. These virtual currencies have also been prone to “boom and bust” dynamics, speculation and pure theft (Second Life scams were common and led to “intervention” by the owners of the game). Storytelling is a major source of value, that is, the value of attention and the markets for audience. There are plenty of private monies created and managed by corporate entertainment groups, telecom operators (via mobile virtual network operators) and marketing frameworks. The casino economy, as already depicted by Keynes and other unorthodox economists, is always storytelling about future states of the world, confidence building and leverage of animal spirits. The novelty of current events is not the fictitious nature of any form of capital, but the potential for digital democratization of controls over the imaginary nature of value creation. But this is just a potential, a possibility, a figment that more often than not is appropriated by centralized and opaque private powers. The game industry is a testbed for new connections between storytelling and money creation. RLM: Monetary value was originally connected to the scarcity of precious metals, such as gold. Our entire monetary system seems therefore to function according to a logic of scarcity. Do you believe it is possible to reverse this logic into a logic of abundance? GS: The gold standard was a fiction itself, the “scarcity” is always produced by institutions that regulate confidence and access to credit. The key issue is not to fabricate abundance, but to question the institutions which produce scarcity out of any standard, gold or whatever. Central banks are at the service of private banks in the creation and management of scarcity. RLM: The promise that nanotechnology holds for our future is one of radical abundance (or so say transhumanists). The possibility of creating any kind of material substance through nanoengineering seems each day more feasible. What would this possibility entail in terms of systems of value exchange? GS: Nanotechnology, environmental concerns and grassroots appropriation of distributed knowledge are the frontiers of a new horizon of energy creation and management. Social groups in charge of managing scarcity for the sake of wealth and power concentration must be held accountable for the destruction of our future. Once this key political conundrum is accounted for, new systems of value exchange and even a non-mercantile society will come into existence. Revolutionary theorists such as Marx envisaged transformation via the extreme clash of contradictions between capital and labour. This approach has never led to a change in the systemic logic of scarcity for the sake of social control. We are once again facing the threshold of large scale societal change, but the outcome of the current crisis should come from our imagination, not from yet another paradox of abundance and scarcity. As long as we remain attached to the materiality of value, the illusion of freedom will but reinforce the massive manipulation of necessity. RLM: What do you think is the role of crowdfunding in this context? GS: Crowdsourcing as well as crowdfunding are examples of the peer to peer opportunities that come along with distributed computer power. However, the power structure behind wealth and scarcity creation may or may not be changed by crowd management. But it should not be taken at face value, so to speak. The stock market of course is an early form of crowdfunding without calling into question the proprietary framework of the companies offering their investment projects to the market. Any market is a form of crowdsourcing, that is to say, of distributed forms of supply and demand matchmaking. The wealth of networks, however, depends on the contractual ecosystem, the institutional framework, the channeling of social imagination, not on the purely quantitative distribution of bids and offers. I see economics as supply, demand and code. Once you have access to the code, once openness becomes part of the game, then there is a chance of crowd behavior becoming collective intelligence and sustainable imagination. RLM: Is the development of digital currencies headed towards a pluralistic ecology in which many micro currency systems co-exist, or is it penetrating the mainstream monetary system? If it is affecting the mainstream financial system, what would be its effect in the long-term? GS: The same issue is at stake both at local and global levels. The global system is, as a matter of fact, an unstable ecosystem of “micro currencies” whereas the dollar has so far exerted an overwhelming influence. Local currencies and private monies coexist with national currencies only to the extent that the Central Bank admits, for instance, that grassroots monetary emissions remain territorial and strictly connected to poverty. However, the question of how new developments in digital technologies and nanotechnologies might alter not only our current monetary systems but also our understanding of value in itself, is still an open question. (shrink)

After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government tried to democratize energy policy-making by introducing public participation. Over the course of its implementation, however, public participation came to be subordinated to expert committees as the primary mechanism of policy rationalization. The expert committees not only neutralized the results of public participation but also discounted the necessity of public participation itself. This trajectory of public participation, from its historic introduction to eventual collapse, can be fully explained only in (...) reference to complex interactions between the macroinstitutions and microsituations of Japanese policy-making at the time of the nuclear disaster: the macroinstitutional reassembling of the developmental state to reallocate more power from the bureaucracy to the cabinet office and the civil society vis-à-vis the microsituational, shifting power dynamics involving political parties, citizens and NGOs, businesses and labor unions, and other relevant actors. This case study thus helps advance the growing science and technology studies research on how the macro and microparameters of policy-making, ranging from the durable institutions of nation-states to situationally specific political struggles, combine to shape the designs, implementations, and policy influences of public participation at particular places and times as well as in particular policy domains. (shrink)

Does the assumption of a weak form of computational functionalism, according to which the right form of neural computation is sufficient for consciousness, entail that a digital computational simulation of such neural computations is conscious? Or must this computational simulation be implemented in the right way, in order to replicate consciousness? From the perspective of Karl Friston’s free energy principle, self-organising systems (such as living organisms) share a set of properties that could be realised in artificial systems, (...) but are not instantiated by computers with a classical (von Neumann) architecture. I argue that at least one of these properties, viz. a certain kind of causal flow, can be used to draw a distinction between systems that merely simulate, and those that actually replicate consciousness. (shrink)

Order flows from consistent laws. Our understanding of our universe is changing, but Reality behind it is unchanged. Einstein's relativity amended Newtonian determinism, and was in turn amended by quantum mechanics. Einstein saw a harmonious advance in knowledge, and said, 'God does not play dice'; but Stephen Hawking later saw a radical departure, and said, 'God is a gambler.' This author, a keen student of philosophy with a moderate background of science, sees in these conflicting conclusions the inevitable distortion (...) when 'the relative' is projected on to 'the Absolute'. Therefore he says, 'Do not worry about God. He is not a visiting player like you and me, but the absolute owner of the casino. When He plays, His left hand picks up what His right hand loses. His status remains unaltered. We had better be looking out for ourselves.' The serious point made is that the Absolute includes and exceeds the time-space-causation frame of relativity, and these parameters cannot cross the border. The limitations must be clearly understood. 'Time' of physics is enought to study kinetic processes but not to locate the creative potential. That requires 'time' of our conscious awareness. But bio-science mistakes consciousness to be a product of brain-cells. In truth, consciousness is the energy, and brain is the equipment through which it manifests. Thus TIME is the Achilles' heel of physics, and MIND is the Achilles' heel of biology. The name of Reality is Total Consciousness. It is eternal. Death was never born, and life never died. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to elaborate two distinctive but interconnected modes of temporalization through common points in the work of Jaques Derrida and Jaques Lacan, namely the Subalternated and the Dislocated time. The explication of the different form of time structure reveals time as relational phenomena, which is constituted by the non-relation between the subject and the Other. The process of subjectivization as the formalization of the Real, or as the work of mourning, excludes traumatic (...) present and opens the space for free flow of the Subalternated time, which is marked by linearity, identitarian thought, subordination, causality ect. The present is, therefore, marked by ontologization of the posthumous remains, canonized, excluded and deprived of any subversive potential. But despite this eternal requiem, something remains between the future and the past, non-present in its spectral subsistence which disrupts smooth stream of the Subalternated narrativity, announcing arrival, return and temporarily inexhaustible artificiality of novelty in the form of the Dislocated time. (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)

Phenomenology's relation to sensation has many facets. Sensation arises in different contexts in Edmund Husserl's work, and receives several reformulations. This causes us to inquire how the sensations that are unified within the temporal flow by time constituting consciousness, in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, and that continue to exercise an affective pull even after having passed away, in Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis, can be related to the bodily sensations which constitute the lived (...) body in Ideas II. What is revealed in a critical study of these texts is the unthematized role that sensation plays in Husserl's writings. Yet sensation is not for that reason less significant, nor could his phenomenological descriptions of experience convincingly forgo this concept. ;What is the concept of sensation which can subtend these different formulations and provide a connecting thread within Husserl's phenomenology? My dissertation is a reply to this question. I argue that the sketches of sensation found in Husserl's works can provide the grounds for a rhythmic and dynamic theory of the lived body---a theory which not only inserts the body into the temporal flow of lived experience, and defines its spatiality as fluid, malleable and affectively charged, but which also opens the body to an intersubjective dimension. In this way, sensation becomes a differentiated and heterogeneous reality. Sensation has the structure of an evolution, the continuity of a rhythm, so that the body that is constituted of sensings secretes time at its joints. This theory frees sensation from Husserl's early hylomorphic schema in Ideas I, and reconnects it to the flow of life, and to bodily experiences of world and others. In the process I also examine alternative views which deal with the role of sensation in the contexts of the body, temporality and otherness. The works of M. Merleau-Ponty, but also of E. Levinas, L. Irigaray, H. Bergson and G. Deleuze are important in this regard. Reading these thinkers in connection to Husserl sheds an unexpected light on their philosophies, while allowing us to challenge Husserl and to propel phenomenology in new directions. (shrink)

LET ME BEGIN this inquiry with the simple but fundamental fact that the flow of time, or passage, as it is also known, is given in experience, that it is as indubitable an aspect of our perception of the world as the sights and sounds that come in upon us, even though it is not the peculiar property of a special sense. Consider, by way of illustration, that I am now sitting at the desk in my study. This (...) particular event was not present at any earlier time, nor will it be present shortly as I become involved in other activities. The present, as I experience it, is regularly associated with later and later events. It does not hop about capriciously from here to a later time, to a previous time, and then to a much later time, or trace out some other such indiscriminate pattern; instead I find it always in association with the next moment, and as I look backward and inward, so to speak, I find that the prior moment was present and that this next-later moment is present. Quite often this condition is expressed by means of imagery. We are asked to envision either a moving present racing along a fixed track of moments or events from earlier to later, or alternatively a fixed present through which stream a series of moments or events, first the earlier and then the later ones. One is in truth hard-pressed to find references to passage which do not employ quasi-poetical tropes and metaphors, and while these do help in some sense to say what we mean, great caution is required when handling them because of their ready tendency to draw us away from the actual phenomenon requiring explanation. (shrink)

Perhaps, the most mysterious phenomenon in the world is man, and among his qualities it is the mind. Whether created “from the dust of the earth” or brought from distant cosmic depths, formed as a result of the evolution of nature or some other yet to be recognized miracle, man has conquered nature, created a univer­sally artificial world, a «second nature» – culture, and has now become not only the master of the Planet but is also looking more (...) and more pragmatically into the Cosmos. The first attempts to master it (as well as the entire previous path of conquering nature) suggest that man possesses some incredibly secret power that allows him to rise and dominate the world. This power is the power of the mind – science, education and culture. It united all other human qualities into a single energy complex, concentrated them in the ability to work, thanks to which it mastered nature, and directed man into a civilized path. Philosophers studied both the historical sources of the origin of the mind, as well as the patterns of its development and the prospects for further application in society and the world. The mind finds various, sometimes unexpected ways for its embodiment – not only in science, philosophy, education, but also in folk traditions, in the prophecies of mystics and maxims of sages. At the same time, the loss of reason can take vari­ous forms – from “mind loss” to the loss of human values at work to the madness of war. The departure from “reason” creates civilizational conflicts, which mostly end in war. The current one is the deepest and most threatening. It is exacerbated by the ruscists’ threat to use nuclear weapons. To put an end to ruscism, to eradi­cate violence, to ensure the Ukrainian victory and to establish guaranteed peace and cooperation between nations – this is the «wisdom» of the mind, its inex­haustible energy, which guarantees new prospects for the civilizational progress of mankind. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine some of the anatomical implications of Campanella's theory of magic, focusing in particular on his crìtique of Aristotle's and Galen's anatomical views. By magic Campanella meant first and foremost communication of energy and knowledge. It is no accident that he viewed both medicine and rhetoric as constitutive disciplines of magic. In doing so, he appealed to the time-honoured notion of the magic of the word theorised in ancient times by the (...) sophist Gorgias. The distinctive feature in Campanella's system of magic is that the word is both a symbolic and a physical entity. Meaning flows from nature to the mind and from the mind to nature. Words are both carriers of meanings and physical agents of psychosomatic transformation. As can be demonstrated by pointing to such paradigmatic cases as natural divination and prophecy, the force of the imagination, the patient's trust in the power of the physician or the healer, and the many influences that air exercises on the body, Campanella's theory of magic rests on a definite anatomo-physiological basis. The most original aspect, though, is the way in which Campanella reinterpreted Arìstotle's and Galen's prìnciples of anatomy so that he could adapt his medical views to the broader framework of his theory of magic (practice), on the one hand, and metaphysics (theory), on the other. In addition, Campanella's onginal account of emotions and passions supported a comprehensive system of magical practice that dispensed with the basic principles of both Aristotle's and Galen's physiology. Campanella was convinced that the vital operations of the body could not be explained by simply relying on the unsentient functions of the vegetative soul (Aristotle) or on the natural faculties of the body (Galen), nor could they be accounted for by assuming the existence of incorporeal souls (Aristotle) or bodily temperaments (Galen). By circumventing both Aristotle's hylomorphism and Galen's vital matenalism of the temperaments, and by appropriating the Stoic view of rational pneuma, he managed to produce a physiological model that was more flexible in dealing with the complex interplay of knowledge, action and appetite, and above all, better suited to account for a universe in which the flow of life and meaning encompassed varìous levels of communication. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

The concept of time is examined using the second law of thermodynamics that was recently formulated as an equation of motion. According to the statistical notion of increasing entropy, flows of energy diminish differences between energy densities that form space. The flow of energy is identified with the flow of time. The non-Euclidean energy landscape, i.e. the curved space–time, is in evolution when energy is flowing down along gradients and levelling (...) the density differences. The flows along the steepest descents, i.e. geodesics are obtained from the principle of least action for mechanics, electrodynamics and quantum mechanics. The arrow of time, associated with the expansion of the Universe, identifies with grand dispersal of energy when high-energy densities transform by various mechanisms to lower densities in energy and eventually to ever-diluting electromagnetic radiation. Likewise, time in a quantum system takes an increment forwards in the detection-associated dissipative transformation when the stationary-state system begins to evolve pictured as the wave function collapse. The energy dispersal is understood to underlie causality so that an energy gradient is a cause and the resulting energy flow is an effect. The account on causality by the concepts of physics does not imply determinism; on the contrary, evolution of space–time as a causal chain of events is non-deterministic. (shrink)

Three physical theories explaining the flow of time are examined. One theory suggests that “flow” is associated with the manner of information transfer between registers within the brain. Different robotic systems are predicted to experience different types of flow. Here, human examples are found to support the theory and the model is modified suggesting that flow is a cognitive illusion. A second theory suggests that time is non-existent, that the universe is a complex quantum (...) state which, upon observation, the brain acquires “stills” and converts them to an illusion of motion and flow. Accordingly the brain should be able to generate a physiological illusion of temporality from stills. Experimental evidence is given that the temporality illusion so generated is not physiological; it is cognitive, lending no support to that theory. A third theory suggesting that the flow of time is really a myth is briefly reviewed. (shrink)

This two-volume work examines far-reaching debates on the concept of courage from Greek antiquity to the Christian and mediaeval periods, as well as the modern era. Volume 1 explains how competing accounts of epistêmê, rational wisdom, and truth dominated classical antiquity. Early Christian and mediaeval thinkers, in contrast, favoured fortitude founded on faith and fear of God over philosophical reasoning left to its own devices. Volume 2 turns to theories of courage from the early modern period to the (...) present. It shows how the twin laws of polis and physis are at the heart of post-medieval thought. Courage is found at the crossroads of love and dread, freedom and fate, happiness and suffering, as well as power and submission to the ruling order. The later influence of evolutionism, existentialism, and the social and natural sciences on moral philosophy is also addressed at some length. The protection of people's best interests, the passions and powers of the human will, and the rule of active energy in all aspects of life supplant courage formerly viewed through the lens of reason or faith, or a combination of the two. These new ideas, paradoxically, herald the end of the ethics of courage. They also undermine the courage of ethical thinking. Courage is no longer an end in itself, nor is it a means to happiness "at the end." Regardless of what Gandhi, Tillich, and Foucault have to say about the topic, late modernity and the global age witness a marked loss of interest in courage as an idea worthy of conceptual investigation. Debates about the moral implications of courage give way to the value-free science of resilience, which studies how people can recover from past trauma and find wellness, primarily in the realm of physis. (shrink)

… Pound’s Imagist economy often mixes metaphors of capitalization with metaphors of expenditure. Words, he writes in an early essay, are like cones filled with energy, laden with the accumulated “power of tradition.” When correctly juxtaposed, these words “radiate” or “discharge” or spend this energy , just as the Image releases “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” . The precise relation of accumulation to expenditure in Pound’s Imagism is never really elaborated. For (...) clarification one would probably have to look toward his theories of sexuality, which hint at a proportion between spermatic retention and intensity of ejaculation. “The liquid solution [of sperm and/or thought],” he writes in his 1921 “Postscript” to Gourmont’s Natural Philosophy of Love, “must be kept at right consistency; one would say the due proportion of liquid to viscous particles, a good circulation; the actual quality of the sieve or separator, counting perhaps most of all; the balance of ejector and retentive media” .13 Similar physiological metaphors will shape Pound’s later economic writings of the thirties and forties. Money will function as a kind of “sieve” or “separator” , and usury will be described as malevolent form of retention, an “obstruction” to the proper circulation of money and goods. Economic justice will therefore involve the institution of a correct “balance” or “measure” between accumulation and expenditure, between “ejector” and “retentive media.” From Pound’s later Confucian perspective, excess in either direction—whether it take the form of “smeary hoarding” or extravagant squandering—always leads to evil and disorder.14Excess is of course what Pound’s Imagist economy most militantly seeks to eliminate from contemporary poetry. Pound writes in 1912, “As to Twentieth-century poetry … it will be harder and saner … ‘nearer the bone.’ It will be as much like granite as it can be … It will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it…. I want it austere, direct, free from emotional slither” . The vocabulary of this passage combines a discernibly American, puritanical suspicion of ornament with a functionalist asceticism that we have come to recognize as a characteristic feature of the international style of high modernism.15 From a postmodernist vantage point, however, we might well question just why the category of excess or surplus represented by “rhetorical din,” “luxurious riot,” or “emotional slither” should be so inevitably construed as negative or uneconomic. Georges Bataille, for one, provides a provocative refutation of this ideology in La Part maudite. The economics he there seeks to define would instead be based on the valorization of excess, or of what he terms “la dépense improductive,” nonproductive expenditure. Bataille’s “economy of excess” turns on “la perte du proper,” that is, the loss of the literal to the figurative, the loss of purity to scatological defilement, and the loss of personal identity to a sacred expropriation by the Other. 13. See also Kevin Oderman’s comments on the importance of delay and deferral to Pound’s troubadour “eroticism of dalliance” in “ ‘Cavalcanti’: That the Body Is Not Evil,” Paideuma 11 : 257-79. If, according to Pound, the “classic aesthetic” involves “plastic to coitus, plastic plus immediate satisfaction,” Cavalcanti’s cult of Amor instead privileges mental reterntion, “the fine thing held in the mind,” that is, erotic or mnemonic capitalization. See LE, pp. 150-53.14. Rabaté, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology, pp. 217-23, similarly links Pound’s “Postscript” to Gourmont to his later economics.15. Herbert Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real , pp. 177-78. Richard Sieburth is associate professor of French at New York University. He is the author of Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont and translator of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments . He is currently preparing an edition of Pound’s writings on France. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia (1728) and the Tradition of CommonplacesRichard YeoIn the fifth volume (1755) of the Encyclopédie in his entry on “En-cyclopædia,” Denis Diderot forecast a time in which the sheer number of books would require a division of intellectual labor. Some people, he said, will not do much rea ding but rather “devote themselves to investigation which will be new, or which they will believe to be (...) new.” The majority, unable to produce anything of their own, “will be busy night and day leafing through these books, taking out of them the fragments they consider worthy of being collected and preserved.” 1 Although Diderot set this prospect in the future, he believed the signs were already visible and offered his encyclo-pædia as a response. Part of this image, however—the selection of passages from a range of authors—was already a familiar one. Re commended by the Ancients, it was widely practised during the Renaissance by the educated elite who kept commonplace books for recording quotations on various themes from Classical authors. Even the epigram from Horace on the title page of the Encyclop édie suggests this lineage: “What grace may be added to commonplace matters by the power of order and connection.” 2In the classical period, the Latin term, locus communis, referred to a general argument capable of being used in different situations. In his Institutiones Oratoriae Quintilian discussed the notion of copia verborum in connection with the ability of a good orator to produce copious illustrations [End Page 157] and embellishments from particular ideas. Renaissance writers thought this facility was enhanced by a record of similar ideas in the same place in a notebook. This practice had been followed in the medieval period, but it became more systematically taugh t as part of rhetoric from the sixteenth century. Commenting on this, R. R. Bolgar wrote:The whole purpose of the Humanists in transmogrifying Greek and Latin literature into a series of notes was to produce a body of material which could be easily retained and repeated. They made titanic efforts to remember the contents of the note-books the y compiled. 3Quintilian’s work, and more immediately, that of the German humanist, Rudolph Agricola, influenced Erasmus in his De Copia, first published in 1512 as De Duplici Copia Verborum ac Rerum Commentarii Duo. This offered advice on how to collect words and passages under various topoi or loci (places) as a means of storing extracts from books that could later be brought together and embellished in either writing or conversation. The set of ideas or themes grouped under one “Head” wer e known as “common-places,” and the notebooks kept for this purpose were commonplace books. 4 These were also called “copie” books in the sense of collections enabling copia, or free flow of material for oratory. Versions of this practice continued into the nineteenth century: figures such as John Milton, George Berkeley, Robert Southey, R obert Burns, and David Thoreau kept commonplace books, some of which were subsequently published. Some of these included less than elevated content: Kenneth Lockridge has uncovered a string of misogynist remarks and anecdotes in the commonplace book of Th omas Jefferson. 5In the only major study of the commonplace tradition, Sister Joan Marie Lechner analyzed its status in Renaissance rhetorical training from the sixteenth to the early seventeenth century, identifying some confusion and [End Page 158] tensions, partly as result of dissatisfaction with the “doctrine of places” taught by classical writers, and also because “commonplace” had come to refer both to a “locus or seat of arguments” and a “speech-within-a-speech.” 6 Her work shows that commonplace books were kept as aids to recall reading and as storehouses (thesauri) of topics and phrases suitable for speeches and conversation, as recommended by Erasmus and other writers. However, Lechner noted a new need pa rtly satisfied by the commonplace collections, which was that they accommodated Renaissance passions for “accumulating universal knowledge.” Thus, in her words:The commonplace book with its encyclopaedic array of topics or places was thought of as a compend of knowledge displayed in a systematic pattern... (shrink)

Everyone, even when asserting unchallengeable authority from God or Science, thinks in language, in words and phrases, in expressions of moral, social and political impact, fighting words and words with and over which we fight. However, debates among the educated can be irrelevant elsewhere, ineffective against the highly motivated whose dogma instructs and guides them, their voting and their arming. The degeneration of “democracy” to “tyranny” such as Plato’s Republic postulated threatens in some lands “of the free,” while (...) in others it seems inexorably in progress. Today “democracy,” republic,” “liberty/freedom,” “justice,” “law and order” are adduced by their actual enemies to complement “nationalism,” “patriotism,” and frightening “empire.” Extremists on both sides decry “Tyranny!” each in fact seeking authoritarian power. All of which have instructive ancient precedents: in the History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides offers horrific accounts of ancient nation-states “long ago and far away,” more or less democratic, that abandoned common sense, moral sense, and with them regard for value words and truth itself. In the early 2020s CE many persons and governments have done little better during the still lingering pandemic. A second horror is prompted by Thucydides’ report of civil war on Corcyra, telling how faction spawned riots, coups d’état, and outright civil war. The twenty-first-century media are uniquely potent, yet mechanics of seduction are timeless. Likewise techniques for winning true believers and votes, as illustrated by passages in Mein Kampf on the language of propaganda, its production and reception. Our hope is therefore Education for a New Era to help students to discover pitfalls of media(ted) “information,” to achieve independent critical thinking at levels of basic language use and foundations of argument. Besides recognizing mis- and disinformation as harmful, they must learn themselves to judge thoughtless use, cynical abuse, or, worse yet, brazen disdain of vocabulary indicating moral/ethical value. Scientists have key roles in this drama; humanists larger ones yet. (shrink)

The issue of the relationship between predictive processing (PP) and the free energy principle (FEP) remains a subject of debate and controversy within the research community. Many researchers have expressed doubts regarding the actual integration of PP with the FEP, questioning whether the FEP can truly contribute significantly to the mechanistic understanding of PP or even undermine such integration altogether. In this paper, I present an alternative perspective. I argue that, from the viewpoint of the constraint-based mechanisms (...) approach, the FEP imposes an important constraint, namely variational free energy, on the mechanistic architecture proposed by PP. According to the constraint-based mechanisms approach, high-level cognitive mechanisms are integral parts of extensive heterarchical networks that govern the physiology and behavior of agents. Consequently, mechanistic explanations of cognitive phenomena should incorporate constraints and flows of free energy as relevant components, given that the implemented constraints operate as long as free energy is available. Within this framework, I contend that the FEP provides a relevant constraint for explaining at least some biological cognitive mechanisms described in terms of Bayesian generative models that minimize prediction errors. (shrink)

It is commonly held that there is no place for the 'now’ in physics, and also that the passing of time is something subjective, having to do with the way reality is experienced but not with the way reality is. Indeed, the majority of modern theoretical physicists and philosophers of physics contend that the passing of time is incompatible with modern physical theory, and excluded in a fundamental description of physical reality. This book provides a forceful rebuttal of (...) such claims. In successive chapters the author explains the historical precedents of the modern opposition to time flow, giving careful expositions of matters relevant to becoming in classical physics, the special and general theories of relativity, and quantum theory, without presupposing prior expertise in these subjects. Analysing the arguments of thinkers ranging from Aristotle, Russell, and Bergson to the proponents of quantum gravity, he contends that the passage of time, understood as a local becoming of events out of those in their past at varying rates, is not only compatible with the theories of modern physics, but implicit in them. (shrink)

War and Nature is an important, cogent, and timely book about the double‐edged nature of technology. Edmund Russell, through meticulous research, establishes a key nexus between the increased use of chemicals in war and peace during several key decades of the twentieth century and the generalized backlash against technology and its unintended consequences that occurred beginning in the mid‐1960s. He clearly places pesticides, rodenticides, herbicides, and chemical warfare agents alongside atomic energy, electronics, massive water harnessing and diversion projects, and (...) other prime examples of America's romance with progress. Thus, he joins his work with a significant body of research examining the United States's headlong plunge to embrace technology, along with sometimes belated efforts to grapple with its effects.The idea of progress has always been a distinctive factor in American identity. However, the fascination with progress was perhaps never so intense, so unreserved, and so naive as in the fifty years from 1914 to the early 1960s. During these years, as Russell points out, the pace of change was accelerated by two world wars that spawned the growth of powerful government agencies as well as commercial companies whose new products benefited richly from government‐funded research. Wartime imperatives hastened development of “miracle chemicals” that preserved the health of American soldiers, as when DDT was widely employed in the Pacific theater of war to kill malaria‐bearing mosquitoes. The result was what President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as he left office, termed the “military‐industrial complex.”Russell uses well‐chosen examples from the archives of chemical manufacturers to illustrate how defense contractors supplying electronics, atomic expertise, and other forms of technological expertise useful in warfare softened their public images by touting beneficent peacetime applications of their products. “Better Living Through Chemistry” along with “Progress Is Our Most Important Product” and other slogans familiar to citizens of the 1950s appealed not just to America's love of convenience and gadgetry. They also appealed to a fundamental U.S. belief that “modern science” would solve age‐old problems, erase perennial blights, and free people to live on a higher plane than any previously experienced by humankind.However, because defoliants, flame‐throwers, poison gases, and other chemical weapons that aided the war effort almost always conjured up negative images in the public mind, manufacturers used analogies of “victory” in war to victory over man's environment to retain a reputable and lucrative place in peacetime society.Perhaps most striking are the parallels between chemicals and atomic energy during the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s in the United States. Both chemicals and atomic energy proved their awesome power in hastening victory in World War II, and both needed softer images after the war ended. The promises of disease‐free fields and enormously increased crop yields appealed to the American public, just as did the hope of electricity “too cheap to meter” and nuclear medicine that might cure cancers.When chemicals began to poison birds, fish, and other species recognized as valuable and desirable to man, when fields lost their productivity, and when illnesses arose in certain occupations that could be linked to chemical exposure, the downsides of progress became evident. America recoiled and reevaluated. Russell weaves congressional testimony together with advertisements, popular cartoons, and other ephemera to bring to life this uniquely American story. He compels the reader to ask striking questions about a nation maturing and itself asking complex questions about one of its most cherished ideals.The final irony of Russell's book may lie in the fact that it was written before the World Trade Center attack on 11 September 2001 but published just afterward, in the midst of America's anthrax episodes in the fall of the same year. The world focus on chemical and biological warfare should now provide a whole set of additional readers for this valuable book. (shrink)

This paper explores space-time with the Minkowski equation, trying to integrate using the three manuscripts presented to the Open Journal of Philosophy (OJPP) a “new theory of gravity” by introducing the concept of space-time flow. Gravity is a push rather than a pull, an idea presented in the first manuscript. Gravity is the inertia, the shape (frame) of space-time produced by dark energy. The space-time surrounding you provides the force that pushes you upwards, but (...) it doesn’t increase the diameter of the Earth. The sensation of gravity is actually caused by the accelerated flow of space-time against you, which acts as a mirror. The Earth’s expansion is apparent; creates the illusion, but Earth does not expand; rather, the space-time flow emanating from the Earth generates gravity. Einstein’s theory of relativity explains that gravity results from the curvature of space-time caused by the presence of mass and the background dark energy. “Dark energy, introduced from all directions,” which exists throughout the universe in space-time, is responsible for the universe’s accelerated expansion. One way to expand space-time is through the concept of cosmic inflation, which suggests that the universe lives a continuous widening of space-time. Free fall and relativity theory support this claim. Dark energy pushes (pressure) space-time inside the atoms, and the space-time, as in a nozzle, produces an accelerated flow which is gravity. Dark energy floods the whole space and produces positive pressure. It is a non-local/ non-analytical energy, an omnipresent that pervades everything. Dark energy is a space-time property; it was first discovered in 1998. The pressure makes space-time emerge from every point of the Universe and push it expansively. Quantum physics suggests that all the energy in the Universe can form a single universal emergent system, which produces time in the present before us in 4D space-time. This is dark energy. The expansion of space-time is universal and occurs everywhere. When this expansion occurs within atoms, it produces a space-time flux, which is gravity. The general expansion produces it and counteracts it. Pushing space-time outside of Earth (Earth does not expand, just looks like it does) is this space-time flux that makes Earth coordinates move upward, to make it feel like falling into Earth. The apparent matter expansion is its complement mirror. Here, we present Gravity as accelerated space-time flow going out from massive objects. (shrink)

There is an inevitable interaction between Arabic and Turkish as word transitions occur in every language. One of the common examples of this exchange between Arabic and Turkish is the word ikhtilāf (conflict).However, it is not possible to say that the bilingual partnership about this word is meaningful. Because this word expresses the meaning of opposition, contradiction, diversity, separation of opinion between two persons or groups, opposing attitude and contradictory attitude in Arabic, all of these meanings are not transferred into (...) Turkish.In other words, the word ikhtilāf’s meaning is narrowed during its transition into Turkish. In fact, the word is almost fixed in Turkish as “the separation of opinion between two persons or groups”. This difference in the meaning of the language between the two languages ​​of the contradiction must not be construed and interpreted as “controversy” or “disagreeing” at every passing moment of the word. Because in some verses this situation can be a wrong choice.Differences in interpretation in tafsir and translation errors are the most obvious indication of this possibility. Therefore, it should be considered that the use and meaning of the word may be changed according to the text. SummaryWords and concepts are the most important tools for people to share with their interlocutors both in oral communication and in writing. Because the meaning of the preferred word and concept directly affects the increase or decrease of the power of the message to be given. So, the choice of word and concept are important in the spoken word and the used word. However, despite this importance, people are not entirely free in word selection. This is because there is no vocabulary to express everything separately. So, the words are limited, and the objects named through them are unlimited. This led people use some words that have more than one meaning, which also explains the emergence of the concept of polysemy.Polysemy is a phenomenon seen in Arabic as well as in many languages. Since the Qur'ān, which contains the messages of Allah to humanity, is in Arabic, there are many words that have two or more meanings. This situation should be taken into account to understand the Qur'ān and its context when determining the meaning of such words. Revealing all potential meanings of qur’ānic expressions is important to convey the intended meaning. In other words, the inability to detect the correct meaning of the word or to ignore the fact that it is very meaningful makes some comprehension problems inevitable.One of the words in this context that have the problem of understanding is the concept ikhtilāf(Conflict). This concept, which is used 51 times in 45 verses in different ways, does not mean the same meaning wherever it is used. It is used in more than one meaning depending on the context in which it is located. The change and diversity that points to the power of Allah, the conflict, the separation of thought and behaviour between the two groups, and the unilateral opposition attitude of a person or group are the meanings of this concept. There is no significant difference in the tafsirs of these meanings regarding the meanings of change, diversity, and contradiction. The differences seen in the exegesis (tafsīr) are in the way that the same meaning is mostly stated in a different way. This situation in the tafsirs was reflected to Turkish translations of the Qur'ān on the meaning of the concept and it was translated correctly in general. This shows that the context of determining the meaning of the concept is taken into account and that the polysemy of the concept is not an important problem in the meaning of “change,” “diversity” and “contradiction.”One of the most important meanings of the concept of ikhtilāf(Conflict) is the difference of thought and behaviour between two people or groups. In this sense, the concept has two subjects and refers to the situation of these two subjects against each other. This meaning, which we see more in the use of the concept as verb, refers to the conflict and contradiction of the different thoughts and attitudes that people have to against others they face because of their personal characteristics and ideology. In this sense, ikhtilāf(Conflict) among the sides reflects a negative situation without the possibility of finding the ground and the middle way. In the verses where the concept is used in this sense, there are also elements that indicate the difference of opinion between the two subjects, such as bayna(between) preposition, the believing-disbeliever comparison. The concept has been translated into Turkish with this sense in the Qur'ān. Its meanings of conflict, conflict and conflict are also used in Turkish. Therefore, it is possible to say that this meaning has a common meaning between Arabic and Turkish. Therefore, meanings of the concept such as conflict, disagreement, etc. in Turkish translations of the Qur'an are enough to reflect the meaning of the verses in this context. So, it is possible to say that in meaning of the concept does not have a problem of understanding and interpreting in general.The concept of ikhtilāf(Conflict) is also used to counter and oppose to a thought or belief in the Qur’an except for the general meaning of the above. With this meaning we encounter in the usage of ikhtalafaand mukhtalifin this sense, it is not only the mutual attitude of the two sides but the dissident, against and opposing attitude of one side towards the other. As such, the concept reflects an action of "one subject". As in the case of conflict between the two sides, there is a negative and undesirable situation in this usage. Because in the verses where the concept is used in this sense, the contradictions, and attitudes of the unbelievers about the faith revealed by Allah, religion, the book, and the prophet are generally explained. However, this meaning of the concept has not been translated into Turkish. In other words, there is no meaning in the word ikhtilāf(Conflict) used in Turkish. Therefore, there is no exact equivalence between Turkish and Arabic regarding this meaning of the word. For this reason, translations in the form of “conflict,” “dispute” for use in this sense are insufficient to reflect the meaning of it. Because, in these translations, the contraction of the concept which was experienced in the transition from Arabic to Turkish was not observed. This causes the misunderstandings of the verses in which this concept exists.The concept of ikhtilāf(Conflict) refers to the differences of tafsir in the verses that express the opposing attitude of a person or group as with other polysemy concepts, this concept also points to the need to be careful. Instead of giving the same meaning in every passage of such polysemy concepts, it is necessary to determine the correct meaning according to the context of the unity of the verse and its context. The same sensitivity should be taken into consideration in translating the concept into Turkish. So, while translating the concept passed in Turkish by narrowing, that accepting it is true in both languages and transferring to Turkish according to it is insufficient to reflect the meaning referred in the verse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Time’s Causal Power: Proclus and the Natural Theology of Time by Antonio Luis Costa VargasM. MartijnVARGAS, Antonio Luis Costa. Time’s Causal Power: Proclus and the Natural Theology of Time. Boston: Brill, 2021. i + 231 pp. Cloth and eBook, $162.00The metaphysics of time in Neoplatonism tends to be described top-down: From transcendent eternity, time as we know it emanates. (...) This is hardly informative about the nature of time as such, however. Vargas’s monograph about Proclus’s theory of time instead takes a bottom-up approach: From the effects of time, he ascends to transcendent and divine Time as their cause—a natural theology. In the process, we learn that the key element of Proclus’s theory is that Time, which orders events and distributes “lifetimes,” provides us with the possibility of understanding the world as an ordered, intelligible whole.The book contains four chapters providing a genealogy of sorts by systematically laying out Proclus’s inspiration from the philosophy of time in Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus respectively. Chapter 1 starts from Plato’s Timaeus and the distinction between the “order of time” and the “flow of time.” The order of time is the intelligible, transcendent substance that causes the “flow of time,” that is, time as change. From the Republic, Proclus harvests “true Number” as determining the former, and the motions of the heavenly bodies dispensing lifespans to all beings as determining the latter. [End Page 732]Chapter 2 starts from Aristotle’s criticism of Platonic time as motion: A motion belongs to a specific substance, but time should be omnipresent. Vargas shows how Aristotle’s understanding of change, causality, and time helps Proclus shape the order of time as a cosmic intelligence that makes the world intelligible through the number by which its processes are measured. In this chapter, Vargas presents a beautiful and rich analysis of how Neoplatonists adopt elements from Aristotle’s physics, psychology, and biology in order to build their Platonic notion of time as “number that counts” or productive number. In Neoplatonic terms: Aristotle’s first intellect as first mover becomes the substantial Order of Time in Proclus, the transcendent monad, and his lower movers become the chain of emanated lower times as kinds of intelligence.In chapter 3, Stoic biology helps elaborate the understanding of time as the order within the cosmos, the world as a living being, and contributes the idea of one simultaneous present or “now” for everything. This cosmic life helps counter Aristotle’s criticism: All motions belong to specific substances but are part of the life of the cosmos. Vargas here also brings in an interesting link to more recent discussions in physics concerning the nature of simultaneity: How do we know whether things occurring far away from each other are simultaneous? The cosmic “now” and the notion of sympathy, which Proclus finds in synchronous processes, provide a metaphysical framework for such simultaneity.In chapter 4, Plotinus’s contribution to Proclus’s theory is discussed: the flow of time as the life of the world soul, which underlies all life in the cosmos and ties it together. It consists in the presence in the soul of the effects, that is, the external activity, of the emanated internal activity of Intelligence. Intelligence, according to Plotinus, must be alive because it is fully active, and its emanation in the world soul leads to the soul’s own external activity, that is, its uniform and discursive production of the world. This external activity is time in the strictest sense of the word. The main difference between Plotinus and Proclus is that for Proclus the flow of time is inferior to the eternal life of the world soul, belonging to its external activity, but for Plotinus it coincides with the world soul. Another interesting difference Vargas highlights is that, where Plotinus denied the possibility of time being a number of changes because of the eternity of the world soul’s production, Proclus instead ascribed it countable infinity resulting from the everlasting repetitions of the Great Year.Vargas’s analyses contain very rich and detailed discussions of metaphysical issues such as the Aristotelian difference... (shrink)

Research on diseases such as cancer reveals that primary mechanisms, which have been the focus of study by the new mechanists in philosophy of science, are often subject to control by other mechanisms. Cancer cells employ the same primary mechanisms as healthy cells but control them differently. I use cancer research to highlight just how widespread control is in individual cells. To provide a framework for understanding control, I reconceptualize mechanisms as imposing constraints on flows of free energy, (...) with control mechanisms operating on flexible constraints in primary mechanisms. I argue that control mechanisms themselves often form complex, integrated networks. (shrink)

Love, fear, hope, calculus, and game shows-how do all these spring from a few delicate pounds of meat? Neurophysiologist Ian Glynn lays the foundation for answering this question in his expansive An Anatomy of Thought, but stops short of committing to one particular theory. The book is a pleasant challenge, presenting the reader with the latest research and thinking about neuroscience and how it relates to various models of consciousness. Combining the aim of a textbook with the style of (...) a popularization, it provides all the lay reader needs to know to participate in the philosophical debate that is redefining our attitudes about our minds. Drawing on the rich history of neurological case studies, Glynn picks through the building blocks of our nervous system, examines our visual and linguistic systems, and probes deeply into our higher thought processes. The stories of great scientists, like Ramon y Cajal, and famous patients, like Sperry's split-brained epileptics, illuminate the scientific issues Glynn selects as essential for understanding consciousness. Some might argue that his lengthy explorations of natural selection overemphasize evolutionary explanations of psychological phenomena, but they must also agree that evolutionary psychology has distanced itself mightily from social Darwinism in recent years and merits a reappraisal. The great consciousness debate may form the core of the 21st-century Zeitgeist; get ready for it with An Anatomy of Thought. -Rob Lightner From Publishers Weekly How do we know? What do we think? How could a philosophical problem-'the mind-body problem,' say-induce a headache? What can evolutionary theory, molecular biology, the history of medicine and experimental psychology tell us about the features of human consciousness, and (once again) how do we know? Glynn, a physician and Cambridge University professor, meticulously attempts to answer these questions and more, setting forth the results of all sorts of research relevant to our brains-from 19th-century dissections to Oliver Sacks-like case studies, work with monkeys and supercomputers, and the enduring puzzles of philosophy, which he rightly saves for near the end. After explaining evolution by natural selection and 'clearing away much dross,' Glynn lays out the experiments and theories that have shown 'how nerve cells can carry information about the body, how they can interact' and how sense organs work; demonstrates the 'mixture of parallel and hierarchical organization' in our brains and 'the striking localization of function within it'; considers where neuroscience is likely to go; and admits that, among the many fields of exciting research just ahead, 'we can be least confident of progress toward a complete, scientific explanation of our sensations and thoughts and feelings.' Other recent explaining-the-brain books have sometimes advanced simplistic, or implausibly grand, claims about the nature and features of consciousness in general. Instead, Glynn offers a patient, informative, well-laid-out researcher's-eye view of what we have learned, how we figured it out and what we still don't know about neurons, senses, feelings, brains and minds. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The nature of consciousness, which perennially troubles the minds of scientists and philosophers, is the subject of an ever-growing body of literature. Two of the latest entries approach the topic from different perspectives. Glynn, a professor of physiology and head of the Physiological Laboratory at Cambridge, offers a comprehensive summary of what we know about the brain-both its evolution and its mechanisms. Among the topics he covers are natural selection, molecular evolution, nerves and the nervous system, sensory perception, and the specific structures responsible for our intellect. Using the mechanisms involved in vision and speech as models, Glynn skillfully describes various neurological deficiencies that can lead to 'disordered seeing' and problems with the use of language. He carefully distinguishes what we know through experimental evidence from what we know through the observation of patients with neurological damage. He also describes some of the major theories that attempt to explain why these structures arose. While his book concentrates on the structures that make up the mind, Glynn is well aware that some physical events appear explicable only in terms of conscious mental events-a situation that conflicts with the laws of modern physics. Only briefly, however, does he consider the various approaches that have been taken to deal with the issues of mind/body and free will. In contrast, this is the primary focus of The Physics of Consciousness. After reviewing the fundamentals of classic physics, Walker (who has a Ph.D. in physics) summarizes elements of the new physics in which our knowledge of space, time, matter, and energy are all dependent on the moment of observation. Walker explores the meaning of consciousness as a characteristic of the observer. In this context both the observer and the act of measurement are critical. In essence, Walker leads his reader on a journey through his concept of a 'quantum mind,' which can both affect matter (including other minds) and can be affected by other distant matter/minds. To break up what would otherwise be an extremely dense text, Walker also relates the very touching story of the loss of his high-school sweetheart to leukemia. Indeed, it is his memory of their relationship that drives Walker to seek an understanding of ultimate reality. At times, he has a tendency to be dogmatic-as when he concludes, 'our consciousness, our mind, and the will of God are the same mind.' While An Anatomy of Thought is appropriate for most academic libraries, the Physics of Consciousness will be most accessible to readers with some knowledge of advanced physics. -Laurie Bartolini, Illinois State Lib., Springfield Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist The codiscoverers of natural selection-Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace-disagreed over the possibility of finding an evolutionary explanation for the human mind. Glynn here argues Darwin's side of the debate, tracing an eons-long path of development starting from simple amino acids floating in primal seas and extending through the erect hominids in which the powers of a massive brain first manifest themselves. Patiently adducing evidence of an evolutionary origin for the underlying molecular machinery, Glynn dissects the nerve centers that make possible speech and hearing, sight, and reading. Pressing deeper, he lays bare the cortical foundations of personality. But those who deal with the mind must attend also to the arguments advanced by philosophers. And it is when he turns from dendrites to syllogisms (especially the vexing mind-body paradox) that Glynn's empirical reasoning fails him. In the end, he concedes his perplexity in trying to conceive of an evolutionary origin for human consciousness. This concession may set the shade of Alfred Wallace to chortling, but it will draw readers into an honest confrontation with a profound enigma. Bryce Christensen. (shrink)

True enough, not many of the human lot we know, not least of all thosewe may chance upon in life in an intricate tangle of modern socialformations where individuals get to interface rather unreflectively mostof the time, would be so generous as to bestow a casual interest in philosophy. Two thousand years ago, this kind of antipathy toward philosophy made its point well when a man named Socrates was condemned to death, proof rather of the unchanging isometrics of equivocation (...) in the face of the compelling demands of justice and truth that Socrates exposed to be the skeleton in the cupboard of power, hiding under the façade of indestructibility. This pervasive practice would have by now covered an entire époque of Western intellectualtradition from the death of Socrates to the contemporary, disguised asunwavering love of everything that abounds in beauty and vitality, adetermined search for the fundament that holds everything together under the condition that Man is free and that Life is precious as too rich and valuable for the taking. (shrink)