This chapter contains sections titled: Analogy with Human Action The Dependency Theses Are Deep Interpretations Weakly Dependent on Surface Interpretations? Consequences for the Constitutive Dependency Thesis.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:William James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Art of New Religious IdealsKolby Knight (bio)And I don’t know a soul who’s not been batteredI don’t have a friend who feels at easeI don’t know a dream that’s not been shatteredOr driven to its knees...Oh, and it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alrightYou can’t be forever blessedStill, tomorrow’s going to be another working dayAnd I’m trying to get some (...) restThat’s all, I’m trying to get some rest—Paul Simon, “American Tune” (1973) / Recreated by Allen Toussaint (2016)William James and W. E. B. Du Bois believed that an artful life could produce new and world-changing religious ideals. As cosmopolitan scholars who studied in the United States and Europe, both men confidently interlaced original interpretations of Shakespeare, Wagner, and Goethe into their academic accounts of individual and social behavior. Beyond their patronage of the arts, James and Du Bois also saw themselves as scientists and artists who had the responsibility to create new pathways and religious ideals at a time when many European and American intellectuals depicted Western civilization as the endpoint of history.This article explores the pragmatic visions of science, art, and religion respectively offered by James and Du Bois. Pragmatism, here, refers to an active mode of study that looks closely at the interaction between specific thoughts and behaviors in particular situations without assuming a standard of truth which influences or evaluates human life from the outside of experience. As pragmatists, James and Du Bois did not believe their work consisted of merely the explication and description of preexisting truths, but more importantly the religious creation of what James called “new facts,” including healthier habits of thought and practice.1 [End Page 71]In this article, I will trace how the two men, as religious naturalists and leaders in the development of a pragmatic social science at the turn of the twentieth century, challenged evolutionary theories which envisioned Western civilization as the highest standard of aesthetic and intellectual development. Part one demonstrates how James, as a psychologist who prioritized the study and development of “first-hand” experiences, worked against visions of science that saw “lower” emotions as a hindrance to impartial intellectual discovery. It also explores how James centered personal religious experiences in his effort to de-center “impersonal” scientific frameworks which depicted human behavior and thinking as beholden to evolutionary laws which transcended individual experience. Part two considers James’s dissatisfaction with the “bad habits” of his privileged intellectual class, and how his own experience of “soul-sickness” and “stage fright” led him to contest both celebratory histories of Western progress and institutional arrangements which juxtaposed his “mystifying” intellectual performances to the lives of everyday people.Part three moves to how Du Bois, as a sociologist and former student of James, refocused James’s religious pragmatism within the context of his experience of anti-Black racism in the United States. This section traces how Du Bois saw his intellectual career as a work of art which could empower Black individuals to see themselves beyond what David Lloyd describes as “the racial regime of aesthetics” which imagines the progress of “lower humans” as dependent on higher civilizational and educational agents. This section also offers a tripartite interpretation of Du Bois’s experience of “double-consciousness” that considers its aesthetic, social, and political dimensions.2 While James expressed a desire to discard his own sense of double-consciousness, Du Bois’s experience of anti-Black racism made his two-ness more enforced and insidious. The fourth section looks at Du Bois’s disillusionment with white standards of beauty and intelligence as an experience akin to what James described as “soul-sickness.” It shows that whereas James believed that his negative emotional experiences could lead him to “new religious ideals” taking shape within the spiritual energy [End Page 72] and discomforts of his own individual body, Du Bois’s negative experience of racism led him to immerse himself in the religious and artistic vitality of Black social worlds which resisted the oppressive mechanisms and caricatures of... (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:Historical Narratives and the Meaning of NationalismLloyd KramerThe vast, expanding literature on nationalism may well defy every generalization except a familiar, general theme of intellectual history: texts about nationalism have always drawn their perspectives and passions from the evolving political and cultural contexts in which their authors have lived. Modern accounts of nationalism show the unmistakable traces of political, military, and cultural conflicts in every decade of (...) the twentieth century—from the era of nationalist rivalries before World War I to the redefinitions of gender, literature, and history that have emerged in contemporary postmodernism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism.This connection between the texts of nationalist scholarship and the modern contexts of politics and culture suggests why historical narratives of nationalism have become part of the history of nationalism itself. Nationalism’s scholarly interpreters cannot easily separate themselves from the objects of their analysis, and their interpretations are often as diverse and fragmented as the nations they describe. This essay enters the debate on nationalism, describes recurring themes in the historical literature, and replicates a key characteristic of the historiography by stressing that the complexity of nationalism and its interpreters resists every simplifying, comprehensive definition. Histories of nationalism provide a striking example of how the history of ideas never reaches a point of uncontested closure and never finally escapes the political and cultural contexts in which all historical narratives are produced.Like most analysts of nationalism, I assume that it is one of the decisive forces in modern history and that its significance demands careful, critical analysis. It also calls for always incomplete definitions, one of which can be drawn from the German historian Peter Alter. Nationalism is “both an ideology and a political movement which holds the nation and sovereign nation-state to be crucial indwelling values, and which manages to mobilize the political will of [End Page 525] a people or a large section of the population.”1 Nationalist ideas are thus a distinctive form of modern thought that shapes the political actions and cultural identities of individuals as well as groups. The meanings of nationalism and national identity typically depend on various dichotomies that define the nation in terms of its differences from other places or people—the dynamic process of identity formation that has received wide attention in contemporary cultural studies. My own view of the “oppositional” structures in nationalist thinking coincides with the concise description by Peter Sahlins: “National Identity is a socially constructed and continuous process of defining ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.... National identities... do not depend on the existence of any objective linguistic or cultural differentiation but on the subjective experience of difference.”2 Sahlins thus assumes that something called national identity is “there,” but he also insists that national consciousness is a “constructed” identity. Nationalism, in short, does not express or reflect a natural, primordial reality.The assumption that nationalisms are historical rather than natural phenomena shapes most of the scholarly literature, so that the study of nationalism leads to historical analysis rather than to biology or physical geography. Although there have been countless historical studies of nationalism in different periods, cultures, and conflicts,3 my discussion will refer to a small number of narratives that have made especially significant theoretical claims about the nature of nationalism. There is of course no way to analyze such theories without exclusions and generalizations, which I shall provide by focusing mostly on works about Europe and dividing the patterns of historical analysis into the following broad categories: (1) the description of nationalism as a central component of modernization, reflecting and also shaping intellectual, cultural, economic, social, and political transitions from premodern to modern history; (2) the claim that nationalisms are modern religious movements, related to but also displacing earlier religions; (3) the argument that nationalism is a linguistic, literary construction that depends on new forms of communication, intellectuals, and narratives; (4) the description of nationalism as a discourse of gender and ethnicity that shapes individual identities and also expresses anxieties about sexuality, culture, and respectability; and (5) the argument that nationalisms can be divided into categories (good/bad, Western/Eastern, [End Page 526] political/cultural) and phases that represent sharp differences in the development of modern... (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Child's Creation of a Pictorial WorldEllen Handler SpitzThe Child'S Creation of a Pictorial World, by Claire Golomb. Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum, 2004, 388 pp.Children's drawings fill us with wonder and delight. They may tend, however, to puzzle us, especially if we seek to comprehend them in terms appropriate to the drawings of mature artists or in terms relevant for other pictorial forms and expressions. Likewise, they (...) may puzzle us if we make the mistake of supposing that they represent in any direct or obvious way the cognitive development of young children or if we see them only as comical, inept efforts at depicting external reality. Children's drawings stimulate many nagging questions, among them the one as to why it should be that a child who knows so much and who is verbally so articulate may be graphically capable of depicting so little.Claire Golomb's work has proven extraordinarily helpful here as a corrective because Golomb, after many years of research and reflection, writes about these youthful creations not as "print-outs" of a child's mind. She sees them, rather, as exemplars of particular visual representational schemata that are generally available to and employed by young children. And although she regards these schemata as universal, she acknowledges that they are clearly subject to a wide range of individual variability. Over all, the value of Golomb's work lies in her extensive, descriptive research. Acknowledging her intellectual debt to her mentor, Rudolph Arnheim, Golomb reminds her readers that representation is never mimesis pure and simple. Representation is never, she tells us, the result of an "intention to copy nature." Therefore, when young children do otherwise, they ought not to be seen as failing. Their drawings ought not to be viewed as unsuccessful attempts to imitate nature or to depict with faithful realism what appears before their eyes. Rather, as Golomb states and attempts to demonstrate throughout the pages of her well-illustrated volume, children employ graphic schemata that develop over time in terms of shape, color, content, and composition. Ever seeking meaning, children create pictorial worlds that, while they have no one-to-one correlation with the perceptual world, are tied to it, importantly, nonetheless.Golomb assiduously describes and illustrates each of her studies so that her readers are treated to a panorama of this "orderly progression," as she puts it, this evolution of children's graphic work. Her book, moreover, is characterized by a certain social scientific aura; that is to say, she proffers statistics and quantifies her data to prove her points. She takes pains to argue, for example, from research conducted in tandem, apparently, with her daughter, that it is extremely difficult to differentiate, prima facie, the drawings of children who have been diagnosed as disturbed from those who are considered normal. Having worked for a couple of years in a residential treatment center for schizophrenic children, I would aver that this claim might be debatable. However, were one to be [End Page 120] able to so differentiate, this might constitute a challenge to Golomb's theory that the representational schemata are, as she puts it, "robust." According to her findings, they remain more or less in tact. Likewise with regard to the issue of cultural variables. Here Golomb argues, gently and respectfully, against positions taken by two other well-known scholars in the field, Brent and Marjory Wilson, who accord a higher priority than she does to cultural differences. According to the Wilsons, children's drawings are importantly influenced by whatever graphic models are made available to them in a given culture. For Golomb, however, these variables, while significant, do not interfere substantially with the universal classifications she proposes. As she writes, "The drawings of young children are as different one from another as fingerprints, yet they can be classified" (357).In general, then, the body of work Golomb offers in this second edition of her first volume published under the same title in 1992 by the University of California Press importantly contributes, as it initially did, to ongoing research in numerous fields, including art education, early childhood studies, art history, developmental psychology, anthropology, and art... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:God’s Knowledge of the World: Medieval Theories of Divine Ideas from Bonaventure to Ockham by Carl A. VaterBenjamin R. DeSpainVATER, Carl A. God’s Knowledge of the World: Medieval Theories of Divine Ideas from Bonaventure to Ockham. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022. xi + 294 pp. Cloth, $75.00Carl Vater skillfully blends historical and constructive concerns in his study of medieval theories of the divine (...) ideas. The book, first, makes a significant contribution to the body of scholarly resources on medieval philosophy by systematically mapping out the complex intellectual history of the divine ideas between the years 1250 and 1325. Throughout the work Vater displays a staggering command of the relevant literature, figures, and ideas from this period of philosophical development. Second, he provides a robust defense and promotion of John Duns Scotus’s theory of the divine ideas, which he regularly insists is the best theory. Through careful analysis of the often subtle differences in medieval articulations of the divine ideas to answer the questions of how God knows and produces creatures, Vater makes the case that Scotus avoided certain pitfalls in earlier theories that rely on a flawed understanding of relations influenced, principally, by Avicenna’s notion of essence.The book itself is divided into five parts with each systematically detailing a particular theory, beginning with the “imitability theory” represented by Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Bonaventure—the one figure, in Vater’s narrative, capable of escaping Scotus’s subsequent critiques. According to Vater, the imitability theory is defined by several notable characteristics, including that the divine ideas are “secondary objects of the divine intellect when it knows the divine essence,” that they perform both cognitive and causal roles, that they are relations, and that there are many of them. The “infinite intellect theory” critiques the imitability theory for depending on a notion of relations that is mistaken for supposing that relations can be known before the terms of the relation are themselves known. In this section, Vater examines the works of Peter John Olivi and his student Petrus de Trabibus. The third part considers what Vater calls the “objectum cognitum theory” developed by James of Viterbo. Here, according to Vater, we encounter the first signs, following Olivi and de Trabibus’s critique of the imitability theory, of the shift away from identifying the divine ideas with relations to defining them as creatures themselves. This shift culminates in the “creatura intellecta theory” introduced by Richard of Mediavilla, but it is not properly developed until Scotus, who concludes that “God knows relations because he knows possible creatures.” The section ends with an analysis of Scotus’s influence on the theories of early Thomists and Scotists, including John of Paris, Thomas of Sutton, and Henry of Harclary. In the fifth part, Vater turns to the “nominalist theory” of Peter Auriol and [End Page 373] William of Ockham. Although both Auriol and Ockham offer accounts of the divine ideas, these are, as Vater says, little more than nods to the Augustinian tradition that ultimately amount to a rejection of the divine ideas.Vater’s approach to these medieval theories has many strengths. By not only classifying the prominent theories during this period but also systematically organizing his interpretation of each respective author, he is able to create a comparative framework for assessing the central issues at play in the divine ideas, such as their status, definition, cognitive and causal roles, plurality and unity, exemplarity, and the question of nonexistent possibles, and he traces variations in each area to identify where change, development, and critique are actually occurring within this seventy-five years of intellectual history. He also is attentive to figures often overlooked in larger narrations of medieval philosophy, and he locates their contributions to the varied development of the divine ideas. More importantly, however, Vater is able to maintain coherence in his evaluation of these complex, intertwining layers of medieval philosophical reflection by constantly returning to the overarching theme of relations in the movement from identifying the divine ideas with relations to approaching them as creatures themselves. Vater is correct when he notes that the divine ideas form a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 23-34 [Access article in PDF] Mind Ahead of the Tone:Integration of Technique and Imagination in Vocal Training at Tanglewood Summer Institute Svetlana Nikitina The use of the body and the mind at the same time is one of the most fascinating things and magic things about music. 1The purpose, indeed the sole purpose, of training for the profession of singing is (...) to improve the connection between the imagination and the sounds that eventually issue from the singer's mouth. 2The utmost goal of art is achieving unity between form and content, the subjective idea and the medium, technique and imagination. Success and livelihood of dancers, actors, and musicians depends on their ability to translate mental ideas into bodily actions and, at its height, merge technical bodily and mental wisdom so seamlessly that we would forget the path that led to it.What is this path? How do individual singers mesh, melt, and marry the technical rigor coming from years of musical training and their ability to imagine and express themselves with those tools? How is the unity betweentechnique and imagination achieved and experienced? And, what is the pedagogy that could support the connection? These are the core questions that guided the study.The goal here is not to propose a conclusive theory of connection, biological or psychological. My hope is to open the curtain for discussion of what is generally considered an "undiscussable" topic in art and music education books because it deals with what is thought of as implicit knowledge that no one could or should teach. Through my observation of Phyllis Curtin's classroom and conversations with her students, some general thoughts and principles of building unity between the technical and artistic selves of a singer emerged. I would like to share those insights and strategies.While this essay does not offer simplistic how-to strategies of fostering creative synergy, it also does not suggest that the connection just happens, [End Page 23] regardless of whether we think or teach about it. What it aspires to do is create a space for thinking about the complexity of integrative experienceand ways in which bridge-building could be facilitated. As such, it could offer insights to both beginning vocalists and voice teachers, as well as be of interest to a broader range of educators and public concerned with core issues on the integrative nature of arts education. Method To serve the goal of presenting complex experiences of creative artists, Ichose to combine analytical and descriptive elements in my research method. Building an analytical argument about the ways integration between imagination and technique could be achieved and supported, I tried to stay close to student stories of connection and disconnection, employing a qualitative rather than a quantitative method of inquiry. This takes the form of large amounts of direct interview data and personal vignettes, from which I traced general patterns of meaning. Research Context A very brief and in no way exhaustive survey of literature on voice education points to a large volume of text spent on training vocal technique. Breath control, charts depicting the larynx and the thyro-arytenoid muscle at work far outnumber chapters on interpretation or "The Work of Imagination" in musical education literature. 3There are precious few books, however, that do not keep the technical and the mental concerns separate, and give the work of imagination an explicit and central role in training of performing artists. Two of those books, Thomas Hemsley's Singing and Imagination and Michael Chekhov's On the Technique of Acting, have not fallen in my lap by chance. 4 Curtin referred to them several times in her classes as books of "singular" resonance to her own singing and teaching.Chekhov's book conceptualizes the basic processes that are involved in the actor's work on character development. These processes include extensive work on the text and its interpretation (understanding, living the text, and essentializing it in performance), in parallel with developing the body... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.2 (2005) 97-103 [Access article in PDF] MoMA as Educator: The Legacy of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Ralph A. Smith Professor Emeritus University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art by Sybil Gordon Kantor. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002, xxv, 472 pp., $39.95. ISBN 0-262-11258-2 Sybil Kantor's history of the (...) class='Hi'>intellectual origins of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an engaging account of Alfred Barr, Jr.'s, pivotal role in acquainting an American audience with the modernist movement in art that had developed in Europe and the Soviet Union in the first part of the twentieth century. Scrupulously documented, Kantor's narrative relies heavily on interviews with Barr's contemporaries, his publications, and his extensive correspondence. She also limns portraits of major figures who either influenced his ideas or were instrumental in establishing MoMA. Although the book is very informative about modern art, according to its author it is not intended to be strictly a history of that art. Rather, it is devoted to Barr's early development, his personal characteristics, his attitude toward the cultural and political climate of the times, his definitions of modernism and formalism, and finally, his legacy.Kantor traces Barr's career through the decade of the 1920s, which culminated in his being named the first director of MoMA in 1929; the expansive years of the 1930s and 1940s when, as Kantor puts it, Barr and the museum were at full throttle; and the later years when Barr was relieved of his director's responsibilities to allow him to spend more time on writing and the mounting of exhibitions. He retired from the museum in 1967, began to show signs of ill health in the mid-1970s, and died at the age of 79 in 1981. The Early Years Barr began his studies in the history of art at Princeton where he took courses with Frank Jewett Mather, who taught about modern art, and with Charles Rufus Morey, a distinguished medievalist whose teaching ranged beyond the architecture and sculpture of the Middle Ages to the other arts of that era. Morey's example of comprehensiveness would later stimulate Barr to think along similar lines about modern art and the organization of MoMA. At Harvard's graduate school Barr learned the skills of connoisseurship and museum management from Paul Sachs whose students went on to become directors of major museums across America. Sachs also encouraged Barr's interest in modern art and provided him with numerous letters of [End Page 97] introduction to scholars and museum directors — and occasionally withfunds for his travels.1 Lincoln Kirstein was a close friend, art critic, and earlyally, while Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Walter Gropius, and Philip Johnson significantly affected Barr's understanding of architecture. A large cast of artists, patrons, collectors, writers, trustees, and editors of "little magazines"(so-called because of their relatively small numbers of readers) also enter the scene and play various roles. A few words are in order about Barr himself who, Kantor says, exhibited more rebelliousness, a larger vision, and greater discipline than most of those around him. Barr the Man Kantor portrays a mind and sensibility possessed of exceptional discernment for the new, the difficult, and the worthwhile in the art of the early twentieth century. Barr's feeling for order, organization, and clarity of relations; his commitment to perfection, freedom, and truth; and his faith in the capacity of modern art to overcome prejudices and improve the taste of Americans are not merely reflections of the disciplinary habits inculcated by Barr's Presbyterian upbringing. They also reveal the classical tastes acquired through his art-historical studies and echo the temper of the age.The time — the 1920s through the 1940s — valued both the rationalism of science with its methods of problem solving and the insights of psychoanalysis with its probing of the irrational. Belief in the inevitable progress promised by advances in technology was, however... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European CultureDallas G. Denery IIStuart Clark. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 415. Cloth, $75.00.A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive (...) form early in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions.Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist optics. This theory sought to secure the accuracy of human sense perception through regularized causal processes that linked things in the world with our various cognitive faculties. While some fourteenth-century intellectuals, most notably Nicolas of Autrecourt and Nicole Oresme, recognized structural deficiencies in this theory, their critiques were mostly ignored or treated as anomalies. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Clark argues, the challenges to this theory multiplied until it collapsed under their weight (20).Clark’s argument is straightforward and, as his evidence mounts, thoroughly convincing. Throughout each of the eight engrossing chapters that form the core of the book, Clark outlines a different threat, a different set of challenges that pointed out problems with the assumption that vision is trustworthy. The range and depth of those challenges are truly amazing. Doctors worried that imbalances in our humoral system, and especially in the black bile that causes melancholy, could render our visual perceptions dubious at best (ch. 2). Theologians, wary of the dangers of witchcraft and eager to prosecute its practitioners, obsessed over the cognitive threats that devils and demons posed to good Christians (ch. 4), while Protestant reformers relegated the entire tradition of Catholic miracles to the counterfeit illusions of the antichrist (ch. 5). For their part, artists believed that perspective undermined vision, depending as it does on the assumption that what we see is always relative, dependent upon our point of view (ch. 3).Clark structures much of his argument around George Hakewill’s 1608 book, The vanitie of the eye, an exposition on the natural, artificial, and demonic sources that forever render visual knowledge suspect. He could just as well have organized it around the opening pages of Descartes’s Meditations, and in many ways Clark’s book serves as a superb rumination on the sources of Descartes’s skeptical arguments. Unlike Etienne Gilson and, more recently, Richard Popkin, both of whom have done so much to open up the scholastic and early modern sources of Descartes’s skeptical thought experiments, Clark does not limit himself to philosophical lineages. Rather, he considers sources of visual skepticism that developed across an entire culture—in natural philosophy, medicine, art, religion, and literature (especially in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not only does the sheer volume and variety of such [End Page 103] sources help to explain Descartes’s urgent desire to overturn everything he had learned and begin again from the foundations, but it also contextualizes the specific arguments he employs. None of Descartes’s skeptical arguments were new and most were well known in the Middle Ages. What had changed over the intervening centuries, Clark contends, was how these arguments drew from... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Edward MacKinnon BORIS PASTERNAK'S CONCEPTION OF REALISM To desire truth is to desire direct contact with a piece of reality. To desire contact with a piece of reality is to love. —Simone Weil, The Needfor Roots According to czeslaw milosz, Boris Pasternak "did not pluck fruits from the tree of reason, the tree of life was enough for him. Confronted by argument, he replied with his sacred (...) dance." Pasternak's poetry, he concludes, is "antispeculative, anti-intellectual," and though he was compelled to make certain concessions in the course of writing Doctor Zhivago, speculative thought nonetheless remained for him a perennial and decided "adversary." ' However, the familiar and conveniently stark distinction between lyricist and thinker upon which such judgments depend is in fact both naive and tiresome since, plainly, creativity and reflection need in no way necessarily subvert one another. Accordingly, while it is indeed likely that the most valued feature of Pasternak's poetry and best prose is its detailed recording ofthe world's incessant change, of the magic and movement of weather and gardens, seasons and landscapes, Milosz is far from just in so readily and categorically dismissing any attribution of poetic thought to Pasternak. For as much as the whole of his poetry amounts to a celebration of life's small wonders, unrivaled in their greatness, there remains at bottom the inspiration of the thinker, of one who has seen and felt, but who at the same time has had to compile and consider in an attempt to make sense of the whole. As if in open challenge to Milosz, CM. Bowra notes that Pasternak's poetic sensibility is "both physical and intellectual." The mental states described in his poems, Bowra writes, "begin with sensations of the eye and ear but contain something else in their mental appreciation of the 211 212Philosophy and Literature situation," namely, his "gift for grasping abstract problems." 2 If Milosz remains unconvinced, and if Wladimir Weidle dismisses Pasternak's poetic thought as "puny and piteous," still more poets and critics have shared Bowra's view.3 Henry Gifford refers to Pasternak's "philosophical habit of mind," Ronald Hingley to the "pyrotechnics" ofhis "darting intellect," and Yury Lotman to his personal and "thoroughly professional philosophical culture." 4 In her review ofPasternak's My Sister, Life, meanwhile, Marina Tsvetaeva observes that "thought is what works in him, burrows in subterranean passages...." 5 And though Nadezhda Mandelstamclaims that the word of all poets "flows from a general, integrated view of the world," she acknowledges too that poets "vary in the range and depth of their understanding" and proceeds to cite Pasternak as her one example of a poet with a particularly unified worldview.6 If we were to agree with Francis Sparshott that "the fiercest hatreds spring from the closest relationships," we could assume in turn that the fundamental antagonism customarily alleged to obtain between the creative and critical faculties in fact indicates only some common, if confused, origin or inspiration.7 In creating, after all, it is predictable rather than idiosyncratic that the artist will be led to investigate the roots ofart within himself, tiiat he will be tempted by the urge to define, to entertain, that is, some rudimentary theory. And indeed, in Pasternak 's case, it is not simply a matter of his poetry and prose having been informed by certain tacit, if stray, aesthetic conceptions, but rather of his having supplemented his intensely thoughtful artwith aconcurrently developed theory. In this article, I want specifically to consider Pasternak's conception of realism, that standard of achievement which, according to his theory, constitutes the touchstone of all great art. In order more firmly to ground this notoriously vague and unwieldy notion, I will appeal not only to complementary theoretical conceptions of Pasternak's, but also to those central ideas advanced by Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good. My intention will be to locate Pasternak's brand of realism within what I take to be an identifiable tradition, or at least a conspicuous and pervasive theoretical tendency, according to which the most crucial criterion of artistic realism is judged to be not any properly physical aspect ofthe completed work, and certainly... (shrink)

The greatest intensity of “live” life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far as possible away. Jacques Derrida. Echographies of Television . Rainer Ganahl has made a study of studying. As part of his extensive autobiographical art practice, he documents and presents many of the ambitious educational activities he undertakes. For example, he has been videotaping hundreds of hours of solitary study that show him struggling to learn Chinese, Arabic and a host of (...) other languages. The stacked boxes of tapes are then presented like minimalist monoliths, dense archives of effort. About fifteen years ago, Ganahl began photographing the lectures that he attends. At the time, he hadn’t seen anyone else doing it, so besides his spare selection of images of the speaker and the audience, much of the time the lectures would just pass into memory, undocumented, or recorded in writing alone. Since then, he has felt the transition to digital cause a significant shift in his process. At the same time, he has seen the habit become ubiquitous as others photograph, record, and videotape the lectures all around him. In keeping with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. , can we propose each small grouping of photographs that result an isthmus stretching between two disparate bodies of mind? The first being the body of the lecture as spelled out in the title of each work – the experience of the event in all its constituent parts. The second is the body of the recipient, the listener, in this case an artist, who plays a minimal role just beyond the prescripted behavior of sitting and listening. He uses a gesture of documentation to draw a line between himself and the event, creating an artwork. Františka + Tim Gilman: As we mentioned before, the theme of the magazine for this issue is "isthmus." It seems like a very good way into your work, and it leads us to ask what connection you see between your photographs of the lecture and the lecture itself? Rainer Ganahl: The relationship is of course a concrete, pictorial one, or if you want a mimetic one but also an abstract one because the photographs carry the title of the lecture, the names of the lecturers, the site, the institution and the time of the lecture. Photos are fixed moments of time and can reproduce images displayed and reproduce visuals presented at a moment but they don’t come with time based recordings that video or sound takes are offering. What remains of a lecture is usually just the memory, some notes and all the announcements of it. In my case I end up with a visual product I declare as my artwork. It might not differ from any snapshot taken by any other student or member of the audience but I do this in a semi-systematic way with certain rules and procedures I have set up. While I am at a lecture I am mainly focusing on the lecture itself. Last night I went to one of Slavoj Žižek which demanded quite some concentration. I even was asking him a question at the end. I took photos as well but still didn’t lose track of the lecture. I didn’t walk around, I was not preoccupied by where I was sitting and what light I was having like some of the other photographing and filming people in the room who came and left, moved around and tried to capture him from this and that angle, from close and far. I just sat there and concentrated on the lecture and yet managed to take about 30 or so images of him, the public around me and of the film clips he presented. Once the lecture is over the story changes: it all becomes a question of the images, their selection, their visual qualities, their labeling and archiving. The function of the images also change: not only do they stand for an intellectual event in a row of lectures that become part of my intellectual history within many possible such histories but they also have to function as art, something not everybody else with images of lecturers demands of their images. This is my specific claim as an artist to impose them as artworks. And as with all artistic propositions the offer can be accepted or rejected. I basically spend my life trying to do exactly that: making what I declare as art, offering something to anybody interested in it as my art, an offer that is not and will never be accepted as such by all people. F+T: What are your criteria for selection, i.e. how do you choose which lectures to photograph, by lecturer, by topic, or do you photograph any and every lecture you can? RG: As everything in my life, I go by my interest which is the result of many factors. If I am aware of a lecturer, read his books or appreciate his works my interest of attending his much higher than if I am not aware of it. I usually don’t go to lecturers simply based on their subjects—something that can happen of course, if the subject, the title of the lecture is promising or at the heart of my interest. Sometimes I also wait for years to get a change to photograph certain people but I do that in a very low-level “keep your ears up” mentality and not in a systematic scanning of all channels and possibilities. I do not go into philosophy departments and photograph everybody teaching there. I go with the flow—and unfortunately a great deal of great talks I also miss because I hear too late of them. Often, I also stumble into them by traveling, by getting emails from friends and by simply being in the right spot at the right time. Somehow you could look at my lecture par cours as some kind of loose intellectual flâneurism . If you know of interesting lectures and events, please, let me know. F+T: Is your selection of images more of a production or post-production method? That is, do you take a lot of photos and select only a few images from each lecture, or do you take them very selectively? Do you have a particular methodology for the selection of images? RG: This all changed a bit with the arrival of digital photography. In the beginning I had to pay a lot of money for film developing. Hence, I was taking either one role - 36 images - or half a role - 13 images - depending on who talked and whether they projected images. With the unlimited capacity of digital imaging I easily end up between 30 and 150 images of one event still depending of whether images are presented or not. In the first years of that project when I wasn’t fully aware yet of what I was doing, I printed at least 2 images of any lecture and sometimes three or even four, a choice that was also constrained by costs. But again, since I have a web site and since images can easily be selected and presented on my web site without generating remarkable costs I have now more and more pain to reduce them to less than ten or eight images for an event. Now, before I have them printed which really is expensive, I can present them already as artwork on my web site without any immediate costs. Thus the economic factor is at the end of the chain which enables me to be more ‘generous’ and include more images. Over the last years I have been mostly selecting at least four photographs for a lecture unit but recently also as many as ten. But so far only one set above four images has been actually printed and sold. What might sound even more shocking is the likely fact that if a curator or a collector demands me to reduce the number of images due to costs, I might compromise at this current stage if the images have not been yet printed or published outside my own web site. This means that to a certain degree any selection that has only seen publication on my web site and not yet been produced runs the risk to change in numbers of images included. Needless to say, I am the last one that finally makes a decision and I do honor all given earlier decision if those were final. F+T: How do you feel the act of photographing the lecture affects your reception of the contents of the lecture? And your recollection afterwards, do you remember the lecture more having photographed it, or just having sat and listened? RG: As mentioned above, I get very little distraction from photographing since I can multitask well and do not obsess about the quality of the image: I photograph from where I am and listen with my ears and not my eyes. I am not sure whether the images serve as a mnemonic devise to the content of the lecture if there are no images involved but they at least remind me that the lecture existed, the title of the lecture and the name of the people and institutions involved. The titles of the hundreds of lectures I took during the past 15 years can also be read as an essay of theoretical life in that period. This will be come more and more visible as time passes by. These images age much better than I do. F+T: You mentioned at the outset of our discussions that you started this practice some time ago and have seen the practice of photographing lecturers become more commonplace. Why do you think that this shift has taken place? RG: The answer is very simple. Photographing is now free of any charge and hence omnipresent. You buy a phone or any other personal digital assistant and it has a camera integrated in it whether you want it or not. There is no need to develop images and there is no hassle to keep images, to distribute images, to organize images and save them. It is all virtual, not creating any costs and doesn’t require any efforts. You don’t spend twenty dollars for photo-developing anymore, you don’t need to walk anymore to your pharmacy or your photo shop to drop off and return to pick up and pay. You don’t need to go to the post office to send somebody a picture. You have a program like Photoshop already built into your camera. Photographing is now a thing for everybody—with functioning cameras made for two year olds. It is technically now nearly impossible to make bad images. The image quality is virtually guaranteed by cheap, high performing, mini-computers packed into miniscule cameras. With all these technological changes, we are undergoing now a cultural paradigm shift that includes permanent recording (not only still image taking) of everything. I wonder even whether babies are just born to be photographed—at least a process where the first photograph is right there. What is interesting now, is how the law is trying to catch up. I am experiencing and expecting more restrictions on photographing and recording—something already in place in many museums and in certain galleries—as the recording devices become more and more invisible and undetectable. It is an interesting cat and mouse play and will end up with some of us that are photographing the world around us in court. The world has become very transparent and everybody is contributing to it with social networking technologies—like twitter and Facebook—that are designed to monitor and communicate every step we make in our lives. F+T: Why did you start the practice? As a way to remember, or to capture the experience of the lecture and the environment there? RG: A couple of years earlier I started to photograph my own reading seminars as part of my art work with results that surprised me positively. I really liked these images of students and people discussing heavy non-fiction with me. The reading seminars justified this kind of pictorialism. Then in 1995 I had the chance to attend an entire seminar by Edward Said entitled “The Representation of Intellectuals at Columbia University,” which really gave me the idea to start this series. Why not also photograph these lectures I visit all the time since this really is a way of representing intellectuals? F+T: The constellation of images and the title seem like a kind of portrait, do you agree? If so, is it a portrait of the speaker, of yourself, or of the event? RG: Well, to follow up on the previous question the lectures are more than just portraits of lecturers since I include not only the speakers but also the audience, an audience that is not named or specifically highlighted as is the speaker. So if we stick with the metaphor of the portrait we would have to extend it also to the environment, the class room, the lecture hall, the arrangements of seats or benches, tables, lecture stands and other stuff typically seen on my images. Often the walls are decorated or even tagged with graffiti or posters and other stuff. There is a big difference between a small seminar room at the English Department of Columbia University, full with books and cabinets and a lecture room at a Paris or Frankfurt university that accommodates 50 to 150 people. We should, maybe, also distinguish between lectures that are one time events—mostly open to the public, free of charge or paid—and events that are weekly, closed to the public and held mostly in universities that can cost fortunes or be paid by the State as it is still predominantly the case in continental Europe. All this, of course, is not necessarily announced in the title of the lecture and is subject to information that isn’t visible on the images. To a certain degree we see also portraits of a general privilege when it comes to the public of certain institutions that are highly selective and extremely costly without forgetting that most of the lectures are dealing with theory, art, philosophy and other highbrow subjects. In general, I would say we see very little if we don’t know already what’s going on, who the lecturer, the institutions, the context are in which we subsequently can zoom into variants like sexual, racial, or age-related make-up without ignoring clothing fashions, hair styling, body mannerisms, gadgets and stuff. F+T: Do you see a relation between this body of work and your other work, for example your language studies? RG: Everything I do is “unfortunately” related. I say unfortunately because this makes my work not so easy to grasp. The relationship to the language studies is relatively clear since both are originally grounded in the domain of education and knowledge production. Nearly all my work comes across that nexus where knowledge and power are addressed. I was at one point wondering what the relationship was to some of my earlier indexical work where I was happy alone with footnotes from books painted on the walls: I came to understand that both are just different manifestations of knowledge and information. F+T: Do you foresee continuing the series indefinitely, or is there an end to it? RG: I think that I will continue this series indefinitely or to be more precise, as long as I go listen to lectures and want to learn something which brings me to your previous question: What do the reading seminars, language studies, historical research and lecture hopping have in common: I learn something. Further Reading Rainer Ganahl’s website William Kaizen. “ Vulgar Politics .” art&education . April 2009. Web. Smith, Roberta. “ Rainer Ganahl: ‘Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration .’” New York Times April 23 2010. Web. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Intertextual Biography in the Rivalry of Cratinus and AristophanesZachary P. BilesMore than a decade ago, Malcolm Heath provided an influential explanation for charges of plagiarism between comic poets when he posited a growing store of ideas that were recycled as quickly as they were invented. As a result, "Anything put on stage in a comedy would become public property and be absorbed into the repertoire, so that all (...) comic poets contributed to it; and all drew on it, although each would aim to give a new and original twist to the material which he borrowed, so that the repertoire constantly evolved. If this was so, then any poet could lay claim to originality... and any rival could make a counterclaim of plagiarism."1 These remarks have important implications for the study of Old Comedy, not least in exposing the irony of such assertions as that of Antiphanes (Poiēsis, fr. 189 K-A), which overstates generic distinctions between tragedy and comedy on the score of originality. Beyond merely acknowledging comedy's essentially adaptive nature, Heath's position suggests that a certain degree of allusiveness was, as it were, built into the genre. Unfortunately there are few opportunities to test the potential insights that follow from Heath's general proposition since the corpus of comic fragments poses so many questions of plot, context, attribution, and-always important for this kind of study-chronology.There is one sequence of plays, however, that has attracted attention since antiquity as an example of comic poets responding to one another and for which valuable insights can still be gained by building on Heath's thesis. In 423 Cratinus took the prize against Aristophanes' Clouds with Pytine, a play in which Cratinus boldly portrayed himself as the hero while borrowing heavily from Aristophanes' caricature of him in Knights the previous year. While interest in the relationship of these plays has been renewed in recent years, the convergence of issues pertaining to adaptation, intertextuality, and rivalry has not been fully explored. Besides discussing these ideas as they relate to Knights and [End Page 169] Pytine, I shall extend the thread of artistic borrowing at either end, first by positing a stage autobiography of Cratinus that both predates and inspired Knights, and then by tracing elements of intertextuality between Wasps and Pytine. Generally speaking Heath's model proves to be of great value; however, my study makes an important modification by treating competition as a vital aspect of comic poetry.2 The intertextuality of these plays primarily depends on poetic biography, and the notion of competition is central to my understanding of stage biography as comic poets employed it either to assert their own superiority or malign their rivals. After examining the biographical interplay in the rivalry of Cratinus and Aristophanes, I end by applying the intertextual model more generally to Wasps, a play that advertises itself as a competitive response and whose intertextual relationship with Pytine can be viewed as a function of competitive strategy.IThe trail of evidence begins with a scholion on Knights 400. Commenting on the chorus's elusive response to Cleon ("If I don't despise you, may I become a blanket in Cratinus' house!"), the scholiast writes:(= Pytine test. ii K-A)3 [End Page 170]Certain errors about Cratinus' retirement aside,4 the scholiast shows himself to be a reliable witness to the play by his knowledge of the plot and ability to cite the text in the continuation of his commentary (fr. 193). Thus, with the exception of treating the more fully developed caricature of Cratinus as a drunk in the Knights parabasis as the actual source of inspiration for his self-portrayal in Pytine, generations of scholars have followed the scholiast's characterization of Pytine as a redemptive play, however exaggerated this biographical (mis)representation may have been in both plays. Two recent studies have raised objections to the traditional understanding of Knights and Pytine. Troubled by a certain feeling of allusiveness in the jokes about Cratinus in Knights and Acharnians, Keith Sidwell hypothesizes a source for the audience's familiarity with details of Cratinus' life by arguing that his stage "biography " was not an Aristophanic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European CultureDallas G. Denery IIStuart Clark. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 415. Cloth, $75.00.A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive (...) form early in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions.Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist optics. This theory sought to secure the accuracy of human sense perception through regularized causal processes that linked things in the world with our various cognitive faculties. While some fourteenth-century intellectuals, most notably Nicolas of Autrecourt and Nicole Oresme, recognized structural deficiencies in this theory, their critiques were mostly ignored or treated as anomalies. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Clark argues, the challenges to this theory multiplied until it collapsed under their weight (20).Clark’s argument is straightforward and, as his evidence mounts, thoroughly convincing. Throughout each of the eight engrossing chapters that form the core of the book, Clark outlines a different threat, a different set of challenges that pointed out problems with the assumption that vision is trustworthy. The range and depth of those challenges are truly amazing. Doctors worried that imbalances in our humoral system, and especially in the black bile that causes melancholy, could render our visual perceptions dubious at best (ch. 2). Theologians, wary of the dangers of witchcraft and eager to prosecute its practitioners, obsessed over the cognitive threats that devils and demons posed to good Christians (ch. 4), while Protestant reformers relegated the entire tradition of Catholic miracles to the counterfeit illusions of the antichrist (ch. 5). For their part, artists believed that perspective undermined vision, depending as it does on the assumption that what we see is always relative, dependent upon our point of view (ch. 3).Clark structures much of his argument around George Hakewill’s 1608 book, The vanitie of the eye, an exposition on the natural, artificial, and demonic sources that forever render visual knowledge suspect. He could just as well have organized it around the opening pages of Descartes’s Meditations, and in many ways Clark’s book serves as a superb rumination on the sources of Descartes’s skeptical arguments. Unlike Etienne Gilson and, more recently, Richard Popkin, both of whom have done so much to open up the scholastic and early modern sources of Descartes’s skeptical thought experiments, Clark does not limit himself to philosophical lineages. Rather, he considers sources of visual skepticism that developed across an entire culture—in natural philosophy, medicine, art, religion, and literature (especially in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not only does the sheer volume and variety of such [End Page 103] sources help to explain Descartes’s urgent desire to overturn everything he had learned and begin again from the foundations, but it also contextualizes the specific arguments he employs. None of Descartes’s skeptical arguments were new and most were well known in the Middle Ages. What had changed over the intervening centuries, Clark contends, was how these arguments drew from... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 (2002) 406-408 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment Henry E. Allison. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 424. Cloth, $69.95. Paper, $24.95. In his new book, Henry Allison provides a study of the two (...) introductions and the first half of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment to stand alongside his previous books on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (1983) and Kant's Theory of Freedom (1990). Those books showed Allison's commitment to the unity and coherence of Kant's thought, and it is the aim of the present book to demonstrate the connections between the two halves of Kant's third Critique, that is, Kant's aesthetics and his teleology, as well as to demonstrate the connections between Kant's aesthetic theory and both his theoretical and his practical philosophy. In order to defend the unity of the third Critique, Allison defends Kant's characterization of the judgment of taste as a species of reflective judgment, and argues that our judgments of beauty depend upon the principle of the purposiveness of nature that is also the basis for judgments about the systematicity of natural laws. To display the connections between Kant's aesthetics and his theoretical philosophy, [End Page 406] Allison uses the first Critique's distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris to explicate the relation between Kant's "analytic of the beautiful" and his "deduction of pure aesthetic judgment"; he then defends the success of Kant's strategy for the deduction of judgments of taste by grounding them in the general conditions of the possibility of cognition. Finally, in order to explain Kant's connection between aesthetics and morality, Allison interprets Kant's theory of the "intellectual interest" in the beautiful as evidence of nature's amenability to our achievement of the ends of morality, an assurance that we need not be motivated in the first place to act as morality requires, but rather to prevent our motivation to be moral from being undermined by our own predisposition to radical evil. He then defends Kant's thesis that all beauty, and thus natural as well as artistic beauty, can be seen as an expression of aesthetic ideas, and specifically of the morally requisite idea of nature's amenability to the achievement of our moral objectives.There is much in this approach with which I can agree, and some with which I cannot. I agree that there is much in Kant's general conception of reflective judgment that illuminates his conception of judgments of beauty, yet I do not think that the principle of taste is analogous to the principle of the purposiveness of nature, because it does not play a role in making particular judgments of taste analogous to the role the latter principle plays in the conduct of scientific inquiry. My own interpretation of Kant's model for making particular judgments of taste is not fundamentally different from that which Allison offers under the rubric of the quid facti, although we disagree about which of the four "moments" of the "Analytic of the Beautiful" are part of the meaning of a judgment of beauty and which function more as grounds for making judgments with such a meaning. But I am not persuaded by Allison's defense of Kant's deduction of pure judgments of taste, that is, his answer to the quid juris, from the objections that I and others have raised to it. Finally, although there are large areas of agreement between our interpretations of Kant's theory of intellectual interest in the beautiful, the claim that aesthetic experience is evidence of nature's amenability to the realization of the ends that we adopt in the name of morality is only part of the story that Kant develops in the Critique of Aesthetic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of AestheticsChristopher McClintickThe Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, by Martha Woodmansee; 200 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, $29.50.Martha Woodmansee’s book The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics deftly employs a historical, materialist focus to trace the growth of the middle-class in eighteenth-century Germany and to analyze its (...) startling, significant effects on literary aesthetics and the construction of canon, genre, and treatment of gender. The first five chapters are devoted, essentially, to an outline of the development of German aesthetics and the concluding chapter to the English reception of Kant. Woodmansee’s study offers much insight into the period and helps greatly to demonstrate “how a cultural formation that evolved as recently as ‘art’ could have entrenched itself so thoroughly that we imagine it always to have existed” (p. 8).Woodmansee’s central contention is that populist theories of aesthetics in Germany and England, which in many ways anticipated important elements of materialist or cultural studies emphases, were muted by canonized writers of the eighteenth century like Schiller, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. These writers propagated instead the Kantian notion of art as a realm separate from other human activities and the distinction between high and low art forms. The first three chapters are particularly strong and provide the historical and methodological underpinning for Woodmansee’s rereading of the history of German aesthetics. Chapter One begins with a discussion of the little-studied German writer Karl Philipp Moritz who, she says, “gave the first unequivocal and systematic expression to what I have called our modern conception of the arts” [End Page 176] (p. 11). Woodmansee points particularly to the fact that Moritz champions the notion of art as having an intrinsic value, an idea that five years later, in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, “came to fruition” (p. 12). In Chapter Two, “Genius and Copyright,” Woodmansee lucidly discusses texts such as Lessing’s essay “Leben und leben lassen,” clarifying the tensions regarding “the emergence in the eighteenth century of writers who sought to earn their livelihood from the sale of their writing to the new and rapidly expanding reading public” (p. 36). The survey includes Herder, Wieland, Fichte, and Goethe, and reveals how these writers’ concerns about the often exploitive relationship of authors and publishers, the growth of a middle-class readership, and the integration of literature into the general economy, greatly contributed to the establishment of the author as the main focus of any critical undertaking.It is Schiller, however, as the archinterpreter and proponent of Kantian aesthetics who is singled out for a particularly thorough rereading. In Chapter Three, Woodmansee writes that Schiller does not represent the kind of political liberality he is purported to in works like On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793) but instead, “at a historical moment when so much discursive activity was being carried on in the name of the people, sought to write them out of his model of poetry” (p. 75). Schiller’s relationship to the middle-class market and its role in his transcendental aesthetic is graphically traced—from his attempts to penetrate the market and, failing this, his acceptance of, and dependence on patronage, and consequent dismissal of the reading public.In Chapter Six Woodmansee devotes her attention to English criticism, ending somewhat abruptly her discussion of German aesthetics with neoclassicism. Here she clarifies the great influence of Kant on Addison, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, who perpetuated the notion of art as an ideal realm, as well as the idea that criticism is a task which has “essentially to do with the recovery of a writer’s meaning” (p. 55). Woodmansee scrutinizes Wordsworth’s ostensibly nonmaterialist artistic motives partly by discussing the poet’s indefatigable efforts to get parliament to extend copyright laws in order to reward high art projects which, Wordsworth believed, the public could not properly appreciate until a later date. Woodmansee’s materialist focus seriously challenges the contention, as many would have it, that Wordsworth was a champion of the working people.Chapter Five, “Engendering Art,” does not adequately develop the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Pain in the Patient’s KneeMary Jacobus* (bio)We know very little about pain either.—Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and AnxietyPain cannot be absent from the personality.—Wilfred Bion, The Elements of Psycho-AnalysisBetween Therapy and HermeneuticsWhat is the place of a psychoanalysis that exists “between” therapy (considered both as a theory and a practice, but also as a theory of practice) and hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation and understanding? How (...) do we understand psychoanalytic “understanding” itself, as a mental process that involves both the analyst and the analysand in the analytic encounter? I want to approach these related questions by way of the writing of the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897–1979). Bion is best known outside the psychoanalytic profession as a pioneer of the so-called leaderless group and a theorist of group process [see Bion, Experiences in Groups]. But his collected theoretical and clinical oeuvre represents—especially in its “epistemological” period during the early 1960s, from Learning from Experience (1962) to Transformations (1965)—the most systematic, original, and philosophical revision of psychoanalytic theory since Melanie Klein’s controversial development of Freudian ideas during the middle decades of this century.1 Consequently, Bion’s influence pervades, and in some cases underpins, the rethinking of psychoanalytic theory and practice that characterizes British object relations in the wake of Klein. In particular, it gives contemporary post-Kleinian analysis its distinctive focus on (not) learning, (non)meaning, and (un)knowing, with an accompanying emphasis on the destruction of the links that make thought possible, as well as on the importance of being able to learn from experience and being able to bear not knowing. In other words, it brings to the fore difficulties associated specifically with questions involving interpretation and understanding in an analytic context.Bion’s writing is noted for its paradoxical combination of directness and difficulty, and for its emphasis on primitive emotional states and experiences, on the one hand, and epistemology and consciousness, on the other. Rigorous in its clinical focus, it also makes [End Page 99] frequent reference to philosophy, mathematics, and other branches of contemporary science. André Green, in the context of the new impetus that Bion gave to orthodox Kleinianism by linking it back to Freud, suggests that his particular contribution lay in realizing that the unconscious phantasies and archaic anxieties emphasized by Klein coincided with thought processes. Finding in Bion “an author who could measure up to Lacan,” Green saw the two as engaged in the common project of “reformulating psychoanalytic theory within a contemporary epistemological framework.” But for Green, “Lacan made the error of excessive abstraction, whereas Bion, with his constant reference to affect and the process of transformation, is the more authentically intellectual” [10–11].2 Although Bion’s writing is read wherever the theory and practice of British object relations psychoanalysis is seriously taught and studied, for the most part it remains surprisingly unknown within the academy. This is especially the case in America—even when it comes to literary critics and theorists with an interest in the “authentically intellectual,” who are often, by contrast, steeped in Lacan and well versed in recent Continental psychoanalytic writing. If only for this reason, but also because Bion’s work is particularly relevant to issues involving the relation between therapy and hermeneutics, I want to focus on the culminating book of Bion’s “epistemological” period during the early 1960s, Transformations—so called because of Bion’s analogy between the psychoanalyst’s representation of the experience of the analytic encounter and the artist’s transformation of the experience of what he sees.Bion’s writing, although terse and at times humorous, makes considerable demands on the reader, particularly on the capacity of the mind to entertain a new thought or consider it from a radically new perspective. He places pressure on thinking (including his own), as well as attempting to communicate the seeming incomprehensibility or hallucinatory dimensions of psychotic thought processes (which are often continuous with normal thought processes). In what follows, I will address both the kind of communication made by Bion himself—which is subject to its own interpretive difficulties and obscurities—and the relation between therapy... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 139 twenty years ago has slowly given way to an awareness that cross-cultural differences are real enough to call for different rules of behavior and different sets of values. Several possibilities are still open to the ethicist concerned with the problem of relativism. We may want to reconsider more carefully than ever before the connotations of "relative," of "action" and of "culture" in the context of (...) those anthropologists whose claims are said to be detrimental to ethics. Of these terms so crucial for what Moser calls relativism of right, only the first has been analyzed from opposite perspectives by Stevenson and Berlin. So far as I know, no one has treated "relative" as a relational term in the fruitful way suggested by Berlin.19 We may also come to realize that the issue of relativism is too much imbedded in historical and metaphysical tenets and thus is not amenable to the ahistorical treatment of the logical status of moral judgment. Thus we may want to rewrite its whole history by exploiting one of the best facets of Moser's essay. That is, a comparative study of the sociology of knowledge with the organic model of cultural anthropology. Lastly we may agree with A. Edel and consider the whole issue a closed chapter in the history of philosophy, and move on to the philosophically more fruitful investigation of the why and wherefore of moral change between generations and between historical periods. L. M. PALMER University of Delaware Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man. By Seymour W. Itzkoff. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. Pp. xi +286. $9.95) There is a sense in which the title of this book is misleading. To be sure, Dr. Itzkoff does deal with Cassirer and with Cassirer's neo-Kantian conception of scientific knowledge and of man. But there is more to the book than this. The first seven chapters are, in effect, a demonstration that "Cassirer left us with a difficult theoretical dilemma: the existence of two contrasting and opposed views of human nature" (p. 172). The last two chapters (pp. 172-252) are the author's attempt to bring those two views into harmony within the framework of contemporary science and philosophical analysis. The first two chapters (pp. 1-37) trace briefly the development of philosophical thought from the time of "the intellectual revolution set in motion by Galileo" to Kant's "Copernican revolution"--to the Kantian thesis, that is, that "the fundamental act of perception and the structuring of experience itseLf depend upon... 'transcendental apperception' as a 'condition of the possibility of perception itself'" (p. 27). It is the concern with "form and function" rather than with "substance and reality," which the Marburg neo-Kantians, and with them Cassirer, accepted as the lasting achievement of Kant's "critical philosophy." But Cassirer found in Kant also a "parallel concern... for humanistic disciplines" (p. 33) and, as "a central theme," the assertion of the "autonomy of human nature" (p. 35). The survey is suggestive but, in some respects, it is also inaccurate. For example, Kant's presumed "lapse into a radical subjectivism" cannot be justified by the reference, in passing, as it were, to the Opus postumum (p. 29)--although the fault is here perhaps that of Norman Kemp Smith rather than that of the author. A more ~o I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), pp. 96-106. 140 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY serious misrepresentation of Kant may be found in the author's acceptance of T. D. Weldon's statement that "the categories... supply principles which are... essential to the existing of a unitary self-consciousness" (p. 32), for this is precisely the reverse of the Kantian position. Also, it is hardly accurate to speak of "Kant's postulation of laws of ethical behavior" (p. 36), for, surely, the various formulations of the categorical imperative are not "laws of ethical behavior" but criteria of such laws. Chapters 3 and 4 (pp. 38-98) are devoted to discussions of the nature of scientific knowledge. Kant's initial commitment to Newtonian mechanics is, of course, a wellknown fact; but Professor Itzkoff quite correctly points out... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 478-480 [Access article in PDF] The German Aesthetic Tradition,by Kai Hammermeister; xv & 259 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; $60.00 cloth; $22.00 paper. In some ways, aesthetic theory has become a thing of the past. With the exception of a kind of fascination with works such as T. W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, as a project, as a tradition, aesthetics has surrendered its (...) once monolithic and grandiose position as the philosophical contemplation of art and the notion of artistic beauty to more diminutive fields such as literary theory, poetics and cultural studies. In some ways, this is due to the very function of aesthetics: the philosophical investigation not simply of what is beautiful, but the formulation of prescriptive ideas about works of art and the judgement them according to these prescriptive ideas. This, in turn, has been looked upon with a certain degree of scorn with the rise of a more pluralistic art world and the bold denial that art needs the guidance of philosophy let alone have any prescriptive function or be able to be classified as "good" or "bad."But Kai Hammermeister's The German Aesthetic Tradition takes a very different view. A bold and difficult project, Hammermeister traces the complex and oftentimes abstruse contours of German aesthetic philosophy from its inception with Baumgarten in the eighteenth century through Adorno in the twentieth. In the process, he not only provides us with an excellent historical-philosophical account of the development of German aesthetic philosophy, he also implicitly argues for the relevance of aesthetics as a way not only of comprehending art, but of understanding the cohesive links between art, society, culture and philosophy.The German aesthetic tradition, as Hammermeister refers to it, was a prolonged intellectual argumentation with classical conceptions of art and beauty inherited from classical Greek thought during the eighteenth century. Classical aesthetics was dominated by two opposing conceptions of art and its function. For Plato, art mirrored the outside world (mimesis) and the judgement of good works of art was based on how well this mirroring of the objective world was carried out. Aristotle's idea was that art served a purgatory function (katharsis), cleansing the emotions of the individual through the identification of the observer with the work of art. All of the thinkers in the German tradition wrestle with this dual conception of art in some form privileging one over the other or, more often than not, combining them and extending their explanatory reach. But as in any tradition, they also struggle with the ideas and philosophies of previous thinkers within the tradition itself making Hammermeister's task more complex, one that he handles with adroitness and precision.The book's overarching argument and structure is triadic. Hammermeister sees the eighteenth century through German Idealism and Romanticism as [End Page 478] articulating a set of different paradigms for interpreting art. These are subsequently attacked in post-Hegelian philosophy and are then revived in different ways in the twentieth century as a reaction to Nietzsche's aestheticization of philosophy. Two paradigms emerge as central for the subsequent unfolding of the tradition. First, there is Immanuel Kant's conception of art as wholly separate from epistemology and from morality. For Kant, the work of art is centered in the experience of the subject and, in terms of form, exists outside its social context. This Hammermeister calls the "first strong paradigm of aesthetics" (p. 40). Next, there is the position of Friedrich Schiller who sees a connection between the work of art with culture, thought and morality. "[T]he culture of beauty demonstrates the freedom of man to turn himself into whatever being he envisions while remaining under the law of morality" (p. 57). For Schiller, there exists a kind of spillover effect of art into other domains of human thought and action—specifically in morality and politics—and this represents a crucial deviation from Kant's paradigm and another tendency within the tradition of German aesthetics, i.e., the aestheticization of other domains of human existence.Schelling and Hegel represent two other... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AfterimagesSvetlana Boym’s Irrepressible CocreationsCristina Vatulescu (bio)[End Page 98]To most people Svetlana Boym was known as a writer: a prolific writer of books marked by originality, insight, and irreverence for intellectual pieties, no matter how fashionable. The media artist side of her that diacritics presents in this issue was chronologically last of her artistic personas. A whole string of these bifurcated the bio blurbs at the end of (...) Svetlana’s monographs. In the first, Death in Quotation Marks (1991), she introduced herself as a playwright and assistant professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. In the second, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), she was also a writer and filmmaker. In her third, most well-known monograph, The Future of Nostalgia (2001), she was again a writer, and this time, full professor at Harvard, but also, as the back cover blurb reminds us, “a native of St. Petersburg who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” “Native” was a word she would have pronounced with an accentuated accent and that she wore as a mask, as another persona. For the record, she did not just write monographs. There is also a novel, Ninochka (2003), that she rewarded herself with writing after receiving tenure at Harvard. After she became a novelist, she also collaborated on a book on Kosmos, the Russian space project and the photographs of its ruins.1 (“Jacob,” her then research assistant recalls her saying one day, “go to the library and find me all the good books on Kosmos.”)2 Her creativity was hard to contain and performative—the whole world was her stage—thus all her authorial and artistic personas. It is just at the end of Another Freedom (2010), her last monograph, that she introduced herself to readers as a media artist.Svetlana’s biographies were not accidental inconsistencies but sustained exercises in self-fashioning, and lately, she told me during our last conversation, self-editing. “There are writers with biographies and writers without biographies,” she often quoted Boris Tomashevsky’s quip as an intriguing prelude to her influential critique of “the death of the author.”3 She launched that critique as the polemic of her dissertation (overseen by Barbara Johnson and formalist scholar Jurij Striedter) in the 1980s, when “the death of the author” had congealed into critical dogma. In the ensuing book, Death in Quotation Marks, she explored the mythologies of the modern poet and critic, including his/her figurative and literal deaths, arguing that the “relationship between texts and life remains a vitally critical issue.”4 She pioneered then her signature critical genre, a writing that would “allow for the incorporation and superimposition of ethical, historical, biographical, and textual issues.”5 At the same time, the book already contains, smuggled inside academic prose, fragments that presage her much later artist’s manifestoes and practices:I wish to preserve the difference between text and life and to avoid subjugating one to the other. In order to open and explore this space of difference we have to trace the ways in which the artistic constructs can, on the one hand, form and inform ordinary experiences and, on the other hand, be deformed and defied by them. This double movement invites us to see literariness or a creative aesthetic impulse in everyday life and to liberate these aesthetic experiences from the confines of “literature” and literary institutions. At the same time, it helps us to deaestheticize literature somewhat and defamiliarize again the violence, pain, and love that it contains.6 [End Page 99]So it is fitting to consider Svetlana’s art in relation to her writing and to her biographies, her crafted fashioning and editing of herself. Far from any sort Gesamtkunstwerk—a concept she detested, these were cocreations, whose contingent coexistence inspired thoughts on difference and a heightened sensitivity to the beauty of cracks, hinges, border lines, and transit zones.Cocreation was a concept she developed and lived for many years; she theorized it at length in her last book, equating it with freedom.7 Among her cocreators were the people around her as well as thinkers, artists, and philosophers with whom she engaged passionately. For her digital art... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface In this issue, one cluster of articles presents scholarly and creative work focused on Latin American queer politics. Each article reveals queer challenges—theoretical, aesthetic, political, ideological, libidinal, corporeal—to prevailing logics of heteronormativity and neoliberalism, and to asymmetrical processes of knowledge production and circulation. Rafael de la Dehesa examines how political responses to AIDS in Brazil enabled surprising alliances between NGOs, activists, and the state, which produced radical (...) social change and, at times, engendered exclusion and vulnerability. Christine Keating and Amy Lind’s essay explores indigenous and transfeminist efforts to transform the Ecuadorian constitution, producing new conceptions of both state and family. Constanza Tabbush and Melina Gaona trace the rise and fall of a neighborhood organization in Argentina called Tupac Amaru, which provided a space of encounter for lesbian, non-gender normative, and marginalized women. In a review of recent work on Latin American sexualities, Juan Camilo Galeano Sánchez finds LGBT people across Latin America and the diaspora deploying “queer revolutionary gestures” as a form of resistance to social, political, and economic marginalization. María Amelia Viteri’s commentary examines the intellectual trajectories of a network of queer scholars from across the Americas. The art essay by Tara Daly engages Iquitos artist Christian Bendayán’s visual efforts to queer prevailing conceptions of the Amazon, and tatiana de la tierra’s* poems offer a deep celebration of female eroticism. * We have spelled tatiana de la tierra’s name in lower case in accordance with the wishes of her literary executors. 256Preface Another cluster of essays highlights reproductive rights and race in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez and Lynn M. Morgan study the tactics that right-wing, US-based organizations deploy against sexual and reproductive rights in Mexico and Central America. Jennifer L. Shoaff examines the Dominican cultural construction of the Haitian mother as “beggar-mother,” which shores up ideas of pathological black maternity. Ana-Maurine Lara’s article considers the gendered and sexual logics of anti-blackness, and anti-Haitianism, in the Dominican Republic. The provocation for our cluster on representations of queer identities and politics in Latin America came, broadly, from developments in Latin America in recent decades: the wave of LGBT organizing around issues from same-sex marriage to transgender rights, alongside the continued, if not escalated, violence against trans, travestis, and other queer people in countries throughout the region. More immediately, it came from a symposium on Latin American/Latin@ queer and sexuality studies, cosponsored by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) and the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), Amherst, in March 2013. Several of the papers published here were initially presented at that event and have been complemented and extended by other analytical essays and creative material on similar questions. Based on their familiarity with the debates, Sonia Alvarez, UMass CLACLS Director and professor of political science, and Amy Lind, head of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, offered invaluable input for this issue, and we thank them for their intellectual generosity and collaborative spirit. Three of the articles in the cluster take us inside the complex relations between queer movements and neoliberal institutions, illustrating the distinctive ways these dynamics play out in different national contexts and political configurations. In “NGOs, Governmentality, and the Brazilian Response to AIDS: A Multistranded Genealogy of the Current Crisis,” Rafael de la Dehesa argues that the AIDS crisis served as a “doorway to the state” for marginalized actors, such as sex workers and LGBT activists. These groups pushed for and won a national AIDS program that dramatically reduced rates of mortality and new infections in Brazil in the 1990s through universal access to treatment and a nonstigmatizing approach to prevention. Its success was based, in part, on World Bank Preface 257 loans and, in part, on a participatory model of public-private partnerships characteristic of neoliberal government. De la Dehesa argues that, “Far from encapsulating activism in a seamless web of biopolitical management... nodes of articulation between officials and activists became sites of conflict and productive tension.” However, while the alliances between NGOs... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 99-104 [Access article in PDF] New York Art, Pittsburgh Art, Art 1 David Carrier Champney Family Professor Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art I. New York Art A fully developed artworld requires not only artists, but also a support system — schools to teach the artists, commercial galleries to display art, and the connected artmarket; public museums and their curators (...) to make that art available to the public; and also, last and least, artwriters to interpret and evaluate the art. This has been true for a long time in America and Europe. I speak of artwriters as "last and least" just because we are important only in some artworlds. In the seventeenth century Poussin depended upon commentary of intellectuals, but his contemporaries Rembrandt and Vermeer did not. In this country, New York is such an artworld and so, perhaps, is Los Angeles. These are the places where young artists go to establish themselves, and so they are the places where the most original new art tends to be made. Artists outside of those centers then imitate the art made there.Artworld centers tend to be large business centers because they require major museums and many collectors. Each component of this system is dependent upon the others. Unless they have collectors, artists cannot support themselves without doing other jobs; unless there are museums, there is no public space in which art can be seen. Unless there are artwriters, there is no way to articulate shared experience of this art. This artworld is a product of modernist bourgeois democracy. Premodern cultures did not have public museums. Nowadays information is disseminated quickly, but the role of centers as places where new art is made, seen, and discussed remains essential. Our novel electronic technologies have not changed this situation.A collecting culture requires not just wealth, but also a special sort of sensibility. In fact, the number of serious collectors anywhere is surprisingly small, as one can see in Los Angeles, which has a great deal of wealth, but a surprisingly thin gallery system. Like collectors, artwriters too are odd sorts of creatures. I usually identify myself as a New York-based critic, because that is where I see most of the shows I review. Artforum, the Burlington Magazine, and Tema Celeste, the journals I now work for have a real interest in exhibitions at the Carnegie and the Warhol, in Pittsburgh, but no concern with shows like this one. Partly the problem is that reviewing space is very hard to come by, but also the difficulty is that it is difficult to make sense of a review discussing artists who are known only locally. Even were I to identify [End Page 99] someone local as a wonderful original talent, it would be very difficult for readers who have never seen her art to evaluate that claim.In Pittsburgh we certainly have good artists, and there are several universities with art departments. But here, as elsewhere in the cities I know, the artmarket is focused on New York; and there is, so far as I can see, only modest critical support for artists. Major collectors here, as elsewhere in America, look to New York, which has a critical mass of galleries, museums, and critics. The Carnegie too, tends to look to New York when planning its shows. The curators travel widely, but most of the art they show, whether American or from elsewhere, is displayed in New York galleries. If one adopts this way of thinking about an artworld, then art made in Pittsburgh inevitably will be judged as "provincial." There are a few major artists, and many derivative ones; and those major ones, the innovators, are in the artworld centers.This is the model Vasari adopts, it is Clement Greenberg's model, and it is the basic model driving the present day artworld. To describe Pittsburgh artists as provincial, then, is to identify the sociological structure of this, a typical local artworld. There is a lot of adventure and intelligence in Pittsburgh art, but inevitably to the critic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 51-56 [Access article in PDF] KarraKarrawirraparri-River Red Gum-Eucalyptus Camaldulensis Vivonne Thwaites [Figures]Karra was a visual arts project devised for the 2000 Adelaide Festival in Australia. Its focus was the River Red Gum, quite justifiably an Australian icon, and once the most widespread tree in south eastern Australia. The project comprised an installation by three artists and a forty-page publication with essays and (...) visual material from many contributors.The intention of the project (which I developed and oversaw as curator) was twofold. First, I hoped that an examination of the River Red Gum from a number of points of view might help people connect with the tree itself, and more broadly with this place non-Aboriginal Australians so uneasily inhabit. Second, given the tree's central place in Australia's inland waterways, I wanted the art to help people consider the urgent problems facing this ecosystem, such as increased salinity, diminished water flow and environmental degradation. This subject had particular relevance for South Australians, as our state is so dependent on the Murray-Darling River system. For example, in February 1999 the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation published a media release on "Salt: Australia's Greatest Battle," declaring that we stand to lose a large fraction of our native biodiversity to salinity, and that native tress "remain the front line answer." [End Page 51]Behind the Festival Centre lies the River Torrens and the Adelaide Plains. Along the river are several gnarled old trees, River Red Gums, some of them predating white settlement and bearing the scars of Aboriginal timber collecting activities. The media was full of stories about the way these trees were still being cut down along the Murray further out, regardless of their proven value in filtering water and reducing salinity. The theme of the 2000 Festival was "The New Out of the Old," and it seemed that a project about the relevance of these beautiful old trees would help educate and inspire. We found the subject for the Festival project right in our own backyard.Once committed to the subject, research could begin. First up was the tree's Aboriginal history. The Kaurna people, original inhabitants of the Adelaide Plains, called it Karra or more fully, Karrawirraparri (literally 'redgum-forest-river'). The tree was central to their lives as source of food and shelter, and supplier of timber for shields and other implements. There are incised shields of Red Gum in the South Australian Museum, and delicate drawings of the tree by Jim Kite. The tree's place in Australia's white history can be traced back to explorer's journals where, variously named, it was described as a welcome sign of the presence of a watercourse. More recently it appears in the natural history writing of Eric Rolls and others (Rolls 2002). Ironically the tree's botanical name, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, originated in 1832, when a botanist admired and named a single specimen grown by monks outside Naples, Italy. The eucalyptus was already spreading in 1832.Early in the research it became clear that the Red Gum tree, and the complex set of natural and cultural interactions it engendered, could be seen as a symbol of human interactions with the land in Australia. The tree was much discussed and much loved by Australians, but also much abused. It seemed that bringing together different systems of understanding and representation of the tree could help contemporary urban Australians begin to understand their own connections to it, and to the land as well. This was the broader cultural agenda of the project.Preparing the art exhibition required a wide reading of literature. Les Murray's poem, "The Gum Forest," one of the greatest 20th - century Australian poems, was inspirational: After the last gapped wire on a post, homecoming for me, to enter the gum forest. (1998, 33) [End Page 52] [Begin Page 54]So too was Murray Bail's book Eucalyptus: By sheer numbers there's always a bulky Red Gum here or somewhere else in the wide world, muscling into the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Believing in Yesterday while Living for TodayJudith P. HallettLee T. Pearcy's meditation on the past and prospects of classical education in the United States, The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America (Baylor University Press, Waco, Tex. 2005), embarks from an assessment by the German émigré-scholar Werner Jaeger in his Scripta Minora, published in Rome in 1961, a year before Jaeger died. Jaeger's exact words merit full (...) quotation: "Without the continuing prestige of the ancient idea of humanity in human culture, classical scholarship is just a waste of time. Whoever does not see this ought to come to America and let himself learn from the way classical studies have developed there." Arguing "that Jaeger was right," Pearcy contends that "Classics, the study of ancient Greece and Rome, has never developed, as other academic subjects and disciplines have, a distinctly American form in response to American social and cultural conditions." Instead, "classics in this country has imitated European models and patterned itself after forms of education and scholarship developed in a cultural context where, as Jaeger saw, the prestige of Humanism guaranteed the cultural value of classical study" (Foreword, x).The Grammar of Our Civility not only offers a thoughtful response to Jaeger's criticism of how classical studies have developed in this alien environment; it also considers how they might, at long last, become truly American. In faulting classics in this country for merely emulating inapposite European models, Pearcy investigates the genesis of these models in Renaissance Italy and nineteenth-century England and Germany, and traces the evolution of American classics in higher and secondary education from colonial to contemporary times. He maintains that the inability of classics "to negotiate successfully the transition at the end of the nineteenth century," moving from the curricular configurations that have been called the "Old College" to the modern American university, has left it uniquely marginalized among professionalized disciplines. Yet he also evocatively imagines, in the mode of another illustrious European settler on our shores, John Lennon: "the contours of a distinctive form of classical education grounded in American personal and social reality [End Page 589] as firmly as European classical studies were grounded in the society they served" (Foreword, ix–x).Pearcy insists that this "pragmatic" American form of classical education needs to resemble its European predecessor by remaining "a way of becoming human and humane." Nevertheless, he envisions that it will adopt patterns of education and scholarship that draw on the "progressive, democratic strain" in the practice of a few American classicists, "avoid[ing] the temptations of some postmodern theories that deny language and literature any possibility of interacting with the human world and make them instruments of power rather than the creators of the powerful." He visualizes a discipline that emerges from and reacts to what he terms the "American cultural self... indeterminate and various." At the same time, he stipulates that this new form of classics must respond to "Jaeger's provocative challenge... by refusing to depend on the 'ancient idea of humanity in human culture'" (118–19).Jaeger's "ancient idea," responsible for the form of classical education that prevailed from approximately the Renaissance to World War I, is the "grammar" of Pearcy's title. Pearcy deploys the term "grammar" in an inventive, subtle analogy between the mastery of an individual language and the study of the entire classical world. As he observes, much as those who acquire the fundamentals of a language through exposure to abstract accounts of its workings become capable of comprehending and actively transforming the culture that this language describes and sustains, so those who once absorbed the messages emanating from that old-time, Old World classical education came to possess the "tastes, values and attitudes of the governing class," and be deemed "civilized" (2–5).Pearcy ponders the form that this "civility" of yore—informed, humane interactions of the mind—might assume in American society today. He similarly considers how a new, culturally rooted and authentic kind of grammar—formal intellectual engagement with the ancient Greco-Roman world in the halls of learning—might foster that civility. Not surprisingly, he assumes that those acquiring this grammar "will begin... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ammianus GeographicusGavin A. SundwallElizabeth Rawson, in her impressive study of the intellectual life of the late Roman Republic, writes concerning the famous beginning of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico: “Caesar opens his work by introducing the geography of Gaul from scratch; his account would be clearer if a simple map with the main rivers had been appended, but there is no sign that it was.” 1 Yet would (...) an ancient reader have responded in the same way? One cannot fault Rawson for desiring a map; ancient geographical accounts are regularly quite confusing and often remain unclear even with a map. But this desire may be something felt only by modern scholars. There is no evidence that the ancients used maps as we do, or that their conception of geography depended on them as ours does today. 2 The most striking feature to emerge from O. A. W. Dilke’s survey of ancient cartography is the almost total lack of map consciousness. 3 Maps in the ancient world had limited and specific use. They were either cadastral, showing boundaries or land divisions, or they were novelties, pertaining more to ancient science than to common use. 4 [End Page 619]One possible exception is the famous Tabula Peutingeriana, or Peutinger Map. Thought to be a fourth-century compilation based on a first-century A.D. map, it is the only surviving example of an itinerary map from the Roman period. 5 Even so, this map resembles nothing more than a “strip” map, with the emphasis placed on routes and cities, not on accuracy in representing geographical shapes or even location (although it can be argued that such distortion was necessary to fit it on its scroll). Other possible extant cartographic examples, such as from the shield of Dura Europos, coins, mosaics, and lamps, are too few and too exotic in nature to further much argument for map consciousness. 6 Thus the written itinerary, more common and widely used than itinerary maps (as even Dilke is ready to concede), 7 emerges as the major source of evidence for geographical depiction. Why should the Romans’ reliance on written or verbal geographical information trouble us so, when in the ninth and tenth centuries the Vikings discovered, explored, and settled Iceland, Greenland, and North America without compass or map, instead receiving their sailing directions from written accounts and sailors’ lore? 8Three recent studies by scholars investigating map use in early modern Europe suggest that mapping as we know it actually began, long after the fall of Rome, as a response to the demands of the modern nation-state. David Buisseret calls the beginning of map use in the fifteenth [End Page 620] century a change “which amounted to a revolution in the European way of ‘seeing’ the world.” According to him, maps as we think of them came to be developed and used to meet the needs of “modern” government under the direction of pioneering ministers. 9 J. W. Konvitz explores this theme for France, focusing in particular on Louis XIV’s revolutionary minister Colbert. Much of the attitude that maps are an administrative necessity, expressed by Claude Nicolet—“But to govern it, it must be known, measured, and above all drawn”—first originated with Colbert. 10 Moreover, Geoffrey Parker traces the origins of strategic map use in the west to the need of Spanish armies in the early modern period for cartographical depiction of the “Spanish Road.” 11If these scholars are correct about the origins of conventional cartography, then it follows that the ancients, despite their cleverness, had no practical interest in maps. Frequently, the lack of clarity in most ancient geography has led us to conclude that maps would have been necessary where none seem apparent, or even to infer map use when measurements or descriptions based on shapes are given. 12 But when we turn to archaeological evidence or to itineraries and periploi, we find that the ancients often used roundabout routes when a shorter and many times easier way was available. 13 How is it possible to explain such discrepancies other than that the ancients “saw” their world differently? They had a purpose in writing about geography much... (shrink)

In recent years, the research field of the evolution of art has witnessed contributions from a wide range of disciplines across the "three cultures". In this thesis, I make both a critical review of existing explanations, and try to do elucidate the evolution of art by employing insights, methods and concepts from different disciplines. First, I critically evaluate the evidentiary criteria from standard evolutionary psychology some accounts employ to demonstrate that art qualifies as a human biological adaptation. I argue that (...) these criteria do not suffice to make that claim. Furthermore, I make the case for a cultural evolutionary approach to the arts. One commonly used evidentiary criterion for art as adaptation is the “tight fit” between artnbsp;human cognition, which is interpreted as suggesting that cognition has undergone selection to produce and appreciate art. However, disentangling cultural and genetic evolution allows formulating thenbsp;hypothesis that art has evolved culturally to match human cognition. Second, I observe that in ancient and modern hunter gatherer societies, artistic activities are virtually alwaysnbsp;with ritual. I discuss what this implies for the adaptive significance of art. Specifically, if the arts have culturally evolved in function of ritualistic purposes, their adaptive value has depended on the adaptiveness of ritual. Third, because architecture is characterized by the combination of utilitarian and aesthetic aspects, it is particularly interesting from an evolutionary perspective and therefore I devote special attention to it. Employing the cross-species comparative approach, I investigate two main purposes human architecture has in common with nonhuman animal constructions: protection andnbsp;Based on the phylogenetic approach I establish that protection may have been the primary function of building aptitudes in humannbsp;and that building was later co-opted for signaling purposes. Subsequently, I comparatively evaluate thenbsp;of signaling models in the cultural evolution of architectural aesthetics. Furthermore I combine insights from environmental psychology, niche construction and cultural evolution theory to develop the hypothesis that a function of religious monumental architecture may have been to support nbsp;or even to galvanize nbsp;social learning. Finally, I connect the account I developed to the cognitive science of religion. I complement the frequently held view that religious monumental architecture is a costly signal with the mechanism of sensory exploitation. I attempt to demonstrate that by exploiting thenbsp;response of awe in religious followers, religious monumental architecture promotes and regulates prosocial behavior and creates in them an openness to adopt supernatural beliefs. Fourth, I dealnbsp;the evolution of visual art, paying again special attention to cultural evolution andnbsp;explanatory value of sensory exploitation. I assert that the relatively late appearance of figurative art in the course of human evolution may be attributed to an increase in the number of social learning opportunities within and between human populations at that time. I support this assertion with archaeological data that indicate overall population growth and increased population densities at that time. These demographic changes, I argue, have allowed the retention and accumulation of innovations required for figurative art making. Contrary to previous accounts, I furthermore aim to show that this process doesnbsp;require figurative art to have served adaptive purposes. Employing sensory exploitation, I establish that figurative art could have evolved by exploiting pre-existing biases of evolved psychology. The dominant themes of upper Paleolithic and late stone age figurative art, animals and humans, seem to support this contention. Fifth, I present a number of experimental studies I conducted to verify whether contemporary art experts would have socially learned to resist exploitation of evolved psychology. One aspect ofrsquo;s exploitative power may be that it elicits aesthetic pleasure by pushing “pleasure buttons” that evolved for other purposes. Consequently, spectators may trade-off rewards from indulging in art and biological activities, resulting in less effort being allocated to reproduction. I contend that, while the generalnbsp; may indeed be exploited, experts, who are typically being exposed to high doses of art, may have socially learned to resist exploitation by selectively preferring art from prestigious art contexts. The latter would be in line with the claim that prestige bias may trump content biases of evolved psychology. The results of three experimental studies supportnbsp;contention. I find that laypeople's art appreciation is positively affected by a content bias for attractive faces, mediated by aesthetic pleasure, whereas experts' appreciation is positively affected by prestige and mediated by admiration for the artist. Moreover, experts confer lower appreciation to attractive compared to moderately attractive content, which is consistentnbsp;the contention that expertise and the use of prestige are associatednbsp;resistance against beautiful content that exploits evolved preferences. This research thus suggests that expertise moderates content and context biases, which may be of relevance to an ongoing debate about their relative importance as drivers of cultural evolution. In addition, this study provides a tentative but novel explanation for the fact, famously established by philosopher Arthur Danto, that beauty lost its central position in Western art during the 20th century. However my findings cannot exclude alternative explanations for the fact that art expert appreciation deviates from evolved aesthetic preferences. Further research may experimentally assess the role of prestige bias and resistance as drivers of this deviation versus other, previously suggested, potential processes. For example, preferences of experts may deviate on account of the fact that art serves as a badge of elite group membership and thus expert art appreciation as a means to distinguish oneself from the masses. Alternatively, art experts may seek intellectual challenges instead of pushing pleasure buttons. Future research may experimentally verify the respective roles of these different hypothesized mechanisms. In addition, it may be investigated how insights from sexual selection research may help elucidating the different processes at play in cultural evolution and particularly in the cultural evolution of art appreciation, given the commonalities between sexual selection and cultural selection models. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Garrison on Beauty in Artworks as a Response to Regulatory PowerA Focus on Butler and KantKelly Coble (bio)As Garrison concedes, critical theory and Confucian philosophy will strike many of his readers as unlikely interlocutors. One would be hard-pressed to find two intellectual traditions more historically and culturally remote, and at least at first glance, more antithetical in their stances on authority and cultural power. In Reconsidering the (...) Life of Power Garrison prosecutes a brilliant case against these appearances, bringing these traditions into sustained and productive conversation. He is able to do so successfully by steadfastly refraining from a style of intercultural philosophy that would force these traditions into abrupt conversation—an errand that would involve stripping each tradition of the cultural and historical circumstances that give it life (p. 31). Instead, Garrison delineates a vast, rhizomatic network in which these traditions can be observed interacting and intersecting, displaying "intriguing similarities as well as informative divergences" (p. 50). Tracing such a network is a daunting task, demanding one bring to bear (i) an elegant, accessible rhetorical style; (ii) redoubtable scholarly erudition: the book features close readings of texts by European philosophers from Kant to Foucault and Butler, Confucius and major figures in the classical Confucian tradition, and leading contemporary scholars of (and in) Confucian philosophy; and not least (iii) an original argument breathing fresh life into the many texts, old and new, under examination.In what follows I offer a summary of a large part of that argument and offer critical comment on a small part of it. As Garrison's title indicates, the book can profitably be read as a sympathetic development of, and critical response to, Butler's account of the psychodynamics of power as developed, [End Page 821] above all, in their 1997 The Psychic Life of Power. Of course, what sets Garrison's endeavor apart from the standard commentary is the use he makes of Confucian insights. One impetus for his doing so is recognition of fertile common ground. The poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, queer-theoretical tradition of which Butler is a major contributor shares with the Confucian tradition a "particular insight into how the relational self arises discursively through naming, ritual, and performance" (p. 49).On what grounds, then, does Butler's account of power merit a critical response, according to Garrison, and how do Confucian insights help shape that response? The point de départ of Butler's 1997 book is Foucault's affiliated notions of assujettissement ("subjection" or "subjugation") and subjectivation (in English as in French). "Subjectivation" is Foucault's coinage for the complex process responsible at once for the formation and maintenance of subjects and their subjection and subordination, a para-doxical achievement that is a hallmark of panoptic regulatory power. As Butler observes, subjection signifies "the way regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place."1 (We note that Butler's influential account of the performativity of gender also draws heavily on this concept of subjectivation.) In their 1997 book Butler gives systematic attention to the following dynamic: subjects depend on the subordinating effects of regulatory power for their existence, giving them an existential stake in, and concomitant desire for, their own subordination. Building on the Foucauldian thesis that the "psychic operation of the norm offers a more insidious route for regulatory power than explicit coercion," Butler proceeds through Hegel's "unhappy consciousness" and Nietzsche's "bad conscience" to an original reading of Freud's melancholia.2 As in Hegel and Nietzsche, so also in Freud, Butler observes, the ego is said to "turn back upon itself," taking itself "not only as an object of love, but of aggression and hate as well."3 And as in Hegel and Nietzsche, so also in Freud, this idea of a turn from the object to the ego that produces the ego, Butler observes, both defies intelligibility and describes a scene of failure. In Butler's words, "The turn from the object to the ego can never quite be accomplished," and as a result the subject "is haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation."4So far, Garrison... (shrink)

Insofar as it has been developed out of a doctoral dissertation, this study manifests both the virtues consequent upon such a birth, and—just as expectedly—the defects. The virtues are found in its careful organization and concern with documentation; the defects are but excesses of the virtues: an all too sober style coupled with some lack of speculative content—this leading to repetition rather than explication. Still, the work had not been intended as a speculative exercise but as an essay in (...) intellectual history, and was, in embryo, a history dissertation. In this regard, no fault can be found with Lipton’s careful tracing of the confused political and academic currents that swept modern Germany. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 231-232 [Access article in PDF] Donald R. Kelley. The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. vii + 320. Cloth, $59.50. The field of intellectual history, once known as the history of ideas, intersects with many other historical sub-disciplines, especially the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science, (...) and cultural history. Donald Kelley, a distinguished intellectual historian and editor of The Journal of the History of Ideas, has written a comprehensive history of his field that emphasizes the process by which scholars who studied the history of thought gradually adopted an approach to their subject that resulted in "the descent of ideas" from philosophical abstraction to the "sublunar" realm of human experience and understanding. This intellectual descent, just like the biological descent of man plotted by Darwin in 1871, has not followed a linear course. Displaying remarkable scholarly range and erudition, Kelley guides the reader through a complex and sometimes amorphous history of intellectual history that covers developments in scholarship from ancient times to the present.The most original and distinctive feature of the book is Kelley's emphasis on the importance of eclecticism in the emergence of intellectual history. The book begins with an exposition of the scholarship of the early nineteenth-century Liberal French philosopher and educator Victor Cousin, whose eclectic approach to teaching the history of philosophy was for him not only the best route to attaining true wisdom but also the key to organizing the history of thought. In this way Cousin helped to make intellectual history a distinct branch of historical scholarship, while his contemporaries Abel-François Villemain and François Guizot marked a parallel shift in interest from the history of ideas to the history of literature and the history of civilization. From this starting point Kelley looks back to classical, medieval, and early modern thought, exploring earlier expressions of eclecticism, including that of Diogenes Laertius in the third century CE, as a distinct and often maligned philosophical tradition. An excellent chapter on the "new" or modern eclecticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which rejected syncretism as well as skepticism and which found a place for Christian thought, gives new significance to the work of [End Page 231] Jakob Thomasius, his son Christian Thomasius, and J. J. Brucker, whose Critical History of Philosophy (1742-44) established the history of philosophy as a distinct discipline.Kelley devotes considerable space to discussing the intersection between the history of philosophy and intellectual history. The former has long served as the "taproot" of the latter, even after eighteenth-century philosophers, striving to establish philosophy as a rigorous science, rejected a historical approach to attaining wisdom. This development caused a split within the ranks of philosophers between the "purists" in the Kantian tradition and "culturalists" like J. G. Herder who, "following the descent of ideas into the medium of language, strayed off into what came to be known as cultural history" (p. 4). In a chapter devoted to the history of philosophy in modern times, Kelley explores the contributions made by the philosophers Ernst Cassirer, Benedetto Croce, and Arthur Lovejoy to the field of intellectual history.By taking a long historical perspective on the development of his field, Kelley is able to demonstrate that some recent trends in intellectual and literary history have longstanding precedents. Thus he traces the recent "linguistic turn" in historical analysis, which he styles the "linguistic return," back to the Renaissance, and he sees the claims of twentieth-century scholars who emphasize the importance of narrative structures in giving meaning to the past as restatements of ancient literary theory. In his chapter, "The Way of Ideas and the Ways of Words," Kelley shows that the descent of ideas began long before the emergence of intellectual history as a distinct field. As might be expected in a work of historiography, Kelley's methodology in establishing these precedents and continuities in scholarship is in a certain sense traditional. Yet there is little that... (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the idea of identity hybridization, assuming that multicultural models, relevant for each type of state, depend on complex historical, socio-cultural, and political contexts. This hypothesis directs my inquiry into Russia’s colonial and postcolonial past, contemplated in relation to European development as well as with similar situations in other parts of the globe. My review of intellectual discussions on the topic and of Russian Orientology in particular show that the complexity of Russian national (...) identity can be traced back to contradictions within the process of European intellectual colonization, as well as to Russia’s realization of the Orthodox civilizing mission in its own empire. I propose the expression “secondary orientalism” to refer to the Russian situation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 693 between the world of our sense perception and the world of objects "in and for themselves," had suggested that the failure to appreciate this distinction was a "Grundvorurteil" common to all controversies, and, finally, had argued for the need to distinguish between the self revealed in "inner sense" and the self as it is in itself, unknowable to us. In his extremely valuable article, "Funzioni (...) logiche e categorie in Kant," Silvestro Marcucci retlects on a complex of issues surrounding Kant's claim to have discovered some sort of correspondence between the components and structure of a "table" of logical functions and those of a set of"pure concepts" or "categories" for the objective determination of objects through the contents of human sensibility. Of central concern to Marcucci is the error of supposing that what is in question is either a mere parallel between functions of judgment and categories or some sort of real identity between them. What is in question, according to Marcucci, are three "uses" but only two "levels" (piani): the foundational level is that of an operative.judgmental "functionality" by which the categories and the pure forms of general logic are produced. He argues that Kant is appealing here neither to pure logical form nor to logical "functions" that are in some way identical with the categories of understanding, but rather to functions of judgment more fundamental than either. The final two essays deal with two of Kant's immediate heirs, Reinhold and Fichte. In "The Sun of Enlightenment" Nathan Rotenstreich argues that Reinhold's notion of Enlightenment had an important social aspect, which is concerned with the distribution of enlightenment and is distinguished from his systematic view. Claudio Cesa, in "Die Vieldeutigkeit des Begriffes 'Trieb' von J. G. Fichte" traces the development of this important concept from Reinhold's concept "Kraft," which was itself neither sensible nor intellectual but changed depending upon its objects: sensibility, understanding, or reason. Cesa goes on to outline how Fichte developed a more positive notion including the conception of inner purposiveness expressing itself in humans as a form for realizing the I. JANE KNELI.ER Colorado State University RICHARD AQUILA University of Tennessee George J. Seidel. Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" of z 794: A Commentary on Part I. Purdue University Series in the History of Philosophy. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993. Pp. ix + 126. Cloth, $25.00. Paper, $12.95. The recent revival of interest in Fichte is now well entrenched in North America and has begun to yield a fairly diverse harvest: new translations, articles, monographs, and, predictably, conferences and a scholarly society. With this volume, however, we have the first entry in the "commentary" category. Given its notorious obscurity and disarray, Fichte's corpus--particularly his Jena corpus, which has remained the main focus of attention--would seem to be an apt subject for the genre. The work to which Seidel has 694 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER ~995 devoted his attention--the Foundations of the Entire "Wissenschaft~lehre"--particularly invites this sort of undertaking; it is a text which, by Fichte's own account, was intended to be accompanied by elaborations, illustrations and explanations. Seidel focuses on what is certainly the most interesting and important part of the text, the first three sections (about 3~ pages in all) which together make up "Part I" of this version of the Wissenschaftslehre. It is here that Fichte tries to articulate the basic principles that will govern his entire philosophical investigation. He uses as the lever for his enquiry two fundamental logical dicta--the principles of identity and contradiction--claiming to uncover three fundamental principles which underlie them: the principles of selfpositing, counter-positing and limitation. The body of the Wissenschaflslehreitself is an elaborate dialectical attempt to work out the implications of these basic features of human subjectivity--in particular to use them to give a deduction of the fundamental categories of human experience. There are a number of different approaches that a commentary might take to this dense piece of text. At one extreme stands the example provided by Findlay, whose commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology takes the form of a detailed paraphrase... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic RationalisationJohn C. McEnroeJeremy Tanner. The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society, and Artistic Rationalisation. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xvi + 331 pp. 62 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $99.In his introductory chapter, Jeremy Tanner quotes J. J. Winckelmann's eighteenth-century description of the Apollo Belvedere: "Among all the works of antiquity (...) which have escaped destruction, the statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art... In the presence of this miracle of art, I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking on it in a worthy manner" (6). Tanner makes it clear that Winckelmann, widely regarded as the founder of modern art history, was not simply recording a personal reaction. Instead, Winckelmann's notion of artworks as autonomous objects of aesthetic experience was deeply rooted in the transformation of the basic institutions of art during [End Page 423] the Enlightenment. These included changes in patronage and production, and the introduction of the new philosophy of aesthetics. The new conception of art as a form of individual expression was tied not only to the notion of personal liberty but also to the growing obsession with national identities. Winckelmann's rapturous response to the Apollo Belvedere is understandable only as a part of this broader set of social and intellectual currents.The kinds of art history that Tanner is concerned with in this book are quite distinct from Winckelmann's and belonged to profoundly different cultural networks. Tanner lays out three goals for the book: first, to analyze art as a form of material culture that was both shaped by society and, in turn, helped to shape society; second, to develop an analytic framework for comparing classical and modern art history without conflating the two; third, to move art history to the explanatory level, exploring not only how classical art developed over the long term, but why. Tanner's approach is sociological, drawing especially on the work of the once influential American sociologist, Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). As a result, Tanner shifts from the traditional focus on artists to the interaction of artists, patrons, and viewers.In chapter 2 ("Rethinking the Greek Revolution," 31–96) Tanner addresses one of the central problems in art history, the apparently sudden transformation from abstraction to naturalism in Greek art in the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E., famously described by E. H. Gombrich as "the Greek Revolution." Why, after generations of continuity within the Archaic style, did Greek artists, alone among the artists working in the broader Middle Eastern tradition, develop the naturalistic style of art represented in, for example, Polykeitos's Doryphoros? For Gombrich, the "Greek Revolution" was fundamentally a matter of artists breaking from ingrained patterns and attempting, as individuals, to match the appearance of their statues with the natural world. Other writers, including several contributors to Diana Buitron-Oliver, ed., The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy (Washington, D.C., 1992), have described the change in terms even more deeply grounded in Winckelmann: the revolution in style was a product of the birth of individuality and personal freedom that accompanied the birth of democracy in classical Greece.Tanner is specifically concerned with what the "Greek Revolution" meant for cult statues. While he rejects the simplistic equation democracy = naturalism as an explanatory device, Tanner nevertheless holds that political changes, marked by the Kleisthenic reforms, had profound effects on both the makers and the viewers of art. Through most of the sixth century B.C.E., the aristocracy was in firm control of religious art. Through the forms of the kouros and kore, aristocrats merged their identities with those of the gods. Through their sponsorship and control of the sanctuaries, they controlled the access ordinary viewers had to images of the sacred. While the immediate effects of the Kleisthenic reforms may have been more complex than Tanner implies, over the course of a generation the authority of the traditional aristocracy declined, and the sponsorship of cult images was... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

As an important corollary of this interpretation of absolute knowledge, the dissertation concludes with the suggestion that Hegelian philosophy need not be regarded merely as an interesting curiosity in the history of ideas, but rather that it can serve as a vital and potentially rewarding source of fresh theoretical insights. ;Instead, the concrete completeness of speculative philosophy can only consist in the activity of a dynamical, ceaselessly self-examining and self-regulating intellectual community. In one sense, of course, no finite system (...) can ever be complete, insofar as it will inevitably be guilty of errors and misconceptions. Yet at the same time, the infinite System is perfect and complete, insofar as it contains within itself the means whereby its own unavoidable flaws will be discovered, corrected, and "forgiven"--i.e. aufgehoben into vanishing moments of a universal totality. ;In opposition to most traditional interpretations of Hegel, the position is maintained that Hegel himself deliberately faced this problem, and that a true understanding of his proposed solution requires a radical Aufhebung of the concept of cognition as such. Relying primarily on the penultimate chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the dissertation argues that absolute knowledge can neither be a finalized system of fully explicit content, nor an endless movement toward such an ideal state. ;This dissertation undertakes a critical examination of one central problem in Hegelian philosophy: viz., whether the final realization of "absolute knowledge" is logically consistent with significant epistemic progress in the system's continuing development. Serious consideration of the concept of systematic completeness, as interpreted on Hegel's terms, uncovers the existence of a profound paradox. On the one hand, if the Truth is the Whole, then the truth of any finite part or aspect of that Whole depends upon its place within the system as a totality. In order to grasp the part and comprehend it correctly, one must already have a systematically ordered knowledge of the universe in its entirety. Yet the methodological open-endedness of dialectical thinking precludes the acceptance of any particular theoretical formulation as final or complete in itself. Hegel interprets the history of philosophy as a progression of successive formulations of the Truth, each of which improves on its predecessors by reconciling their internal contradictions, but no one of which is adequate in itself. Hence, no theoretical world view, including Hegel's own, can rest content within its limits, for the inevitable advance of thought must in the end throw it down. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Ratzinger's Republic:Communio's Postliberal TurnSam Zeno Conedera S.J. and Vincent L. Strand S.J.Is the political future of the West a postliberal one? For the past decade, numerous prominent thinkers in America and Europe have been debating this question. Matters that not long ago were merely of historical interest, such as Pope Gelasius I's understanding of the relation between sacral authority and royal power, Thomas Aquinas's thought on monarchy (...) and Robert Bellarmine's theory of the pope's indirect authority in temporal matters are now increasingly studied for their potential answers to contemporary political questions. This development, which would have been nearly unimaginable just a decade earlier, unsurprisingly has been led by Catholics. We say "unsurprisingly" in view of the long pre-modern tradition of Catholic political thought, as well as the Church's long struggle against liberalism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the current postliberal writers explicitly connect themselves to both of these aspects by using the term "integralist" to describe their position.1 [End Page 889]This "new integralism" represents a radical departure from the mainstream of Catholic political discourse of the last half century, which has largely sought rapprochement with Western liberalism. A group of writers, led by John Courtney Murray, George Weigel, Michael Novak, and Robert George, have held that the American constitutional order is rooted in the natural law tradition, and therefore is basically friendly to Catholic political thought. The Church's role in American life, they say, is upholding the natural law as a public moral philosophy, while embracing the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment as a matter of principle, in accordance with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. This "Whig Thomism," which for decades represented the predominant outlook of conservative American Catholics, must now face the challenge of a different sort of Thomism represented by the integralists.2While the engagement between Whig Thomists and integralists has received most of the attention from scholars and journalists alike, another postliberal option has emerged in recent years. Its source is a group of Catholic thinkers associated with the Communio theological movement. Their political vision, which has no single name or label, has a complex and subtle relationship with the thought of earlier Communio writers, most of whom shared the Whig Thomist desire for reconciliation with Western liberalism. [End Page 890] The appearance of a Communio postliberalism therefore represents a significant development within this intellectual tradition. The most important representative of the earlier Communio perspective on political questions is Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI, who has recently been lauded as the "most important Catholic thinker of the twentieth century" on matters at the intersection of theology and politics.3In an article titled "Ratzinger's Republic" that appeared in these pages in 2020, we identified a significant tension in his thought about the Church's contribution to political life.4 Exploring Ratzinger's writings on natural law, we demonstrated that two currents are present. In accord with his fundamental theological commitments about nature and grace and about faith and reason, Ratzinger often questioned the effectiveness of arguments from natural law. He claimed that, since reason is historically conditioned, and therefore in the current order marked by sin, reason needs grace and faith to function properly. Yet, on other occasions, Ratzinger strongly endorsed arguments from natural law, highlighting its role as the foundation of a just democratic political order. We traced this ambivalence about natural law back to a dilemma at the heart of Ratzinger's political thought. On the one hand, in accord with his thinking about the relations of nature and grace and faith and reason, Ratzinger argued that the state needs the Church to supply moral values that the state cannot furnish on its own. On the other hand, he believed it belongs to the very nature of the Church to be separate from the state, and he endorsed nonconfessional, religiously pluralistic states.5 In light of these two commitments, Ratzinger argued that the contribution Christians are to make to the state is to supply moral values that were discerned under the influence of grace and divine revelation but... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christianity and Secular Reason: Classical Themes and Modern Developments ed. by Jeffrey BloechlJoseph W. Koterski, S.J.Christianity and Secular Reason: Classical Themes and Modern Developments. Edited by Jeffrey Bloechl. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. vii + 288. $40.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-268-02228-0.It does not bode well for a collection of essays when the introduction needs to make a concession like the one found here: (...) “This volume brings together a plurality of approaches to a loosely related set of questions, themes, and phenomena” (6). Yet, surely, truth in advertising is an uncommon virtue. The frank honesty of Jeffrey Bloechl, the editor of this volume, is much to be commended.What unifies the essays in this volume is not a common topic or a common approach but a common concern with the problem of understanding the relation between Christianity and secular reason. The issue in play is how much respect a religion that claims to be the recipient of divine revelation owes to autonomous reasoning in any particular age. The problem is exacerbated in those periods of history that are marked by strong claims for the powers of human reasoning.Bloechl’s introduction is particularly helpful due to its distinction between secular reason and secularized reason. Unless a believer takes the fideist position of holding that only claims grounded in faith are valid knowledge-claims, there is no reason to deny or cast skeptical aspersions on secular reason. The term simply names the use of reason according to its proper governing principles on any topic where the justifications for various truth-claims are drawn only from this-worldly experience and, for disciplinary reasons, make no use of divine revelation. It is the type of reasoning that is done within a saeculum, that is, within a given period of time, according to the canons of sound reasoning operative in that epoch. The term “secularized reason,” by contrast, names the view of reason that is hostile to the legitimacy of any knowledge-claim that involves the testimony of divine self-disclosure as its warrant. The proponents of secularized reason often conveniently overlook the likelihood that such hostility risks begging the question by disallowing any form of divinely backed testimony in principle, while allowing human testimony in such spheres as history or courts or law. If one is prepared in general to accept testimony as a justification for a truth-claim, then the proper criterion is the credibility of the source. But then there is no principled way to preclude in advance the possibility that testimony that originates with God might provide the strongest possible type of warrant for certain knowledge-claims. It is mere prejudice to decide in advance that this alternative is simply beyond the pale of consideration.Threaded through the essays in this volume is the perennial problem of the relationship of faith and reason. Earlier ages posed the problem on their own terms, sometimes quite different from modern assumptions. Readers unfamiliar with the thought of Thomas Aquinas, for instance, might well be [End Page 141] surprised to learn that the very first question of the Summa theologiae asks whether any sort of sacra doctrina is necessary beyond the philosophical sciences. Such a stance does not raise a question about whether faith can be a genuine source of knowledge, but merely asks if there is need for the sort of knowledge that is grounded in faith. Aquinas answers the question not only by reflecting on the difficulties that arise from expecting that everyone will have the necessary time, interest, and intellectual resources to figure out for themselves the things that they need to know for the sake of salvation; he also notes certain areas that are entirely beyond the scope of unaided reason, such as knowledge about the triune nature of God.By contrast, the proponents of secularized reason tend to cast doubt on the very possibility that any truth-claim based on religious faith could even be counted as knowledge. Brad Gregory’s recent book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard University Press, 2012) does a masterful job in tracing the unforeseen... (shrink)

Sustainability is the result of modern-day design philosophy as a result of major industrial developments and many conflicts and wars. This concept is what prompted this research to focus on the possibility of achieving the principles of sustainability practically - in field reality - through the use of artificial intelligence techniques to create contemporary designs derived from the Saudi Asiri heritage and employ them in printing sustainable clothing supplements. Heritage-inspired design has cultural meaning and importance, and its purpose is to (...) transmit our heritage to our emerging generations, and therefore it is considered a type of sustainable thought. The Asir region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has a rich heritage that is greatly influenced by the charming nature of the place. The Asir region is distinguished by the art of the “Asiri Cat,” which consists of engravings, lines, and aesthetic formations engraved by women specialized in this field. They inherited this art from the women who preceded them. Asiri art is distinguished from other arts. The use of bright natural colors such as blue, green, orange, black and white, as the Asir region is considered one of the important heritage and tourist areas within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has played a pivotal role in enriching the cultural and creative stock not only of the Saudi citizen, but also of the Arabian Gulf region. This is what prompted us in the current research to delve into the analysis of the creative and artistic aspects of Asiri art inscriptions and to benefit from the aesthetic values of Asiri art decorations in contemporary artistic designs that achieve sustainability for the purpose of exploiting them in the manufacture of plastic fittings for clothing supplements to serve small industries. Many diverse designs have been implemented using different printing techniques. From (direct drawing method - stencil printing - pictorial screen printing) the use of different types and colors to implement different products to produce clothing accessories that are closely related to the structure of form and content of Al-Qat Al-Asiri art, and depends on its aesthetic philosophy about the heritage and cultural references associated with the place and the artist’s own vision. To revive Saudi heritage. The research aims to take advantage of the geometric and floral decorative elements in Al-Qat Al-Asiri’s artistic engravings as a source for enriching and sustaining printed designs for women’s clothing supplements that are characterized by authenticity and contemporaryness, and preserving popular motifs by reformulating them. In keeping with the times, and preserving its most prominent features, in a way that enhances belonging and preserves the community’s heritage and values. From extinction, endless horizons of creativity and innovation have been achieved in the field of printing clothing supplements, and sustainable plastic repetition, which the designer or art practitioner resorts to in general, and the field of printing in particular, as a creative pluralistic plastic method.The research followed the descriptive and analytical approach in identifying the origins and characteristics of the Asir artistic inscriptions (the cat), analyzing their vocabulary, reformulating them, and drawing inspiration from them to enrich the printed designs of women’s clothing supplements, in addition to the experimental approach in the applied study through the use of different techniques and materials. The results of the study concluded that there are various aesthetic values in the Asiri cat engraving that can be used to create contemporary designs on clothing accessories using different printing techniques, in order to preserve the Asiri heritage in the southern region of the country. The study recommended the need to pay attention to studying heritage and the arts it contains because of its great importance, as it stimulates appreciation of traditional art and preserves it. (shrink)

Stephen Gaukroger traces the development of Descartes's thought in the social, religious, and intellectual context of seventeenth‐century Europe. Gaukroger describes Descartes's upbringing and his education at the Jesuit La Flèche collège, and shows the role these played in the development of his ground‐breaking work in philosophy and science. The book details the effects of his relationships with others on his work, both through collaboration and through conflict. It discusses the history of the composition of his major works (...) and details their structure and content. It documents the correspondence, which played a major part in the development of his thinking, both before and after publication. The book concludes, as it begins, with his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia on the subject of the passions. (shrink)

In order to introduce the text description of this class will show seven keywords, they represent In order to understand the general process for the seven. Need to mention is that the author published in Chinese script - title "Gadamer's philosophy of the seven key" - and this content is not the same. In fact, only one in that the use of key words in this speech mentioned the four key words will be used the next article. 1 Linguistics (...) as high as the United States in the "real management and methods," a book in the last third of the contents of the specified language is "the universal medium of interpretation of experience." It is in this medium, things are understood, understanding and interpretation to occur. It is the fundamental and the first thing on a switch, it makes things possible, without it, understanding must not occur. It is in this medium, the real management there, although in terms of the real incidence of management and is not limited to this medium. Sprachlichkeit is up to the universal language of the United States to name the first of of a proper noun. history of as language, history is a popular media, and history is also rising to become "a hermeneutical principle." To understand history, which must be traced back to Heidegger, "and there is time," the first six parts, entitled "Timing and historical nature." This title has been out of correct revelation, history is the study of this structure there is some a result of this there is the same as in the past and the present one there, it was possible there through his plans and will itself which extend to the future. Dilthey on Heidegger benefit of this term and its historical significance, but that裡Dilthey, the basic processes of life, and in Heidegger, the basic process is still alive there in the past and future Among the visual field. It is a learning process rather than the life there is a process, there is a process rather than the life philosophy of life regardless of the process. Dilthey and Gadamer and Heidegger places of historical analysis for the premise. 3 by the historical role of awareness up to the United States, this keyword has not appeared in from Schleiermacher, Dilthey, or Heidegger that裡. But Heidegger once spoke to the author, the concept represented by the word directly from Dilthey and future. Indeed, the word and the "fusion of" two persons都benefit from Hegel and Dilthey, Heidegger than In order to impact. At the same time, for the resumption of encounter with the text of the history of this effort directly, the recall In order to Heidegger and Qike fruit. Up to the United States shows that it is essential that "the existence of the structure." That is to say, it is usually associated with the text coming from a tradition, crushed In order to present before the sight. 4 hermeneutics into the cycle and see in understanding the structure and the first cycle between hermeneutics, there is a close link. Hermeneutics and the cycle regardless of such a concept, not only from a part of the overall future understanding, understanding from the part of the overall future. This is a logical contradiction, but it depicts In order to understand the kind of work does not have the way to recovery. This is to see What are the relationship? Up with the United States use this word in the former understanding of the meaning of a person he can understand any part of the text and context before, must have a pre-understanding. When Schleiermacher hermeneutics for the cycle to take a more formalistic point of view, he also participate in an objective and subjective look for. In order to reject the United States is up for the subjective, and he describes, in understanding the text, our understanding of a person but a different meaning, and this sense of ownership in a situation with a theme of the event . Heidegger the hermeneutic circle and put the world on their own understanding of the context in which the world is time and the existence of the world, in order to In order to reinvent the meaning of hermeneutic circle. It exists in the time being and is expected to forward to the future, it is a person exists in the world of all possibilities of a personal meaning. Gadamer Heidegger and then one more step beyond, he is defined as the cycle of hermeneutics and the interpretation of the traditional sports were a correlation between the movement. Heidegger's masterpiece裡tradition and not important, but those for the traditional and the interpretation of the relationship between text, up to the U.S. In order to play an important role in the analysis. Up to the United States, brought into the discussion In order to "complete expectation" that the key concept, it is subject to the historical role of awareness of the operation of the core. In this part of the contents of the directory for the present review is to show to some of the major associated. 5 authority and tradition up to the United States on the authority of the traditional view is that from his understanding and the hermeneutic circle before the concept developed in the future. Enlightenment for the suspect an effort made ​​to switch the authority of the United States to see coming up is one-sided, because the authority is naturally found in the leading field in a PhD, the referee, professors and experts. Recognize these people for a topic you know even in the natural and appropriate. So regardless of up to his brother's wife is not a legitimate authority and legitimate authority, and authority as a concept to see the future is appropriate. Similarly, our traditional understanding among the living, and we should explore a more deeper with our traditional relationship. Traditional German text is Űberlieferung, incurs passed along . Once again, as a fair decision without dialogue and is not legal to see, up to the United States against this anti-traditional views of the Enlightenment. 6 Depending on the domain of integration sight philosophy of integration is another sign up to the United States is not to find elsewhere. Basically, the text of the encounter with a sight In order to involve the integration of text and interpreter of the visual field of sight. And a man's own awareness is a fusion of traditional with the product. "That is convenient to get a sight of their own, but also requires a fusion of traditional with." In order for each dialogue also involves a fusion of sight. It is a wildcard description of the terminology. 7 Dialogue dialogue leading up to the U.S. interpretation of the theme of philosophy, relying on a life of his ideal, he as such a show of openness. Schleiermacher as high as the United States in general, is a talented rapper. However, the need for a fruitful dialogue open to others point of view, and the need to recognize that he or she may be right. In a true dialogue, both sides都want to talk more close to the truth regardless of management topics, which are more important than winning. Finally, the dialogue is a basic hermeneutical tool, a means to understand, so we coming close to the theme of the issue, but ready to change our point of view. An introductory section explains that the lecture will present seven key terms, representing seven aspects of the universal process of understanding. It is noted that a published lecture in Chinese by this author under the title "Seven Key Terms in the Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer "is not the same as this, and indeed only one of the terms in that lecture is used in this one, although four of them are used in tomorrow's lecture. An introductory section explains that the lecture will present seven key terms, representing seven aspects of the universal process of understanding. It is noted that a published lecture in Chinese by this author under the title "Seven Key Terms in the Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer" is not the same as this, and indeed only one of the terms in that lecture is used in this one, although four of them are used in tomorrow's lecture. 1. Sprachlichkeit-Linguisticality As Gadamer notes in the final third of Truth and Method, language is the "universal medium of hermeneutical experience." It is the medium in which things are understood, the medium in which understanding and interpretation take place. It is fundamental and prior to everything. It makes things possible, and without it understanding cannot take place at all. It is the medium in which truth happens, although there is more than this to the happening of truth. Sprachlichkeit is the term Gadamer uses to name the "universal priority" of language. 2. Geschichtlichkeit-Historicity Like language, history is a universal medium, and historicity is raised to the status of "a hermeneutical principle. "To understand historicity, one has to go back to the six sections of Heidegger's Being and Time that carry the heading" Temporality and Historicity. "Already this title correctly suggests that historicity is a consequence of the ontological structure of Dasein as a being that lives with a past and a present, and also extends itself into the future through projecting possible being. Heidegger is indebted to Dilthey for the term and sense of historicity, but in Dilthey the basic process is life, whereas in Heidegger, the basic process is being-in-the-world in horizons of past and future. It is an ontological process rather than a life process, a process of being rather than the vitalism of life in life-philosophy. Gadamer presupposes Dilthey's and Heidegger's analysis of Geschichtlichkeit . 3. das wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein-the Historically Effected Consciousness This is a key term in Gadamer that does not appear in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, or Heidegger. Heidegger once remarked to the author that the idea that this term represents is straight out of Dilthey. Certainly it and the "fusion of horizons" are more indebted to Hegel and Dilthey than to Heidegger. At the same time, the effort to restore the historical immediacy of encounter with a text recalls Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Gadamer argues that the essence of it is " the structure of experience. "That is to say, it shatters the present horizon, usually with a text from tradition. 4. Hermeneutische Zirkel and Vorurteil-Prejudice and the Hermeneutical Circle There is an intimate connection between the fore-structure of understanding and the hermeneutical circle. The hermeneutical circle refers to the idea that one understands the part from the whole, but also the whole from the parts. This is a logical contradiction, but it describes the back and forth way that understanding works. What has this to do with prejudices ? Gadamer uses this word as synonymous with pre-understanding, and one has to have a prior understanding before one can understand any part of a text or situation. While Schleiermacher took a more formalistic view of the hermeneutical circle, he also looked at the objective and subjective sides. Gadamer rejects the subjective side and explains that in understanding a text we are not understanding a person but a meaning that resides in a situation and a subject-matter. Heidegger revolutionized the meaning of the hermeneutical circle by placing it in the context of an understanding of self and world that is temporal and existential. It exists in time and anticipates a future, and it is the personal sense of one's possibilities for being in the world. Gadamer took a step beyond Heidegger by defining the hermeneutical circle as the interplay between the movement of tradition and that of the interpreter. Tradition plays little role in Heidegger's masterwork, but it and the interpreter's relation to the text loom large in Gadamer's analysis. The discussion brings in the key concept in Gadamer of the "anticipation of completion" which is central to the working of historically effected consciousness. A review of the table of contents for the section is presented to show some of the major relationships. 5. Autorität und Tradition-Authority and Tradition Gadamer's views with regard to authority and tradition grow out of his concepts of preunderstanding and the hermeneutical circle. The effort by the Enlightenment to discredit all authority seemed one-sided to Gadamer because authority is naturally accorded to doctors, judges, professors, and other experts in a field. To acknowledge that they know more about a subject than you do is natural and appropriate. So Gadamer speaks of legitimate authority and illegitimate authority, but authority as a concept seems appropriate. Likewise, tradition inhabits our understanding, and we should seek an ever deeper relationship to our tradition. The German word for tradition is Űberlieferung, that which is handed down. Again, Gadamer takes up arms against the Enlightenment prejudice against tradition as illegitimate without dialogue or a fair trial. 6. Horizontverschmelzung-Fusion of Horizons The "fusion of horizons "is another trademark of Gadamerian philosophy. It is not found elsewhere. Basically, the encounter with the text involves a fusion of horizons, that of the text and that of the interpreter. Also one's own consciousness is a product of a fusion of horizons with the tradition. "Even to acquire one's own horizon requires a fusion of horizons with the tradition." Every conversation, too, involves a fusion of horizons. It is an all-purpose term. 7. Conversation Conversation is a leitmotif of Gadamer's hermeneutical philosophy, an ideal he lived by, an openness he exemplified. Schleiermacher was a gifted conversationalist, as was Gadamer. But a fruitful conversation requires openness to the viewpoint of the other person, and the acknowledgement that he or she could be right. In a true conversation both partners want to come closer to the truth about a matter, and that is more important than winning. Ultimately, conversation is a basic hermeneutical tool, a means of reaching understanding, so we approach a subject with questions, but ready to change our point of view. (shrink)

The main aim of this dissertation is to trace the systematic development of Husserl's early theory of intentionality, particularly as it reflects and influences his understanding of the mind-world relation. The dissertation is divided into two parts. ;In the first part, I trace the historical roots of phenomenology back to Husserl's teacher Franz Brentano. I argue that for Brentano, intentionality is a purely mental relation between a mental act and a mentally immanent intentional object or content. I also (...) argue that Brentano embeds this view in a roughly Lockean or "critical realist" position which adds a third element to the two elements of the intentional relation, viz., a really existing, extramental or worldly object---or, as Brentano prefers to call it, "thing." This "thing" is not psychologically accessible but is rather hypothesized by the natural scientist as a causal explanation for our intentional experiences. ;In the second part of the dissertation I chart the course of Husserl's early intellectual development in the period immediately following his philosophical apprenticeship under Brentano, again focusing on intentionality. I document Husserl's initial adoption of the Brentanian view, as well as his growing doubts about Brentano's immanentism. Through his work on the problem of nonveridical intentionality and the descriptive psychology of perception, Husserl is led to reject altogether the idea that intentionality is a genuine relation and to adopt instead an adverbial account which explains intentionality as an exclusive feature of mental acts, one that can be studied without any reference to the objects at which these acts aim. In the Logical Investigations , this conception of intentionality is coupled with a Cartesian, epistemologically oriented methodology to yield a conception of the philosophical study of the mind and its experiences in which no reference is made to the objects of the real world. I conclude the dissertation by indicating briefly how Husserl in subsequent years would augment and deepen this position through his concept of the noema. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Revisionism:The Bicentennial of Independence, the Early Republican Experience, and Intellectual History in Latin AmericaElías José PaltiLatin America's Revolution of Independence was an event of world-historical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously created new nation states and established republican systems of government. This occurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of "nation" and "republic" remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of (...) debates naturally emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind of dilemmas and problems contained therein.Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has been precluded by the teleological assumptions which have informed traditional approaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historians to interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that prevented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberal concept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, the concerns of Latin American commentators were seen as "deviations" from the rational path of conceptual development and understanding. It was necessary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the debates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century could reveal their historical significance and become matters for systematic analysis. The rise of a "new intellectual history," insofar as it has [End Page 593] questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putative models and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, has opened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues for scholarly research in the field of Latin American politico-intellectual history.The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by the approach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly influenced by this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in Latin America have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to revise established perspectives in the field. This has made room for the development of a self-defined "revisionist" position. However, what is to be revised has not always been clear.The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence as the epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover their rights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalistic biases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already present at the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could be perceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however, the revisionists' contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the 1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America of Marxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence of American and European historians in the field, had already destabilized Manichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a struggle between liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nuances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged from the rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new states were the result of the contingent process of formation rather than its premise. [End Page 594] Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of nationalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises on which these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the sets of antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded: enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; "liberty of the Modern" / "liberty of Ancient;" modernity / tradition; individualism / organicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism in Latin American, its contributions to the field of politico-intellectual history, and the kind of problems that it raises in turn.The Tradition of History of "Ideas" in Latin AmericaMany scholars consider Charles Hale to be the key figure in the emergence of the revisionist critique. As Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo remarks, for the case of Mexico (which has served as the exemplary case for the entire region): "Up to the moment Charles Hale came to intervene, we could recount to ourselves a delicious... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:F. R. Leavis (Modern Cultural Theorists)Stephen OgdenF. R. Leavis (Modern Cultural Theorists), by Anne Samson; x & 196 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992, $45.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.If it is an overstatement to say that the waves of change currently disturbing the teaching of English in universities originated from the splash made by F. R. Leavis at Cambridge beginning in 1933, Anne Samson’s account of the (...) theorist’s influence scarcely admits it. Her chapter titles—“Leavis and the Growth of English Studies,” “English as a University Subject,” “Literary ‘Theory’ and Constituting the Canon”—indicate not only the range of issues connected with F. R. Leavis’s name but also his significant involvement in their genesis.Samson’s book portrays Leavis as the efficient cause in the establishment of university English as a critical, or more accurately a diagnostic, enterprise. At an early professional cost (he was denied faculty appointment at Cambridge for five years), Leavis helped cut English curricula free from philology, languages, and classical studies; a responsibility Samson partially excuses by connecting Leavis’s motivating principles back through Matthew Arnold to Dickens and Carlyle and even to one “Reverend H. J. Rose, a leading figure in the founding of King’s College, London... declaring in a sermon delivered in 1826 that literature teaches ‘the wisdom of men better and wiser than ourselves’ and prepares for the ‘examination of those moral and intellectual truths which are not only the worthiest exercise of our reason, but most concern our future destiny’” (p. 12).This moralism Samson sees as the central and redeeming principle in Leavis’s system. Specifically, she identifies the Condition of England debate—over the state of culture and economics in a “‘technologico-Benthamite world’” (p. 63)—as the key to Leavis’s literary criticism, his influential journal Scrutiny, and his wide-ranging reform endeavors. “Literature mattered to Leavis because he believed it to be the means, above all others, of combating the ills of a mechanised, constantly changing world and of restoring the heritage of those dispossessed by the machine” (p. 3).Professionally asserting the primacy of criticism over scholarship, then in his writings making no distinction between the literary and the social, Leavis ultimately refused any separation between literature and life. Samson carefully [End Page 360] traces this development in Leavis’s general theory in order to bring out its easily-overlooked implication for the social position of a literary academic. She quotes this crucial passage from Leavis: “The critic... is as much concerned with the health of the mind as any doctor with the health of the body. To set up as a critic is to set up as a judge of values... For the arts are inevitably and quite apart from any intentions of the artist an appraisal of existence” (pp. 15–16). No longer a mere scholar, or the type of irrelevant empiric Leavis so hated in the person of C. P. Snow, the Leavisite theorist is the grand physician diagnosing all society’s ills. Literary artists and their writings, so far from forming the most important part of literature, become perfectly irrelevant—“quite apart”—with the medicocritic prescribing universally “of existence.”Samson’s treatment of Leavis is analytical, though enjoyably and consistently biographical. For instance, her final, and largest, chapter shows the moralist model of the literary critic (the “judge of values”) in action by detailing the history of Leavis’s complete reversal of estimation between T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. Leavis originally gave Eliot “hero-worship” (p. 162) and dismissed Lawrence as “mechanical” (p. 157). But concurrent with Eliot’s progress to Anglo-Catholicism, Leavis’s moral judgments overturned and, true to type, he increasingly censured Eliot’s writings by diagnosing problems in the man, while he grew to idolize Lawrence; ironically for “rescuing life from... inner mechanisation” (p. 169).Such inconstancy, here expressed in every word, Samson sees as an historical mark of character which places Leavis among the “Great Men of Ideas” (p. 172).Stephen OgdenSimon Fraser UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The history of philosophy is replete with attempts at invoking rationality as a means of directing and even subduing human desire and emotion. Understood as that which moves human beings to action, desire and emotion come to be associated with human freedom and rationality as a means of curbing that freedom. Plato, for instance, takes for granted a separation between thought and action that drives a wedge between our rational ability to exercise self-discipline and the free expression of desire and (...) emotion. Hobbes, on the other hand, replaces our internal ability for rational self-control with the external authority of the political State. So long as freedom and control are pitted against one another, human beings are incapable of attaining a symbiosis of these two elements of human action so essential to realizing true democracy. Unlike Plato, John Dewey sees in democracy the greatest potential for individual and social life. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the educational philosophy of Dewey, which culminates in an educational aesthetic, appeals to and makes the most of the symbiosis of freedom and self-control, emotion and reason. Dewey’s educational aesthetic not only offers an alternative to traditional methods of education, but also demonstrates how the goal of a democratic way of life is made feasible by means of intelligently guided self-discipline—a form of self-control guided by intelligence that is not a constraint upon freedom, but instead embodies greater opportunity for freedom. I trace the basis for this synthesis, in the social-political and pedagogical principles of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both Locke and Rousseau offer educational theories that begin turning our attention toward the essential partnership required of rationality and emotion. Dewey's educational aesthetic is then considered as a response to alienating forms of education that continue to pit control and freedom against one another, and which thwart the intellectual and emotional development necessary for autonomy and democratic forms of social organization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Foundations For Flow:A Philosophical Model For Studio InstructionKrista RiggsThe need for a new approach to studio instruction becomes evident when the current state of the profession and the effects of typical teaching methods are considered. In a profession with relatively little demand for a large supply of candidates for professional employment, realistically very few undergraduate music performance majors will achieve success as either orchestral players or as soloists. (...) Extreme competitiveness and the political hierarchy common in a typical music studio setting can squelch creativity and hinder a student's possibility to attain optimal experience in performance. Such an environment can pose a threat to a student's self-image and motivation, possibly becoming detrimental to the success of the student in any chosen occupation, whether ultimately within music or outside the profession.1As Roland Persson notes, studio teachers are generally hired primarily for their performance accomplishments and place in the historic lineage of their instrument's pedagogy without much regard for previous training in educational theories.2 With a lack of training in instructional methods or developmental theories, college music teachers tend to conduct lessons in the manner in which they were taught. Thus, little attention may be paid to individual differences or developmental issues.3 Studio instruction has also traditionally been approached [End Page 175] in a maestro-like, authoritarian manner with one-directional commands given as law from master teacher to seemingly subordinate students. Such a manner of teaching may contradict the tendency of creative individuals to show more deviant traits of critical and independent thought, possibly hindering the student's potential for artistic growth.4Many music students tend to gain much of their concept of self-worth based on how they perceive their musical ability to be assessed by their studio instructor.5 A dependency for approval can lead to the pursuit of unachievable perfection that can be detrimental to the emotional development and self-confidence of the student.6 A common focus on a final product in instruction rather than on the creative process of personal and artistic growth can also contribute to the detrimental setting of unrealistic goals and resulting lack of self-esteem in the student. Evaluation of artistically, intellectually, and emotionally developing students against an unattainable perceived aesthetic ideal or in comparison to other students of differing strengths and levels of development can hinder motivation while increasing anxiety, extreme competition, and negative emotional response in the learning experience.7 In a more personalized curriculum that centers on individual strengths and weaknesses through a mentoring approach, each student may be guided to develop the intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual faculties leading to optimal experience. From creative flow and the peak experiences of self-actualization comes intrinsic motivation for students to pursue creativity as a way of life, with further motivation to find moments for artistic expression and personal satisfaction in all aspects of their being.8A new model concerned with the development of the "whole" student as an individual can serve as a philosophical supplement to studio instructors who may not have received much training in developmental issues, educational theories, or related facets of the psychology of learning and performance. Although each aspect of the model can be considered separately, the potential of guiding a student toward the attainment of optimal experience is increased when all aspects are considered according to strengths and weaknesses present in the individual student. Incorporating the theories and ideas in studio instruction may help enhance a student's artistic and personal development while also strengthening a healthy mentoring relationship between teacher and student. While the model presents aspects of psychology alongside developmental and educational theories, the focus remains as a philosophical synthesis of diverse ideas into a unified system with flow at the center. Rather than aiming to deconstruct or refute opposing theories, the model synthesizes supporting ideas. As Estelle Jorgensen notes, the purpose of a synthesis-oriented or "synoptic" model is not so much to argue or refute contrasting views as it is to build upon the supporting theories and ideas of other writers. The "body of thought" serves an explanatory purpose [End Page 176] of the "clarification of terms and exposition... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art in Nature and Schools:Nils-UdoYoung Imm Kang Song (bio)IntroductionThe arts are an integral part of our culture, and they invite us to investigate, express ideas, and create aesthetically pleasing works. Of interest to educators is clear scholarship that links the arts to cognitive and intellectual development. The processes of creating art and viewing and interpreting art promote cognitive and skill development.1 Elliot Eisner, who has (...) written extensively on this topic, argues that "Artistic activity is a form of inquiry that depends on qualitative forms of intelligence."2 Eisner suggests that children can use art to question and reflect on sensory information from their daily lives, and from this reflection develop insight, awareness, and critical thinking skills.3 Expanding on this idea, many scholars suggest that sensory perceptions promote learning through reflection, thus affirming the link between sensory perception and cognitive processing.4 Greene also posits that the arts provide a reflective type of learning, in which students learn "new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and moving."5 This expressiveness develops from the creative nature of art and its ability to encourage students to "[learn] to learn."6This article focuses on how the arts heighten cognitive experience through the use of natural materials and sites and the engagement with the natural world. The arts expose viewers to new ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking about nature; this can lead to greater awareness of and motivation to act on behalf of nature. Arts-based experiences "encourage contemplative, reflective thought, which can extend environmental awareness, an essential basis for environmental understanding."7 Sharpening sensory and perceptive [End Page 96] skills through observation and creation can offer children insights into the mystery and metaphor of nature.8 Such a powerful experience often fosters aesthetic sensitivity and can also motivate students to act. To assist in this process, teachers can offer a context of factual information, creative idea exploration, interdisciplinary tools, and a sense of social awareness.9Eisner notes that simple natural components, such as those encountered in viewing or creating ecological art, can be enormously powerful when considered from an aesthetic perspective.10 He writes,A tree, for example, can be viewed as an investment in the value of one's property, as a species of flora, as a source of shade, or an expressive form that provides a certain quality of experience when one looks through its leaves just before sunset. The tree's aesthetic features become salient when we choose to perceive the expressive features of the tree.11Greene reinforces the idea that aesthetic understanding can be deeply engaging to learners and can highlight things that had previously gone unnoticed, thus providing new insights in the life of the viewer.12 Viewers experience new connections, identify new patterns, and think in entirely different ways that break from a more constricted viewpoint. It is this kind of fresh thinking that is needed in the field of environmental education, and which ecological art may in fact provide. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Nils-Udo, Circle of Calumet Bamboo, Calumet bamboo; 1990, Reunion, Indian Ocean. Photo by Nils-Udo.[End Page 97]In light of these ideas about aesthetics, ecology, and education, several questions are raised. How can an aesthetic experience with the works of an environmental artist lead children to take in more through their senses and to apply such radical openness in any subject that comes up for them? What really makes ecological artworks unique, not only as aesthetic experiences but as learning experiences? How can ecological art in educational settings inform, inspire, and engage students around environmental issues? In this article, I examine the artworks of Nils-Udo, a German artist, by looking at his art-making processes, intentions, and themes. Using illustrations of several of his major works situated in various natural environments, I consider how these artworks could initiate discussions and foster connections to classrooms while providing elementary and middle school students with the opportunities to view and ponder existing artworks, create their own natural artworks, and heighten their ecological awareness.The ArtistIn order to more deeply understand Nils-Udo's life and work, I interviewed... (shrink)

The article analyzes the works of Chinese artists of various historical eras who used a stylistic and thematic direction with the image of a plum blossom. The artists' appeal to images of nature to convey feelings and experiences contributed to the emergence of this image and its formation as a symbol of steadfastness and inflexibility of character. Thus, the subject of the proposed study is Chinese painting, the object is the formation of such a common motif as a plum blossom. (...) The purpose of this publication is to determine the main types of images of this image in Chinese traditional painting in the time interval from the VI century to the end of the XIV century — the most fruitful period of its formation and development. Plum blossom is of greater importance in the development of traditional landscape painting in China. For almost a millennium, the interpretation, compositional solution, as well as the technique of depicting this image have changed. The author's contribution to the development of the problem is a comprehensive analysis of images of plum blossoms in landscape paintings by Chinese artists of various historical eras, as well as the characteristics of the process of evolution and the features of the embodiment of this image. The paper traces the origins of this plot in the art works of Chinese artists, analyzes the processes of change and development of images, and characterizes the specifics of its external expression and internal content. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 487 Although this reviewer would have appreciated a fuller expression of the dialectical interdependency and synthetic elements holding between Fichte and Schelling than Schurr actually developed, his study is nevertheless an orderly and well-documented presentation of their fundamental views. The study can serve as a solid and professional introduction to the postKantian phase of German Idealism, and it most certainly deserves translation into English. LAWRENCES. STEPELEVICH (...) Villanova University Die Konstitution der Jl'sthetik in Wilhelm Diltheys Philosophie. By Michael Heinen. Abhandlungen zur Philosophie, Psychologie und P~dagogik, no. 100. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974. Pp. 220) Michael Heinen's book draws attention to Dilthey's interest in the original dimension of art experience. That interest has been the traditional stock in the trade of philosophers since the ancient Greeks, and most crucially since the subjectivization of the aesthetic sphere in the speculative thought of Kant and German idealism. But the point is that there is a gap between those philosophers who speculated about perception, aesthetic pleasure, and the enjoyment of the senses, and who tried to justify those speculations through wide-ranging inquiries into the order of the world and its understanding through our ego and its potentialities--betweenthem and Dilthey, who knows that this age-old enthusiasm for metaphysical and epistemological inquiries has become obsolete. The earlier display of erudition may be vast and awe inspiring. But in Dilthey's mind an interest in those inquiries is no longer foremost. Commendable as all of them may be, they approach the world of the work of art and its experience from the outside, in an independent, self-sufficient, and almost autonomous manner, without facing up to the horizon of the world in which an artistic work is rooted. This horizon of the world emerges as the leitmotif of Heinen's book. Heinen reminds the reader that those who create are immersed in this horizon. The conditions under which they work, the tools they have, the methods they use, the materials that are available to them, the ideas they have in mind--all this can be traced back to the world which surrounds them. Moreover, they belong to an historical world. They are oriented toward a past they remember, a future they anticipate; and all they think, or feel, or will, stands in an historical context, long before they are conscious of themselves in this respect. Heinen rightly points out that this creates a problem not only for the analysis of the artistic expression but for the field of hermeneutics, for the method of understanding this expression. It is not so much something that is understood in its meaning by referring to an ego, or a system of cognitive faculties. It emerges from the socio-historical world; and we must place it back in the same horizon from which it emerges. Heinen agrees with Dilthey that we always find ourselves within the whole of life; and when understanding something--a work of art or any other historical object--we have to do it within the full context of life to which we belong. It is an objectification of life that we have to understand from life itself. This may help to explain why a work of art is more than an object created by an artist through his inspiration and the unconscious production of his genius. From his Hegelian perspective Heinen tells us that whenever an artist is involved in the creation of something he is dependent upon the world in which he lives and upon a dialectic between himself and the horizon of life. Heinen expressly defends the probability of this dialectic in a chapter on the presuppositions of Dilthey's aesthetics (pp. 134-162). He studies Dilthey's attempt to discover a methodological basis for the human sciences. He calls attention to the remarkable sequence of sketches in which Dilthey distinguishes between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, between human sciences that, in one way or another, deal with historical and other manifestations of 488 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY life and inner experience, and natural sciences that deal with phenomena, with objects of nature. Dilthey is profoundly conscious and frank in announcing that the human sciences also treat phenomena or objects. But... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dante’s Vision and the Circle of KnowledgeAnthony RodaDante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, by Giuseppe Mazzotta; 328 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, $37.50.Future students of Dante, The Divine Comedy, literature, criticism, the history of ideas, theology, philosophy, and many other disciplines will be in permanent debt to Giuseppe Mazzotta for his keen study of Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge. While tracing the (...) principal streams of Western thought which irrigate Dante’s fertile genius, Mazzotta reconstructs the intellectual topography of Dante’s Europe and show how “l’altissimo poeta” reorders and refines it and arrives at a radical reformulation of the foundation of knowledge in contrast to the standard philosophical and theological currents of the times. This new vision of the foundation of knowledge is the central concern of The Divine Comedy which for Mazzotta provides a world view no less monumental than the synthesis of the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions of Thomas Aquinas. Perhaps, more so, for he argues Dante’s great epic provides not only an alternative epistemology but one which captures much more adequately the human historical experience.Vico’s insights, a thorough familiarity of Dante’s sources and his alert appreciation of the unique treatment these sources receive in the context of “la commedia divina” supply Mazzotta with a theoretical framework for his own brilliant critical, historical, and etymological analyses. He marshals these researches around his overriding concern to show that inherent within the Comedy is the view of “poetry as nothing less than the foundation of all possible knowledge” (p. 3). Dante’s radical claim is designed to provide an account which accords with the educational and intellectual development of the individual within history. Consequently for Mazzotta, Dante’s poetic (metaphorical) mode attempts to reconcile what must have been an intellectual and moral landscape of hopeless contradictory systems and projects. Dante’s poem [End Page 194] provides a vivid survey of the breakdown of human bonds, human projects, and human justice and suggests a corrective that escaped the methods of reason, as well as those of the mystic’s. Since both of these are at bottom antihistorical, they attempted to deny conflict and uncertainty (Dewey’s ultimate traits of experience).The above comments should suggest both the general appeal as well as, and I must emphasize, the high level of scholarship Mazzotta exhibits in his project which is arranged into three parts. The first part (Chapter 1–5) is devoted to “poetry and the arts of language,” and a quick glance at these chapters reveals that it is concerned with that part of the liberal arts called the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic). In addition to their educational role, the author examines the role and intricate connections these disciplines have to the central social structures of the times. Consequently, these are not mere sterile academic exercises but serious attempts that show the intimate connections between methods of knowing (discourses) and social structures, especially authority in all of its modes (moral, intellectual, political, etc.). Further, by virtue of this, he shows the need for a reexamination of knowledge which does justice to the lived experiences of the individual and to which the second part (Chapters 6–8) is devoted. Briefly, this means coming to terms with language, memory, imagination, dreams and visions, and that great nightmare, human history. It also invokes the aesthetic (poetic/metaphorical) foundations of all knowledge in contrast to the Cartesian dismissal. The claim, however, enlightening for the Comedy, is controversial as a general tenet and demands will be forthcoming for an evaluation, even though there is much good work in philosophy which lends support to it, e.g., Stephen Pepper’s World Hypotheses, R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art, and Lewis E. Hahn’s A Contextualistic Theory of Perception, etc.In the last part (Chapters 9–11) Mazzotta argues that Dante’s final organizing vision figures the world sub specie ludi. These chapters examine the problems and experiences of order, transgression and exile which for Mazzotta demand a Theologia Ludens whose roots are imbedded deep in Aristotle’s Ethics and expressed by the virtue of eutrapelia, “a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Art of Theater—A PrécisJames R. Hamilton (bio)In The Art of Theater I propose and explain a claim that many theater people hold true in some form but, so far as I can tell, have defended in a manner that has had almost no success outside discussions among themselves.1 The claim proposed is that, in an unqualified way, theater is a form of art. By that I mean (...) theatrical performances are what are created in the practice of theater and that theatrical performances are works of art because they can be picked out and appreciated in the same ways we appreciate other kinds of artworks.2The agenda I set for the book is to state and explain what that claim comes to—exactly and in detail. Accordingly, most of the book consists of explanations of what else must be true if the claim is true, together with arguments defending the truth of those entailments. Some of the material consists of clarifying what the claim does not entail, and some passages contain arguments to show that alternative claims have problems that this one does not. Of these, I have allowed the explanation and clarification materials to carry the burden. Many philosophers and literary theorists are likely to find the claim incomprehensible because they have inherited, rather than critically accepted, a conception of theater as centrally dependent on literary texts.3 Philosophers, literary theorists, and theater theorists are better served by the explanations and clarifications I offer, however, because they show the claim can withstand the immediate objections or worries likely to arise.The direct argumentation I offer for the claim is historical. Indeed, I begin the book by tracing how theater has been conceived and practiced in the European theatrical tradition since the 1850s. I start there and then for several reasons. First, it is the beginning of a period of great achievement in theater, when literary artists began again to write for theater. Second, the same period also gave rise to a now dominant conception of theater: namely, [End Page 4] the idea that theatrical performances, or at least the most often performed, are events that are dependant primarily if not exclusively on literary texts. Finally, the 1850s were also the beginning of a period in which theater people were both doing and thinking about theater in ways that resisted that very same dominant conception. The conclusion I come to in tracing this history is that—without always intending to and sometimes by intending the opposite—theater’s theoretical practitioners have put us in a position to see the truth of the claim that theatrical performance itself is an independent form of art. Assured we can see that truth in the actual historical practices of theater, even in its most self-consciously text-oriented period, I then proceed to explain and clarify the claim.To begin with, the enormous success of the conjunction of literature and theater in late European theater practice means that any view of the art status of theatrical performances must explain the relation between a performance and a literary text, at least when a literary text is used in the performance. This is the first bit of explanation I undertake. A number of models of this relationship have been proposed, and I survey three of the primary ones. First, the “literary” model holds that performances illustrate or, at best, interpret the text and exist as a means to present the content—or the interpreted content—of the text in a performance mode. Second, the “two-text” model holds that the content of the literary text must be translated, adapted, transformed, reconstructed, or otherwise “reinscribed” in the language of theater. A third model, popular in analytic aesthetics, attempts to piggyback an account of theatrical works, texts, and theatrical performances on the well-developed ontology of musical works, scores, and musical performance.4 This third model might provide the right ontology of theatrical performances. Before we try to determine what kinds of things or events make our experience of theater what it is, however, first we should seek the best explanation of that experience. And that is the task I undertake in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 292-307 [Access article in PDF] The Rhetoric of the Geometrical Method Spinoza's Double Strategy Christopher P. Long A double strategy may be apprehended in the first definitions, axioms and propositions of Spinoza's Ethics: the one is rhetorical, the other, systematic. Insofar as these opening passages constitute a geometrical argument that leads ultimately to the strict monism that lies at the heart of Spinoza's (...) philosophy, they function systematically as grounding principles. However, insofar as they are designed to uncover errors at the heart of the Cartesian system, they function rhetorically as a critique of Descartes's equivocal theory of substance. The geometrical mode of presentation lends an aura of necessity to the systematic strategy and tends to eclipse the rhetorical strategy that functions as a critique of Cartesian dualism. 1 To this extent, the systematic strategy itself functions rhetorically. On the other hand, to the extent that any seventeenth-century attempt to establish a monistic system would inevitably have had to involve a critique of Cartesian dualism, the rhetorical strategy itself functions systematically. Thus, although two distinct strategies are simultaneously discernible in the opening passages of the Ethics, the two work together, each arguing on a different front, to establish Spinoza's monism. By focusing on the rhetorical side of this double strategy, the underlying nature of Spinoza's critique of Descartes can be clarified and certain gaps in the systematic, geometrical argument for monism can be explained. Descartes's theory of substance The rhetorical strategy Spinoza employs at the outset of the Ethics involves a brilliant use of equivocation and ambiguity designed to draw a reader dedicated to Cartesian dualism into the heart of an argument designed to [End Page 292] undermine this dualism itself. The impetus behind this rhetorical critique is surely Spinoza's dissatisfaction with Descartes's theory of substance. 1. Descartes's equivocation Descartes's theory rests upon a fundamental equivocation: on the one hand, the term "substance" is meant strictly to designate that which is absolutely self-sufficient, namely, God; on the other hand, Descartes allows for a weaker understanding of substance, which pertains to those things (specifically res cogitans and res extensa) that require only the concurrence of God in order to exist (Principles I, 51-52; AT VIIIA24-25). 2 Thus, for Descartes, although God is, strictly speaking, the only substance, there remains a sense in which both res cogitans and res extensa may be understood as substances as well.Ultimately, this equivocal understanding of substance may be traced to a tension internal to Descartes between the Aristotelian notion of substance as underlying subject and the seventeenth-century mutation of that notion, which came to be defined in terms of causal self-sufficiency. 3 Jonathan Bennett traces the source of this mutation back to the view held by Aristotle that the existence of some property depends upon its being instantiated--that is, there can be no courage unless there exists someone courageous. He continues his interesting argument thus: This suggests that there is a relation of dependence running from properties to the things that have them and not conversely. The dependence would be logical: the thesis must be that "existent but uninstantiated property" is conceptually defective, not merely contrary to physics. Thus, one mark of a genuine thing, or substance, is its not being logically dependent for its existence on anything else. (Bennett 1984, 56) The development of this line of thinking leads to the conception of substance we find both in Descartes's Principles and in Spinoza's Ethics, namely, that a substance must not causally depend on anything outside of itself for its existence. 4 However, with Descartes, what emerges out of this tradition is a hybrid understanding of substance in which the term "substance" is not reserved simply for that which is utterly self-sufficient (God), but extends to those things that depend only upon the concurrence of God for their existence (rescogitans and resextensa). This bifurcated understanding of substance seems to stem from the distinction at work in [End Page 293] Aristotle... (shrink)