A philosopher and a cognitive neuroscientist conversed with Buddhist lama Tilmann Lhündrup Borghardt (TLB) about the unresolved phenomenological concerns and logical questions surrounding “pure” consciousness or minimal phenomenal experience (MPE), a quasi-contentless, non-dual state whose phenomenology of “emptiness” is often described in terms of the phenomenal quality of luminosity that experienced meditators have reported occurs in deep meditative states. Here, we present the excerpts of the conversation that relate to the question of how it is possible to first have and (...) later retrieve such non-dual states of selflessness and timelessness that are unrelated to sensory input. According to TLB, a “pure” experience of consciousness contains the phenomenal quality of luminous clarity, which is experienced solely in the transitional phase from the non-dual state of absolute emptiness to the state of minimal emptiness, when the person gradually returns to duality. However, this quality of luminous clarity can also be experienced in non-minimal states as in the experiential mode of being awakened. TLB describes this transition as a kind of ephemeral afterglow in the form of a maximally abstract phenomenal quality, i.e., luminosity, which justifies the conclusion of having been in a state of “pure” consciousness. (shrink)

We are naturally disposed to believe of ourselves and others that we are free: that what we do is often and to a considerable extent ‘up to us’ via the exercise of a power of choice to do or to refrain from doing one or more alternatives of which we are aware. In this article, I probe thesource and epistemic justification of our ‘freedom belief’. I propose an account that (unlike most) does not lean heavily on our first-personal experience (...) of choice and action, and instead regards freedom belief as a priori justified. I will then consider possible replies available toincompatibilists to the contention made by some compatibilists that the ‘privileged’ epistemic status of freedom belief (which my account endorses) supports a minimalist, and therefore compatibilist view of the nature of freedom itself. (shrink)

In the waking state, in the absence of meta-awareness, mind wandering with specific contents can lead to negative mood. Such negative mood can be incorporated into dreaming according to the continuity hypothesis of dreaming. In this paper we argue that in the presence of what we call ‘sustained phenomenal meta-awareness’, negative mood would not follow mind wandering in waking. Sustained phenomenal meta-awareness has a non-sensory, non-affective phenomenal character. It is essentially intransitive, prereflectively self-aware, non-propositional, non-conceptual and devoid (...) of subject-object structure. In other words, this unique kind of meta-awareness is non-representational. Evidence is then provided that such sustained phenomenal meta-awareness can be incorporated into the subsequent dream state as non-dual lucid dreaming in which, again, no negative mood would arise. Based on the latter observation, we have coined the term ‘mindful mind wandering’ and defined it as mind wandering in the presence of sustained phenomenal meta-awareness. We argue that not only does mindful mind wandering not lead to negative mood in waking, but also its incorporation into dreaming, as non-dual lucid dreaming, result in a state that is free of negative affection. (shrink)

While the general topic of agency has been collaboratively explored in philosophy and psychology, mental action seems to resist such an interdisciplinary research agenda. Since it is difficult to empirically access mental agency beyond externally measurable behavior, the topic is mainly treated philosophically. However, this has not prevented philosophers from substantiating their arguments with psychological findings, but predominantly with those which allegedly limit the scope and conscious controllability of mental action in favor of automated subpersonal processes. By contrast, the call (...) for a methodological extension through introspective access is particularly noticeable among proponents of a wider significance of mental action. Taking this up, it is shown how an empirical-introspective methodology can obtain a differentiated structure of mental activities occurring in directed thought. The empirical results gained under replicable conditions with 32 participants lead to insights about mental activity regarding (1) immanent causation, (2) content-free intention, (3) active receptivity and (4) its selective openness to mental content, and (5) different levels of observational awareness. These arguments speak for assigning an agentive status to the activities studied and hence for a more significant role of mental action in cognitive processes. (shrink)

This article holds that ability to support one’s opinions with arguments, awareness of the arguments for other opinions, and insight into the superiority of some arguments are basic requirements for rational discourse. Based on a content analysis of Swiss Italian newspaper coverage of a controversy over a smoke-free law introduced and finally implemented in the canton of Ticino in 2007 and on a five-wave panel survey of public opinion on the issue, the article describes elements of the (...) argumentative structure of news coverage of this issue and relates them to rationality requirements. It finds that the newspapers offered a wide variety of arguments to readers (articulation function) when political activity to introduce a ban intensified, and especially when arguments mattered as a referendum approached. Papers displayed a reasonable and differentiated picture of arguments, contributing to a unique pattern of weighting and evaluating them. Neither newspaper coverage nor public opinion showed much sign of change, which speaks against a reaction to superior arguments. Finally, the newspaper bias towards arguments for the ban and their inclination to publish objections to arguments against may have contributed to a widespread lack of awareness of arguments against the ban among people favouring it. Thus, evidence of the rationality of argumentative structures is mixed, and further enquiry into this subject is encouraged. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Free Will in the Light of Neuropsychiatry”Benjamin Libet (bio)Is Free Will Incompatible with Neuroscience?Sean Spence sets forth some interesting approaches to the issue of free will. His concepts are provocative and his marshalling of related quotations is informative.However, I shall argue with some of his crucial assumptions, in a way that affects the validity of some of Spence’s major conclusions. The latter are (...) that “conscious experience is always temporally postneural activity and thus... ‘caused’ not causal. Our ‘control’ is a sense which may be lost.... Our sense of agency is apparently illusory.”I have, of course, no quarrel with the view that even a fully voluntary act is initiated unconsciously (non-consciously). That condition was in fact demonstrated experimentally by us (Libet et al. 1983) when we found that cerebral neural activity (“readiness potential”) precedes the subject’s awareness of his/her intention or wish to act by at least 350 msec. This applied to fully self-initiated acts that occurred without “pre-planning” by the subject of when to move. (Incidentally, those finding have been replicated by others—see Keller and Heckhansen, 1990 with commentary thereon by Libet 1992, and Wong et al. 1988).However, we also found that conscious intention did precede that actual motor act by about 200 msec. That left open the potentiality for the conscious function to control the outcome of the process that was initiated in the brain unconsciously (see Libet 1985). We have all had the experience of consciously suppressing or vetoing the performance of an urge or intention to act. The 200 msec interval provides sufficient time in which the voluntary process could be stopped, before final activation of the motor area about 50 msec before the act. We were able to show that subjects could veto an act in the 100–200 msec interval before the expected time for the action.Spence dismisses this free will potentiality in the control or veto of a voluntary process. He says: “It is flawed because the ‘decision’ (in consciousness) to act or not to act is itself the ‘result’ of preceding neural activity.” This argument is based on my own evidence that a period of up to 500 msec of cerebral activity is required to produce a conscious sensory experience (Libet 1993, for review).But conscious control of a process is not the same as becoming aware of the volitional intent (Libet 1985, 563–564). Control implies the imposing of a change, in this case after the appearance of the awareness of intention to act. Conscious control may not necessarily require the same neural “time-on” feature that precedes the appearance of awareness per se. There is presently [End Page 95] no directly applicable evidence against the appearance of a conscious control function without prior neural processes specific to its initiation.In short, one cannot cavalierly dismiss the possibility of a conscious free will function on the basis of a belief that such a control function must be itself initiated unconsciously by prior specific neural processes. The argument that conscious free will control is simply a useful delusion must still be regarded as a philosophical belief, not a scientifically demonstrated proposition.Spence goes on to suggest that “Consciousness is necessary for purposeful (intentional) action but it is not the initiator.” But if Spence is consistent in his view that all conscious functions are preceded by specific neural activities that initiate the function, then his putative role for consciousness would have been itself initiated unconsciously. How, then, would consciousness be “performing (purposeful, intentional) actions with subtlety and invention” if it is simply an after-effect of the responsible cerebral process? It would appear that Spence is postulating an active role for consciousness in directing the course of neural activities carrying out purposeful, intentional actions. That is the kind of potentiality I was suggesting must be kept open, but one that Spence dismissed elsewhere as “flawed.”On a technical point: The Grey Walter experiment is cited as evidence for postulated effects of timing, in the “illusion” of self-initiation of an act. However, that experimental result was simply due to the fact that the motor cortex initiates the command... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Free Will in the Light of Neuropsychiatry”G. Lynn Stephens (bio)A necessary condition of our having free will is that we initiate some of our actions by our own will or decision. Spence argues that, in light of certain empirical findings, we can accept that willing causes action, only if we acknowledge that willing is a non-conscious phenomenon. “If the notion of free will (...) is retained... it will be a free will which is essentially non-conscious.... [A] conscious free will (in the sense of consciousness initiating action) is incompatible with the evidence....” I shall argue that Spence’s conclusion depends upon a highly questionable understanding of what it is for a decision to be conscious.The evidence to which Spence refers above comes from experimental studies by Libet. This work suggests that, at least for simple motor performances, we become aware of willing the action only after the act has been initiated. This raises the possibility that our subjective experience of willing an action generally follows rather than precedes initiation of the relevant act and, hence, does not cause that action.What does all this entail concerning the causal efficacy of willing or deciding? Spence carefully refrains from drawing the conclusion that decisions never cause actions. Rather he concludes that “conscious decisions do not cause acts.... “Our decision or freedom is illusory (if by these terms we mean conscious phenomena).” We can continue to maintain that our decisions sometimes initiate actions, but only provided that we regard our decisions as non-conscious.In order to evaluate the claim that conscious decisions do not cause actions, we need to distinguish two questions: (1) Does my decision, of which I am conscious, cause me to do A? and (2) Does my being conscious of my decision cause me to do A?We might answer (1) in the affirmative, but (2) in the negative. That is, it might be true that my decision to do A caused me to do A and that I was conscious of that decision, but false that my being conscious of my decision caused me to do A. Indeed, we might suppose that, although my decision caused me to do A, I did not become conscious of that decision until after I had done A. How could this be? Suppose that my subjective experience of deciding to do A results from an (internal) perceptual process and that this process takes time. In that case it is possible that, having decided to do A, it requires more time for me to become conscious of that decision than is required for the decision to initiate my doing A. By the time I become aware of my decision, I have already done what I decided to do.The evidence Spence offers is incompatible with the hypothesis that the subjective experience of [End Page 97] my decision to do A causes me to do A, but quite compatible with the hypothesis that my decision to do A, of which I was conscious, caused me to do A. When he expresses his point by saying, “decisions to act arise prior to our consciousness of them,” or “The role of consciousness in volition is not that of initiator,” he is drawing the conclusion warranted by his evidence.However, he goes beyond his evidence when he says, “Thus our decision or freedom is illusory (if by these terms we mean conscious phenomena),” or “Conscious decision do not cause acts.” To justify these conclusions he needs to argue that something counts as a conscious decision only if we become conscious of it at precisely the instant at which it occurs. (Compare: Something counts as an event that we see, only if we begin to see it precisely at the instant at which it occurs.) Absent some defense of this view, a defense provided nowhere in Spence’s paper, we may continue to maintain that conscious decisions do cause actions.Related ArticlesFeature Article: Free Will in the Light of NeuropsychiatryCommentary: Commentary by FrithCommentary: Commentary by LibetCommentary: Commentary by StephensResponse: Response to the CommentariesG. Lynn Stephens G. Lynn Stephens, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama... (shrink)

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen may be the most acclaimed graphic novel of the twentieth century. This chapter examines how it explores two metaphysical questions: What is the nature of time? Does free will exist? Moore and Gibbons explore these questions together, illuminating connections between time and free will through connections between the graphic novel’s form and content. The chapter introduces three views of the nature of time: presentism, the view that only the present exists; growing-universe (...) theory, the view that only the present and past exist; and eternalism, the view that past, present, and future exist. Because of Moore and Gibbons’ distinct use of images and words within the visual structure and their depiction of a character who is simultaneously aware of past, present, and future events, the chapter deduces that the operative view in Watchmen is eternalism. After discussing three views of the existence of free will, the chapter then argues that eternalism entails that people could not have acted otherwise than they actually acted. Hence the operative view in Watchmen is either determinism, according to which no one has free will because no one could have done otherwise, or compatibilism, according to which people can have free will because having it merely requires having acted. The chapter concludes that the operative view is compatibilism. Finally it responds to the objection that compatibilism is mistaken. If no one could have done otherwise, then determinism must be true. (shrink)

In August 2017, Google executives found themselves in a difficult position. An internal memo written by a disgruntled software engineer, James Damore, had just gone viral. In this memo, Damore claimed that the relatively small number of women in the tech industry was partly due to biological factors, and that many of Google’s diversity efforts were therefore counterproductive. The contents of this memo were offensive to many (and thus were having a negative impact on the overall workplace environment), but the (...) executives were aware that the wrong reaction to it would at least partially vindicate Damore’s claims about the lack of open discussion at Google. In the end, after two days of controversy, Google leadership decided to fire Damore on the grounds that he had violated the company’s code of conduct. This case gives students an opportunity to explore the numerous issues raised by Damore’s memo and the controversy surrounding it. Did Google handle this case properly? Was firing Damore the right thing to do? How could the situation have been handled more effectively? (shrink)

Background: how mind functions is subject to continuing scientific discussion. A simplistic approach says that, since no convincing way has been found to model subjective experience, mind cannot exist. A second holds that, since mind cannot be described by classical physics, it must be described by quantum physics. Another perspective concerns mind's hypothesized ability to interact with the world of quanta: it should be responsible for reduction of quantum wave packets; physics producing 'Objective Reduction' is postulated to form the basis (...) for mind-matter interactions. This presentation describes results derived from a new approach to these problems. It is based on well-established biology involving physics not previously applied to the fields of mind, or consciousness studies, that of critical feedback instability. -/- Methods: 'self-organized criticality' in complexity biology places system loci of control at critical instabilities, physical properties of which, including information properties, are presented. Their elucidation shows that they can model hitherto unexplained properties of experience. -/- Results: All results depend on physical properties of critical instabilities. First, at least one feed-back or feed-forward loop must have feedback gain, g = 1: information flows round the loop impress perfect images of system states back on themselves: they represent processes of perfect self-observation. This annihilates system quanta: system excitations are instability fluctuations, which cannot be quantized. Major results follow: -/- 1. Information vectors representing criticality states must include at least one attached information loop denoting self-observation. -/- 2. Such loop structures are attributed a function, 'registering the state's own existence', explaining -/- a. Subjective 'awareness of one's own presence' -/- b. How content-free states of awareness can be remembered (Jon Shear) -/- c. Subjective experience of time duration (Immanuel Kant) -/- d. The 'witness' property of experience – often mentioned by athletes 'in the zone' -/- e. The natural association between consciousness and intelligence -/- This novel, physically and biologically sound approach seems to satisfactorily model subjectivity. -/- Further significant results follow: -/- 1. Registration of external information in excited states of systems at criticality reduces external wave-packets: the new model exhibits 'Objective Reduction' of wave packets. -/- 2. High internal coherence (postulated by Domash & Penrose) leading to a. Non-separable information vector bundles. b. Non-reductive states (Chalmers's criterion for experience). -/- 3. Information that is: a. encoded in coherence negentropy; b. non-digitizable, and therefore c. computationally without digital equivalent (posited by Penrose). -/- Discussion and Conclusions: instability physics implies anharmonic motion, preventing excitation quantization, and totally different from the quantum physics of simple harmonic motion at stability. Instability excitations are different from anything hitherto conceived in information science. They can model aspects of mind never previously treated, including genuine subjectivity, objective reduction of wave-packets, and inter alia all properties given above. (shrink)

What is it for a picture to be more realistic, or more depictive, than another? Without committing to any thesis as to what depiction consists in, I show that degrees of depictiveness are grounded in a certain relation between two basic kinds of differences between pictures: configurational differences and content differences. A picture is thus more depictive just in case it is seen as having fewer nondepictive features, whereas a nondepictive feature is individuated through the susceptibility of the picture's (...) configuration to change without entailing any change in the picture's content. (shrink)

Topicality is due to the fact that self-identity as the identity of the subject and the result of its self-determination now is explained with the two-sided ascent of human to freedom, when at first the subject realizes the need for self-disclosure of its own essence, the embodiment of human nature, and then it overcomes its dependence from its internal nature and the generation of identity begins as a manifestation of free will and creativity of the person of culture. The (...) purpose of the study is to clarify the essence and the meaning of the personality identity as a result of its self-determination in the educational environment. Objectives of the research: distinguishing of the lines of theoretical interpretation of the personality identity; the characteristic of identity as a form of personal being in the educational environment, which ideally integrates the inner world of a person and its external world into a single psycho-social universe on the subjective level; clarification of the fundamental aspects of the personal identity understanding, its main factors within the framework of the common structure of the educational environment; consideration of the phenomenon of identity from the point of view of the subject in the context of the problem of intersubjectivity. An analysis of recent research and publications that initiated the solution of the problem: the use of articles by the authors Bart R., Weber M., Ilenkov E., Klepko S., Kultaieva M., Oleksenko R.. Scientific novelty is contained in the identification of the high role of interaction in the educational environment on the intercultural level, which is conditioned with the general attitude towards the subject as a representative of one or another group of the educational process subjects, in the distinguishing of the content range of identity. The results of the research : the person is determined to be the center, the subject of the educational environment, whose positive changes can help to talk about the effectiveness of this environment, when it as an essential element of society becomes a self-organized and managed multifunctional open pedagogical system, within which a personality recognizes oneself as a socially developed integrity. Conclusion: identity as a result of self-determination of personality in the circumstances of the educational environment arises as a problem of finding of the meaning of life and of person oneself in the domain of sociocultural and personal values. It is the concept that gives an opportunity to analyze this environment from the point of view of the effectiveness of the growth of self-awareness and subjective activity of its participants. (shrink)

Spiritual awareness can help survivors be free from the shackles of COVID-19 by offering effective and efficient solutions while still adhering to health protocols. This qualitative research article aims to reveal the spiritual experiences of COVID-19 survivors and the role of spirituality in the healing process. The data were randomly collected from 10 COVID-19 survivors as primary sources from Java, Indonesia, who vary in age (30+), gender and profession. In contrast, secondary data were taken from the survivors whose (...) experiences are shared online. Their information was later categorised based on concepts, attitudes and contents and then confirmed (cross-referenced) with previous studies of COVID-19 survivors’ spiritual experiences and their contribution to the healing process. Statements from informants were adapted to spiritual concepts, distinguished by frequency and interpreted. This study revealed that spiritual experiences contribute significantly to the healing process, enabling COVID-19 survivors to overcome fear and alleviate depression, thereby bolstering the immune system. They could be strengthened by recognising the pandemic as Allah’s will. Such recognition enables individuals to accept the disease better and the outcome can be improved through worship. This spiritual wellness contributes to survivors’ physical health, one of the most critical factors in recovery. Contribution: This study contributes to coping with COVID-19 with a spiritual approach practised by its survivors by practising Islamic rituals to get closer to Allah. Spiritual endeavours can reduce survivors’ stress and boost their inner immune system so they remain optimistic, which eventually helps them recover. (shrink)

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

Lucid dreaming refers to a dream state characterized by the dreamers awareness of being in a dream and being able to volitionally control its content. The aim of this study was to find neurophysiological evidence for the 7 criteria of lucid dreaming proposed by Paul Tholey. Each of the criteria was analyzed separately with regard to its underlying neurocircuits. We hypothesized that not one, but many regions are involved in the state of lucid dreaming. Our results have shown (...) a satisfactory overlap of the theoretical components and the brain regions activated during a lucid dream. During lucid dreaming, a brain network seems to emerge, that is more than the sum of its parts. Further research is needed to understand the psychoneurological underpinnings of lucid dreams. (shrink)

Mental health, in one awake, guarantees that person knowledge of the central phenomenon-contents of his own mind, under an adequate classificatory heading. This is the primary thesis of the paper. That knowledge is not itself a phenomenon-content, and usually is achieved in no way. Rather, it stems from the natural accessibility of mental phenomenon-contents to wakeful consciousness. More precisely, when mental normality obtains, such knowledge necessarily obtains in wakeful consciousness. This thesis conjoins a version of Cartesianism with the concepts (...) of mental health and human nature. Demonstration of the thesis requires that we show that a particular human mental potential fails fully to be realized when such self-awareness is impaired. That potential is for consciousness of the world (w-Cs), wakefulness. W-Cs divides into consciousness of the outer world (ow-Cs), and consciousness of the inner world (iw-Cs), and we need to demonstrate an essential dependence of ow-Cs upon iw-Cs. Now w-Cs is the adoption of the correct occurrent epistemological posture to the world, and this involves free rational determination of occurrent cognitive attitudes via the internal systematized knowledge of the world, which requires adequate awareness of mental phenomenon-contents. Therefore ow-Cs needs iw-Cs. This is displayed in mental structural accounts of hypnotic, drunken, and psychotic disturbances of consciousness. (For we endorse a structural account of mental health.) We show how failures of self-consciousness entail disturbed modes of determination of cognitive attitudes by the knowledge-system, which is loss of contact with the personal yet true internal representation of the world, which is loss of contact with reality, which is a disturbance both of w-Cs and of consciousness itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Non-Cartesian Frameworks”James Phillips (bio)Whither psychoanalytic theory and practice? This is the question raised by Louis Berger as he confronts psychoanalysis’s response to the collapse of Cartesianism that has shaken the foundations of other humanist disciplines (as well as the natural sciences) and has finally caught up with Freud’s heirs. Anyone wanting evidence of this shakeup in psychoanalysis need only consult the final 1994 issue of the (...) International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. For the seventy-fifth anniversary edition of the journal, the editors organized a symposium on “The Conceptualization and Communication of Clinical Facts in Psychoanalysis.” In his foreword to the 300-page issue, the editor, David Tuckett (1994, 865–70), evokes the theoretical pluralism that has beset the field and asserts what is the presupposition of all the articles that follow: There are no theory-free facts, and the challenge now is to deal with this reality.I think I can assume, however, that for Berger these papers would mostly fall into his category of “not going far enough.” He invokes a Cartesian representationalism, critiqued variously by Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Castoriadis, that continues to infect even such discussions of fact and theory in psychoanalysis as those in the landmark volume of the International Journal. Thus, though that volume may represent the official announcement of the death of positivism in psychoanalysis, it stops short of announcing the profession’s entry into the postmodern era. Indeed, it should be noted that in much contemporary discussion, an awareness of the issues of theoretical pluralism and fact/theory dilemmas rests quite comfortably with the most blatant examples of representational thinking. The object-relations tradition, for instance, remains such a dominant force that most of us would have a hard time giving up our talk of internal objects and internal representations.Berger’s presentation of the three critics of representational thought is clear and enlightening. The inclusion of Castoriadis is important because he, unlike Heidegger and Wittgenstein, is a clinician. Berger’s application of this critique of representation to psychoanalysis, and specifically to the question of the theory/practice relationship, is also developed in a meaningful way. (For a development of the critique of representational thinking that emphasizes the role of Locke in expanding the Cartesian tradition, see Nasser 1994.) Since I am in agreement with the thrust of Berger’ s presentation and have little to add to it, I will focus my comments on one area that I think does warrant further discussion—the relations between the postmodern and other postempiricist or postpositivist traditions. Although some writers (e.g., Leary 1994; Silverman 1994) tend to group movements such as postmodernism, hermeneutics, [End Page 187] and social constructionism together, Berger’s argument singles out postmodernism as the only truly nonrepresentational postempiricist movement.Of the other non-Cartesian traditions, Berger says that “their tacit retention of representationalism (including its concomitant, the theory/practice dichotomy) demonstrates their failure to identify, adequately understand, or avoid key Cartesian difficulties and limitations. They fail to appreciate the effects which accompany enframing.” He adds later: “I have been making my point with examples drawn mostly from the American Middle School, but I submit that any analytic position that invokes models or analogous logical formalisms—e.g., hermeneutic, self-psychological, constructionist, action linguistic—is subject to the identical criticisms.” I wish to take up the case of hermeneutics and question whether its differentiation from postmodernism does indeed revolve around the issue of representational thought. Sorting this issue out will bear on the final conclusions of Berger’s paper. It is true, as Berger points out, that hermeneutic discussion in psychoanalysis often involves a comparison of (representationally articulated) models; but that is not the whole story regarding hermeneutics. Remember, after all, that Heidegger—directly in Being and Time (1962, 62), and indirectly through his profound influence on Gadamer—was a pivotal figure in the development of hermeneutics. Heidegger considered his analysis of man’s precognitive enmeshment in the world to be a “hermeneutic of Dasein.” For his part, Gadamer’s analysis of man’s relations to others and to the world concludes in a relationship that is mediated through a language that is fully dialectical and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Yet Another Attempt to Salvage Pristine Perceptions!Monima ChadhaIn a recent debate in this journal, Arindam Chakrabarti (2004) astutely identifies a new problem space that has opened up in the debate on nirvikalpaka perceptions. He indicates that the problem space is a grid arising out of the possible answers to three distinct but interrelated controversies. In this comment I primarily concern myself with the first two of these controversies. (...) It is to be expected that the discussion will have some bearing on the third issue, but I will not have much to say about that directly. I begin by listing the first two controversies, in Chakrabarti's terms:1. Do all our perceptions involve the use of concepts, or recognitions of general features, or do some perceptions involve purely concept-free content?2. Are our perceptions necessarily or possibly self-aware or are there awarenesses that the subject of the awareness is necessarily unaware of?A little familiarity with the influential view about the Nyāya notion of nirvikalpaka pratyak???E63;a makes it seem that it falls squarely within the second disjunct in each of the questions, namely that it is a purely concept-free perception and that the subject is necessarily unaware of it. This conjunction smells of incoherence, and this is a theme that Chakrabarti has pursued much in his work. Before we discuss his arguments in detail, I wish to note some points about the very formulation of the controversies.Regarding the first, the way the disjuncts are presented reveals that Chakrabarti endorses a tight relation between concepts and recognitional abilities involving general features. I think it is right to say that a subject who possesses the concept F has reliable (though fallible) recognitional abilities to identify F's. However, I do not think that the converse is necessarily true. That is to say, a subject who has reliable (though fallible) recognitional abilities to identify F's possesses the concept F. Animals are a case in point: everyone agrees that pet dogs have the capacity to recognize their masters—they may even have the capacity for recognizing masters of other dogs that they play with—but at the very least it is controversial whether the dog has the concept of master. Once we admit that having recognitional capacities with respect to a certain general feature does not automatically result in the possession of the concept of the corresponding universal, then we can allow that some concept-free perceptions may involve the recognition of general features.Regarding the second, we can say that the subject is necessarily unaware of indeterminate perceptions only if we qualify this by saying that the subject is unaware of the indeterminate perception at the moment it arises. By force of the Nyāya argument, I will show that the subject can be made aware at a later time that an indeterminate [End Page 333] perception must have occurred at an earlier time. So, in effect, this comment questions the influential view with respect to nirvikalpaka pratyak???E63;a, according to which it is a purely concept-free perception that the subject is necessarily unaware of. I argue that indeterminate perceptions involve dispositional recognitional capacities and that the subject can be made aware of such perceptions at a later time by force of an inference; therefore they are not such that the subject is necessarily unaware of them. Some may object that in using this strategy to make indeterminate perceptions intelligible I may succeed in making some notion of indeterminate perceptions intelligible but have deviated so far away from the Nyāya notion that I certainly cannot be said to address the concerns that haunt Chakrabarti. Not so, as we shall see that most of the materials I use for arguing for this position are from Nyāya texts and other sources that are respected by Nyāya-inspired epistemologists.In the seminal paper, Chakrabarti proposes to banish nirvikalpaka pratyak???E63;a from Nyāya epistemology, for he thinks that on the whole admitting non-conceptual perceptions is likely to cause more harm rather than benefit the coherence and plausibility of their overall epistemological position (Chakrabarti 2000). In another recent article Chakrabarti... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:OwlJohn HollanderOwlNow that the owl-light—in the time between Dog and wolf, as some call it—ends, we wait As you alight on an unseen Branch to interrogateThe listener and the rememberer; Lost outlines heighten—as last colors fade— The sounder darkness you confer Upon the spruce’s shade.Deluded by the noonlight’s wide display Of everything, our vision floats through thin Spaces of ill-illumined day: How we are taken inBy what we (...) take in with our roving eyes! Your constant ones, if moved to track or trace, Take their head with them, lantern-wise Taking heed, keeping faceIn the society of night, and keeping Faith with the spirit of pure fixity That sets the mind’s great heart to leaping At what you more than see. [End Page 163]Medusa’s visage gazed our bodies to Literal stone unshaded: your face, caught In our glance widely eyes us through, Astonishing our thought. You who debated with the nightingale The rectitude of northern wisdom, cold Against the love-stuff of the tale The laid-back south had told; And yet who stood amid the lovely, thick Leaves of the ivy, while in all their folly The larks and thrushes sought the prick And berries of the holly; You who confounded the rapacious crow Thus to be favored by the great sky-eyed Queen of the air and all who know, Now ever by her side; With silent wing and interrogative Cry in lieu of a merely charming song, You sound the dark in which you live Perched above right and wrong. Resonance is not vacancy: although He could hear nothing in your hollow howls But woe and his own guilt, Thoreau Rejoiced that there were owls. Scattered and occasional questionings With here and there too late a warning shout, Wisdom arises on the wings Of darkness and of doubt. Where in day’s vastnesses does truth reside? In noon’s uncompromising light and heat When even our own shadows hide Under our very feet? Or in the hidden center of the quick Resilient dark on which your narrowed sight So pointedly alights to pick Not the day, but the night, [End Page 164] Its fruitful flower, petaled a hundredfold? Oh it is there, truth, with the poor blind prey Trembling with prescience or cold Waiting for how your way Of well-tuned suddenness and certitude Tight-strung and execution highly wrought Leads to the pounced-on object, food For something beyond thought, By overlooking nothing, overseeing In all the stillness hidden, tiny motions Squirming with the life of being Inferences and notions. With patient agency the beak and claws Of fierce sublime awareness pluck it clean Deriving what for us are laws Governing the unseen. Under torn canvas we put out to sea Trusting, though puzzled by what glows above, To something like philosophy To be the helmsman of Life (but whose life?). Your lessons of the land, Down-to-tree, then, if not -to-earth, indict Our helplessness to understand Just what we are at night. Immensities of starlight told us lies Of what and where we are; but, we allow, Drunk with the Milky Way, our eyes Are on the Wagon now, Fugitive slaves, leaving despair for dread As if in search of the cold, freeing North, Keep gazing steadily ahead Keep on Keep knowing forth You urge us, as your silences address The power that Minerva chose you for: Great-winged, far-ranging consciousness Now come to rest in your [End Page 165] Olympian attentiveness that finds The affrighted heartbeat on the ground, perceives The flutter of substances, the mind’s Life in the fallen leaves.John HollanderYale UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Généalogie de la liberté by Olivier BoulnoisKristell TregoOlivier Boulnois. Généalogie de la liberté. Paris: Seuil, 2021. Pp. 496. Paperback, €24.00.The author starts from an apparently simple question: are we free? But such a question is not as simple as it seems. This book shows that it is neither eternal nor universally asked; rather, it is a question linked to a specific culture (the West), and it (...) has a history. This is why the author intends to draw up its genealogy.In order to draw up a genealogy of the concept of freedom, we must leave aside the standard theoretical framework that assumes freedom as a given. Rather, we should ask: Does [End Page 152] freedom exist? What is its nature? Should it be described as the absence of compulsion or as the power of choice? We must also be wary of any systematic approach to these questions, such as those that have opposed partisans of freedom to determinists or intellectualists to voluntarists throughout the ages. If we want to draw up a genealogy of freedom, we should rather think about the theoretical conditions that made possible the birth and the development of this theoretical "artifact," as Boulnois calls it (23). Contemporary discussions about freedom tend to debate its nature without wondering why such a concept was forged in the first place. By contrast, Boulnois takes a step back and tries to discover the nature of freedom by turning to the moment of its birth.Boulnois has adopted a genealogical approach in his previous books. He used it in his Être et représentation, whose subtitle is une généalogie de la métaphysique moderne à l'époque de Duns Scot (Paris: PUF, 1999). He also mentioned it in the title of a collection of edited essays, where he preferred to talk of "genealogies" in the plural in order to accommodate the diversity of approaches adopted by the authors of the contributions to that volume (Olivier Boulnois, ed., Généalogies du sujet: de saint Anselme à Malebranche [Paris: Vrin, 2007]). In his new book, Boulnois explains his choice of the genealogical method as an attempt to give a history of freedom that might reconcile the so-called continental and analytic approaches (18). Instead of giving a simple description of theories of freedom, by his genealogical method Boulnois intends to show how the Western approach to freedom has resulted in an aporia—the very aporia that Kant diagnosed as an insoluble problem in his Critique of Pure Reason. Boulnois's genealogy should be distinguished from the so-called archeology as heralded by the French scholar of the Middle Ages Alain de Libera. Although both the genealogical and the archeological methods originate in the writings of Michel Foucault, and as such are undeniably connected to each other, the genealogical enterprise is intended to "deconstruct" past philosophers' claims not in order to leave them behind and reject them (as the archeological method intends to do), but rather to become fully aware of those philosophers' theoretical choices and commitments (see Boulnois, Être et representation, 16). Genealogy is thus supposed to "liberate" our thought by making apparent the framework in which we think.To deconstruct the problem of freedom, Boulnois proceeds in four main steps. First, he shows how the problem of freedom is constructed by examining a cluster of related concepts (free will, will, power, and action) and discovering the aporia of free will, which appears to be both indubitable and impossible to conceptualize. Second, Boulnois turns to Aristotle's ethics and theory of action, which conceives of human choices without appealing to the idea of freedom. Third, he considers the "invention of freedom," or better of free will (in Latin, liberum arbitrium voluntatis), by highlighting three main moments: the Stoics' assent to the order of the world; Alexander of Aphrodisias's cogitations, which make room for free will in an Aristotelian framework, even without ever naming it; and finally, Augustine's reorganization of ethics around the very concept of free will. Fourth and finally, Boulnois focuses on the medieval debates concerning freedom and the way they contributed to contrasting human beings with the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Opining the articuli fidei:Thomas Aquinas on the Heretic’s Assent to the Articles of FaithM. V. DoughertyTHOMAS AQUINAS’S ACCOUNT of the infused virtue (habitus) of faith presupposes that some intrinsically intelligible truths are beyond the range of the natural cognitive abilities of human beings. The possession of the virtue of faith allows the believer to transcend certain natural epistemic limitations so that he can assent to truths that are (...) necessary for salvation. Consonant with the Catholic theological tradition, Aquinas refers to such truths as the articles of faith (articuli fidei), and stock examples include propositions concerning the Trinity and the Incarnation.1In light of the many and well-known texts from the Corpus Thomisticum that highlight the disproportion or incommensurability between the articles of faith and the natural cognitive abilities of human beings, it would not be unreasonable for one to assume that faith is required to assent to such articles of faith [End Page 1] in this life. Such an interpretive assumption could be expressed as:A1: A human being can assent to the articles of faith in this life if and only if the human being is fortified with the infused virtue of faith.One might be led to ascribe A1 to Aquinas when one considers that he criticizes the Pelagians precisely for maintaining that the assent to matters of faith is caused by nothing other than free will.2 Still further, one might think that strong evidence for A1 is Aquinas’s claim that “free will does not suffice for believing, since those things that are of faith are above reason.”3I argue, however, that A1’s identification of the virtue of faith as a necessary condition for the assent to the articles of faith does not adequately reflect Aquinas’s position, despite the many texts that may suggest such a view.4 That Aquinas does not endorse A1 can be made evident by examining his largely overlooked account of the epistemic state of the heretic (haereticus). To be sure, most commentators who explore the Thomistic treatment of heresy focus on the psychology of error underlying the heretic’s denial of one or more of the articles of faith.5 In the present paper I take an alternate path, however, focusing on those epistemic acts whereby the heretic gets its [End Page 2] right, so to speak, by correctly assenting to some of the articles of faith. Aquinas maintains that the heretic does not possess the infused virtue of faith yet still assents to all the articles of faith except for the one or more articles that he denies. Bereft of faith, the heretic “holds those things that are of faith by another mode than through faith.”6 This seemingly anomalous epistemic condition deserves consideration.7I. Intellects without FaithThe heretic appears to be cognitively privileged, since without faith he assents to the things that are of faith, seemingly overcoming without divine assistance the aforementioned disproportion between the limited range of reason and the articles of faith. Aquinas is aware of the apparent difficulty; in the Summa theologiae he defuses the rather unusual objection that heretics appear to have greater cognitive capacities than the faithful, since heretics routinely and unassistedly assent to those higher truths without possessing the virtue of faith.8 Aquinas concludes that the heretic holds the articles of faith by opinion (opinio), not faith.What makes one a heretic? Frequently Aquinas identifies obstinacy (pertinacia, instantia) as a necessary condition for heresy.9 The cause of heresy is at times identified with pride [End Page 3] (superbia).10 On Aquinas’s account, heresy is a species of unbelief (infidelitas) and every heretic is a schismatic.11 But the heretic does get many things right. If one were to deny all of the articles of faith, one would not qualify as a heretic, but would simply be a nonbeliever or an apostate. So, apart from the denial of an article (or a few articles) that specifies heretics as the distinct kind of heretic they happen to be, heretics for the most part succeed in assenting to most—but not all—of the articles of faith.Although the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In, Out Me, You Mental, Moral Where Do I Begin?Mark D. Rego (bio)I once attended a Buddhist meditation retreat, led by an American meditation teacher. The instructor had studied and practiced is Asia for many years and was well versed in the practices and teachings of Buddhism. Among his opening remarks was something along the line of the following: "One question that is asked on every retreat is, (...) 'if there is no true self, then who is it who has come here to become free of the illusion of a self?' The answer is, I don't know, but we can start anyway."This sense of practicality in the face of unanswerable questions is built into Buddhism, as is the relationship among the particularities of each individual, a process akin to externality, mental well-being, and morality.I raise Buddhism both because of its central interest into the nature of the self (an obviously germane consideration in the papers under discussion) and because of this second feature noted, namely the comfortable integration of individuality, character building, ethical action, and mental well-being (the issue of the true self will, thankfully, have to wait). It is this theme that I raise via the discussion of externality.The commentaries of Talmadge and Graham, unintentionally I think, pull me toward a beguiling observation in my daily practice of psychiatry. Namely, patients commonly report their clinical improvements in terms of how they deal better with others, how they are more thoughtful and even handed (with themselves included), and how they better cope with the demands of their individual lives. In senses both highly individual and highly principled, and in ways both explicit and implicit, when patients feel better they often feel that they are better people (all the kinds of treatment mentioned in my paper equally apply; there is no exclusivity in this result).There is also an interesting consistency in a dual manner in which this is expressed. In one way people report the improved coping, handling, and so on mentioned. In the next breath the same person commonly says, "I feel like myself."The meditation instructor would be pleased; it appears that through a process of becoming aware of and letting go of some form of negativity an individual feels better, acts better, and feels more unified. (As the instructor was psychologically sophisticated, he would not mistake the "like myself" sentiment as a Buddhist heresy. Rather, he would understand it as a reflection of being more at ease with and aware of disparate parts of himself.) And all this without figuring out who the real self is. [End Page 331]I mention these observations about Buddhism and clinical care because when I consider the processes of evaluating, deciding, and forging identity and volition it seems to me that somewhere between the lines the individual is aligning himself with some sense of what is good. The resultant experience of volition and cohesive identity is, often but not always, experienced as good both psychologically and morally.Change, Others, and ValuesIn the two commentaries that follow my paper on Frankfurtian externality and therapeutic change (Rego 2004), Talmadge (2004) and Graham (2004) highlight different aspects of externality and therapeutics. Talmadge, an addiction psychiatrist, expands the theme of volitional change in recovery from addiction. For Talmadge, as for most in the field, the question of when and how an addict has truly committed to change (hitting "rock bottom"? accepting the first of the twelve steps?) is perennially in the air. Such knowledge would be invaluable in guiding addicts along their rocky paths.Although still far short of the mark, Talmadge finds some illustrative guidance in Frankfurt. The shift that takes place within the addict to place him on the road to recovery is not necessarily "rock bottom," or conformity to a program's dictates or a state of new knowledge. Rather, it is a shift in will. By whatever process (and Talmadge is quite aware that there seem to be many paths) the addict has come to care about sobriety in a way he or she did not before. He or she now cares in a way that is part of him or her... (shrink)

This book stems from more than 30 years of experience in the development of practical law enforcement ethics training. It is written based on the real-world application of a wide variety of approaches to enhancing ethics awareness and decision-making skills. There has been an explosion of efforts to increase the emphasis on ethics in law enforcement. The most effective of these efforts involve our law enforcement officers themselves in (1) sharing ideas, experiences, and wisdom with each other and (2) (...) analyzing long-term consequences in a risk-free learning environment, before the need arises for making actual decisions or engaging in conduct. Accomplishing those objectives can be attempted with a variety of formats, presentations, and approaches. Instead of being shown how to “teach” ethics, readers will be given material and ideas on how to enhance existing ethics awareness and ethics skills with their personnel. Readers are provided with pointers on talking with staff, not “at” them, in order to foster awareness about how ethical values and standards to which they already subscribe apply in real-world law enforcement decision-making and conduct. A unique aspect of this text is that it is written primarily for line sergeants and lieutenants to use with their own in-service personnel. It contains material that is designed to be easy-to-present and non-intimidating. It is adaptable to briefings of limited duration as well as longer training sessions. There is substantial content to enable an agency to maintain an on-going program of recurrent, short-but-meaningful discussions with and among personnel. Most importantly, it is practical and down-to-earth–not theoretical or abstract. Also, the book is based on the belief that with a combination of interest and practice, any sergeant or lieutenant, or any officer or deputy, can overcome any self-perceived weakness and become an accomplished “ethics awareness discussion leader.” In addition to its primary audience, the book will also be a helpful resource for field-training officers, senior officers, non-sworn personnel, and law enforcement executives. (shrink)

Women in patriarchal culture are treated unfairly and seen as second-class beings. Their presence is considered as something incidental and not essential. For this reason, this paper examines one of the short stories by Muna Masyari, a female writer from Pamekasan, Madura Sortana. Matchmaking and the myth of the Madurese have put Madurese women in a state of oppression and unfavorable conditions because of the binding culture that dominates women. Muna, using the Sortana short story as a means to advocate (...) for the value of feminism which in the context of Madurese culture is taboo to fight against. This study aims to explore the existence of women who are represented by female characters called Embu. This research method uses qualitative-descriptive research by analyzing the content of the story, looking at sentences and paragraphs related to the issue of the existence of women in Sortana short story. The theoretical concept used is existentialist feminism. From the results of the analysis, it is known that the gender injustice experienced by the Embu character in the short story is in the form of marginalization, subordination, and stereotypes. Meanwhile, through his actions, the Embu figure has the awareness to become the Self in order to be free from the Other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Yet Life Keeps ComingPatricia Romanowski BasheWhile the guidance offered to authors of commentary articles suggests they not write about their personal experiences, the fact is, I would not be here were it not for my personal experience as the mother of a young man with autism spectrum disorder and other diagnoses. Though I left a successful writing career to become a special education teacher and then a Board (...) Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA), it was not, strictly speaking, a career decision. It was a mom decision. When asked how I came to where I am today, I say, “Well, one day, I looked across the table at an individualized education program (IEP) meeting and asked myself, ‘Could I do as good a job as the people sitting across from me?’ And the answer was, yes.” Some people believe I am joking. I am not.To parent a child with autism is to be confronted daily with a dream of his future and the realization that you probably cannot achieve that alone. Instead, you will rely on a world of professionals, institutions, and systems to make it happen. How well that works out for you depends on a number of factors that should not matter but ultimately do: where you live, how well funded and law abiding your local school district is, how much access you have to qualified professionals, and how well your state agencies charged to care for individuals with disabilities after they leave school does its job. Though essential, love, dedication, and hope may not be enough to hoist your child over the hurdles, whether they are set by immovable bureaucracy or mercurial brain chemistry. We each strive to clear the track, to level the road, and I chose to do that by “going pro” and becoming a small part of the system that will serve my son and countless others with ASDs throughout their lives. Even so, I find myself as daunted by the transition to adulthood and the prospect of preparing him for a life without me as anyone writing here. Anonymous Three, who recounts her son’s struggle for independence, captures the questions that most of us might never get to answer but can’t stop asking: “What happens when we can no longer care for him?”When a pediatric psychiatrist diagnosed my own son with Asperger disorder in 1997, I wished to be one day free of the obligation to explain his diagnosis to people who had never heard of it. Today, thanks to major campaigns to promote autism awareness and the public recognition of a handful of celebrities with autism, there is less explaining required. It seems that everyone knows someone who has a child with autism, and everyone knows Temple Grandin’s story. Contrast this to the world of 1993, shortly after my friend and coauthor Barbara L. Kirby (Romanowski Bashe and Kirby 2001, 2005) turned to the internet to make sense of her son’s Asperger diagnosis. There was no Google, no Bing. It would be months before the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), which included Asperger’s for the first time, was published. Local doctors and teachers had never heard of it; parents and professionals were still gathering facts, trying to put the pieces together to form a coherent picture of what it meant to have autism. [End Page 183]Some things are different now, nearly twenty years later. Professionals, parents, and individuals with autism have developed a culture of autism, complete with opposing views on everything from applied behavior analysis and classroom inclusion to medication and guardianship. As a number of narratives illustrate, parents often find themselves making tough choices around these issues, and the best option in the abstract is not always the best option or even a possibility in the real world, on the ground. These narratives depict how the parents of individuals with ASDs struggle, sometimes mightily, to bridge the gap between what should be in terms of reliability of diagnosis and prognosis, access to effective, affordable, evidence–based education, treatment, and intervention, and—perhaps most important—meaningful, practical, realistic planning and programming for successful transition to adulthood. And... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MIMESIS AND EMPATHY IN HUMAN BIOLOGY William B. Hurlbut, M.D. Stanford University Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the Lord. (Leviticus. 19:18) The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, (...) thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! (Matthew. 6:22-23) On the levels both ofcommon discourse and scientific description, the concept of empathy has found renewed popularity. Like a bridge that spans disparate realms, the idea of empathy can reconnect neurophysiology with psychology and social theory, and reestablish the grounds for a natural concept of ethics. Specifically, it can connect mimetic theory with a possible basis in biology, since empathy seems to represent an extension ofmimetic processes across the animal kingdom. For this reason, empathy/mimesis might be the grounds for a concept of ethics based on natural observation. Drawn from a German term Einfühlung, which means "feeling into," empathy carries the concept of "getting into the feelings of someone else" (deWaal 79). As a medium for the formation of meaningful bonds and William Hurlbut15 sensitive associations, the concept of empathy has taken on, in popular discourse, the somewhat sentimental notion ofsympathy. In the scientific description, however, empathy is seen as the highest human expression of a broader biological capacity for mimesis that seems inextricable from the very progress ofthe phylogenetic process. Among the earliest life forms, organisms drew information from one another to pattern and coordinate such basic biological functions as reproduction and nurture. But with the increased complexity of multicellular creatures, new means of communication arose, making possible more flexible adaptation and sociability. Gradually the direct chemical coordination suitable for collectives or swarms gave way to richer and more individual communication between organisms of higher forms of differentiation. The externally evident demarcation ofthe head region, with its organs ofsensory perception and communication, evolved in parallel with internal cerebral structures capable ofprocessing more complex impressions of the surrounding environment and coordinating greater freedom of motion. These vital powers of action and awareness in turn came to be governed, guided and integrated by an inner felt sense of need, goal or purpose. As Leon Kass says, "desire, not DNA, is the deepest principle of life" (Kass 1994, 48). This quality of "inwardness" is paralleled by an equally complex differentiation and integration of the external "look" ofthe animal. This "look," which is the literal translation of the Latin root of our word species, is the result of a genetically determined plan as important as any internal vital organ. It provides the unity of form that reveals or selectively conceals the inner life of the organism. It communicates and coordinates vital information regarding sexual and other social interactions. This upward process ofcomplex integrated organization of the "inner life" and the external action and presentation of selfreaches its fullest expression in the human form. Along with upright posture and its freeing ofthe hands as tools of "gnostic touching," comes a reordering of the senses and a highly flexible, furless canvas of selfpresentation we call the face (Kass 1985, 287). Upwards through mammalian evolution there is a progressive refinement of the structures of the face that facilitate active and increasingly subtle communication and penetration into the life of the other. With more than 30 finely tuned muscles of facial expression and vocal control, human beings are capable of a wide array of communicative 16 Mimesis andEmpathy expressions of emotions and intentions. Paul Ekman claims to have discerned more than 1 8 forms of smiling, each with a distinct meaning (66). With upright posture came a retraction ofthe snout and bilateral stereoscopic vision. Sight replaced smell as the prominent sense. Whereas smell required direct chemical contact, and sound gave formless information, sight gave a knowing and accurate encounter with the form and unity ofwholes. Sight allowed rapid perception ofobjects and actions at distant horizons. The detached beholding of sight allowed a deeper and more accurate apprehension 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:Reconsidering Buster Keaton’s HeroinesBarbara E. SavedoffIt has become commonplace to acknowledge that art tends to reflect the prejudices and presuppositions of the age in which it is produced. Such acknowledgement can serve not only to place the prejudicial attitudes expressed by artists and authors in their proper context, it can also reassure us that we have avoided the same prejudices, or at least, that we have achieved a (...) greater awareness of and sensitivity to them. But we should not be too easily reassured by these thoughts of our own enlightened progress, for the prejudices that we think we discover in works of art may sometimes be of our own making.Prejudice is, at least in part, a problem of distorted perception. Freeing oneself of prejudice is thus not simply a matter of disposing of false beliefs; it requires new habits of perception—becoming able to see what one could not see before. Since habits of perception can be deeply ingrained, we may find it difficult to recognize their persistence. Therefore even as we attempt to repudiate prejudicial attitudes, we may find ourselves misled by their continuing distortion of our vision. This can lead not only to continuing bias on our part, it can also lead to unwarranted charges of bias against others. For instance, the distorted vision that can pervade our evaluation of people in real life can also pervade our evaluation of characters in films or novels. When this happens, we may unfairly charge the film or novel with the perpetuation of negative stereotypes. There are also other ways in which we may be misled by our own biases. For example, if we expect to find negative stereotypes in the products of a given age, this may lead us to see the stereotypes that we anticipate—whether they are really there or not. The work of art can thus become a mirror of our own prejudices and preconceptions. [End Page 77]This is, I believe, what has occurred with much of the criticism of the portrayal of women in Buster Keaton’s films. Critical essays, commentaries, and even film-schedule blurbs tend either to downplay the strengths of the heroines in his films or brand them unfairly as stupid and incompetent. This unjust characterization of the heroines has become an unquestioned myth planted early in the minds of Keaton’s audiences. For example, some prints of The General contain an “educational” introduction which, among other things, describes Annabelle as yet another one of Keaton’s scatter-brained heroines. 1 The audience is thus primed to see Keaton’s heroines in this light.In my discussion I will expose the gap between the myths surrounding Keaton’s heroines and the actual characterization of those heroines in the films. I will then explore possible explanations for the durability of the myths by looking at whether there is something about Keaton’s films that provokes these prejudicial readings.IKeaton’s short film, The Balloonatic, begins in an amusement park with the hero vainly pursuing one woman after another until he is finally given a black eye by a young woman he has annoyed with his attentions. Discouraged, he wanders over to watch the launching of a hot air balloon, where he is given a pennant to attach to its top. His task completed, he finds himself atop the runaway balloon. When his rash attempt to shoot a bird perched on the balloon brings him rapidly back down to earth, he discovers himself stranded in the wilderness.The hero quickly sets out to adapt to his wilderness environment, but he is thwarted in his efforts by his inexperience and incompetence in the role of outdoorsman. He tries to fish, but when he casts his line, he catches the hook on his pants. He then dams up a stream so that he can pick up the stranded fish, but unbeknownst to him, they fall through a hole in his creel as soon as he puts them in. When he finally does realize what is happening, his dam breaks and he is carried helplessly down stream by the rush of water. Later in the film, we see the hero trying to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I Didn’t Like It, but I Recommend It: An Undergraduate Reflects on Contemplation in the ClassroomLauren RodgersWhile taking Introduction to World Religions as a first-year college student, I became acutely aware that my preconceived notions about religions were often wrong, and I had been oblivious to the diversity and complexity of the traditions I began to study. During subsequent semesters, I studied Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, and during (...) the spring semester of my junior year I was happy to add Buddhism to my schedule. In that class, I not only examined manifold Buddhist teachings and histories, but engaged in a form of Buddhist practice, too. Four days a week, my fellow students and I arranged our zafus in a straight line, bowed, and adjusted our postures to commence fifteen to twenty minutes of zazen. By the end of the semester, I concluded that although I am very ambivalent about this meditation practice, I nonetheless believe that contemplative practices can be valuable tools in the academic setting.Because we were partaking in a religious practice in an academic setting, there were possibilities for ethical conflicts. My professor raised these and we discussed them several times during the first half of the semester, before we collectively agreed to give zazen a try. The only Buddhist in the room was my professor, so I agree that it was essential for her to stress that zazen was optional, and that if anyone felt uncomfortable in any way, it was okay to opt out. My professor reiterated this several times. I am not a follower of any religious tradition, so I did not have any conflicting feelings. Several of my classmates were Christian, but, like me, most were excited to give it a try. I think there was no sense of conflict because Buddhism involves a lot of practices geared toward developing insight on the basis of experience, and zazen does not require belief in a higher power. Buddhism does acknowledge the existence of gods, but they are irrelevant to the spiritual path. Also, my professor is an ordained Zen priest, and therefore very familiar with zazen. I did not have any doubts that we were taught an authentic practice by someone qualified to teach it.Just as there was no pressure to participate, I did not feel that I was forced to like zazen or hold back any feelings of opposition; I was free to express how I felt and why. At first I did not like it because it hurt my back, and instead of sitting there in pain [End Page 119] every day, I let my professor know and she helped me make some adjustments to my posture. But I disliked meditation for other reasons, as well. I rarely, if ever, was able to stop my mind from being like a monkey on a jungle gym. As we sat, we repeatedly counted to ten and fixed our gaze on a spot in front of us. I was told that it is natural for my mind to bounce around and wander off while counting, but I did not expect it would happen before I got to four. Adding to my frustration was the fact that 70 percent of the time, my thoughts were focused on all of the work that I needed to get done before the end of the day. Even though I only sat for fifteen minutes, I got antsy and staying still was not helpful. It makes me wonder, though, whether or how my feelings would change if I did zazen in the summer when my stress levels are way down. Or what if I meditated for more than fifteen minutes? How long would it take before my mind settled down? Would it get worse?Although my restlessness was not the most pleasant experience, I did have days where I found meditation helpful personally. In addition to zazen, we also tried walking meditation, and on nice days we meditated outside near a waterfall on campus. The sound of the water was really soothing, and I noticed that my mind wandered much less. Sometimes it was a relaxing break during the day, and even if I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Dante, Hyperspheres, and the Curvature of the Medieval CosmosWilliam EggintonIn the course of his lectures on medieval literature at Oxford University in the 1950s C. S. Lewis would ask students to walk alone at night, gaze at the star-filled sky, and try to imagine how it might look to a walker in the Middle Ages. It would not likely have occurred to him that some forty years (...) later several astrophysicists would ask that their readers perform the same activity, at least figuratively—not, however, with the intention of experiencing medieval conceptions of the cosmos but rather in order to begin to imagine the shape of our own. One of the astrophysicists in question is Stanford Professor Emeritus Robert Osserman, whose 1995 book The Poetry of the Universe is an attempt to acquaint lay readers with what the most recent research suggests is the shape of the universe by leading them through a brief history of the mathematical and technological developments that made such boundary-breaking thought possible. Paradoxically, when it comes to trying to imagine that all-encompassing form which is derived from a four-dimensional mathematical model called a hypersphere, he turns not to ultra-modern computer-generated images nor to dry but technically accurate exegeses of mathematical formulae but rather to the verses of a fourteenth-century Italian poet, Dante Alighieri. His claim is that in the third canticle of the Divine Comedy, which details his ascent through the heavens, Dante describes the cosmos with astonishing precision as a hypersphere, exactly as modern physics has determined it to be.If the cosmology of the present makes use of Dante heuristically, however, it never asks the most obvious question: Why? Why does one need to go back to the fourteenth century for a poetic description of how the universe appears to modern science? Osserman assumes it to be a mere coincidence, and why should he not? What possible access would a thinker—a poet even—of the European Middle Ages have to the highest achievements of almost six centuries of subsequent thought? In answering this question, I am not proposing to naively interpret the past in our own image, claiming Dante to be a mathematical genius [End Page 195] before his time. I am, however, suggesting that there is an excellent explanation for why one must look to the fourteenth century for models of expression adequate to the challenges posed by nineteenth and twentieth-century advances in mathematics: namely, that in the course of the Scientific Revolution, wherein were laid the epistemological foundations for the discoveries of modern science, certain possibilities of thought and imagination were discarded, forgotten, and certain abilities were, if only temporarily, lost. The Middle Ages has long been painted as a period whose culture was hostile to free thought and new knowledge; perhaps it is now time to recognize that it was also a time in which phenomena could sustain mutually exclusive and contradictory explanations, when the battle between faith and science had not yet been conclusively won by either side, and when the efforts to bridge the stories they told could produce conceptual edifices whose mere possibility would be unthinkable only 200 years later. This essay is about one such conceptual edifice and how openness to its perspective allowed a poet to put into words what could not be imagined by his descendants, and what eludes us even today.The Shape of the Modern UniverseImagine that you are a completely flat creature, living happily in your two-dimensional world.1 As observers we are outside this world, and we can see you milling about with your flat friends, blissfully unaware of the uncharted regions one dimension away on either side of you. Now imagine that this plane is not flat—in the sense of rectilineal—as you might have created it in your mind, but rather is curved; in fact it is a sphere. Assuming that this sphere is large enough, there is no reason that you, an inhabitant of this surface, should be aware of its curvature. Even we, the three-dimensional observers, if close enough to the surface, would not recognize its curvature. One could conjecture, however... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.1 (2005) 27-29 [Access article in PDF] Community, Consciousness, and Dynamic Self-Understanding Marya Schechtman Keywords consciousness, unconscious, self-understanding, embedded consciousness, personal identity I would like to thank both of my commentators for their generous and insightful comments. After an extremely clear and accurate summary of my position, Grant Gillett suggests that it should be supplemented with a recognition that the self-understanding I describe is (...) rooted in culture and social practice. I agree wholeheartedly with the need for such a supplement. In this paper, I try to switch from the emphasis on contents of consciousness found in traditional developments of the Lockean insight to an emphasis on the fact of reflective self-consciousness, which I think better captures what seems right in Locke's view. My suggestion is that we take up Locke's claim that the essential feature of personhood is awareness of oneself as a self, and understand this self-awareness in terms of an implicit demand for intelligibility in one's conscious experience. Considering oneself as a self requires that one view one's current state not as a free-standing moment that might or might not be related in appropriate ways to the states of a freestanding past or future self, but rather as part of an unfolding life story. This involves, among other things, an acknowledgment of our obligation to questions such as: "Why do I feel this way?" or "Why am I doing this?" Being a self involves holding oneself accountable for what one is doing and feeling. In this case the accountability is to oneself.The possibility of being accountable to oneself obviously depends, however, on a cultural context in which there is such a thing as accountability to others. It is only against a backdrop where others may call for an explanation of one's behavior or speech—and where not all explanations count as legitimate—that one can demand intelligibility from oneself. Children must be socialized into personhood by learning the right questions to ask about how their lives hang together, and what kinds of answers count as answers to those questions. Person, in Locke's sense, is a normative and forensic term, and is therefore inherently bound up with public standards. My point here is the somewhat limited claim that the attitude toward our own lives and experience, which is self-constituting, giving us a sense of ourselves as persisting beings, will involve this kind of accountability to oneself. I agree, however, that the tools for achieving this sort of attitude come in with mother's milk and early socialization. A fuller development of my claim thus [End Page 27] requires much more discussion of the role of culture and society in self-constitution. I begin such a discussion in my Constitution of Selves (1996), and hope to take it up in more detail in future work.Markus Heinimaa (2005) wonders if I have gone far enough in rejecting traditional approaches to the problem of personal identity. Although I say that the perceiver-self is not a homunculus, I do talk about it as if it is an entity, and about the unconscious as if it is a place inside this entity where psychological states can hide. Heinimaa's suggestion is that both the perceiver self and the unconscious are unnecessary complications, and that I can achieve my goal without them. Locke's insight can be better (or at least as well) captured, he suggests, with a kinetic view of the person as a process of self-understanding. These challenges are well taken. Although I cannot fully answer them here, perhaps I can clarify my position somewhat, and in so doing motivate some of my assumptions.I begin with my assumption of unconscious mental states and processes. My discussion starts from the idea that there are considerations pulling us toward the claim that the person must be identified with consciousness, and also considerations pulling us toward the view that the person must be more than conscious experience. The first set of considerations is laid out in some detail in... (shrink)

The current study investigated the influence of morphological structure on the earliest stages of Arabic reading acquisition. More specifically, we aimed at examining the role of root and pattern units in beginners from Grade 1 to 3. A first set of reading tasks evaluated the presence of a morphology facilitation effect in word and pseudoword reading by manipulating independently the familiarity of roots and patterns. The second one pursued to examine the contribution of morphological awareness to reading performance. The (...) results suggest that reading ability is early influenced by the awareness of morphological composition. Children read faster and more accurately pseudowords composed of familiar morphemes. Furthermore, regression analyses revealed, for every reading measure, a significant contribution of one morphological test in addition to grapheme knowledge. Results are discussed taking into account the differences obtained depending on lexicality and morpheme type (root or pattern). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXIV, Number 2, November 1998, pp. 295-311 Hume's Wide View of the Virtues: An Analysis of his Early Critics JAMES FIESER Hume discusses about 70 different virtues in his moral theory. Many of these are traditional virtues and have clear moral significance, such as benevolence, charity, honesty, wisdom, and honor. However, Hume also includes in his list of virtues some character traits whose moral significance (...) is not immediately obvious, such as wit, good manners, and dialogue. Mid-eighteenth century critics of Hume's moral theory almost unanimously felt that his notion of virtue was too broad and that Hume should have distinguished between genuine moral virtues, on the one hand, and mere intellectual abilities on the other. According to the critics, grouping the two together devalues the true virtues. Hume was aware that his broad understanding of the virtues was controversial and we know from his letters that he read at least some of these critiques. He nevertheless vigorously defended his position. Although Hume sees this as an issue worthy of defending, contemporary Hume scholarship has neither discussed the nature of the eighteenth century criticisms nor given adequate attention to the success or failure of Hume's position. I address these issues here. I begin by presenting Hume's defense of his wide view of the virtues as it appears in both the Treatise and the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals.1 Then I chronologically present early criticisms of Hume's view, including those by Francis Hutcheson, James Balfour, John Leland, and James Beattie. From these early discussions I suggest that we find three criteria to distinguish between genuine moral virtues, such as justice, and James Fieser is at the Department of Philosophy, University of Tennessee at Martin, Martin TN 38238 USA. email: jfieser@utm.edu 296 James Fieser less morally urgent intellectual abilities, such as industriousness. The three criteria are: (1) moral virtues are a matter of choice and intellectual abilities are not; (2) moral virtues by themsleves aim at a good end and intellectual abilities by themselves do not necessarily do so; and (3) moral virtues are such that the failure to obtain them incites blame, whereas the failure to obtain intellectual abilities does not incite blame. Although I believe that the first criterion fails, I argue that the second and third criteria provide reasonable ways of distinguishing moral virtues from intellectual abilities. Hume's Argument Hume's first account of the wide scope of the virtues appears in Book III, Part iii, of the Treatise, published in 1740. His main criterion in determining the virtue of an agent's character trait is whether the action it produces has consequences that trigger symapthetic feelings of moral pleasure2 in the minds of spectators (T 574-575). In Section 4, entitled "Of Natural Abilities," he argues that the distinction between natural abilities and moral virtues is unfounded since both groups of mental qualities bring forth the same sympathetic moral feelings in the spectator (T 606-614). Anticipating objections, Hume considers several possible points of distinction between natural abilities and moral virtues, but then rejects them all. First, he considers that the precise feelings elicited in the spectator designate two separate classes. Hume's reply is that the precise feelings elicited by each virtue (for example, benevolence, charity, justice) are also distinct in minute ways. Nevertheless, we still classify all such elicited responses as feelings of moral approval. Second, he considers that natural abilities are involuntary whereas moral virtues are the result of free will. Hume's reply is that many involuntary abilities, such as fortitude, have classically been catalogued as virtues. He adds that there is no conceivable reason why any involuntary quality of an agent mazy not produce sympathetic pleasure in the spectator. Third, Hume considers that habits relevant to moral virtues can be altered through reward and punishment, whereas habits relevant to natural abilities are more fixed and cannot be altered by these means. Hume's reply is that if we are not biased by such moral systems, then this distinction would not even arise. In An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), published eleven years later, Hume presents the broad... (shrink)

The freedom of expression is ‘the great bulwark of liberty’ and a ‘cornerstone upon which the very existence of a democratic society rests.’ It constitutes one of the ‘basic conditions for [a democratic society’s] progress,’ encapsulating ideas that may even ‘offend, shock or disturb.’ In his Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that free speech is of paramount importance, particularly in the form of a ‘robust public discourse as a means to promote citizen awareness and vigilance.’ To this end, freedom of (...) expression is a central tenet of democratic checks and balances as it allows for an ‘informed consent of the governed.’ Despite the recognition of this freedom since classical times, and the repeated proclamations of support by a variety of institutions, such as the Council of Europe, what is demonstrated, hereinafter, is that the freedom of expression is in a state of severe recession (regardless of the ‘openness’ of a society). This has resulted from a set of interrelated challenges, namely, the stark demise of Internet freedom within the general ambit of a widening conceptualization of hate, and the systematic strategy of moderating ‘hateful’ content. Whilst these challenges are inextricably interconnected with the technological revolution of our times, the authors hold that the fragile positioning of the freedom of expression in the framework of the Council of Europe and, particularly, the approach adopted by the major regional human rights court of the world, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), has facilitated the systematic erosion of the central agora of expression, namely, the Internet and its fora. It is argued that the current _status quo_, as described hereinafter, is marked by a corrosion of _parrhesia_ or free speech itself and, also, of _isigoria,_ namely, the equal right of all to free speech. In light of the above, and for purposes of extrapolating on the challenges to this fundamental freedom, this paper will commence with a normative assessment of the legitimacy and impact of restricting the freedom of expression, followed by an overview of its position in the Council of Europe, with a focus on the concept of hate. Further, and emanating from the ECtHR’S position in _Delfi v Estonia,_ on the liability of Internet intermediaries, it will conduct an analysis of the status of speech online, extrapolating on the issue of ‘hate speech’ and the horizontalization of responsibility _vis-à-vis_ content moderation through the structural juxtaposition of private, profit-making companies deciphering on issues of freedom of expression through, inter alia (yet increasingly) the use of Artificial Intelligence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 175-188 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 38 Bioethics Resources on the Web * Once described as an "enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor" (Pool, Robert. 1994. Turning an Info-Glut into a Library. Science 266 (7 October): 20-22, p. 20), Internet resources now receive numerous levels of organization, from basic directory (...) listings to elaborate "links" (cross-references to other Internet documents) that flash and glow in the dark. In many ways, the Internet functions as a direct extension of the traditional library. Following linked references across various sites is an electronic version of browsing library stacks, and the serendipitous discoveries made while "surfing the Net" recall the wonders of physically going "book-to-book." Although many of the Internet's best aspects augment library strengths by eliminating physical distance from sources, Net resources pose unique problems for researchers. It is not always clear who is responsible for the content of Web documents, when the document was produced, or how often (if ever) it is updated. Internet resource tools, then, must enable researchers to identify appropriate resources and to evaluate what they find when they get there. Web Research as Taking "Snapshots" Given the Internet's visual nature and fluid content, the process of conducting research on the Web has been likened to taking an informal picture of information on a specific date at a particular time. This metaphor also conveys the "zoom-in" aspect of searching through Web pages by going from general to specific categories. In the first section of this Scope Note, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) staff present a snapshot of bioethics resources taken during the spring months of 2000. Entries are divided into the categories of directories, electronic journals, full-text documents, news/current awareness, and teaching resources. In the two subsequent sections, this series of categories is repeated for entries on a specific topic within bioethics-genetics-and again for general search and evaluation tools. Where a Web site may contain pages applicable [End Page 175] to more than one category, multiple entries are made for that site with appropriate information for each category.Much as telecommunication advances have strengthened the relationship of patients and providers as partners, the dynamic nature of the Internet acknowledges that the researcher functions as a librarian whenever accessing the Web. It is our hope that BIOETHICSLINE and the other NRCBL databases not only will enable researchers to search the Web more efficiently, but also will help them to evaluate what they find when they get there. Bioethicsline on the Web: An International Plan in Progress Once only available through libraries, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the funding agency for the ongoing development of the BIOETHICS LINE® database from the Kennedy Institute, has provided free Web access to that database of 63,000 citations since September 1998 through Internet Grateful Med. Plans are now underway to eliminate such specialty databases and incorporate all citations into PubMed (for journal articles) or LOCATORplus (for book-like materials and chapters in books). Both of these databases are likewise available at no cost on the Web. In the transition to PubMed and LOCATORplus some features of BIOETHICSLINE that presently are available may be lost. Researchers are encouraged to contact the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature with search requests or for search strategy assistance with either the current or the future system (medethx@georgetown.edu).The inclusion of bioethics citations in PubMed and LOCATORplus will have several advantages. First, unique keywords from the Bioethics Thesaurus will be considered for inclusion in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the indexing vocabulary for PubMed and LOCATORplus, thereby enhancing retrieval of relevant clinical literature by offering more precise terminology covering ethical issues. Second, it will be easier to identify foreign-language materials, which are not currently included in the scope of BIOETHICSLINE. Third, the updating schedule will become more frequent. On the other hand, there may be some loss of searching precision because certain specialized features... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Das Medusenhaupt der Kritik, Kantstudien Ergänzungshefte by Manfred GawlinaHenry E. AllisonManfred Gawlina. Das Medusenhaupt der Kritik, Kantstudien Ergänzungshefte 128. Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996. Pp. ix + 345.This work is the first full scale study of the controversy between Kant and the Wolffian philosopher Johann August Eberhard. The controversy was launched by Eberhard’s publication in 1788 of the first part of the first volume of the (...) Philosophisches Magazin, a journal which he and a handful of associates created specifically as an organ for attacking the Kantian philosophy from the standpoint of Leibniz and Wolff. The central claim was that whatever is true in the Kantian philosophy is already contained in Leibniz, and where Kant differs from Leibniz (such as in the denial of knowledge of things in themselves or “true things”) he goes astray. Kant reacted strongly to this [End Page 632] critique, first in a pair of letters to Reinhold (May 12 and 19, 1789) and then in his own published response, with the sarcastic title: Über eine Entdeckung. nach der alle neue Kritik der reinen Vernunft durch eine ältere entbehrlich gemacht werden soll1 From Eberhard’s side the controversy continued through three more volumes of the Philosophisches Magazin (1790–92), and two volumes of its successor, Philosophisches Archiv (1792–95). Although Kant himself did not respond directly to these subsequent attacks, he contributed material to Johann Schulz for his review of the second volume of the Philosophisches Magazin.Gawlina analyzes the controversy at both the pragmatic and philosophical levels. The former includes a consideration of the motivations of the protagonists and the various strategies and tactics adopted in an attempt to convince the philosophical public of the correctness of their respective positions. Eberhard, for his part, was particularly concerned with the threat which the Critique, which Kant himself describes as the “Medusa head” (hence the title), posed to the survival of Leibnizian-style metaphysics, while Kant’s primary concern was with the misrepresentation of his own philosophy that he saw in Eberhard’s attack. At the philosophical level, the controversy is presented as a clash between two conflicting and ultimately irreconcilable philosophical paradigms: the first being the ontological orientation of Leibniz (defended by Eberhard) according to which pure (contradiction-free) thought mirrors being (this entails that logic has ontological significance), and the epistemological-transcendental orientation of Kant, according to which the fundamental questions concern the conditions of human knowledge and the justification of its claims. The author is well aware that there are epistemological elements in Leibniz and ontological ones in Kant (most notably the claims about space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic), but he argues persuasively that these are grounded in the philosopher’s respective ontological and epistemological standpoints.This general thesis serves to illuminate virtually all of the main points of the controversy, including the question of why Eberhard refuses to admit either the significance or novelty of the analytic-synthetic distinction, while Kant insists on both. Of particular interest in this regard is the author’s discussion of the distinction between Schranken (limits) and Grenzen (boundaries), which Kant himself draws in the Prolegomena (§58). This distinction becomes relevant to the controversy because of Eberhard’s frequent appeal to the fact that Leibniz recognizes the Schranken of human knowledge as part of his attempt to show that Leibniz anticipated Kant in providing a “critique of pure reason.” As Gawlina notes, however, the limits of knowledge, as understood by Leibniz, are merely de facto constraints on the extent to which finite minds are capable of grasping things from the eternalistic perspective of God, whereas the boundaries insisted on by Kant are principled restrictions, grounded in the positive conditions of the possibility of cognition for finite knowers. [End Page 633]Although Gawlina thus clearly indicates the ways in which Eberhard misunderstood and misrepresented Kant’s position, he refuses to declare Kant the victor in the controversy. This is partly on historical and partly on philosophical grounds. Historically, the reason is that in spite of all of its limitations, Eberhard’s critique of Kant did succeed in raising questions among Kant’s followers regarding the coherence of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Clinical CommentaryChong Siow Ann, Associate ProfessorDr. G appears to experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia, which is arguably the most severe mental disorder and which afflicts about one in a hundred people. This is a psychotic disorder that causes disturbances and distortions in thinking, including neurocognitive impairments, perception and behaviour. There is no cure for this often devastating disorder. Current antipsychotic medications can alleviate some of the symptoms but it (...) often comes at a price as these antipsychotics have burdensome side effects.A feature of this disorder is anosognosia, which is a lack of awareness or “insight” that an illness is present. This lack of insight presents a particular challenge because these individuals would, as in the case of Dr. G, refuse needed treatment as they do not perceive that they are ill. This is not necessarily an all-or-none phenomenon but is rather more complex and multidimensional; there might be an unawareness or recognition on behalf of the patient that they are suffering from a mental illness, the failure to appreciate the necessity of treatment; and/or the inability to recognise and define the psychotic symptoms like unusual thoughts and hallucinations as signs of illness1 and in many instances, all three are present. It is also by no means uncommon. Studies have found that between 60% and 80% of people with schizophrenia lack awareness of their illness to varying degrees.2This phenomenon remains an enigma. Some regard it as a form of psychological defence against the harsh reality of a psychotic illness — awareness of having a chronic and devastating illness might lead to demoralisation, hopelessness and suicide.3 Recent research, however, [End Page 250] indicates that this psychological denial plays a small part, if any, and instead has found an association with certain neuropsychological and neurocognitive deficits,4 as well as functional and structural brain abnormalities in the frontal lobe of the brain.5The prevailing clinical view thus is that this is an intrinsic and organic aspect of the schizophrenic illness which has nothing to do with wilfulness but rather the incapacity to perceive the presence of the illness. Edwin Fuller Torrey, an eminent psychiatrist and executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Foundation, calls anosognosia the “single largest reason why individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder do not take their medications”, and he has remarked that “to keep talking about civil liberty is illogical. Patients are anything but free when they’re at the beck and call of their own delusions”.6It is also this view that it is a product of a brain disorder that some — particularly patients — find unacceptable. At one level, it does not take into context the person’s own experiences, and at a deeper level it calls into question the conception of the self with its capacity to exercise judgements and the autonomy to make decisions.This is a perennial ethical issue in psychiatry when people with severe mental illnesses refuse treatment. This becomes a Catch-22 situation where part of the illness that needs treatment is also preventing any treatment to be given: implicit in the principle of informed consent for treatment is that the person should be aware of the nature and course of their illness and acknowledge the need for treatment. While there are laws for involuntary commitment, the bar is usually high in that there must be a clear and present risk of harm to the person or others. Alan Stone, a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard University proposed a possible justification for involuntary treatment based on his “thank-you theory” which assumes that patients will become well and subsequently agree that the intervention was in their best interests but research suggests that only half of these patients would admit so.7One suggested mechanism is the use of advance directives — psychiatry’s version of the living will in which people can specify what sort of medical care they would like should they become mentally unwell and unable to exercise appropriate judgement. An intrinsic part of this might include a “Ulysses contract” — just as Ulysess instructed his crew to lash him to the mast of the his ship so that he could... (shrink)

How is modern psychotherapy impacted when it is approached from the presence and understanding of the unconditioned mind? What happens when therapists are able to function as a sacred mirror for their clients' essential nature, reflecting back not only the contents of awarenessùthoughts, feelings and sensationsùbut awareness itself? Informed by their direct experience as well as by nondual teachings from both eastern and western wisdom traditions, the authors take a fresh look at what psychotherapy can be. These seminal essays (...) will challenge and inspire readers to approach psychotherapy in a new wayùas a potential portal for experiencing their deepest nature as free and joyful beings.Seasoned clinicians, Dan Berkow, Stephan Bodian, Dorothy Hunt, Sheila Krystal, Lynn Marie Lumiere, Richard Miller, John Prendergast, John Welwood, Jennifer Welwood and Bryan Wittine, and innovative western spiritual teachers, Adyashanti and Peter Fenner, explore critical issues at the interface of psychology and spirituality from a nondual perspective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to My CommentatorsDavid CarrierI am immensely thankful to Rika Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Klaus Ottmann, and Sean Ulmer for their comments on my book. And to Daniel A. Siedell for organizing this mini-symposium, which really is an author's dream. By gently pressing me to think about important issues, these sympathetic commentators have advanced dialogue.When writing Museum Skepticism I became very aware that there are (...) two kinds of literature that discuss museums. There are memoirs of curators or other museum employees, and there are the commentaries by academics, which usually look at museums from the outside. My ambition was to look at this institution in a way that would both be sympathetic to the practical concerns and embody a theoretical point of view. One otherwise sympathetic reviewer complained that I was only looking at the museum from the outside.1 That certainly is correct, but for obvious reasons people who work in museums are unusually unwilling to describe their inner workings. To have a good theory of the museum, you need to be practical. Often, for example, critics complain about the proliferation of shops and restaurants, urge that admission be free, or say that blockbuster shows are destructive and overcrowded. However one judges such moralizing, the museum director who needs to balance the budget can hardly be guided by such reasoning. One can be critical, as I am, about the power of the super-rich in museum life. But in what other way could funding be found? The history of debates about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) points to obvious ways in which, in America at least, reliance on public funding poses problems. My goal, then, was to develop a realistic analysis.Sean Ulmer correctly notes that to understand the art in museums, we must consider its prior history. Chinese paintings, Islamic decorations, Maori sculpture, and premodern European art were not made to be displayed in public galleries. And so there are legitimate questions about how to set it alongside modernist art, whose natural home is the art museum. Allowing this much, I am not sure why he thinks it impossible to describe museums in a single book. We need to understand how artifacts with such varied origins can be coherently displayed in one building. Here, then, we get to Ulmer's second concern—museum displays. Recently museums have experimented with thematic displays. The Museum of Modern Art in New York did that before its recent reconstruction; the Tate Modern has such a system; and during summer 2006 the Whitney tried such a plan. I understand the need of museums to experiment, to find new ways to attract visitors to the permanent collection. Still, a straight chronological display has the obvious advantage of presenting that history of art in which, for example, Impressionism leads to Cubism, and then on to Abstract Expressionism. The obvious danger of thematic displays is that they bewilder the larger public. [End Page 22]When I said that museums are top-down institutions, I was thinking of the grander public museums where the function of the trustees is to raise money, either by giving themselves or by networking. These people who provide funding no doubt have their own agendas, but they, in turn, respond to larger economic and political concerns. I would be astonished if the Metropolitan Museum of Art asked Arthur Danto or Leo Steinberg to be a trustee; or, to look closer at hand, if the Carnegie Museum of Art or the Cleveland Museum of Art asked me to play that role. Since we are mere professors, what practical help could we provide? I expect that at smaller museums the situation is different. But here, again, it is important to be realistic. Cleveland's art historians have not had any influence on the rebuilding plan for the Cleveland Museum of Art. Of course I would be flattered if the new director asked for my opinion, but to be honest, I am not sure that I could tell him anything useful. When Ulmer discusses the comparative role of permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, he touches on a very important point. Like him, I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 167-170 [Access article in PDF] Journey into Emptiness: Dogen, Merton, Jung, and the Quest for Transformation. By Robert Jingen Gunn. New York: Paulist Press, 2000. xiv + 334 pp. Written by a New York psychotherapist who also has Zen training, the thesis of this book is that the experience of emptiness is a necessary precondition to spiritual transformation. "Emptiness" is defined as "an experience (...) of being without, of not having, not having answers, not having property, not having love or power or hope" (1). "Transformation" is described as a path that leads to the realization of our rootedness in a transcendent dimension. Three paths of transformation are discussed through three case studies: Buddhism in the experience of Dogen; Christianity through the life of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton; and Depth Psychology as developed in the life experience of Carl Jung. In each case the major obstacle to be overcome is ego and ego attachments. The transformation process, argues Gunn, is often triggered by an initial experience of emptiness such as the early loss of one's mother, an experience of death, divorce, depression, illness, failure, identity confusion, or loss of community. The traditions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Depth Psychology view a person's pivotal experience of emptiness "not as something painful to be avoided, but a door, leading to a larger vision and experience of connection to all of life" (7). Response to the experience of emptiness can be by either engagement or avoidance. Refusing the path of transformation will add to one's burden of suffering whether understood as karma, sin, or neurosis. Yet this is often the contemporary choice. Afraid to move into the unknown, or to let go of ego control, we hold on to whatever is within our grasp—a house, a marriage, an idea, an identity—and avoid the challenge of realizing our true selves. Choosing to enter the Buddhist Way, to take up one's cross or to make the unconscious conscious, is to adopt transformation from an initial emptiness to a "way of life that consists in ever-expanding awareness, continual letting-go of attachments and increasing freedom and service to all of life, to being itself" (9).The author suggests that three stages in the experience of emptiness and self-transformation [End Page 167] are found in the case studies of Dogen, Merton, and Jung: (1) experienced emptiness in their own lives; (2) used that experience to embark on their own path of transformation; and (3) returned to offer their practical experience as a method for others to use. Although viewed differently by each, emptiness is primary for all, and the self that is let go of remains but is transformed. For Dogen, in emptiness we let go of everything, including self and emptiness itself. What remains is no-thing, an insubstantiality that is neither nothing nor something, but leads us back to the Self, which is everything. For Merton, letting go of everything leaves an empty self experienced as poverty, but a poverty that leads to fulfillment, which finds the true Self hidden with Christ in God—free for God, free for others, free for whatever God wills. For Jung, emptiness is the sacrifice of ego to the larger Self, which transcends individual consciousness.While the analyses of the emptiness/transformative experiences of Dogen and Merton are well done, the presentation of Jung lacks depth and completeness. The author's psychotherapist vocation seemed to artificially force the analysis—as, for example, in Gunn's attempt to show that in each case the major trigger of the emptiness experience was the early loss of the mother.I found the presentation of Dogen's Buddhist experience to be the most fully developed and convincing of the three case studies. Gunn does an excellent job of situating Dogen's experience within the context of Buddhism by presenting a well-researched and well-written summary of Buddha, Nagarjuna, and Bodhidharma; however, the contribution of the Theravada understanding is completely ignored. The presentation of Nagarjuna is especially well done, but the author... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Hypothesis on the Origin of TradeThe Exchange of Lives for Sacrifice and SexPablo Díaz-Morlán (bio)introductionThe primary objective of this study is to propose a hypothesis regarding the origin of trade that will help to solve the enigma of why human groups, normally each other's enemies, stopped exchanging blows in order to exchange things. The complexity of this crucial step forward in the relationships between hostile primitive groups (...) can be summarized as follows. In order for an exchange to take place, both parties must take part in it voluntarily because they see a mutual benefit in doing so. In turn, both parties should be aware that in order to obtain what interests them, which is closely guarded by the other party, in return, they must hand over what the other party is interested in. The perception of the interest of the other plays a crucial role in trade, both today and in its origins. The next step to be taken after a successful initial exchange was its consolidation, after it had been proved that it mutually benefited groups who had, until then, been enemies. Once established, this pacific exchange would have diversified considerably and its complexity would have increased significantly. An added [End Page 165] advantage, which was unexpected but real, was that its subsequent usefulness in curbing violence contributed to its growing expansion. The emergence of a comparative advantage in the groups that adopted trade would have guaranteed their future progress with respect to those that continued to systematically adopt violent conduct toward their neighbors.1Throughout this study, we will come across the old idea that the market prevents war. Without a doubt, trade and war between individuals and groups are closely connected, but the boundaries between them are fuzzy and their demarcation has proven elusive to researchers. Albert Hirschman studied the intellectual climate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in favor of trade and the express declaration of Montesquieu that "peace is the natural effect of trade."2 Since then, this idea has gained ground among researchers of economics and other fields of knowledge. In L'enfer des choses and subsequent works, Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Paul Dumouchel defend that the economy (the market) is a substitute for the sacred, containing violence through violent means. The market contains violence in the two senses of the term contain: It holds it and curbs it; it is both the poison and the remedy. The consumer society makes all objects available to everyone and in this way deactivates mimetic rivalry, deferring violent conflicts. But it is only a temporary remedy. In the words of Girard, "It is always necessary to find new toys."3Following the path initiated by Dumouchel and Dupuy, with their criticism of the free market economy and their proposal for a new notion of scarcity, in his text The Empire of Value, André Orléan claims that money is at the origin of the market. My analysis alludes to a moment prior to that established by Orléan. He maintains that he does not contemplate the historical origin of money but instead uses the expression "the conceptual origin of money." In fact, when he defends the essential monetary base of the market, he refers to an already developed market system, that is, an economic system for which the operation is structured around the institution of the market.4 Mark R. Anspach also criticized the market system in his book À Charge de Revanche. This author proposes the transcending of the perverse logic of vengeance that defines both war and the market that transforms it into a positive reciprocity based on the gift. This constitutes a type of shift away from looking at the past (settling old accounts) to looking toward the future, embracing gratitude, which gives rise to the initial gesture of giving.5 This study analyzes a time prior to that examined by Orléan and Anspach. It was the moment of hominization, that is, mimicry, the subsequent violence that threatened the survival of human groups and, as we will seek to explain, the market as an institution that has accompanied humankind since its conformation as a species... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on InsightDilemmas, Paradoxes, and PuzzlesMarga Reimer (bio)Keywordsinsight, psychosis, treatment adherence, medical model, autonomy, open placebos, rationalityThe Practitioner's DilemmaThe psychiatrist aware of the potential intractability of what Jennifer Radden calls "insightlessness," faces a dilemma. Should she encourage her patient to embrace a medical model of his "troubles," a model whose adoption is likely to motivate treatment adherence? She might then be trying to do the impossible; she might (...) also alienate her patient in the process. Should she instead encourage her insightless patient to embrace his own non-medical model, according to which treatment adherence makes no medical sense whatsoever? She might then see herself as encouraging a kind of uninformed consent: Her insightless patient might be taking powerful, potentially harmful, medication for reasons (such as sound sleep and "peace of mind") that would never medically justify adherence.In my original paper, I suggested that the way out of this dilemma might be to embrace the latter option, while characterizing the very real (and medically based) benefits of treatment adherence in non-medical terms. I now realize that my proposed resolution reflects an oversimplified understanding of what might be called the "practitioner's dilemma." As Michaela Amering (2010) makes clear, the situation for those with mental illness is improving dramatically. With "recovery orientation" as the "guiding principle of mental health policy," the emphasis is on "health promotion, individual strengths, and resilience." The question becomes: Can the practitioner encourage her insightless patient to partake in this "recovery" movement if she does not simultaneously encourage him to embrace a medicalized understanding of his "troubles"?Not obviously. For although a "recovery" model might eschew notions like illness1 and disease, pathology and dysfunction, and even schizophrenia, it will inevitably involve some medical notions. The patient who partakes in the "recovery movement" described by Amering, would seem to have no choice but to accept a model that is essentially medical. Consider the language used by Amering in characterizing that movement. She talks of mental health problems, therapeutic relations, patient self-determination, diagnosis and, of course, recovery. The concepts underlying such language are intrinsic to the patient-oriented movement Amering describes. The question becomes:How can the insightless patient rationally partake in such a movement without embracing some version of the medical model of mental illness? [End Page 85]This question suggests the importance of promoting some kind of insight, even if not insight "into psychosis." At the close of these comments, I consider briefly what such "revisionary" insight might involve.Paradoxes of Conditional and Relinquished AutonomyAutonomy among patients with psychosis presupposes the sort of clear-headedness that arguably comes only with treatment adherence. This may provide some justification for the "coercive treatments" that Anthony (2006) finds so offensive. For patients with psychosis, genuine autonomy is conditional, requiring some degree of insight: Recognition that their "troubles" are at least amenable to medical treatment. Once the patient recognizes this, he can choose freely to decline such treatment (regardless of whether that choice is ultimately respected). Call this the "paradox of conditional autonomy." The conditional nature of autonomy is a familiar point in philosophical discussions regarding free will. There is no genuine freedom without the sort of knowledge required for informed choices. What distinguishes the patient with psychosis from persons more generally is that his autonomy is further conditioned: The knowledge required for autonomous decision making arguably requires some degree of treatment adherence.However, the mentally ill patient has the right, as do all patients, to relinquish autonomy. He may opt for deference to, and dependency on, the relevant experts: Mental health care professionals (Campbell 1994). We are led once again to paradox. To respect the patient's autonomy, the mental health care professional must respect his right to forego autonomy in favor of deference and dependency. This paradoxical situation, involving a kind of deferred autonomy, is not unique to psychiatry but applies to medicine across the board. Indeed, it applies to the human service industry more generally where, as McGorry (1992) suggests, there is an implicit assumption that the service user is to defer to the expertise of the service provider.This assumption is rightly challenged. Suppose Justin and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 26 (2006) 213-216 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reviewed byJohn Berthrong Boston University School of TheologyDialogues at One Inch Above the Ground: Reclamations of Belief in an Interreligious Age. By James W. Heisig. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003. 215 pp.Few scholars are better prepared than James W. Heisig to write about the current state of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and few have written more insightfully about the historical, (...) theological, religious, and spiritual factors that have made Buddhist-Christian dialogue so intriguing for the last four decades. Heisig is the director of the Nanzan Institute, one of the premier institutions in the world dedicated to cultivating dialogue primarily between Christians and Buddhists, but also with people of other traditions and no religious belief at all.The title of the book is taken from the writings of the famous medieval poet Saigyō, who said that he tried to live at "one inch above the ground." Heisig follows Saigyō's advice by focusing many of his articles on themes such as health and ecology rather than abstruse metaphysical discussions of the intricacies of Buddhist and Christian doctrines, although, as one would expect, he shows a deft hand at explaining the philosophical and theological dimensions of living life at one inch above the ground.The opening two chapters on how we can collectively view the current ecological crisis demonstrate Heisig's sure hand at moving between profound meditations on current events and demonstrating how these problems can be even better understood in terms of spiritual and religious insights. Heisig argues that having two eyes, one Buddhist and one Christian, might just help us walk better on the ground, especially a ground that is being harmed on a daily basis by human disregard for the natural environment. His essay on the interpretation of the Buddhist principle of sufficiency is based on the injunction that we should learn to "consider how much is enough." The following essay demonstrates how hard-headed he can be with his call for us not to move from an uncaring contempt for nature to an equally ill-conceived sentimentalization of nature.There are so many insightful and clever features to the essays in the book that it is hard to pick out any one essay for special comment, but one of my favorites, high-lighting [End Page 213] Heisig's rhetorical powers, is "Six Sūtras on Dialogue" (pp. 139–157). This essay demonstrates what a Christian theologian might learn from engaging in interreligious dialogue. Moreover, it even takes the form, as Heisig explains, of the traditional Buddhist sūtra of six teachings on the nature of dialogue. Dialogue, according to Heisig (echoing Alfred North Whitehead), "is an adventure of ideas" (p. 141). The first teaching is "The spirit of interreligious dialogue need not be born of traditions in order to be reborn there" (p. 145). One of the strong points Heisig makes over and over again is that we now live with increasing self-awareness in a religiously pluralistic world. Actually, we always have, though various theological traditions have been adept at either ignoring or rejecting the notion that there could be anything positive about religious pluralism. At its worst, pluralism simply demonstrated the spiritual depravity and turbidity of humankind, and at best, it could simply be ignored as unworthy of serious comment. With the growing social, political, economic, military, and cultural interconnections of the modern world, no one can ignore pluralism. Theologians and religious leaders, in particular, need to think about religious pluralism even if this dialogue is not something that was "born" within their traditional theological discourse.The second teaching is a corroloary of the first: "Dialogue is primarily a minority enterprise that stands free of the obligations of institutional religion" (p. 147). Now, the leaders of institutional religion might dispute this point, but again Heisig is correct in noting that people are going to talk to their neighbors regardless of what they are told to do by worried religious authorities. He makes the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will by Günter ZöllerDaniel BreazealeGünter Zöller. Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii + 169. Cloth, $49.95.The subtitle says it all: “Original Duplicity,” which is to say, interdependent duality, or perhaps “equiprimordiality.” The thesis defended by Günter Zöller in this meticulously documented and elegantly written new book is (...) that the traditional emphasis upon the “primacy of the practical” in Fichte’s thought is seriously misleading and obscures one of the most striking aspects of his highly original transcendental analysis of consciousness and experience.Limiting his exegesis to the period of the “early” or “Jena” Wissenschaftslehre, Zöller carefully explains how “practical” and “theoretical” elements are inextricably linked at every stage of Fichte’s analysis. While it is certainly true that Fichte made a brilliant effort to demonstrate the dependence of “thinking” upon “willing,” of “knowing” upon “doing,” and hence of “theory” upon “practice,” it is no less true that, in doing so, he also established that there can be no “willing” without some prior awareness, and hence some “knowledge,” both of one’s present condition (“what is”) and of some particular goal to be accomplished by free activity (“what ought to be”). The Kantian distinction between “theoretical” and “practical” reason is, therefore, on Fichte’s analysis, simply a reflection of a more fundamental distinction between the “theoretical” and “practical” activities or powers of the I, neither of which can function in the absence of the other. [End Page 374]What Fichte proposes is, in Zöller’s phrase, a truly “integrated theory of reason,” one that begins by positing a pure and original unity of intellect and will in the mere concept of selfhood, that proceeds to a discursive, transcendental analysis of the dynamic and dialectical interplay between “theoretical” and “practical” moments in the constitution of experience (or of empirical self-consciousness), and that concludes by positing, albeit only as a regulative ideal, or as a necessary but unobtainable goal of infinite striving, the final, empirically achieved unity of theory and practice: an ideal of a self that is no longer divided against itself or others and of a world that has been wholly transformed by intellectually guided human activity. As Fichte’s account proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear not only that we must distinguish the will from the intellect—even as we continue to insist upon their systematic interdependence—but that we must also modify our original understanding of both. This conclusion is most unambiguously presented in those works of 1796–99 that collectively constitute the “second” or “revised” version of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, including the lectures on Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo and the System of Ethics, and it is upon an analysis of these texts that Zöller’s interpretation is chiefly based. According to the latter, an adequate theory of willing must not merely contrast and relate “the will” to “the intellect,” but must recognize that even pure volition contains a certain cognitive core and presupposes some guiding law that is simply integral to the will itself. Similarly, “mere cognition” will always be found to contain within itself, in the form of “feeling,” a certain “practical” dimension of its own.Zöller’s careful account of Fichte’s genetic deduction of the necessary interplay between theoretical and practical elements in the constitution of selfhood and experience is by far the most detailed and accurate one available in English, and forms the core of his book. It is by no means, however, the only topic he discusses. The first two chapters, for example, constitute an excellent general introduction to Fichte’s entire Jena project and include a fine discussion of the relationship between Kantian and Fichtean idealism. Chapter 3, which explicates the key notions of “positing” and “determining,” will be of immense help to anyone trying to understand German idealism in general and Fichte’s philosophy in particular. Like Kant’s ethical theory, Fichte’s is often treated in isolation from his larger system, but Zöller’s Chapter 4 clearly explicates the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist and Catholic Monks Talk about CelibacyThomas Ryan, CSPThe electronic sign at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport was flashing "Orange Alert" as a dozen Buddhist monks arrived in their burnt orange robes from around the country for three days of dialogue on celibacy with a similar number of Catholic monastics come together from various monasteries at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. As he opened the October 26–29, 2006, (...) meeting, Rev. William Skudlarek, executive director of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID), said, "You (Buddhists) have been at this for some five-to-seven hundred years longer than we have. We have something to learn."This was the second Monks in the West interreligious dialogue. The first took place in 2004 at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in northern California. On the Catholic side, the participants came from the Benedictine, Cistercian, and Camaldolese monasteries. On the Buddhist side, they came from the Theravada, Mahayana, and Tibetan traditions. Through the event, participants began the day with an hour of quiet sitting in meditation and joined the monastic community at St. John's for their rhythm of daily prayer.The first session dealt with theory, the "why" of celibacy. Buddhist participants explained that their teachings focus on seeing how suffering is created and cured. Attachments give rise to suffering, so advancement in the spiritual life requires letting go of one's attachments. Attachment to desires, among which are sexual desires, is a hindrance to spiritual progress. "Raging desire takes away choice, freedom," said Rev. Kusala Bhikshu, a Buddhist chaplain at UCLA, in his opening presentation. "The senses must be controlled in order to be free."Brother Gregory Perron from St. Procopius monastery in Indiana spoke of how monastic life demands a profound understanding and acceptance of solitude. "Celibacy is a tool," offered Perron, "a skillful means like intentional simplicity of life, by which our heart is burrowed out and the core of our being laid bare. By embracing it, the monk accepts the aloneness that characterizes every human being."In response to Buddhist reflections on the illusory nature of the body, Catholic participants pointed out Christianity's remarkably positive evaluation of the [End Page 143] body in the doctrines of the Incarnation, the bodily Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Both sides acknowledged balancing points of reference as well, such as, in Christianity, Paul's "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Rom 7:24). Though humankind ranks eighth from the bottom in Buddhism's thirty-two-realm cosmology, that level is the only one where spiritual growth can happen. Thus human form is in the end praised by the Buddha.In the second session, the participants moved from theory to practice. Rev. Jisho Perry from the Shasta Buddhist Abbey in California said that "the whole thrust of training is not to give in to desire that arises." He described the Buddhist method of accepting sexual feelings without either acting on them or repressing them, but just letting them pass through. "The right use of will is willingness, not willpower—the willingness to sit there and let that feeling pass through," he said.Fr. Skudlarek expressed appreciation for this Buddhist approach to transforming the sexual energy. "I never got a sense in our training of accepting the feeling with awareness and letting it pass without acting on it. You had to fight it! And the more you resisted, the stronger it got!"Rev. Heng Sure, who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, presented celibacy as the first step in a three-step process that goes from celibacy to stillness to insight. "It should not be seen just as a difficult adjunct to the spiritual path, but as essential to it," he said. The practice of meditation represents daily periods when the senses are stilled and not allowed to pursue sense objects. "Something happens to the energy in the stillness; the pressure goes away." In married life, he explained, spiritual practice is "partial and piecemeal," making celibacy a more effective means to move toward insight and the peace and happiness that flow from it. In the discussion, Benedictine Fr. Mark... (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:Reviewed by:Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking by Yvonne C. ZimmermanAbbylynn HelgevoldReview of Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking YVONNE C. ZIMMERMAN New York: Oxford, 2013. 223 pp. $35.00In Other Dreams of Freedom, Yvonne Zimmerman develops a genealogical analysis of US antitrafficking policy. She aims to show how antitrafficking initiatives in the United States are influenced by and expressive of distinctively Protestant (...) norms regarding gender, sex, and freedom. Zimmerman argues that US antitrafficking initiatives are limited in their ability to promote [End Page 229] diverse expressions of freedom because they are both implicitly and explicitly framed from within such a religious worldview. As a result of the biases that have shaped US antitrafficking efforts, the complex social phenomenon of human trafficking, which involves a variety of forms of exploitation and abuse, has become essentially identified with the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women and girls. According to Zimmerman, this has led to a disproportionate focus on “freeing” trafficking victims from sexual slavery and exploitation to “choose” to live lives that better reflect “good old American values” (126). Instead of respecting the agency of victims and promoting their freedom to make diverse choices about their own lives, current initiatives encourage conformity to “American” (i.e., middle class, white, and Protestant) values. If dreaming “other dreams of freedom” is ever to become a reality for the wide range of individuals who are or have been trafficked, becoming critically aware of these biases is an important first step.Zimmerman’s primary aim is to reveal these biases, and she examines them from a number of different angles. Thus, she examines the historical development of antitrafficking legislation; the gendered and theological language of US antitrafficking public policy; the implementation of policy under the Bush and Obama administrations; and the historical influence of distinctively Protestant conceptions of human freedom, morality, and sexual expression on what many typically consider to be “traditional American values.” Zimmerman’s analysis urges readers to become critically aware of how the language used in public policy communicates and enforces particular norms. She highlights the gendered language that normativizes female passivity and male aggression, and pays close attention to the deeper theological meaning of terms like “evil” and “God-given potential” used in US public policy that link Christian understandings of freedom to sexual expression. According to Zimmerman, understanding the religious moral imagination evoked by such language helps to explain the otherwise unreasonable “conflation of sex work and human trafficking” in US policy (173).On the whole, the threads of sex, gender, and freedom that Zimmerman picks up are generally well supported throughout Other Dreams. Her research also raises some difficult questions that are beyond the scope of her book but worth considering. For example, even if the language of evil carries with it certain theological assumptions, is it possible that there are good reasons for using such language in addition to the language of justice? Or, even if one challenges the Protestant norms that are being used to shape antitrafficking efforts, are there other reasons for supporting the policy that is in place?Zimmerman’s book is clear, well-written, and accessible. Other Dreams of Freedom will likely appeal to a number of different audiences: diverse scholars interested in the relationship between religion and public policy; political activists, social workers, or policy makers interested in the problem of human [End Page 230] trafficking; and teachers of advanced undergraduate or graduate courses that deal with these issues. Other Dreams of Freedom is edifying, thought-provoking, and timely. As more attention turns toward the global social problem of human trafficking it is important that the policies in place and the activities of those who implement them are not hampered in their usefulness by unexplored biases.Abbylynn HelgevoldUniversity of Northern IowaCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)