This article brings out certain philosophical difficulties in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage, the initial moment of the subject’s development. For Lacan, the “original organization of the forms of the ego” is “precipitated” in an infant’s self-recognition in a mirror image; this event is explicitly prior to any social interactions. A Hegelian objection to the Lacanian account argues that social interaction and recognition of others by infants are necessary prerequisites for infants’ capacity to recognize themselves in a mirror image. (...) Thus mutual recognition with another, rather than self-recognition in a mirror, is what makes possible subsequent ego-formation and self-consciousness. This intersubjective critique suggests that many of the psychoanalytic consequences that Lacan derives from the mirror stage (e.g., alienation, narcissism, and aggressivity) may need to be rethought. (shrink)

This paper explores issues that arise between Adorno and Marcuse over the potentials and implications of Freudian theory. These concern whether it is possible to expound a non-repressive relationship between what Freud calls the life and death drives, on the one hand, and the ego, on the other, that does not collapse into abstract utopianism or clear heteronomy. After detailing the theory of instincts and ego formation that early critical theory draws from Freud, I argue that neither Adorno nor (...) Marcuse is successful in articulating the possibility of such a non-repressive form of subjectivity: Adorno produces a powerful conception of freedom as non-reductive, communicative reconciliation between ego and instinctual nature, but remains committed to a Freudian conception of the interplay between elements of the psyche that makes it difficult to see how reconciliation could be actualized therein. Marcuse, on the other hand, develops a conception of liberation that largely abandons the ideal of ego autonomy by rendering the ego a spectator to the unfurling of instinctual impulses. In the concluding section, I argue that a more judicious evaluation of the death drive’s contribution to critical thought could clear space for a rapprochement between Adorno and Marcuse, and a more successful incorporation of Freud into critical theory. (shrink)

Ego psychology, more existential than scientific in tone, has made psychoanalytic theory more congenial to historical studies, especially when they deal with creative and conflicted leaders. Erikson's concept of the identity crisis points to the intersection of family-centered conflicts with social and cultural history. It also orients the historian to the reanimation of problems in earlier stages of the life-cycle, the importance of work to identity formation, and the neurotic function of over-identification with a troublesome parent. Phenomenologically descriptive rather (...) than causally explanatory, psycho-biography mediates between Freud's naturalism and Collingwood's idealism by relating conscious and unconscious purposes. It establishes congruences and resonances, helping to explain in narrative form the meaning, timing, and urgency of a leader's characteristic ideas. (shrink)

This article explores the formation of a tranimal, hippopotamus alter-ego. Confronting transgender with transpecies, the author claims that his hippopotamus “identity” allowed him to escape, all at once, several sets of categorization that govern human bodies. He starts with an account of how his metaphorical hippo-self is collectively produced and performed, distinguishing the subjective, the intersubjective and the social. The article then investigates the politics of equating transgender and transpecies, critically examining the question of the inclusion of “xenogenders” in (...) the trans political movement. Finally, the author returns to the magical power of metaphors, arguing that metaphors do materialize insofar as the flesh does not remain unchanged by them. Analogizing his hippo-self to a “cut” as theorized by Eva Hayward – a regeneration of the boundaries of the self – he offers a final crossing to the world of fiction by showing how the His Dark Materials trilogy outlines an aesthetics of porosity, which suggests that the self is, as much as a novel, a work of fiction. (shrink)

_The Phantom of the Ego _is the first comparative study that shows how the modernist account of the unconscious anticipates contemporary discoveries about the importance of mimesis in the formation of subjectivity. Rather than beginning with Sigmund Freud as the father of modernism, Nidesh Lawtoo starts with Friedrich Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical diagnostic of the ego, his realization that mimetic reflexes—from sympathy to hypnosis, to contagion, to crowd behavior—move the soul, and his insistence that psychology informs philosophical reflection. Through a transdisciplinary, (...) comparative reading of landmark modernist authors like Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Georges Bataille, Lawtoo shows that, before being a timely empirical discovery, the “mimetic unconscious” emerged from an untimely current in literary and philosophical modernism. This book traces the psychological, ethical, political, and cultural implications of the realization that the modern ego is born out of the spirit of imitation; it is thus, strictly speaking, not an ego, but what Nietzsche calls, “a phantom of the ego.” _The Phantom of the Ego _opens up a Nietzschean back door to the unconscious that has mimesis rather than dreams as its _via regia,_ and argues that the modernist account of the “mimetic unconscious” makes our understanding of the psyche new. (shrink)

The primary aim of the current study was to examine whether depleted cognitive resources might have ramifications for the formation of neutral and negative spontaneous false memories. To examine this, participants received neutral and negative Deese/Roediger–McDermott false memory wordlists. Also, for half of the participants, cognitive resources were depleted by use of an ego depletion manipulation . Our chief finding was that depleted cognitive resources made participants more vulnerable for the production of false memories. Our results shed light on (...) how depleted cognitive resources affect neutral and negative correct and errant memories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ego CredoMichel Serres (bio)Saint Paul combines in one singular person the three ancient formats, Jewish, Greek, and Latin, from which the Western World sprang. A devout Pharisee, he was born in Tarsus into a family of the Diaspora, and educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel; he observed Mosaic Law and constantly cited the Torah, both Psalms and Prophets, with erudition. It also seems likely that he knew Greek philosophy, at (...) least by way of Philo the Jew, since he wrote and spoke the Greek language and cited some of its authors, saying that he admired its wisdom, practiced its elegance, and dreaded its reason. As a Roman citizen, like his father, he took pride in this status; he must have known Roman Law, since after being sentenced by the imperial courts, he addressed an appeal to them.Saint Paul not only symbolizes the cultural melting pot among Mediterranean sailors, port-merchants, and occasional scholars during the Pax romana; he above all embodies the integral man built by the Law, the Logos, and the Administration, three formats forged in the fires of Hebraic monotheism, Hellenistic rational Wisdom, and Roman Law, themselves respectively shaped by ritual in the Temple, harmony in the Cosmos, and the City-State in the Empire. This triple belonging to an organized society, a systematic world, and an all-powerful god promotes excellent modes of conduct.Triply formatted in this way, Saint Paul, newly named, rose up out of the trinity of his belonging; he traveled the world over, and he invented the coming era. In so doing, he braved three disasters: the persecution of his fellows, the mockery of Greek philosophers on the Areopagus, and his trial and probable execution by Rome. In and through Paul, all the superior and lasting achievements of the Indo-European and Semitic traditions stem from this original bifurcation; the good news he proclaims is incarnated and grafted on him and through him; from him, the branch of a new creature springs forth.Although his ancient formats imply a belonging to three different communities, the new man identifies with none of them in order to create something entirely new. But what? [End Page 1]Belonging and IdentityIn a previous book, I wrote that my identity cannot be reduced to my belonging to certain groups. So do not call me "old man," a male, or a writer, but put me, if you must, in whichever subcategory designates the corresponding age, sex, or profession. Apart from these characteristics, who am I? Me. All the rest, including what the government bureaucracy obliges me to write on my so-called "identity" card, merely indicates some of the subcategories to which I belong.If you confuse belonging and identity, you make a logical error that is certainly serious, but, in the end, relatively benign. Moreover, you set yourself up to make a deadly mistake, that of racism, which consists precisely in reducing a person to one of his groups. We owe this distinction (which is so important that I like to repeat it) to Saint Paul. We owe it to him both in theory, because he elaborates it, and in terms of his life, because the Good News that he brings breaks with the three ancient formats, all three of which were associated with groups."There is neither Jew nor Greek," says Paul, "there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female" (Gal. 3:28). All he mentions here are classes, sexes, languages, or nations—in short, all categories or groups. What he means is that there is no longer any belonging in the earlier sense, leaving only the identity I = I: "But by the grace of God I am what I am" (1 Cor. 15:10).For Paul, the only thing left is this "new creature": I, the adoptive Son of God, through faith in Jesus Christ; I, full of faith and without works, without pride; I, empty, poor, and nothing: universal.Who am I? I am I, and that is all. If we put aside the subcategorical definition of belonging (x å A), the principle of identity becomes evident, not in a formal way, as in the Aristotelian sense of a... (shrink)

While the “symbolic” meaning of early body ornamentation has received the lion’s share of attention in the debate on human origins, this paper sets out to explore their aesthetic and agentive dimensions, for the purpose of explaining how various ornamental forms would have led interacting groups to form a cultural identity of their own. To this end, semiotics is integrated with a new paradigm in the archaeology of mind, known as the theory of material engagement. Bridging specifically Peirce’s pragmatic theory (...) and Malafouris’ enactive take on aesthetics allows us to appreciate the formation of aesthetic ideals through the agentive effects of material signs. It is thus proposed that, by attending to the interrelation between form, effect, and affect, members of social groups would have come to appreciate the ways in which their ornamental culture resembles and differs from that of neighbouring groups. Following the Lund conception of cultural semiotics, I argue that models of Ego-culture would have come to evolve along Alter-cultures that also employ ornaments, and against Alius-cultures that have yet to develop or adopt personal decoration. The aesthetic ideals associated with early body ornaments must have therefore played a catalytic role in the formation and communication of group membership. I thus close by proposing that the origins of new cultural identities can be explained by tracing the co-development of ideas and ideals. (shrink)

Since 1950, Erik Erikson's emphasis on ego-identity formation as the crucial task of adolescence has been the framework for almost all subsequent research and programming to empower positive adolescent development. Chatlos has recently described a “Framework of Spirituality” and contends that identity formation significantly interferes with and should occur after a spiritual transformational process for optimal and more meaningful adolescent development. This article reviews the current status of research in identity formation, including religious and spiritual identity (...) class='Hi'>formation contributing to his conclusion, and describes the spiritual transformational process that is proposed to be central to positive adolescent development. A possible link between systemic focus on identity formation and current social upheaval is also identified. (shrink)

There has been increasing emphasis on professionalism in medical education over the past several decades, initially focusing on bioethical principles, communication skills, and behaviors of medical students and practitioners. Authors have begun to discuss professional identity formation (PIF), distinguishing it as the foundational process one experiences during the transformation from lay person to physician. This integrative developmental process involves the establishment of core values, moral principles, and self-awareness. The literature has approached PIF from various paradigms—professionalism, psychological ego development, social (...) interactions, and various learning theories. Similarities have been identified between the formation process of clergy and that of physicians. PIF reflects a very complex process, or series of processes, best understood by applying aspects of overlapping domains: professionalism, psychosocial identity development, and formation. In this study, the authors review essential elements of these three domains, identify features relevant to medical PIF, and describe strategies reported in the medical education literature that may influence PIF. (shrink)

This paper suggests that learning a language is accomplished through the formation of new language identities and explains this process through the use of existential phenomenology. In order for learning (and specifically, the learning of a language) to happen, a permanent change in the identity of the learner must occur. The paper suggests the introduction of the concept of linguistic ego states as a model for such a change in learner identity which, in turn, brings about the embodied (not (...) just cognitive) retention of the acquired knowledge. In order for such retention to occur the situation must bring about anxiety, an existential crisis, or the distress and turmoil mentioned in the article’s title. This leads to a leap of faith, or an irreversible, qualitative personal change, a move to a different existential mode of being. (shrink)

The current stage of the development of amateur stayer running practices can be characterized as personality-building, since the main goals of runners (especially marathon runners and super marathon runners) are not so much related to strengthening health, as to the sphere of personal improvement and self-knowledge: the development of will, character, testing yourself in an extreme situation, testing previously inaccessible emotions and states of consciousness. The object of the study is ego texts (books for a wide audience, including the online (...) "samizdat") of modern Russian running enthusiasts. The method of studying these texts is the biographical method, which makes it possible to determine the multidimensional influence of running activity on fundamental changes in personality development and the formation of her life path. The analyzed biographies inherit both the confessional tradition of Augustine (the contrast of the aimless and vicious "pre-race" life, as well as the traumatic experience of running neophyte and significant achievements in many areas of personal development after the adoption of the values expressed through running Coubertin's "religio athleticae"), and the adventurous and heroic biographical tradition noted by M. M. Bakhtin, inherent in the Renaissance, as well as romanticism and Nietzscheanism with their focus on the formation (in our case, through a stayer run) of a new (or "super-") person. The qualitative result of running activity is the achievement by the subject of a new stage of development – a person running (homo currens), which is characterized by activity, mobility, heroism, asceticism, striving for maximum self-realization, achieving harmony of body and spirit. Homo currens opposes both virtual pastime and the fetishization of comfort culture, suggesting, referring to the concept of Viktor Frankl, filling life with new meanings and values through overcoming the inevitable suffering for a stayer run. Amateur running is considered by writers as a publicly available and effective means of gaining physical, mental and social well-being, which expresses its humanistic essence and gives philosophical and anthropological significance to the works under study. (shrink)

This essay draws on a wide range of feminist, psychoanalytic and other anti-racist theorists to work out the specific mode of space as ‘contained’ and the ways it grounds dominant contemporary forms of racism i.e. the space of phallicized whiteness. Offering a close reading of Lacan’s primary models for ego-formation, the mirror stage and the inverted bouquet, I argue that psychoanalysis can help us to map contemporary power relations of racism because it enacts some of those very dynamics. Casting (...) the production of subjectivity on the field of the visual, Lacan performs some of the fundamental conceptions of space and embodiment that ground the dominant forms of racism in these cultural symbolics. Namely, he articulates a body that is bound by skin, structured by a logic of containment, cathected through aggression and distance, and read primarily through the way it looks – both how it appears and how it beholds the appearances of other bodies. Unraveling this nexus of power relations, I argue that a fundamental anti-racist strategy is to interrupt, interrogate and re-deploy this interpellation of images. Key Words: ego-formation • embodiment • historicity • Lacan • ontological • phallus • race/racial difference/racism • space • visual • whiteness. (shrink)

Analyzing Eros and Civilization, in this article I argue that Marcuse is incapable of offering an account of the empirical dynamics that may lead to the social change he envisions, and that his appeal to the benefits of automatism is blind to its negative effects. I then claim that Marcuse's vision of the good life as centered on libidinal self-realization, if actualized, would threaten the freedom of individuals and potentially undermine their sense of self-integrity. Comparing Marcuse's position with that of (...) Adorno, I argue that the former fails to take temporality and transience properly into account. Unlike Adorno, Marcuse has no genuine appreciation of the need for mourning. Instead, Marcuse's concept of primary narcissism, which is meant to represent the gist of his utopian vision, leads him to recommend an essentially melancholic position. I finally argue that political action requires a stronger ego-formation than what Marcuse's conception allows for. (shrink)

A pós-fenomenologia é um enfoque na filosofia da tecnologia que investiga como as tecnologias influenciam e moldam o mundo e o ego. Embora a pós-fenomenologia tenha expressado desde o início a ambição de oferecer uma estrutura não-essencialista e não-fundacionista, o desenvolvimento estrutural desse aspecto está virtualmente ausente. O pragmatismo peirciano, como será proposto, pode fornecer essa estrutura, bem como os blocos de construção para o desenvolvimento da visão da autoformação em termos de sublimação. Essa visão tenta reconhecer que nosso ambiente, (...) que é cada vez mais um ambiente tecnológico e sujeito à mudança radical, molda consideravelmente quem nós somos e influencia quem deveremos ser. E, ao mesmo tempo, resiste à ideia de que o ego não é mais do que um joguete de influências e forças contingentes. (shrink)

The main theory at the core of this monograph is that the person is an entity ontologically new, since she is able to perform an act of self-transcendence, which is meant as her critical distancing from her own “self”, understood as subject of social recognition (Anerkennung), in order to open to the encounter with the world (Weltoffenheit). This allows us to consider a person in a new way, different both from confessional interpretations that see her only as a center of (...) the spirit and from reductivistic views. Schelling examines the act of self-transcendence through the concept of ecstasy, whereas Scheler associates it with the phenomenological reduction. The act of self-transcendence, that Schelling sees as originated by the “hunger of being”, is at the roots of the formation process of a person (Bildung): the person takes her shape by exiting from her own self-referential dimension and encountering otherness. If considered from this viewpoint, Plato’s “epimeleia heautou” exceeds an intimistic perspective: the “care” is no more a solipsistic self-care, but rather becomes the care through which the person transcends her own self to open to the relationships with otherness. It turns, therefore, into a care for world-openness (care for Weltoffenheit). The transformation of the individual and of society so becomes the double-faced aspect of the same process. The development of this set of problems occurs through a dialogue with Schelling’s and Scheler’s positions, but it is also supported by a historical-philosophical investigation, that for instance provides evidence of the influences of Schelling’s Berlin period on Scheler’s last theories and on the philosophical anthropology of the 20th century. Schelling was the first to conceive the concept of “eccentricity” in an anthropological sense, since until then the term had been confined to Kepler’s astronomy. Consequently, the planets’ elliptic (eccentric) movement heightens to an emblematic metaphor of human nature and freedom. The monograph also examines a possible convergence between Plato’s epimeleia heautou and Scheler’s phenomenological reduction. The book ends with a chapter on the topic of Vorbild. The exemplary testimony, that is Vorbild, becomes witnessing evidence immune from any pedagogical-moralistic intent: in fact, if it should relapse into the rhetoric of the “wish to give a good example”, it would immediately conform to the opposite logic of the model. A model is universal in so far as it makes everyone more like the others, nullifying the diversity, whereas exemplariness is universal in so far as it makes everyone more unique and motivates each one to follow her own characteristic path of existential trans-formation. Exemplarity doesn’t convey any contents, but rather encourages a kind of solidaristic involvement. Yet there are also negative exemplarities (Gegenbild) that place obstacles in the formation and block the existence of the personal center. (shrink)

Phenomenological theories have a long history in undermining the traditional opposition between mind and body. According to them, the material, viz. the corporal can serve as a place for the processes of meaning-formation, i.e., as a condition of possibility for any set of relationships forming a body of meaning. In this paper, this manifests itself through the fact that the basic concepts related to corporeality, e.g., perception, movement etc., are the conditions of possibility for any construction of meaning and (...) consciousness process, as also shown by contemporary neuroscience and communication theory in the case of intelligence and communication. However, this was already known to Aristotle, long before the advent of modern neuroscience, but the stakes were even higher for him: the issue of corporeality is itself problematic in terms of determining its boundaries, as the limits of the Self (viz. my body) merge with those of the world. The situation is similar to the passive and active synthesis of Husserl and also to Heidegger’s twofold openness of the Dasein, conflating the boundaries of the Self and the limits of the world for our human being-there, or consciousness. (shrink)

Higher education institutes both foster the advancement of knowledge and address society's socioeconomic and environmental challenges. To fulfil these multiple missions requires significant changes to how the role of a researcher is perceived e.g. a researcher identity that is congruent with the objective of contributing to fundamental knowledge while also engaging with non-academic actors, broadly, and entrepreneurship, in particular. We argue that the early stages of an academic career—namely the PhD training trajectory—and the knowledge networks formed during this period have (...) a major influence on the scientist’s future capacity to develop an appropriate researcher role identity. We draw on knowledge network and identity theories to investigate how the knowledge networks (i.e. business, scientific and career knowledge networks) of PhD students promote changes to, reinforce or conflict with the perception of a researcher role identity. Our longitudinal qualitative network study includes PhD students and their supervisors funded by the H2020 FINESSE project. At the network level, we show that scientific knowledge is distributed equally throughout young academics’ networks but that entrepreneurial (business) and career knowledge tend to be concentrated around certain individuals in these networks. On the PhD student level, we observe different pronunciations of the researcher role identity linked to students’ interactions with their knowledge networks. We distinguish identity conflicts due to misalignment between ego and alters which leads to withdrawal from the network. Our findings have practical implications and suggest that universities and PhD student supervisors should support PhD students to develop a researcher identity which is in line with the individual PhD student’s expectations. (shrink)

This paper argues that the diagnostic import of Adorno's culture industry writings lie in their psychoanalytically rooted claim that contemporary culture is losing its ability to negate and reconfigure experience, due to the modern subject's instrumentalized relationship to culture. Adorno uses psychoanalytic ideas—namely, modified and historicized versions of Freud's theory of the instincts, ego formation, the reality principle, and the superego—to show that changes in the social organization of the psyche, which track the transition from myth to enlightenment, put (...) the ego in a precarious position, torn between a primal fear of nature that drives it to submit to society, and internalized fear of its own internal nature, as well as of losing itself in society. This explains how culture becomes a resource capable of being mobilized by the ego's defense mechanisms of identification and introjection to shore up its own sense of solidity, thereby negating culture's potential for transcendence or transformation. This paper concludes with a coda that suggests that, while rejecting Adorno's metacritique of the reason is not sufficient grounds for rejecting the culture industry, critical theorists like Habermas and Honneth may have other tools at their disposal for contesting its conclusions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 19-26 [Access article in PDF] Restriction and Individual Expression in the "Play Activity / Zokei Asobi " Since World War II, art teachers in Japan have wavered between two senses of value. The first issue is whether they should foster children's specific artistic ability (for example, drawing, painting, or sculpture) in art class. Many art teachers believe that there is a standard (...) body of knowledge about art that should be taught, much like chemistry or mathematics. In fact, teachers do set these restrictions by giving teaching materials or subjects of expression to children in art class. On the other hand, art teachers recognize the need to encourage the expression of each child's individual emotions and creativity. So, Japanese art teachers are faced with a contradiction: requiring [End Page 19] each child to express herself "freely" within an environment restricted by a set curriculum.In Japan, when the government guidelines for teaching were revised about 25 years ago, a new domain was instituted in the elementary school art class. The domain is called "Play Activity/Zokei Asobi." The field of expression consists of two domains: the making of works (visual objects) according to a theme or subject and the "Play Activity" using various materials. The former is equivalent to the basic picture, craft, design, and sculpture education. The Play Activity is based on the viewpoint that children's expression naturally comes from within and is expressed as spontaneous play, such as playing in the sand or with blocks. Because children have a natural curiosity, play is not to be directed by someone else, but by their own will. Children's spontaneous play is viewed as the beginning of individual expression. Although the Play Activity has not yet fully permeated into art education of Japan, it has brought some changes to art class. The Play Activity has forced art teachers to think about their role: whether one should emphasize restriction — "shall I teach something to children?" or freedom — "how should I deal with each child's individual expression?" In this essay, I explore teachers' stream of consciousness about children's expression and meanings and subjects of the Play Activity in Japan. Child's Expression and Works of Art The Japanese art class consists of two fields: "expression" and "appreciation." In the past, children's main activity has been expression in art class. In recent years, appreciation has gradually come to be thought of as important as expression. There are historical reasons for this general philosophy about "art".Many Japanese people think that only talented and famous painters or sculptors create "art." In their minds, "art" consists of highly valued "works of art" like those seen in museums and galleries. So, because it is quite different from that of a talented artist's masterpiece, children's expression has not been considered as art.On the other hand, children's expression is considered to be an important part of ego formation. In order to accomplish this, suitable materials and techniques must be part of the various formative experiences in art class. In this way, their inner emotions and thoughts can be communicated through the process and product of their expression. Because art teachers know such intuitive expression is an important part of life, it has been regarded as more important than appreciation. In this art class, children have not made "works of art" but have "expressed" themselves, thus they have been distanced from "Real art" (famous masterpieces). The Restriction Born of Confusion about the Sense of "Art" The Japanese general sense of "art" has brought a contradiction into art class. Because the works of talented and famous artists are highly valued in [End Page 20] many adults' minds, teachers often unrealistically expect young children to express as well as an adult.For example, many Japanese value lifelike pictures as excellent. Consequently, many adults expect children to draw objects exactly as they appear. A college student who grew up surrounded by this value system retains such a sense of value. And if she cannot draw a lifelike... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

_In the light of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy, this paper looks into some of the problems of contemporary man as an individual, a member of society, a citizen of his country, a component of this world, and of nature itself. Concepts like Science; Nature,;Matter; Mental Being; Mana-purusa; Prana-purusa; Citta-purusa; Nation-ego and Nation-soul; True and False Subjectivism; World-state and World-union; Religion of Humanism are the focus of this paper. Nature: Beneath the diversity and uniqueness of the different elements in Nature there is (...) an essential unity that not only allows for this diversity but even supports it. Nature is both a benefactor and a force: a benefactor, because it acts to carry out the evolution of mankind; a force, because it also supplies the necessary energy and momentum to achieve it. Natural calamities: If mankind can quieten the tsunamis and cyclones and droughts and earthquakes that rage within, and behave with care and compassion towards Nature, not exploiting, denuding, or denigrating it, there is a strong possibility that Nature too will behave with equal care and compassion towards man and spare him the natural calamities than rend him asunder. Science: The limitation of science become obvious, according to Sri Aurobindo, when we realize that it has mastered knowledge of processes and helped in the creation of machinery but is ignorant of the foundations of being and, therefore, cannot perfect our nature or our life. Science and philosophy: The insights of philosophy could become heuristic and algorithmic models for scientific experimentation. Matter: An interesting aspect of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy is his acceptance of the reality of matter even while highlighting its inadequacies; the ultimate goal, according to him, is the divination of matter itself. Purusa: If the mana-purusa (mental being) were to log on to the genuine citta-purusa (psychic formation), without necessarily logging off from the prana-purusa (frontal formation), it may help quieten the turbulences within, which may be a prelude to the quietening of the disturbances without, whether it be physical maladies, cravings (for food, fame, fortune, etc.), destructive competitiveness; or wars, terrorism, ethnic conflicts, communal riots, and the other such social maladies that afflict mankind today. Nation-ego (false subjectivism) and Nation-soul (true subjectivism): Sri Aurobindo considers Nation-ego an example of false subjectivism, in which national identity and pride are stressed to prove one's superiority and suppress or exploit the rest. The Nation-soul, as an example of true subjectivism, attempts to capture one's traditional heritage and values in its pristine form, not as a reaction to hurts and angers or as compensation for real or imagined injuries or indignities of the past. World-state (false subjectivism) and World-union (true subjectivism): Similarly, a World-state founded upon the principle of centralization and uniformity, a mechanical and formal unity, is an example of false subjectivism, while a World-union founded upon the principle of liberty and variation in a free and intelligent unity is an example of true subjectivism Human actualization: Even if two human beings are similar, in so far as they are human beings, there is so much diversity between them. Part of the movement towards human self-actualization lies in the fact that this diversity should not be forcibly curbed, as also the realization that beneath all that appears disparate there is an essential unity. Also, man is not the end product of evolution but an intermediate stage between the animal and the divine. Moreover, he is endowed with consciousness that enables him to cooperate with the forces of evolution and speed up and telescope the next stage of evolution._. (shrink)

Are there opportunities to use the plural to express the first person (“I”) of “the same person” in English? It means that the self is an entity that guarantees uniqueness and is at the core of identity. Recently, radical and rapid innovations in AI technologies have made it possible to alter our existential fundamentals. Principally, we are now interacting with “virtual personalities” generated by generative AI. Thus, there is an inevitability to explore the relationship between AI and society, and the (...) problem domain of phenomenological sociology related to the “virtuality” of personalities and the world. Encountering and interacting with “others without subject” artificially generated by generative AI based on individual big data and attribute data is a situation that mankind has never experienced before from the perspective of sociology and phenomenological sociology related to the ego. The virtual personalities can be perceived as if it were interacting with existing humans in the form of video and audio, and it is also possible to arbitrarily change their attributes (e.g., gender, race, age, physical characteristics) and other settings, as well as to virtually create deceased persons or great figures from the past. Such technological innovation is, so to speak, a virtualization of human existential identity, and advanced technologies such as AI will transform not only the boundary between self and others but also the aspect of human existence itself (Shibuya in Digital transformation of identity in the age of artificial intelligence. Springer, Belrin, 2020). In addition, from a phenomenological viewpoint, the boundary between reality and virtuality is blurring due to technological innovation in the living world itself, and there is a concern that this will lead to an artificial state of detachment. Actually, the use of advanced technologies such as AI, VR in virtual worlds and cyberspace will not only cause people to lose their reality and actuality but will also endanger the very foundations of their existential identity. Therefore, we must ask what it means for us as existences to interact with virtual personalities in a virtually generated world, and what is the nature of the intersubjectivity formation and semantic understanding as well as the modes of existence, facts, and worlds, and what are their evidential natures. In line with what Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, once declared at the beginning of his “Cartesianische Meditationen” (Husserl in Cartesianische Meditationen, e-artnow, 2018), that “we need to begin philosophy radically anew”, as also phenomenological sociology, it can now state that “we need to begin phenomenological sociology radically anew”. Then, this paper reviews and discusses the following issues based on technological trends. (shrink)

The concept of habit enfolds an enormous richness and diversity of meanings. According to Husserl, habit, along with association, memory, and so on, belongs to the very essence of the psychic.1 Husserl even speaks of an overall genetic “phenomenology of habitualities”. In this paper, as an initial attempt to explicate the complexity of phenomenological treatments of habit, want to trace Husserl’s conception of habit as it emerged in his mature genetic phenomenology, in order to highlight his enormous and neglected original (...) contribution in this area. I shall show that Husserl was by no means limited to a Cartesian intellectualist explication of habitual action (as commentators such as Bourdieu and Dreyfus have claimed), but attempted to characterize its complexity across the range of human individual, sub-personal, personal, social and collective experience. Habit, as we shall see, for Husserl, is intimately involved in the constitution of meaningfulness (Husserl’s Sinnhaftigkeit) and forms of sense (Sinnesgestalten) at all levels, from the level of perceptual experience, through the formation of the ego, to the development of society, history and tradition, indeed to our whole sense of the harmonious course of worldly life and to the genetic constitution of worldhood as such. Habituality, furthermore, is a key structural principle in the genetic constitution of the transcendental ego itself, as it unfolds as a concrete living and acting person in an intersubjective, cultural and historical world. (shrink)

This essay argues that Freud's theory pictures modern selves as coping with a new existential and social predicament: a sense of homelessness within their own home. More specifically, Freud suggests that individuals feel estranged from parts of their own psyche as well as feeling distant from their own culture and tradition ; in modernity, neither one's mind nor one's community can promise any longer a sense of ground. Because of this sense of perpetual and irrevocable displacement, Freud feared that modern (...) selves might become semi-psychotic, selves lacking an inner social-normative voice. He calls on moderns, however, to overcome this bleak prospect and the related danger of political chaos by accepting the social norms imposed by their super-egos. But Freud champions only a conditional acceptance of tradition, one that involves ongoing scepticism, ambivalence and emotional distance. Freud's position could therefore be characterized as a unique type of communitarianism: it seeks a balance between admission of the constitutive force of tradition on the one hand, and the formation of an emotional detachment from its myths, practices and normative claims on the other. (shrink)

theories. What was Freud thinking, when, and why and what were the major influences which shaped his ideas? We follow the inner movement of his theory construction, its meaning and coherence, as well as his conceptual logic and personal directions concerning his evolving views of the reciprocal interactions between mind and body, the motivational force of instinctual drives, and the dominant role of sexuality rooted in evolutionary biology in human development, behaviour, and the creation of neurotic disturbances. We follow Freud's (...) construction and sequential reconstructions of his theoretical models concerning the nature, dynamics, and principles of unconscious mental functioning, including his changing concepts on the nature and purpose of dreams. We trace his changing views on the role of deferred action of early childhood experiences and the determining role of unconscious fantasy, psychic reality, in the formation of adult character structure and neuroses. Through such historical analysis this book provides grounding for a meaningful understanding of Freud's familiar concepts: id, ego, superego, and the Oedipus complex. We explore what these concepts meant to Freud, why he conceived them, and what functions they served in his theory of mind. This is the perfect book for students and trainees wanting to learn more about the development of Freud's ideas, as well as for established psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in expanding their knowledge of Freud's theories. (shrink)

In this thesis I investigate the notion of experience in German Idealist Philosophy. I focus on the exploration of an alternative to the transcendental model notion of experience through Schelling's insight into the notion of logogrif. The structural division of this project into two sections reflects the two theoretical standpoints of this project, namely the logic and the logogrif of experience. The first section - the logic of experience - explores the notion of experience provided in Kant's Critique of Pure (...) Reason, Critique of Judgement and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. I argue that Kant's fundamental question about the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements succeeds in thematising the aporia of cognitive experience but results in a subject-oriented, representational model which radically confines the notion of experience to the constitutive laws of the understanding or to the normative precepts of Reason. Experience is founded upon a sharp division between faith and knowledge, will and logic, desire and reflection, absolute and finitude. Fichte's endeavour to articulate a non-representational account of experience, does not succeed in extricating itself from the representational model, so long as experience is reduced to the ever-producing deeds of the self-positing ego. Despite the serious differences between Kant's and Fichte's notions of experience, both accounts, so long as they unfold from a transcendental standpoint, attempt to resolve experience into conceptual laws or determinations of the ego's absolute will. Experience is transformed into an object of the subject's cognitive or volitional faculties. The paradoxes of man's interaction with the world are intended to be accommodated either by the law-giving spontaneity of the understanding and the Architectonic of Pure Reason or by the overpowerful primordial act of the self-positing ego. This implies the conceptualisation of the self in terms of constant identity-through-time, or sheer self-determination. However, this conceptualisation remains at the normative or prescriptive level, which in turn is projected upon the world. The latter, though appears as the subject's property, essentially remains alien and opaque, confirming the radical limitations of the ego rather than its order-giving authority. Moreover, this notion of experience is ultimately founded upon a radical expulsion of the divine from the world, the de-spiritualisation of the sensual and the de-sensualisation of the spiritual, the sharp juxtaposition between absolute and finitude. This results in a self-defeating subjectivity, whose firm identity and rule-giving authority does not rescue it from its perennial unattainability to 'organise the conditioned' or 'conquer the unconditioned'. In Kant's and Fichte's thought, however, I detect elements that potentially transgress their transcendental account of experience. These are found in Kant's concept of spontaneity and free play between understanding and imagination, and Fichte's concept of productivity. I argue that these elements lose their potential dynamism, so long as they are absorbed by the transcendental demands for the solution of the aporias of logic. However, these elements point to the need for a radical re-conceptualisation of the notion of experience. This is provided by means of Schelling's logogriflic approach, which constitutes the theme of the second section. The second section - the logogrif of experience - attempts to articulate a different approach towards the notion of experience, through an exploration of Schelling's versatile and provocative thought. This section focuses on Schelling's original insight into the notion and act of logogrif, which opens the dialogue between logos and mythos, cosmic becoming and human soul, cosmic imagination and human reflection, faith and knowledge. This section attempts to illuminate Schelling's fascinating philosophical investigations and discoveries that have been rather overlooked, possibly, due to Hegel's overwhelming critique. This section, after a brief critical examination of the Identity Philosophy, attempts to elucidate Schelling's notion of experience through his middle works, Of Human Freedom, Ages of the World, The Deities of Samothrace, which are treated as a self-developing trilogy. Schelling re-addresses the aporias of logic not as part of Reason's self-interrogation but as part of the cosmic paradoxes and living experiences. In this way, Schelling resets the scene of the debate on the conditions of possibility for cognitive experience by putting on the stage the enigmas of the cosmos and life rather than the Tribunal of Reason. Logic itself is conceived as a potency in the cosmic becoming, and consequently can no longer attempt to establish the transcendental conditions for the possibility of cognitive experience. Cosmic becoming, in which man is an active part, is conceived as the process of the movement, the interaction, the transformations and transmutations of multiple potencies. These, far beyond any mechanical conceptualisation, appear as self-moving and yet interdependent, unknown yet familiar, inscrutable and yet manifest powers, describing the mystery of life itself. The latter is depicted as an ever-recurrent act of longing for self-expression as active unity. Experience is conceived as the lived process of a network of living potencies, which may not only resist rational powers but may also puzzle and seize them. In this context, reflection acquires a plastic dimension, as opposed to its rigidity in the representational model of experience. Reflection depicts cosmic longing's self-formation, whose man is part. This self-bending formation partially illuminates the nature of longing, and from this standpoint is the logic of the longing. However, this formation is movable, transmutable and mostly ineffable, and from this standpoint is the logic of a riddle: a logogrif. Logogrif is the transitive term that attempts to describe the transition of experience from its enacted phase to its allusive conceptual utterance, and in this sense the term itself participates in both phases, as both form of thought and form of life. The logogrific approach to experience in turn transposes us as from the realm of pure concepts to the realm of the mystery of life, from pure thought to acts of longing, from the Architectonic of Pure Reason to Cosmic Theurgy. The latter term attempts to grasp the paradox and dynamism of cosmic and non-cosmic becoming by means of multiple, vanishing and ever-recurring, transmutable potencies, or in Schelling's terms 'the magic of insoluble life'. Schelling's logogrific account consists in a powerful voice for the re-enchantment of the world, the introduction into the notion of experience of the imminence of the divine. This is not suggested in terms of the adoption of old religious doctrines but by means of the discovery and re-discovery of the theurgy of life, through the intensification of our artistic mood, the creative expansion of our deeds. This notion of experience allows for the reconsideration of the notion of the self, in terms of a dynamic, conflictual process between conscious and unconscious powers and the critical revaluation of the accounts of subjectivity which reduce it to the sphere of self-consciousness. The thesis concludes with the need for an investigation into the relation between logos and mythos, which only tangentially has been introduced by the present project. In this context it will be possible to re-appraise the potential that the logogrific approach opens for an alternative to both logical and traditional mythological patterns of thinking. (shrink)

The article investigates the mechanisms shaping a new quality of social development in contemporary Russia amidst growing societal challenges. Four key mechanisms are explored: mediation, social dialogue, polysubjectivity, and convergence. These are analyzed for their role in fostering novel forms of social integration and development. The mechanisms serve as tools for studying and shaping the current interplay between tradition and innovation, cultural stasis and social dynamics across various sociocultural contexts and transitional processes. The paper draws upon works presented at the (...) All-Russian Scientific Conference “Individualization and Collectivism in Contemporary Russian Society,” offering an original interpretation that synthesizes and structures these studies. Notable contributions include V.A. Lektorsky’s concept of “the supra-individual as social universality,” which advances our understanding of socio-individual meaning formation and transcends the individual-society dichotomy. A.A. Auzan’s analysis of the dual-core structure of Russian culture aptly captures the unique challenges of social development in Russia. O.V. Aksenova’s examination of the contradictory nature of social action subjects in an increasingly technologized society illuminates the complexities of balancing freedom with necessity, and uniformity with diversity in social action. V.M. Rozin’s approach is considered for its potential to facilitate mediational social dialogue in Russian society. The author argues that neither the individualistic nor the collectivist cores of Russian culture can independently drive effective modernization. Instead, the concept of convergence is proposed as a means to transcend the extremes of ego-individualism and totalitarian collectivism. Three primary directions for implementing convergent strategies are identified: synthesizing individual and social aspects in social action and dialogue, optimizing center-periphery interactions in governance, and developing public-private partnership models as a form of economic convergence. The study emphasizes the need for new forms of social integration and concludes that Russia’s sustainable social development requires an integrative socio-individual model, combining elements of individual freedom and collective solidarity. (shrink)

The Branch of Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Center for Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the RAS, the RAS Institute of Philosophy, and the RAS Institute of Psychology are arranging “Individualization and Collectivism in Contemporary Russian Society” scientific conference, to be held in Moscow, April 2024. The event marks the 300th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the 95th birth anniversary of the Russian philosopher and social theorist (...) A.S. Akhiezer. Its primary objective is to foster the development of criteria for analyzing intersubjective relations within the act of social development. The conference’s focus on the investigation of social development is grounded in the dominants of contemporary philosophical-sociological non-classics and proposes several topics for discussion. These include the transition from the absolutization of Kant’s categorical imperative, which mandates the consideration of humans solely as the ultimate end in the system of intersubjective communication and the knowledge process, to an alternative consideration of humans as means of self-improvement and a crucial resource for social development (V.S. Bibler). It encompasses the rejection of absolutizing the function of contrasting faith and knowledge, the Self and the Other, the “own” and the “foreign,” scientific and everyday consciousness (V.A. Lectorsky, I.T. Kasavin, V.N. Porus). The interpretation of the meaning of personality shifts from concepts like cogito ergo sum, “pure Self,” “Self,” “Ego,” “Super-,” to the “ability of the Self to respond to the call of the Other,” thereby forming the smallest cell of the socio-individual as a synthesis of the social and the individual (M.M. Bakhtin, V.A. Lectorsky, R.S. Grinberg). Overcoming the established inequality of economic systems is addressed through the socio-individualism of small and medium-sized enterprises (A.S. Akhiezer, R.S. Grinberg). The conference also anticipates discussions on the following topics: How do the transfer and exchange of accumulated global knowledge from the individual to the other, and vice versa, contribute to the formation of small creative groups, serving as a communicative platform for nurturing socially oriented individuals – agents of social development? Moreover, how can dialogue be effectively constructed among participants of partnership relations who operate on differing premises (J.-P. Sartre)? The discussion is aimed at contemplating the contradictory, oxymoronic, yet dialogue and synthesis-oriented concepts of “individualization of the social,” “socially oriented individual,” and “socio-individualism.”. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Fundamental Principle of Fichte's Philosophy The purpose of this monograph is to make a careful study of Fichte's conception of the ultimate principle. In his various writings the principle appears under many different names. 'The Ego, ' 'the Idea of the Ego, ' 'the moral world-order, ' 'God, ' 'the Absolute, ' 'Being, ' 'the Light, ' are some of the phrases by which it is most commonly designated. It is not the main purpose of this study (...) to examine tile much discussed question of the relation between the two periods of Fichte's philosophy. But the question is so intimately connected with the problem which I have undertaken that some discussion of it is inevitable. I have tried, however, to keep well within the limits of my theme, and instead of considering the relation between the two periods in all its aspects, have sought merely to determine how far the conception of the fundamental principle which we find in Fichte's later writings differs from that which appears in the earlier ones. The references to Fichte's writings are to the Sammtliche Werke (Berlin, 1845-1846, 8 vols.) and to the Nachgelassene Werke (Bonn, 1834-1835, 3 vols.). References to the Sammtliche Werke are indicated by the letters S. W.; to the Nachgelassene Werke, by the letters N. W. References to the Kritik der remen Vernunft arc indicated by the letters A (for the First Edition) and B (for the Second). All other references to Kant's writings are made to Hartenstein's second edition of the Sammtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1867-1868, 8 vols.) and are indicated by the letter H. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

In face of the postmodern ideal of a 'mutiple' subject, there has been talk at regular classical psychoanalysis's normative orientation toward intervals since the end of the the ego's capacity to cope consistently with reality may Second World War of psy seem obsolete. However, a psychoanalytic theory choanalysis being obsolete. which is revised in the light of object-relations theory, In these fields - where the integrationist social psychology, and an intersubjectivist notion is not just an ideolo account of the (...) class='Hi'>formation of the drives can answer the gical weapon - this signifies postmodern challenge. According to this alternative the tendency of a growing psychoanalytic view, the goal of a 'healthy' development discrepancy said to have of personality is a state of an inner capacity for dialo opened up between the origue, able to account normatively for altering forms of ginal and the current socio-ego-identity under changing social conditions. (shrink)

In his collection of essays Having the World in View (2009), John McDowell draws a distinction between empirical experience (conceived as the conceptual activity relevant to judgment) and empirical judgment (i.e., the full-fledged assertoric content itself ). McDowell’s latest proposal is that the form of empirical experience is transferable into judgment, but it is not itself a judgment. Taking back the view he advanced in Mind and World, McDowell now believes that perception does not have propositional content as such, but (...) the content of perception can, however, always be actualized in a judgment. There is, in other words, a strict parallelism between the deliverances of sensibility and potential future judgments of experience. The early Husserl disagrees with this and recognizesexplicitly the existence of coherent forms of perceptual engagement with the world that is independent of the mastery of language and the use of concepts.Perception constitutes—together with certain other embodied practices—our primary mode of access to the world, and this occurs before and independently ofour thinking activity. However, the realization of the centrality of time for intentionality will lead Husserl after 1905 to recognize a kind of lawfulness internal tothe sensuous materials themselves, prior to any egoical achievement. The most immediate consequence of this paradigm change is that the very idea of non-conceptual content now seems unwarranted. Indeed, if time is that which keeps the process of sense formation unified even at the lowest levels of constitution, then the world-disclosing activity of the ego cannot be discontinuous with the conceptual realm. Against this background, it will be argued that the dialectic between the conceptual and non-conceptual ultimately makes no sense on a phenomenological basis. Once temporality has entered the scene, the only meaningful opposition that stands is that between the conceptual and pre-conceptual spheres. (shrink)

Rédigées entre 1943 et 1953, ces notes inédites révèlent combien Michel Henry fut préoccupé par le problème de « l’expérience d’autrui » dès ses années de formation philosophique. Elles révèlent également l’utilisation précoce d’une jeune Henry des Ecritures comme source d’inspiration pour un certain nombre d’intuitions spécifiquement philosophiques qu’il développera dans sa trilogie de fin de vie sur la philosophie du christianisme.

Rédigées entre 1943 et 1953, ces notes inédites révèlent combien Michel Henry fut préoccupé par le problème de « l’expérience d’autrui » dès ses années de formation philosophique. Elles révèlent également l’utilisation précoce d’une jeune Henry des Ecritures comme source d’inspiration pour un certain nombre d’intuitions spécifiquement philosophiques qu’il développera dans sa trilogie de fin de vie sur la philosophie du christianisme.

The main purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between flow experience and goal orientation theory, as well as, the differences in flow experience based on the orthogonal model of goal orientation theory. Two hundred and seventy eight athletes completed the Task and Ego Orientation Sport Questionnaire based on how they usually feel. The Flow State Scale was completed thirty minutes after an important competition, along with the challenge-skill ratings, based on how athletes felt during the particular competition. (...) The results indicated that the athletes’ task orientation may be the critical factor for attaining flow in competitive sport, feeling more skillful and estimating the upcoming competition as challenging, while ego orientated athletes lack these elements, which are important for them to get into flow. Additionally, the balance between athletes’ goal orientation preferences seems important for the formation of flow experience. (shrink)

This essay explores the trope of sleep in Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy of anthropotechnics. Sleep is shown to be important for our understanding of Sloterdijk’s project as an index of his subject’s larger, hidden complex of inertias, habits, and corporeal requirements and processes that dominate subjective life and that exist outside the mastery of ego and consciousness. The essay explores this thesis by considering a series of figures that appear in Sloterdijk’s writings and interviews: the philosopher Heraclitus with his dismissive remarks (...) on sleep, the insomniac Emil Cioran, the sleepwalker in Romantic thought. As the essay develops, it shows how, given such a subject formation, anthropotechnics is properly conceived as a management of the subject’s automatic processes to trick or repurpose or redirect them to work in concert or coincidence with the anthropotechnical project, rather than against it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Concordance to Descartes’ “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia.” by Katsuzo Murakami, Meguru Sasaki, Tetsuichi NishimuraTuomo Aho and Mikko YrjönsuuriKatsuzo Murakami, Meguru Sasaki, and Tetsuichi Nishimura. Concordance to Descartes’ “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia.” Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1995. Pp. v + 355. Cloth, DM 198.00.This is a product from the Descartes database of Tokyo University scholars. It gives an account of the occurrences and contexts of words in the Meditationes (the main (...) text only), aiming at a complete survey of vocabulary. The work keeps strictly to the form of a lexical concordance; in addition to the word lists, there is only a brief instruction. (A bibliographical note about editions might be useful.) Technical realization is excellent. But concordances like this are big and expensive books; could they possibly be published more easily in electronic format?Most words of Descartes’s text are included in the main concordance. There they are listed following the alphabetic order of standard dictionaries, and in each entry the total amount of occurrences of the word is announced. Then every occurrence is quoted in its context (one line = approximately two in the Adam-Tannery standard edition). Quotes within each entry are arranged and their places identified by digits showing the page and line in AT edition.Some function words and most indeclinables are placed in an index which gives only the numbers and locations of their occurrences. In most cases this is certainly reasonable, but some choices are problematic. For example, why have the 638 + 36 occurrences of qui in its two senses (‘who’, ‘what’; ‘how’, ‘whereby’) been printed with full contexts, while the philosophically interesting adverb plane (‘plainly’, 55 times) is to be found merely in the index?Concordances are uncommon for modern philosophy, but they are familiar and valuable tools in work with ancient texts. Obviously they function in linguistic research, and even the present Descartes book has largely the same goal: to serve the study of neo-Latin language. Undoubtedly, a rigorous case study like this is important for such [End Page 135] investigations. (There remains, however, a difficulty, as the editors point out, because the AT text differs from original editions, mainly in matters of orthography and punctuation.) But also a completely nonlinguistic philosopher can benefit from this material. It is useful to see all occurrences of a word together and at once; many careless generalizations could be avoided by checking from a concordance.One can make amusing observations at random. Thus some terms have remarkably low frequencies (notitia, qualitas occur 4 times; materia 3 times; absolutus, principium 2 times; abstractus, definire, dispositio, species 1 time; intentio, possibile not at all). On the other hand, there is an overwhelming concentration on the semantic family round cogitare, cognoscere, comprehendere, concipere, percipere. Descartes has some idiosyncratic favorites, like advertere/animadvertere. One also notices his strong liking for words of seeing and light (15 arguments from lumen naturale!). It hardly is a surprise that his most cherished favorite is ego (492 times).Tuomo Aho and Mikko Yrjönsuuri University of HelsinkiCopyright © 1998 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc... (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to investigate into the peculiarities of the reflection of sense as the main idea of modern European philosophy. This idea refers to self-consciousness, about which modern empirical philosophy speaks in the language of reflection (J. Locke), and rationalism - in the language of Cogito (R. Descartes). For Kant, Cogito is a transcendental condition for the formation of concepts, and therefore reflection should be transcendental. According to Husserl, the main task of phenomenological reflection was (...) to obtain essences of processes, to build things from the acts of Cogito. In Husserl's words, reflection "carries the world as a meaningful sense". Such a sense (smysl) becomes a problem escaping both from analysis and interpretation. Its peculiarity lies in the deontological status of sense: the phrase "a sense should be" connects the sense with a realm of duty, and duty provides a correlation between Ego and integrity of the world, language and culture. Reflection of sense (smysl) becomes the process of comprehension, the mechanism of formation of the whole set of meanings in the culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering ApartheidMark Sanders (bio)What was apartheid? How is it being remembered? Two questions. The first of them, almost at once, encourages a third: what is apartheid? An answer to the first question will be an answer to the third. Knowing what apartheid was, it is implied, we will know what apartheid is. We will know what it is in essence. But if the answer supplied to the first question (...) is the same as that to the second, the question has been begged. This answer and begged question affect not only what we understand apartheid to have been. The essence of what apartheid is has been derived from an activity of remembering that is historically contingent. Is there a way out of this circle? A path to a place where essence will in no way be trammeled by any historical excrescence—where apartheid, stamped with -heid, the Afrikaans suffix for -ness, stands forth intact, unique—where, in a final victory, apartheid's phantasy of separateness will have perfected itself in truth? Supposing that responsibility involves the unstable articulation of essence and contingency, and consequent decision in the "night of non-knowledge," would it be responsible to seek such a way out? Is it possible, on the other hand, not to embark upon, or want to embark upon, such a search?The title "Remembering Apartheid" is to be understood as shorthand for this aporia of certain knowing. It refers in the first place to ways of remembering bound up, in South Africa, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These have involved not only the collection of facts anchored in recollection, a classically forensic project, but also the admission of acts of grieving and the invitation for others to participate in these acts—a participation to which I will refer, employing the word in the general sense of a mourning-with, as condolence. The word remembrance (echoing the German Gedächtnis, with its folding in of Denken) might more closely approach the inextricable interlinking, before the Commission, of epistemic and mournful practice. Yet, in traversing the aporia provisionally without eliminating it, the title of my essay lays claim to knowledge. It announces: this is apartheid, for this is what apartheid was. It thereby also seeks to acknowledge that, just as forensic evidence assembled by the Commission may be bound up with the grieving of witnesses, no claim about the nature of apartheid can be untouched by the affective demands of those who bear the burden of remembering. The legacy of apartheid of which they speak is of undiscovered bodies, of bodies denied a proper burial. They seek the help of the Commission in rectifying this state of affairs. What we hear when we listen to those witnesses is this: apartheid was a proscription on mourning, specifically of the other. Can we then not say: apartheid is, at least for those who remember the worst deeds committed under it, and who attach to them a particular affect, a proscription on mourning the other? Viewed from a purely forensic point of view, it is far from clear that we possess evidence to impeach this testimony. [End Page 60]Apartheid was/is, in the most general terms, an interdict against the development of a social formation. Although Afrikaner-nationalist politicians and intellectuals sometimes frightened the volk with images of being swamped by the vast black African mass or of being ploughed under as a people [see Louw 1: 505], the nature of that social formation was never outlined in precise terms. Versions of racial degeneration and bastardy were proffered by apartheid theorists, but what the ideology of race purity and the power that hid behind it really entailed was a foreclosure of the other, and thus of any historical possibility of another social formation—of what Breyten Breytenbach, alluding in Dog Heart [69] to the novelist Jan Rabie, calls "other-making" (andersmaak).In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Sigmund Freud offers an account of the social formation that, although standing on the shoulders of conservative nineteenth-century writers such as Gustave le Bon, does not depend upon racial, cultural, linguistic, or other characteristics that, singularly or together, formed the core... (shrink)

The question of Paideia analysed in Jaeger’s pioneering study may be linked to Husserl’s question of the formation of the monadic self, intersubjectivity and the foundation of the community of human beings. Husserl’s phenomenological education manifests itself in the formation of an ego and a phenomenological community. In addition, Fink, having close intellectual links with Husserl, undertakes an in-depth analysis of the question of educa­tion as a sublime model of the Greek city. In this paper we propose a (...) comparative analysis about Paideia between Husserl’s late writings since his Cartesian Meditations, and Fink’s relevant works. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is distinguishing between "internal" and "external" public human through comprehending the phenomenon of Self in its virtual-digital essence as a popular demonstrative-project space "BETWEEN" aggression and harmony. Theoretical basis of the work is based on the study of the phenomenon of modern human aggression in the virtual-digital space and the "project space" of the living environment through understanding the nature of the human "I". The penetration limits of the Self of the public human into the (...) "project space" are comprehended and the nature of the self-realization and self-search models of human through the "transcendent ego" is revealed. Originality is demonstrated through comprehending the Self phenomenon of the public human, which forms new anthropological research direction and represents a conceptual paradigm of relationship of "human I – publicity – human We – the living space of the Other". Conclusions. The Self of the public human as the space "BETWEEN" does not completely "dissolve" in a separate ontological basis, but is the basis for the formation of his/her "I", while only participation in the existence of others reveals the meaning of his/her own existence. Such interaction requires significant human efforts – skills and competencies of public communication, which are able to create a successful self-identification of a public human without aggression and conflict. (shrink)

La philosophie européenne est souvent critiquée comme une manière dépassée de penser et est taxée d’individualiste, d’anthropocentrique et d’euro-centrique. Plusieurs de ces approches critiques partagent la notion que la source majeure des problèmes gît dans la pensée cartésienne héritée de l’ego. Je confronte cette notion anti-cartésienne de la philosophie européenne en argumentant que la phénoménologie husserlienne offre une réinterprétation robuste et viable de l’ego cartésien, une réinterprétation qui échappe aux impasses kantiennes du formalisme et de l’intellectualisme. Suivant l’analyse de Husserl (...) et de Merleau-Ponty, je montre que le moi qui constitue le sens du monde n’est ni seulement une forme de représentations ni un solus ipse. Plutôt que d’être une forme statique ou un agent solitaire, le moi formateur du sens est une formation dynamique doté d’une structure interne et de relations génératives avec autres ego similaires. (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)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way in which Kojève influences the thought of Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan, with an emphasis on the way in which each understands violence. We will defend the thesis that, despite the important theoretical and stylistic distances that separate them, in both cases violence appears as a doubled negativity. In Bataille, violence is, on the one hand, negativity without employment - that is, woundedness, existential tearing - and, on the other hand, (...) subjection to labour and discourse. In Lacan, violence is dehiscence, vital insufficiency and, at the same time, the specular rivalry inherent in the formation and dynamics of the ego. Keywords: negativity, violence, Bataille, Lacan Resumen: El presente trabajo tiene el propósito de explorar el modo en que Kojève influyó en el pensamiento de Georges Bataille y Jacques Lacan, haciendo hincapié en el modo en que cada uno entiende la violencia. Defenderemos la tesis de que, a pesar de las importantes distancias teóricas y estilísticas que los separan, en ambos casos la violencia aparece como negatividad duplicada. En Bataille, la violencia es, por un lado, negatividad sin empleo, esto es, herida, desgarro existencial y, por otro lado, sujeción al trabajo y al discurso. En Lacan, la violencia es dehiscencia, es decir, inacabamiento vital y, al mismo tiempo, la rivalidad especular inherente a la formación y la dinámica del yo. Palabras clave: negatividad, violencia, Bataille, Lacan. (shrink)

This essay places the recent academic fascination with trauma and victimhood in a psycho‐social context within which identifications with pure victimhood hold sway. The essay takes as its starting point Freud's description, in Civilisation and its Discontents, of the formation of the super‐ego via the small child's negotiation of ambivalence towards its first authority figure. It is argued that this process lacks secondary re‐inforcement in western urban postmodernity, where authority has become diffuse, all‐pervasive and unavailable as a point of (...) identification. In this context, aggression becomes harder to acknowledge and manage resulting in a tendency towards Manicheanism and the attenuation of ambivalence. Taking as its case‐study Marianne Hirsch's writings on the ethical aesthetics of postmemorial photography, the essay concludes that recent work on trauma and testimony fails to acknowledge that identifications may straddle victimhood and perpetration. This acknowledgement is only possible where some containment of aggression feels possible. (shrink)

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

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics for a Layered SelfLaughter, Reciprocity, Generosity, HomeCynthia WillettI can imagine no better way to respond to these insightful readings than to turn the spotlight on the important books that Ann Murphy and Megan Craig have written on affect and ethics! Craig’s book, Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology, weaves radical empiricism into phenomenology as only a philosopher who is also an artist could. Her evocative queries on (...) prereflective affects, perception, and ethical attunement shed light on the role of moods for unsettling rigid ego boundaries, ethical subjectivity, the feeling of being alive, the audible dimension of ethical encounters, life beyond a struggle to survive, temporality, and ethical ambiguity. These themes are compelling for any postmoral ethics that operates beyond or below the register of modern moral theory’s abstract laws and transparent cogitos. Her work balances an ethical concern for vulnerability with a vital regard for the vibrancy of living creatures and landscapes.Ann Murphy’s Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary illuminates philosophical questions with an abiding lucidity that does not weaken but amplifies the complexity and difficulty of ethics. Murphy’s work exposes how tropes of violence saturate philosophical discourses of both identity formation and of political and historical transformation, and how this violence, embedded in norms, denies sympathetic concern to those outside the limits of cultural intelligibility. Building upon recent work by Judith Butler, Adriana Caverero, and others, Murphy addresses the ambiguities arising from the multiple responses that exposure to vulnerability provokes. These responses can signal care but [End Page 70] they can also manifest violence. Even as she acknowledges the complex underside of cultural intelligibility, Murphy affirms sympathy and generous concern as paradigmatic virtues to be cultivated in response to various forms of violence. She probes the significance of shame and guilt for collective responsibility, ever alert to alterity and difference. With attentive care to the singular contributions of a broad range of philosophers and critical traditions, she argues compellingly for a corporeal ethics grounded on the ontological fact of vulnerability.Through their work, Murphy and Craig pose astute questions for my project, and, in fact, for any endeavor to conceptualize an ethics attentive to an embodied sociality. I describe the multifaceted approach I contribute toward this task as a call and response ethics for a layered self. Craig wonders if the more basic feature before any “call” is contact, touch, or immersion. She notes my concern that “any purported gap or abyss between humans and animals has less to do with unique human capacities than with the rise of urban centers and the loss of contact with other species.” Harm arises from a loss of contact. This is so true. Ethics as contact calls attention to the poetry of proximity, to erotic waves that transmit through the sound or feel of the other’s breath, the heat of the body, and the smell of the skin. This intense proximity serves as a compelling source for ethical sociality, resonating in some respects with what Merleau-Ponty explores as the sense of flesh and touch and, as Murphy suggests, a transcendental eros. This contact is as primal and ordinary as the skin-to-skin contact of caregiver and infant or, perhaps, the skin-to-hair contact of a terrier and her human companion, lost for a moment in inexplicable laughter. From these observations, Craig asks if “call and response” as a locution or central designation adequately captures the intimacy and intensity of these engagements.Craig’s remarks raise the further question of what is at stake in designations or phrasings. An ethics of call and response, designated as such, emerges from phenomenological but also crucially Africana and critical theory traditions. As a relational ethics, this ethics of call and response highlights social relations and expectations, opening a path outside of what Murphy characterizes as the trifecta of virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism. It attends to desire (eros) beneath, in between, and above the prescriptive rules of moral reason or the interests of individuals. At its center are social bonds (friendship and companionship, community and domination, love, hate, and other social emotions, belonging and alienation, and the conflicts of groups and reconciliation) rather... (shrink)

In psychoanalytic theory, the notion of the person inevitably evokes the notion of subjectivity. Not that the former can be reduced to the latter; but if psychoanalytic theory is anything more a certain type of therapeutic practice, it is indeed a theory of the subject or a theory of the subjective relation. We should perhaps begin by specifying that the subjective relation must be understood as a complex whole: an intrapsychic relation, that is, a relation between the various instances that (...) make up the subject, and at the same time an inter subjective relation, that is, a relation between (at least) two subjects. These two aspects are both inseparable and conflictual. They are inseparable because the self cannot exist, cannot construct itself without the other (whether this be a parental other or a peer). They are conflictual for at least two reasons. On the one hand, because the intrapsychic relation is by definition an arena of conflict: the conflict that opposes the Ego to the contradictory but equally tyrannical demands of the Id - which translates its attachment to the body and testifies to its inherent drives - and of the Superego, which represents its rootedness in the social and cultural sphere. And on the other hand, because this subject, which is thus divided within itself, must undergo the trial of bringing its desire face to face with the desire of the others with whom it is destined to live. The psychoanalytic theory of the subject is therefore the theory of a doubly heterogeneous relation: there is the heterogeneity of the components of the self, which go, once again, from their anchorage in somatic drives to the most ethereal expressions of the ideal; and there is the heterogeneity of the relation between this self and the self of the other. Moreover, this double heterogeneity is not limited to the matter of components: after all, these, one might think, would ideally be open to reabsorption into the homogeneity of the individual. On the contrary, this heterogeneity gives rise to a double rationality or double logic. Psychic causality - to borrow André Green's expression - is also driven by the conflict that opposes what in psychoanalysis are known as the primary processes, which Freud has described in chapter 7 of the Traumdeutung and which govern the formation and organization of the dream images, to the secondary processes, which are those processes that govern our daytime thoughts. Psychic causality is formed by the struggle for hegemony between these two logics, each of which is itself acted upon by an antagonism between what Freud, at the end of his life, called Eros and Thanatos, the urge for Life and the drive toward death or destruction. (shrink)