This article discusses the reality of the existence of the Self as a self-sufficient phenomenon by tracing the relationship between the concepts of subject and the Self with consideration of postmodernist and socioconstructionist critiques. The author identifies the main approaches in the history of philosophy, arguing for the disappearance of the individual subject and propose counterarguments against those positions. Critically assessing the postmodern idea of the “death of the subject,” notions of the Self as a social and linguistic (...) construction, as well as a narrative, the author demonstrates the inconsistency of a position that views the Self exclusively as a product of the European cultural tradition. It is shown that the concept of the Self presents the real phenomena of consciousness and self-awareness, and the use of this concept is necessary for the realization of any of the subject’s actions, both cognitive and social. At the same time, it is necessary to reconsider the concept of the Self from... (shrink)

Debates about the planet’s recent entrance into an epoch of earth history now characterized by the destructive effects of humankind’s having become a planetary force to rival plate tectonics, supervolcanos and asteroid impacts should have the effect of placing Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin’s conception of natural history in a new light. For what it is perhaps most striking about this conception is not only its proximity to a present made newly aware of nature and history’s total interpenetration, but (...) just how precisely its understanding of natural history’s essential transitoriness accords with what is now everywhere observable: that ever-accelerating process of disintegration through which it becomes clear that the life of phenomena can only be known today if it is also known in terms of that reality of disappearance to which the current age daily testifies. For Adorno and Benjamin, such a conception of natural history had very real consequences for how philosophical cognition and construction would have to be remade, leading both to pursue far-reaching experiments in intellectual production that it is the task of this paper to reconstruct in the light of its possible relevance for the theory and practice of critical theory today. (shrink)

I argue that our present crisis of meaning is grounded in what Dallas Willard called "the disappearance of moral knowledge," and in institutional changes related to this disappearance. Following Frankl, I argue that meaning requires self-transcendence via commitment to "higher" values, but the disappearance of moral knowledge has obscured the reality of such values, and hence has obscured the path to meaningful self-transcendence.

This is a book about the philosophy of time, and in particular the philosophy of the great logician Kurt Godel (1906-1978). It evaluates Godel's attempt to show that Einstein has not so much explained time as explained it away. Unlike recent more technical studies, it focuses on the reality of time. The book explores Godel's conception of time, existence, and truth with special reference to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Frege. In the light of this investigation an attempt is made (...) to shed light on such issues as the precise sense in which Godel believed in the possibility of time travel, the relationship of the reality of time to the objectivity of temporal becoming, and the significance of time for human existence.This is a book about the philosophy of time, and in particular the philosophy of the great logician Kurt Godel (1906-1978). It evaluates Godel's attempt to show that Einstein has not so much explained time as explained it away. Unlike recent more technical studies, it focuses on the reality of time. The book explores Godel's conception of time, existence, and truth with special reference to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Frege. In the light of this investigation an attempt is made to shed light on such issues as the precise sense in which Godel believed in the possibility of time travel, the relationship of the reality of time to the objectivity of temporal becoming, and the significance of time for human existence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phenotype/Genotype Distinction and the Disappearance of the BodyGabriel GuddingThe discipline of genetics has long been a rhetorical and heuristic locus for social and political issues. As such, the science has influenced culture through the avenues of law, medicine, warfare, social work, and even, since 1972 in California, the education of kindergarten students. It has affected how we view the body, morality, romance, biography, and agency—not to mention (...) procreation and death.In many ways the delamination of genotype from phenotype was the first cut, so to speak, in this new cosmetics of life. The distinction between structure and expression arose from an interdisciplinary struggle for authority in the biological sciences at the turn of the century. This preceptual split in the organism between structure and expression came over time to fundamentally alter the percepts of the body, in terms of how the body is juridically, medicinally, and otherwise, generally perceived and understood. More importantly and interestingly, this delamination within the organism between its genotype and phenotype eventually led to a sense of the body’s fragility and its eventual “disappearance” as a seat of agency, morality, and identity; and in turn these three groundings of modernity have been redistributed to the gene, the genotype, and the genome. In one sense, then, this paper traces not so much the birth of a new view of the body (the genetic) but the drama of its disappearance, in which the body melts to a silhouette and is replaced by the genotype and its expression, the phenotype.In 1911 Wilhelm Johannsen of the University of Copenhagen published “The Genotype Conception of Heredity,” 1 which introduced to geneticists the ideas of “phenotype” and “genotype.” Johannsen coined these terms in objection to what he considered to be an erroneous conception of heredity, [End Page 525] which he called the “transmission view”: the idea that “personal qualities” (such as honesty or good looks) could themselves be or otherwise influence “the true heritable elements or traits” passed on from one generation to another. He called this transmission view “apparent heredity” and claimed that this idea relied upon an economic-juridical model of the transmission of property—and thereby provided no disciplined or profound understanding of true heredity. He asserted that in factthe transmission-conception of heredity represents exactly the reverse of the real facts, just as the famous Stahlian theory of “phlogiston” was an expression diametrically opposite to the chemical reality. The personal qualities of any individual organism do not at all cause the qualities of its offspring; but the qualities of both ancestor and descendent are in quite the same manner determined by the nature of the “sexual substances”—i.e., the gametes—from which they have developed. Personal qualities are then the reactions of the gametes joining to form a zygote; but the nature of the gametes is not determined by the personal qualities of the parents or ancestors in question. This is the modern view of heredity. 2This was indeed a profoundly new view of heredity: Johannsen quite boldly and deliberately intended his genotype-phenotype distinction to stand as a watershed between the old science of heredity—exemplified by Mendel, Galton, Weismann, and others—and the new science of genetics. He said, “The science of genetics is in a transition period, becoming an exact science just as the chemistry in the times of Lavoisier, who made the balance an indispensable implementation in chemical research.” 3 And he was right: genetics was indeed in a transition period, primarily due to the theoretically accommodating qualities of this new distinction. The science of genetics became radically simplified: the confusion which arose from the attempts to correlate characteristics to their corresponding units of hereditarian influence diminished. Viewing personal qualities and characteristics, in all their variation, as expressions of underlying structures instead of mutual correlates to them drastically simplified the theoretical and experimental aspects of heredity.Not only did this distinction revolutionize the science of heredity, it helped insinuate the new science of genetics into a position of autonomy and authority with respect to the other life sciences. Historians of science, such as Jan Sapp, have suggested that the genotype-phenotype distinction played a... (shrink)

What are the epistemic bases of the knowledge of the reality of our own body? Proprioception plays a primordial role in body representation and more particularly at the level of body schema. Without proprioception people can feel amputated and the mislocalization of proprioceptive information through the remapping of the Penfield Homonculus induces illusions of phantom limbs, illusions that contradictory visual feedback cannot erase. However, it turns out that it is not as simple as that and that vision also intervenes (...) in body knowledge: vision of one's own body allows deafferented patients to move and phantom limbs to disappear. Finally, the existence of phantom limbs in aplasic patients as well as studies on neonates provide evidence of an innate component of body representation. (shrink)

This article argues that reality and virtuality are still very much phenomenologically distinguishable, although this might not be the case forever. I argue for two main types of virtuality – one inherently involved in the dynamic horizons of perceptual experiences, while the other is all of our experiences of digital images – in order to show that a particular possible instantiation of the latter type, namely “pure” mixed reality (MR), might come to blur and collapse various experiential categories (...) in the future, not least real and irreal, like never before. To show this, there are three main sections. First, I outline my understanding of the two basic types of virtuality, as understood from a classical phenomenological analysis. Second, I give an account of the most important family of “virtual technologies” relevant to the question at hand, namely virtual, augmented and mixed reality (VR, AR and MR respectively) technologies. After homing in on MR, I explain what “pure” MR is and how, through tactile holograms, this might change even basic experiential distinctions going forward, and not necessarily for the better. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Search of a Reality-Based Community:Illusion and Tolerance in Music, Education, and SocietyPatrick K. SchmidtThe two questions that arise in this symposium are: What kind of world engagement is required of music education? and Should music educators participate in political understanding? While my immediate response was and is: How we can afford not to? that is, not to engage fully with the world and not to do so (...) politically, at the same time I also recognize the ways in which that has been problematic in the music education profession. Particularly, in how we continue to experience what I would call events without future: ersatz events made of illusions. Such a proposition is implicated in the following questions: How seriously are we committed to rethinking our practice and re-engaging with our ideals, traditions, visions, and discourses? Has our conception and practice of democracy disappeared (or remained unformed) in the insubstantiality of shadows? How do [End Page 160] we react to political understandings that dismiss the communities in which we live, as well as the singularities and differences that mark us? Who are those of us supposedly living in the/a "reality-based community?"1An aide of the current administration explains the White House stance by saying, "We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."2 The idea, of course, is that we not only can, but perhaps, must dissociate from such communities (particularly those that do not conform to such envisioned reality). An Empire, one might say, seeks power as well as expansion, confluence as well as stability, tradition as well as ideological certainty. It probably comes as no surprise then, that dictatorial regimes are often more stable, including economically, than new or recalcitrant democracies. (I myself grew up in such a regime in Brazil in the 1970s and early 80s.) The word "Empire" conjures up images that are localized, monocentric, confluent, and institutional. The reality today, however, seems much closer to what Antonio Negri and Richard Hardt portray:3 a reality modeled upon the production of subjects with increasingly similar desires and prone to a certain subservience to commodity and technology. But if this "we" is no longer "us" but an illusion, if this reality-based community no longer distinguishes, questions, problematizes, or engages with its own reality or realities, perhaps more than ever it is time that we began to think politically, that our assumptions and that of others be challenged, and that we seek understandings that, as Randall Allsup has proposed, "are rendered in a world that is contingent, political, and always in motion."Following the model adopted here I will address some of the concepts Estelle Jorgensen proposes, particularly those associated with the notion of supremacy and its propagation through "reductionistic and nationalistic forces." Such a vista will serve as a departing point for my own reflections on the shades, contradictions, complexities, and possibilities we might find when considering majority led silence and voicing, as well as the role of political and empathetic dialogue in our practices, be they professional and/or connected to citizenship.4A Search for the Ethical: Majority Rule?Today, music education as a society negotiates a reality that is more complex and multiple—one of a multitude of one5 —of separation through categories that, while preserving the impression of distinctiveness, allows for a larger invisible and uncontested majority to instill what Alexis de Toqueville called over a century ago the "tyranny of the majority."6 We need to consider here that, as Negri and Hardt propose, there is no one center to this Empire, "no tangible, nuclear element to be identified and/or resisted." This tyrannical majority is paradoxical, for while it dictates it is also silent.7 What is there, then, are spaces in and through which our disengagement allows for the strengthening of what is [End Page 161] perceived and experienced as inevitable, as a faceless majority that controls and decrees, that denies and structures.This tyranny of the majority, the underside of our democratic visions, can lead in politics, as in our professional practices, to a sense of the famous Foucaultian panopticon where total surveillance is... (shrink)

In 1909, Ehrenfest published a note in the Physikalische Zeitschrift showing that a Born rigid cylinder could not be set into rotation without stresses, as elements of the circumference would be contracted but not the radius. Ignatowski and Varićak challenged Ehrenfest’s result in the same journal, arguing that the stresses would emerge if length contraction were a real dynamical effect, as in Lorentz’s theory. However, no stresses are expected to arise, according to Einstein’s theory, where length contraction is only an (...) apparent effect due to an arbitrary choice of clock synchronization. Ehrenfest and Einstein considered this line of reasoning dangerously misleading and took a public stance in the Physikalische Zeitschrift, countering that relativistic length contraction is both apparent and real. It is apparent since it disappears for the comoving observer, but it is also real since it can be experimentally verified. By drawing on his lesser-known private correspondence with Varićak, this paper shows how Einstein used the Ehrenfest paradox as a tool for an ‘Einsteinian pedagogy’. Einstein’s argumentative stance is contrasted with Bell’s use of the Dewan-Beran thread-between-spaceships paradox to advocate for a ‘Lorentzian pedagogy’. The paper concludes that the disagreement between the two ways of ‘teaching special relativity’ stems from divergent interpretations of philosophical categories such as ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’. (shrink)

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) had a powerful influence on the development of American pragmatism in the twentieth century. He also had a strong impact on the social sciences. This classic book represents Mead's philosophy of experience, so central to his outlook. The present as unique experience is the focus of this deep analysis of the basic structure of temporality and consciousness. Mead emphasizes the novel character of both the present and the past. Though science is predicated on the assumption that (...) the present is predictable based on a thorough knowledge of the past, the experience of the present, says Mead, is an utterly unique moment comparable to no other, and when it is past the novel character of that unique experience is irrevocable. The emergence of novelty within the perceived rational order of reality is the crux of the problem that Mead explores. The present, in his words, is "the emergent event . . . something which is more than the processes that have led up to it and which by its change, continuance, or disappearance, adds to later passages a content they would not otherwise have possessed." The present as "the seat of reality" heavily conditions our retrospective view of the past as much as it helps to shape the future. The novelty of every present experience causes us to reconstruct our preceding experiences to make sense of the past, which is naturally assumed to be the main cause of what we presently experience. Our perspective on reality is thus relative to the conditioning of each new event and it changes continuously as the effects of the present shift our view of the past and future. This emphasis on the integrative, holistic nature of reality, in which everything past, present, and future is a condition of everything else, makes Mead's philosophy highly relevant to today's scientific picture of a quantum universe, where chance and probability play a role in the emergence of reality. Also of great interest is the way in which he extends his basic analysis of temporal-spatial reality to the emergence of mind and consciousness as a natural development of the evolutionary process. This stimulating and provocative work attests to John Dewey's praise of Mead as "the most original mind in philosophy in America" of his generation. (shrink)

Most critical studies of consumerism denounce the deceptive images produced by commodities, but what happens when consumer goods are rejected as waste? Instead of considering garbage disposal as a merely technical and hygienic issue, this article investigates the “aesthetics of disappearance” of waste. The structural reasons for the invisibilization of waste and the political effects of its manifestation will be analyzed through Jacques Rancière’s notion of “distribution of the sensible.” The central thesis is that material consumer culture, based on (...) a continuous process of devaluing and replacing items, needs organizing the perceptual field to make waste disappear and thus create the illusion that, once discarded, an object vanishes. Therefore, making waste visible is interpreted as a rapture of the normative configuration of the sensible, disturbing habitual modes of experiencing and signifying reality. This hypothesis is investigated through a paradigmatic artistic work: Matta-Clark’s Garbage Wall (1970). The American artist exposes waste in the public space to challenge the established distribution of spaces and functions in the urban context, displaying waste’s stubborn resistance to the imperative to disappear. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese Gleams of Sufī Light: Wang Tai-yü's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm, with a New Translation of Jāmī's Lawā'iḥ from the Persian by William C. ChittickE. N. AndersonChinese Gleams of Sufī Light: Wang Tai-yü's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm, with a New Translation of (...) Jāmī's Lawā'iḥ from the Persian by William C. Chittick. By Sachiko Murata, with a foreword by Tu Weiming. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 264.Contacts between China and the Near East are at least as old as civilization but have been relatively little studied. This has led to a lack of attention to Chinese Islam. Yet, Islam has been a profoundly influential force in China for centuries. In Chinese Gleams of Sufī Light, Sachiko Murata has stepped forward to bring a wider awareness to the interactions between Chinese Islam and native Chinese philosophic traditions. (Murata is also the author of The Tao of Islam [1992] and, with Islamicist William Chittick, The Vision of Islam [1994]). [End Page 257]The present book adds greatly to our understanding. It includes a translation of The Great Learning of the Pure and Real, by Wang Tai-yü (ca. 1590-ca. 1658) and facing-page versions of William Chittick's English translation of the fifteenth-century Gleams (Lawā'iḥ) by 'Abd al-Rahman Jāmī and Murata's English translation of Liu Chih's (ca. 1662-ca. 1730) Chinese version of the same work. (Here, incidentally, I follow the book in using the Wade-Giles system.) One can see, comparing the translations, howLiu recast Jāmī's work in Chinese philosophic language, paraphrased some difficult passages, summarized others, and added his own commentaries.Interestingly, Liu eliminated Jāmī's Persian poetry. Murata thinks this is because Liu wanted to focus on the hard ideas; I suspect that it was because Liu realized that Persian prosody and imagery were too far from Chinese poetry to please his audience.Both Wang and Liu belonged to what must have been a rather loose but some-how connected circle of Chinese Islamic scholars. Both, also, almost necessarily used language fairly widespread in Chinese philosophy. Terms such as "emptiness" and "transformation" had many Chinese resonances, some most un-Islamic (Neo Confucian and Buddhist, for instance).Neither Chittick nor Murata give any glosses for key philosophical terms in either source language. Their philosophical and religious provenance, Chinese or Muslim, is correspondingly unclear.What is clear is that Neo-Confucianism had a strong influence on these scholars. Haqiqa "reality" is often translated as li "principle." Pen-jan "root nature" is used for the Arabic compound "essence and attributes." These examples are discussed in the introduction (p. 19). "Annihilation" becomes "conquering" (pp. 148-149). This is strange, because "Annihilation" (fana') is a technical term in Sufism for the disappearance of the self in God; it is an Arabic term, and literally means something like. "passing away." It signifies the forgetting or loss of self, such that only contemplation of the Divine remains. It is as close to the Divine as humans can get since, in Islam, humans cannot be absorbed into Allah (as, in Buddhism, they can be absorbed into Nirvāṇa or the Buddha-nature). "Conquering" seems a rather strange way to express this in Chinese. Perhaps Chinese Muslim readers of the time had developed this specialized sense for it.There are, of course, debatable translations here to contend with (both from Persian and Arabic to Chinese and from Persian and Chinese into English), but it appears that real incommensurability is involved. It was very difficult to use the language of Chinese philosophy in the seventeenth century, influenced as it was by centuries of Neo-Confucian thought, to talk about a radically different religion characterized by an infinitely powerful and wise God, aware of all futures, close to the believer and yet cut off.The inevitable result is to wedge the Arabic and Persian philosophy, so heavily informed by Neoplatonic essentialism and other... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Demise of the Aesthetic in Literary StudyEugene GoodheartAnumber of years ago at an MLA convention I was on a search committee interviewing candidates for a position in Victorian literature in our department. One of the candidates had done a dissertation on Christina Rossetti in which “Goblin Market” played a prominent role. As I recall, the candidate was putting forth a New Historicist or feminist argument about the poem, (...) when one of my colleagues on the committee interrupted her with the question: “But is it a good poem?” The question took me by surprise, for I didn’t remember such a question having been asked of students in years. It dumbfounded the candidate. She had apparently never considered the question. The poem was there as an occasion for... I was about to write interpretation or analysis, but it would be more accurate to say: a placement in a particular discourse—historicist, feminist, deconstructionist, ideological. The candidate’s fluency about the poem came to a halt. She spluttered a few phrases about the power of the poem. She was unprepared to answer the question, having never been asked or taught to ask it by her teachers of any poem or novel or play that she had read.We may not have been fair in our judgment of her. If we had been consistent and asked the same question of all the candidates, I don’t think we would have met with greater success. Our candidate’s disability was, indeed still is, built into the profession of literary studies at the present time. That aesthetic judgment is not one of the current professional practices is clear not only from its absence in the content of literary study but from the styles of the discoursers. No longer written [End Page 139] in a vernacular style, criticism has become a species of sociological prose once held in contempt by literary scholars: ponderous, abstract, obscure, ungainly, jargonish. There are practitioners of New Historicism, ideology critique, and deconstruction who write well, but who seem to regard their own gifts of expression as incidental, and are not in the least discomfited by the bad writing of others.Style is not an incidental matter. Orwell made a compelling case for its political and moral significance. In his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” he preaches the virtues of plain speech, the transparent and elegant style as a mark of self-honesty. (Transparency makes it difficult to conceal your ideas from yourself.) In Writing Degree Zero and subsequent writings, Barthes deconstructed, so to speak, the Enlightenment myth of transparency as a guarantor of honesty and truth. Reality was not as perspicuous to “natural” plain writing as the Enlightenment believed. Barthes’s own style (rich, inventive, personal, alternately perspicuous, and obscure) is that of an imaginative writer. I don’t want to adjudicate the differences between Orwell and Barthes, but I should note what may not be obvious: they have a shared aesthetic concern with style, a concern that has virtually disappeared from academic discourse.It has become almost an embarrassment to speak in behalf of aesthetic value in the academy. One of the few unembarrassed exceptions is the voice of Harold Bloom whose jeremiad The Western Canon begins defiantly with an affirmation of the aesthetic against its demystifiers. “‘Aesthetic value’ is sometimes regarded as a suggestion of Immanuel Kant’s rather than an actuality, but that has not been my experience during a lifetime of reading.” 1 I take it that Bloom is saying that aesthetic value is an experience and not a theory. Indeed, if we insist on a theoretical justification of the aesthetic, we will end up speaking as does Barbara Herrnstein Smith of its contingent and subjective status (it is in the eye of the beholder and every beholder sees things differently) or we may find that the aesthetic is inescapably contaminated by political, moral, and philosophical interests. “Contaminated” perhaps, but as Bloom says, not reducible to these interests. It is useful to remember that aesthetics has been traditionally associated with the idea of disinterestedness. As Jerome Stolnitz remarks, we perceive beauty when it is the object of a “disinterested and sympathetic attention... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Scale of the Nation in a Shrinking WorldJoan Ramon Resina (bio)The 1990s saw the rise of political issues that, although by no means new, generated a great deal of discourse based on a semantic rupture with the past. The need to inscribe political analysis with a feeling of historical acceleration was nowhere as patent as in George W. Bush's New World Order. Although the "New World Order" quickly (...) gave way to the euphemism "globalization," it soon became obvious that political agendas would change considerably as would the terms of engagement with realities that had once seemed straightforward and now appeared riddled with theoretical problems.Nationalism was salient among those realities. Although it had driven decolonization in the fifties and sixties and throughout the Vietnam era, it seemed to flare up roughly at the time when Bush pronounced the bipolar order dead. As the political map was being redrawn after the breakdown of the Soviet empire, other foci of political struggle caught the world's attention. National struggles in other regions were interpreted as collateral of that breakdown rather than long-standing symptoms of similar tensions at different scales. Once more, the European continent was caught in the incongruity of its historical processes. While Western Europe was cautiously advancing toward economic and political integration, Eastern Europe found itself returning from a "posthistorical" experiment in supranationalism to the "historical" horizon of polities being reconfigured according to such social tangibles as a common language and religion, a traditional relation to place, and shared identifying memories.Until the 1990s the West smugly believed that it had consolidated state borders around seemingly homogeneous societies. Cultural integration was flaky in spots (Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, Corsica); those resistances, however, were looked on mostly as archaic irrelevances bound to disappear. But as nationalism began to haunt the cozy dream of a posthistorical balance of power, nonchalance gave way to a glut of intellectual exorcisms meant to conjure the evil that had caught at Europe's edges. In this new context, the Balkans represented for Europe, in Žižek's words, "the peculiar status of a ghost that haunts it." If the Balkans "are always somewhere else, a little bit more toward the southeast" [3], in the 1990s the danger of Balkanization seemed ubiquitous. At the time, a true Balkan hysteria rang out in the most self-satisfied European nations. In France and Spain, long-standing conflicts between center and periphery were recast in terms of the horror seen on CNN. Europe spatialized its fears, turning geographic distance into a metaphor for the racism directed against its internal others.Europe's internal others did not consist only of immigrants from non-EU countries, for whom liberals always had a soft spot, but also of those peoples and territorial units capable and culpable of tearing admirable nations apart. It was in those territorial units, which had been incorporated but not assimilated in the course of nation-state building, that nationalism was "raising its ugly head." It was here that "'reflexive' Politically Correct racism" (Žižek) applied the Balkans metaphor, projecting every conceivable horror into the intentions of unsuspecting citizens. As Žižek observed at the time, "[t]he [End Page 46] Balkans constitute a place of exception with regard to which the tolerant multiculturalist is allowed to act out his/her repressed racism" [6]. This perverse acting out was all the more acceptable, inasmuch as the peoples subjected to the logic of displaced racism were after all white and developed, and thus free game for the tolerant multiculturalist, who could always bring forward less-developed regions as potential victims of the centrifugal region's egotism. When the Balkans war broke out in May of 1991, the first Western European reactions were predominantly pro-Serbian. Never mind that Slovenia and Croatia were pro-Western and democratic. Western intelligentsias accused them of pettiness and lack of solidarity and began to restrain their large-state bias only when Serbian annexationists directed their all-out war against Bosnian Muslims, who, although white and no less developed than their attackers, were, by virtue of their religion, a patent instance of otherness. Overnight politically correct racism swung from tolerance for... (shrink)

This thesis is to make sure the art's political possibility especially in the age of the technological reproduction. Since Benjamin declared the death of the 'aura' in the modern art, the concept of the art has been criticized and changed, that of the simulacre which Plato had blamed in his 'republics' newly appeared passing through the post-modern application of Baudrillard. But the simulacre is not negative any more here, even though it was the side effect of the mimesis(the poetic process, (...) so long as it is not oblivious that simulacre is just the fake reality as Plato and Baudrillard said, it was different from the real. The artwork could not be free from the destiny of the dream, for it is available after awakening out of it. In the post-modernism the distinction between the dream and the real disappeared, which could be linked to understanding the fetishism of the technological reproduction widely spreading among the highly industrialized people. The semiology of Saussure could be borrowed to make people isolated of it awakened to the revolutionary subject. That is to say, if the simulacre is like the dreaming, to draw the social revolutionary possibility of it, they need to overcome these fetishism, that is, the learning that this dream is not the reality, and after that they can leap as another subject perceiving the power of that dream. According Freud, the dream is based on the unconscious process of the empty signs. And the teaching of 'the signs of the equivalent differences' in Saussure makes us free from the essentialism of the word(a sort of the fetishism), know that we are so much as the sign or the citizen empty in it, and so get to know that we need another signs, or neighbors even though, and for they are empty, too. The revolutionary subject is not based on the great individual subject but the empty(lost) 'us' that so need to associate each other. And the post-modern art, popular mass art can help us being social subjects. That is what Benjamin had dreamed in post-aura art through 'the artworks in the age of the technological reproduction'. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the period of Russian symphonic music of the 1960s. A new generation of "sixties" composers has entered the Soviet music scene, imperiously declaring themselves with bright creative achievements, fresh and modern musical language. The epoch of the turning point dictated a new reality, required new artistic thinking, generated diverse creative ideas. The panorama of Russian music was quite colorful, many things in art appeared and disappeared very rapidly, stylistic pluralism, lost at the dawn (...) of Soviet power, returned to the music scene. Special attention is paid to the works of composers of the Leningrad school — S. Slonimsky, Y. Falik, L. Prigozhin and V. Gavrilin. All of them opened new stylistic horizons and absorbed into their sound orbit the main trends of modern music, including the conquests of the Western avant-garde.  The scientific novelty of the work consists in the fact that the author examines the bright and original works of young Leningrad authors in the context of stylistic and linguistic innovations of the 1960s. The article analyzes the role and place of "Sixties" composers in the struggle for "new music". The main conclusion of the article is the idea that the period of musical renewal of the 1960s under consideration turned out to be extremely saturated with the most complex and diverse problems: ideological, general aesthetic, musical style. S. Slonimsky, Y. Falik, L. Prigozhin, V. Gavrilin became undisputed leaders in the renewal of Russian music of the second half of the twentieth century, and their works-"symbols" fully reflected the intense search of the post-war generation of Soviet composers. (shrink)

Plato was the first author to use the term mûthos (myth) in our modern sense.1 He described the role of myth in Athens, in order to contrast it with an argumentative philosophical discourse aimed at the truth. Even so, he had recourse to this unverifiable story not only in a practical role, in order to persuade the citizen to obey moral norms and political laws, but also in a theoretical context, evoking premises from which philosophical discourse could develop, and picturing (...) realities such as the soul, that could not be grasped by either the senses or the intellect. With the disappearance of the city-state and the constitution of Kingdoms and Empires, the social and political aspects of myth tended to disappear in the Mediterranean world, allowing the soul to take “centre-stage.” While theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony persisted, they did so only to provide a framework for a vast drama—that of the salvation of the human soul—as described in the Chaldaean Oracles and the treatises of the Sethian Gnostics. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the peculiarities of the social novel genre content, the traditions of which are rooted in the modern era and transformations under the influence of radical changes in the type of thinking in the postmodern outlook. Postmodern fictional way of thinking is based on the image of the world as a combination of multiplying realities. As the result, the social reality started being perceived as a construction in which complicated-by-intelligence values disappear while (...) elementary routine constructions multiply. Epistemological uncertainty also influenced this result. In conditions of ‘trading reality‘ the intellectuals lose their positions, traditional values destruct, humanities knowledge fades as it doesn’t have any certain market cost, the dream about the social equality vanishes together with the idea of socialism itself. Discourse of possession can not be combined with the discourse of moral. New positions are obtained by the representatives of different subcultures that become the centre of amorphous mass. The modern British social novel represents the social changes, which have occurred owing to the changes of the paradigm of thinking. The absence of socially significant landmarks deprives the British of an impulse to socially significant actions, allows manipulations with masses. The absence of national idea is connected with the painful search of the national identity, which is believed to be the main point in modern literary process. (shrink)

The modern realities of life in Ukraine, plunged into war by the Russian Federation, as well as those countries that are in a state of ontological threat, with new force actualize the problem unfolding in the social plane (we are talking about the antinomy of “chaos – stability”). In other words, modern social cataclysms – COVID-19 and war – have disrupted the stability of everyday life. The presence of the threat of nuclear escalation of the international conflict expands the metaphysical (...) horizons of thanatological and suicidal problems, the aggravation of which can destroy the established order of the civilized world, which has found itself in a borderline situation. In view of the above, the purpose of this study is to clarify the essence of the phenomenon of chaos and social processes derived from it – the end, catastrophe, according to the philosophical views of the French thinker J.Baudrillard. Achieving the specified goal will contribute to the development of modern methods and technologies of social work in the community to minimize/overcome difficult life circumstances determined by the war situation. J.Baudrillard was deeply convinced that chaos is not completely opposed to rationality. The thinker believed that the dominance of rationality over reality is limited, because in reality it is not the subject who dominates the objective world, but the competition between the subject and the object. This study is focused on the actual existential problem of a person being in a borderline situation of chaos, determined by the reality of a thanatological situation, which enables the perspective of an ontological threat of a planetary scale, the origins of which are contained in the obsessive idea of total control, the realization of which leads to the disappearance of the social and the replacement of reality with an illusion, including even the illusion of security as a fundamental basis of the rescue economy, which is clearly observed in the ideology of the russian federation, which is based on the consumption of disaster in everyday life. The social work specialist’s awareness that chaos is not the end of everything (it is better to define this phenomenon as the end of the old order transformed into disorder, an example of which can be anomie), but the beginning of a new order, will directly contribute to the achievement of effective results in his professional activities in the community, in particular, in the direction of minimizing/overcoming the consequences of anomie as a type of chaos. (shrink)

The historical origins of the Kyoto School of Philosophy of modern Japan, represented by Kitaro Nishida and Hajime Tanabe, may be derived from both the ancient Chinese idea of Change and the ancient Indian Upanishadic idea of the mutual identity of Brahman and Atman. The ancient Chinese idea of Change signifies change as well as non-change, and even their dialectical unification. Both origins are structured by the self-identity of the opposed in logic, and these historical prototypes have been developed into (...) the various forms of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist philosophy. The notion of Nothingness or Emptiness rather than Being has been set up as the fundamental principle. The principle of Nothingness as ultimate reality has been connected with the logic of self-identity of theopposed, and this is evident in Nishida’s concept of the self-identity in absolute contradistinction that is equivalent to the Place of Absolute Nothingness. Even though Nishida’s idea of Place is directly and explicitly influenced by the ancient Greek idea of Topos, it has indirectly and implicitly been affected by the traditional agricultural society as well, in which the land is regarded as the self-identical substratum despite the cyclic time of the four-seasons change. The ancient Chinese idea of Change also reflects the agricultural society in which the cyclic time plays an important role on the basis of the unchanging self-identical land as the underlying substratum. Nishida succeeds in establishing the new logical expression of Eastern traditional thought, deeply hidden in consciousness, in relation toWestern philosophy. The uniqueness of Nishida’s idea of Place may have its main source in the traditional agricultural background, and in this sense his way of thinking may be rural in character. On the other hand, Tanabe, though following Nishida at first, turns to making criticism of the mentor with the establishment of the triadic logic of species as the dialectic, which is characterized by the perpetual self-negating conversion in action. In contrast to Nishida, Tanabe represents the urban type of thinking, which is in pursuit of transforming in life. While Nishida’s idea of Absolute Nothingness has an affinity with the ancient Chinese philosopher Laotzu’s idea of Nothingness from and into which every entity comes and goes, Tanabe’s concept of Absolute Nothingness as the principle ofconversion is more closed to the Buddhist idea of sunyata, i.e., Emptiness, which is devoid of any substance in itself. As regards evil, the difference between them is obvious in that for Nishida evil and time or history disappear into the ultimate horizon or place of Nothingness with the tendency toward a kind of monism of goodness, whereas for Tanabe evil copes with goodness and retains its own status throughout, never being reduced to the opposed. Even if so, both of them, however, fail to construct a philosophy of history from the epochal or durational viewpoint, compared to Heidegger and Jaspers. (shrink)

The main themes and aims of this book are understanding aesthetics, contemporary art and the end of the avant-garde not from the traditional viewpoint of the metaphysics of the beautiful and the sublime but rather thru close connection to the techno-genesis of virtual worlds. This book tackles problems in contemporary art theory such as the body in space and time of digital technologies, along with other issues in visual studies and image science. Further intentions exhibit the fundamental reasons for the (...) disappearance of the picture in the era of virtual reality starting from the notion of contemporary art as realized iconoclasm; art has no world for its "image". The author argues that the iconoclasm of contemporary art has severe consequences. This text appeals to philosophers of art and those interested in contemporary art theory. (shrink)

The disappearance of the public good as a subject of philosophical discourse is described. The work of Confucius and the work of John Dewey contain robust concepts of the public good, but in the controversial work of Richard Rorty the idea of the public good undergoes a radical transformation. The Great Learning of Confucius, John Dewey's "The Public and Its Problems", and Richard Rorty's "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity" are examined. What emerges from this cross-cultural study is a reconsideration of (...) the relation between metaphysics and social philosophy. (shrink)

In this Master's dissertation, I try to show that the causal theory of memory, which is the only theory developed so far that at first view seems more plausible and that could be integrated with psychological explanations and investigations of memory, shows some conceptual and ontological problems that go beyond the internal inconsistencies that each version can present. On one hand, the memory phenomenon analyzed is very limited: in general it is reduced to the conscious act of remembering expressed in (...) a propositional format: the idea of an agent who can control his memory reports, in contrast to a passive subject who merely retrieve his encoded memories, is not even considered. Furthermore, the representational function of memory is the only function taken into account; and all the diachronic changes that could entail a dynamic conception of memory are ignored, as is the consideration of context in a broad sense of the term. On the other hand, causal theories make some implicit assumptions that are obviously questionable (e.g., the difference between facts and events) and leave some of their key concepts unexplained, like the nature of the causality, the isomorphism between the memory trace and the memory event, etc. Nonetheless, the principal point that we criticized is the idea of a correspondence between a past event or representation of it, the correspondent memory trace and the memory representation of it. Psychological models of memory, with the exception of the spatial analogy, question some of these assumptions and suggest that memory information is organized in a way other than that implied by the causal theory. But it is distributed connectionism that actually challenges the causal theory of memory, not only through some of its basic postulates, like the superpositional conception of memory traces, their mutual influence and constant state of change, but also because it is compatible with a more situated approach to memory phenomena as well as with the idea that memory in reality accomplishes a variety of functions that go beyond the representational one. The explicit and implicit ideas provided by distributed connectionism, together with the previous criticisms that we made to of causal theory, clearly suggest the possibility of developing another kind of philosophical theory of memory, different from existing theories. This task, nonetheless, implies: (a) A much deeper study of connectionism principles and memory models, as well as of the rival candidate, symbolism, plus the evaluation of these models in the light of psychological and neurophysiological empirical research, which unfortunately I have not dealt with in this work. (b) An analysis of the metaphysical nature of events and facts, in order to see if we should decide in favor of a realist or a non-realist account. It is also clear that this decision can’t be taken without an examination of perception studies (and not exclusively philosophical ones) which would be crucial for determining what is encoded in memory, and studies devoted to language, which, I suspect, plays an important role in the segmentation of reality. (c) A clarification of the notion of causality, because we wouldn’t like to deny any kind entail the complete disappearance of boundaries between memory and imagination. And even if I suspect that my future work will question the existence of absolute boundaries between these two capacities, the notion of causality can’t be completely erase from the theory of memory without erasing the memory phenomenon itself. But this causality, as we’ve already showed, can’t consist in the naïve conception adopted by the causal accounts of memory, nor can it be explained in counterfactual terms. If we think of the reconsolidation concept, of the interdependence between all the memory system, and of the deciding influence of context, it’s almost sure that more than one notion of causality will need to be invoked in order to explain memory. (d) Because I do not want to reduce the study of memory exclusively to cases of remembering, it’s essential to analyze how memory intervenes not only in imagination, but also in perception, reasoning and future projection, for example. In this respect, we could quote the interesting articles of Atance & O’Neill (2001) and Bucker & Carroll (2006), the first concerning the relationship between episodic memory and episodic future thinking, the second concerning the relationship between episodic memory and all kinds of self-projection, such as navigation and theory of mind, relations that would also have to be explored from a philosophical perspective, in particular to overcome the tendency to suppose that representation is the only function of memory. I will also mention the necessity of combining the notion of metamemory with that of memory to some extent; as I have already remarked, it is implausible to suppose that a subject who consciously remembers something is unable to exert any kind of control over his memory reports. (e) Finally, in order to integrate a situated conception of memory into a philosophical account, it will also be indispensable to take into consideration what is known as “everyday memory research” as well as studies in social and collective memory. (shrink)

The analysis of the “Tygodniówka” column published on the last page of a weekly magazine “Angora” for the years 2020–2021 made it possible to evaluate the way of presenting an individual and his everyday life during the COVID-19 pandemic in a crooked mirror of cartoon jokes. During one year there is an evident change in attitudes and behaviour of people who have already got used to the pandemic to some extent. Due to the length of the material collected and the (...) most visible change that took place in the way of presenting the mocked events, attitudes and human behaviour in the past year, two specific issues of “Angora” were selected, i.e. 49/2020 and 49/2021. In addition, the examples from the holiday issue 33/2021 have shown how the behaviour of an individual living in constant fear of the coronavirus changes during a vacation. A man tired of the prohibitions and sanitary regime to be in force also seeks opportunities not to follow them for a while. He consciously circumvents restrictions and prohibitions, does not comply with the sanitary regime, which is manifested by the resignation from wearing masks and maintaining social distance. All of this can be found in the jokes of “Tygodniówka”, where mercilessly accurately reflects the pandemic reality, although it’s been showed in the crooked mirror. The person seems to be sure that the coronavirus has magically ceased to be a threat, perhaps even disappeared. (shrink)

I argue that, since Marx's theory of the cause of alienation is inadequate in accounting for all cases of alienation, his solution to overcoming alienation by abolishing private ownership and the capitalist mode of production is not tenable. The socialist society envisioned by Marx cannot overcome the alienation that he ascribed to the capitalist system and cannot avoid systematically producing its own form of alienation. ;Marx was unable to discover any necessary causal link between alienation and "the movement of private (...) property." Nevertheless, Marx's theory of socialism and communism is based on the assumption that private property is the cause of alienation and that the elimination of private property will eliminate alienation. Marx transformed Hegel's idea of alienation to fit a different context, wherein the solution to alienation was found in an examination of the material conditions of human existence rather than in an overall intellectual understanding of reality. ;Even granted the truth of Marx's belief that the alienation of labor can be entirely eliminated by abolishing private ownership, it does not follow that the other forms of alienation in the realm of the superstructure will necessarily disappear with the transformation of the economic structure. The recognition of the fact that the source of alienation can be something other than private ownership is important to an understanding of the problems that have existed in the twentieth-century socialist societies. ;My analyses of the political alienation caused by the effects of Mao's ideology and the economic alienation caused by the state's control of labor are intended to show the inadequacy of classical Marxist theory in accounting for the realities of not only Mao's regime but of all modern socialist regimes. The irrationality of central planning and the government's exploitation of labor are embedded in the fundamental structure of the socialism envisioned by Marx. These features inevitably become a prominent hindrance to the realization of socialist goals and eventually render these goals impossible. (shrink)

Many viewers presented with a round plate tilted to their line of sight will report that they see a round plate that looks elliptical from their perspective. Alva Noë thinks that we should take reports of this kind as adequate descriptions of the phenomenology of spatial experiences. He argues that his so‐called enactive or sensorimotor account of spatial perceptual content explains why both the plate's circularity and its elliptical appearance are phenomenal aspects of experience. In this paper, I critique the (...) phenomenal adequacy of Noë's sensorimotor account of spatial perceptual content. I begin by showing that some of its central claims are in conflict with the phenomenology of perceptual experience. I then argue that shape appearances have no phenomenal reality, thus undermining this central motivation for his account. (shrink)

Effort is then well-nigh indescribable. Not wholly so, else it would be meaningless. Description is a matter of degree: who can fully describe red or wet? To be sure, description comes down in the end to the pointing to certain given qualities or relations or events which are just there. All connotation rests on denotation, though it may be something more. But the unique positive thing about effort is its originality; to which indeed we can point, since every one experiences (...) it in himself. Yet common to all men though it is, it is so intangible! more spirit than body, more force than substance. We should perhaps best call it not a datum but a factum, or better still, a fiat, a doing rather than a deed, yet not merely a becoming, for we see things coming to be, we hear a melody progressing and touch a moving object. Effort, dynamic as it is, is not just the process, rather it is--we must re-iterate--the start, the initiative of the process. Nor is the experience of it properly called mystical. Even if mystical experience were indescribable, as has been wrongly alleged, these would be two quite different indescribables, the one receptive, the other originative. All we can say perhaps is that effort is analogous to the push that starts the ball rolling, not the motion of the ball, not the acceleration, but the enforcement of these. Its witness does not lie in its value as explanation of the motion; the witness is direct, the immediate experience which every man has. It seems to be no object of scientific investigation in the technical sense. It cannot be measured by itself, as acceleration and motion are measured. That is why physics has abandoned the old notion of force, the physical analogue of effort, replacing it by mass-acceleration. That is why the rationalists in modern philosophy look askance at this direct experience of man, so intangible that we can draw from it no logical implications. For it has no structure. Its characteristic is not clearness nor distinctness. We might be tempted to say it is like a point in space, too small to be envisaged, yet not a zero; but it is more like a dot or spark, so small as to be just seen, so small as to have no visible spread, no content that we can analyze to draw out rational consequences connecting it with other things. Here too we see why the contemplative thinker seldom believes in free choice, which the natural man naturally accepts. Free choice is the kind of thing that might well belong to this experience; free choice is origination. Not necessarily that all effort is freely made. The baby exercises no free choice when he sucks hard at the nipple, nor the adult when he wrestles for his life with an enemy. But they want, need, desire; that is the point. Desire--that is the essence of effort. Desire has the originative quality; it comes as it were out of one's self and from no other source, it is what we want, our self insisting on its own. But the business is so deep within that it is easily overlooked, or deliberately excluded from the gaze, and without a qualm. We might say it is too near to be noticed, or too deep down to obtrude itself, as the water in the well is easy to see, but not the spring at the bottom of the well. Effort disappears from the scene when the thinker is calmly gazing; but when he acts it is felt, and strongly felt. It is in fact the very essence of the self, the well-spring of its worth and its growth. A man is what he does. His worth lies in what he makes. All that he is responsible for, all that he earns, is credited with, or guilty of, comes from this innermost source. So thinks the practical man, so we all believe when we are conducting our lives in intercourse with one another and with nature. But for the contemplative attitude there is here too little of clear articulation, of object-matter for analysis; no use can be made of it in a deductive system. So the system-builders discard it. (shrink)

This article deals with the material presence of the past and the recent call in the human sciences for a " things." This renewed interest in things signals a rejection of constructivism and textualism and the longing for what is "real," where "regaining" the object is conceived as a means for re-establishing contact with reality. In the context of this turn, we might wish to reconsider the status of relics of the past and their function in mediating relations between (...) the organic and the inorganic, between people and things, and among various kinds of things themselves for reconceptualizing the study of the past. I argue that the future will depend on whether and how various scholars interested in the past manage to modify their understanding of the material remnants of the past, that is, things as well as human, animal, and plant remains. In discussing this problem I will refer to Martin Heidegger's distinction between an object and a thing, to Bruno Latour's idea of the agency of things and object-oriented democracy, and to Don Ihde's material hermeneutics. To illustrate my argument I will focus on some examples of the ambivalent status of the disappeared person in Argentina, which resists the oppositional structure of present versus absent. In this context, the disappeared body is a paradigm of the past itself, which is both continuous with the present and discontinuous from it, which simultaneously is and is not. Since there are no adequate terms to analyze the "contradictory" or anomalous status of the present-absent dichotomy, I look for them outside the binary oppositions conventionally used to conceptualize the present-absent relationship in our thinking about the past. for this purpose I employ Algirdas Julien Greimas's semiotic square. (shrink)

Moral theory is an important guide to bioethical decision-making, but it can confuse and mislead those who offer ethical advice to clinicians and researchers, delaying decisions that must be made in a timely fashion. In this paper I examine the ways moral theory can lead bioethicists astray. Absent a sensitivity to the empirical realities of ethical problems, moral theory 1) contributes to the disappearance of the persons caught in an ethical quandary, 2) focuses on the puzzle-solving rather than examining (...) the conditions that generate moral problems, and 3) universalizes ethical dilemmas, overlooking local processes for resolving moral questions. Taken together, empirically informed moral theory and theoretically informed empirical research can help bioethicists transcend the is/ought problem in ethical work. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Dynamic Foundation of Knowledge It is now a long time since the writer of the following pages first thought of a dynamical interpretation of the concept of Matter. After some years of consideration and discussion he expressed his views in print in an essay entitled Matter and Energy: Are there two Real Things in the Physical Universe? This essay was published in 1887. A second essay was published in 1897 under the title, The Doctrine of Energy: A (...) Theory of Reality. In these essays he maintained that the scientific concept of energy adequately explains the phenomena of nature, and that the inconsistent concept of material reality should be finally abandoned. The question referred to has made great apparent progress since the date first mentioned above. The foolish abuse with which in certain quarters such ideas were then greeted has disappeared. They might now almost be called popular. In philosophical journals they are constantly referred to, whilst as integral parts of scientific theory they are accepted and employed by many high authorities. The successors of some who looked upon them with dislike and derision seem even disposed to claim them as their own. 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)

Philosophical analysis of the Soviet Union as a phenomenon is relevant in light of the approaching centennial of its formation. The significance of this event derives from the Soviet Union’s enormous scale and historically, qualitatively unique formation that included many dozens of nations and nationalities. This formation replaced the equally enormous Russian Empire but arose not due to natural development but on its ruins, by the means of a European Marxism adapted to domestic conditions. Nowhere in the world have societies (...) and states like the Soviet Union arisen spontaneously, while the Eastern European “people’s democracy” countries created after the Second World War repeatedly attempted to free themselves from the kinship and dominance of the Soviet Union and would disappear immediate with its collapse.In this article, the question of what the Soviet Union was in its project and reality is discussed in the following contexts: Marxist solutions to Russia’s agrarian question and their subsequent internationalization to create a “world union of workers and peasants” (V.I. Lenin); analysis of the principle of forced labor as the primary means of creating the “socialist working man”; the formation of the Soviet Union as a “quasi-federal” community of peoples “national in form, socialist in content”; and the forced inclusion of Eastern European peoples in the emerging “world Soviet Union” as “payment” for their liberation from fascism. This article justifies the claim that without analysis of the essential role of these ideas and phenomena, one could hardly expect to gain a holistic understanding of the nature of the Soviet Union. (shrink)

In _The Later Middle Ages,_ the third volume of his monumental _History of Political Ideas,_ Eric Voegelin continues his exploration of one of the most crucial periods in the history of political thought. Illuminating the great figures of the high Middle Ages, Voegelin traces the historical momentum of our modern world in the core evocative symbols that constituted medieval civilization. These symbols revolved around the enduring aspiration for the _sacrum imperium,_ the one order capable of embracing the transcendent and immanent, (...) the ecclesiastical and political, the divine and human. The story of the later Middle Ages is that of the "civilizational schism"—the movement in which not only the reality but the aspiration for the _sacrum imperium_ gradually disappeared and the unification of faith and reason dissolved. His recognition of this civilizational schism provides Voegelin with a unique perspective on medieval society. William of Ockham, Dante, Giles of Rome, and Marsilius of Padua all emerge in Voegelin's study as predecessors to modern thought; each turns to personal authority and intellectual analysis in an attempt to comprehend the loss of the _sacrum imperium_ as an authoritative ideal. Voegelin is further drawn into investigations that, despite insufficient attention by scholars, still bear relevance to the study of the later Middle Ages. The mysticism apparent in _Piers Plowman_ and the apocalyptic revolt of Cola di Rienzo are merely two reactions to the disintegration of wholeness. Yet the story of the later Middle Ages does not merely revolve around disintegration. Voegelin recognizes the emergence of the constitutional political tradition as the most positive development of this period. He is at his best when explaining the difference between the presence of a representative institution and the growth of communal consciousness. Voegelin's study of the English political pattern is matched only by his unique perspective on the German imperial zone, culminating in a fitting conclusion on Nicholas of Cusa—the one political thinker with the ability to evoke the unity of mankind beyond fragmentation. _The Later Middle Ages_ is at once a brilliant examination of the symbols that characterized medieval society and a remarkable predecessor to Voegelin's study of the modern world, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation. (shrink)

Plato’s work offers insights into the corrosive impact of eros, insights central for contemporary politics. The article combines an in-depth reading of Plato with a case study, arguing for the relevance of communism. This is because love also establishes a relationship of subordination to the object of desire, which can subjugate and entrap the lover in his or her feelings. Such instrumentalization of eros in communism was promoted by adherents being supposed to love the sufferers. The obligation that to understand (...) and help the sufferers one must become a sufferer turned suffering into an autopoietic system. The acceptance of such instrumentalization of love was rendered possible first by a sense of guilt due to the system of passionate interests (Tarde and Latour), connected to the rise of capitalism as a solution for the period of civil wars, and then by the liminal conditions that emerged, especially in eastern Europe, after two world wars; conditions that were purposefully perpetuated through staging a sacrificial system, paralysing social life. The character of such liminal leaders can be analysed through the figure of the trickster, developed by anthropologists, complementing Weber’s notion of charisma. While communism disappeared as a force, contemporary political life is increasingly reduced to a politics of victimhood and suffering, where the search for the good life is replaced by the double negation of eliminating all suffering from the world – an effort that only produces the opposite result, while public reality becomes torn apart by sex scandals, confirming Foucault’s insight about the investment of desire and enslavement to sexuality. (shrink)

''The problem of Transcendence is the problem of our time. " I Needless to say, Transcendence was a particularly lively i~sue when Karl Heim wrote these words in the mid-1930's. Within the province of philosophi cal theology and philosophy of religion, however, it is always the prob lem, as Gordon Kaufman has recently reminded us. 2Por the question concerning the nature and the reality of Transcendence has not only to do with self-transcendence, but with the being of Transcendence-Itself, that (...) is to say, with the nature and the reality of God as experienced and understood at any given time or place. Now there are those today who would claim that any further discus sion of the latter half of this proposition, namely,Transcendence-Itse1f or God, is worthless and quite beside the point. Such persons would claim that the particular logia represented by the theological sciences has collapsed by virtue of its object having disappeared. Indeed, when one surveys the contemporary scene in philosophy and theology, there is a good deal of evidence that this is the case':"" theology of late having be come something of a "spectacle," to use Pritz Buri's term. One of the reasons for this, we here contend, is that the richness and the diversity of the meaning of Transcendence has been lost. And even though we do not here intend to resolve the issue, neither do we assume that such an enqui ry is either impossible or irrelevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Transformative Journey of TransplantationValen KeeferThe moisture from the ocean floated effortlessly through the air as it glided over the rocky cliff. The steady stream of mist covered my face and frizzy hair with beaded water droplets. I had been sitting on a bench alone for hours admiring the Northern California coast at a magnificent overlook featuring a bird’s-eye view of the endless sea and campground I called home (...) for the past month. The stunning mountain landscape behind me, the soothing colors of the coastal shrubbery, and the smell of eucalyptus made for a trifecta of surreal beauty. The ocean disappeared from my view and I became engulfed in the precipitation and felt like I was suspended in a cloud. I was soaking in every moment as it was the last day of my solo RV trip.The fog slowly separated and exposed bits and pieces of the ocean again and then a breathtaking rainbow came into sight. Each end appeared to be touching either side of the campground like it was giving it a hug. I was eye-level with the center and highest point of the rainbow, arching above our home on wheels. I stood on the bench with my arms wide open, embracing nature and the gift of life in all its glory. This moment would not have possessed such deep meaning if it wasn’t for the journey that came before it—the transformative journey of transplantation.Some may think of transplantation as a singular event when in reality, it’s a lifelong journey that can start with a diagnosis many years prior. My transplant journey began when I was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease (PKD) at 10-years-old. Being diagnosed with a hereditary disease that has deeply impacted multiple generations of our family and with no known treatment or cure was a lot to carry as a child.My youth was full of love from my parents and filled with illness and the limitations and long-term impacts of growing up with multiple chronic illnesses. My education on PKD was the brutal real-life experiences of enduring it firsthand—with no support groups, resources, or internet to seek answers. I always felt different during a time when you’d do anything to fit in. I couldn’t play sports and had to sit on the sidelines in gym class. I was often in the nurse’s office, hospital, or recovering from a surgery. I hid my scars and unattractive body while changing in gym class. Friendships were really hard. Relationships were even harder.Growing up with chronic illnesses takes away from the fun of dreaming. It’s like that bright future full of endless possibilities is blocked by a huge mountain you know you have to summit first with no supplies, no friends, and no paved path to follow.Complications from PKD followed me from high school right into college, when I spent almost a year in the hospital. Both of my kidneys were removed, I was on dialysis, had pancreatitis, received over 70 blood transfusions, survived an internal bleed, and was in dire need of a lifesaving kidney transplant.At 19-years-old, I was too sick to be placed on the transplant waiting list, but needed a kidney to survive. My parents were living at the Ronald McDonald House, wondering if they would be the next ones to lose their teenage daughter. A close family friend forever changed our lives when she restored my health by selflessly donating her kidney to me. While it was an arduous path to transplantation, in some ways, the journey was just beginning.Fifteen years following my kidney transplant and summiting what I thought was going to be the most challenging mountain of my health journey, I found myself back on death’s doorstep with another battle ahead. I was in need of a second miracle, this time a lifesaving liver transplant. It was PKD again. The bile ducts in my liver were so gnarly that they looked like limbs of an oak tree rather than the desired smooth straw-like appearance. Their malformations led to chronic liver infections and multiple sepsis... (shrink)

Evolutionary theory is awash with probabilities. For example, natural selection is said to occur when there is variation in fitness, and fitness is standardly decomposed into two components, viability and fertility, each of which is understood probabilistically. With respect to viability, a fertilized egg is said to have a certain chance of surviving to reproductive age; with respect to fertility, an adult is said to have an expected number of offspring.1 There is more to evolutionary theory than the theory of (...) natural selection, and here too one finds probabilistic concepts aplenty. When there is no selection, the theory of neutral evolution says that a gene’s chance of eventually reaching fixation is 1/(2N), where N is the number of organisms in the generation of the diploid population to which the gene belongs. The evolutionary consequences of mutation are likewise conceptualized in terms of the probability per unit time a gene has of changing from one state to another. The examples just mentioned are all “forwarddirected” probabilities; they describe the probability of later events, conditional on earlier events. However, evolutionary theory also uses “backwards probabilities” that describe the probability of a cause conditional on its effects; for example, coalescence theory allows one to calculate the expected number of generations in the past that the genes in the present generation find their most recent common ancestor. (shrink)

Introduction -- As real as it gets : Derrida -- The experiential divide : Merleau-Ponty and Derrida -- Connective tissue -- The originary disconnect -- Deconstruction and the computer -- Reality show: baudrillard -- The problem with reality -- The genealogy of value -- Hyperreality -- Disappearance and death -- The baudrillard twins -- Reality shows : Virilio -- Speed, light ,and the attack on reality -- The tyranny of real time -- The ultimate interface (...) -- War and faith -- The fate of the real : Lyotard -- Withdrawal of the real : the two waves -- Complexification and the inhuman -- Virtual intelligence -- TDers, BUers, AI, and AL -- The remainder -- Getting real(er) -- The problem of technology -- The question of alienation -- Between alienation and reconciliation -- In praise of materialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:In Search of the ClassicEdward E. FosterIn Search of the Classic, by Steven Shankman; xvi & 331 pp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.“In search of” in the title of a book is often a code warning of lukewarm conviction or academic disingenuousness. In Shankman’s title, however, the phrase is literally appropriate because he forthrightly argues that the classic is, of its nature, (...) something that always exists in quest and tension. The classic is not to be located merely in classical antiquity or in the tastes of a privileged class. Though Shankman grants that these often are associated with the literary classic, he finds the nature of the classic rather in the nature of literature as a state of metaxis or “in-betweenness.” His examinations of classical, neo-classical, and modern works define various aspects of this “in-betweenness,” the state of tension that exists in the truly classic at any point in the history of literature.Although Shankman dismisses Derrida, Foucault, de Man, and others for having mistaken their own destruction of Enlightenment rationalism for a demonstration that rationality is impossible, he is not wildly original. He uses Habermas’s notion of classic literature as enduring and independent of time and Vogelin’s concept of metaxis as foundational for his sprawling, yet lucid, inquiry into the idea of the classic in Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Pindar, Virgil, Dryden, Defoe, Swift, Valery, and others, and in the traditions of the epic, ode, pastoral, and lyric.Fundamental is the view that classic literature has the greatest power to represent human experience. To avoid the hermeneutical conundrum of the subject-object dilemma, Shankman asserts literature to be in “a middle place” from Plato and Aristotle on. He sees a basic agreement between them on how literature stands between the One and the Many. Put negatively, literature is not sparks from the One or compilations of the Many. Rather it is a mediator between these polarities: classic literature accommodates the propositional purity of philosophy to the indeterminacy of thing-reality. Literature is neither an abstract kernelization of truth nor an anthology of the things of experience [End Page 256] but an analogical conjunction of the two extremes—therefore tension, therefore continual quest.Using Plato, especially the Cratylus and the Symposium, and Aristotle, especially the Metaphysics and the Poetics, Shankman describes a rationality that exists in literature that is clearly identified in his chapter on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels by emphasizing the idea of man as an animal capax rationis. This in itself places man’s literary enterprise in a middle place and Shankman explores its various implications in a variety of works. From this perspective, it is argued that literature must be about something that matters; that pure poetry or reflexive poetry cannot achieve the ambiguity of analogy as the central core that the classic requires. Thus, Plato never rejected poetry—only the debasement of poetry into either the fantastical or literal (or the confusion of the two.)The true classic walks a line between ignorance and knowledge, rhetoric and philosophy, literalism and fantasy, “thing-reality” and “the ideal.” The Aeneid makes a good test case. It is at once a piece of propaganda and a statement of an ideal that is complicated by the duplicity of Aeneas’ abandonment of Dido, the brutality of his killing of Turnus, and his emergence in Book VI from the underworld by the Gate of Ivory (false dreams). Such tension is exemplary of what Shankman sinuously argues is at the heart of “the classic” in a variety of other works.The argument is persuasive and attractive, even if not compelling, in a world where many critics would have us believe that all of literature, canonical or not, is disappearing into nontext. That about half of the chapters are adaptations of previously published articles risks a discontinuity that is largely avoided by recapitulations of where we are in the exposition of our struggle in a continuing and intrinsic state of rational metaxis. I like the idea, but I must reserve judgment on a thesis that attends to the poetry of Yvor Winters and E. V. Cunningham... (shrink)

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

I seek in this paper to explore what might be meant by “the presence of God.” The sense of God’s presence, which never disappeared from the lives of many people, seems to be emerging quietly in the work of serious thinkers. Sometimes other terms, such as “spirit” or even “face,” hint at the issue. In later sections, I discuss the relevance of this issue to the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and others influenced by him. Finally, I discuss the (...) class='Hi'>reality of trauma in human life and its implications for Whiteheadian thought and thought about the presence of God.I explore the sense we have ofpresence, something different from mind or body or objects or consciousness. We become aware of our own presence in the world and the unique and irreplaceable sense we have of our own presence. We become aware that sometimes we are more intensely present to other people than is normally the case. Then we begin to sense occasions when the other person becomes more intensely present to us. Some people search for a cosmic presence, hoping perhaps that we are not ultimately alone. (shrink)

This article traces two trends in the evolution of subjectivity in philosophy: the concept of subjectivity introduced by Protagoras and the Sophists, which is related to the characterization of human knowledge, and the understanding of subjectivity in Descartes, who viewed it as a special reality that determines the essence of the individual as a “thinking thing.” The author examines the major turning points in interpreting subjectivity: Protagoras’ empirical interpretation, the metaphysical shift in Descartes, and the anti-metaphysical shift in postmodernism (...) that signified a return to the empirical understanding of subjectivity, predicting its “disappearance” along with the concepts of individuality and human in the “post-human” reality. In addition, the article discusses the trend of “de-subjectivizing” the human in contemporary philosophy. There are two ways of eliminating the subject: traveling backward from its metaphysical to its empirical understanding as its consequence of redefining the goals and... (shrink)

The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence … upon the presence of others who have seen and will remember. … Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfillment … the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been.Research on the relationship between public memory and collective identity is varied (...) and extensive, but one fairly prominent scholarly perspective coalesces around Hannah Arendt's idea that the practices of remembrance are the lifeblood of the polis.1 The stakes here are high, for it seems that without remembrance .. (shrink)

Textor reveals the roots of analytic philosophy in a great age of Austro-German philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He introduces Brentano, Mach, and other key figures, and traces the development of the landmark ideas that there can be 'psychology without a soul', and that metaphysics lies beyond the limits of knowledge.

In the first part of this paper a relational account of incongruent counterparts is defended against an argument due to Kant. I then consider a more recent attack on such an account, due to John Earman, which alleges that the relationalist cannot account for the lawlike left--right asymmetry manifested in parity-violating phenomena. I review Hoefer's, Huggett's and Saunders' responses to Earman's argument and argue that, while a relationalist account of parity-violating laws is possible, it comes at the cost of non-locality.

Although the idea of nature has allbut disappeared from recent discussion ofeducation, it remains highly relevant to thephilosophy and practice of education, sincetacit notions of human nature and whatconstitutes underlying reality – the `natural'order of things – necessarily orientateseducation in fundamental ways. It is arguedthat underlying our various senses of nature isthe idea of nature as the `self-arising' whoseintrinsic integrity, mystery and valueimplicitly condition our understanding ofourselves and of the reality in which we live.I argue that the acknowledgement (...) of nature soconceived opens up a perspective on educationthat requires us to review currently dominanttechnological notions of truth and knowledge,and also of what should characterize theprocess of education, reasserting the properplace of more intuitive, local and dialogicalknowledge and relationships. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 201-207. “Poetry is experience, linked to a vital approach, to a movement which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful course of life. In order to write a single line, one must have exhausted life.” —Maurice Blanchot (1982, 89) Nikos Karouzos had a communist teacher for a father and an orthodox priest for a grandfather. From his four years up to his high school graduation he was incessantly educated, reading the entire private library of his granddad, comprising mainly (...) the Orthodox Church Fathers and the ancient classics. Later on in his life he sold the library for money, only to buy a little more time before he went broke again: “I carry sorrow like a cage/ I got no birds/ as I come back from her hair/ I see the profit emptied/ cool from terror.” (1993, Ι, 101) Nowadays—and ridiculously recently—we are more than apt to speak of a certain insouciance pertaining to the Greek form of expenditure: expenditure without any type of investment, sometimes not (even) symbolic. In the vaults of the European unconscious, this imprudent stance still conjures a “capital punishment” in the form of de-capitation, reflecting back the fear of excess and the terror of its consequences.1 Thus the Greek way of living is very close to what a stranger could have termed as “the Greek way of dying.” Yet, what is not often understood is that the Greek esprit , the same one that invented the maxim μηδ?ν ?γαν (“nothing in excess”), does not experience death solely as an imminent fear of bankruptcy. For it miraculously combines its unconditional acceptance with the promise of a resurrection that is always there in the scents of Spring, from Dionysus to the orthodox Christ: “Everyone resurrects himself through dying [….] Resurrection is the switching of mortalities.” (2002, 94) Hence, if an entire library was imprudently traded for a plate with seven olives, a sliced tomato and some fresh goat cheese, let us not be fooled: this is not the meal of the pauper, but that of “an aristocrat from God” (1993, II, 491) feeding his eloquent loudmouth, ridiculously cut open in an otherwise rock-solid caput . *** To speak of the Greek experience is to speak about a half-dead language that still utters in life what is seemingly excluded from it and thus forbidden to be talked about: death. Death as anything that is out of this world, as something that will never return . Still, along with an experience of death that recently waned as a worn-out academic fashion, the Greek experience is dead too. Nearly 2300 years of written words separating Homer from the fall of Byzantium equal 500 books on a library traded for money: “I am with the killed. Hence my deepest solitude. I do not feel this tremendous macho society, beyond from the fact that it is a ruthlessly consuming one. It is me who pays all the time .” (2002, 57) Let us do the math and see how much this dealing with the Greek experience is costing the poet and how much dealing with the Greek experience might cost us today. *** “I do not guarantee a single word.” (Karouzos, 1993, II, 454) Through its various dialects and forms, the Greek language speaks through an incessant historical dissemination. Anyone who is aware of this terrifying polymorphy and still calls himself a poet, must stand against a white sheet of paper, pen-in-hand, with a very particular duty: to be as fully inconsistent as possible. In the formally ironic uniqueness of the poem, the poet functions as “a band-aid for lesser and greater antinomies.” (1993, I, 251) Of course these antinomies are not exhausted in language—they are historical, political and, alas, existential. Yet, beyond appearances , it is language that ruthlessly encodes them through history, submitting the poet to the temptation of placing them one next to the other on a single white sheet. The closer their neighboring, the greater the scattering of the writer in the ironic uniqueness of the paper. In a work where poetic license is described as a “freedom-impasse” (2002, 51), this task is undertaken in full conscience of its personal consequences: “what I am interested in is to escape my individuality (envisioning the non-ego) […] Nevertheless, my dissociations never achieve duration.” (2002, 74-75) Hence, though poetry is the “deserted direction of will,” (1998, 62) the stance of the poet is not that of a Nietzschean “great man.”2 Whereas drunkenness provides a thread between the poem and the excess it both presupposes and infuses (“Poetry always enlarges. ‘Drunkenness’ is nothing more than that,” (2002, 85)), whereas language flashes in loudmouth spurts of déraison (“When I am alone I do something else. I utter words. For example, while having my ouzo and listening to music I am most likely capable of randomly shouting ‘Electricity!’” (2002, 138)), the poet never gives in to the double affirmation that would eventually risk the “element of pleasure in discourse.” (2002, 80)” It is exactly because the gap of the antinomies is so vast that poetry is not meant to be written with a hammer. Neither does writing consist in a reevaluation of those elements. In short, poetry is not an affirmation of difference, but the surprising beauty of chiming antinomies. We might never transcend them, but it is up to us to put them together. Yet again, this voisinage is not to be identified with the necessity of chance as an eternal return.4 On the contrary it is a return from that very return : Let us treat Yes as a No to No and No as a Yes […] And let us not forget that this pissed affirmation crumbled down Nietzsche’s intellect in the dark paths of this world. (2002, 88) This return from the “vicious circle” should in no way be taken as a form of artistic prudence. Rather it can be seen as a dribble of demonic inconsistency as Dionysus transforms himself into a Christ that is in turn de-theologized: “Who can forbid that? Every man is capable of his own theology, nothing can stop him.” (2002, 73-74) This is a turn towards an existential vision of the world, historically coinciding with a particular political defeat of the Left, to which the poet devoted all his life: after the defeat of the popular front I raised the question “why do we exist?” while others were asking “why we failed.” (2002, 57)5 But most of all it is a return to poetry that exceeds the existential question itself, going beyond the issue of faith. Poetry comes in as a question of return after a defeat that is confessed in full profanity. Though it accepts the necessity of the defeat, it does not affirm it. Though it negates it, the negation is not in the name of a promise to be delivered in the kingdom of heavens. Following a historical and existential defeat, poetry is born post mortem . It signals a return to Christ as “groundless religiousness in the surprise of the real as such” (2002, 72) which is at once a return to the refuge of childhood. It is not a question of endurance towards an eternal return. Rather it is a question on the possibility of an existential return. Returning in a world as someone who cannot enjoy any returns exactly because he is averse to guarantees. A return without returns. *** PHOTOCOPY OF HAPPINESS When I was young I used to pin down cicadas and step on ant nests. I used to stand there silent for hours. With threads I decapitated bees. Now I am a dead man breathing. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 336.) The return to the “paradise of childhood” (2002, 68) constitutes the devouring refuge of its own memory when defeat becomes the synonym of adulthood. The political struggles of a young communist in a country torn up by a civil war right after World War II fraught with incarcerations and exiles. Historically they resulted in the defeat of the communist movement in Greece and opened up a long turbulent road that would peak in the dictatorship of 1967. Existentially they led to a series of disillusionments: mental breakdown, divorce, abandonment of studies in law school. To the question “why do we exist” the answer was poetry. Still this exposé should not be read as a sweeping chronography of a man. For it actually happens to coincide with the historical fate of a nation that after its modern constitution never stopped dreaming of the glories of its past youth, in a present that was (and is) sweepingly disappointing. But isn’t this return to youth finally a way of compensating for a loss of youth that necessarily results in a losing adulthood? Will Greeks, the eternal children of Plato and Nietzsche, ever learn? How to return without dying, how to remember without wasting time? WE ARE IN THE OPEN MEANING Living the coldest mauve night right across Parthenon I went to take a piss on some foliage and I was enjoying the foliage as it was steaming. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 340) Beyond the historical tragedies of modern Greece and away from any personal disappointments, the relation that this land holds with language and history is mediated through the Greek light—whose omnipresence is the very condition of its transcendence. All historical contradictions from Dionysus to Christ took place under this light; all those disseminated dialects were spoken beneath its warmth. To paraphrase Lévinas,6 light is both the condition of the world and of our withdrawal from it—a withdrawal towards the invisibility of God, of the dead, of meta-physics, resulting from the temptation that all is still here, behind this light the visibility of which they once evaded: “birds, the allurement of God.” (1993, I, 17) Under that luminous sky, if Greeks can do anything at all, it is to envision a return that will never come. All they can do is write poetry—which is doing nothing; other than lending an ear to a disseminated language whispering a unity that cannot be promised, as an adulthood in defeat is ready to recognize. Trying “to trap the invisible in visibility” (1993, II, 483) they forget that they have grown up and one day they die—with the promise of return. Hence an additional meaning must be given to this return to childhood. It does not signal salvation but rather its promise. To the ears of an aged continent it means that the return to/of poetry is a losing game, a return without returns. “Europe, Europe… you are nothing more than the continuation of Barabbas.” (1993, I, 295) *** “Life is not there to verify theories.”7 The records show that Karouzos was finally given a second-class pension from the Greek government, at the time when he was being recognized by the literary press as one of Greece’s major contemporary poets. Being neither a bourgeois nor a nobelist, he proclaimed himself to be an anarcho-communist, unconditionally faithful to the utopia of a classless society. He also drank, heavily. “Capitalism made an animal out of man/ Marxism made an animal out of truth/ Shut up.” (1993, II, 369) Perhaps one of the most scandalous divides of our times has been the one between the living and the dead, the latent prohibition that the living should not be concerned with the dead based on the mere impossibility of the dead to be concerned with the living in the first place. What adds to this scandal is that this divide abuses anything that cannot return to us by subsuming it under the same futility. Hence death is no longer “loss” in the usual sense. It no more refers to the things we lost but to our “loss” (of time, money and well-being) as we insist to dwell on them. Death is a waste —of time. It is this waste that we find in the insouciance of Greek expenditure; the waste in dealing with a language that most of its historical part is no longer spoken (a dead language); the waste in translating a poet who is ex definitio untranslatable; the waste of his vision, his money, his life. The waste of dealing with anything that cannot return and that cannot bring in any returns . But it is also the waste of life that poetry itself presupposes, the waste of dealing with invisibility, with anything that is out of this world and thus invokes the fear of death that is in turn—and surprisingly— nowhere to be found. Instead of death, what is there, beyond the light, is the being without us (to recall the Lévinasian il y a ), the mumble of our own nothingness which constitutes the price to be paid for writing poetry under an evergreek light. To understand this to-and-fro, is to realize that poetry is something out of this world that nevertheless takes place in this world, by virtue of this world. But to ridiculously equate this to-and-fro with death as non-existence, is to exile poetry along with its own possibility from this same old world: I do not believe that poetry will ever disappear from this world. […] But I am also sure that it does not have many chances of playing, as you say, a redemptive role in our vertiginous technological future. Without being endangered as a creative need, it will be placed on the side of history. (2002, 32) It is mainly there that we would like to locate the meaning of Nikos Karouzos’s poetry today. If we are willing to include the Greek original it is because we consider that it will be both a waste of time for us to do so (since most of you cannot read Greek) and because it might induce you to the even larger waste of learning it. We would additionally be glad if this small introduction served as an equally wasteful, academically useless piece of reading, gesturing towards a taboo of investing in anything Greek—that is in anything dead among the living, in anything that will never come back and maybe was never here in the first place. This is the only way to reserve for ourselves the possibility of poetry and preserve the light of its promise. “To return: that is the miracle.” (1993, I, 17) Athens, Greece July 10, 2011 NOTES 1 “ Capitale (a Late Latin word based on caput “head”) emerged in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in the sense of funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money or money carrying interest.[…] The word and the reality it stood for appear in the sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) ‘… quamdam seminalem rationem lucrosi quam communiter capitale vocamus ’, ‘that prolific cause of wealth that we commonly call capital’” (Braudel, 1992, 232-233). 2 “A great man – a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style – what is he? First : there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him, including even the fairest, ‘divinest’ things in the world.” (Nietzsche, 1968, 505, §962) 3 Cf. Deleuze, 1986, 186-9. 4 “Return is the being of becoming, the unity of multiplicity, the necessity of chance: the being of difference as such or the eternal return.” (Deleuze, 189)5 In this 1982 interview Karouzos refers to the defeat of the communist movement in Greece after the civil war of 1946-1949 between the Governmental Army and the Democratic Army of Greece, the military division of the Greek communist party. Karouzos’s father was a member of the communist National Liberation front (EAM) members of which formed the mainl resistance movement (ELAS) in Greece during WWII. The poet was a member of the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), which was a youth division of EAM. After the end of the war, ELAS was called to disarmament in view of the formation of a National Army. The members of EAM resigned from the government of national unity and a series of protests led to a 3 year civil war between ELAS and the Government Army. After the defeat of ELAS the Communist party was outlawed and many communists were exiled in deserted Greek islands. Karouzos, who took action in the Greek resistance and was active during the Greek civil war, was exiled in Icaria on 1947 and in Makronisos on 1953 where he was called two years earlier to do his military service. 6 “Existence in the world qua light, which makes desire possible, is then, in the midst of being, the possibility of detaching oneself from being. To enter into being is to link up with objects; it is in effect a bond that is already tainted with nullity. It is already to escape anonymity. In this world where everything seems to affirm our solidarity with the totality of existence, where we are caught up in the gears of a universal mechanism, our first feeling, our ineradicable illusion, is a feeling or illusion of freedom. To be in the world is this hesitation, this interval in existing, which we have seen in the analyses of fatigue and the present.” (Lévinas, 1988,43-4) 7from a TV interview. THE POETRY OF NIKOS KAROUZOS From Redwriter [ Ερυθρογρ?φος ], in Collected Works, Vol . II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 463-4. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 9-10.] JESUS ANTI-OEDIPUS* Why were we once saving till the fifth day the Paschal lamb? The scriptures say: with this victim’s meat we ought to cleanse all of our senses. To give life to the whitest wave miraculous odors in the extension of the chest. Ideals to death. For us to witness the illustrious dawns of Absinthe and for the soul to be a deeply carved ornament on the fore we named will. Then many deer running amidst the evergreen growth with watery hymns, then, the unintended angels descending with heights spiraling in their momentum offer themselves to the luminous Adventure. Whence the need for speech and our sufferings covered with flags like the glorified dead. An incorporeal finger pointing at the flamboyant and fragrant holocausts within the tired horizons and the exhausted breadths with joys of the mistletoe on fire and shivering all of the green-leaved love. Something would have chirped again had we not driven it away— maybe the ewe’s grass. Something would have called us to the eternal resurrection— maybe the grace of spring. But now our heart is fiercely blinded, withdrawn to the appearances of Hades. Silence and ice incessantly cover the Infant Spirit in thatched times. While the cherry trees are dreaming faintly glowing in absolute darkness there’s nothing the Babylonians can contemplate in labs with automatic colored lights. How to rejoice now in the fifth day of the lamb? We have forked the stars. We’ve gradually become supposedly sublime with plucked chimeras in our hands. Avenged relentlessly by science. *Though the poem appears in a 1990 collection, it was actually written in 1968. Hence the reader must be aware in not associating Karouzos’ Anti-Oedipus with the famous 1972 work of Deleuze and Guattari, given that the former precedes the latter. ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΑΝΤΙ-ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ Γιατ? κρατο?σαμε κ?ποτε ?ς την π?μπτη μ?ρα το πασχαλιν? πρ?βατο; Τα κε?μενα λ?νε: μ’ αυτο? του θ?ματος το κρ?ας ?πρεπε να καθαρ?σουμε ?λες τις αισθ?σεις. Για να δ?σουμε κ?μα στη ζω? λευκ?τατο θαυμ?σιες ευωδι?ς στην ?κταση του στ?θους. Ιδανικ? στο χ?ρο. Για να βλ?πουμε τα λαμπρ? χαρ?ματα του ?ψινθου και να ’ναι η ψυχ? στ?λισμα βαθυχ?ρακτο της πλ?ρης που την ε?παμε θ?ληση. Τ?τε πολλ?ς δορκ?δες τρ?χοντας αν?μεσα στην καταπρ?σινη φ?ση με τους υδ?τινους ?μνους, τ?τε, κατεβα?νοντας οι αθ?λητοι ?γγελοι με κυλινδο?μενο το ?ψος στην ορμ? τους χαρ?ζονται της αστραφτερ?ς Περιπ?τειας. ?θεν η μιλι? γι’ αυτ? χρει?ζεται και τα δειν? σκεπ?ζονται ωσ?ν τους τιμημ?νους νεκρο?ς με σημα?ες. Ασ?ματο δ?χτυλο δε?χνει τα φλογ?δη και μοσχοβ?λα ολοκαυτ?ματα στους κουρασμ?νους ορ?ζοντες στα εξουθενωμ?να πλ?τη καθ?ς αν?βουν οι χαρ?ς του νερα?δ?ξυλου και τρ?μει ολ?κληρη η πρασιν?φυλλη αγ?πη. Κ?τι θα κελαηδο?σε π?λι αν δεν το δι?χναμε— μπορε? της προβατ?νας το χορτ?ρι. Κ?τι θα μας καλο?σε στην απ?ραντη αν?σταση— μπορε? του ?αρος η χ?ρη. Μα η καρδι? μας ?γρια τυφλ?θηκε π?ρασε στα φαιν?μενα του ?δη. Σιγ? και π?γος αδι?κοπα σκεπ?ζει στους αχυρ?νιους καιρο?ς το Ν?πιο Πνε?μα. Την ?ρα που ονειρε?ονται οι βυσσινι?ς και λ?μπουν αμυδρ? μεσ’ στο απλ?τατο σκοτ?δι τ?ποτα δε στοχ?ζονται οι βαβυλ?νιοι στα εργαστ?ρια με τ’ αυτ?ματα χρωματιστ? φ?τα. Π?ς να χαρο?με πια την π?μπτη μ?ρα του προβ?του; Φουρκ?σαμε τ’ αστ?ρια. Γ?ναμε σιγ?-σιγ? δ?θεν υπ?ροχοι με μαδημ?νες χ?μαιρες στα χ?ρια. Μας ν?μεται σκληρ? η επιστ?μη. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], in Collected Works, Vol. II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 472. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18.] DIALECTΙCS OF SPRING Christ the straight angle; Christ the Pythagorean theorem. Christ the infinitesimal calculus from above the blessed Sets Christ. Christ the tessellation of massive particles Christ the zero mass. Hence we spray numbers and fields of lust. We are carabineers of diseased logic plus something— Observed means observer and Hekate The darkness luminous and light in the dark Astarte banqueters demons from today. ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΙΚΗ ΤΟΥ ΕΑΡΟΣ Χριστ?ς η ορθ? γων?α· Χριστ?ς το πυθαγ?ριο θε?ρημα. Χριστ?ς ο απειροστικ?ς λογισμ?ς ?νωθεν ?λβια Χριστ?ς τα Σ?νολα. Χριστ?ς η ψηφιδογραφ?α στα μαζικ? σωμ?τια Χριστ?ς η μ?ζα μηδ?ν. ?ρα ψεκ?ζουμε αριθμο?ς και πεδ?α λαγνε?ας. Ε?μαστε τυφεκιοφ?ροι νοσο?σης λογικ?ς και κ?τι-- παρατηρο?μενο σημα?νει παρατηρητ?ς και Εκ?τη σκ?τος το π?μφωτο και φως εν τ? σκοτ?? η Αστ?ρτη συνδαιτημ?νες δα?μονες απ’ ?ρτι. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18. [1993, II, 472]. CREDO (as we are used to say in Latin) Α I believe in one Poet expelled from heavens / fugitive from the god and vagabond, Empedocles / and here on earth / exile on the earth etc. of Baudelaire /. Β I believe in one Computer inside thunder and through matter. Γ Suffering undefiled / substantive / the Poet uplifts himself slow-burning suicidal implying lengthy sleeps. Δ Cutting down on prospective mistakes. Ε Of all things visible and invisible officiating the onion-peelings. Ζ The Poet has nothing / see the departed /. Η I believe in one Poet that says: madness I enjoy; he ridicules existence; let me light up from my mana. Θ Syntax he doesn’t care about when musicality commands him. Along with still more licenses, and Ts are played according to the concept sound anywhere. E.g. the winters here, he winters there; it will not come—I will not rest, etc. etc. Ι The Poet exercises thought until it’s stripped down. Κ And if he’s Greek he must always study the fineness of Attica, in light, mountains, fields and sea. For this fineness teaches language. Λ And if he’s deeply destined the Poet expresses the unexplainable of the explained; he happens to be a rightful heir to the scientist and his predecessor. Μ On the froth he does not last; the Poet blusters at the bottom of the pot. Ν Flamebred and never redeemed. Ξ The Poet must sometimes say: what a consumption of presence — be a bit lonely for a change! Ο The Poet is twilit. Π He is susceptible of deaths and resurrections. Ρ He looks from the corner of his eye and exists in a glance. Σ He follows behind the mother. Τ Eveningless when it comes to age. Υ I believe in one Poet who says: let the purities coincide. Until the Corinth of the Universe or even further. Φ In a higher despair. Χ In a brighter quintessence. Ψ In one sensation that lifts off. Ω Forgiving everyone. CREDO (ως ε?θισται να λ?με λατινιστ?) Α Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν εκτ?ς ουρανο? / φυγ?ς θε?θεν και αλ?της, Εμπεδοκλ?ς / και επ? της γης / εξ?ριστος π?νω στη γη κ.λπ. του Βωδελα?ρου /. Β Πιστε?ω εις ?να Υπολογιστ?ν εντ?ς κεραυνο? και δια της ?λης. Γ Υποφ?ροντας ?χραντα / ουσιαστικ?ν / ο Ποιητ?ς ανατε?νεται βραδυφλεγ?ς αυτ?χειρας εξυπακο?οντας πολ?ωρους ?πνους. Δ Τα υποψ?φια λ?θη λιγοστε?οντας. Ε Ορατ?ν τε π?ντων και αορ?των ιερουργ?ντας την αποκρομμ?ωση. Ζ Ο Ποιτ?ς ?χει τ?ποτα / βλ?πε τους αναχωρ?σαντες /. Η Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: η τρ?λα μ’ αρ?σει· γελοιοποιε? την ?παρξη· ας αν?ψω απ’ τη μ?να μου. Θ Συνταχτικ? δεν το γνοι?ζεται στην προσταγ? της μουσικ?τητας. Μαζ? και μ’ ?λλες ακ?μη λευτερι?ς, και τα νυ πα?ζονται κατ? την ?ννοια ?χος οπουδ?ποτε. Π.χ. τον χειμ?να εδ?, το χειμ?να εκε?· δε θ? ’ρθει – δεν θα καταλαγι?σουμε, κ. λπ. κ.λπ. Ι Ο Ποιητ?ς γυμν?ζει τη σκ?ψη σε απογ?μνωση. Κ Κι αν ε?ναι ?λληνας οφε?λει να σπουδ?ζει π?ντοτε της Αττικ?ς τη λεπτ?τητα, σε φως, βουν?, χωρ?φια και θ?λασσα. Διδ?σκει γλ?σσα η λεπτ?τητα το?τη. Λ Κι αν ε?ναι βαθι? πεπρωμ?νος ο Ποιητ?ς εκφρ?ζει το ανεξ?γητο του εξηγητο?· τυγχ?νει ν?μιμος δι?δοχος του επιστ?μονα και προκ?τοχ?ς του. Μ Στον αφρ? δεν ?χει δι?ρκεια· στο πατοκ?ζανο μα?νεται ο Ποιητ?ς. Ν Φλογοδ?αιτος και ποτ? ξελυτρωμ?νος. Ξ Ο Ποιητ?ς κ?ποτε πρ?πει να λ?ει: μεγ?λη καταν?λωση παρουσ?ας – γενε?τε και λ?γο μοναξι?ρηδες! Ο Ο Ποιητ?ς ε?ναι αμφ?φλοξ. Π Επιδ?χεται θαν?τους και αναστ?σεις. Ρ Ακροθωρ?ζει και υπ?ρχει σε ξαφνοκο?ταγμα. Σ Ε?ναι ουραγ?ς της μητ?ρας. Τ Αν?σπερος απ? ηλικ?α. Υ Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: να συμπ?σουν οι αγν?τητες. Μ?χρι την Κ?ρινθο του Σ?μπαντος ? μακρ?τερα. Φ Σε αν?τερη απελπισ?α. Χ Σε φαειν?τερη πεμπτουσ?α. Ψ Σε μια α?σθηση που πτηνο?ται. Ω Συγχωρ?ντας τους π?ντες. From Large Sized Logic [ Λογικ? μεγ?λου σχ?ματος ], Athens: Erato, 1989, n.p. [1993, II, 521-3]. (shrink)

This paper deals with the strategy of defence that Aristotle dedicates to the principle of contradiction; the analysis is concentrated on passages of Metaphysics Gamma 4. The main thesis of the paper is that Aristotle’s strategy is an ontological, and therefore not only a logical, one: the principle is defended on the basis of the, from an ontological point of view, unacceptable consequences which would arise in case of the absence of the principle itself. These consequences are, for instance, the (...) disappearance of properties, of essences, of individual entities and of the plurality of essentially distinguishable entities, since the contents of the properties, the role of properties as essences and the constitution of the individual entities cannot hold, if the principle of contradiction does not hold. The principle of contradiction is, therefore, not only a logical principle: it is the ontological presupposition of the whole reality; without it there is no entity. (shrink)