The entry aims to explain a core feature of otherwise different variants of romanticism: the commitment to “the primacy of aesthetics.” This commitment is often expressed by the claim that the “aesthetic”—most broadly that which concerns beauty and art—should permeate and shape human life. The entry proposes that this romantic imperative should be understood as a structural or formal demand. On that reading, the romantic imperative requires that we model our epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, political, social and scientific pursuits according to (...) the form of the aesthetic comportment to the world, exemplified in poetry. Rather than aiming to replace “real” life, science and philosophy with poetry, the romantics urge human beings to fashion their ordinary lives and to do science and philosophy according to the model provided by poetry. Philosophy, science and everyday life need not be poetry, but poetic or poetry-like. Structurally, they should become similar. Why so? The main task of this entry is to offer an answer to this question and to show that the reasons for “poeticizing” life, science and philosophy are themselves philosophical. (shrink)

Since the Romantic period, painters have no longer made use of traditional Christian iconography to express religious transcendence. Taking their cue from Schleiermacher's Reden Über die Religion, painters have sought for new, personal ways to express religious transcendence. One example is Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea. Rosenblum argues, in his Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, that there is a parallel between Friedrich and the abstract expressionist Rothko with respect to the expression to religious transcendence. In this (...) article I investigate how the experience of transcendence that Rothko's paintings want to evoke is to be described. Is it an experience of the sublime in the Romantic tradition? Is it the evocation of the ultimate in accordance with Tillich's broad concept of religion? Does it display affinity between Rothko and the first generation of abstract painters such as Kandinsky and Malevich? Or is it a transcendent experience that cannot be situated so easily within the options supplied? After determining Rothko's understanding of transcendence, some issues will be brought up that could be fruitful for Christian theology. (shrink)

The topic of eschatology is generally confined to the field of theology. However, the subject has influenced many other fields, such as politics and history. This dissertation examines the question why eschatology remained a topic of discussion within twentieth century philosophy. Concepts associated with eschatology, such as the end of time and the hope of a utopian age to come, remained largely background assumptions among intellectuals in the modern age. Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Berdyaev, and Hans Blumenberg, however, explicitly addressed the (...) subject in their philosophies. The impetus of this study is Heidegger's statement, "Being itself is inherently eschatological," which indicates the centrality of the subject in his understanding of Being. This statement led to the question whether eschatology played a larger role in Western thought. It also raised the question concerning the relationship between eschatology and other philosophical subjects such as teleology. Because of the multitude of assumptions concerning the meaning of eschatology, Chapter One provides essential working definitions. In order to obtain a sufficient understanding of the topic and address the use of the term among the three philosophers, it was necessary to see how eschatology was understood and acted upon in Western thought. Chapter Two addresses the history of eschatology in the West and concludes that there are two general streams of eschatological thought that explains why it continued to remain a subject for contemporary philosophers. Chapters Three through Five address how eschatology was used by Heidegger, Berdyaev, and Blumenberg respectively. Each utilized the subject in different ways: for Heidegger eschatology constitutes Dasein's existence. Futurity ("forward-directedness") is a condition Dasein as a totality. Dasein is "being-toward-the-end" or "toward-death." Berdyaev combines the eschatological tradition with philosophical achievements and offers an "eschatological metaphysics." He distinguishes eschatology from teleology arguing against teleology, noting that only a "personalist" eschatology can solve the problems of dualism and objectification. Blumenberg differs from Heidegger and Berdyaev by offering a negative evaluation of eschatological belief in the West contending that the modern secular age is the result of a failed eschatology. The conclusion of this work follows Charles Taylor's contention in A Secular Age that "our sense of where we are is crucially defined in part by a story of how we got there." The conclusion is that eschatology, throughout most of Western thought, functioned largely as a background assumption for understanding time and history. The transition from the linear concept of time to a cyclical concept defines in part the modern secular age. The notion of future time is an important and often neglected dimension of hermeneutic understanding. The continued influence of eschatological thought in Western history explains why the philosophers under consideration in this work address eschatology and signals that its influence upon philosophical thought is not likely to diminish in the future. (shrink)

In a long-forgotten essay, Alvin Gouldner defended the distinctive contributions of Romantic social science. Today, half a century later, very few would risk making a similar plea. Owing to its deconstruction, the discourse of Romanticism has increasingly fallen out of favor in the social sciences, meaning social scientists have progressively come to see Romanticism as less a resource for critique than a bourgeois ideology warranting critical scrutiny. Yet the truth is quite a bit more complicated. For despite its disapproval at (...) the level of social science's explicit culture, Romanticism continues to serve, at the level of implicit culture, as a potent resource for social analysis. We start with a clarification of what we mean by Romanticism. While Romanticism may be an amorphous and multifaceted structure of thought and feeling, like Gouldner, we do not think it lacks coherence. Thus, we outline what we take to be the core dimensions of the ‘Romantic syndrome’, and then survey some of its key figures in Western social thought. Next, we move to a discussion of three select studies about the infiltration of Romanticism into the capitalist heartland—the sphere of work. We demonstrate how, consistent with our argument that Romanticism has become increasingly symbolically polluted within social science, each of these studies critiques the Romantic turn at work, while nevertheless anchoring their critiques in Romanticism, albeit in increasingly implicit fashion. We conclude by offering some reflections on why Romanticism continues to haunt contemporary social science—and why this matters. (shrink)

The publication of Timothy Michael’s British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason represents a landmark in the study of British Romantic literature. In 1953, M. H. Abrams published his...

I argue that Schelling’s construction of symbolic language is to be understood as an application of Naturphilosophie; indeed, more generally, that the concept of the symbol theorised anew in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany was predominantly a naturphilosophische concept, and its transfer into the discourses of aesthetics and ultimately linguistics was one instance of a broader project to understand aesthetic phenomena through the explanatory framework of naturalism. That is, Schelling is here understood as continuing a project of “aesthetic naturalism,” (...) which consists in the explanation of aesthetic phenomena naturalistically. In their theories of symbolic language, Schlegel and Schelling both extend such naturalistic accounts to the production of linguistic sense, and I go on to trace this Naturphilosophie of meaning through Schlegel’s 1801 Berlin lectures on aesthetics, Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of art and into his later essays. (shrink)

ABSTRACT While Marx threw off his attraction to Romanticism when he was still a teenager, scholars have detected various senses in which deep structures of Romantic thought persist in his work. These structures have frequently been taken as contributing factors to Marx’s alleged millenarianism, doctrinaire rigidity, and intolerance. The mature Marx does draw on Romantic ideas at crucial moments; but rather than reinforcing an image of Marx as an intolerant ideologue, the Romantic element in his thought, properly construed, suggests theoretical (...) openness and humility before an unmasterable reality. (shrink)

Russian public opinion in the first half of the nineteenth century was buffeted by a complex of cultural, psychological, and historiosophical dilemmas that destabilized many conventions about Russia's place in universal history. This article examines one response to these dilemmas: the Slavophile reconfiguration of Eastern Christianity as a modern religion of theocentric freedom and moral progress. Drawing upon methods of contextual analysis, the article challenges the usual scholarly treatment of Slavophile religious thought as a vehicle to address extrahistorical concerns by (...) placing the writings of A. S. Khomiakov and I. V. Kireevskii in the discursive and ideological framework in which they originated and operated. As such, the article considers the atheistic revolution in consciousness advocated by Russian Hegelians, the Schellingian proposition that human freedom and moral advancement were dependent upon the living God, P. Ia. Chaadaev's contention that a people's religious orientation determined its historical potential, and the Slavophile appropriation of Russia's dominant confession to resolve the problem of having attained historical consciousness in an age of historical stasis. (shrink)

Genesis 2:4–25, the story of the creation of man and woman, has received great attention in modern theology. The text indeed contains the most fundamental teaching of the Bible on the relation between man and woman, on sexuality, and on marriage. In this article, however, I attempt to highlight some of the theoretical/philosophical potential of the text. While I accept the main theological teaching of Genesis 2 about the equality of the sexes, I argue that the text goes beyond the (...) mere presentation of this theological doctrine, and provides a structure that allows for a dynamic interplay between the sexes. I contend, furthermore, that this structure and the ensuing dynamics can be interpreted as a subtle treatment of the issue of the same and the other. Finally, I argue that in this way the biblical text can provide a description of the experience of love and an account of human creativity. In other words, it accounts for the possibility of realizing our divine likeness, the divinity of the human. (shrink)

This paper offers an intellectual portrait of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, by considering his incorporation of perspectives associated with “modernism,” the artistic and intellectual avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century. These perspectives are largely absent in other alternatives in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Emphasis is placed on Lacan’s affinities with phenomenology, a tradition he criticized and to which he is often seen as opposed. Two general issues are discussed. The first is Lacan’s unparalleled appreciation of the (...) paradoxical nature of human experience, together with his treatment of paradox as almost a criterion of truth. These points are illustrated by considering Lacan’s conceptions of the self and of erotic desire. The second issue is Lacan’s focus on the “ontological dimension,” on overall styles or modalities of what might be termed “transcendental subjectivity”: namely, what he calls the registers of the “Imaginary,” the “Symbolic,” and the “Real.” By emphasizing the incommensurable yet interdependent nature of these modalities, Lacan offers a synthesis of dynamic/conflictual and formal/ontological dimensions of the human condition. This paper offers an encompassing portrait of Lacan’s major ideas that is at odds with the widespread assumption that Lacan is somehow a deeply anti-humanist thinker who derides the subjective dimension. Lacan’s most distinctive contributions are fundamentally concerned with the nature of human experience. They show strong affinities with hermeneutic forms of phenomenology inspired by Heidegger, a philosopher who focused on ontological modes of Being and considered paradox as a mark of truth. (shrink)

The examination of the modern construction of subject is not over yet. Although many thinkers have exhausted its conceptual ambiguities and practical consequences, its impact is far from fully understood without an analysis of the construction of childhood for the future subject. In this essay, I problematize five constructions of childhood that emerged in the modern time and scrutinize the impasses of logic or conceptual ambiguities within, along with the practical consequences thereof. I explore how the modern construction of childhood (...) is problematic in and of itself, as well as the light it sheds on the deeply embedded ambiguities and aporia :75–88 2007) in the construction of the modern subject. This paper will untangle the problems associated with each of these constructs and their respective implications for the making of the modern subject. (shrink)

This paper argues that children as members of a perennial psychoclass represent one potential vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult–child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. I argue from Herbert Marcuse’s prophetic invocation of a “new sensibility,” which is characterized by an increase in instinctual revulsion towards violence, domination and exploitation and, correspondingly, a greater sensitivity to all forms of life. As the embodiment of (...) a form of philosophical “post-animism” or hylozoism, it represents the evolutionary shift that, it could be argued, our species requires for survival at this historical moment. I suggest that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny—the long formative period of human childhood and the pedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle—makes of the adult-collective of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. After exploring child–adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what John Dewey called “impulse” and “habit,” I argue for a form, or archetype of schooling first articulated in ancient Greece called skholé, a space that functions, according to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, as a “meeting place,” a “form of gathering and action” dedicated to inquiry, and not to the production of calculated, preordained outcomes—a space removed from the world of production, and characterized by a form of temporality associated with childhood: aion, or “timeless time,” as opposed to kronos, or linear time. Skholé is dedicated to emergence and cultural reconstruction, which follows from an educative relationship between adults and children based on understanding the latter as bearers of the “novel,” and on a faith in the “reorganizing potentialities” of childhood impulse, or interest—that is, on natality as a fundamental principle of cultural evolution. (shrink)

European theorists of childhood still tend to locate the first positive acknowledgements of childhood as a human developmental period in its own positive right between the 16th and 18th century in Europe. Even though the findings of Ariès have been constantly challenged, it still remains a commonplace, especially within the history of education, to refer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the 18th century as one of the earliest and most prominent conceptualisers of childhood as a positive period that must not be (...) evaluated in the light of its distance to adulthood but for its inherent value as an important and unmissable period of human life. Such a view is as unhistorical as it is biased and eurocentred. This article endeavours to shed at least a small light on the history of education and of childhood outwith the usual focus. The central objects of examination are the theoretical treatises of Zeami Motokiyo regarding the Noh theatre which have long been recognised as one of the great cultural achievements of humankind. Despite their acknowledged importance, theorists of education have hardly engaged with these treatises even though they present us with a whole theory of education that also embraces a very original and positive theory of childhood. Given that the treatises originate from the 14th-early 15th century, they pre-date everything the typical Western History of Education would bring forth as the beginning of a positive childhood and a pedagogy that acts accordingly. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the prospects for thoroughly secular thought. It does so in relation to recent theories of secularization (and especially Charles Taylor’s and Hans Blumenberg’s) as well as by attending to two very different intellectual projects, one mounted by Jeremy Bentham (in particular his concept of felicity or happiness), the other by Michael Oakeshott. It argues that Bentham’s utilitarian account of happiness depends on a Christian conceptual structure, and that Oakeshott’s understanding of philosophy as a practice of questioning (...) presents a brighter hope for thoroughly secular thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to explain the family resemblance between the early socialism that emerged in France from the aftermath of the Revolution and Owenite socialism, which emerged out of the very different political and religious circumstances of late Georgian Britain. While the ‘sciences’ of Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier were conceived to end the crisis produced by the French Revolution, Owen’s newfound principle, what he called the ‘science of the influence of circumstance’, emerged from his A New View of (...) Society and his ideas on formation of character, was directed to the solution of the problems of industrial Britain during the French wars and after. The article shows that, contrary to the arguments of the pathbreaking work of Gregory Claeys, Owen’s ideas had less to do with a Republicanism that, for Claeys in following the work of J.G.A. Pocock, had its roots in the Renaissance, and more to do with the emergence of the science of society whose origins lay in the late Enlightenment and the shared concerns of English, Scottish, and French thinkers on trying to understand an emerging and new social order. (shrink)

This paper offers a genealogy of dialogic education, tracing its origins in Romantic epistemology and corresponding philosophy of childhood, and identifying it as a counterpoint to the purposes and assumptions of universal, compulsory, state-imposed and regulated schooling. Dialogic education has historically worked against the grain of standardized mass education, not only in its view of the nature, capacities and potentialities of children, but in its economic, political and social views, for which childhood is understood as a promissory condition. Dialogic education (...) is oriented to what Dewey called “a future new society of changed purposes and desires,” made possible by an emergent form of social character. It has followed its own developmental trajectory from its origins in Pestalozzi’s Rousseau-inspired innovations, through anarchist theory and practice and the Progressive Education movement, to its current most salient formulation in the Democratic Education movement, whether as an enemy within the gates of standardized education or as expressed in innumerable alternative forms of schooling or unschooling. The paper highlights several key characteristics, gleaned from all those forms, of the dialogic school—identified as intentionality, transitionality, emergence, aesthetic temporality, interdisciplinarity and group governmentality--and argues further that community of philosophical inquiry theory and practice as a form of post-Socratic group dialogue that emerged in the 1970’s, is a pedagogical praxis that offers a grand operational template for dialogic education as a form of schooling. (shrink)

Artykuł dotyczy ukształtowanej przez anglosaski romantyzm przemiany kulturowego obrazu doświadczenia religijnego — przemiany dostrzeżonej w literaturze przez amerykańskiego krytyka literackiego Geoffreya Hartmana. Najważniejsze aspekty tej przemiany to: zwycięstwo modelu poezji kreatywnej nad jej modelem mimetycznym, epitafijność oznaczająca uwrażliwienie na przemijalność świata, naturalizacja nadprzyrodzoności, a także rezygnacja z odpowiedzi na pytania ostateczne. Horyzont poszukiwań sensu tych przemian wyznaczany jest u Hartmana przez quasi-mesjanizm w ujęciu Adorna — przeświadczenie, że wyżej należy cenić różnorodność niepełnych i ułomnych odpowiedzi niż integralność prawd ostatecznych.

Darwin is well known for his wondrously ambiguous rhetoric. The author who used an ‘entangled bank’ as his metaphor for Nature and its complex relationships built up the substance of his text from a corresponding entanglement of unresolved theoretical relations. Ambiguous positions, arguments that seem to fold in on themselves, vacillations, contradictions, and pluralities of explanation suffuse Darwin's science and its constituent metascience. The Origin abounds in ambiguities with regard to the technical features of evolutionary biology. But the domain of (...) ambiguity I wish to address is Darwin's metaphysical stance. I want to approach the question of Darwin and secularization through what might be called the trope of ambiguity. My principle concern is with the origins of that ambiguity. These lie in the conflicting cultural and ideological resources Darwin used to construct the theory of natural selection. (shrink)

This article argues that children represent one vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult-child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. Following Herbert Marcuse's invocation of a ‘new sensibility’, the author argues that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny—the long formative period of human childhood and the pedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle—makes of the adult-collective of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. (...) After exploring child-adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what Dewey called ‘impulse’ and ‘habit’, three key dimensions of dialogic schooling are identified, all of which are grounded in a fourth: the form of dialogical group discourse called community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), which is based on the problematisation and reconstruction of concepts through critical argumentation. As a discourse-model, CPI grounds practice in all of the dialogic school's emergent curricular spaces, whether science, mathematics, literature, art, or philosophy. Second, it opens a functional space for shared decision-making and collaborative governance, making of school an exemplary model of direct democracy. Finally, CPI as a site for critical interrogation of concepts encountered in the curriculum (e.g. ‘alive’, ‘justice’, ‘system’, ‘biosphere’) and as a site for democratic governance leads naturally to expression in activist projects that model an emergent ‘new reality principle’ through concrete solutions to practical problems on local and global levels. (shrink)