Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context” is one of the most famous papers in literary theory, but there are aspects of it which, in my experience, are not commented on. Why are there no commas in the title? I present a puzzle, but there is a solution which I presume many will quickly go for.

In this paper, I attempt to formulate an Ingardenian conception of the literary work’s aesthetic value. Following Mitscherling’s lead, I attempt to place Ingarden’s aesthetics within his overall phenomenological-ontological project. That is, I argue that Ingarden’s aesthetics can only be properly fathomed in the context of his ontological deliberations, since, as he himself often enunciated, all his philosophical investigations constitute a realist rejoinder to Husserl’s turn toward transcendental idealism. To this end, I bring together insights from his aesthetics and (...) ontology to establish a coherent account of values, where artistic and aesthetic values are analyzed as they manifest themselves in the literary work of art. By attending to the ontology of its aesthetic (and artistic) values, I argue, the literary work’s stratified formation becomes more explicit. Keywords: Roman Ingarden, aesthetic value, artistic value, the literary work of art, ontology, aesthetics. (shrink)

Sarah Hammerschlag en su obra Broken Tablets: Levinas Derrida and Literary Afterlife of Religion, editada por Columbia University Press, incursiona en el terreno de los estudios religiosos a partir de dos importantes referentes: Emmanuel Levinas y Jacques Derrida. El orden de la presente exposición será mediado por la estructura misma de la obra, esbozando una serie de consideraciones capitulares y finiquitando con breves consideraciones generales. El texto se compone de las siguientes secciones: Preface (0), What must a Jewish thinker (...) be (1), Levinas, Literature and the run of the world (2), Between the Jew and writing (3), To lose one’s head: Literature and the democracy to come (4), Literature and the political-theological remains (5), Epilogue: There is not a pin to choose between us (6). (shrink)

A review of Clive Scott's Translating the Perception of the Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology (Oxford: Legenda, 2012).

This article examines Jacobi's two novels, Allwill and Woldemar indirectly showing how much Allwill prefigures Kierkegaard's Seduce in Either/Or and the plot of Woldemar Hegel's final scene of Section VI of his Phenomenology of Spirit.

In this paper, we wish to address how meaning occurs in literary reading as well as in literary discussion. To do so, we propose to rely on the theoretical elaborations of Pierre Bayard, Winnicott and Marc Richir. Thus, the point is to propose a tie between literary theory, psychoanalysis and phenomenology so as to account for the creativity of the act of reading as well as the way a new meaning can arise between those who share (...) their reading of a same book. (shrink)

Drawing on research in narrative theory and literary aesthetics, text and discourse processing, phenomenology and the experimental cognitive sciences, this paper outlines an embodied theory of presence in the reading of literary narrative. Contrary to common assumptions, it is argued that there is no straightforward relation between the degree of detail in spatial description on one hand, and the vividness of spatial imagery and presence on the other. It is also argued that presence arises from a first-person, (...) enactive process of sensorimotor simulation/ resonance, rather than from mere visualizing from the perspective of a passive, third-person observer. In sections 1 to 3, an inter-theoretical argument is presented, proposing that presence may be effectively cued by explicit references to object -directed bodily movement. In section 4, an attempt is made at explaining which ways of embedding such references in the narrative may be particularly productive at eliciting presence. (shrink)

This study aims to corroborate Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of fundamental ideas from Saussure’s linguistics by linking them to works that were independently elaborated by Jan Mukařovský, Czech structuralist aesthetician and literary theorist. I provide a comparative analysis of the two authors’ theories of language and their interpretations of thought as fundamentally determined by language. On this basis, I investigate how they conceive linguistic innovation and its translation into changes in the constituted language and other social codes and institutions. I explain (...) how they elaborate on Saussure’s idea of language as a system of oppositions by interpreting cultural innovation as a systematic variation of pre-established social norms and, similarly, linguistic innovation as gesturing within language. Connectedly, I show how Mukařovský’s works help clarify Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the gestural dimension of language. By discussing the two thinkers’ arguments in favour of linguistic innovation, I explore what could be called phenomenological limits of structuralism. (shrink)

The paper argues that Sartre’s work as both a literary critic and social philosopher is deeply indebted to his early commitment to phenomenology. The first part of the paper examines the nature of reading and writing in the account of literary meaning that is presented in the transitional text, 'Qu’est-ce que la littérature?' While acknowledging the political turn that occurs in Sartre’s work, we then discuss how the theme of history emerges in the later essay, 'Questions de (...) méthode,' as one that opens up a “double reading” of human motivation. Our conclusion maintains that the Marxist phase of Sartre’s work is based on the hermeneutical notion of comprehension, which provides an anthropological grounding for his existential philosophy. (shrink)

Two brief Late Antique religious texts, respectively by the monk Theophanis and by Monoimus the Arab, present an interesting problem of whether they embody the authors’ experience, or whether they are merely literary constructs. Rather than approaching this issue through the lens of theory, the article shows how phenomenological analysis and studies of living subjectivity can be engaged with the text in order to clarify the contents of introspective experience and the genesis of its religious connotations. The analysis uncovers (...) a previously unnoticed form of embodied introspective religious experience which is structured as a ladder with a distinct internal structure with the high degree of synchronic and diachronic stability. This approach also helps one identify the specific introspective techniques in the canonical and non-canonical literature of early Christian tradition, as related to the concepts of “ theosis ” and “ kenosys ”, as well as to suggest some neurological correspondents of religious cognition. (shrink)

Much has been written about the possibility of human trust in robots. In this article we consider a more specific relationship: that of a human follower’s obedience to a social robot who leads through the exercise of referent power and what Weber described as ‘charismatic authority.’ By studying robotic design efforts and literary depictions of robots, we suggest that human beings are striving to create charismatic robot leaders that will either (1) inspire us through their display of superior morality; (...) (2) enthrall us through their possession of superhuman knowledge; or (3) seduce us with their romantic allure. Rejecting a contractarian-individualist approach which presumes that human beings will be able to consciously ‘choose’ particular robot leaders, we build on the phenomenological-social approach to trust in robots to argue that charismatic robot leaders will emerge naturally from our world’s social fabric, without any rational decision on our part. Finally, we argue that the stability of these leader-follower relations will hinge on a fundamental, unresolved question of robotic intelligence: is it possible for synthetic intelligences to exist that are morally, intellectually, and emotionally sophisticated enough to exercise charismatic authority over human beings—but not so sophisticated that they lose the desire to do so? (shrink)

This article argues that understanding any space or site relies on a knowledge of its fourth dimension - the timescape. It will explore this by situating the investigation in the museum - a place of heightened contrivance which could easily be shallowly interpreted as "mere style". It will defend a new method of investigating museum temporality which combines both phenomenology and literary theory, and will replace the idea of geo-epistemology with geochronic epistemology: an understanding of context and situation (...) which takes on time as well as spatial location. In so doing, it moves on from notions of the museum as a place out of time, situating it in the networks of meaning, power and politics in which we have lived and are living. Thus, "the whole space of the exhibition" as Lyotard said, "becomes the remains of all time": the Museum on the Edge of Forever. (shrink)

According to Greimas, the semiotic square is far more than a heuristic for semantic and literary analysis. It represents the generative “deep structure” of human culture and cognition which “define the fundamental mode of existence of an individual or of a society, and subsequently the conditions of existence of semiotic objects” (Greimas & Rastier 1968: 48). The potential truth of this hypothesis, much less the conditions and implications of taking it seriously (as a truth claim), have received little attention (...) in the literature. In response, this paper traces the history and development of the logical square of opposition from Aristotle to Greimas and beyond, to propose that the relations modelled in these diagrams are embodied relations rooted in gestalt memories of kinesthesia and proprioception from which we derive basic structural awareness of opposition and contrast such as verticality, bilaterality, transversality, markedness and analogy. To make this argument, the paper draws on findings in the phenomenology of movement (Sheets-Johnstone 2011a, 2011b, 2012, Pelkey 2014), recent developments in the analysis of logical opposition (Beziau & Payette 2008), recent scholarship in (post)Greimasian semiotics (Corso 2014, Broden 2000) and prescient insights from Greimas himself (esp. 1968, 1984). The argument of the paper is further supported through a visual and textual content analysis of a popular music video, both to highlight relationships between the semiotic square and mundane cultural ideologies and to show how these relationships might be traced to the marked symmetries of bodily movement. In addition to illustrating the enduring relevance of Greimasean thought, the paper further illustrates the neglected relevance that embodied chiasmus holds for developments in anthropology, linguistics and the other cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This paper aims at analysing, in a phenomenological perspective, how meaning occurs in literary readings as well as in literary discussions. The study takes as its empirical starting point a seminar session, in which several academic readers have shared their experiences of the same novel. It appeared that the constitution of the novel's meaning was modified and continued during the discussion and, therefore, that the meaning of the novel was not available before the discussion happened. Then, to understand (...) what happened before the discussion, the inquiry relies on P. Bayard's theoretical elaborations, which state that the solitary experience of reading itself involves previous readings: the subjectivity of the reader is haunted by a plurality of texts, virtually involved in the process of reading of the novel. Therefore, the article intends to explore the notion of potential space, coined by Winnicott, and to define it as an intersubjective space, made of virtual subjectivities. Ultimately, to describe the way a new meaning has arisen between the participants, the study relies on M. Richir's phenomenology. The point, here, is to question the actual but unconscious interweaving of the subjectivities in the discussion. Thus, the study provides a deeper understanding of the creativity of the act of reading, by assuming that creativity cannot happen without a plurality of subjectivities, existing or virtual. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is often credited as having offered one of the most thorough phenomenological investigations of the nature of boredom. In his 1929–1930 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, he goes to great lengths to distinguish between three different types of boredom and to explicate their respective characters. Within the context of his discussion of one of these types of boredom, profound boredom [tiefe Langweile], Heidegger opposes much of the philosophical and literary tradition on boredom (...) insofar as he articulates how the experience of boredom can be existentially beneficial to us. In this chapter, we undertake a study of the nature of profound boredom with the aim of investigating its place within contemporary psychological and philosophical research on boredom. Although boredom used to be a neglected emotional experience, it is no more. Boredom’s causal antecedents, effects, experiential profile, and neurophysiological correlates have become topics of active study; as a consequence, a proliferation of claims and findings about boredom has ensued. Such a situation provides an opportunity to scrutinize Heidegger’s claims and to try to understand them both on their own terms and in light of our contemporary understanding of boredom. (shrink)

In my paper, I establish an Ingardenian phenomenological ontology of virtualized ficta, i.e., fictional entities introduced to virtual gaming. The first Section of my paper provides an ontology of virtualized ficta, focusing primarily on their ‘‘existential moments’’. But in order to have a firm grasp of the ontological aspects grounding the virtual work, it’s important to engage its strata. This is what I attempt to do in Section 1.2. Virtualized ficta’s intentional dependencies are strongly manifest in what I call the (...) ‘‘strata of the virtual work’’. That is, I repurpose Ingarden’s strata of the literary work, the picture, and the film to showcase that virtualized ficta, from the bottom up (i.e., from their pure ontology to aesthetics) are purely intentional entities. In short, I argue for a purely intentional account of virtualized ficta as ficta-made-virtualia, whose ontological status is determined by the creative acts of game developers and gamers. (shrink)

This paper explores Jean Starobinski's often tacit conception of the implied author, with a view to clarifying his intellectual legacy for literary criticism. It argues that it is plausible to trace a certain strand in the intellectual genealogy of Starobinski's literary theory from the descriptive psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey to twentieth-century psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Accordingly, the question "Who is Jean Starobinski?" is formulated in a sense which seeks to move beyond the bare facticity of biographical detail, a (...) sense that can be expected to differentiate between scholarly and purely journalistic enquiry to ask: who, exactly, is the Jean Starobinski that we encounter in his major works - works like "The Living Eye" and "Transparency and Obstruction"? It is from this vantage point that the discussion proceeds to clarify Starobinski's ambivalent relations to both Rousseau and Freud, and thereby to illuminate some of the tensions and nuances inherent in his notion of the implied author. (shrink)

Hegel believed the Antigone tragedy not only revealed the national spirit of ancient Greece but was indeed the greatest artwork of all time. displaying the “Logic of History”, was the critical role Antigone tragedy played in the phenomenology of spirit from the standpoint of Hegel. This article will attempt to answer how Hegel reads Antigone's tragedy and how he observes the “Logic of History” in it. Ancient Greek society, In Hegel’s point of view, has constantly been the symbol of (...) “unity of life”. however, Hegel believes that at certain times in history, this unity of ethical life and its state of joy in Greece has been destroyed. Since Hegel believes literary works have historical-cultural implications and considers art and literature as the first medium by which the spirit becomes self-conscious, in the section “True Spirit, ethical Life” from the book Phenomenology of Spirit, he describes the fall of the ethical life of Greek society by reading of the Antigone tragedy. What Hegel understood from the Antigone tragedy was a series of painful conflicts that ensued as a consequence of a contradiction between ethical powers within Greek society. powers that had heretofore been in unreflected unity, but now that their contradictions revealed, the ethical life of society collapsed and the spirit moved to a more rational and liberated stage. These stages are in fact very much the irreversible final course of history toward achieving freedom. (shrink)

In the chapter Spirit of the book "Phenomenology of spirit" in a section called "True spirit, ethical Life", Hegel looks into the happy state of "ethical life" in Greece. The concept of ethical life is a very crucial concept because it formulates Hegel's fundamental political and social ideal, which is to establish synthesis between the community and the individual. In this research, we study the ethical life of people who are unreasonably immersed in the customs and laws of a (...) certain society. In the following, we see that this world is divided and the unity of laws in it is shaken. For this reason, Hegel discusses the literary genres of epic and tragedy in order to show that in them, a person progressively becomes himself and becomes aware of his individual character. Hegel destroys his primitive ethical substance dialectically through essential conflicts, with forced actions and untangling choices of people with will and as a result people are deprived of their social identities. In this dialectical process, the "living unity" of the polis is fragmented and becomes a mass of separate atoms. (shrink)

Studies on mind-wandering frequently use reading as an experimental task. In these studies, reading is conceived as a cognitive process that potentially offers a contrast to mind-wandering, because it seems to be task-related, goal-directed and stimulus-dependent. More recent work attempts to avoid the dichotomy of successful cognitive processes and processes of mind-wandering found in earlier studies. We approach the issue from the perspective that texts provoke modes of cognitive involvement different from the information processing and recall account that underlies many (...) early mind-wandering studies. After all, reading itself is an umbrella term for activities that are characterized by a variety of phenomenological and functional signatures. We conceptualize reading and mind-wandering in relation to each other through the framework of enculturated predictive processing, which is informed by research in literary studies. Earlier accounts think of reading predominantly in terms of the construction of situation models that organize textual information. By contrast, enculturated predictive processing foregrounds shifting stances readers can take in relation to the text. Characters featuring in literary texts might be mind-wandering themselves, or passages in literary style might make the construction of a clearly defined situational model impossible. Furthermore, we take into account that texts often elicit mind-wandering through the construction of task-relevant and attention-driven virtual scenarios in readers' minds. This more complex account of reading can enrich recent attempts to understand mind-wandering as a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon. The study of mind-wandering can benefit, we argue, from a closer attention to the process of reading and to the texts it deploys as stimuli. The emerging perspective from enculturated predictive processing and literary studies makes distinctions in reading that in turn enable research on mind-wandering to ask more precise questions about (1) different kinds of mind-wandering, (2) different modes of reading, and (3) how and where they interconnect across time. (shrink)

Scholarly discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics tend to focus on his philosophy of painting. By contrast, comparatively little attention has been paid to his philosophy of literature. However, he also draws significant conclusions from his work on literary expression. As I will argue, these reflections inform at least two important positions of his later thought. First, Merleau-Ponty’s account of “indirect” literary language led him to develop a hybrid view of phenomenological expression, on which expression is both creative and descriptive. (...) Second, a study of literature furnished him with the resources to develop a novel account of phenomenological “essences”, which holds that essences are revisable explanations of first-order experience. Both results have been overlooked by commentators. They demonstrate the systematic import of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of literature and language, and amount to a qualified extension of a basic Husserlian position. (shrink)

In this paper we will explore how Albert Camus has much to offer philosophers of education. Although a number of educationalists have attempted to explicate the educational implications of Camus’ literary works (Denton, 1964; Oliver, 1965; Götz, 1987; Curzon-Hobson, 2003; Marshall, 2007, 2008; Weddington, 2007; Roberts, 2008, 2013; Gibbons, 2013; Heraud, 2013; Roberts, Gibbons & Heraud, 2013) these analyses have not attempted to extrapolate pedagogical guidelines to develop an educational framework for children’s philosophical practice in the way Matthew Lipman (...) did from John Dewey’s philosophy of education, which informed his philosophy for children curriculum and pedagogy. To this end we offer comparisons and contrasts between Camus and the pragmatist educational discourse centred on communities of philosophical inquiry (or, more broadly, collaborative philosophical inquiry). In particular we focus on the phenomenology of inquiry, namely, that “inquiry must begin with a problem, question, or doubt and must aim at a solution or resolution, both of which are genuinely felt—something in which the inquirer actually has a stake” (Gregory & Granger, 2012: 13). We conclude that what Camus calls lucidity has implications for the notion of reconstruction, prominent in Dewey’s thoughts on education, and central to Lipman’s focus on philosophy functioning educationally. (shrink)

Philosophy-and-literature as a subfield theorizes about the relationship between the two. Though few would explicitly say that philosophy is the point and literature the means, it’s common to see discussions of literature serving as an expression of philosophical insight and uncommon to see discussions of philosophical ideas put in service of literature. So, the aim of this paper is to explore, and suggest one concrete instance of, a literary work where philosophical concepts are instrumental for literary ends. The (...) metaphysical claims in T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” are not there to make a philosophical point, but to create a new sense of a lyric “now” that produces a time internal to the poem. This is a poetic achievement, and philosophical utterances help to produce the lyric now by foregrounding temporal readerly phenomenology. The example enriches our understanding of the possible relationships between philosophy and literature. (shrink)

1 Introduction1 In the 1980s, hermeneutics was often incorporated into deconstructionism and literary theory. Rather than focus on authorial intentions, the nature of writing itself including codes used to construct meaning, socio-economic contexts and inequalities of power,2 Gadamer introduced a different perspective; the interplay between effects of history on a reader’s understanding and the tradition(s) handed down in writing. This interplay in which a reader’s prejudices are called into question and modified by the text in a fusion of understanding (...) and topic revitalized the study of the printed word. Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being also appealed to the post-modern antipathy toward modernity and metaphysics.3 If the truth and validity of interpretations are limited to communities of language, then our mode of being in history cannot but be historical. This point of view rendered Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics vulnerable to the critique of moral and epistemological relativism. However, Gadamer’s theory of interpretation also stems from re-examination of the beginning of knowledge in the Pre-Socratics and Plato, and on this basis, is receptive to another dimension of inquiry than that which was trending in North America. -/- At the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1982, Chung-ying Cheng for the first time introduced onto-hermeneutics to an audience of esteemed philosophers including Li Zehou, Ren Jiyu, Feng Youlan, and Zhang Liwen.4 In contrast to schools of deconstruction and literary theory that had disengaged the interpreter from trans-historical sources of meaning and truth, Cheng explained that interpreters exist within a cosmological order inextricable from responsibility to harmonize Heaven and Earth in creative acts of interpretation. By integrating Chinese cosmology into hermeneutics through ontology, he tacitly challenged philosophers in the West to re-examine assumptions about humanity’s place in nature and by implication, Gadamer’s recovery of the beginnings of knowledge in Western philosophy. -/- Cheng’s Neo-Confucianism is inspired by the method and goals of Thomé H. Fang. The following words by Fang seem to prefigure, although in an indistinct and bundled way, aspects of Cheng’s philosophy including a Mencian theory of human nature, comprehensive observation, and creativity: “In the very process of living in concord with creative Nature, Man is charged with an ideal to be fully realized in the light of the principle of comprehensive harmony.”5 Like Fang, Cheng reinvigorates Chinese culture and language, but not solely in order to vindicate the insights of Neo-Confucianism. He has studied Western thought, from pragmatism and the analytic school to German idealism and phenomenology, to unlock and clarify philosophical concepts within the Yijing tradition and thereby render them intelligible to Anglophones. The result has been an awakening of Western scholars to the moral and cultural consequences of decoupling their thought from metaphysical foundations that are neither dogmatic nor doctrinal. -/- Not unlike the dialectic of Gadamer’s dialogue form, onto-generative hermeneutics integrates contrary positions on the same topic in order to blend both sides into a world philosophy, or as Cheng says, a “totalizing or integrative theory,”6 not to be confused with a theoretical rewording of a theory. On the contrary, the universal scope and relevance of hermeneutics stems from personal experience. Just as Gadamer, in response to faction and strife, immersed himself in Plato during the war years, and developed a method with which to harmonize opposites, so too, according to On-cho Ng, was Cheng moved by faction, strife and political persecution to develop a path toward unity.7 Gadamer taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Cheng at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa among other institutions in North America. They facilitated trans-continental educational and cultural ties. Similar experiences yield similar insights irrespective of differences of time and place. Hence, authors in this issue who reside in Europe, China and North America, delineate the differences between Gadamer and Cheng, yet also, in light of Cheng’s onto-generative method and cosmology, develop integrative theories. Due to the page-budget restriction of the publisher, certain articles of this special theme will be subsequently published in the next issue. -/- 2 Integrative Theory This special issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy confirms a dimension of hermeneutics that Cheng has both motivated and inspired. The contributors do not abide by the conviction that since thought is mediated by language, interpretations cannot transcend culture. On the contrary, their research exemplifies the fruits of trans-historical onto-dialogical hermeneutics within limits defined by their field inquiry, organized into Parts I and II, around three themes: language, the philosophy of history and ethics. -/- Andrew Fuyarchuk introduces the theme of ontology in relation to Gadamer’s turn to language. Fuyarchuk argues that Chung-ying Cheng’s criticism of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is informed by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and thereby overlooks how Gadamer’s Platonic-Pythagorean problem of the division between the One and Many is harmonized in the event of language, which in turn positions Gadamer in proximity to the presupposed grounds of receptivity in Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. Lauren Pfister’s contributing article addresses the year 2000 meeting between Cheng and Gadamer in Heidelberg and expands the transhistorical grounds of meaning in Gadamer to matters of theology. Pfister’s summary of the written Chinese record of their conversation indicates that Cheng does not address the role of Christian philosophy and hence, the role of the inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. This is important not only for detecting changes in Cheng’s philosophical development, but also for modifying his hermeneutics along the lines of a living conversation, possibilities explored by Pfister in a sequel to the article submitted to this issue. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of how Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being extends possibilities in Cheng’s thought, Pfister anticipates the article by Katarina Gajdosova. She returns to the roots of Chinese thought during the Warring States period and broadens the meaning of names in recently excavated texts. Contrary to the conventions about how to understand terms, she appeals to both Heidegger’s ontology and Cheng’s notion of receptivity and creativity to reinterpret naming in relation to cosmology. Along the same lines, insofar as the event of Being is lingual, Jay Goulding captures its emergent structure in an evolving community of scholars and scholarship. He recalls his philosophical journey toward Cheng’s philosophy that begins in conversations with Gadamer at McMaster University in Hamilton, leads to Heidegger and Asian thought, expands into turning points with teachers and colleagues from various backgrounds that by increments contributed to Goulding’s formulation of “Daoist phenomenology.” -/- Although differing traditions guide their inquiries and research, Cheng and Gadamer recall the wisdom of the past to ameliorate the fragmentation in contemporary life. This leads them to re-examine the origins of philosophy; historical roots and thus sources of creative re-interpretations East and West whose affinities are developed in contributions by Hyun Höchsmann and Friederike Assandri. Höchsmann assesses convergences and divergences in the origins of Chinese and Western philosophy (Confucius and Socrates, the Yijing and Pre-Socratics) that culminates in pairing Gadamer’s understanding of paideia in the context of Plato’s political cosmology in the Timaeus with moral and social cultivation in The Western Inscription. She delineates the limits of this comparison which in turn justifies introducing Vattimo’s notion of locality. Assandri’s comparative analysis moves between India and China, Buddhism and Tang Daoism. Based on Gadamer’s argument that writing detaches concepts from their cultural moorings, she defines and applies three levels of understanding in onto-generative hermeneutics to Buddhist terms that were assimilated into the Benji Jing and in so doing clarifies essential dimensions of Daoism. -/- Contributions by Stephen Palmquist and Nicholas Brasovan position Cheng in relation to Kant and Gadamer by way of Aristotle’s ethics respectively. On the one hand, Palmquist plots Cheng’s evolving criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy and draws on crucial dimensions of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reposition that criticism in a constructive relation to Kant’s emphasis on the philosophical conditions of morality while also indicating how religious dimensions of his thought answer Cheng’s concerns for lived moral action. For Palmquist, Gadamer enables a constructive criticism of Cheng. On the other hand, Brasovan compares Cheng’s Yijing-based account of moral deliberation with Gadamer’s Aristotelian-based ethics and reasons that in contrast to Cheng, Gadamer’s hermeneutical consciousness is disengaged from practical knowledge. For Brasovan, Cheng is a constructive critic of Gadamer. Palmquist and Brasovan’s divergent angles on Gadamer and Cheng map onto a dialectic of contrast and complementarity that constitutes the inner logic of Cheng’s philosophy. In other words, Gadamer and Cheng ought to be read alongside one another for the sake of removing discrepancies and contradictions, which constitutes the organic structure of their thinking. -/- 3 Our Mode of Being in History Is Not Historical The conversations between Cheng and Gadamer in this issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy pivot on language, philosophy of history and ethics within a comparative framework of analysis, but also explore the grounds that make the comparisons possible. Those grounds are informed by Chinese cosmology, and function to wrest Gadamer from the shadow of Heideggerian facticity and reposition him within the range of Cheng’s ideas about our place in nature that is embedded in his question about how mind emerges from inorganic matter.8 -/- For Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, human finitude, our ownmost individuating death ensures that hermeneutics is always open to the other as other, always on the way toward understanding the meaning of Being. To arrest the process in a concept of “the Absolute” cannot but represent someone’s point of view, and thereby render hermeneutics indistinguishable from ideology. However, insofar as finitude is defined by them in terms of an onto-theological concept of immorality, finitude is a metaphysical concept consistent with epistemologies and confuse beings with the meaning of Being. As a result, the celebrated political value of hermeneutics to always be on the way toward an understanding of the meaning of Being admits subtle variations on the same worldview that are insufficiently self-critical. -/- Gadamer scholars of Heidegger are right. A transformation in ethos and opening to the meaning of Being depends on awareness of finitude. Yet this awareness does not yield openness to more of the same, i.e., discourse structurally incapable of coming to unity but instead, for both Gadamer and Cheng, openness to a distinctly different ontological dimension of reality. As Sandra Wawrytko and So-Seong Park indicate,9 this ontological dimension is prefigured in the experience of being-as-a-whole or the totality of all possible relations in both Chinese totemic shamanistic rituals,10 and Greek Dionysian festivals.11 Through these religious experiences human ethos and therefore consciousness is expanded and elevated from being centered on one’s ownmost concerns toward an affinity with all sentient beings from insects and plants to animals. The channel for this affinity is an auditory disposition and hence, the emotions, compassion, and feeling response. -/- The capacity for an auditory disposition, or as Gadamer calls it, listening consciousness to respond to the inter-relationality and therefore inherent balance of nature is developed through music, song and dance of the religious rituals and festivals. They facilitate the unity of mind with nature. This use of music, that transforms ordinary consciousness, explains Cheng’s emphasis on the receptivity of feeling response in comprehensive observation, and Gadamer’s emphasis on openness to the other in attunement. However, an auditory disposition characteristic of pre-literate oral cultures that reveals the “All” need not rely on religion. As theorists about the evolution of language have explained,12 modern languages preserve their pre-historical past in music or prosody. That is to say, the song and dance that revealed the totality of inter-related beings to an ethos of comprehensive observation and attunement toward beings in classical civilizations is retained in the back-and-forth movement or rhythm of the dialogue form. Our mode of being in history is a mode of being in nature – through the music of language. -/- While alerting the reader to the limits of a nominalist interpretation, Gadamer expresses the inner law of the nature as follows: “in perishing there is always becoming, and in becoming there is always perishing.”13 Considered in process, opposites generate and blend into each other. This law of nature applies to everything.14 Hence, in a manner comparable to Pfister’s concluding insights, onto-dialogical hermeneutics is not only open to discrete events of otherness but moreover, to the moving structure of reality expressed, as Gajdosova suggests, in the existential moment of naming. Considered as interplay of tension and resolution with a life of its own, the dialectic of a dialogue is self-similar to the way in which an organism grows (by instinct). There is, therefore, a sense in which the art of interpretation extends the human mind into the eternal cycles of nature such that we participate in the articulation of the inner telos/homeostasis toward which all beings strive and importantly for Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, within the material limits of energy to which our embodied minds are self-evidently subject. In mortality there is always immortality. (shrink)

Many of the following literary-critical texts (not all quite conventional “long-form” essays) originally appeared on the Landscape Agency New York website, LANY Archive-Grotto, on the web portal Geocities, between the years 1997 and 2008 – i.e., over a period of roughly ten years. Versions of some were published in various journals, academic or otherwise. In re-presenting them here, the intention is to trace a proverbial “red thread” that crosses the entirety of the work, arguably what might be denoted the (...) works-based agency of works, and, arguably, the telltale trace of what is otherwise known as the “life-work,” yet for works versus for authors. -/- The entire, retrospective apparatus of The Editioning of Gardens is also, decidedly, an homage to New York, New York, either where or from where much of the research was undertaken and “lived.” Manhattan, indeed, haunts these pages, directly and indirectly – that is to say, the unparalleled access to libraries, bookstores, universities, galleries, cafés, pubs, restaurants, cinemas, parks, and the streets is quite simply the source for the often-intense, yet suitably critical exegetical works. -/- This book is meant to both recapitulate themes crossing the “life-work” of the works collected, but to also illustrate the transitional gestalt of the 1990s and 2000s, something we collectively have not yet quite exited, and something that still haunts and gives pause to architects and landscape architects today. In naming this collection “The Editioning of Gardens,” the intention is to draw attention to the fact that it is landscape that underwrites almost all architectural interventions, whether acknowledged or denied, and that it is “landscape” – in the widest sense of the word – that we inherently and collectively inhabit. -/- NOTA BENE: -/- While many of the essays and texts presented here have been previously published as “working papers” or “reviews” on the LANY Archive-Grotto website, or in journals and P2P dossiers (i.e., in open-access collections posted to research repositories, here denoted Things Czech and Dossier LANY), their presentation in book form makes them more readily accessible and effectively new works as totality. Most have also been re-edited and re-formatted for inclusion in The Editioning of Gardens. -/- All texts are also dated so as to situate them in the timeframe in which they appeared (or were written), as snapshots or surveys of passing times. While re-edited and re-formatted for presentation here, they have not been re-written as such due to their implied “historic” and “time-based” nature. As collection, however, they function as an (un)timely reminder of critical exegesis as rite of passage – underscoring the significance of the title of the collection. This latter trait is what, ironically, makes the collection contemporary and post-contemporary – timely and untimely at once. (shrink)

Lisa Zunshine stayed at Hotel Laxmi Park at Bishnupur, I do not know whether that hotel exists now or not. I sparred with Rukmani Bhaya Nair at an international literary meet at Dehradun in 2017 and I have that video. In this hurriedly written essay for an FDP conducted by a Central University in India in collaboration with a College in New Delhi, I point out the need to distinguish between philosophy and darśana while accessing the corpus of Raja (...) Rao. Zunshine in her work on literature and cognitive studies and, Bhaya Nair in her mimetic mode disregards Eastern hermeneutics to read all Indian authors in English. This essay which is not proofread, nor intended for publication shows the sorry state of Indian letters in English today. Indian scholars of Indian literatures in English do not refer to Indian thinkers but rush into aping their Western dole-givers. Therefore, I turn to Arif Dirlik's work on Third world scholars in the First world and make a case for rethinking the methodologies in approaching Indian letters in English. This author hopes that others in the future will not simply quote Plato to understand Raja Rao. (And, he was awarded an A+ for this work.) Both Zunshine and Nair effect an elision of everything Indic from world and Indian letters respectively. (shrink)

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

This article takes up the idea of language as a home and dwelling, and reconsiders what this might mean in the context of diasporic bilingualism – where as a ‘heritage speaker’ of a minority language, the ‘mother tongue’ may be experienced as both deeply familiar yet also alien or alienating. Drawing on a range of philosophical and literary accounts (Cassin, Arendt, Anzaldúa, Vuong, among others), this article explores how the so-called ‘mother tongue’ is experienced by heritage speakers in an (...) English-dominant world. From navigating one’s being in-between language-worlds, to the experience of language loss and efforts of reconnection, I argue that bilingual dwelling involves many complex layers often overlooked by philosophical accounts of language that do not attend to the lived world of the migrant and racialised outsider. By turning to the example of bilingual parenting, I then examine how such an undertaking, while labour-intensive, offers opportunities to refresh and co-create language-worlds anew. (shrink)

Mathematical objects are divided into (1) those which are autonomous, i.e., not dependent for their existence upon mathematicians’ conscious acts, and (2) intentional objects, which are so dependent. Platonist philosophy of mathematics argues that all objects belong to group (1), Brouwer’s intuitionism argues that all belong to group (2). Here we attempt to develop a dualist ontology of mathematics (implicit in the work of, e.g., Hilbert), exploiting the theories of Meinong, Husserl and Ingarden on the relations between autonomous and intentional (...) objects. In particular we develop a phenomenology of mathematical works, which has the stratified intentional structure discovered by Ingarden in his study of the literary work. (shrink)

This paper draws together as many as possible of the clues and pieces of the puzzle surrounding T. S. Eliot’s “infamous” literary term “objective correlative”. Many different scholars have claimed many different sources for the term, in Pound, Whitman, Baudelaire, Washington Allston, Santayana, Husserl, Nietzsche, Newman, Walter Pater, Coleridge, Russell, Bradley, Bergson, Bosanquet, Schopenhauer and Arnold. This paper aims to rewrite this list by surveying those individuals who, in different ways, either offer the truest claim to being the source (...) of the term, or contributed the most to Eliot’s development of it: Allston, Husserl, Bradley and Bergson. What the paper will argue is that Eliot’s possible inspiration for the term is more indebted to the idealist tradition, and Bergson’s aesthetic development of it, than to the phenomenology of Husserl. (shrink)

Can we gain knowledge by reading literature? This essay defends an account of reading, developed by Stanley Cavell and Hans-Georg Gadamer, that phenomenologically describes the experience of acquiring self-knowledge by reading literary texts. Two possible criticisms of this account will be considered: first, that reading can provide other kinds of knowledge than self-knowledge; and, second, that the theory involves illegitimately imposing subjective meaning onto a text. It will be argued, in response, that the self-knowledge gained in reading allows one (...) to gain other sorts of knowledge too, and that the reading process described by Gadamer and Cavell avoids excessive subjectivism. (shrink)

Husserl’s allegiance to realism came under attack following his Ideas. Ingarden was a fierce critic of his teacher’s turn to transcendental idealism and provided compelling arguments both for his idealist reading of Husserl and for his rejection of idealism. One of the main arguments Ingarden devised against Husserl’s turn was based on his aesthetics. Against Husserl, Ingarden established literary works and fictional objects as purely intentional objects that are (1) doubly structured, vis-à-vis their formal ontology, and (2) endowed with (...) spots of indeterminacy. These facts, Ingarden argues, necessitate the transcendence of the purely intentional object. In this paper, I explore his argument, while establishing the ontological foundation on which it rests. (shrink)

The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible "worlds" containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind of (...) literary text. This paper discusses the emergence of "aesthetic worlds" in the work of both poets and then examines how a common concern with Baroque form unites them in the phenomenological task of overcoming Cartesian dualism. (shrink)

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. (...) The meaning of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

This study firstly addresses three threads in Chris Marker’s work – theology, Marxism, and Surrealism – through a mapping of the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida onto the varied production of his film and photographic work. Notably, it is late Agamben and late Derrida that is utilized, as both began to exit so-called post-structuralism proper with the theological turn in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It addresses these threads through the means to ends employed and as (...) ends proper (as production of semi-autonomous works that also, paradoxically, index a much larger field of inquiry and theoretical praxis). It is perhaps French “schizophrenia” regarding theological versus political agency that best accounts for the sardonic deployment of irony and humor in Marker’s work in the face of Big History. Such means to ends (plus a subtle anti-intellectualism vis-à-vis fashionable academic trends) tend to underscore the severity and ultimate sincerity of Marker’s overall cultural-political project. -/- Dossier Chris Marker is also a study of a late-modern chiasmus, impersonal-personal agency, as it comes to expression in the works of Marker, as the dynamic interplay of political and subjective agency. As chiasmus, the complementary halves of this often-apocalyptic dynamis (a semi-catastrophic, temporal or historical force-field) also – arguably – secretly agree to meet, through the work of art, in the futural (problematized in contemporary French post-phenomenological and post-post-structuralist theory as “the event).” Consistent with the classical figure of concordia discors, Marker resolves these irreducible warring aspects of life experience in an atemporal and ahistorical moment that inhabits the work of art from its inception. This redemptive aspect in art is also the ultimate gesture of the artwork as autonomous subject and “mask” (or “screen”) for forces that reside beyond the frame of the image or work, as its proverbial Other, or within the frame, as other to that Other. -/- Despite the complications of the as-yet unresolved post-modern condition (its nihilist-relativist bias), and its similar, mostly circular concerns with the image and/or media, Marker’s work is clearly not post-modern. In fact, when tested against immemorial cultural epiphenomena, that work withstands all attempts at categorization and/or art-historical analysis proper. It remains unassimilable to the post-modern cause ... What emerges, upon closer examination, and through rigorous re-contextualization, is the prescient force of Marker’s works toward that futural state buried in art that is also “theological,” versus atheological, and heedlessly anterior to cultural politics per se. -/- In the case of Marker, this age-old or immemorial “thing-in-itself” (the artwork as image of world-chiasmus) finds its foremost or penultimate formation in his very-still photography – the singular images that are also the building blocks for his renowned ciné-essays. Not without irony, this same austere, reductive force of the still image (as form of proscription) also inhabits the more complex, synthetic works (or montages) that he has formulated and presented “dramatically,” here and there, through the often-sketchy apparatuses of his new-media experiments, as of the late 1980s. Ultimately, this world-image as chiasmus was always present within his earliest literary projects, from the 1940s forward – most especially in books and essays, with or without actual images. -/- Marker’s “return” to photography (to exhibiting still photography in galleries), in the late 2000s, is in many ways a return to the singular object of the artist-critic’s desire; the image in/for itself, while that image – endlessly troubled or interrogated for decades – continues to speak “in tongues” anyway, often against, or oblivious to, the voice of the author/artist/narrator. -/- Marker is a High Romantic Christian Marxist. The “Christic” aspect is rightly well-hidden, but emerges when the eschatological versus historical center of his work is exposed (the existential-metaphysical fuse such as also inhabits the works of Caravaggio), and when his early years are examined in light of his later and/or final years. Marker’s semi-personal/semi-impersonal apocalyptic vision is writ large in diverse works that cross decades, figuring a redemptive, world-shattering formation of art as pleroma. (shrink)

Romantic psychology is first specified in counter-distinction to Enlightenment-informed faculty-psychology, whose scientific paradigm is fundamentally materialistic and mechanistic. Romantic psychology is then presented through Fr. Schlegel’s theory and practice of the literary fragment. In the fragment, we discover selfhood that is self-positing, powered by electro-chemical forces and enlivened by the stimulating Other. Romantic psychology determines the self as an ironic system, complete and yet organically open to other selves. It is phenomenological in nature and its contemporary legacy can be (...) found in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical hermeneutics. (shrink)

Preface/Introduction: The question under discussion is metaphysical and truly elemental. It emerges in two aspects — how did we come to be conscious of our own existence, and, as a deeper corollary, do existence and awareness necessitate each other? I am bold enough to explore these questions and I invite you to come along; I make no claim to have discovered absolute answers. However, I do believe I have created here a compelling interpretation. You’ll have to judge for yourself. -/- (...) What follows is the presentation of three essays I have worked on over the past several years seeing publication for the first time. “Hollows of Experience” was written first as an invited chapter for a collection on the ontology of consciousness. However, when cuts became necessary, my chapter got the knife. Its length has prohibited it from publication in any print journal. “Myth and Mind” was written next as a journal article, but as my involvement with it grew so did its length, so it has also idled on my websty awaiting its call. “From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience” was written most recently, but it is the only one to have been available to the public elsewhere than my own website. Under the name, “The Continuum of Experience”, it was Target Article #95 on the recently closed Karl Jaspers Forum (for discussion purposes only). -/- I have put them in a different sequence here, for reasons of logical sense. Up first, “Panexperientialism” deals with an idea difficult for many to accept, namely that conscious experience is a particular mode of symbolically reflected experience that is largely unique to our species. However, I aver that experienced sensation in itself (as found, for example, in autonomic sensory response systems) goes “all the way down” into nature, and thus the title, panexperientialism. -/- Understanding this idea is helpful to dealing with the focus on language in Part I of “Hollows”, next, since here speech and general symbolic interaction in general are found to be the catalysts for the creation of our consciously experienced world (our “lived reality”). In Part II, however, I explore how experienced sensations must be coeval with existence, and, with even greater temerity, how all this sensational existence might have arisen within some literally inconceivable background of awareness-in-itself that yet has a dynamism that occasionally breaks into existence as experiential events and entities. (The latter may sound wacky, but physicists and cosmologists are themselves attempting to come to terms with that which seethes with vast potential energy in what they refer to as the quantum vacuum.) -/- “Myth and Mind” was put third since it deals with a major lacuna in “Hollows” — that presumed prehistoric period when members of our species made the painful crossing of the symbolic threshold into the beginnings of cultural consciousness. Speech plays a central role here, too, but I look more at narrative structures from the dawn of self-awareness when ritual and myth became vital to human survival. Why would fantastic stories and bizarre rituals be necessary? I speculate that growing foresight led to the unavoidable realization of certain mortality, from which, in turn, emerged the secondary realization that we were now alive. In contrast to our yet-to-come death, we have life here and now, and by ritually identifying with a symbolically expanded mythic, i.e., sacred, reality, we may continue to live on after bodily death, just as our ancestors and loved ones must also do. Language and mythmaking are necessary to avoid mortal despair and they remain at the core of human consciousness. -/- As Ernst Cassirer (1944) has noted, language and myth are “twin creatures”, both metaphoric webs over a reality we can never wholly comprehend. We live in the symbolic and construct our works of imagination and wars of conquest to make life meaningful, to feel immortal, and to sense that we ourselves participate in a reality greater than ourselves. No doubt we do, but this does not mean our culturally constructed self-identities survive the death of our bodies, and it does not imply that our symbolic concepts can ever indicate the ultimate truth. We simply must symbolize an extended reality that was sacred to our ancestors: “Is it not our way, as illusory as it may be, to force continuance on our world and our life in the face of their inevitable ending? Are we not compelled to extend those imaginary horizons as far as we can despite the terror and the sometime joy their extension incites? Is their closure not a form of death?” (Crapanzano, p. 210) -/- Of course, this leaves me in the uncomfortable position of being forced to admit that this venture of mine must inevitably be another attempt at meaningful mythmaking. But what else could it be? This is certainly not a scientific proof though it is indeed an academically rigorous exploration. (Just try to count the citations!) I hope the reader will judge my thesis on the basis of its coherence, the sense of meaning it evokes, my intellectual responsibility, and, finally, the engagement it inspires. If you have read my expositions and found yourself immersed in the timeless questions I here call forth, I would call these writings successful (even if you violently disagree with my answers). -/- I am very grateful to Huping Hu for granting me this special issue of JCER in which to present my ideas in some detail. He has patiently dealt with my exuberant approach and allowed the many changes I kept coming up with right until the final publication date. I also wish to thank the many potential commentators who politely replied to my invitation, and, even more, I thank those who made time to write actual commentaries. -/- References -/- Cassirer, E. (1944). An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven/London: Yale UP. -/- Crapanzano, V. (2004). Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: U of Chicago Press. -/- Gregory M. Nixon University of Northern British Columbia Prince George, British Columbia, Canada Email: [email protected] Websty: http://members.shaw.ca/doknyx. (shrink)

[Proofs; please cite published version] In recent years, some prominent scholars have been making a surprising claim: examining literary texts for hidden depths is overblown, misguided, or indeed downright dangerous. Such examination, they’ve warned us, may lead to the loss of world Heidegger warned of (Gumbrecht), to the world-denying metaphysics Nietzsche warned of (Nehamas), or to the suspicious form of hermeneutics Ricoeur warned of (Best, Marcus, Moi). This paper seeks to suggest that, though the concerns are understandable, there’s ultimately (...) nothing to worry about. The fact that Nietzsche himself happily used metaphors of surface and depth suggests that they are not, in fact, metaphysically fraught. The fact that it’s possible to appreciate surfaces at the same time as depths means that there’s no real danger of losing the world. And as for depth-talk turning us into suspicious hermeneuts, that would happen only if we made two fallacious assumptions: first, that all depths are meanings; second, that all hidden features are in a text by accident. But since plenty of authors hide things deliberately, and since what’s hidden often has nothing to do with propositional content, both assumptions are profoundly mistaken. Meanwhile, the surface/depth metaphor is the only thing that adequately captures the phenomenology of reading, especially when it comes to misdirection-based, hermetic, enigmatic, ironic, or satirical texts, where special activity on our part prompts a sudden leap to a radically different mode of understanding. And unlike its rivals, the surface/depth metaphor reflects a real asymmetry: depths explain surfaces, but not vice versa; surfaces are available without depths, but not the other way around. We need the metaphor, and we need to stay open to hidden depths as we read. As long as we don’t come in with terrible assumptions, nothing bad will happen to us, and plenty of good things will. It’s perfectly safe to go back in the water. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 134-135 [Access article in PDF] Allen Speight. Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 154. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $18.95. Hegel's notorious use of literary references in his Phenomenology of Spirit has been a source of numerous interpretive difficulties, sparking disagreements not only about the actual referents of Hegel's literary (...) allusions, but also—and more importantly—about the meaning and purpose of such allusions. In this insightful, highly readable new book, Allen Speight challenges the stale orthodoxies that have pitted the Phenomenology's systematic/philosophical readers against its literary/historical ones, and offers an innovative interpretation that takes seriously the work's literary structure and allusions, while also giving due consideration to its systematic philosophical aims. Combining the rich sensibility of a literary mind with the careful rigor of a philosophical mind, Speight deftly shows how Hegel's Phenomenology is a work whose very aim, in part, is to transcend the traditional, but often limiting, dichotomy between philosophy and literature.As Speight explains it, the general purpose of this book is to make "a contribution to understanding the philosophical project of the Phenomenology and why that project requires Hegel's appropriation of literary works and forms as it does" (9-10). The book's philosophical point of departure is the critical mass of recent scholarship that sees Hegel's epistemological task in the Phenomenology as essentially Sellarsian in its critique of the "Myth of the Given." For Speight, the Hegelian critique of the myth of the given implies that all knowledge claims are essentially corrigible and socially mediated, and this implies—in turn—that any attempt to draw rigid lines of demarcation between a purely "systematic" and a purely "historical" or "anthropological" approach to philosophy and its problems must ultimately fail. From this interpretive vantage point, Speight holds, a strong case can be made for the essentially literary character of Hegel's Phenomenology, and the essentially philosophical purpose of his literary allusions. As Speight is careful to acknowledge, his own distinctive approach to the Phenomenology is not meant to rule out other, divergent emphases or interpretations, but only to provide "a way of better understanding the role that literature plays within the philosophical enterprise of the work as a whole" (18).Speight begins to deliver the details of his promised "better way" by investigating what he calls the "literary turn" or the seemingly sudden "eruption of the literary" that starts to motivate the Phenomenology's transition from the section on "Reason" to the section on "Spirit." For Speight, the shapes of Active Reason that are crucial in this transition begin to raise a new set of problems concerning human agency. Furthermore, it is not at all a coincidence that Hegel's heightened concern with agency at this juncture of the Phenomenology [End Page 134] is accompanied by an unmistakable burst of literary references. Rather, it is an indicator of Hegel's careful, deliberate, and self-conscious strategy of using literature to make a philosophical point about agency, since it is literature—according to Speight's Hegel—that gives us privileged access to the philosophical problems of agency and their potential resolution.For Speight, Hegel's use of tragedy gives us special insight into the retrospectivity of all human action; his use of comedy points to the theatricality (or what we might call the socially mediated expressivity) of all human action; and his use of the romantic novel points to the necessity (and eventually opens up the possibility) of the forgiveness implied by all human action. While Hegel had already made use of both tragedy and comedy in the Reason section of the Phenomenology, it is only in the Spirit section, Speight argues, that these literary-philosophical shapes are taken up (e.g., in Antigone and Rameau's Nephew) in a historically self-conscious way that can lead (via the "beautiful soul" novel) to the possibility of forgiveness and thereby instigate the transition to the Religion section.Speight's "better way... (shrink)

Philosophers often suggest that their theories of free will are supported by our phenomenology. Just as their theories conflict, their descriptions of the phenomenology of free will often conflict as well. We suggest that this should motivate an effort to study the phenomenology of free will in a more systematic way that goes beyond merely the introspective reports of the philosophers themselves. After presenting three disputes about the phenomenology of free will, we survey the (limited) psychological (...) research on the experiences relevant to the philosophical debates and then describe some pilot studies of our own with the aim of encouraging further research. The data seem to support compatibilist descriptions of the phenomenology more than libertarian descriptions. We conclude that the burden is on libertarians to find empirical support for their more demanding metaphysical theories with their more controversial phenomenological claims. (shrink)

Phenomenological critique attempts to retrieve the lived experience of a human community alienated from its truthful condition and immersed in historical crises brought by processes of objectification and estrangement. This introductory article challenges two methodological assumptions that are largely shared in North American Critical Phenomenology: the definition of phenomenology as a first person approach of experience and the rejection of transcendental eidetics. While reflecting on the importance of otherness and community for phenomenology’s critical orientation, we reconsider the (...) importance of eidetics from the standpoint of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, highlighting its historical and contingent character. Contrary to the received view of Husserl’s classical phenomenology as an idealistic and rigid undertaking, we show that his genetic phenomenology is interested in the material formation of meaning (Sinnbildung), offering resources for a phenomenological approach to a materialist social theory. Keywords: critical phenomenology, critical theory, genetic phenomenology, community, normativity. (shrink)

In the article I discuss functionalist interpretations of Husserlian phenomenology. The first one was coined in the discussion between Hubert Dreyfus and Ronald McIntyre. They argue that Husserl’s phenomenology shares similarities with computational functionalism, and the key similarity is between the concept of noema and the concept of mental representation. I show the weaknesses of that reading and argue that there is another available functionalist reading of Husserlian phenomenology. I propose to shift perspective and approach the relation (...) between phenomenology and functionalism from a methodological perspective, specifically taking into account the functionalist explanatory strategy called functional analysis. I discuss the notion of function in Husserl’s works and Husserl’s idea of functional phenomenology. The key argument I develop is that in functional phenomenology we can find an explanatory strategy which is analogous to the strategy of functional decomposition used in functional analysis. I conclude that the proposed functionalist reading of phenomenology opens a new approach to the integration of phenomenology with cognitive sciences. (shrink)

The internet provides us with a multitude of ways of interacting with one another. In discussions about how technological innovations impact and shape our interpersonal interactions, there is a tendency to assume that encountering people online is essentially different to encountering people offline. Yet, individuals report feeling a sense of togetherness with one another online that echoes offline descriptions. I consider how we can understand people’s experiences of being together with others online, at least in certain instances, as arising out (...) of their feeling together as a we. Using Walther’s phenomenological framework of communality, I explore whether the following might take place online: habitual communal experiences and actual we-experiences. While neither of these sketches amount to a full account of how we find ourselves with others online, I suggest that they reveal how insights from the phenomenology of sociality can be used to deepen our understanding of online communality. What is more, I suggest that the strength of this approach is that in some cases it allows us to circumvent tricky questions about embodiment online and, in others, prompts us to ask to what extent a fully-embodied interaction is really required for we-experiences. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of how existential phenomenology has influenced qualitative research methods across a range of disciplines across the social, health, educational, and psychological sciences. It focuses specifically on how the concepts of “existential structures,” or “existentials”—such as selfhood, temporality, spatiality, affectivity, and embodiment—have been used in qualitative research. After providing a brief introduction to what qualitative research is and why philosophers should be interested in it, the chapter provides clear, straightforward examples of how qualitative researchers have (...) used existentials to analyze qualitative data and design qualitative studies. The chapter is intended to introduce philosophers to existential approaches to phenomenological qualitative research, with the aim of facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. (shrink)

I develop a view of the common factor between subjectively indistinguishable perceptions and hallucinations that avoids analyzing experiences as involving awareness relations to abstract entities, sense-data, or any other peculiar entities. The main thesis is that hallucinating subjects employ concepts (or analogous nonconceptual structures), namely the very same concepts that in a subjectively indistinguishable perception are employed as a consequence of being related to external, mind-independent objects or property-instances. These concepts and nonconceptual structures are identified with modes of presentation types. (...) Since a hallucinating subject is not related to any such objects or property-instances, the concepts she employs remain empty. I argue that the phenomenology of hallucinations and perceptions can be identified with employing concepts and analogous nonconceptual structures. By doing so, I defend an ontologically minimalist view of the phenomenology of experience that (1) vindicates Aristotelianism about types and (2) amounts to a naturalized view of the phenomenology of experience. (shrink)

First, I briefly characterize Dretske’s particular naturalization project, emphasizing his naturalistic reconstruction of the notion of representation. Second, I note some apparent similarities between his notion of representation and Husserl’s notion of intentionality, but I find even more important differences. Whereas Husserl takes intentionality to be an intrinsic, phenomenological feature of thought and experience, Dretske advocates an “externalist” account of mental representation. Third, I consider Dretske’s treatment of qualia, because he takes it to show that his representational account of mind (...) succeeds in naturalizing even the “subjective” features of experience. I claim that Dretske's argument for his account of qualia turns on an ambiguous characterization of qualia. I conclude that he succeeds in naturalizing qualia only if qualia are understood as nonphenomenological features of experience and that he therefore has less to say than he thinks about the subjective life of beings such as us. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea of "objective phenomenology," or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about (...) experience are objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. (shrink)

In this article I present the phenomenological tradition as a new grounding for human rights as universal rights. The hypothesis defended is to conciliate Husserl’s phenomenological method and Reinach’s a priori law in order to offer a new grounding to human rights. In order to combine Husserl and Reinach’s ideas, I propose to expand the comprehension of a priori. It would be present as eidos of each object and I name it as material a priori; it also be present in (...) the eidetic relations and I name it as formal a priori. Yet the object would have an essence, a necessary content, a material a priori, and necessary states of affairs, necessary relations and connections, a formal a priori. Reinach, in The A priori Foundations of the Civil Law, describes eidetic relations, such as, the relation between promise, claim and obligation. I propose three eidetic universalities to ground law, these are what I will call human rights. I also face a few difficulties presented by DuBois and De Vecchi derived from the amoral approach of a priori laws. Then, I highlight the difference between this proposition and Albert’s. Finally, I defend the proposition that a priori laws are beyond natural and positive laws. (shrink)