We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country's most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of various (...) forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls's wake.--. (shrink)
Presenting a comprehensive portrayal of the reading of Chinese and Buddhist philosophy in early 20th-century German thought, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in early Twentieth-Century German Thought examines the implications of these readings for contemporary issues in comparative and intercultural philosophy. Through a series of case studies from the late 19th-century and early 20th-century, Eric Nelson focuses on the reception and uses of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism in German philosophy, covering figures as diverse as Buber, Heidegger, and Misch. He argues that (...) the growing intertextuality between traditions cannot be appropriately interpreted through notions of exclusive identities, closed horizons, or unitary traditions. Providing an account of the context, motivations, and hermeneutical strategies of early twentieth-century European thinkers' interpretation of Asian philosophy, Nelson also throws new light on the question of the relation between Heidegger and Asian philosophy. Reflecting the growing interest in the possibility of intercultural and global philosophy, Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in early Twentieth-Century German Thought opens up the possibility of a more inclusive intercultural conception of philosophy. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/chinese-and-buddhist-philosophy-in-early-twentieth-century-german-thoug ht-9781350002562/#sthash.1lY6OTYj.dpuf. (shrink)
Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the myriad things, (...) and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology. This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history. (shrink)
In this wide-ranging and authoritative volume, leading scholars engage with the philosophy and writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a key figure in nineteenth-century thought. Their chapters cover his innovative philosophical strategies and explore how they can be understood in relation to their historical situation, as well as presenting incisive interpretations of Dilthey's arguments, including their development, their content, and their influence on later thought. A key focus is on how Dilthey's work remains relevant to current debates around art and literature, the (...) biographical and autobiographical self, knowledge, language, science, culture, history, society, and psychology and the embodied mind. The volume will be important for researchers in hermeneutics, aesthetics, practical philosophy, and the history of German philosophy, providing a valuable introduction to Dilthey's work as well as detailed critical analysis of its ongoing significance. (shrink)
The capability approach to distributive justice, as defended by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, represents perhaps the most influential recent attempt to reconcile the competing demands of liberty and equality. Specifically, capability theorists have claimed that their insistence on the universal cultivation of a set of capabilities for basic human "functionings" is fully consistent with a liberal neutrality commitment. Their reason is that these capabilities are, like Rawls's primary goods, rational to want "whatever else one wants." This article suggests, in (...) contrast, that the capability approach fails to satisfy the neutrality requirement endorsed by both Sen and Nussbaum. It further suggests that the non-neutral character of the approach reflects its Rawlsian lineage, and raises serious doubts about the coherence of Rawls's account of primary goods. (shrink)
Isaiah Berlin's distinction between "negative" and "positive" concepts of liberty has recently been defended on new and interesting grounds. Proponents of this dichotomy used to equate positive liberty with "self-mastery "-the rule of our rational nature over ourpassions and impulses. However, Berlin's critics have made the case that this account does not employ a separate "concept" of liberty: although the constraints it envisions are internal, rather than external, forces, the freedom in question remains "negative" (freedom is still seen as the (...) absence of such impediments). Responding to this development, Berlin's defenders have increasingly tended to identify positive liberty with "self-realization." The argument is that such an account of freedom is genuinely "nonnegative," in that it does not refer to the absence of constraints on action. This essay argues that the claims made on behalf of "freedom as self-realization" cannot withstand scrutiny, and that they fail to isolate a coherent view of liberty that is distinguishable from the absence of constraint. (shrink)
Early Daoism, as articulated in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, indirectly addresses environmental issues by intimating a non-reductive naturalistic ethics calling on humans to be open and responsive to the specificities and interconnections of the world and environment to which they belong. "Dao" is not a substantial immanent or transcendent entity but the lived enactment of the intrinsic worth of the "myriad things" and the natural world occurring through how humans address and are addressed by them. Early Daoism potentially corrects (...) both anthropocentrism and biocentrism in environmental ethics by disclosing the things themselves in the context of the selfcultivation of life. Given increasing environmental devastation and the dominance of views, practices, and institutions reducing nature to a background and/or raw material for human activity, this "ethics of encounter" discloses the life of things as inexhaustibly more than human projects and constructs, extending ethical recognition and responsibility beyond social relations and the social self. (shrink)
Summary A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” material others such as environments and animals; the bonds (...) and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. “This is an extremely impressive, original, and thorough treatment of two key twentieth-century thinkers and their applicability to the most pressing social and political issues of our time.” — Jeffrey A. Bernstein, author of Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History “This book is an excellent and timely contribution to political and environmental philosophy, located around a nuanced historical and philosophical approach to Levinas and Adorno. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with these figures or with the current moment.” — Martin Shuster, author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. (shrink)
In paradigmatic Confucian (Ruist) discourses, emotion (qing) has been depicted as co-arising with human nature (xing) and an irreducible constitutive source of human practices and their interpretation. The affects are concurrently naturally arising and alterable through how individuals react and respond to them and how they are or are not cultivated. That is, emotions are relationally mediated realities given in and transformed through how they are felt, understood, interpreted, and acted upon. Confucian discourses have elucidated the ethical character of the (...) emotions and sought to understand and cultivate emotional life as a hermeneutical and ethical task in establishing expectable patterns of human flourishing that orient virtues, roles, and relations. In this chapter, I explore the extent to which classical Ruist and Neo-Confucian discourses offer hermeneutical models for interpreting the complex interconnections between moral psychology and their mediations in the ethical life world. By examining a range of Confucian sources, the author argues that Confucian “moral psychologies” clarify affective dimensions of human existence within the interpersonal nexus of ethical life and indicate ways of cultivating affective awareness for relationally understanding and interpreting others, one’s world, and oneself. (shrink)
The Greek Tradition in Republic Thought completely rewrites the standard history of republican political theory. It excavates an identifiably Greek strain of republican thought which attaches little importance to freedom as non-dependence and sees no intrinsic value in political participation. This tradition's central preoccupations are not honour and glory, but happiness and justice - defined, in Plato's terms, as the rule of the best men. This set of commitments yields as startling readiness to advocate the corrective redistribution of wealth, and (...) even the outright abolition of private property. The Greek tradition was revived in England during the early sixteenth century and was broadly influential throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its exponents included Sir Thomas More, James Harrington, Montesquieu and Thomas Jefferson, and it contributed significantly to the ideological underpinnings of the American Founding as well as the English Civil Wars. (shrink)
Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “negative” and “positive” concepts of liberty has recently been defended on newand interesting grounds. Proponents of this dichotomy used to equate positive liberty with “self-mastery”—the rule of our rational nature over our passions and impulses. However, Berlin’s critics have made the case that this account does not employ a separate “ concept” of liberty: although the constraints it envisions are internal, rather than external, forces, the freedom in question remains “negative”. Responding to this development, Berlin’s defenders (...) have increasingly tended to identify positive liberty with “self-realization.” The argument is that such an account of freedom is genuinely “nonnegative,” in that it does not refer to the absence of constraints on action. This essay argues that the claims made on behalf of “freedom as self-realization” cannot withstand scrutiny, and that they fail to isolate a coherent viewof liberty that is distinguishable fromthe absence of constraint. (shrink)
Early Confucian “moral psychology” developed in the context of undoing reactive emotions in order to promote relationships of reciprocal recognition. Early Confucian texts diagnose the pervasiveness of reactive emotions under specific social conditions and respond with the ethical-psychological mandate to counter them in self-cultivation. Undoing negative affects is a basic element of becoming ethically noble, while the ignoble person is fixated on limited self-interested concerns and feelings of being unrecognized. Western ethical theory typically accepts equality and symmetry as conditions of (...) disentangling resentment; yet this task requires the asymmetrical recognition of others. Confucian ethics integrates a nuanced and realistic moral psychology with the normatively oriented project of self-cultivation necessary for dismantling complex negative emotions in promoting a condition of humane benevolence that is oriented toward others and achieved through self-cultivation. (shrink)
I consider the intertextuality between Chinese and Western thought by exploring how images, metaphors, and ideas from the texts associated with Zhuangzi and Laozi were appropriated in early twentieth-century German philosophy. This interest in “Lao-Zhuang Daoism” encompasses a diverse range of thinkers including Buber and Heidegger. I examine how the problematization of utility, usefulness, and “purposiveness” in Zhuangzi and Laozi becomes a key point for their German philosophical reception; how it is the poetic character of the Zhuangzi that hints at (...) an appropriate response to the crisis and loss of meaning that characterizes technological modernity and its instrumental technological rationality; that is, how the “poetic” and “spiritual” world perceived in Lao-Zhuang thought became part of Buber's and Heidegger's critical encounter and confrontation with technological modernity; and how their concern with Zhuangzi does not signify a return to a dogmatic religiosity or otherworldly mysticism; it anticipates a this-worldly spiritual or poetic way of dwelling immanently within the world. (shrink)
One critique of the early Daoist texts associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi is that they neglect the human and lack a proper sense of ethical personhood in maintaining the primacy of an impersonal dehumanizing “way.” This article offers a reconsideration of the appropriateness of such negative evaluations by exploring whether and to what extent the ethical sensibility unfolded in the Zhuangzi is aporetic, naturalistic, and/or religious. As an ethos of cultivating life and free and easy wandering by performatively enacting openness (...) and responsiveness to things in an immanent this-worldly context, the Zhuangzi is oriented toward the relational attunement of disposition and practice rather than toward metaphysics or religion in a transcendent sense. It consequently suggests an immanent anarchic ethics without principles while neither forgetting nor reifying the sacred and the mundane in its playful illumination of the biospiritual dynamics of cultivating life. (shrink)
This chapter examines: (1) the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger's political engagement on behalf of the National Socialist regime and his ambivalence toward some but not all of its political beliefs and tactics; (2) his limited "critique" of vulgar National Socialism and its biologically based racism for the sake of his own ethnocentric vision of the historical uniqueness of the German people and Germany's central role in Europe as a contested site situated between West and East, technological modernity (...) and the Asiatic. Heidegger did not break with radical right-wing Germanist thought, as some scholars have argued. He at most placed National Socialism within his narrative of the history of being, metaphysics, and technology, and thereby relativized it without addressing either its uniqueness or its totalitarian structures and practices. Heidegger formulated his own metaphysical and ontological version of Antisemitism during the National Socialist period. This vision was deeply connected with his understanding of the "history of being" and was intensified during and immediately after the Second World War. Heidegger could perceive no difference between the Shoah and the Allied bombing, defeat, and occupation of Germany. Heidegger's post-war philosophy (of home, history and technology) is deeply shaped by, and remained complicit with, his thinking during this period. (shrink)
This paper challenges the standard view that Kant ignored the role of prudence in moral life by arguing that there are two notions of prudence at work in his moral and political thought. First, prudence is ordinarily understood as a technical imperative of skill that consists in reasoning about the means to achieve a particular conditional end. Second, prudence functions as a secondary form of practical thought that plays a significant role in the development of applied moral and political judgment. (...) The political judgment of citizens and politicians is prudence regulatively guided by right and virtue. As informed by regulative ideas, prudential judgment negotiates the demands of these ideas in relation to the cultural, political, and social realities of a particular form of life. This sense of prudence is empirically informed and involves a context-sensitive application of morality as well as conceptions of individual and general welfare. (shrink)
At a time of great and increasing interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this volume draws readers into what Levinas described as "philosophy itself"--"a discourse always addressed to another." Thus the philosopher himself provides the thread that runs through these essays on his writings, one guided by the importance of the fact of being addressed--the significance of the Saying much more than the Said. The authors, leading Levinas scholars and interpreters from across the globe, explore the philosopher's relationship to (...) a wide range of intellectual traditions, including theology, philosophy of culture, Jewish thought, phenomenology, and the history of philosophy. They also engage Levinas's contribution to ethics, politics, law, justice, psychoanalysis and epistemology, among other themes. In their radical singularity, these essays reveal the inalienable alterity at the heart of Levinas's ethics. At the same time, each essay remains open to the others, and to the perspectives and positions they advocate. Thus the volume, in its quality and diversity, enacts an authentic encounter with Levinas's thought, embodying an intellectual ethics by virtue of its style. Bringing together contributions from philosophy, theology, literary theory, gender studies, and political theory, this book offers a deeper and more thorough encounter with Levinas's ethics than any yet written. (shrink)
As a contribution to a critical yet responsive materialist ethics of environments and animals, I reexamine the significance of nature and animals in the critical social theory of Theodor Adorno. In response to the anthropocentric primacy of intersubjective discourse and recognition in recent figures associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Habermas and Honneth, I argue for the ecological import of the aporetic dialectic of nature and society diagnosed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s later works. Adorno’s (...) continuing confrontation with the “domination of nature” traces the tensions between the ideological construction and resistance of “nature” as well as the instrumentalization and implicit disruptive promise of sensuous life. It indicates the material and bodily bonds between human and animal happiness and suffering, the ambiguous role of mimesis in domination and emancipation, and the critical prospect of an unforced and non-coercive freedom toward the object and answerability toward socially and historically mediated yet non-identical natural life. (shrink)
Although the words “nature” and “ecology” have to be qualified in discussing either Daoism or Heidegger, the author argues that a different and potentially helpful approach to questions of nature, ecology, and environmental ethics can be articulated from the works of Martin Heidegger and the early Daoist philosophers Laozi and Zhuangzi. Despite very different cultural contexts and philosophical strategies, they bring into play the spontaneity and event-character of nature while unfolding a sense of how to be responsive to the world (...) through a practice of “non-coercive-activity” and “letting be”. Significant ecological implications can be drawn from the recognition of nature reinterpreted as dao and as Sein. The openness and receptiveness of experiencing the world as being-under-way suggests what might be called a “pluralistic holism,” involving the recognition of both the interconnectedness and the unique singularity of things, and the possibility of being responsive to the phenomena themselves in their mutuality as wellas in their particular givenness. (shrink)
Hegel remarked in his discussion of the nothing in the Science of Logic that: “It is well known that in oriental systems, and essentially in Buddhism, nothing, or the void, is the absolute principle.” Schopenhauer commented in a discussion of the joy of death in The World as Will and Representation: “The existence which we know he willingly gives up: what he gets instead of it is in our eyes nothing, because our existence is, with reference to that, nothing. The (...) Buddhist faith calls it Nirvana, i.e., extinction.” It is striking how nineteenth-century German philosophical discourses concerning negativity, nihility, and nothingness explicitly refer to Buddhism, which was initially conceived by Christian missionaries as a “cult of nothingness” and became entangled with European debates concerning pessimism and nihilism. In this article, I reconsider how the interpretation of negativity and nothingness in Schopenhauer and nineteenth-century German thought informed the reception of Buddhism as a philosophical and religious discourse, and trace the ways in which Buddhist emptiness was reinterpreted in the context of the Western problematic of being and nothingness. (shrink)
This paper is about the relevance of the ineffable and the singular to hermeneutics. I respond to standard criticisms of Friedrich Schleiermacher by Karl Barth and Hans-Georg Gadamer in order to clarify his understanding of language, interpretation, and religion. Schleiermacher’s “indicative hermeneutics” is developed in the context of the ethical significance of communication and the ineffable. The notion of trace is employed in order to interpret the paradox of speaking about that which cannot be spoken. The trace is not a (...) brute singularity but bears a fundamental relationship to the word—and ultimately the word of God—for Schleiermacher. (shrink)
Leah Kalmanson's Cross-Cultural Existentialism offers an original and provocative interpretation of existentialist themes and threads running through classical and modern East Asian Buddhist and Ruist philosophical sources. The book takes its point of departure in existential questions concerning meaningfulness and meaning-formative practices, as articulated in European existentialism and postexistentialism, and traces how these questions are and can be addressed in their own terms in dharmic and Song dynasty Ruist discourses of karma, vital force, and ritual propriety. The book elucidates existential (...) techniques and practices encompassing case studies of Buddhist... (shrink)
Responding to critiques of Dilthey's interpretive psychology, I revisit its relation with epistemology and the human sciences. Rather than reducing knowledge to psychology and psychology to subjective understanding, Dilthey articulated the epistemic worth of a psychology involving (1) an impure phenomenology of embodied, historically-situated, and worldly consciousness as individually lived yet complicit with its naturally and socially constituted contexts, (2) experience- and communication-oriented processes of interpreting others, (3) the use of third-person structural-functional analysis and causal explanation, and (4) a recognition (...) of the ungroundability, facticity, and conflict inherent in knowledge and life. (shrink)
In this article, Kierkegaard's depiction of the teleological suspension of the ethical is contrasted with Levinas's articulation of the emergence of the ethical in the Akedah narrative drawing on Jewish, Christian, and Chinese philosophical and religious perspectives. The narrative of Abraham's binding of Isaac illustrates both the distance and nearness between Kierkegaard and Levinas. Both realize that the encounter with God is a traumatic one that cannot be defined, categorized, or sublimated through ordinary ethical reflection or the everyday social-moral life (...) of a community. For Kierkegaard, the self is forced back upon itself, exposed to the otherness of its singular unfathomable source; in Levinas a traumatic exposure and delivery over to the Other occurs. It leads to an inescapable ethical responsibility more fundamental than either religious faith or theoretical cognitive knowledge. The rupture and aporia of Abraham's sacrifice appears to destroy the categories of the ethical. Yet it might suggest something other than the nihilistic or voluntaristic destruction of ethics. It indicates instead a different modality of the ethical; an aporetic and paradoxical ethics that resonates in part with classical Chinese Daoist sources such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. (shrink)
