This is a study of the correspondence between Forms and particulars in Plato. The aim is to determine whether they exhibit an ontological symmetry, in other words, whether there is always one where there is the other. This points to two questions, one on the existence of things that do not have corresponding Forms, the other on the existence of Forms that do not have corresponding things. Both questions have come up before. But the answers have not been (...) sufficiently sensitive to the intricacies of the questions. Nor have they been adequately resourceful with what little evidence there is in the original sources. The intention here is to make up for that deficiency, not just with better answers but also with better insight into the questions. (shrink)

This paper describes how body regimes are effectuated in the prevailing treatment strategy of physiotherapy. The process of self‐mastering in the context of sports‐related injuries is highlighted. Through a Foucauldian perspective on body regimes the aim is to shed light on the process of individualization and self‐mastery in rehabilitation. The treatment of illness in the physiotherapy clinic does not characterize the patient as sick, and exempt the patient from daily duties and expectations. The empirical data include 17 qualitative illness narratives (...) and several years of fieldwork observing patients with anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in a physiotherapy clinic. The study demonstrates how the expectation that the patients be active and self‐mastering permeates the total process of treatment. The individual responsibility for personal well‐being is a recurrent phenomenon in public health services in general, and specifically prominent in the rehabilitation of sports injuries. (shrink)

Nihilism is the logic of nothing as something, which claims that Nothing Is. Its unmaking of things, and its forming of formless things, strain the fundamental terms of existence: what it is to be, to know, to be known. But nihilism, the antithesis of God, is also like theology. Where nihilism creates nothingness, condenses it to substance, God also makes nothingness creative. Negotiating the borders of spirit and substance, theology can ask the questions of nihilism that other (...) disciplines do not ask: Where is it? What is it made of? Why is it so destructive? How can it be made holy, or overcome? Genealogy of Nihilism rereads Western history in the light of nihilistic logic, which pervades two millennia of Western thought and is coming to fruition in our present age in a virulently dangerous manner. From Parmenides to Alain Badiou, via Plotinus, Avicenna, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze and Derrida, a genealogy of nothingness can be witnessed in development, with devastating consequences for the way we live. Conor Cunningham's elaborate and sophisticated theology, spanning the disciplines of philosophy, science and popular culture, permits us to see not simply how modernity has formulated its philosophies of nothing, but how these philosophies might be transfigures by the crucial difference theology makes, and so be reconcilable with life and the living - with the very gift which being is. (shrink)

Discussions of the object as a key to understanding central aspects of modern and contemporary art. Artists increasingly refer to "post-object-based" work while theorists engage with material artifacts in culture. A focus on "object-based" learning treats objects as vectors for dialogue across disciplines. Virtual imaging enables the object to be abstracted or circumvented, while immaterial forms of labor challenge materialist theories. This anthology surveys such reappraisals of what constitutes the "objectness" of production, with art as its focus. Among the topics (...) it examines are the relation of the object to subjectivity; distinctions between objects and things; the significance of the object's transition from inert mass to tool or artifact; and the meanings of the everyday in the found object, repetition in the replicated or multiple object, loss in the absent object, and abjection in the formless or degraded object. It also explores artistic positions that are anti-object; theories of the experimental, liminal or mental object; and the role of objects in performance. The object becomes a prism through which to reread contemporary art and better understand its recent past. Artists surveyed include Georges Adéagbo, Art in Ruins, Iain Baxter, Louise Bourgeois, Pavel Büchler, Lygia Clark, Claude Closky, Brian Collier, Jimmie Durham, Fischli & Weiss, Luca Frei, Meschac Gaba, Isa Genzken, Gruppe Geflecht, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, John Latham, Antje Majewski, Gustav Metzger, Cady Noland, Gabriel Orozco, Adrian Piper, Falke Pisano, Eva Rothschild, Aura Satz, Kenneth Snelson, Hito Steyerl, Josef Strau, Alina Szapocznikow, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Erwin Wurm Writers include Homi K. Bhabha, Jack Burnham, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Lynne Cooke, Gillo Dorfles, Jean Fisher, Ferreira Gullar, Charles Harrison, Paulo Herkenhoff, Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Jean-François Lyotard, Lev Manovich, Ursula Meyer, Bruno Munari, Georges Perec, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Dieter Roelstraete, Howard Singerman, Nancy Spector, Marcus Steinweg, Anne Wagner, Gérard Wajcman, Slavoj Zizek. (shrink)

The lush surreal illustrations of this book and its short humoristic story telling make it a fun, quick read for all ages and for anyone obliquely interested in our thirst for development and the nature of who we are. Through a poetic parody of human's desires for more of everything, we become aware that such a quest does not bring us any closer to knowing ourselves or seeing, as contemporary scientific or spiritual leaders are telling us: all things and (...) beings of our planet are intimately related, alive and ultimately "One." While each colorful painting alludes to our close relationship with the world, short lines innocently and wryly comment on the predicaments of our lives pertaining to the industrial world, where dream and reality often appear intertwined. Through the shifting identities of forms, this album gives us a glance at our own formless nature and how our excessive wish for love, home, comfort, power, and productivity inexorably transforms our worldview and make us bypass our deep infinite nature, which cannot be contained through words. As some indigenous traditions have taught us: "life is like a dream. One wonders whether it is by living that we dream or by dreaming that we live.". (shrink)

According to the mythical-religious literature time is determined by the eternal nature of divinity or origin of all things. From this adagio, theological literature is provoked and studies on the eternal nature of divinity suggest that if the universe was created the image of its creator the first must also be eternal. Therefore the question arises: how to shape that which by nature is formless, infinite, namely eternity? To answer this question the following paper develops a brief history (...) about the Judeo-Christian tradition on the problem of time and its relationship with eternity and also tries to prepare at the end one logical answer to the question about the form of eternity. (shrink)

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

The human animal feels fear: the ancient tranquil hordes, inhabitants of infinite plains where time stood still, have dissolved into a swarming, formless mass rushing into the future as if into the void: without a plan, without a leader, without roots; perhaps the only thing that guides it is the vague feeling of being a body whose limbs can not survive if separated.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, CultureRoger CorlessOn Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture. By Robert Magliola. Preface by Edith Wyschogrod. American Academy of Religion Cultural Criticism Series, edited by Cleo McNelly Kearns, Number 3. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997. xxii + 202 pp.How does one review a deconstructionist book—a book that seeks not only to discuss deconstruction but to be deconstructionist, a book that simultaneously takes books seriously and mocks (...) both the author and the reader for imagining there could ever be such a thing as a book, a something that is written and then read, a writing that says that everything is Writing but that all Writing/writing is written under erasure and so is (as p. 202 explicitly, self-reflexively proclaims itself) an empty page that is, by that very emptiness, marked? Derrida derides the Introduction, for, he asks (without speaking, parlant avec dénégations, denying that he is expressing denials) what is being Introduced? What do we think we are doing when we lead a reader into (introducere) something that is not there to be lead into until a reader is lead or leads himself or herself into it? Do we not, thus, need an Introduction to the Introduction, and another Introduction to that Introduction, a regressus ad infinitum introductionum? Edith Wyschogrod writes a Preface. Does she mean us to think that the book has a Face, and that it therefore needs a pre-Face? Does she think that she/we face toward the book, or does the book face toward her/us, or does/do she/we both together face toward the putative subject matter, which itself has two faces, Buddhism and Christianity? And who am I, the reviewer?This cannot be a review (a looking-over), but it might be a re-view (a looking-again), which informs (in-forms, incarnates) itself so that you, dear Introducer of Yourself, can review (look over) your presuppositions about Buddhism, Christianity, life-worlds, and reality in general, and re-view them (re-visit them, look again at them) so as to reform (re-view, see-again, as formless, and thus re-form) them.One draws a circle, says Charles Fort, beginning anywhere. So let us open the book at random. On page 84 we find: “Taiwan has over 25,000 students studying in the United States, the largest foreign contingent in American universities.” This aggressively logocentric sentence is provided with a footnote: “Statistic of 1987. Since then, the proportion of Chinese from the People’ [sic] Republic has become much more noticeable.” Hmm—a little typo, but nevertheless we are, to our surprise, deep in the overheated hotel conference rooms of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. So, why are we told this? It is part of a section that cuts (“Lt. sect-, cut”, we are reminded on p. 175) across (cross-hatches) Magliola’s life/lives run/runs (Curriculum Vitae, Curricula Vitae, Curricula Vitae Novae, Curricula Vitarum, as the chapter headings have it) as an academic, a Catholic, an almost-priest, a Buddhist meditator, a husband, a divorcé, an Italian, an American, [End Page 216] a resident of Taiwan. All these spill out from the overstuffed closet of Magliola’s life/lives, which, without warning, he opens upon us and then sits among the salade challenging the reader to become bricoleur. But if we do, we feel we have missed the point. Or we have seen the point—which is just as bad.Crosshatch: that’s the theme, I think. Cross, “X” (both the Roman character “eks” and the Greek character “chi”), crucifix, saltire, cross-religions, cross-cultures, cross-countries, cross-country, crossing-out (rature), and finally, revelation by relationis oppositio under/through four forks (“Il ne s’écrit que sous la grille des quatre fourches”—p. 177, quoting Derrida).Magliola is on this cross, he is cross (angry/mad), he is crucified by it, he hopes to cross over by means of it. “This book is not written for the arrived by the arrived” (p. xix), yet he is “on the water, not at sea” (p. xx).It may not be incorrect to say that the book is in... (shrink)

June 2022 A Revolutionary New Metaphysics, Based on Consciousness, and a Call to All Philosophers We are in a unique moment of our history unlike any previous moment ever. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. As I write, the planet is in deep trouble, heat, fires, great storms, and record flooding, (...) weather patterns drastic everywhere. Capitalism has been so successful in supplying us with an endless array of consumer items, that we have never noticed there is a cost. But there is a cost, the cost is the very life of the Earth herself, and now the day of reckoning is here. Days of reckoning are most often days of rath. But I am hoping that this is a day of major Awakening over the entire planet. We have caused a crisis so great for the Earth we can hardly get our minds around it. But I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis are ideas, about who and what the Earth is, Ourselves, and what we are here for. I am proposing that this is a call to all philosophy and philosophers to rethink ourselves from the ground up. The human race has never gotten the Earth right and now we must, for the Earth is the true foundation for civilization. We are in deep trouble with the Earth, and it owes to the fact that the great male thinkers never got the Earth right, they could never make the connection between the life of mind and the life of the Earth. I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis we are in are ideas. And that in fact the planet is in the grip of a false metaphysics, and scientific image of nature that really comes most recently from Descartes. His conviction that matter, and with it the Earth, are simply the weighable, the measurable the extended in space and time, utterly devoid of any inner life of mind thoughts or Consciousness. This view of matter and the Earth goes back to the very dawn of thought, Descartes is just its most recent and comprehensive version of things. This view of matter is really a false metaphysics that dominates most of the modern world and underpins the whole scientific image of nature itself. I am proposing this is a false metaphysics and offering a new version of things based on Consciousness. If there is a single idea fueling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something without Consciousness. When you intend to ravage and savage the planet, turn it into consumer items to be converted into money in the bank, first pretend that all of the bright beings in the natural world are devoid of Consciousness, just “things” you do not have to have any conscious about destroying them. I am proposing that this term Consciousness, that has appeared as term and a problem for modern science, is the key to getting ourselves right with the Earth. I propose this new theory for science will ramify into every other disciplines as well, and the ways we think just about everything. This old paradigm based on a false theory of matter, has run its course, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction. We need new ideas, and we need them now. You will find my recent work in the Scientific God Journal under the title: Consciousness as the Organizing Principle, and a very complete version of my arguments for this term Consciousness, along with radical reinterpretation of modern science itself, on the Galileo Commission site. It is a radical moment for all of the thinkers among us, take this as my small contribution to rethinking ourselves in new terms, based on my understanding that the true basis for the whole of Being, the Universe, the Cosmos, and with them Ourselves, is this term Consciousness. And unpack it. And I predict that with this term Consciousness every intractable human problem in both science and the modern world will go down like a line of dominos before it. And so, here are a few new ideas I would offer you. These are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine, a great Awakening as of Springtime after a long dark and lonely Winter. We are leaving behind us an old civilization based on male dominance, fear lies and control, now in decay, disease, and death disintegrating all around us. We are moving into a whole new civilization based on Love and Truth. A new civilization requires new basic terms values and first principles. And so, I return to Descartes. 1. Just over 300 years ago a young man travelling with the army found himself stranded in a foreign town in a bare room lit by a candle with nothing to do but think. And in a couple of nights Descartes laid the entire thought foundations for modern science and most of the modern world. It isn’t clear that modern philosophers with their funding sources of grants, their graduate students, their reputation and all the perks and privileges of academia can do any better. Descartes claimed there are just two principles in the Universe, Matter and Mind. God was pure mind; human beings were mind and matter. And we are the only ones on the planet with mind. Everything else all of the bright array of beings who share the planet with us are simply matter. And matter? The weighable the measurable the extended in space and time utterly devoid of any inner life of thoughts, feelings, or Consciousness This classification was a boon for developing science. Scientists did not have to worry about any inner life in nature, ideas or Consciousness, they could just set about weighing and measuring, as they have until the present day. But it was a disaster for the Earth. Earth was once worshiped as a Goddess. With Descartes she became almost overnight “things.” Simply commodities and resources, an endless of supply of consumer items, to be turned into money in the bank. And now Descartes concept of matter is up for us. If there is a single idea that is enabling and driving the destruction of the Earth, it is the conviction that Earth is something without Consciousness. This whole scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is driving the destruction of the Earth, and driving us all insane, and it needs to change. Ever since Descartes formulated Dualism, scientists and philosophers have been trying to get rid of it. They have done this by attempting to make matter the fundamental term of reality, and to explain mind or Consciousness in terms of matter. And now, Consciousness has emerged as term and a problem for modern science. 2. The prevailing Universe picture has been mainly based on the belief that Consciousness appears only at the end of evolution in ourselves and some of the higher animals when matter attains “a certain state of complexity” and it is produced by neurons in the brain. But Consciousness is nothing real in itself, the neurons are doing the work, Consciousness is simply a byproduct of neural activity. As William James summed up this position, not his: Consciousness is to the brain as a shadow to the runner, it runs beside him but never influences his stride. And so, the great problem of neuroscience: How do neurons produce Consciousness? So far, no one has been able to say how. All we have is parallelism. Two processes are running in parallel a train of neural events and a train of Consciousness events. And so, which one is primary? The face of neuroscience and much of the modern world is that the neural events are what is really real, Consciousness is secondary. The conviction that Consciousness is something produced by neurons is so deeply held and has been so for so long, that it seems like an obvious fact. It is in fact an assumption and a theory, and it could all well be the other way around. The scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is now up for us. It has enabled the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a unique place in our own evolution where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, there are the best reasons for rethinking Descartes concepts of matter. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to escape dualism by making matter the fundamental term. And now, this has not worked. In a nutshell: The mind body problem, the “hard problem of Consciousness” ---how do neurons in the brain, atoms and molecules give rise to ideas thoughts and feelings and who what and where is the “I” who sees them? And then, the near-death experience. I remind you of the truth of the near-death experience. The body in the bed is brain dead eeg flat, but the patient, pure Consciousness is hovering at the ceiling watching the doctors work over the body below, able to read dials he could not have seen from the bed, sometimes able to events in the corridor beyond the room, all subsequently confirmed by the doctors. Evidence as good as it gets that the patient really was out of his body. And so, the patient is able to see without eyes, hear without ears and to think and remember without a brain. There is not a single scientific principle that can account for this. And I am proposing that the near-death experience is a threshold and a key for a much deeper understanding of the Universe. These three problems are so hard they cannot be solved by present scientific principles and therefore call all present principles and ways of thought into question. When your axioms cannot account for the data, it is time to drop them and find better fundamental terms. We have not been able to solve the problems of Consciousness with the assumption that matter is the most basic and fundamental term. And so, if Cartesian dualism is to be overcome at all, we need to try it the other way around. 3. We are in the position of Copernicus. Remember Copernicus? He was making his calculations on the assumption that the Earth was the center of the Universe until they became so unwieldy that he decided to try it all the other way around. To make the sun the center, the Earth revolving around it. And lo, all of his data fell neatly into place. I am proposing a whole new Universe picture. Evolution makes us continuous with every other being, Consciousness would not be in us if it were not in them also, and then, in the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living beings. I propose to make Consciousness the most basic term and see what follows. I am in fact, proposing a new Copernican Revolution, that Consciousness is the true basis for the Universe and the right fundamental term, for science itself all other disciplines as well, and the whole of the modern world. And I predict that every intractable problem in science or the modern world, will go down like a line of dominos before it. In a nutshell: Consciousness and not matter is “first and fundamental” in the Universe, it is there from the very “Beginning” everything has it and all of the true causalities, the explanatory principles belong to it. Not to matter. What then is matter? All matter is an Appearance of something much more real, Consciousness. All matter is an expression of Consciousness, even the least little bit of matter contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. And so, we revise the scientific image of nature. Science at present is two termed, matter/energy. It needs to become three termed: Matter/energy/Consciousness, with the recognition that all of the basic principles, the true causalities of events, and of the Universe belong to Consciousness. And now physics. To accommodate this new Universe picture physics needs to alter just one term, energy. All energy contains Consciousness, that idea alone will change our world forever. The animals the trees the plants are just as conscious as we are, as is the Earth herself, a continuum of many forms of Consciousness of which our own is one. The Earth consists of interacting and intersecting forms of Consciousness, Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness. A remarkable work has just appeared entitled “Beyond Words What Animals Feel and Think.” Describing in detail how like ourselves all of the animals are. And the more we can see how like us everything else really is, the harder it will be for us to do them all in, in the interest of turning them into consumer items. And so, here is a new principle of understanding, that entails completely new forms of explanation, and a whole new Universe picture to be spelled out in terms of Consciousness and its various properties. This is a Universe that is aware awake and Enspirited throughout. And so, there is only one principle, not two. And so, how does Consciousness work? There is “no mind/body problem.” My Consciousness is aligning the Consciousness of neurons in the brain, that aligns the Consciousness of all other cells in the body, that aligns the Consciousness of molecules and atoms themselves. Mainly from the top down, but also interactive, and not reduction to the purely physical forces. 4. And so, here is a radical new Universe picture, and with it a new way to think about the Universe itself, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. It requires a complete revision of both of the terms of modern science itself. The problem of the modern world owes in deep measure to Descartes concept of matter as something devoid of interior life. But he is only the most powerful and simple expression of a whole tradition of thought that predates him, that goes back to the very dawn of thought itself. It owes to the conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was something devoid of reason, or mind, and therefore something to be held in complete contempt. We are emerging from a civilization based on contempt for the Earth, and down the road, it will become contempt for the body, sex, women, the Native people, and people of color everywhere. And so, this entire tradition is now up for us, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction, and we need to get beyond it. I am proposing that this term Consciousness is the way out. The missing piece of the puzzle and the idea whose time has come. And it will enable us to move into a completely new civilization based on respect for the Earth, women, sex, people of color, that honors everyone and has a place for all. Revolutions in science occur when new data show up that cannot be accounted for by existing paradigms (Thomas Kuhns: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Consciousness, and all the properties and problems of Consciousness are just such data, and they compel a new scientific revolution. But we are a scientific age. A new Copernican revolution in science is such as revolution everywhere. And Consciousness is the key to getting every other reality at all levels and depths right as well. It will enable us finally to get the Earth right, get ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. Archimedes: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. I am proposing a new synthesis among our fundamental terms in which this term Consciousness is the new lynchpin. And so, I return once more to Descartes. Descartes in the Mediations was a dualist, they were two realities interacting in the pineal gland mind and body. But Descartes age was high on “Cartesianisms,” on Descartes concept of matter. Animals were simply cleverly wired machines (Hobbes called them automata). Rumor had it that Descartes followers went about kicking dogs reasoning that their howls were not due to any feelings of pain, but simply the wiring of the machine. We have been doing this to the Earth ever since, and now the Earth is not going to stand for it any longer. It is time we all woke up. There is no matter in Descartes sense of it, or in Plato and Aristotle’s sense of it. This old concept of matter is embedded in all of the crisis and catastrophes---fires, drought, pandemics, over population, the disintegrating economies, our ways of life, capitalism and consumerism themselves. All matter is Enspirited, contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. Now I tell you something about Descartes you may not know. In the Mediations was a dualist, there are minds and bodies. But by the end of his life, he knew the truth. Descartes guided his whole life by these vivid dreams, and toward the end of his life he had this dream: He saw the Universe as a giant machine and in the heart of the machine propelling the whole, was Consciousness. And so, out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day. Here is a renewed and a new science, a new cosmology. And with it, a revolutionary new metaphysics. The whole of the modern world is in the grip of a false metaphysics, based on Descartes theory of matter. Here is a new, and finally true metaphysics based on the single term, Consciousness. 5. And in all my works, I spell out this new metaphysics based on Consciousness, and what it means for how we think about virtually everything: The Universe, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. Of who, what and where Spirit is, that we may connect with Spirit everywhere. There is only one term for the Universe, and not two, this single term Consciousness, that manifests itself in two modes: Consciousness in Form, Consciousness Formless. And so, here is a sketch of what this new term Consciousness really means. For four great aspects of the real, four new cornerstones for a whole new civilization on Earth, based on Love and Truth. A. For the Universe: New causalities, all matter is an expression of Consciousness, awake and aware, Enspirited throughout, which has a place for the causalities of love ideas intent plan and purpose, what Aristotle called final causality, that for the sake of which. And it has a place for subjectivity, the greatest mystery in the whole of the Universe, knowable only in ourselves, but there in everything else as well, bedrock in the chain of causalities. The buck stops here. Here are two very different Universe pictures. The Cartesian Universe consists of things, pushed, and pulled around by the physical forces that function blind. The true Universe consists of selves and not things. Selves at least in ourselves, are organized and focused about an I, an I am, or a sense of self in everything, ever other being dear to itself. Just one aspect of subjectivity. And so, it is Consciousness all the way down, and subjectivity all the way down. Science proceeds on the basis of the negligible of what it can leave out as unimportant. Subjectivity is the ultimate animating principle of the Universe. What Descartes really did was to strip from nature what is most essential about it, its animating principle Consciousness. And so, we come out of a long history of “clunk.” The great male thinkers have killed creation. First in concepts and now in the lived life. And so, after centuries of fruitless search, not all of it in vain, finally, and just in time the true basic principle for the Universe has shown up in virtually all disciplines, this term Consciousness. B. And so, the Earth: What does this term Consciousness really mean for the Earth? It means that all of the bright array of beings around us have Consciousness. And the more we can realize how like us they are, the harder it will be to do them all in. Is this what it really means to be “made in the image of Spirit?” To destroy ever other living being? The god of Genesis is a creator god who has created billions and billions of living forms. Man, taking himself to be made in the image of Spirit has destroyed virtually all of it. The Earth is not things, not commodities and resources, not an endless array of consumer goods. The Earth consists of conscious living spiritual beings like ourselves, who need to be honored and respected, nurtured and cared for, to be Loved. And if the human race can finally pull it off and bring Love here and start helping the Earth rather than destroying her, even our vast numbers now at 8 billion, may not matter. Deeply embedded in the modern world is a false cosmology based on the hitherto useful but ultimately false metaphysics of Descartes. In particular it owes to Descartes concepts of matter, and of the Earth, as something devoid of Consciousness. And now this concept is up for us. If there is a single idea enabling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something devoid of Consciousness. And we all have a vested interest in keeping this false concept in place. When you intend to ravage and savage the Earth, to turn it into consumer items, and money in the bank, first pretend she has no Consciousness that way we need not have any conscious about it. We are in deep trouble with the planet. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, here are a few new guiding principles for the planet, based on Consciousness. Consciousness has field properties. The Earth is Consciousness throughout, connected and interconnected throughout, intersecting and interacting fields of Consciousness of which our own is one. To harm one is to harm all. Only this understanding of the Earth can set our destructive technologies, and capitalism, their goals, and their limits. The real problem with capitalism, and with civilization itself is it has no true understanding of the Earth, all the exquisite networks and webworks that connect all beings with one another. Nor it is about to admit that the Earth is our “life support system,” reason gone insane in the modern world. We are destroying our life support system, capitalism is the full expression of the human death wish in the modern world, and it needs to change. And now, let the barriers between ourselves and all other beings go down. C. And so, Ourselves. This new Universe picture based on Consciousness opens into and has a place for new concepts of human identity. In particular, it has a place for reincarnation, a process whereby one Consciousness dons’ bodies again and again and lays them down. This is a process wholly impossible on materialistic theories. This new view of things puts a higher perspective on Freudian determinism, which is a partial knowing in a greater account. We are something more than the victims of genes drives and childhood. We are immortally eternal evolving spiritual beings who take on a cycle of earthly lives in order to achieve certain goals and abilities, and then, our earthly cycle complete, we depart the Earth plane for other areas of the Universe physical or purely spiritual, to continue our evolution elsewhere. The scientific evidence for reincarnation is increasing on all sides, see for example the work of Michael Newton, a mainstream scientist forced to confront the fact of reincarnation. A completely new reincarnational picture is now emerging everywhere. We choose our parents for abilities we could acquire through them. We all come here with reasons for being here, and we all have free will, an original property of Consciousness, and we work out our issues accordingly. We all come here with the same reason for being here. It is to experience the Earth plane and human society at all levels and depths, in every social role, every climate, both sexes male and female and in all races. We are all here to acquire a deep understanding of the Earth plane with all its challenges and all of its present problems. We are not here to devour and consume the Earth, but to honor her for the learning experience she makes available for us. And so, reincarnation is the great equalizer, the fundamental basis for any bill of rights. Many of the problems of the modern world owe to the fact that reincarnation has not been taught in the West. Reincarnation was the center piece of Jesus teachings. It was banned by a fourth century council that decided the populous could best be controlled through fear. They edited all mention of reincarnation from the scriptures, and inserted fear terms instead, a judgmental god, and so on. If reincarnation had been taught, there would have been no suppression of women, but the gift of both sexes would have been honored and developed. And there would have been no reason for contempt for people of color because who they are, we have been or will be. There is no reason to look down on anyone when we know that our own identity includes membership in theirs. The truth of reincarnation needs to be the foundation for getting ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. D. And so, Spirit. This new Universe picture, based on Consciousness, has a place for Spirit as simply Infinite Consciousness. All universes all worlds are formed out of this Consciousness, divine and sacred throughout. And Spirit is everywhere in the Earth and can be connected everywhere. And the Native North American people had things right. Everything has its own Spirit, and without contradiction is also an expression of Spirit. And what I am really doing in terms of concepts of modern science is presenting the Native North American version of the Real. And this new Universe picture has a place for the essential insight of all religions almost smothered by church tradition: Love. Not an emotion but a great Oneness, that can be found everywhere, even in a busy city street. But especially in the Earth, that is levels and depths of Oneness everywhere. And so, for the first time in their long and bitter antagonistic history, science and religion now share a common base with this term Spirit, the lynchpin in a new conceptual framework. And I offer an interpretation of where we are in our history, this present moment of historical grace, and these tumultuous times in which we live, the return of the Goddess and the Divine Feminine, the Reappearance of the Feminine in history, the Advent of Women, this great Awakening, as of Springtime after a long dark Winter, the Awakening, the Second Coming. And so, stay tuned! (shrink)

A cloudy November evening deep in an old forest. It is really dark, and I try to observe my environment. I discern the difference between the treetops and the dark sky and the snow-covered ground. Everything else is formless. My vision is quite useless, and the other senses are weak in these circumstances. Only the background hum is audible and most aromas are erased by the freezing temperature. In a winter outfit, all I can feel is the moving air (...) on my face. Yet, this is not sensory deprivation, there are things to observe. What is it possible to discern when the visual stimulus is minimized? This article focuses on the aesthetic experience of darkness by analyzing a visit to a deep natural darkness and attempts to connect this distinct case to aesthetic theory. The emphasis is on the descriptive analysis of the challenges of seeing in the darkness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Evolution and Creation—A Response to Michael Chaberek's Critique of Theistic EvolutionMariusz Tabaczek O.P.Translated by Monika Metlerska-ColerickIntroductionMichael Chaberek's critique of my "Afterword" to the Polish edition of Thomistic Evolution: A Catholic Approach to Understanding Evolution in the Light of Faith is essentially focused on three points. First of all, Chaberek questions my thesis supporting the compatibility of evolutionary theory with the Christian faith in creation. Secondly he discounts the possibility (...) of reconciling evolution with the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical tradition. Finally he provides arguments undermining the theory of evolution as the best scientific explanation for the diversity of species observable in the world.1 Because I do not undertake an analysis [End Page 255] of strictly biological problems in the "Afterword," in the present response I will concentrate on the first two points only.2 I trust that engaging in a discussion with Chaberek's views in this respect provides an opportunity to broaden and clarify my position regarding the issue which is the subject of our dispute. To begin with, I would like to stress that, in exploring the topic from the perspective of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of philosophy and theology, I am moving in the sphere of possible interpretations and new approaches. Therefore, I do not treat the aforementioned tradition in an inflexible and dogmatic manner.3 [End Page 256]The Definition of CreationI should start my response to Chaberek's critique by invoking the definition of creation as elaborated by Aquinas. After all, it seems that the disagreement referred to in the present article focuses, to a large extent, on the comprehension of the divine act of creation. My views on this matter are not, in my estimation, a significant alteration of the teaching of St. Thomas. Rather, they are an attempt at drawing conclusions from some of his intuitions regarding creation, which appear in various sections of the body of his work.4According to St. Thomas, the word "creation" (creatio) has two crucial and inextricably linked meanings: (I) creation in an active sense (divine action) and (II) creation in a passive sense (receiving divine action). Within the scope of the first meaning, St. Thomas distinguishes between: (Ia) the primary act of creation, defined as bringing the entirety of being into existence out of nothing (ex nihilo), without any prior existing matter, and (Ib) maintaining contingent beings in their existence and essence. The consequence of (Ia) and (Ib) is contingent beings' full dependence on God regarding what they are and the fact that they are (exist), which determines the essence of creation in the passive sense (II).Regarding (Ia), St. Thomas—in a neo-Platonic vein, in support of the claim that nothingness cannot be the object of God's action in the act of creation—states that "we must consider not only the emanation of a particular being from a particular agent, but also the emanation of all being from the universal cause, which is God; and this emanation we designate by the name of creation" (ST I, q 45, a. 1, corp.). It is worth adding here that, according to St. Thomas, the matter, which is the result of the act of creation, is not indefinite, as is assumed by Chaberek when he refers to creation as the bringing out of nothing "of a certain primordial matter of an indefinite form."5 On the contrary, Aquinas states explicitly that "primary matter was not created altogether formless, nor under any one common form, but under [End Page 257] distinct forms" (ST I, q. 66, a. 1, corp., ad 2), enumerating, at this point, the forms of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire.In reference to (Ib), St. Thomas defines the divine act of maintaining contingent beings in existence and essence (in the fact that they are, as well as in what they are) as conservatio rerum. What is more, even though he emphasizes that "the preservation of things by God is a continuation of that action whereby He gives existence" (ST I, q. 104, a. 1, ad 4), Aquinas does not employ the currently popular concept of continual creation (creatio continua). It seems that... (shrink)

French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy is acting uneasily when it comes to contemporary politics. There is a sort of agitation in his work in relation to this question. At several places we read an appeal to deal thoroughly with this question and ‘ qu’il y a un travail à faire ’, that there is still work to do. From the beginning of the 1980s with the ‘Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur le Politique’ and the two books resulting out of that, until (...) the many, rather short texts he published on this topic during the last years of the century, the question of politics crosses very clearly Nancy’s work. He not only fulminates against the contemporary philosophical ‘content’ with democracy. Instead of defending a political regime, he wants to think the form of politics in the most critical and sceptical way. To Nancy, the worst thing we can do in thinking contemporary politics, is taking it for granted that we know what politics is about today, given the evidence of the global democracy. So to him, we almost have to be at unease when it comes to politics. On the other hand, in thinking contemporary democracy, the work of Claude Lefort is undeniably the main reference. Long before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the upsurge of an all-too-easy anti-Marxism, Lefort articulated in a nuanced way the formal differences between totalitarianism and democracy. According to Lefort, the specific ‘form’ of democracy is that it never becomes an accomplished and fulfilled form as such. In a certain sense, the only ‘form’ of democracy is formlessness, a form without form. In a democracy, the place of power becomes literally ‘ infigurable ’ as Lefort says. Democracy stands for formlessness or the relation to a void. Nancy objects so to say against a ‘Leformal’ conception of democracy – the empty place, the formless, the ‘ infigurable ’ or ‘ sans figure ’, the ever yet to come. ... This conception of democracy would still be caught in the infinite metaphysical, dialectical horizon of immanentism, while it pretends to have already left that horizon behind it, presenting itself as the finite alternative to the infinite totalitarian politics. Democracy as formlessness is indeed no longer based on a metaphysical Idea, Figure, or Truth. We want to clear up the philosophical sky of Nancy’s remarks by confronting them with some thoughts of Lefort. (shrink)

This paper discusses the notion of disimagination a translation of the German word Entbildung, which was devised by Meister Eckhart as a reinterpretation of the Neoplatonic categories of abstraction (aphairesis) and negation (apophasis) in connection with Nishitani Keiji's standpoint of emptiness. Nishitani proposes a nonsubjective, nonrepresentational, and nonconceptual type of knowledge to avoid the problem of representation implied in the modern subjective self-consciousness that prevents our access to the reality of things. It is argued that what he calls a (...) knowing of non-knowing can be understood as a transposition of the problematics of aphairesis to a new context, that of the formless form. The ontology of images in the creative process, both cosmic and artistic, is examined from Nishitani's identification of likeness and suchness on the field of emptiness. It is suggested that the resulting denial of the traditional distinction between being and appearance approaches a critique closer to postfoundational metaphysics and, like disimagination, aims at an ascetic movement of self-negation and detachment from words and images that leads, in turn, to a creative and playful use of language free of representation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religious Identity and Openness in a Pluralistic WorldRita M. GrossIn our final sessions after twenty years of working together, we have been asked to reflect in some way on identity and openness in a pluralistic world. Specifically, the question is, "How do I understand my own identity as a religious Buddhist or Christian in light of the fact that I am open to the validity of the beliefs held (...) by the other tradition?"Frankly, this puzzle seems like a no-brainer to me and always has. Religions are language systems, and no language is universal and absolute. End of problem. In one fell swoop, as we concede the relativity of all our language games, we also recognize that more than one language could be "valid," whatever that might mean. There is no reason to assume that all people speak my language and it would be illogical to claim that people who don't speak my language are deficient. The worth and utility of my language is in no way diminished because it is not the only language in the world. Language is a tool through which we communicate, and any language could be a useful tool, so long as we don't endow it with universal relevance, more freight than it can bear.There may or may not be a formless absolute that grounds all finite existence. All religions assert that there is, whether as a being or as an experience. But beyond that assertion nothing can be determined because all such assertions must be expressed in language or some other limited expression—an expression in form. There is no other option. Much as we might long to transcend expression in form and leap into mind-to-mind transmission, in a public medium that is not possible. Many of us may have intuited such experiences of mind-to-mind transmission, but when we open our mouths to speak, we can only do so in the realm of form. And so we are stuck with our myriad expressions of a formless, transcendent absolute and cannot even determine for sure if we are talking about the same thing when we try to express the inexpressible.Therefore, we are compelled to concede the limits of language. This is the solution to the problem of the coexistence of a strong individual religious identity with openness to the relevance of other religious languages. Other religions, as well as my [End Page 15] own, are nothing more than highly relative language systems. There is no logical or spiritual way for them to be anything more. It seems to me that copping to the limitations of language, to the inability of language ever to capture truth completely, is completely essential in the pluralistic world we now inhabit. It is hard to imagine how people could believe that the deity speaks Arabic, not Hebrew, or Hebrew, not Arabic, and biblical Hebrew (rather than any other version of Hebrew) at that! It is hard to imagine how people could believe that they have the actual words of Jesus in the red print in their new testaments, even though those words were originally written in a language he never spoke and were translated into an archaic English that we no longer speak and barely understand. Nothing but egotistical pride can drive such self-aggrandizement, such identification of my viewpoint, my verbal attempts to express my experience, with the eternal and ultimate Way Things Are.In light of the historical and cross-cultural information that is now more than abundantly available, the only rational and humane conclusion to be drawn is that all religious institutions and creedal systems are human constructions dependent at least in part, if not wholly dependent, on the particular circumstances of those who construct and utter them. Therefore, they are of limited rather than universal relevance. Their cultural specificity is too obvious for any other conclusion to be feasible. Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and English are not universal languages, and only extreme hubris could claim the Formless Absolute speaks my language, not yours. Thus, even if our religions owe their genesis to some transcendent, nonhistorical source, they can be codified and captured only in a relative... (shrink)

The aim of this work is to elucidate the meaning of 'infinity' from a phenomenological perspective, especially within the framework of Husserl’s theory of knowledge and perception. In the first chapter I firstly sketch the basics of Husserl’s phenomenology of knowledge. Thereafter I delve into the questions concerning the reduction to the 'reellen Bestand', which is hold to be the ground of verification of purports in the "Logical Investigations". I then propose an interpretation of the categorial intuition as directed to (...) the laws an 'Auffassung' follows when it organizes the sensual contents related to an object. In the second chapter I briefly expound Husserl’s phenomenology of perception and I show how perception can be hold as an intentional experience. Afterwards I concentrate on the constitution of space and of thing (Ding). I show in which sense the structures of both constitutions are dependent on the sensations and kinesthesis (i.e. proprioceptions) experienced by the subject. In the third chapter I finally deal with the problem of infinity. I face some recent interpretations of Husserl’s theory of perception according to which infinity is somehow intertwined in and even intuited through thing-perception (Dingwahrnehmung). I claim that thing-perception can not be hold as an access to infinity, i.e. no thing-perception is a perception of something as infinite. Following I show how some other kinds of sensual experience can correspond to a perception of infinity. On the base of some Husserl’s manuscripts and through a brief confrontation with Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime I sustain that infinity can be sensually intuited in the senses of limitlessness and of formlessness. I then show that categorial intuition is necessary in order to constitute the meaning of mathematical infinity, i.e. an endless whole of discrete parts. In fact, the idea of such an “entity” is dependent on the capacity of grasping the law of a serial production. In the conclusion I establish that mathematical infinity is the only kind of infinity which can not find any sensual correlate. This is due to the fact that it is a meaning composed by two contradictory prescriptions: 'reach the limitless' and 'go on without an end'. I consequently argue that the idea of infinity is grounded on sensual experience and does not need any supernatural origin. (shrink)

This paper discusses the notion of disimagination a translation of the German word Entbildung, which was devised by Meister Eckhart as a reinterpretation of the Neoplatonic categories of abstraction (aphairesis) and negation (apophasis)in connection with Nishitani Keiji's standpoint of emptiness. Nishitani proposes a nonsubjective, nonrepresentational, and nonconceptual type of knowledge to avoid the problem of representation implied in the modern subjective self-consciousness that prevents our access to the reality of things. It is argued that what he calls a knowing (...) of non-knowing can be understood as a transposition of the problematics of aphairesis to a new context, that of the formless form. The ontology of images in the creative process, both cosmic and artistic, is examined from Nishitani's identification of likeness and suchness on the field of emptiness. It is suggested that the resulting denial of the traditional distinction between being and appearance approaches a critique closer to postfoundational metaphysics and, like disimagination, aims at an ascetic movement of self-negation and detachment from words and images that leads, in turn, to a creative and playful use of language free of representation. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

Each inhabitant of our world Gilbert calls an id quod est or subsistens. Its main constituents are the subsistentiae and these are accompanied by the 'accidents', quantity and quality. The subsistent owes its status to a collection of inferior members of the Aristotelian class of accidents, which to Gilbert 's mind are rather 'accessories' or 'attachments from without'. The term 'substantia' is used both to stand for substance and substantial form, i.e., that by which something is subsistent. The collection of (...) subsistentiae or the forma totius is called natura. However, 'natura' is also used to stand for either just one subsistentia or all the forms found in a subsistens even including its 'accidental' forms. The inclusion of all kinds of accidents is seldom found in the intension of the word 'natura'. One of the key notions featuring in Gilbert 's ontology is esse aliquid. 'To be a-something' has a threefold import. First, it means 'to be only some thing', and to miss perfection. Second, it has the positive sense of 'being a something', i.e. 'being determinate and well-delineated', not indefinite, not formless that is. Third, 'to be a something' implies concreteness, corporealness and singularity. (shrink)

In the Corpus Hippocraticum and in tragedy, γκος is difficult to translate, for it corresponds to a very primitive notion, intuitively implying a confusion between two aspects that were gradually distinguished: 1) a thing's bulk or extension, and 2) an appreciation, as a function of its bulk and its extension, of the load represented by this thing, or its weight. This explains why the term usually designates something that has a certain mass. As an indefinite quantity of formless matter, (...) this is probably a notion which was used by medio-Platonists, strongly influenced by Stoicism, to understand matter the Timaeus . In Plotinus' polemic against the Stoics, γκος, which refers to a magnitude with resistance bereft of qualities, is thus situated at a level intermediate between matter (λη), bereft of all determination, and the body (σμα), which is endowed with magnitude and qualities. In the Sentences , Porphyry uses the term γκος 30 times in its technical sense, almost as often as Plotinus in the whole of the Enneads . This is probably because he felt uncomfortable with Plotinus' notion of matter bereft of all determination, including magnitude. (shrink)

Daniel Anderson's commentary on the Symposium consists of careful readings of all the individual speeches, in which he is concerned not only with the overt arguments but even more with their subtext. The subtext is Dionysian--a theme implicit in the dialogue's setting as the celebration of Agathon's victory at a drama festival, since such festivals were in honor of Dionysus--and the dialogue as a whole is about the irreducible dialectic between form and formlessness, Apollo and Dionysus. Dionysus represents the life (...) force, so "all living things may be regarded as manifestations of Dionysus" and the masks worn by the actors in Greek drama symbolize the fact that "Each living thing is a mask of Dionysos". Beneath each mask, therefore, is only life force, and not a stable individual identity. Even the removal of a mask is only the creation of a new mask. In his discussions of the speeches Anderson keeps this leitmotiv [[sic]] in view, and attributes particular masks to the first six speakers, while Alcibiades, on the other hand, "is the persona of Dionysos". (shrink)

Yung Sik Kim's new book is a welcome addition to the large number of studies of the thought of Chu Hsi, arguably the most important literati thinker in China since the Southern Song dynasty . Chu's ideas became orthodox empire‐wide during the early Ming dynasty , and during the Ming and Qing dynasties millions of candidates for the imperial civil service examinations mastered the “Learning of the Way” associated with Chu and his followers. With the exception of the pioneering study (...) by Yamada Keiji in 1978, nearly all previous accounts of Chu's ideas written by students of Chinese philosophy have emphasized the metaphysical, moral, and epistemological concerns in Chu's writings. Those more concerned with imperial dogma and state power in China since 1400 have tended to paint Chu Hsi's “Learning of the Way” as a monolithic, authoritarian ideology that legitimated the Ming and Qing dynasty rulers politically, socially, and culturally among gentry elites.Kim acknowledges that the core of Chu Hsi's grand intellectual synthesis was focused on moral and social philosophy, but in this book Kim provides compelling information that Chu was also concerned with natural knowledge about the three levels of reality: heaven and earth, the myriad things in the world, and the human realm. Humans thus formed a triad with heaven and earth as the most numinous living thing because they were endowed with the psycho‐physical stuff of ch'i that was most clear and complete. Recognizing no boundary between the physical and the spiritual, Chu Hsi equated human nature with the universe. The basic concepts that informed Chu's natural world were yin‐yang, the five evolutive phases, and the dualism of li and ch'i .Chu Hsi advocated a scholarly agenda that would explain why things and events were as they were. Through the “investigation of things,” the heavenly principle that inscribed the ch'i of each object and event could be discovered. Normally historians of Chinese philosophy stress the place of universal heavenly li in Chu's thought, but Kim makes a concerted effort not to overlook the important place of ch'i as the aggregated collection of stuff in the universe, some dense and falling like the earth, some airy and rising like heaven. Indeed, as important as li was for Chu Hsi's moral philosophy, ch'i was the most important concept he employed to explain natural phenomena, material changes, and earthly events. With no discontinuity between matter and life, or between materiality and mind, Chu's philosophy made no allowance for the Western distinctions between the material and spiritual spheres or between the physical and mental realms.It was precisely such views that troubled the Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci who came to China in the late sixteenth century. Ricci and his European cohort would be condemned in the early eighteenth century by French Jansenists and Spanish Franciscans for their overly accommodational compromises with traditional Chinese religious practices such as ancestor worship, which Ricci interpreted as a civil rite. Nonetheless, when Ricci studied Chu Hsi's moral philosophy and natural thought, he was appalled at its materialism and atheism, which he considered the fault of Buddhism and its impact on Song literati such as Chu Hsi.The “noninertness” of ch'i carried over from the dynamic materiality of all things, including the human mind, to the formless and unfathomable spirits and ghosts that existed in a border area outside the natural realm between heaven and human beings. The dispersion of ch'i upon death could take many forms but, according to Chu Hsi, in the end all such ch'i disaggregated, leaving no ongoing or abiding spiritual form for humans, plants, or animals. The ch'i of the ancestors could be prayed to because the materiality of their descendants was the same ch'i, but even this continuity could not survive more than a few generations. Again, the Jesuits were shocked at this atheistic view of the human soul and its eventual demise materially with no possible eternal life after death.Accordingly, Kim's careful study of what Chu Hsi thought about the natural world makes it evident that most modern studies have elided an essential aspect of traditional Chinese thought, particularly the centrality of ch'i in the dynamic processes of collection and dispersion that produce all things, whether living or inanimate. Students of Chinese philosophy have tended to prioritize those aspects of Chu Hsi's views on universal li and its instantiated forms that are more amenable to a Western, Judeo‐Christian‐Islamic reading drawn ultimately from the debate between Plato and Aristotle over the universal forms of particular things.Modern presentations, in other words, have failed to grasp why a generation of Jesuit scholars who spent their adulthood in China during the seventeenth century found Chu Hsi's views alien and dangerous. Kim deserves credit for going against the tide of twentieth‐century scholarly interpretation and restoring to Chu Hsi those aspects of his natural philosophy that have been conveniently repressed to make his views more palatable. Rather than just the builder of the orthodox brick wall of traditional Chinese moralism, we can see that Chu Hsi's natural philosphy challenged any view of the world that assumed theological differences between life and death, mind and body, or the spiritual and physical. (shrink)

Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as an (...) aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music. (shrink)

The Question of the Self Perhaps the clearest access to the question of the self in Dogen lies in the fascicle of Shobogenzo entitled "Genjo-koan. ...

Some combinations of attitudes--of beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on--do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of "structural rationality" that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet a number of surprisingly difficult challenges arise for this idea. These challenges have recently led many philosophers to attempt to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a "shadow" of "substantive rationality"--that is, correctly responding to one's (...) reasons. -/- In *Fitting Things Together*, Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend--defending the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality, distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality, and tackling the most important challenges for this view. In so doing, he gives an original positive theory of the nature of coherence and structural rationality that explains how the diverse range of instances of incoherence can be unified under a general account, and how facts about coherence are normatively significant. He also shows how a failure to focus on coherence requirements as a distinctive phenomenon and distinguish them adequately from requirements of substantive rationality has led to confusion and mistakes in several substantive debates in epistemology and ethics. -/- Taken as a whole, Fitting Things Together provides the first sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Formless SelfNewman Robert GlassThe Formless Self. By Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 174 pp.For the past seven years I have been deeply involved in a worldwide experiment in global education. Students in the Comparative Religion and Culture (CRC) Program study the world's great religions for ten-week terms in each of East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East, totaling one (...) academic year in all. Recent programming has taken place in Taiwan, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Turkey, with stops in Rome and Athens. Students have met with Buddhist and Christian teachers in Kyoto, Sojiji, Eiheiji, Taiwan, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Bylakuppe, Dharmsala, Jerusalem, Rome, Athens, Ankara, and Istanbul. As part of their academic work, students write responses to each encounter and engage in term-end and year-end reflections on their own work. The program brings to light, in a very powerful way, some of the fundamental questions in cross-cultural study and interreligious dialogue. How do we come to understand a religion or culture other than our own? In analyzing their own work, students find themselves using terms from a Jain teacher's talk in Sravanabelagola to frame their response to the Dalai Lama's talk in New Delhi, and terms from the Dalai Lama's talk to understand and respond to the audience with the Pope in Rome. As the students become more sophisticated in understanding issues in interpretation, new questions are posed: How many people (other than ourselves) do we unknowingly bring to understanding an encounter with an other? When we use the Dalai Lama's talk in interpreting the Pope, does this enlarge our understanding of Catholicism, diminish or distort the Pope's message, or create something new altogether? What do we gain and what do we lose?Joan Stambaugh's The Formless Self is "an attempt to present Eastern ideas, or at least oneWestern interpretation of Eastern ideas, toWestern readers in a meaningful way" (p. x). The most referenced names in the index are Heidegger, Nietzsche, Plato, Keirkegaard, Descartes, and Meister Eckhart. These, then, are the key figures Stambaugh brings with her as she enters into conversation with the three Buddhist thinkers Dogen, Hisamatsu, and Nishitani. The latter two figures are themselves well known for their conversations withWestern thinkers. Stambaugh's book is best located within the larger body of work within and about the Kyoto School, that school of Japanese philosophy identified primarily with Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji, and more recently with Abe Masao. In the United States, this school of philosophy reached its zenith of popularity in the late 1980s, culminating in an American Academy of Religion (AAR) award to Abe Masao's Zen and Western Thought and a series of annual AAR dialogues between Abe and John Cobb. Abe's presence hovers over Stambaugh's book as well, from an acknowledgment in the preface (p. x) to a reference in the index that seems to encompass the whole book. The Formless Self is a good short introduction to key beginning texts [End Page 300] in this larger field: Dogen's Genjokoan, the Hisamatsu-Tillich dialogues, and Nishitani's Religion and Nothingness.Stambaugh has in print translations of a substantial number of Heidegger's texts, including a recent translation of Being and Time. As might be expected, she seems to have a special affinity for Dogen's Uji (Being-Time; see especially pp. 31-40), and makes a creative contribution to the different understandings of these difficult concepts. Stambaugh also makes a brave attempt to work with Dogen's discussions of fire turning to ashes, fish in water, and mountains walking/ranging (pp. 39-48) in a productive way. Stambaugh's middle section on Hisamatsu may be the best place to begin, centering as it does on the dialogues with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. In 1957, the Zen Buddhist teacher and scholar Shin'inchi Hisamatsu was a visiting professor at Harvard lecturing on his recently published book Zen and the Fine Arts. Though Tillich's aesthetic approach to "ultimacy" made for a fine series of dialogues with Hisamatsu, the numerous difficulties in the dialogue serve as a warning... (shrink)

Gersonides has at times been viewed as an essentially orthodox Aristotelian in his metaphysical views. This designation, however, has been challenged on a number of grounds. This paper examines the way in which Gersonides revises the traditional conception of hylomorphism by positing that matter can exist without form. Motivated by a desire to reconcile Aristotelian natural philosophy with the Ptolemaic astronomical model, formless matter is seen as a necessary entity to posit in order for his cosmological model to be (...) coherent. By allowing for this exception case, Gersonides turns hylomorphism from a metaphysical principle to a general, though not universal, principle of physics that can must be revised if other observational and philosophical commitments are to be maintained, which speaks to a distinct attitude toward Aristotelian metaphysics than is otherwise assumed to be the case for Gersonides and his contemporaries. (shrink)

The paper in this volume challenge the concept of form and aim to set out, explore and develop different theories and examples of 'the formless'.

According to the Chinese military philosopher Sunzi, a military commander's actions must be “formless.” Ender Wiggin, in Ender's Game, displays this formlessness in the fact that when we try to analyze his actions we are left with a sense of confusion about his reasoning. Sunzi advocates tactics including strengthening the martial spirit of your own soldiers through rewards and punishments, targeting the enemy's martial spirit through tricks, exploiting their fear and anger to inspire or sap their abilities, and outwitting (...) the opponent through a mix of orthodox and unorthodox maneuvers. Sunzi stressed the importance of psychological self‐control, unfeeling and cold analysis driven by practical considerations, and adroit maneuvering of soldiers and formations on the battlefield. This chapter demonstrates how Ender's own military decisions can be illuminated by the writings of Sunzi and other seminal Asian philosophers like Confucius and Laozi. By these standards, Ender qualifies as a military genius. (shrink)

Are there any things that are such that any things whatsoever are among them. I argue that there are not. My thesis follows from these three premises: (1) There are two or more things; (2) for any things, there is a unique thing that corresponds to those things; (3) for any two or more things, there are fewer of them than there are pluralities of them.

In a rich and thought-provoking paper, Lambros Malafouris argues that taking material culture seriously means to be ‘systematically concerned with figuring out the causal efficacy of materiality in the enactment and constitution of a cognitive system or operation’ (Malafouris 2004, 55). As I understand this view, there are really two intertwined claims to be established. The first is that the things beyond the skin that make up material culture (in other words, the physical objects and artefacts in which cultural (...) networks and systems of human social relations are realized) may be essential to the enactment of, and be partly constitutive of, certain cognitive systems or operations. The consequence of establishing this claim is supposed to be that we have a mandate to recast the boundaries of the mind so as to include, as proper parts of the mind, things located beyond the skin. Thus, in talking about the contribution of the world to cognition, Malafouris (2004, 58) concludes that ‘what we have traditionally construed as an active or passive but always clearly separated external stimulus for setting a cognitive mechanism into motion, may be after all a continuous part of the machinery itself; at least ex hypothesi’. This is the position that, in philosophical circles, is known increasingly as the extended mind hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers 1998; Menary forthcoming). Henceforth I shall refer to this hypothesis as EM. A stock example will help bring the idea into view. Rumelhart et al. (1986) note that most of us solve difficult multiplication problems by using ‘pen and paper’ as an external resource. This environmental prop enables us to transform a difficult cognitive problem into a set of simpler ones, and to temporarily store the results of certain intermediate calculations. For the fan of EM, the distributed combination of this external resource and certain inner psychological processes constitutes a cognitive system in its own right. (shrink)

The Things We Do and Why We Do Them argues against the common assumption that there is a kind of thing called "action" which all reason-giving explanation of action are geared towards. Sandis explains why all theories concerned with the form which any such explanation must take fail from the outset, and shows how various debates on the nature of so-called motivating reasons only arise because the participants all share a number of mistaken views which follow from the basic (...) assumption under attack. In so doing, he urges philosophers and psychologists alike to stop asking whether the explanation of action is causal, and to focus instead on its multifarious objects. This book will appeal to anyone interested in motivational psychology, the reasons for which we act, and the philosophy of explanation in general. (shrink)

According to orthodoxy, the most fundamental kind of causation involves one event causing another event. I argue against this event‐causal view. Instead, the most fundamental kind of causation is thing causation, which involves a thing causing a thing to do something. Event causation is reducible to thing causation, but thing causation is not reducible to event causation, because event causation cannot accommodate cases of fine‐grained causation. I defend my view from objections, including C. D. Broad's influential “timing” argument, and I (...) conclude with implications for agent‐causal theories of free will. (shrink)

Chinese culture is neither the first problematic thinking (analogy) claimed by the authors of Anticipating China , nor the second one (logical inference). On the one hand, analogies are one of the most remarkable aspects of Chinese thinking, while on the other hand, Yin-Yang, Dao and Fo are all universal codes that could neither be reached by analogy nor by logical inference. In fact, both the first and second problematic thinking share the same world view, taking the world as a (...) composite, and the difference lies merely in whether the components are irreplaceable particulars or substitutable elements. Both build their knowledge on the components and how they combine. In the terms of this paper, both systems are constructed with spatially definable forms, real or nominal. The highest codes in Chinese culture are not built upon the physical properties of an object, and could never be found by analysing the object, physically or logically. Yin-Yang, Dao and Fo are names without form, and thus are thinking modes that cannot be described by a spatial concept. They are non-structural systems and a way of formless thinking. (shrink)

Moving education to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and the many alternatives during the COVID19-pandemic raised the question of pedagogical form. In a sense, pandemic education in its two-dimensionality was a frictionless, sanitized reduction of education to pure form; it offered a more efficient transfer of knowledge and was marked by a heightened means-to-an-end logic. This has made the informal, unforming and deformational activity that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call study even more difficult, if not impossible during pandemic education. In this (...) article, we consider the pitfalls of thinking in terms of pedagogical form and the formalization of education by engaging with Emile Bojesen’s work on education as (de)formation. Via Harney and Moten, we reflect on what the concept/practice of study by way of formless formation teaches us about (pre-)pandemic education and about pedagogical forms that might be in keeping with study in post-pandemic education. (shrink)

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary.

I argue that fitting envy plays a special role in safeguarding our happiness and flourishing. After presenting my theory of envy and its fittingness conditions, I contrast Kant’s view that envy is always unfitting with D’Arms and Jacobson’s defense of fitting envy as an evolutionarily-shaped response to a deep and wide human concern, that is, relative positioning. However, D’Arms and Jacobson don’t go far enough. First, I expand on their analysis of positional goodness, distinguishing between an epistemic claim, according to (...) which we use implicit or explicit comparison to know what position we occupy in a continuum of goodness, and thus to form judgments of goodness, and a metaphysical one, according to which much human goodness depends on implicit or explicit rankings and positionality. Second, I argue that fitting envy is not only intrinsically valuable qua fitting response to authentic goodness, but can be epistemically, morally and prudentially valuable. (shrink)

Every Thing Must Go aruges that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it ...

Quasi things come and go and we cannot wonder where they've been (starting from the wind) -- Quasi-things assault and resist us: feelings as atmospheres -- Quasi things are felt (though not localized): the isles of the felt-body -- Quasi-things are proofs of existence: pain as the genesis of the subject -- Quasi-things affect us (also indirectly): vicarious shame -- Quasi-things communicate with us: from the gaze to the portrait (and back) -- Quasi-things (...) are the more effective the vaguer they are: twilightness. (shrink)