In his writings on mnemonics, Bruno established a complex affinity between magic and Kabbalah on the one hand, and between Lullism and the art of memory on the other. The Nolan is no stranger to the hermetic text of the Renaissance, based on the Corpus Hermeticum and especially on the Kore Kosmu, which pursued value purification of exteriority through interiority.In The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Bruno picks up on the hermetic exercise of pattern conversion, from the sense-related (...) vices towards the reason-related virtues, operating thus a reorientation from the exterior toward the noetic interior. One recognized here the same technique Plato used in his Republic, when he amassed all the gods of Homer into one alone, the embodiment of Truth, Justice and Good.The purpose of The Expulsion dialogue is to grant a return to unity to the intellect. Thus, Bruno unveils the fact that the magical religion of the Egyptians becomes his own, seeking, by way of magical rituals, to attain divine loftiness, that condition in which things acquire their meaning and significance, making thus possible the acknowledgement of their existence. (shrink)

Traditionally, comparative literature has focused on the study of influences between texts and it is only recent work that has explored the analogies and affinitiesof historically independent cultures. In this spirit, this paper develops methods for a structured poetic analysis and applies them to a systematic comparison of thepoem “Niǎo Mǐng Jiàn” from the 8th-century Chinese poet Wáng Wéi and the program piece of Paul Celan’s Atemwende: “Du Darfst,” based upon a detailed analysis of their poetics. The analysis and translation (...) reveals how both poems employ words and images as signs without reference, and create dialogical gaps through ambiguity and impersonality. Thus, despite their cultural and historical separation, both poetic texts become “hermetic,” and both poets apply the “hermetic” as a method of inquiry into truth, a truth that cannot be simply pronounced, but needs to be cowitnessed, or heard in silence. It is through this meaningful “silence” that their poetry invites readers and translators all the more perceptively to engage in meaningful conversations. These results entail encouraging perspectives for the question of the limits of translation, especially with regard to east-western studies and for crosscultural comparative literature. Thus, the paper supports Prof. Li Qingben’s and Prof. Guo Jinghua’s claim for a multi-dimensional framework in the study of East-West cultural influences. (shrink)

From the perspective of semiotics, or a science of signs, communication exceeds the usual verbal mode of expression and covers extra linguistic modes. This paper addresses a specific communicative system represented by Tarot pictures. The semiotic approach not only presents Tarot as exceeding its function as a game but also de-mystifies, in part, its occult side by virtue of the analysis of semiosis, or the action of signs in nature. Using references from the Hermetic philosophy, to Dummett, to Peirce, (...) to Smolin, the paper asserts that, should we understand the language of signs, the memories of past and future events would be accessible to human reason. (shrink)

W. H. Auden, the sometimes Greta Garbo of twentieth-century poetry, once told Stephen Spender that he liked America better than England because in America one could be alone. Further, in his introduction to The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse Auden remarked that while in England poets are considered members of a “clerkly caste,” in America they are an “aristocracy of one.” Certainly it does seem to be the individual poet—Whitman, Williams, Olson, Plath, O’Hara, Ginsberg—who has altered the landscape of (...) American poetry and prosody, not the group. And most American literary “movements,” as Robert Creeley has pointed out, are simply comprised of a few people who on occasion drink together, and who are as likely as not to end the evening in violent argument over an aesthetic or political point. Yet the notion of schools or movements remains, in mainstream historical criticism at least, a vital one. How many introductions to anthologies of American poetry, for example, continue to use such rubrics as the Transcendentals, the Populists, the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the New York group? And while established poets often rebel from any sense that they are part of a larger community, which by definition is self-limiting, they are often complicit in their initial categorization. For poets as well as critics the idea of a school is often a useful fiction serving as both a kind of protective hothouse and a platform for getting a hearing.The most recent “group” of American poets—the first since the anthology wars of the early sixties really to be of more than passing interest and perhaps to be actually capable of bringing about a major shift of attention in American poetry and poetics—is the so-called “Language” school. Individual volumes by poets often considered part of this group number well into three figures now and there have been important journals and anthologies produced in a serious and sustained fashion by these writers. Yet in part because of what seems the essentially hermetic character of the project , there has been little notice of this activity by academic critics or reviewers.1 What I’d like to do here is briefly map a few major aspects of the territory, describing some of the practical and theoretical questions which seem to occupy many of these writers in their ongoing critique of the “workshop poem.” 1. Two important exceptions are discussions of some of this work in Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse and Marjorie Perloff’s review “The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties,” American Poetry Review 13 : 15-22. All further references to Perloff’s article, abbreviated “WS,” will be included in the text. For a discussion of the various Language poetry journals and anthologies, see my chapter “American Poetry, 1940s to the Present” in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual/1983, ed. Warren French , pp. 349-74. Lee Bartlett, an associate professor of English, has directed the University of New Mexico’s creative writing program for five years. Coeditor of the critical journal American Poetry, his Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets will be published this fall. Currently he is writing a biography of William Everson. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 113-126 [Access article in PDF] Gadamer on Poetic and Everyday Language Christopher Lawn Gadamer's writings since the appearance of his ground-breaking Truth and Method 1 elaborate and defend the diverse claims of his much-contested philosophical hermeneutics. This is taken further in many recently translated essays where we witness the application of basic hermeneutical insights to areas as various as pedagogical theory and modern (...) medical practice. These investigations are important, as they testify to the universality of hermeneutics. Yet more significant in Gadamer's recent work is a pronounced turn towards "the poetic." Despite large claims in Truth and Method about the irreducibility of the linguistic, there is precious little on the poetic in this work, apart from a few asides about the relationship between poetry and the everyday language of conversation. The distinction between poetic language and everyday language of the "life world" makes a token appearance in Truth and Method (TM, pp. 469-70) and increases in significance in more recent works, especially those occasional essays devoted to aesthetics, poetics, and hermeneutically inspired readings of modern German lyric poets. 2A good deal turns on the distinction between "everyday" or "ordinary" language and "poetic" language. Gadamer's increasing appreciation of the poetic leads him into interpretations of contemporary poetry, notably the hermetic lyric of Paul Celan. 3 The different dimensions to language are brought into relief when considered in relation to the notion of play. Like the poetic, "play" and "playfulness" are cursorily mentioned in the First Part of Truth and Method as repressed aspects of the truth of the work of art. When hermeneutically reclaimed, they stand as a buttress against subjectivist, modernist versions of the aesthetic. Yet Gadamer fails to fully thematize "play," as it disappears [End Page 113] from view in Parts Two and Three of Truth and Method, losing itself in the interpretive turn towards those other facets of hermeneutic truthfulness, historicality and language. In the later essays, specifically those reflecting upon the poetic and the aesthetic, "play" becomes wider and assumes a much greater significance. Play, and this is most evident in the language of poetry, reveals itself to be a fundamental characteristic of language itself.Notions of "play" and "language-games" are more obviously associated with the later work of Wittgenstein. Many critics have observed, en passant, an obvious proximity between Wittgenstein and Gadamer, although their closeness has been noted rather than explored 4. Converging around the issue of everyday language, Gadamer and Wittgenstein radically disagree vis-à-vis "poetic language." For all his appreciation of language's specificity and consequent resistance to theory, its endless slipperiness and variety, Wittgenstein, early or late, seldom confronts language at its most opaque and elusive, that is, in the poetic.What does this Wittgensteinian silence about "poetic language" reveal? The movement away from a logic-driven picture theory of meaning (in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) to the more informal, loosely textured, pragmatics of language (in the Philosophical Investigations), represents hostility to philosophical abstraction and an appreciation of the "rough ground" of ordinary, philologically speaking, "living,"language. What should we say of the literary and poetic dimensions to language, themselves significant dimensions to "living" language? The ability of the language-games to change, the capacity of language to transform itself and work in new uncharted regions--about these Wittgenstein is largely silent.Gadamer's concern with the poetic shows how many of these questions might be addressed from within another philosophical tradition. Were Wittgenstein less inscrutable, it would be tempting to regard the ordinary/poetic distinction, and its dependence upon the notion of "play," as a clear advance on the familiar language-game model. This is a temptation I partially resist. Wittgenstein's enigmatic comments, in the closing pages of the Philosophical Investigations, on "aspect-dawning," "seeing-as," gestures, and pictures, not to mention his compressed and aphoristic "poetic" style, force one to draw back from such an easy conclusion. [End Page 114] I In "Philosophy and Poetry" (OTROTB, pp. 131-39) the different aspects of language are likened to types of currency in... (shrink)

Resumen: Siguiendo el hilo conductor de la pregunta sobre cómo se nos puede conceder un acceso a la poesía de Paul Celan, el artículo discute dos enfoques diferentes: por un lado, el de la experiencia hermenéutica de Hans-Georg Gadamer; por otro, el de la experiencia diseminal de Jacques Derrida. La intención de la confrontación de las posiciones opuestas respecto a la poesía de Celan no es ni examinar los supuestos y preposiciones de ambas posiciones ni impugnar la legitimidad de una (...) de ellas desde el punto de vista de la otra, sino establecer y evocar el sentido de la disensión, la significación del discernimiento entre ellas y, así, abrir un campo de posibilidad para ambas, para una hermenéutica y para una deconstrucción hoy; y a través de ello también, y sobre todo, un lugar y un tiempo para el poema de Celan, la posibilidad de escucharlo y oírlo, de convertirse en destinatario de su voz inter-(a)pelativa. Palabras clave “Du liegst”; Lenguaje hermético; Comprensión; H.G. Gadamer; J. Derrida // The Secret of the Encounter. Paul Celan’s Poetry between Hermeneutics and DeconstructionAbstract Following the guiding line of the question how an access to Paul Celan’s po-etry can be granted to us, the article discusses two different approaches: on the one hand, the hermeneutic experience of Hans-Georg Gadamer; on the other hand, the disseminating experience of Jacques Derrida. The intention of the confrontation of the opposing positions regarding Celan’s poetry is nei-ther to examine the suppositions and prepositions of both positions nor to contest the legitimacy of either of them from the viewpoint of the other, but rather to establish and evoke the sense of the dissention, the signification of the discernment between them and, thus, open up the field of possibility for both, for a hermeneutics and for a deconstruction today, and through it also, above all, a place and a time for Celan’s poem, the possibility to listen to it and to hear it, to become the addressee of its inter-(a)pellative voice. Keywords “Du liegst”; Hermetic language; Understanding; H.G. Gadamer; J. Derrida. -/- Este artículo fue traducido al español por Facundo Bey. (shrink)

The Politics of Belonging represents an innovative collaboration between political theorists and political scientists for the purposes of investigating the liberal and pluralistic traditions of nationalism. Alain Dieckhoff introduces an indispensable collection of work for anyone dealing with questions of identity, ethnicity, and nationalism.

This book is of considerable interest to philosophers. Bruns studies poetry from two perspectives: as hermetic and as orphic. In the first, a poem is considered as a self-sufficient whole, admirable and analyzable in itself, the world-reference of its words suspended; in the second, a poem is considered much as Heidegger takes the work of poets, as establishing a world in which meaning can be found, as instituting a condition in which words and being are indistinguishable. Of the book’s (...) eight chapters, six are devoted to the hermetic and two, the last two, are concerned with the orphic. The literary theories and opinions of the Russian Formalists, the Prague Structuralists, Wallace Stevens, Valéry, Barthes, and Foucault are presented as the first modern move towards a hermetic sense of poetry; the literary object is considered as determined by a system of pure relations. The movement is further studied in a chapter on Mallarmé and his attempt to isolate the book and writing from any worldly context, to employ the physical and spatial character of words written on a blank page as the ultimate setting for what is stated; even syntax begins to evaporate, leaving spatial constellation as the principle of order. The hermetic is further intensified in Flaubert and Joyce. Bruns uses Jakobson’s opposition of metaphor and metonymy as a framework here; metaphor is the process of substituting one word or unit of language for another, metonymy the process of annexing other units to the one we have; it works in combination, association, syntax, and the linkage of sentences. Metaphor is normally dominant in poetry, metonymy in narration and prose. But in the prose of Flaubert and Joyce, metaphor comes to prevail. In Flaubert there still remains room for metonymy and its narrative element, but in Joyce metonymy is overwhelmed by metaphor. The extreme is reached in Finnegan’s Wake, where the principle of substitution, metaphor, reaches beyond the replacement of one word by another, into replacements among parts of words: "eventide," for example, blends with "Eve," and completely new words are formed which are, however, parasitic on established words, as the writer attempts to control that which classically remained beyond his free manipulation, the very establishment of words out of phonemic units. The writer tries to move in an area of the subconscious calculus, to insert his choices beyond the limits of what he seemed forced to take for granted. In all this the linguistic object and not the world becomes more and more the writer’s theme, and the last step is reached in the chapter on Beckett. Bruns describes various transformations of language found in Beckett’s work, and concludes with Lessness, in which all syntax is dissolved and no ordering principle seems to remain; correlatively, the speaker of such surrealistic discourse also loses his identity. (shrink)

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different (...) approaches to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

The appearance of the first Hermes Trismegistus’ texts in cultural space «Slavia Orthodoxa» falls on XV century: in Serbian literature Konstantin Filozof’s «Žitije despota Stefana Lazarevića» and in old Ukrainian “Palais Krekhivsky” described by Ivan Franko. Serbian version contains only few lines, but Ukrainian includes individual and very complete section on Hermes Trismegistus’ life. It provides the information on the origin of Hermes, on the story of his father, and on his studying of secret alchemical knowledge in Egypt. Separately is (...) Hermes understanding of the Trinity divine nature allocated. Orthodox literature of XV century is mostly apophatic. Following the Christian thought of first centuries, which in the face of pseudo-Dionysius Aeropahit stated, that the description accuracy of God is in denial terms only and that our language is not developed enough to express the divine essence. Such statements can be found in the Slavic texts of Hermes. God’s Hermes nature is also stated in apophatic style that is consistent to intellectual atmosphere of Orthodox Slavs. So the scribes were able to tailor the Hermetism founder’s image to their needs, concerning questions on the nature of the Holy Trinity being. In general, it did not contradict to Hermetism, which believes that the more there are meanings contradict to each other, the more obscure the words are used, the more expressed is shown in confusing characters, the more they are suitable to describe the Absolute. (shrink)

This book presents a phenomenological and hermeneutical research, where the body is taken both as fundamental ontological situation of human, as well as a language phenomenon, appearing in the dialectical tension between two Greeks notions – soma and sarx. The first of them is a becoming, hypostasizing entity, which in Aristotelian terms can be called dynamis (potentiality), while the second one, since it is a hypostasis, can be called energia (actuality). So the difference between them, using Heidegger’s terms, can (...) be seen as ontological one. One of the hypotheses of the research is that such a specifically divided body is a ground of mystical experience. Though as the examples provided here were mysticisms by Gregory Palamas and Meister Eckhart, they were interpreted as spectacular particularities of the broader, not only religious, phenomenon of mysticism. The latter is redefined here as a relation (including erotic one), based on meeting and co-action of two or more bodies etc. -/- This book is a phenomenological and hermeneutical research, where the body is presented both as fundamental ontological situation of human, as well as a language phenomenon, appearing in the dialectical tension between two Greeks notions – soma (the body) and sarx (flesh). The first of them is a becoming, hypostasizing entity, which in Aristotelian terminology can be called dynamis (potentiality), while the second one, since it is a hypostasis, can be called energia (actuality). Though the difference between them, using Heidegger’s terminology, can be presented as ontological. For one of the hypotheses of the research is that such a specifically divided body is a ground of mystical experience. Though as examples taken here were mysticisms by St Gregory Palamas and Meister Eckhart, they understood here as radical, but spectacular particularities of the broader (and essential for such a body) phenomenon of mysticism, which is redefined in this book as not only religious relation, based on meeting and co-action of two or more bodies, hermetic from the outside (so erotic relation also can be presented by this notion). (shrink)

Radio Free Europe used balloons to drop leaflets in an attempt to supplement radio with printed words in the 1950s—a historical moment when closing borders, censoring the press, jamming foreign radios, tapping telephone lines, and tracking letters from abroad created an almost hermetically sealed space without many means for exchanging information across the Iron Curtain. This article traces how distorted and limited information shaped Cold War propaganda and practices of information-gathering. The article further examines unpredictable environmental factors that were transformed (...) into persuasive political rhetoric. A comparative analysis of communist media shows similarities of imagination in a visual propaganda campaign across five communist countries. Fantasies evolved into an object of public interest when propaganda strategies embraced a language of facts. (shrink)

This article engages Friendship: A Central Moral Value by Michael H. Mitias. It questions Mitias’ distinction between friendship as a moral and theoretical concern as opposed to a practical one. It distinguishes the narrow from the wide meanings of philia in Aristotle’s approach. It looks at the resonances of classical approaches in later theories of friendship, while also attending to the innovations of later thinkers. It suggests that the moral paradigms Mitias delineates might not be as hegemonic nor as hermetically (...) sealed as he suggests. Mitias’ contribution is better understood as an addition to moral philosophy than to friendship studies. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

This article analyses the online communication of the Estonian extreme right that appears to be characterized by an echo-chamber effect as well as enclosed and hermetic meaning-making. The discussion mainly relies on the theoretical frameworks offered by semiotics of culture.One of the aims of the article is to widen the scope of understanding of autocommunicative processes that are usually related to learning, insight and innovation. The article shows the conditions in which autocommunicative processes result in closed interactions, based on (...) reproducing stereotypes and redundant content. We detect antithetical meaning-making, an orientation towards normative (“correct”) texts and the prevalence of phatic communication as the main dominants that guide closed autocommunication. Such communication leads to polarization of dissimilar views and hinders dialogue. Our case study focuses on the discussion that arose in the context of the European Refugee Crisis that started in spring 2015. (shrink)

List of contributors; Acknowledgments; Introduction Robert S. Westman and David C. Lindberg; 1. Conceptions of the scientific revolution from Bacon to Butterfield: a preliminary sketch David C. Lindberg; 2. Conceptions of science in the scientific revolution Ernan McMullin; 3. Metaphysics and the new science Gary Hatfield; 4. Proof, portics, and patronage: Copernicus’s preface to De revolutionibus Robert S. Westman; 5. A reappraisal of the role of the universities in the scientific revolution John Gascoigne; 6. Natural magic, hermetism, and occultism in (...) early modern science Brian P. Copenhaver; 7. Natural history and the emblematic world view William B. Ashworth, Jr.; 8. From the secrets of nature to public knowledge William Eamon; 9. Chemistry in the scientific revolution: problems of language and communication Jan V. Golinski; 10. The new philosophy and medicine in seventeenth-century England Harold J. Cook; 11. Science and heterodoxy: an early modern problem reconsidered Michael Hunter; 12. Infinitesimals and transcendent relations: the mathematics of motion in the late seventeenth century Michael S. Mahoney; 13. The case of mechanics: one revolution or many? Alan Gabbey; Index. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan was a notoriously difficult and idiosyncratic thinker. But is there any value in his hermetically difficult style? By highlighting certain crucial elements of his practice, I show how Lacan enlists the notion of difficulty to press home that he did not want his readers to understand directly. Instead, as Foucault and Althusser explain so well, Lacan wished for his readers and auditors to discover themselves as subjects of desire through reading him. Indeed, in miming the language of (...) the unconscious, Lacan believed he could throw into sharp relief the notion of the unconscious itself and, paradoxically, better express himself. This temporary detour through misunderstanding indicates the programmatic value of difficulty itself. By commenting on the comedic aspect of Lacan's difficult literary dandyism, I also seek to playfully remind the reader that Lacan was a master of comedy and irony and that it is only by adopting a comparative literary approach to his work that we can appreciate how his theory of misunderstanding is at the heart of his conceptualization of madness and psychosis, allowing us to see how, for Lacan, the subject is ontologically sick. (shrink)

The article tries to answer the following questions: Why did Lewis Carroll\'s ideas, expressed in the form of fairy tales, fascinate numerous analytical philosophers? What does Carroll\'s contribution to the contemporary logic and philosophy consist in? The basic thesis of the article is that Lewis Carroll - remaining in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of David Hume\'s and George Berkeley\'s philosophy - supplied material illustrating the problems connected with the use of language. He showed how improper use of language leads (...) to formation of philosophical problems. The article presents Carroll\'s output. He was one of the pioneers of symbolic logic that he developed in Boole\'s and De Morgan\'s tradition - in the field of the so-called recreation mathematics that he popularized in the form of riddles, puzzles, doublets and puns, compared by some logicians to a formal system. The article presents the essence of the theory of language developed by Carroll, in which language may be something hermetic with only one person having access to it (the case of Humpty Dumpty), but also something common, something social (Alice\'s conversation with the White King). Attention is paid to the fact that Carroll differentiated between what is nonsensical and what is absurd (the criterion being its relation to logic). It is pointed that Carroll\'s aim was first of all discovering the nonsense that is hidden behind the formulation of a metaphysical problem. In the article also the connections are studied between Carroll and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the relation between them being seen in the view that absurd introduced by means of humor is a kind of vaccine that is supposed to protect us from forming absurdity in philosophy. In conclusion it is stated that Carroll\'s ideas that are the most significant for analytic philosophers are concerned with the nature of language that is not a transparent medium for him, but something that offers resistance when we communicate with others, as well as something that may be flexible and adjusted to our will. By manipulating language Carroll shows in what way philosophy balances between sense and nonsense and how often philosophical questions arise from erroneous use of language and erroneous posing of problems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Milton and Political CorrectnessMary Ann McGrail (bio)In the opening of the title essay of Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss speculates:We can easily imagine that a historian living in a totalitarian country, a generally respected and unsuspected member of the only party in existence, might be led by his investigations to doubt the soundness of the government-sponsored interpretation of the history of religion. Nobody would prevent him (...) from publishing a passionate attack on what he would call the liberal view. He would of course have to state the liberal view before attacking it; he would make that statement in the quiet, unspectacular and somewhat boring manner which would seem to be but natural; he would use many technical terms, give many quotations and attach undue importance to insignificant details; he would seem to forget the holy war of mankind in the petty squabbles of pedants. Only when he reached the core of the argument would he write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think. That central passage would state the case of the adversaries more clearly, compellingly and mercilessly than it had ever been stated in the heyday of liberalism, for he would silently drop all the foolish excrescences of the liberal creed which were allowed to grow up during the time when liberalism had succeeded and therefore was approaching dormancy. His reasonable young reader would for the first time catch a glimpse of the forbidden fruit. The attack, the bulk of the work, would consist of virulent expansions of the most virulent utterances in the holy book or books of the ruling party. The intelligent young man who, being young, had until then been somehow attracted by those immoderate utterances, would now be merely disgusted and, after having tasted the forbidden fruit, even bored by them. Reading the book for the second and third time, he would detect in the very arrangement of the quotations from the authoritative books significant additions to those few terse statements which occur in the center of the rather short first part.[24–25]This description of exoteric writing—that is, writing with two teachings: “a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject, which is indicated only between the lines” [Strauss 36]—is the principle of reading most closely associated with Strauss and Straussians. What Strauss describes here is the practice of “writing between the lines” by authors holding heterodox views, constrained by the prejudices of their audience or the vested interests of the regimes within which they write. The term is broadly misused by both opponents and students of Strauss’s work themselves and has helped to gain Straussians the mythopoetic status of hermetic school. The popular version of this theory [End Page 98] is that there are writers with secret teachings, and this occasionally lends itself to different kinds of scholarly deception and grandstanding.Strauss, in this passage, refers to the position of a writer in a totalitarian country. This might lead a writer or critic in a liberal, democratic country to conclude wrongly that this kind of writing would not appear in a liberal society where there is no direct suppression of freedom of speech. I wish to suggest in this article that Milton’s Areopagitica uses a form of exoteric writing, what Macaulay calls a “peculiar art,” which addresses itself not just to the dangers of suppression of thought from above, but also to the potential dangers of suppression of thought from below. In liberal regimes, de Tocqueville located the origins of the latter, the suppression of thought from below, in what he called the tyranny of the majority. One contemporary form of this is “political correctness,” an insistence that public writings and speeches be purified to conform to a particular view of what constitutes “unprejudiced” language. Geoffrey Hill has referred to these communally enforced constraints as “the thuggish stereotypes of political correctness,” a phrase which conveys the paradox of a concept which is based simultaneously on a certainty about the incapacity of writers... (shrink)

The year 1492 is only the last in a series of “ends” that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries are set between periods, communities, and texts. This book addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from (...) Christian Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts. The book offers a reading of texts that emerge from its Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic cultural sphere: Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed; the major text of Kabbalah, the Zohar; and the Arabic rhymed prose narrative of Ibn al-Astarkuwi. The author argues that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre. At stake are issues – texts and contexts – that have gained particular urgency in the writings of such recent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Avital Ronell. The book reads the place and taking place of language, interrogating the notion of disappearing contexts and the view that language is derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is mourned as silent and lost. (shrink)

When authors act by either publishing or non-publishing their texts, they sometimes use a language of gestures. These gestures can assist to position the author in the intellectual field. In this way some German eighteenth-century philosophers who thought against the grain of mainstream rationalism withdrew from the public sphere, using the image of the Egyptian god Harpocrates, who puts his index finger to his lips—a symbol for maintaining silence. In a sense one can thus label this kind of quietism (...) as “harpocratism.” The essay examines the imagery and contextualizes it in three case studies from the years 1720-50. Moreover, it explores its sources in political as well as antiquarian and hermetic discourses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essay serves as a model for defining intellectual positions not so much by their content, but rather by their practices of symbolic distancing from others, of building identities in emotional communities, and of shaping free zones of inquiry where they could flourish. (shrink)

A Religion of Progress has taken shape over the last 21 centuries, from the Enlightenment to present times. It is quite simple to follow a thread from Hermeticism to today, however, several facts have altered its content, therefore, reformulating some of its promises and vision of the world. This paper attempts to evaluate how that Religion of Progress has become a sort of Techno-Hermeticism 2.0. Digital technologies have redefined old hermetic myths into a high-tech religion with dire environmental consequencies. (...) Some of those myths are the resurrection of the bodies, the construction of the City of God, the Adamic universal language and so forth. Now religion must confront the upcoming collapse, however, it is unable to provide satisfactory answers. This goes for all the different churches, from accelerationists (Nick Land) to extinctionists and believers of digital solutionism. That leaves possible imaginative responses to that sociecological crisis without any relevant proposals. (shrink)

Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make something that is not a work of art. This question returns over and over in modernist culture, where there are no longer any authoritative criteria for what can be identified (or excluded) as a work of art. As William Carlos Williams says, “A poem can be made of anything,” even newspaper clippings.At this point, art turns into philosophy, all art is now conceptual art, and the manifesto becomes the distinctive genre (...) of modernism. This book takes seriously this transformation of art into philosophy, focusing upon the systematic interest that so many European philosophers take in modernism. Among the philosophers Gerald Bruns discusses are Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas.As Bruns demonstrates, the difficulty of much modern and contemporary poetry can be summarized in the idea that a poem is made of words, not of any of the things that we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, narratives, or expressions of feeling. Many modernist poets have argued that in poetry language is no longer a form of mediation but a reality to be explored and experienced in its own right. But what sort of experience, philosophically, might this be? The problem of the materiality or hermetic character of poetic language inevitably leads to questions of how philosophy itself is to be written and what sort of communitydefines the work of art—or, for that matter, the work of philosophy.In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience—or, indeed, an alternative form of life—as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how. (shrink)

SubStance is pleased to present, for the first time in English, the Prologue and Epilogue from Roger Caillois's Pierres réfléchies. Pierres réfléchies is the last, and least cited, of Caillois's singular writings on stones, which are being rediscovered and reread in the contemporary geologic-philosophical-aesthetic context. Here, Caillois provides a final articulation of his mystical materialism and diagonal science, his hermetic reading of a cosmos composed of hieroglyphic signs, in which "stone… speaks… the most convincing language in the universe." (...) These ruminations from Pierres réfléchies display a deeper methodological discernment, and more somber humor, than the earlier works. Perhaps this is... (shrink)

‘Everyone who now reads and writes in the West, of whatever racial background, sex or ideological camp, is still a son or daughter of Homer.’ While the extent to which this claim is accurate has been disputed, it is not wrong in our own day to grant the highest honours for ongoing influence to the author of theIliad. All the more so in Late Antiquity, a period frequently viewed as hermetically isolated from the classical world, but which resolutely viewed itself (...) as part of that unbroken cultural and literary continuum. One of those who made repeated use of Homer's epic was the Emperor Julian, one of the most prolific writers among Rome's emperors. In the fourth centurya.d., Homer's influence was still predominant, not only being Julian's favourite and most frequently cited author but also forming for Libanius of Antioch ‘one of the pillars of rhetorical teaching’. Despite Glen Bowersock's statement that Julian's many writings offer unique insight into his character and disposition, Julian is still a historical character who is not easy to ‘know’. Julian's life was shaped by the murder of his father, brothers and uncles by a cabal involving, if not orchestrated by, his cousin Constantius II. This was followed by the removal of his trusted confidant Salutius, again by Constantius. These experiences exhibit an unusual phenomenon, in that, when Julian referred to them, they were prefaced by a spate of Homeric allusions. Julian's wrath at people taken from him was both genuine and politically useful, but the expression of it was dangerous enough that he expressed it obliquely in the language of Homer. These citations and allusions, drawn primarily from theIliad, were far more than Julian's flaunting of his education, but were rather a tool for subtly conveying his desired message, a message with strong political tones. I will treat these passages in the order in which Julian wrote them, although that places the events reminisced about in the reverse order. (shrink)

: This paper argues that Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground makes a fundamental point that runs directly counter to the received popular image of the work; i.e. the understanding that Notes describes a consciousness reflecting on itself, hermetically sealed within its own Cartesian interior. In truth, a closer reading shows that the mind depicted therein is profoundly relational and situated in a particularized context, and that this discursive mind characterizes what Wittgenstein says about mental privacy in the context of the private (...) language argument. The upshot is that language is not secondary, not an afterthought, and thus not posterior to pure subjectivity of the kind that many who celebrate "inferiority" take as a given human experience. (shrink)

Art history cannot be sealed off in cultural isolation: given our innate forms of life, language, and human nature, cultural diversity is only skin deep. The identification of art by historical recursion could not be restricted to the fixed art history of one hermetically sealed cultural tradition because there is no such thing. Attempts to define artworks recursively thus lead to the absurdity that everything in the present might be art because of unknown art antecedents in earlier human cultures (...) that we in a contemporary culture would not call art. Making the lack of a theory the theoretical point of a practice leads to chaos. (shrink)

_Dark Tongues _constitutes a sustained exploration of a perplexing fact that has never received the attention it deserves. Wherever human beings share a language, they also strive to make from it something new: a cryptic idiom, built from the grammar that they know, which will allow them to communicate in secrecy. Such hidden languages come in many shapes. They may be playful or serious, children's games or adults' work. They may be as impenetrable as foreign tongues, or slightly different (...) from the idioms from which they spring, or barely perceptible, their existence being the subject of uncertain, even unlikely, suppositions. The first recorded jargons date to the time of the Renaissance, when writers across Europe noted that obscure languages had suddenly come into use. A varied cast of characters -- lawyers, grammarians, and theologians -- denounced these new forms of speech, arguing that they were tools of crime, plotted in tongues that honest people could not understand. Before the emergence of these modern jargons, however, the artificial twisting of languages served a different purpose. In epochs and regions as diverse as archaic Greece and Rome and medieval Provence and Scandinavia, singers and scribes also invented opaque varieties of speech. They did so not to defraud, but to reveal and record a divine thing: the language of the gods, which poets and priests alone were said to master. _Dark Tongues _moves among these various artificial and hermetic tongues. From criminal jargons to sacred idioms, from Saussure's work on anagrams to Jakobson's theory of subliminal patterns in poetry, from the arcane arts of the Druids and Biblical copyists to the secret procedure that Tristan Tzara, founder of Dada, believed he had uncovered in Villon's songs and ballads, Dark Tongues explores the common crafts of rogues and riddlers, which play sound and sense against each other. (shrink)

This article deals with an object of Philosophy, strictly the Philosophy of Language, which concerns the study of the logic and of the dialectics. So, it proposes to analyze the dialectic-logical conceptual aspects in the Corpus Hermeticum 12.12-14a in comparison with the logical texts of the Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, in order to find supposed sources conformed with the hermetic text, and know how they were re-worked in it. For that, the references, descriptions and quotations of Sextus Empiricus and (...) of Diocles Magnes, apud Diogenes Laertius, they constitute important sources on the philosophical doctrines of Zenon, Cleanthes and Crysippus. One considers that the doctrine of the first part of the Corp. Herm. 12 is, often, Platonic. Nevertheless, there are realized signs of influences of stoicism. The conception about νοῦς [nous] in the man is from Platonic origin, but the expression προφοριϰὸς λόγος [prophorikos logos] is certainly Stoic. Then, the Corp. Herm. 12 is a product of a middle-stoicism or middle-Platonism, stoicizing Platonism or platonizing Stoicism, which cannot have appeared before the c. I B.C.E. Specifically, the article is interested in the dialectic-logical problem that involve some Stoic concepts, as λόγος, προφοριϰὸς λόγος, φωνή [phōnē], as well as the problem of the connective propositional logic in the platonizing process through the doctrine of νοῦς themed in the Corp. Herm. 12.12-14a, assuming a theological dimension and a divine character of λόγος, by being ἐνδιάϑετος λόγος, the thought that exists ἐν τῇ διαϑέσει, ἐν τῷ νῷ. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Transitions to a Modern Cosmology: Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa on the Intensive InfiniteElizabeth BrientThe Epochal Transition from the late medieval to the early modern world has long been thought in terms of the gradual “infinitization” of the cosmos. Traditionally this process has been studied by focusing on the pre-history and the aftermath of the Copernican revolution, that is, by describing the transition from the finite, hierarchically ordered (...) medieval cosmos to the infinite and homogeneous universe of the new astronomy. I would like to situate this paper within the context of a more general reading of the process of the infinitization of the medieval cosmos. That is, I want to argue that this process of “infinitization” must be understood intensively as well as extensively. Nature, in the modern age, is thought of not only as infinitely extended in space, but also as exhibiting an infinite richness in all of its parts. Each particular, each individual being is grasped as utterly unique, as infinitely rich and consequently as conceptually inexponable. Thus the infinitization of the real leads to an infinitization of the knowable—the radical shift in ontology grounds a corresponding shift in epistemology, so that the progress of human knowledge is understood as an unending project infinitely extended over time. In order to underscore both aspects of the infinitization of the medieval cosmos (intensive as well as extensive) I will focus on the way in which a single metaphor (that of the infinite sphere) is unfolded historically in the thought of Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa.1 This paper may thus be viewed as a case study of [End Page 575] the way in which the modern notion of “intensive infinity” may be traced back to late medieval speculation on the nature of God’s omnipresence in the world.1. EARLY SOURCES OF THE INFINITE SPHERE METAPHORThe metaphor of the infinite sphere makes its first appearance in the pseudo-Hermetic Liber XXIV philosophorum, a small book in the literary form of an “opus propositionum” which, in twenty-four propositions, describes the ineffable essence of God in the mystical language of Neoplatonic theology. It is in the second proposition of this book that we find for the first time the formulation, “God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.”2 This formulation represents a significant development in the history of the Neoplatonic conception of intensive unity, and in the Christian understanding of divine infinity. The Neoplatonic One is here identified with God as infinite being. As a result the relationship between the One and the many, between God and the world, comes to be viewed in a new light, through the lens of “infinite unity.” The metaphor of the infinite sphere is a paradoxical formulation which pictures the coincidence of divine immanence with divine transcendence. That is, it expresses a double infinity: both intensive and extensive. God’s center is located at every point, as it were, indicating the plenitude and infinite richness of God’s being, while there is no limit, no boundary to the extent of God’s all-encompassing reach. The infinite sphere figures the divine nature as an intensive plenitude without end or bounds. The third and next proposition in this same work goes on to strengthen this sense of divine intensity, by asserting that God in his entirety is present in every part (Deus est totus in quolibet sui). The divine nature is not spread out compositionally, as it were, but is wholly present throughout. Proposition 18 describes God as a sphere which has just as many circumferences as points (Deus est sphaera cuius tot sunt circumferentiae, quot sunt puncta), once again, an exploding image which can only make sense in the case of an infinite sphere. These three propositions taken together provide us with a springboard for considering the nature of infinite unity. The exploding paradox of the infinite sphere [End Page 576] provides a rubric for thinking the coincidence of transcendence and immanence, a way of conceptualizing infinite unity, which cannot be “grasped” with finite concepts or through discursive reasoning. The metaphor of the infinite sphere finds its meaning precisely in the way... (shrink)

Though Joseph Nadler published the definitive, critical edition of Hamanns' complete works, the hermetic character of these texts warrants only too strongly a publication of at least the major texts with commentaries. The annotated edition is planned to comprise eight volumes. From the viewpoint of the history of ideas, Vol. IV is undoubtedly the most interesting, since it contains the important texts on the origin of language. These were directly provoked by Herder's famous Abhandlung über den Ursprung der (...) Sprache; "the Magician of the North" fights the spirit of the Aufklärung even when it is clothed in the more attractive, pre-romantic setting of Herder's prose. Besides a fantastic amount of notes and commentary, Miss Büchsel, the editor of Vol. IV, offers a comprehensive and penetrating introductory study. Especially important are the chapters on the "pre-history" of Hamanns' Herder-interpretation and its influence on the later development of German intellectual life from the early Goethe to the old Schelling Vol. V contains the so-called mystery-writings directly pertinent to the Christian doctrine of the revelation of the Incarnated Son of God. These texts are truly esoteric, and even the multitude of notes accompanying them cannot always fully overcome their terrible obscurity. And here arises the only objection against this edition. The notes and commentaries are a mine of detailed information, and they "unconceal" the meaning of every word. Yet perhaps their very abundance impedes their stated purpose. They do help in understanding the words, but they make sustained reading of the texts themselves impossible. The encyclopedical character of the notes is cause for both exasperation and for growth in knowledge and inspiration.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Though Joseph Nadler published the definitive, critical edition of Hamanns' complete works, the hermetic character of these texts warrants only too strongly a publication of at least the major texts with commentaries. The annotated edition is planned to comprise eight volumes. From the viewpoint of the history of ideas, Vol. IV is undoubtedly the most interesting, since it contains the important texts on the origin of language. These were directly provoked by Herder's famous Abhandlung über den Ursprung der (...) Sprache; "the Magician of the North" fights the spirit of the Aufklärung even when it is clothed in the more attractive, pre-romantic setting of Herder's prose. Besides a fantastic amount of notes and commentary, Miss Büchsel, the editor of Vol. IV, offers a comprehensive and penetrating introductory study. Especially important are the chapters on the "pre-history" of Hamanns' Herder-interpretation and its influence on the later development of German intellectual life from the early Goethe to the old Schelling Vol. V contains the so-called mystery-writings directly pertinent to the Christian doctrine of the revelation of the Incarnated Son of God. These texts are truly esoteric, and even the multitude of notes accompanying them cannot always fully overcome their terrible obscurity. And here arises the only objection against this edition. The notes and commentaries are a mine of detailed information, and they "unconceal" the meaning of every word. Yet perhaps their very abundance impedes their stated purpose. They do help in understanding the words, but they make sustained reading of the texts themselves impossible. The encyclopedical character of the notes is cause for both exasperation and for growth in knowledge and inspiration.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Placing Bruno—both advanced philosopher and magician burned at the stake—in the Hermetic tradition, Yates's acclaimed study gives an overview not only of Renaissance humanism but of its interplay—and conflict—with magic and occult practices. "Among those who have explored the intellectual world of the sixteenth century no one in England can rival Miss Yates. Wherever she looks, she illuminates. Now she has looked on Bruno. This brilliant book takes time to digest, but it is an intellectual adventure to read it. (...) Historians of ideas, of religion, and of science will study it. Some of them, after reading it, will have to think again.... For Miss Yates has put Bruno, for the first time, in his tradition, and has shown what that tradition was."—Hugh Trevor-Roper, _New Statesman_ "A decisive contribution to the understanding of Giordano Bruno, this book will probably remove a great number of misrepresentations that still plague the tormented figure of the Nolan prophet."—Giorgio de Santillana, _American Historical Review_ "Yates's book is an important addition to our knowledge of Giordano Bruno. But it is even more important, I think, as a step toward understanding the unity of the sixteenth century."—J. Bronowski, _New York Review of Books_. (shrink)

In his writing, Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, (...) and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition. Identifying key hermetic moments in Deleuze's thought, including his theories of art, subjectivity, and immanence, Ramey argues that the philosopher's work represents a kind of contemporary hermeticism, a consistent experiment in unifying thought and affect, percept and concept, and mind and nature in order to engender new relations between knowledge, power, and desire. By uncovering and clarifying the hermetic strand in Deleuze's work, Ramey offers both a new interpretation of Deleuze, particularly his insistence that the development of thought demands a spiritual ordeal, and a framework for retrieving the pre-Kantian paradigm of philosophy as spiritual practice. (shrink)

Current work in language models (LMs) helps us speed up or even skip thinking by accelerating and automating cognitive work. But can LMs help us with critical thinking -- thinking in deeper, more reflective ways which challenge assumptions, clarify ideas, and engineer new concepts? We treat philosophy as a case study in critical thinking, and interview 21 professional philosophers about how they engage in critical thinking and on their experiences with LMs. We find that philosophers do not find LMs (...) to be useful because they lack a sense of selfhood (memory, beliefs, consistency) and initiative (curiosity, proactivity). We propose the selfhood-initiative model for critical thinking tools to characterize this gap. Using the model, we formulate three roles LMs could play as critical thinking tools: the Interlocutor, the Monitor, and the Respondent. We hope that our work inspires LM researchers to further develop LMs as critical thinking tools and philosophers and other 'critical thinkers' to imagine intellectually substantive uses of LMs. (shrink)