The aim of this essay is a philosophical reconstruction of the category of Eastern Europe (as topographical and ethical, and only by implication a geographical one). This will proceed in three steps. First, deconstruction of the category in question by exposing its colonialist and post-colonialist origins. Second, projection of a new cultural geography of Eastern Europe. The main criteria of which are: 1) belonging to the European community of values, 2) being directly and permanently exposed to a paradoxical cultural formation, (...) neither European nor Asian, which poses a constant threat to all neighboring states and nations – Russia. In the third step, Eastern Europe is presented as a specifically determined way of living, experiencing, and self-understanding, localized in particular space(s); that is, a particular ethos rooted in a concrete topos/topoi. This ethos has been driven by the ideals of freedom, equality, cultural diversity, and the sovereignty of the people; and actualized in a kind of cultural flexibility, hybridity, and polyphony. However, this ethos has never been something given. It has been gradually developing throughout its dramatic history, and this was not only a history of those sublime ideals (and their partial actualization), but also of their real and brutal negation. That is why this ethos is grounded in a constantly renewed activity of self-questioning and self-searching, in a persistently recurrent will of self-determination; and that is also why Eastern Europe cannot be enclosed in a single narrative, but it expresses itself through different and often competing stories. (shrink)

In the first of two essays on the ontological ground of otherness, and its phenomenological availability, we argue that what we call the “occasion” within the encounter of others are sources as well as re-sources for disclosing the results of a construction and concealment of a secret identity, one we keep from ourselves even though we have created it. Yet, individuals are capable of returning their encounters to the well of sensus communis, and that sensus communis is as natural as (...) it is cultural. Human beings are not compelled to interpret strangeness as threat, even if we are culturally compelled to interpret strangeness itself. Narrative lives in our sensus communis, and it is open, revisable, even danceable. Immediacy is person, the person that is community, and it is sublime, is both liked and disliked. (shrink)

This is the second of the essays on the existential-ontological ground of otherness, in which we see this ground as essentially entwined with our personhood and our personal identities. We analyze irony as both a “mechanism” of constituting these very identities and as an act revealing their self-altering nature. Irony in our view — informed by Kierkegaard, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis — is a subtle existential strategy by means of which subjectivity (not “the subject”) not only asserts itself, but also, and (...) much more importantly, initiates an open-ended process of self-actualization and self-formation. Irony, as we present it, is at once a form of defensive response against the “absolute” character of reality and comparably “absolutist” aspirations of an individual. Such responses open up a space of negotiation between and among these forces, in their creative interplay. In doing so the responses can be as constitutive for subjectivity as they can be disruptive. The disruption does not only undermine the (apparently) unshakeable forms of our self-understanding. More radically, the disruption puts on the stage our “alternative identities,” those with which we have to confront ourselves, whether in the negative mode of repression, or in the acts of positive, or even playful, recognition. In this way irony reveals and articulates otherness in the very heart of subjectivity. (shrink)

The authors of this collection argue that all philosophy is really philosophy of culture and that through it we can live more meaningful, flourishing, and wisely guided lives.

Preview: Words have weight and power; and so do narratives and ideas. They can shape and re-shape realities. They can reveal unheard and unthought of before aspects and dimensions of the world we live in, and in this sense, constitute truth for us; however, they can also, by means of the very same gravity conceal, distort or even destroy our view on reality and our vital relations with it and with ourselves. They are the basic means of our self-understanding, but (...) they can also destroy the very fundaments of it. We always find ourselves within a certain discursive space providing us with the basic ontological, existential, and axiological coordinates for our living and acting. These coordinates indicate and are expressive of our values and concerns, our plans and projects, our normative ideals, and basic attitudes toward ourselves, others, and strangers. They are informative of who we are by pointing out where we stand. They constitute a space of mattering: the space within which our lives are possible only because first they are meaningful; that is, worth of standing for, worthy of defending. However, these spaces quite quickly can become taken for granted, then de-temporalized, de-historicized, petrified, and finally no longer expressive of our identities. (shrink)

Recenzja: Skye Cleary, Existentialism and Romantic Love, New York, Palgrave MacMillan 2015, 208 stron.

Preview: The status of philosophy of culture seems to be notoriously unclear. Since its birth as a methodologically self-aware discipline, it constantly provokes controversies and questions concerning its nature, scope, and objective field of cognitive interests. Is it to be conceived – as it was intended by Wilhelm Dilthey – as a kind of philosophical foundation for Geisteswissenschaften and even more specifically for Kulturwissenschaften – in which case it would play a parallel role to philosophy of science in its relation (...) to natural sciences? Or is it to be understood as a kind of inter-discipline or trans-discipline whose task is to provide a synoptic view on the world we live in and try to understand? Or perhaps one should see it as a particular meta-philosophical orientation – understood rather in terms of a specific approach or a form of sensitivity than as a discipline which would be fully determined with regard to its methodology and objective field of cognitive interests? Or, as some scholars quite convincingly suggest, should be seen first and foremost as a way of life oriented around human intellectual and spiritual growth? Or still as something else? Furthermore, even if we assume a common agreement with regard to its nature and status among other philosophical disciplines as well as its relation to humanities and natural sciences – it does not mean that it will be followed by a similar agreement with regard to its most adequate methodological approach. Should it be: descriptive, archeological, critical, procesual, teleological, normative? Perhaps a synthesis comprising all of them? Or still something different? (shrink)