This chapter contains sections titled: Being and Otherwise than Being: Around NÉANT or Death Immanence and Transcendence: With the Ruin of the Representation Immanent Transcendence: The Case of Chinese Thought Conclusion: The Meaning of All Existents Endnotes.

Traditionally, metaphysical notions of self and other presuppose a dualism that underlies much of Western philosophy. This dualism is opposed by accounts of self and other in recent continental philosophy and classical Chinese philosophy, which I compare. I argue that the self is seen in continental and Chinese thought as embedded in relations and language, and not as transcendent or prior in the metaphysical sense to them. I argue for this by focussing on three themes: self and (...) language, self as relational and embedded in the world or contextual environment, and self and the particular other. These three themes show that the complexity and dynamic of the self-other relation is much more realistically conveyed by continental and classical Chinese thought than by the traditional metaphysical account. (shrink)

This paper develops an interpretation of nature in classical Chinese culture through dialogue with the work of François Jullien. I understand nature negatively as precisely what never appears as such nor ever can be exactly apprehended and defined. For perception and expression entail inevitably human mediation and cultural transmission by semiotic and hermeneutic means that distort and occult the natural in the full depth of its alterity. My claim is that the largely negative approach to nature that Jullien finds (...) in sources of Chinese tradition can also be found in the West, particularly in its apophatic currents or countercurrents that contest all along the more powerful positive conceptions and systems for construing and mastering the natural world. These insights grow especially from the critique of idolatry, in which worship of nature, in concrete, objective forms taken as gods, is negated. Bringing out this negative-theological matrix can give us a perspective on Jullien’s treatment and expose some of his own biases notably in favor of immanence to the exclusion of metaphysical transcendence. Comparative philosophy serves in this negative-theological key self-critically to identify blind spots in one’s own culture. (shrink)

Traditionally, metaphysical notions of self and other presuppose a dualism that underlies much of Western philosophy. This dualism is opposed by accounts of self and other in recent continental philosophy and classical Chinese philosophy, which I compare. I argue that the self is seen in continental and Chinese thought as embedded in relations and language, and not as transcendent or prior in the metaphysical sense to them. I argue for this by focussing on three themes: self and (...) language, self as relational and embedded in the world or contextual environment, and self and the particular other. These three themes show that the complexity and dynamic of the self-other relation is much more realistically conveyed by continental and classical Chinese thought than by the traditional metaphysical account. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and AestheticsJoseph GrangeIn Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics. By François Jullien. Translated by Paul M. Varsano. New York: Zone Books, 2004. Pp. 1,969.A book praising "blandness"—which is the translator's English word for the French fadeur, which is the author's translation of the Chinese dan!—and a book that is at once fascinating (...) and "repellent" (to use the translator's description of his tortuous search for an equivalent of fadeur and dan), In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics by François Jullien is a "globalizing" philosophical essay bent on stopping readers in their tracks at every twist and turn of the text. Is it worth the trouble? I shall venture a response in this review.More than once while reading this book, I was reminded of Plato's Sophist, where the difficulty in locating the sophist is described in such intricate detail. First he is here, but then he is over there; on the other hand, he could be hiding near by— but wait, maybe he has disappeared. So it is also with blandness. And perhaps it should be so, because once you have located the bland, it ceases to be bland and turns into something else. To take a fix on blandness Jullien throws it against a number of traits, qualities, experiences, and events: strength, music, sounds, signs, landscapes, painting, tastes, literature, ideology, margins and centers, and, finally, the fact that "transcendence is natural." At the same time, the author weaves these contrasts and comparisons through the history of Chinese culture, especially in the evolution of its painting and poetry. [End Page 484]Foremost among the qualities associated with blandness is inner detachment. What come immediately to mind are Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and aspects of Confucian teaching. Jullien has already given us a splendid treatise in his The Propensities of Things, and in some ways this volume rings many changes on that study of Chinese culture. But there is more to blandness than causal efficacy. It also suggests openness and a mood of friendliness toward the other, the different, and all things strange. Further, blandness is similar to harmony in the sense that it does not insist on its own presence. Rather, it constantly blends together opposites through its own power.It is power and its expression that is at the heart of the author's project. He attempts over and over again to show how the seemingly weak is actually the strong, that the far away is really close to hand, that emptiness is charged with spontaneous creative energy. Thus, what lingers is not yet finished expressing itself. And the translator tells us that a gustatory sense is the primary base of fadeur, dan, and blandness. The body is the region within which the bland can have its most powerful effect. Think of Chinese medicine, where "the web that has no weaver" (the title of Ted Kaptchuk's brilliant book) is the object of the physician's art. Or consider the power of water to yield and then conquer all. Or remember the Mahāyāna Buddhist's invocation of śūnyatā as the source of healing and renewal. Or recall the many times that Confucius advises silence rather than words. All these moments are akin to what Jullien calls "blandness."One way to grasp the insight into Chinese culture that Jullien is struggling with is to express it by way of Neoplatonism and Spinoza. What is often forgotten in expositions of these formidable philosophies is the way in which they use a novel doctrine of causality to bind together different realms of beings. For Plotinus and Spinoza the cause never really leaves the effect but remains there, hidden but effective. It is through this lingering presence that transcendence and immanence, body and soul, and God and the World remain conjoined. The image of the ladder so frequently found in these texts must be understood to run in both directions—up and down. So also, blandness is a dao that opens up experience to further depths and heights.Jullien's major concern is aesthetics... (shrink)

Can Levinas be of any use for a radical political project beyond the liberal horizon? By illustrating the irreconcilability of Levinas’ ethico-politics to liberal conception of the individual, its rational peace and economic arrangement, this article argues that there is a radical distance between Levinas’ thought and the western liberal tradition. Yet demonstrating this irreducibility by itself does not expose the underlying radical possibilities of Levinas’ ethics. This task is accomplished by providing a new reading of the ‘third’ in (...) which this concept, instead of merely expressing the betrayal of ethics, points to two simultaneous orders of justice: formal and ethical. The ethical order of justice indicates that the formal justice exists so that the state fulfills its promise of furnishing the human condition with a face-to-face relation. The ethical order of justice simultaneously contains and transcends formal justice, exposing the structural inability of liberalism to offer a fundamental conception of human liberation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What’s God Got to Do with It? A Response to Claire KatzDiane PerpichThe original context for the remarks that follow was a book session at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in October 2009.1 Somewhat surprisingly, both sets of comments at the session focused on what it might mean that the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas—variously identified by key terms like revelation and creation, by (...) God, or by reference to Levinas’s confessional writings and the texts of the Jewish tradition—appeared to be absent from my book, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Now admittedly, these texts and terms and their relation to Levinas’s main philosophical works is not explicitly discussed in the book, but the fact that both respondents focused almost exclusively on this absence raises the question of whether one needs to invoke religious terms in a discussion of Levinas’s reflections on ethics and ethical life. In effect, can a reading of Levinas’s ethical thought succeed without referring to God or the texts of the Jewish tradition? While in one sense, this question is quite beside the point of what I was trying to do in the book, in another, it touches quite closely on a central concern of that work; namely, what if anything justifies or provides a warrant for the exorbitant sort of responsibility that Levinas talks about throughout his writings, philosophical and confessional alike?I will return to this point momentarily in the context of a more detailed discussion of Claire Katz’s remarks, but allow me to begin by expanding briefly on the point of departure for the analysis of Levinas offered in my book. When I first read Levinas, the two features of his thought that struck me as [End Page 118] completely fascinating and utterly perplexing were the account of an alterity so absolute that it defied conceptuality and the notion of a responsibility so infinite that it rendered “me,” the ego, a hostage to the other. What could these two phrases—“absolute alterity” and “infinite responsibility”—mean? Clearly, neither phrase could be meant literally. There simply is nothing that is wholly immune to concepts; and as Levinas himself learned from the study of Henri Bergson, even “nothingness” is, and thus ontology and conceptuality, hand in hand, seem to be fundamental. Similarly, if responsibility is infinite, where infinity is reasonably thought to designate the scope of one’s obligation, the notion becomes incoherent. If I literally cannot do something, then in what sense ought I to do it? A responsibility for everything and everyone is seemingly just the same as having no responsibility at all. And what is most perplexing in all of this is that this inconceivable alterity is said to bring about, in some manner, this impossible responsibility. Let me add that it seemed to me on that first reading (and it still does) to be completely unhelpful to identify “God” either with absolute alterity or with the force of the command that renders us infinitely responsible to the other. To substitute God for alterity, or to claim that God commands our responsibility, explains nothing; it may well be one way of admitting or signaling that explanation has come to an end, but it does not necessarily add anything to that admission. Given the perplexities that beset my first reading of Levinas, it seemed to me that the first task for anyone writing about Levinas and ethics would be to work out the relation between alterity (or transcendence, or the other) and responsibility (as infinite, irrecusable, and asymmetrical). That, effectively, is what the book sets out to do.A second set of motivations for the book intersects with this first set of problems, though in this case, it is less a problem internal to Levinas’s thought and more a problem that arises in connection with certain habits of reading that have become entrenched in the secondary literature. There is a line of interpretation about Levinas’s thought that for many years went largely unchallenged. This “standard” reading begins with the idea that, for Levinas, ethics is not one branch of philosophy among others, rather it is... (shrink)

This paper will attempt to assess the primary differences between what I take to be the two primary philosophical "traditions" in contemporary French philosophy, using Derrida (transcendence) and Deleuze (immanence) as exemplary representatives. The body of the paper will examine the use of these terms in three different areas of philosophy on which Derrida and Deleuze have both written: subjectivity, ontology, and epistemology. (1) In the field of subjectivity, the notion of the subject has been critiqued in two manners, (...) either by appealing either to the transcendence of the other (Levinas, Derrida) or to the immanent jlux of experience itself, in relation to which the Ego itself is trancendent (Deleuze, Foucault, Sartre, James). (2) In the field of ontology, a purely "immanent" ontology would be an ontology in which there is neither a "beyond" or an "otherwise" Being, nor "interruptions" in Being, both of which would require an appeal to a formal element of transcendence (Deleuze). Such a "transcendent" and aporetic structure, which can never appear or be present as such within Being, is what lies at the basis of the project of deconstruction, with its attendant aporias (Derrida). (3) This distinction, finally, finds parallels in Kant's epistemology, for whom the possible experience is conditioned by purely immanent criteria (Deleuze), whereas what goes beyond the limits of possible experience is transcendent (Derrida). Drawing on these three thread of analysis, the paper concludes with an assessment of what is at stake in the ethical differences between the two traditions. The question of "transcendence" is "What mast I do?", which is the question of morality (a duty or obligation that is beyond being, an "ought" beyond the "is"). The question of "immanence" is "What can I do?" (my power or capacity as an existing individual within being). For Levinas and Derrida, ethics precedes ontology because it is derived from an element of transcendence (the Other); for Deleuze, ethics is ontology because it is derived from the immanent relation of beings to Being at the level of their existence (Spinoza). (shrink)

The act of thought-thought as an act-would precede the thought thinking or becoming conscious of an act. The notion of act involves a violence essentially: the violence of transitivity, lacking in the transcendence of thought... Totality and Infinity The work of Emmanuel Levinas revolves around two preoccupations. First, his philosophical project can be described as the construction of a formal ethics, grounded upon the transcendence of the other human being and a subject's spontaneous responsibility (...) toward that other. Second, Levinas has written extensively on, and as a member of, the cultural and textual life of Judaism. These two concerns are intertwined. Their relation, however, is one of considerable complexity. Levinas' philosophical project stems directly from his situation as a Jewish thinker in the twentieth century and takes its particular form from his study of the Torah and the Talmud. It is, indeed, a hermeneutics of biblical experience. If inspired by Judaism, Levinas' ethics are not eo ipso confessional. What his ethics takes from Judaism, rather, is a particular way of conceiving transcendence and the other human being. It owes to the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber a logos of the world and of the holy, which acknowledges their incom mensurability without positing one as fallen and the other as supernal. (shrink)

The ‘Pascalian’ tradition in French thought is a moral rigorism that demands practical embodiment while denying that any embodiment of its demands can ever be complete. The power of this tradition may be seen even in French political moralists of the 20th century. It is revealed in Bergson’s view that the open morality must seek practical expression through the closed society, while constantly subverting it. It is revealed in Levinas’s claim that the ‘saying’ requires to be ‘said’ but always (...) undermines the said, so that what is explicit is ‘always wanting’. Directly, and also through the influence of Levinas, the Pascalian tradition exerts a complex influence on Derrida, in whose thoughts about the topic of justice moral rigorism transforms into an idea of radical epistemic incompleteness, or infinite deferral. ‘Pascalians’ such as Bergson, Levinas and Derrida are convinced, consequently, that the ethical can be given only sporadic or uninstitutionalized political expression; in this regard, they may be contrasted with ‘Lockeans’ who believe that political theory is at one remove from our deepest ethical or religious conclusions. In light of that contrast, the differences between Continental and Anglophone political theory may be traced to post-Reformation circumstances rather than, as is often supposed, to the Enlightenment. (shrink)

What is the law of the law? What produces our craven subservience to linguistic norms, and our shocking indifference to the phenomenon of universal suffering? In a path-breaking new work of philosophy, Louis Wolcher seeks to answer these questions from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism. Bringing an Eastern sensibility into contact with three of the most important themes in Western philosophy, Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy meticulously investigates three of the twentieth century's most important philosophers: Martin Heidegger - (...) on being, Emmanuel Levinas - on ethics, and Ludwig Wittgenstein - on language. In the context of the larger Western obsession with transcending the ordinary, Louis Wolcher argues that the yearning for transcendence is born of the illusion that there is a fundamental difference between the ordinary and the profound. Employing Zen koans and stories to advance a 'deflationary' view of language and knowledge, he goes on to argue that the norms of transcendence to which we cling are not eternal truths but artefacts of desperate minds adrift on a sea of impermanence. What used to seem so majestically True, Right and Just thus shows itself to be utterly mundane: as merely true, right and just. What is left, however, is not nihilism - for clinging to a view of 'nothingness' is just as deluded as clinging to a view of 'somethingness' - but rather a new beginning of compassionate concern for the suffering of others. Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy is a strikingly original synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. It will enlighten philosophers and legal theorists, as well as those who are interested in or open to the insights of Zen Buddhism. (shrink)

This book presents detailed discussions from leading intercultural philosophers, arguing for and against the priority of immanence in Chinese thought and the validity of Western interpretations that attempt to import conceptions of transcendence. The authors pay close attention to contemporary debates generated from critical analysis of transcendence and immanence, including discussions of apophasis, critical theory, post-secular conceptions of society, phenomenological approaches to transcendence, possible-world models, and questions of practice and application. This book aims to explore (...) alternative conceptions of transcendence that either call the tradition in the West into question, or discover from within Western metaphysics a thoroughly dialectical way of thinking about immanence and transcendence. (shrink)

On standard accounts of responsibility, one is thought to be responsible for one's own actions or affairs. Levinas' philosophy speaks of a responsibility that goes beyond my actions and their consequences to an infinite, irrecusable, asymmetrical responsibility for the other human. In the dissertation, I present a defense of Levinasian responsibility and argue that distinctive of Levinas' thought as an ethics is the manner in which it maintains the absolute and unexceptionable character of responsibility, while simultaneously putting into (...) question every possible ground or justification for this claim. The central chapters of the dissertation consider the connection between the formal structure of transcendence and the deformalization of this notion as responsibility. After discussing the notions of transcendence employed in the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, I examine Levinas' criticism that transcendence in their sense remains an immanence insofar it continues to tie the conditions of intelligibility to modes of understanding and comprehension. Levinas' reconception of transcendence as a relation to exteriority and absolute alterity is then examined as it is developed first in his early writings , and then in Totality and Infinity through the tropes of the idea of infinity, metaphysical desire, and the face. The aim of these chapters is not only to elucidate in detail the conception of transcendence, but to examine why Levinas thinks that transcendence is already an ethical event. While commentators have sometimes claimed that ethics in Levinas' sense is neither normative nor descriptive, I show that the question of normativity--of how ethical claims are binding on us--is central to the problematic of responsibility, though in a way which ultimately forces us to revise our understanding of both normativity and ethics. Levinas contests the possibility of decisive evidence that would prove the truth of our ethical obligations. What I show is how the call for proof or justification always already distorts and passes over the meaning of responsibility. (shrink)

François Jullien intervenes into the ontology debates to understand Chinese thought as an anti-ontology, but instead in terms of ‘life’, that is as a sort of vitalism. Chinese anti-ontology features the juxtaposition of the wu (there-is-not) with the you (there-is). This, I argue, maps onto theology’s counterposition of otherworldly and this-worldly. Here Daoism features an ascetic and unstratified wu in contraposition to Confucianism’s you of moderation and stratification. We contrast ontology’s causation with ‘efficacy’ in Jullien’s Chinese (...) thought. We read Zhuangzi’s ‘Equalization of Things’, where the inequalities of the you are equalized in the wu, as a sort of vitalist object energetics. We turn to Chinese ethics, and its driving virtue of yi. We understand the yi not as ‘righteousness’, which is a theological attribute of Christ, but instead as closer to political ‘right’, in China embedded in immanentist forms of life. Western Cartesian ontology is often contrasted with Chinese thought that works through a certain ‘analogism’. We read this, with Walter Benjamin’s Chinese ‘mimetic’ faculty, in terms of a vitalist energetics, a forcefield of the Ten Thousand Things. (shrink)

Examining Levinas’s critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas’s thought. According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a (...) series of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the ecstases of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us. The author suggests that though Levinas’s conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger’s philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas’s philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 34.2 (2006) 14-36 [Access article in PDF] "The Possibility of the Poetic Said" in Otherwise than Being (Allusion, or Blanchot in Lévinas) Gabriel Riera Language would exceed the limits of what is thought, by suggesting, letting be understood without ever making understandable [en laissant sous-entendre, sans jamais faire entendre] an implication of meaning distinct from that which comes to signs from the simultaneity of systems or the (...) logical definition of concepts. This possibility [vertu] is laid bare in the poetic said. [...] It is shown in the prophetic said. —Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being [my emphasis] Writing, without placing itself above art, supposes that one not prefer art, but efface art as writing effaces itself. —Maurice Blanchot, Writing of the DisasterIn an effort to elucidate a more originary difference than Heidegger's ontological difference between Being and entities, as well as an ethicity of thinking able to respond to the trace of transcendence of the other's face, Lévinas's philosophy redefines language radically and does so in uneasy proximity to poetic language. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), Lévinas deploys a constellation of terms—discourse, expression, communication, face, sincerity, witnessing, prophecy—in order to elucidate the ethical dimension of language, the ethicity of philosophical discourse. This constellation revolves around the crucial notion of signification and the two operative concepts of the said (le dit) and saying (le dire). By the former Lévinas understands the semantic content of an utterance or the giving of signs by a sender to an addressee, but also the different modalities by which a subject masters the world by assimilating it to the measure of consciousness (discourse, narration, history, manifestation, representation). Saying (le dire) refers to the way of signifying primarily that I am for the other, the expression of being-for-the-other that subjectivity "is" before positioned as the source of signs or comprehension: subjectivity as exposition. While the said expresses a content, the saying is expression without content.Language for Lévinas is the "structure" of both the retraction and the inscription of infinity (l'infini), and this "structure" is what Lévinas calls ethics. It is thus possible to affirm that in Lévinas there is no ethical turn without a certain linguistic turn, one in which the a priori of language is interrupted by an anteriority whose a priori character is enigmatic. But Lévinas's linguistic turn is turned inside out: for him language contains the other's call and thus harbors a form of exteriority within itself. This is because language is elevated to a metaphysical category (in the sense of Totality and Infinity [1961], where it means the breaching or interruption of totality) that exceeds the simple [End Page 14] "giving out of signs" [délivrance de signes] [AE 81/OB 48] or communication. Lévinas claims that "saying is communication, to be sure, but as a condition for all communication, as exposure [exposition]" [AE 82/OB 48]. Signification precedes and defines language as proximity and contact with the other and not as the "vicissitude [peripetia] of the thematizing intentionality" [AE 216/OB 137] of a subject whose main attribute is its ability to synchronize questions and answers, being and its manifestations, and by so doing leaves no margin for being exposed to the other. Further, signification also names an enigmatic pre-diction that challenges the primacy that language, understood as a system of signs, enjoys in other philosophies (structuralism and analytic philosophy, for example).Most critics agree that Lévinas's philosophy is inhospitable to aesthetic phenomena and ambivalent toward poetic language. His severe condemnation of the work of art in "Reality and Its Shadow" (1948) is still present in Totality and Infinity, Lévinas's first major work, where he establishes a relation with the other as face-to-face in discourse. And although in Otherwise than Being Lévinas finally acknowledges "poetic" language's ability to suggest significations that exceed the order of discourse and even endows it with a (quasi)-ethical force... (shrink)

What, at this historical moment "after Auschwitz," still remains of the questions traditionally asked by theology? What now is theology's minimal degree? This magisterial study, the first extended comparison of the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, explores remnants and echoes of religious forms in these thinkers' critiques of secular reason, finding in the work of both a "theology in pianissimo" constituted by the trace of a transcendent other. The author analyzes, systematizes, and formalizes this idea of an (...) other of reason. In addition, he frames these thinkers' innovative projects within the arguments of such intellectual heirs as Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, defending their work against later accusations of "performative contradiction" (by Habermas) or "empiricism" (by Derrida) and in the process casting important new light on those later writers as well. Attentive to rhetorical and rational features of Adorno's and Levinas's texts, his investigations of the concepts of history, subjectivity, and language in their writings provide a radical interpretation of their paradoxical modes of thought and reveal remarkable and hitherto unsuspected parallels between their philosophical methods, parallels that amount to a plausible way of overcoming certain impasses in contemporary philosophical thinking. In Adorno, this takes the form of a dialectical critique of dialectics in Levinas, that of a phenomenological critique of phenomenology, each of which sheds new light on ancient and modern questions of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. For the English-language publication, the author has extensively revised and updated the prize-winning German version. (shrink)

In the philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinasʼs early career, it is in a phenomenology of Eros that he claims to have uncovered the site of what he calls ʻtranscendenceʼ. This is no small claim. According to the argument of the later Totality and Infinity (1961), the history of Western philosophy is to be thought as the history of the ʻphilosophy of the sameʼ. Within this polemical generalization almost the whole of Western philosophy is characterized as a totalizing discourse which (...) aims to reduce everything to the categories of a thematizing consciousness. Conceptual structures are employed (or presupposed) in order to make diverse phenomena commensurable within a system, and according to Levinas this operation always constitutes a reduction of what is ʻotherʼ to the order of the ʻsameʼ. In agreement with a certain transcendentalism which is itself implicated in Levinasʼs critique, these structures of thought are then equated with consciousness itself; the thematizing project is one of mastery in which noemata will of necessity conform to noesis, in which the object is constituted for and by the subject. The experience of transcendence, so rare in this version of philosophyʼs history, is the experience of whatever is and truly remains other than me, recalcitrant to mastery through conceptualization and to the transcendental project of the subject to construe everything as originating from within itself. If, then, it is first of all in the erotic relation that the possibility of the experience of transcendence is said to arise, Eros can in no sense be dismissed as an unimportant or peripheral theme for Levinas, and a full investigation is warranted, especially given the current interest in Levinasʼs work, interest which is not limited to the discipline of philosophy. Furthermore, as the notion of Eros is closely associated, textually and conceptually, with what Levinas calls ʻthe feminineʼ, critical attention has been excited amongst feminist scholars of various persuasions, with claims – both positive and negative – being made for Levinasʼs significance as a resource for feminist philosophy and feminist politics. If assertions of a ʻLevinasianʼ feminism, no matter how qualified, tend to rest on the idea that Levinasʼs phenomenology of Eros, and analyses of ʻthe feminineʼ mark a break in or a new departure from a ʻmasculinistʼ tradition, this article seeks, in part, to argue to the contrary. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MATERNAL COMPASSION IN THE THOUGHT OF RENÉ GIRARD, EMIL FACKENHEIM, AND EMMANUEL LÉVINAS Ann W. Astell Purdue University l;ike empathy, compassion is a word that seldom occurs in the /writings of René Girard,' who prefers to answer to Martin Heidegger's "anxiety" [Die Sorge] before death by speaking instead of a "concern for victims" [le souci des victims].2 Maternal corn-passion does enter Girardian analysis directly, however, in his discussion (...) ofthe biblical good harlot, a compassionate mother whom Girard calls "the most perfect figura Christi that can be imagined" (1978, 241). In this paper I focus on the neglected theme of maternal compassion in the writings of Girard, letting them enter into conversation, first, with Emil Fackenheim's reflections on the plight and actions of Jewish mothers during the Holocaust and, second, with themes sounded in the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. I argue that maternal compassion is actually central to Girard's understanding of the unveiling of the victimage mechanism, because it sees goodness in the very life of every potential victim, regardless ofwhat that person has done or is capable ofdoing, simply because he or she exists, has a face. The "innocence" of every victim is reducible to the innocence of the infant, because an infant within a sacrificial system can substitute for every other possible victim. The infant and, even more, the unborn bring us back to the very origins of life, to the Creator. There 1 On empathy and Girard, see my "Saintly Mimesis, Contagion, and Empathy." " See James William's comment on this topic in René Girard, ISee Satan Fall Like Lightning (177, note 4). The locus classicus for Martin Heidegger's "anxiety" is his Being and Time, sections 39-42. 16Ann W. Astell is, as Plato asserts and Lévinas reminds us, a "Good beyond being" that, on a transcendent plane, constitutes the "innocence" ofevery human being that lives, protesting against any one's murder. To illustrate the triangulation of desire, the rivalry of doubles, the mimetic crisis, and its possible outcome in victimage, René Girard turns to the famous biblical story ofthe judgment of Solomon in 3 Kings 3:16-28. In that story two women, two harlots, approach the king, each claiming to be the mother ofa single, living infant, over whom they are fighting. "The symmetry is obvious," Girard writes, "and it represents the very essence of human conflict" (1978, 238). Unable to determine the truth ofthe case on the basis of their conflicting testimonies, the wise king tests them by proposinga sacrificial solution that parodies distributivejustice. He decides to cut the baby in half, giving each woman an equal share, the symmetrical division ofthe victim mirroring the symmetry between the litigants. "The Latin word decidere," Girard notes, "mean etymologicalIy to divide by the sacrificial knife, to cut the throat of a victim" (1978, 238). The proposed sacrifice is averted because its horrific promise of an equal apportionment of parts of the baby's body—a sameness that would confirm the two as doubles—reveals a significant difference between the two women. According to the usual reading of the passage, one of the mothers, having (either deliberately or accidentally) killed her own baby by smothering him, lacks any genuine love for the other woman's infant. As Girard explains, "The only thing that counts for her ispossessing what the other onepossesses. In the last resort, she is ready to accept being deprived ofthe child as long as her opponent is deprived of it in the same way.... All that counts is her fascination with her hated model and rival" (1978, 239). The other woman, however, filled with yearning for the life ofthe child to whom she has given birth, reveals herself to be its true mother by renouncing her maternal rights in a passionate plea: "I beseech thee, my lord, give her the child alive, and do not kill it" (3 Kings 3:26). Commenting on the passage, Girard characterizes the values of the false mother as sacrificial, those ofthe good mother as anti-sacrificial. With reference to the child whose fate hangs in the balance, the distinction is clear enough. The true mother begs for the baby... (shrink)

The article stages the beginning of a virtual conversation between Levinas's 'ethics as first philosophy' and Adorno's negative dialectic. Part I frames the problem: for both thinkers the task of critique depends on some access to a 'fixed point' for transcendence (Levinas) or a 'standpoint removed' from the domain of existence (Adorno). Part II traces the deep, even essential, connection both perceive between knowledge and violence, a link which brings the possibility of critique even more stringently into question. A (...) standpoint removed must be both less and more than knowledge. Part III sketches Adorno's response to this dilemma in the tracing of a negative dialectic, a thinking that is 'the morality of thought', and one that turns traditional dialectics inside-out. Negative dialectic seems to meet Levinas's ethical criteria for critique. Part IV outlines Levinas's response: the fixed point for critique is in the proximity and sensibility of the ethical relation that lies behind all formal alterity and therefore behind all ontology and all cognition, whether pre-dialectical, dialectical, or post-dialectical. Yet the ethical relation cannot be said except in terms virtually dependent on negative dialectic. Part V examines a potential Levinasian criticism of Adorno and a potential Adornian criticism of Levinas. The fulfillment of the ambition of each would require him to adopt the standpoint of the other. And this may be possible in that thinking along with each demands that one think not only of multiple perspectives but with them. Key Words: Adorno • critique • dialectic • ethics • knowledge • Levinas • negative • proximity • transcendence • violence. (shrink)

The article stages the beginning of a virtual conversation between Levinas’s ‘ethics as first philosophy’ and Adorno’s negative dialectic. Part I frames the problem: for both thinkers the task of critique depends on some access to a ‘fixed point’ for transcendence (Levinas) or a ‘standpoint removed’ from the domain of existence (Adorno). Part II traces the deep, even essential, connection both perceive between knowledge and violence, a link which brings the possibility of critique even more stringently into question. A (...) standpoint removed must be both less and more than knowledge. Part III sketches Adorno’s response to this dilemma in the tracing of a negative dialectic, a thinking that is ‘the morality of thought’, and one that turns traditional dialectics inside-out. Negative dialectic seems to meet Levinas’s ethical criteria for critique. Part IV outlines Levinas’s response: the fixed point for critique is in the proximity and sensibility of the ethical relation that lies behind all formal alterity and therefore behind all ontology and all cognition, whether pre-dialectical, dialectical, or post-dialectical. Yet the ethical relation cannot be said except in terms virtually dependent on negative dialectic. Part V examines a potential Levinasian criticism of Adorno and a potential Adornian criticism of Levinas. The fulfillment of the ambition of each would require him to adopt the standpoint of the other. And this may be possible in that thinking along with each demands that one think not only of multiple perspectives but with them. (shrink)

Contemporary scholars of Chinese philosophy often presuppose that early China possessed a naturalistic worldview, devoid of any non-natural concepts, such as transcendence. Challenging this presupposition head-on, Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod argue that non-naturalism and transcendence have a robust and significant place in early Chinese thought. -/- This book reveals that non-naturalist positions can be found in early Chinese texts, in topics including conceptions of the divine, cosmogony, and apophatic philosophy. Moreover, by closely (...) examining a range of early Chinese texts, and providing comparative readings of a number of Western texts and thinkers, the book offers a way of reading early Chinese Philosophy as consistent with the religious philosophy of the East and West, including the Abrahamic and the Brahmanistic religions. -/- Co-written by a philosopher and theologian, this book draws out unique insights into early Chinese thought, highlighting in particular new ways to consider a range of Chinese concepts, including tian, dao, li, and you/wu. (shrink)

The works of Emmanuel Levinas, a survivor of the Nazi horror, are striking in the constancy of their thought and the strength of their appeal. We are not condemned to evil and hatred; rather, we are called to be-for-each-other. For You Alone explores the relational and religious quality of Levinas' work. Our lives are always twofold rather than "one and the same." A relational life is dependent on encounters that are revelatory. Revelation means that life is no mere sameness (...) but is tied to the revelation of the other, to you. Here is transcendence par excellence. Here is what the name of God signifies, the relational and ethical bond that takes us outside ourselves toward the other in our midst. What could be more natural, more human, or more divine than to speak of the relational quality of life? An answerable life means that we are asked after, called, required. "Here I am under your gaze," Levinas writes, "obliged to you, your servant. In the name of God.". (shrink)

Discusses the journey of Buddhist ideas on awareness and personhood from India to China. Encounters of Mind explores a crucial step in the philosophical journey of Buddhism from India to China, and what influence this step, once taken, had on Chinese thought in a broader scope. The relationship of concepts of mind, or awareness, to the constitution of personhood in Chinese traditions of reflection was to change profoundly after the Cognition School of Buddhism made its way to (...) China during the sixth century. India’s Buddhist philosophers had formulated the idea that, in order for human beings to achieve perfect enlightenment, they had to produce a state of awareness through practice that they described as “luminous.” However, once introduced to the Chinese tradition, the concept of the “luminous mind” was to become a condition already found within human nature for the possibility of achieving human ideals. This notion of the luminous mind was to have far-reaching significance both for Chinese Buddhism and for medieval Confucianism. Douglas L. Berger follows the transforming path of conceptions of the luminosity of consciousness and the perfectibility of personhood in order to bring into clearer relief the history of Indian and Chinese philosophical dialogue, as well as in the hope that such dialogue will be reignited. (shrink)

Contemporary theoretical streams in sinology and modern Chinese philosophy have devoted increasing attention to investigating and comparing the substantial and methodological assumptions of the so-called 'Eastern' and 'Western' traditions. In spite of the complexity of these problems, the most important methodological condition for arriving at some reasonably valid conclusions will undoubtedly be satisfied if we consciously endeavor to preserve the characteristic structural blocks and observe the specific categorical laws of the cultural contexts being discussed. Whenever sinologists speak of (...) class='Hi'>Chinese philosophy, they must inevitably consider the appropriateness of this term. Due to the fact, that the general theory and genuine philosophical aspects of Chinese thought have only rarely been treated by Western scholars, they namely continue to remain quite obscure for the majority of them. Therefore, we must examine the fundamental question (or dilemma) of whether it is possible to speak of traditional Chinese thought as philosophy at all. (shrink)

Western scholars read "dialectical materialism" in Chinese Marxism within a Western philosophical frame. Some hold that Chinese Marxism is Chinese in some important sense, but fail to see what is involved; others see nothing particularly Chinese about Chinese Marxism. Similarly, Chinese Marxists identify bianzhengfa with Marxian dialectic, without adequately realizing the difficulties attending that concept. ;The dissertation shows tongbian as a distinct but not necessarily unique style of Chinese "thought" , which was (...) formulated in ancient philosophical literature such as the Yijing. I argue that Chinese intellectuals understand Marxist thought in terms of tongbian. What tong-bian sees is a "world as such," or ziran ; with no transcendence, every element is relative to every other and all elements are thus "correlative." Each particular is both self-determinate and determined by every other. An explanation of relationships requires a contexualist interpretation of the world in which events are strictly interdependent. "Polarity" implies a relationship of two events, each constituting a necessary condition for the other. Yin always suggests becoming-yang, and vice versa. Any two events constantly alternate each another, change into each other, exchange with each other, displace each other, and so on. The salient feature of tongbian philosophy is that the complementary and contradictory interactions of the two basic elements of a polarity like yin-yang constitute the forces, and produce change. ;Chinese Marxism finds its roots in Engels but reads him in a distinctly different way and, by drawing on tongbian, develops into a strong and useful strand of thought. I examine this in the writings of Cai Yuanpei, Qu Qiubai, Ai Siqi, and Mao Zedong. I show that juxtaposing dialectics with bianzhenga is a misunderstanding. The version of Chinese Marxism that I recover seems close to Marx on certain points, especially In terms of "internal relations." However, it is rather a third way as developed from a culture and tradition that can not be understood in Western terms. (shrink)

As Emmanuel Levinas states in the preface to Existence and Existents, "this study is a preparatory one. It examines . . . the problem of the Good, time, and the relationship with the other [person] as a movement toward the Good." First published in 1947, and written mostly during Levinas's imprisonment during World War II, this work provides the first sketch of his mature thought later developed fully in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This (...) new edition marks the first time this important work has been made available in an inexpensive paperback edition. Levinas's project in Existence and Existents is to move from anonymous existence to the emergence of subjectivity; to subjectivity's practice, theory and morality; to its encounter with the alterity of the other person. He is concerned here primarily with the time of the solitary subject; time is the inner structure of subjectivity, of the movement of existing. "Levinas's work," says Alphonso Lingis, "contains not only wholly new analyses of the forms of time of the present, the past, the future but also a new conception of the work of time." Beginning with Existence and Existents, then, it is possible to begin tracing the progressive "alterization" of time as it unfolds across the development of Levinas's entire philosophy. As a "preparatory" study, Existence and Existents introduces the major themes and concerns that occupied Levinas throughout his career. This is essential reading for understanding both Levinas's own philosophy and the developments in philosophical thought in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Across four decades of writing, Levinas repeatedly referred to the Holocaust as ‘the Passion of Israel at Auschwitz’. This deliberately Christological interpretation of the Holocaust raises questions about the respective roles of Judaism and Christianity in Levinas’ thought and seems at odds with his well-known view that suffering is ‘useless’. Basing my interpretation on the journals Levinas wrote as a prisoner of war and a radio talk he delivered in September 1945, I argue that his philosophical project is best (...) understood as an ontological rendering of Judaism that accounts for the opening or transcendence of sense and intelligibility. Judaism provides Levinas with a salient critique of liberal and idealist philosophies of the subject and an alternative to fundamental ontology. I show how Levinas’ account of the ‘Passion of Israel’ can be read within the exegetical history of Jewish accounts of divine suffering and thereby effects a reversal of the Christian typological gaze. I conclude by suggesting that Levinas’ recourse to Judaism as a philosophical category does not assume a dogmatic origin to philosophy but ‘formally indicates’, in the Heideggerian sense, the phenomenological origins of normativity. In this respect, the ‘Passion of Israel’ involves not only a reversal of the Christian typological gaze but also a deconstruction of Judaism. (shrink)

Levinas's project throughout Totality and Infinity and in his earlier works Existence and Existents and Time and the Other is to situate the primacy of the ethical as foundational first philosophy. For Levinas, myth is intimately connected to being, the being before reflection and thought. The entering into reflection and thought Levinas terms transcendence, the epoché, or first ethical gesture. In order to situate his ethics, Levinas turns to the Cartesian notion of infinity: the idea of infinity (...) as an overflowing presence, the container capable of containing more than it can draw from itself, from its own being.1 This idea of infinity is grounded in an experience of the Other as primal.2 The presence of a face... (shrink)

Excerpt from Chinese Thought: An Exposition of the Main Characteristic Features of the Chinese World-Conception In China the most ancient mode of recording thought was accomplished by chieh sheng or "knotted cord," which is alluded to by Lao-Tze in his Tao Teh King, (written in the sixth century be fore Christ) as the ancient and venerable, though awkward, mode of writings, and also by Confucius in the third appendix to the Yih King. All detailed knowledge of (...) the use of knotted cords in china has been entirely lost, but we can easily understand that it was a mnemo-technic method of remembering data of various kinds and communicating ideas. The same practice prevailed in ancient Peru as well as among the islanders of Oceania, and seems to have been common all over the globe among the peoples of a primitive civilisation. In South America the knotted cords are called "quippu" and some that are still preserved in ethnological collections were used to indicate the tribute to be paid to the Incas by the several tribes. They consist of woolen threads, the different colors of which represent different kinds if produce: corn, wheat, fruits, furs, etc., while the number of knots register the amount or measure. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This essay explores the relation between repetition and thought in Bergson and Deleuze. In Bergson, this relation is seen in the method of intuition by which thought is made to think in time and in the ‘rhythms’ at work in how intuition is a contact with time or life, urging conceptual precision. This framework is used to clarify Deleuze's thought without image as that contingent encounter with the persistent forces of life that demand the perseverance of (...) class='Hi'>thought. Far from stressing difference alone, both link the repetition in life to the unsettling persistence required to develop a truly new thought. (shrink)

Using Chinese thought, explores how non-Western thought can structure generally applicable social and political theory. With a particular focus on Chinese thought, this volume explores how, and under what conditions, so-called “non-Western” traditions of thought can structure generally applicable social and political theory. Reversing the usual comparison between “local” Chinese application and “universal” theory, the work demonstrates how Chinese experiences and ideas offer systematic insight into shared social and political dilemmas. Contributors discuss (...) how medieval Chinese understandings of causal heterogeneity can relieve impasses within contemporary historiography, how current economic and social conditions in China respond proactively to the future configuration of world markets, and how hybrid modes of cross-cultural engagement offer new foundations for the enterprise of learning from cultural others. Each chapter works from Chinese perspectives to theorize the location of knowledge, its conditions of production, and the modes through which its content or adequacy is legitimated, challenged, and sustained. Rather than reproducing Eurocentric knowledge production in Chinese form, the mobilization of Chinese thought as a generally applicable body of theory actually breaks down clear boundaries between Chinese and non-Chinese thought. (shrink)

Summary A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” material others such as environments and animals; (...) the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. “This is an extremely impressive, original, and thorough treatment of two key twentieth-century thinkers and their applicability to the most pressing social and political issues of our time.” — Jeffrey A. Bernstein, author of Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History “This book is an excellent and timely contribution to political and environmental philosophy, located around a nuanced historical and philosophical approach to Levinas and Adorno. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with these figures or with the current moment.” — Martin Shuster, author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. (shrink)

The immigrant problem, one of the most striking socio-pathological events of our day, is more often raised in the context of political issues. While these debates are driven by local and political interests, what is hidden behind political calculations is the tragic position of the migrant. The migrant, who comes to the agenda with political debates, takes on an extremely negative image in terms of social relations. The problem with the sameness of "We" is that the "Other" or the immigrant, (...) as the expression of an element that is incompatible with the local culture, is pushed from the field of "I" into otherness, and is evaluated as an element of conflict that does not force the transformation of publicity on the social level. Although the interest-based determining power of politics has negative effects on the formation of sufficient human common sense regarding the problem, there is an intense debate in the philosophical literature on the basis of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Lévinas. Most of the studies put forward in the context of associating the ideas put forward by the thinkers in question with immigration have kept the research deep but limited in scope. In our study, the subject was not deemed necessary in depth, it was sufficient to discuss the basic thinkers, views and the basic dynamics of the relevant views on the subject, and care was taken to outline the relevant literature. Levinas, who stands out as one of the dynamics of the basic literature on immigration and the emphasis on "Otherness", pointed to Western thought that did not prioritize ethical relations as the cause of the political crises of his time. Levinas tries to handle the problem of Otherness, which emerges as a political, ethical and legal problem of the tension that the "I"-centered way of thinking, which brings about sameness, will experience against the "Other", in a different way from the tradition of thought that prioritizes ontology. In the thought of Levinas, who considers the “Other” as an alternative field of sameness, the transcendence dimension of Otherness has the function of removing the Self from narcissism through the discovery or tension of the alterity in the "Other" rather than the sameness of the position of the "I" against the "Others". There is a belief that the "Other", embodied in transcendent Otherness, will lead to an act of unconditional hospitality in the "I". It can be seen that Arendt also discusses the problems that Levinas puts on the agenda. In the context of "Otherness", Arendt's criticisms of the concept of right, which manifests itself with a political ontological understanding rather than an ethical relationship as expressed in Levinas, are in question. Thus, while it becomes possible to question the legal structure that does not include the “Other” in the political sphere, the importance of the "Other" for political discourse is also revealed. At this point, conditional hospitality comes to the fore in the context of foreigner's right, which we encounter in Kant. However, Derrida, who would state that Levinas's unconditional hospitality had practical problems, also found Kant's conditional hospitality problematic. The immigrant, as the “Other” of our time, which is hoped to gain an ethical-political basis of thought in the context of the idea of hospitality, aims to re-discuss the idea of hospitality developed in the existing literature, while also being a call to produce thoughts on the philosophical understanding of the immigrant and the importance of creating a philosophy of immigration. (shrink)

In his philosophical texts Levinas privileges le dire, which always presupposes the relation to the other, over le dit, which transforms the other into an objective entity. Likewise in his analysis of thinking, he does not limit himself to the thought itself but aspires to reach what he characterizes by the word “transcendence.” This is a cardinal concept of his philosophy; it is not restricted to the religious meaning that God and God’s essence are beyond human comprehension, but (...) expresses the true sense of beyond myself. Such is the vocation of ethics, but it can be conceived and understood only through the secularization of “the sacred”. The literal meaning of “transcendence” is “beyond” and “ascend”. In Levinas’s work, this word designates the change of place that is conceived as the ethical passage of the I to the other, or the substitution of myself for the other. (shrink)

Agamben’s potentiality, and Chinese dao, entail experiencing movement on being. This article presents our experiments with these movements in the context of pedagogy, putting at stake our mode of existence in thinking. We examine Agamben’s potentiality as an aporetic experience in pedagogy. We find echoes of dao movement in a controversial pedagogical event in China. Interlacing potentiality and dao with our experience of pedagogical thinking, each makes the other intelligible. We show that reasonings of pedagogy in the USA and (...) China repeat the very paradoxes and exclusions they seek to overcome. We also gesture towards a way that, suspending and holding pedagogical reasoning in being empty, welcomes what cannot be learned or taught. This way also offers an example for comparative education. (shrink)

The articles in this volume present an important selection of Jao Tsung-i's research in the field of the early Chinese intellectual tradition, especially as concerns the question of the conditio humana. Whether his focus is on myth, religion, philosophy or morals, Jao constantly aims at describing the Chinese version of a series of developments that are broadly associated with the Axial Age in the study of the ancient world in general. He is particularly interested in showing how early (...) China had developed its own notion of transcendence as well as a system of prediction and morals that allowed man to act on his own account, without having to rely on divine providence. (shrink)

In his philosophical texts Levinas privileges le dire (“the saying”), which always presupposes the relation to the other, over le dit (“the said”), which transforms the other into an objective entity. Likewise in his analysis of thinking, he does not limit himself to the thought itself but aspires to reach what he characterizes by the word “transcendence.” This is a cardinal concept of his philosophy; it is not restricted to the religious meaning that God and God’s essence are (...) beyond human comprehension, but expresses the true sense of beyond myself. Such is the vocation of ethics, but it can be conceived and understood only through the secularization of “the sacred” (or more exactly, “the sanctified”). The literal meaning of “transcendence” is “beyond” (trans) and “ascend” (scando). In Levinas’s work, this word designates the change of place that is conceived as the ethical passage of the I to the other, or the substitution of myself for the other. (shrink)

Various schools of philosophy have tried to claim Henri Bergson as one of their own. In France he has been regarded primarily as an early phenomenologist. In the United States and Britain he is still regarded as a vitalist philosopher. This introductory study looks at Bergson’s use of philosophical form and aims to dispel the view that Bergson ever stuck to one type of philosophy at all, be it vitalism or phenomenology. The claim of any one form of thought (...) to the title of “first philosophy” is challenged by the idea of a Bergsonian _metaphilosophy,_ which states that, in a universe with no static foundations, there can never be first philosophies. In other words, if everything is changing, then this must be no less true of philosophy. _Bergson and Philosophy_ is an important and lucid reassessment of an influential philosopher that sets his work in philosophical contexts. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is a major voice in twentieth century European thought. Beginning his intellectual career in the 1920s, he has developed an original and comprehensive post rationalist ethics of social responsibility and obligation. The influence of his work has already been profound and far-reaching, readily acknowledged by such diverse and important figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Enrique Dussel. Time and The Other was first presented as a series of lectures in 1946-47 at the College Philosophique and is (...) probably the clearest statement of Levinas' thought. Along with Existence and Existents (1947), it represents the first formulation of Levinas' own philosophy, later more fully developed in Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974. (shrink)

This paper proposes a third meditation-category—automatic self-transcending— to extend the dichotomy of focused attention and open monitoring proposed by Lutz. Automaticself-transcending includes techniques designed to transcend their own activity. This contrasts with focused attention, which keeps attention focused on an object; and open monitoring, which keeps attention involved in the monitoring process. Each category was assigned EEG bands, based on reported brain patterns during mental tasks, and meditations were categorized based on their reported EEG. Focused attention, characterized by beta/gamma activity, (...) included meditations from Tibetan Buddhist, Buddhist, and Chinese traditions. Open monitoring, characterized by theta activity, included meditations from Buddhist, Chinese, and Vedic traditions. Automaticself-transcending, characterized by alpha1 activity, included meditations from Vedic and Chinese traditions. Between categories, the included meditations differed in focus, subject/object relation, and procedures. These findings shed light on the common mistake of averaging meditations together to determine mechanisms or clinical effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Transcendence of WordsAkos Krassoy (bio)Levinas’s central contribution to aesthetics and the philosophy of art is his well-known and provocative attempt to ethicize art. Yet, there is hardly any certainty regarding the nature of this ethicization. As far as the realization of Levinas’s program is concerned, readers usually remember its harmful effects.1 On the other hand, there are equally appreciative tones in his reading of art. It might (...) be more correct to say that the derogatory side is part of a fundamentally ambiguous attitude. It is almost as if Levinas’s radical ethical thinking, the job of which is to tackle totalizing Western thought, should speak in two voices when it comes to the aesthetic and the arts.Most of the commentaries run into, and then set out to resolve this weird situation marked by pejoration and ambiguity in one way or another. This is no easy task to accomplish; there is surely no single way out of this labyrinth. An element of irony is definitely required on the side of the interpreter. Arguably, my text may be no exception in the long line of attempts. In the following, I shall try my hand at these complexities and, similarly to other readers, deal with the contradictory remarks and implied but underdeveloped ideas by putting them into a meaningful framework. Like others before me, I shall do my best to provide a narrative as coherent as possible in which the letter [End Page 1] and the spirit of Levinas are followed and the relevant (phenomenological) aesthetic context is taken into account. In my case, this will mean siding with those interpreters who see a fixed set of problems dominating — that is, a single consistent path winding — in Levinas’s difficult itinerary. In more concrete terms, I shall join the camp of those who show sensitivity to the introduction of the critical act and argue that the shortcomings of the aesthetic are, to some extent, reversed in its recontextualization in human communication.2 Yet, unlike these authors who touch upon the issue of criticism to varying degrees, I shall concentrate fully on placing critical activity in the center of Levinas’s aesthetic thought and thus treating art as an important segment of ethical signification. My focus will be on the reintegration of the disengaged image into reality; I shall try to determine what this development in art implies in Levinas’s ethical phenomenological project. Concerning the particular course of my text, I shall concentrate mostly on the issue of ambiguity and, gradually working my way through it, deal with pejoration at the same time. I shall first analyze what is at stake in this ambiguousness, then attempt to establish its governing logic, only to prepare the ground on which criticism as a way out of the maze can be seen in its entirety.A Real Headache: AmbiguousnessAnyone interested in Levinas’s aesthetic thought arrives at a truly interesting but nebulous field. By nebulousness I primarily mean the overly ambiguous character of Levinas’s position. What Levinas has to say is indeed quite difficult to pin down or, at least, it is highly equivocal: the noise of critique is balanced by the sound of quiet but all the more patent affirmation. In every phase of his thinking there is a suspicion felt toward artistic expression, which may on occasion reach the level of derogation; all this is nevertheless accompanied by clear-cut support. This can be sensed in chance remarks, such as, in “Reality and Its Shadow” — the essay mostly responsible for the bad reputation of [End Page 2] Levinas in aesthetics — where Levinas discusses the plasticity of literary works and mentions a “particularly admirable page” in Proust’s The Captive (RS 10). In spite of the anti-aesthetic logic and philistine-like rhetoric of the essay, the art-loving character of the author — who is beyond a doubt an affectionate reader — is revealed for a second.Remarks like this are quite suggestive with respect to Levinas’s appraisal of the arts—as are many other details of Levinas’s work. Of all these, his apparent knowledge and use of artworks in his... (shrink)

This paper investigates the meaning of the neo-Confucian concept of 'li'. From early on, it has the sense of a pattern designating how things are and ought to be. But it takes on the appearance of something transcendent to the world only at a certain point in history, when it becomes juxtaposed to 'qi'. Zhu Xi has been criticized for this 'li-qi' dichotomization and the transcendentalization of 'li'. The paper re-examines this putative dualism and transcendentalism, looking into both Zhu's discussions (...) and pre- and post-Zhu discussions of 'li', and concludes it to be an inter-connective threading immanent to the world. (shrink)

A expressão “o Messias sou eu” aplica-se à relação ética como primeiro acontecer do messias. Subjetividade mesma do sujeito. Através de comentários rabínicos do Talmude, Lévinas traz uma hermenêutica que faz recurso à ética como proximidade e responsabilidade inalienável e insubstituível por outrem. Nesse sentido, as noções hebraicas de messianismo e dizer profético , lidas no midraxe da hermenêutica rabínica, permitem avançar na ideia da linguagem religiosa em seu sentido original: ética. Tais noções habitam uma ordem metafórica que permite ao (...) pensamento desdizer-se e a querer dizer outramente. Nos comentários do Talmude não há lugar para o entusiasmo religioso ou para o arrebatamento de uma experiência mística, mas hermenêutica rigorosa e ininterrupta à procura de sentido que está sempre mais além. Tal maneira de ler a experiência religiosa abandona o sagrado numinoso para se chegar à transcendência como ética. Trata-se do pensamento marcado pela experiência do homem refém de todos os outros. Esse homem é necessário aos outros homens, visto que, sem ele, a moral não começaria em parte alguma. É homem messiânico contemporâneo, eleito e profético. Em Lévinas, o Messias sou eu . Palavras-chave : Hermenêutica. Religião. Ética. Messias.The expression "I am the messiah" applies to the ethical relationship as the first task of the messiah: the subjectivity of the own subject. Through rabbinic commentaries from the Talmud, Levinas brings us a hermeneutic that understands ethics as proximity and responsibility, irreplaceable and inalienable by others. In this sense, the Hebrew notions of messianism and prophetic words, taken from the midrash within the rabbinic hermeneutics, allow us to advance on the idea of religious language in its original sense: ethics. Such notions are metaphors that take the thought to reveal itself in other ways. In the comments of the Talmud there is no place for religious enthusiasm or for any sort of rapture of mystical nature. But, there is indeed, a place for a rigorous hermeneutic that it is in permanent search for a kind of meaning that is always beyond. This way of understanding the religious experience leaves the sacred numinous and understands transcendence as ethics. In this sense the thought appears marked by the experience of the man who is seen as hostage to each other. This man is necessary to the other man, since without him the moral would never start anywhere. Within Levinas perspective, ‘I am’ this contemporary and elected messiah. Keywords : Hermeneutic. Religion. Etic. Messiah. (shrink)

Transcendence, Levinas tells us, is not a failed immanence. It presupposes an Exteriority that cannot be integrated into a totality. Such is its excellence: a surplus that rends Being's monism and allows for a pluralism that is not a "missed union". In the first sections of this article I show how the ethical relation with the Other is the only one that, for Levinas, satisfies the conditions he thus imposes on a metaphysical — i.e. transcendent — relation. I subsequently (...) link this 'return' to Plato's idea of a 'Good beyond Being' to the problem of Evil. If Evil is the refusal of the Good, we should, of course, first understand what it means that, as Levinas contends, the Good has chosen us before we could choose it. Are we to think of this 'election' as a command or as an invitation? Concretely: is the appeal of the Other something one cannot not hear, or does it only have the force to disturb those who "retain it"? In other words: should one think of Evil in terms of a choice for irresponsibility which is already situated in the horizon of a responsibility one cannot refuse; or should what in the former case is called Evil, not rather be thought of in terms of a deafness that is sui generis and not the privation of a hearing that ought to be there? Could there not be an irresponsibility that is not the refusal of responsibility, and that, instead of being situated within ethics, would rather complicate our way of conceiving the ethical relation? In the last section I oppose to Levinas's way of conceiving the relation between transcendence and immanence a different approach: the Good is inevitably incarnated and thus pluralized to a point where it becomes difficult to still present it as the Good. Incarnating the transcendent is not merely wrapping it in a context which leaves it unaltered. The incarnans is not just the envelope for the incarnatum. It is its "originary supplement" (Derrida). But then, inevitably, the relation between 'the' Good and 'Being' becomes anti-platonic: transcendence becomes mortal and fragile. It can bleed! It is in terms of such bleeding that we ought to look at some of the conflicts that trouble our societies — multiculturalism being one example amongst others. (shrink)

Jin Yuelin’s logical and philosophical thought was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Bertrand Russell. The same influence existed also in the case of his view on truth, which was considerably close to the views maintained by Russell in his phase of logical atomism. In their investigations, Russell and Jin not only focused on similar topics, but also occupied similar philosophical positions, such as realism in the domain of ontology, empiricism in epistemology, and the correspondence theory in the domain (...) of the theory of truth. Nevertheless, Jin Yuelin’s view on truth was not only a mere imitation or recapitulation or even plagiarized copy of Russell’s, but also contained innovations and characteristics of its own. Jin, for example, emphasized certain general characteristics of truth, including the notion of truth as a relational quality, that truth is not a matter of degree, and that it is relative neither to time and space nor to the different types of knowledge. By so doing, Jin underlined the objectiveness, reliability, and transcendence of true propositions. By arguing that the correspondence theory of truth possessed strong foundations in common sense, Jin set out to defend the role of common sense in philosophy and science, maintaining that the former cannot be completely eliminated and arguing against the notion that any modification of a part of common sense would ultimately be founded on yet another segment of common sense. Moreover, Jin delivered his own response against the theory of the gap between “subject and object/the internal and the external,” which had been used to question the correspondence theory of truth, proposing a variety of cognitivist theory, which defined facts as “the given” (datum) that has been received and arranged. Most importantly, facts are cognitive constructs created on the basis of “the given” and encapsulate both subjectiveness and objectiveness. Jin Yuelin was a modern Chinese philosopher who had achieved profound erudition in both Chinese and Western thought, and, above all, an independent an profoundly original thinker. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Interpreting from the IntersticesThe Role of Justice in a Liberal Democracy—Lessons from Michael Walzer and Emmanuel LevinasNicholas R. Brown (bio)1As anyone who is familiar with more recent theological debate can attest, the appraisal of the liberal democratic tradition has undergone a radical reevaluation in the wake of Stanley Hauerwas’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s scathing critiques. As a result of their blistering assault, religious ethicists and philosophers now find themselves operating (...) within a discursive milieu that is almost the photo negative of the one they previously inhabited. For what has followed After Virtue and After Christendom is a situation in which compliance with liberal democratic norms is now perceived as actively inveighing against justice rather than as an integral prerequisite to its pursuit.There are cracks, however, beginning to emerge in the MacIntyre/Hauerwas edifice. For what is becoming disputed and increasingly so among a growing chorus of religious ethicists and philosophers is whether their critical reading of liberal democracy offers the most [End Page 155] helpful or even the most biblical way to think through its own moral dimensions as well as those undergirding its relationship with justice.It is the emergence of these criticisms that forms the basis for this essay. For the thesis that I wish to advance below is that liberal democracy offers religious ethicists and philosophers alike a moral framework and vocabulary from which it is possible to comprehend and enact the normative precepts encapsulated within a biblical understanding of justice. Accordingly, some aspects of my argument will build upon the rhetorical trajectories that have been already charted by the ethicists and philosophers I mention above.What distinguishes my approach, however, is that I will proceed from a more focused examination of some of the ethical and political undercurrents found within contemporary Jewish thought. More specifically, I want to probe the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the political philosophy of Michael Walzer, for I believe the juxtapositional methodology of interpretation which informs each of their perspectives is illustrative of an interstitial hermeneutic that helps further illuminate the moral compatibility between biblical and democratic accounts of justice.2By now, MacIntyre’s and Hauerwas’s critiques of the liberal democratic tradition have been so thoroughly documented, discussed, and dissected that a review of their perspectives cannot help but have a certain pleonastic quality.Probably the most significant and disturbing problem that MacIntyre and Hauerwas see belying the liberal democratic tradition stems from its conception of time and space, or more precisely, its lack thereof. For what they discover upon a more careful probing of its moral and epistemological underpinnings is a pursuit of transcendence not dissimilar to Gnostic metaphysics. In the case of liberalism, however, the existential encumbrances to be excised are not corporeal and carnal in nature, but historical and social. [End Page 156]Such conditionalities, surmise liberal theorists, are so shot through with conceptual prejudices that they comprise an interpretative straight-jacket that vitiates against the kind of objectivity necessary to engage in a nonparochial process of moral and political discernment. For it is precisely this ability “to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract point of view that is totally detached from all social particularity” which MacIntyre sees as constituting “the essence of moral agency” of modern liberalism (AV 31–32). Therefore, “liberalism is successful,” maintains Hauerwas, “exactly because... [it] provide[s] that philosophical account of society designed to deal with” the moral and political implications such a social and historical denuding portends, namely “a system of rules that will constitute procedures for resolving disputes as they pursue their various interests.”1However, what liberalism defines as success MacIntyre and Hauerwas see as anything but. Instead, both judge its “system of rules” to be an insidious prescription for a particularly virulent form of moral nihilism and political bankruptcy. For by stripping moral and political discourse of their historical and social referents, liberalism, ironically and tragically, eviscerates itself of the very heuristic and discursive practices necessary to make those... (shrink)