Dushu carried a most interesting article in its eleventh issue: "Starlight in the Dark of the Night" . In this article the author, Wu Zengding, introduced to the reader the autobiography of Vera, an aristocratic Russian woman of the nineteenth century who planned the assassination of a Russian tsar. The most engaging part of this article is the analysis—or rather, description—of the "enormous fascination" exerted by revolution. I have said many times that there is nothing more fascinating for young people (...) than revolution and love; and, under certain circumstances, the fascination of revolution is more powerful than that of love. Simply put, at least one of the factors that led Vera to take the extreme road of revolution was her fear and rejection of the shi su existence of married women in old Russia. I am reminded of the heroine, Lin Daojing, in Yang Mo's novel Song of Youth, who is rescued by Yu Shuize from a state of hopelessness after fleeing from marriage, and subsequently cohabits with him. She later ruptures with Yu Shuize , not only because of political conflicts, but also because of conflicts in their outlook on life. Had she stayed with Yu, she would inevitably have gone down the road of worldliness—having children, looking after the home, doing the family budget, dealing with birth, old age, illness, and death; she would have become garrulous and overly talkative, and so forth. There would be no more romance, no more drama—and readers would have objected to that. (shrink)

Arendt's conception of culture could supersede claims that nature's intrinsic value or human interests best ground environmental ethics. Fusing ancient Greek notions of non-instrumental value and Roman concerns for cultivating and preserving worldly surroundings, culture supplies an ethic for the treatment of nonhuman things. Unlike a system of philosophical propositions, an Arendtian ecology could only arise in public deliberation, since culture's qualitative judgements are intrinsically linked to processes of political persuasion.

Arendt's conception of culture could supersede claims that nature's intrinsic value or human interests best ground environmental ethics. Fusing ancient Greek notions of non-instrumental value and Roman concerns for cultivating and preserving worldly surroundings, culture supplies an ethic for the treatment of nonhuman things. Unlike a system of philosophical propositions, an Arendtian ecology could only arise in public deliberation, since culture's qualitative judgements are intrinsically linked to processes of political persuasion.

Os chamados manuscritos C, recentemente publicados, têm um interesse especial para a clarificação da constituição do mundo na medida em que mostram como, a partir de um mundo primordial ou quasi-mundo correlato à pré-intencionalidade, se atinge o mundo plenamente intersubjetivo constituído por uma intencionalidade de interesses desde uma práxis comunicativa. Seguindo os manuscritos, este artigo tem um propósito quádruplo: 1) tentar discernir diferentes caracterizações do mundo como horizonte universal, representação-mundo, todo, forma, idéia e fundamento; mostra-se, assim, o papel da temporalidade (...) na raiz desses traços de mundanidade; 2) níveis de constituição do mundo são desvelados a fim de diferenciar um fundamento previamente dado de um fundamento que se desenvolve através dos estágios do mundo egóico, mundo da casa, mundo da vida e mundo-em-si; desvela-se aqui um encaixamento desses horizontes um no outro; 3) uma análise posterior dos níveis é dada através do questionamento retroativo na primalidade (Urtümlichkeit) como um retrocesso que revela o desenvolvimento de um pré-mundo a um mundo genuíno; uma gênese permanente, antes de uma gênese do passado, é realçada; 4) finalmente, mostrar- se-á como antecipações da fenomenologia póshusserliana nos remetem a uma abertura originária do mundo em sua mundanidade, um âmbito que é anterior à manifestação de um mundo de objetos e uma ordem de manifestação diferente daquela do mundo. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Fenomenologia genética. Husserl. Manuscritos C. Mundo. Temporalidade. ABSTRACT The recently published C-manuscripts hold special interest for the clarification of the constitution of the world by showing how, starting from a primal or quasiworld correlated with preintentionality, it advances to the full intersubjective world constituted by an intentionality of interests within communicative praxis. Following the manuscripts, this paper has a fourfold purpose. First, it attempts to discern different characterizations of the world as universal horizon, world-representation, whole, form, idea, and ground. The role of temporality at the roots of these traits of worldliness is shown. Second, levels of constitution of the world are disclosed in order to differentiate a readymade ground from a ground that develops through the stages of egoical world, homeworld, lifeworld, and world-in-itself. An encasement of these horizons one-in another is displayed. Third, a further analysis of levels is given through the inquiry back into primality (Urtümlichkeit) as a retrogression that reveals the development from a pre-world to a genuine world. A permanent genesis rather than a past genesis is brought out. Finally, anticipations will be shown of post-Husserlian phenomenological views regarding an originary openness of the world in its worldliness, a realm that is prior to the manifestation of a world of objects, and a different order of manifestation than that of the world. KEY WORDS – Genetic phenomenology. Husserl. C-manuscripts . World. Temporality. (shrink)

Os chamados manuscritos C, recentemente publicados, têm um interesse especial para a clarificação da constituição do mundo na medida em que mostram como, a partir de um mundo primordial ou quasi-mundo correlato à pré-intencionalidade, se atinge o mundo plenamente intersubjetivo constituído por uma intencionalidade de interesses desde uma práxis comunicativa. Seguindo os manuscritos, este artigo tem um propósito quádruplo: 1) tentar discernir diferentes caracterizações do mundo como horizonte universal, representação-mundo, todo, forma, idéia e fundamento; mostra-se, assim, o papel da temporalidade (...) na raiz desses traços de mundanidade; 2) níveis de constituição do mundo são desvelados a fim de diferenciar um fundamento previamente dado de um fundamento que se desenvolve através dos estágios do mundo egóico, mundo da casa, mundo da vida e mundo-em-si; desvela-se aqui um encaixamento desses horizontes um no outro; 3) uma análise posterior dos níveis é dada através do questionamento retroativo na primalidade como um retrocesso que revela o desenvolvimento de um pré-mundo a um mundo genuíno; uma gênese permanente, antes de uma gênese do passado, é realçada; 4) finalmente, mostrar- se-á como antecipações da fenomenologia póshusserliana nos remetem a uma abertura originária do mundo em sua mundanidade, um âmbito que é anterior à manifestação de um mundo de objetos e uma ordem de manifestação diferente daquela do mundo. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Fenomenologia genética. Husserl. Manuscritos C. Mundo. Temporalidade. ABSTRACT The recently published C-manuscripts hold special interest for the clarification of the constitution of the world by showing how, starting from a primal or quasiworld correlated with preintentionality, it advances to the full intersubjective world constituted by an intentionality of interests within communicative praxis. Following the manuscripts, this paper has a fourfold purpose. First, it attempts to discern different characterizations of the world as universal horizon, world-representation, whole, form, idea, and ground. The role of temporality at the roots of these traits of worldliness is shown. Second, levels of constitution of the world are disclosed in order to differentiate a readymade ground from a ground that develops through the stages of egoical world, homeworld, lifeworld, and world-in-itself. An encasement of these horizons one-in another is displayed. Third, a further analysis of levels is given through the inquiry back into primality as a retrogression that reveals the development from a pre-world to a genuine world. A permanent genesis rather than a past genesis is brought out. Finally, anticipations will be shown of post-Husserlian phenomenological views regarding an originary openness of the world in its worldliness, a realm that is prior to the manifestation of a world of objects, and a different order of manifestation than that of the world. KEY WORDS – Genetic phenomenology. Husserl. C-manuscripts. World. Temporality. (shrink)

Despite Hannah Arendt’s scepticism about psychoanalysis, this essay shows the relevance of Freud’s psychoanalytic notions of love and sublimation for Arendt. In her rejection of a political relevance of love, Arendt does not take into consideration the libidinal aspects of collective bonds, nor does she give an account of the passionate aspect of being together despite the crucial role of amor mundi in her work. Following Freud, I demonstrate that love and sublimation are fundamental to worldliness, central to our (...) understanding of forgiveness and the making of promises, all of which is pivotal to understanding Hannah Arendt's political thought. In Freud’s writing love and sublimation expand knowledge and creativity and enable community building. By negotiating between Arendt’s and Freud’s writings on love and politics, this article demonstrates that sublimated love mediates between the private and public spheres. The ultimate question I ask concerns the relation between love of the world and its negation by radical evil. (shrink)

The fundamental principle of Hans Blumenberg’s concept of Modernity is “immanent self-assertion,” through which the modern human being identifies within itself the possibilities of transforming or re-constructing the world according to a human order. “Immanent self-assertion” is a product of human progress and is conditioned by the historical development of theoretical curiosity. In this article, it is argued that Blumenberg’s concept of Modernity is founded on a misinterpretation of Epicurean ataraxia, which is traditionally defined as “freedom from anxiety” and which (...) Blumenberg himself characterizes as “dispassionate ease.” For Blumenberg, ataraxia epitomizes the limitations of theoretical curiosity before the modern era. Where Blumenberg identifies “immanent self-assertion” as the means of extending absolute influence over the world through the subjugation of nature, it is argued that Epicurean worldliness resides within a sense of self-mastery against the radical contingency of tuchē that defines the world order.Le principe fondamental du concept de modernité de Hans Blumen-berg est « l’affirmation de soi immanente», par laquelle l’être humain moderne identifie en lui-même les possibilités de transformer ou de reconstruire le monde selon l’ordre humain. « L’affirmation de soi immanente » est un produit du progrès humain, conditionnée par le développement historique de la curiosité théorique. Dans cet article, on avance que le concept de modernité de Blumenberg est fondé sur une interprétation erronée du ataraxia épicurien, défini traditionnellement comme « l’absence d’anxiété » et que Blumenberg lui-même qualifie de « facilité impartiale ». Pour Blumenberg, ataraxia incarne les limites de la curiosité théorique avant l'ère moderne. Là où Blumenberg identifie « l’affirmation de soi immanente » comme le moyen d'étendre une influence absolue sur le monde par la subjugation de la nature, il est soutenu que la mondanité épicurienne réside dans un sentiment de maîtrise de soi contre la contingence radicale de tuchē qui définit l'ordre mondial. (shrink)

For a Better Worldliness is not only a statement of Abraham Kuyper's and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theological concept and historical practice of discipleship. It is also--and perhaps more importantly--a call to engage in the fullness of the Christian life here and now. While this book goes to great efforts to establish sound historical and theological insights specifically in regards to Kuyper and Bonhoeffer, there is a strong underlying current that these particular insights deeply matter to the life of discipleship in (...) the world today. History shows us that discipleship is not a singular journey; because of Jesus Christ it is not a description of one set path with one set of guidelines. A disciple can be a prime minister who unabashedly and successfully campaigned on his Calvinistic principles, just as he can be a participant in a coup d'état launched against a tyrant, leading to the disciple's own imprisonment and death. Jesus Christ calls--whether to the height of political office, or to the dank prison cell, or (more likely for us) to somewhere in between. - Back cover. (shrink)

The phenomenal character of dreaming has long been a matter of philosophical debates. Most of the time, dreaming is either likened to perception or likened to imagination, in order to decide whether it gets closer to normal or abnormal states of consciousness. This line of debates extends from the traditional dream argument to the contemporary movement of phenomenology. This article presents what specific contributions phenomenology has made to the millennial investigations of dreaming. Its structure is twofold. Firstly, we introduce how (...) pioneering phenomenologists, including Edmund Husserl, Jan Patočka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugen Fink, and Jean Héring, analyse the lived characters of dreaming respectively. Secondly, we show that those pioneering phenomenologists, by engaging with the traditional dream argument, have laid out the worldliness of dreams as a crucial criterion for deciding how similar dreams and reality can be. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s treatment of death has a great deal in common with Heidegger’s notion of “authentic Being-towards-death.” Most importantly, both thinkers argue that an individual’s death, rather than simply annihilating an individual’s life, meaningfully impacts this life while it is still being lived. Heidegger, like Kierkegaard before him, provides an anti-Epicurean account in which life and death are co-present. Despite this kinship, there have been numerous efforts from both the Kierkegaardian camp and from Heidegger himself to distinguish sharply the one from (...) the other. While Heidegger makes several somewhat condescending comments about Kierkegaard’s endeavors, many Kierkegaardians are wary of associating him too closely with Heidegger. After a brief description of their largely shared philosophy of death, I would like to consider what I take to be the most significant complaint from each side and suggest a more nuanced understanding of their relationship. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Mahmoud Darwish’s exilic experience as depicted in Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (1986). For Darwish, the siege of Beirut was a climactic moment in which he realized that he is stuck on a perpetual threshold. Imposed by the sovereign power, this exilic threshold characterizes the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon bereft of their rights as citizens and held outside their homeland and political domain. I wish to argue that, rather than being trapped in this condition, Darwish (...) takes it as a vantage point to critically reconstruct the notions of homeland and political belonging. This involves a contrapuntal approach to the notions of homeland, diaspora, and memory, and acts as a form of resistance. It converts the exilic threshold that keeps the poet neither outside nor inside the political domain into a site of worldliness in both the Arendtian and Saidian sense of the term. Elaborating on Judith Butler’s account of cohabitation and diasporic thinking, I argue that the exilic condition Darwish describes can give rise to a political ethic that resists the homogenization of spaces and temporalities, and allows for an alternative sense of political belonging. (shrink)

The problematic of world articulation is central to post-phenomenological approaches. With Castoriadis, it emerges as a significant if shadowy thematic. Its shifting contours in his thought are redolent of the ongoing dialogue between romantic and enlightenment currents. They are also indicative of the ambiguity inherent to cultural articulations of the world in modernity. Here, two world perspectives open up various — and conflicting — interpretative challenges to which a response is necessitated. In Castoriadis's case, these take on particular forms of (...) more general trends of `alienation' and `worldliness'. In particular, the isolation of the social-historical as the sole bearer of creativity tends to result in world alienation, whilst his later shift towards radical physis indicates a trend towards vertical worldliness. Arnason's theorization of world articulation in its twofold sense re-imagines the worldliness of the social-historical both in terms of the world tout court and our concrete stance towards it (or the world towards us). As such, it offers a corrective to the `worldless freedom' of the social-historical in Castoriadis's thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 513-530 [Access article in PDF] Hans Blumenberg and Hannah Arendt on the "Unworldly Worldliness" of the Modern Age Elizabeth Brient Introduction In attempting to describe and respond to the dominant ethos of the modern age one is quickly confronted with a startling and seemingly intractable paradox: the age which has defined itself by the very intensity of its "this worldly" (...) orientation is at the same time haunted by an ever growing sense of world loss, of the Unheimlichkeit of modern reality.On the one hand the modern turn away from the transcendent contemplative and religious ideals and values of antiquity and the Middle Ages is evidenced by a profoundly new, active, and indeed constructive approach to the world. Modern science is predicated on an objective stance which demystifies the cosmos and allows for a technological mastery of nature which has improved human life in innumerable ways. The modern conception of the self is grounded in a new conception of the autonomy and dignity of the individual, and modern political theory begins with the notion that society is an artifact to be constructed in the service of the very individuals who constitute the body politic. We are made uneasy by the nagging suspicion that life in this world which we have remade for ourselves is somehow hollow, an artificial construction without depth or solidity, a merely superficial order which threatens to dissolve into meaninglessness. The technological advances made possible by modern science have also brought the atomic bomb, global warming, and acid rain. Power over nature has led to the power to destroy nature. The modern world has seen an unprecedented rise in individual freedom, and yet the autonomy of the individual has all too often given way to the anomie of the individual. Loss of community advances alongside failed experiments in social engineering, and the specter of totalitarianism haunts the modern dream of social and political emancipation. [End Page 513]Paradoxically, then, modern worldliness is attended by an uneasy sense of world alienation. It has become quite common in attempting to give an account for this perplexing state of affairs to speak of a process of secularization in the transition from the medieval to the modern world, a process in which many of the central ideas and principles of the modern age are taken to be secular variations on medieval theological themes. Thus, for example, faith in the progress of science or of history is taken to be a secularized version of belief in divine Providence, the political equality of all individuals under the law is said to be a secular reiteration of the understanding of the equality of all human beings before God, the transcendental subject is exposed as a secular version of the divine or angelic knower, and the communist state and other modern utopias marking the end of history are said to be secularizations of Christian eschatological expectations of the end of the world and the coming reign of God.This reading of the epochal transition explains the worldly character of modern reality in terms of the "immanentization" or secularization of religious attitudes and expectations. It also serves to explain the uncanny sense of worldlessness characteristic of much of modern life. This is because the new secular forms are now revealed either as distorted and impoverished versions of an originally meaningful world view (as for example in Neo-Scholasticism) or as the unfortunate perpetuation or unfolding of an inherently nihilistic tradition (as say Nietzsche, Heidegger, and many contemporary post modernists would have it). But does the secularization thesis as a tool of historical explanation really do justice either to the complex reality of the epochal transition in concrete historical terms or even, and more to the point, to the fundamental character of the supposedly secularized modern ideas?Hans Blumenberg and Hannah Arendt would both no doubt answer emphatically in the negative. Both insist on the genuine novelty of modernity, on the fundamentally unprecedented character of the modern orientation to and in the... (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that cosmopolitans should elucidate the qualities and dispositions, or ‘virtues’, associated with the ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship. Bryan Turner's suggestion that cosmopolitan virtue should be identified as a type of ‘Socratic irony’, which enables individuals to achieve distance from their homeland or way of life, is explored. While acknowledging the attractions of his account, certain limitations which indicate the need to generate a richer theory of cosmopolitan virtue are identified. To that end, an alternative (...) picture of cosmopolitan virtue is presented by drawing on Hannah Arendt's ideas of ‘world’ and ‘worldliness’. It is argued that cosmopolitan virtue involves the adoption of a self-reflexive mode of being in the world, the cultivation of a heightened care or feeling for the world, and the ability to adopt certain skills in the manner of our disclosures to the world. (shrink)

Nigel Clark’s ‘ex-orbitant globality’ concerns the incalculability of other-than-human forces we typically fail to acknowledge, yet which haunt all considerations of environmental change. This article considers Gaia theory as a useful heuristic to register the ubiquity of bacteria to environmental activity and regulation. Bacteria are Gaia theory’s fundamental actants, and through symbiosis and symbiogenesis, connect life and matter in biophysical and biosocial entanglements. Emphasizing symbiosis might invoke the expectation of a re-inscription of the human insofar as the ubiquitous inter-connectivity of (...) life ultimately connects everything to the human. I want to argue toward the opposite conclusion: that bacterial liveliness suggests a profound indifference to human life. As such, symbiosis does not efface difference, nor its vigorous refusal to be absorbed within human formulations of world-remaking, including environmental change. Bacterial indifference’s radical asymmetry suggests the need for non-human centred theories of globality. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:The present article examines the utopian and theological politics of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Brethren of Purity). I focus on the Ikhwān’s elusive “virtuous city,” a harmonious and righteous community situated on a wondrous island, where residents work in unison toward salvation by deferring to one creed. This city’s imagery is intimately tied to principal theological dimensions of their work. Through the virtuous city, the Ikhwān utilize the imagery of estrangement to elucidate their theological position on the soul’s imprisonment in the (...) body. But there is another, subtler dimension to their utopianism. I argue that the Ikhwānian utopia serves as a juxtaposition to their Muslim society, which they thought was afflicted by credal divisions. Accordingly, their utopia seam-lessly weaves together a synthetic narrative about eschatology (i.e., the afterlife) and an empirical critique of their contemporary society. Additionally, this paper contributes to the development of scholarship on medieval Islamic utopianism. (shrink)

The reflection undertaken here aspires to understand human emotion by joining Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s descriptions of emotion in a thoughtful confrontation(Auseinandersetzung). In his 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger carries out a phenomenology of being-in-the world which illuminates the “structures” of emotion.Aristotle’s descriptions of emotions in the Rhetoric serve to enrich the structures delineated by Heidegger. Although millennia separate the two thinkers and their civilizations, what they say together about emotion is meaningful today. Their philosophical projects may seem to subordinate consideration of (...) emotion to rhetorical or ontological purposes, but they actually serve to enrich our understanding by recognizing the intertwining of speech, world, and emotion. (shrink)

Intellectual Impostures seemed at first to create something of dilemma for me. My position was obviously an example of the kind that Sokal and Bricmont's set out to critique, but I found myself entertaining a variety of responses, why be so nasty, so sneering, why overstate the case, why attribute failings of individual's arguments to all of some supposedly homogeneous group be they constructivists, sociologists of science postmodernists or whatever? Why be so earnestly tendentious? Yet, did I not agree with (...) much with what they had to say? I too find plenty of contemporary scholarship obscure and irrelevant, and most importantly, I agree with them about the necessity of criticism, especially political criticism. Hence it seemed inappropriate to respond with equally over the top denunciation. Fortunately, I had time to look at some of the associated literature particularly Flight From Science and Reason and A House Built on Sand where I discovered two writers dealing with important issues in the Culture Wars. Philip Kitcher trying to find some middle ground and a way to recognise that some important and valuable work is being done in Science Studies, and Meera Nanda formulating some telling criticisms of the 'localist' thesis including some of my own work. (shrink)

The reflection undertaken here aspires to understand human emotion by joining Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s descriptions of emotion in a thoughtful confrontation(Auseinandersetzung). In his 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger carries out a phenomenology of being-in-the world which illuminates the “structures” of emotion.Aristotle’s descriptions of emotions in the Rhetoric serve to enrich the structures delineated by Heidegger. Although millennia separate the two thinkers and their civilizations, what they say together about emotion is meaningful today. Their philosophical projects may seem to subordinate consideration of (...) emotion to rhetorical or ontological purposes, but they actually serve to enrich our understanding by recognizing the intertwining of speech, world, and emotion. (shrink)

In this recently published book, Jefferson provides a lucid and detailed examination of, and answer to, its provocative title. In doing so, the focus of Jefferson’s analysis is largely on what a br...

This essay explores Hannah Arendt’s thought concerning mass society’s tendency to constrict the appearances of the world. The role that art plays for her is brought into further relief in conjunction with the larger theme of the value of disclosure. Because Arendt’s thought concerning appearance runs on a parallel course to the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, further insight into the experience of art is discovered. The significance of Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding, as it is exemplified in the experience of art, (...) is owed to the resistance it provides to what Arendt posed as the loss of plurality, spontaneity, worldliness. (shrink)

If the theme of this special edition can be reformulated as a question (what was and is the current use of the Bible in theology?), it would be challenging and very difficult to answer the question because of a diverse usage of the Bible throughout history and today, stretching in a continuum of both vertical and horizontal probabilities: vertically, theism vs. atheism and horizontally, worldliness vs. holiness. The objective of this essay is to argue for the incorporation of the (...) ‘spiritualities’ of divine immanence and divine transcendence in the composition of theologies, facilitated by a comprehensive and multidimensional reading of the Bible and the acknowledgement of contributions from the sciences. In this research, the reasoning will address the following relevant aspects: (1) taking into account the epistemology of the ‘Bible’ and ‘Theology’; (2) the consideration of postmodernity, post-secularism and spirituality and (3) the composition of neo-theologies. Contribution: This article pleads that biblical analyses should play a more comprehensive and determinative role in the composition and formulation of theology, pointing more explicitly to the transcendence and immanence of God. The reading of such theologies then must create different lived experiences of the immanence and transcendence of God. (shrink)

Essays discuss the themes of worldliness, affectedness, understanding, and the care-structure found in Heidegger's work on the nature of existence.

Recent studies of peacebuilding highlight the importance of attending to people’s local experiences of conflict and cooperation. This trend, however, raises the fundamental questions of how the local is and should be constituted and what the relationship is between institutions and individual actors of peace at the local level of politics. I turn to Hannah Arendt’s thoughts to address these issues. Arendt’s thinking provides a distinctive form of realism that calls for stable institutions but never depletes the spirit of resistance. (...) Peacebuilding guided by this insight seeks to enable parties in conflict to voice their competing opinions by acting agonistically in public and to help them align their disruptive yet creative voices with a desire to establish and sustain common institutions. Thus, Arendt’s thinking not only offers a way to increase sensitivity to local differences but also to provide direction to the politics of resistance. In the end, it offers a balanced insight into peacebuilding and local agency beyond the contemporary liberal and critical approaches to peace. (shrink)

English title: Master Eckhart’s God Confronted with Nietzschean Critique of Christianity. Author tries to demonstrate that the way of thinking about Christian God developed in the late Middle Ages by Master Eckhart goes beyond the interpretation which underlies Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity as a religion of the other world. In the paper, Author first presents the said criticism, followed by the vision of God outlined by Eckhart. He demonstrates that Christianity, criticized by Nietzsche, uses a commonsense vision of God’s transcendence (...) based on spatial images. The author also demonstrates that Eckhart defines this transcendence in such a way that it does not fall under Nietzsche’s criticism, in particular it cannot lead to the depreciation of worldliness in favour of an invented other world, which Nietzsche observes. Eckhart’s thought makes room for Christianity ‘after Nietzsche.’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“A Child Has Been Born unto Us”Arendt on BirthAdriana CavareroTranslated by Silvia Guslandi and Cosette BruhnsIn The Human Condition, at the end of the dense chapter on action, Hannah Arendt reiterates that action, that is, the political faculty for excellence, “is ontologically rooted” in the fact of natality, “like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to (...) begin” (Arendt 1998, 246).1 To reinforce this argument, Arendt compares action to miracles, and makes an interesting and, as we will see, somewhat perplexing reference to the Bible:[The miracle] is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether.…It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”(HC, 247)The citation is suggestive, but incorrect. In the Gospels, which do announce with true joy the birth of the child, the phrase as it is quoted here does not exist. It appears instead in Isaiah (9:6), translated into English both as “For to us a child is borne,” and, in the version of the King James Bible from which Arendt is plausibly drawing, as “For unto us a child is born.” The error, if indeed it is an error, is thus twofold (see Young-Ah Gottlieb 2003, 136ff.), since [End Page 12] both the passage referenced and the words cited are incorrect. That Arendt frequently cites from memory, and that the citations tend to be bibliographically incorrect, is known to her interpreters, but in this case the error ends up being quite significant. As is well known, the prophetic text carries a strong Messianic burden, and such a burden would trouble significantly the thesis that Arendt is here illustrating; the Gospels’ message creates instead fewer obstacles to her strategy of framing the meaning of birth within the mundane horizon that in her vocabulary takes the names of “world” or “worldliness.” Since “‘to live’ and to ‘be among men’” mean the same thing (HC, 7), the child, every newborn, that is, every human being that makes its entrance in the world, is not, according to the Arendtian vision, born to us, coming from elsewhere, but appears among us here. The scenario of birth, like that of action, whatever be the holy text that mentions or exemplarily validates them, is, for Arendt, a radically mundane scenario that does not call into question any transcendence or religious instance of salvation.Jewish, secular, and classically trained in Greek and Latin, Arendt, who had little familiarity with the Jewish language and tradition, met Christian thought primarily through Saint Augustine, to whom she dedicated her doctoral thesis (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, published in Berlin in 1929 and then in English in 1996 as Love and Saint Augustine), and who remained a constant point of reference throughout her work. A phrase from Augustine—initium ut esset homo creatus est—present in the thesis, appears, in fact, in Arendt’s later texts, including The Human Condition, indeed with obsessive repetitiveness in reference to the category of birth.2 In her monumental work The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, a full seven years prior to The Human Condition, Arendt already writes: “Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est, ‘that a beginning be made, man was created’, said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man” (Arendt 1973, 479). On the philosophically anomalous theme of birth, the contributions of the Christian tradition that Arendt does appreciate are predominantly two: the “glad tidings” that herald the coming of the child, and Augustine’s comments on the narrative of Creation.Natality, Birth, and the Human Condition of... (shrink)

This book gives a critical assessment of key developments in contemporary French philosophy, highlighting the diverse ways in which recent French thought has moved beyond the philosophical positions and arguments which have been widely associated with the terms 'post-structuralism' and 'postmodernism'. These developments are assessed through a close comparative reading of the work of seven contemporary thinkers: Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and François Laruelle. The book situates the writing of each philosopher in (...) relation to earlier traditions of French thought. In differing ways, these philosophers decisively distance themselves from the linguistic paradigm which dominated so much twentieth-century thought in order to rethink philosophical conceptions of materiality, worldliness, shared embodied existence and human agency or subjectivity. They thereby open the way for a radical renewal of the claims, possibilities and transformative power of philosophical thinking itself. This book will be an indispensable text for students of philosophy and for anyone interested in current developments in philosophy and social thought. (shrink)

It has been suggested that philosophers should adopt a methodology largely inspired by mathematics and that the “mathematical” virtues of rigor, clarity, and precision are also fundamental philosophical virtues. In reply, this paper argues that some excellent philosophy lacks these virtues and that too much emphasis on the mathematical virtues excludes potentially valuable forms of philosophical discourse and makes the profession less diverse than it should be. Unduly restrictive conceptions of philosophical argumentation should be avoided. On a contributory conception, philosophy (...) should try to make a positive contribution to human emancipation where possible. The paper argues that it is possible and desirable for epistemology to contribute in this way and that the mathematical virtues are less significant in this context than the emancipatory virtues of what one might call “liberation philosophy.” These include irony, reflectiveness, imagination, contrarianism, and worldliness. (shrink)

That Oakeshott and Arendt's political works contain Augustinian references is well known. What historians of political thought have had difficulty in is assessing the consistency and importance of the Augustinian themes within their work. It transpires that the traces of existentialism and personalism in Augustine are amplified and clarified by their use in Oakeshott and Arendt, to the extent that they form an important subtext to their work. One stumbling block for scholars attempting to link the ?mature? works of Oakeshott (...) and Arendt to Augustine has been a sense of disparity between the eschatological character of Augustine's writings and the civic worldliness of Oakeshott's associations and Arendt's public realm. Returning to several strands of twentieth-century Augustinianism, from the personalist to the existentialist to the liberal, reveals an Augustinianism that is much more credibly linked to the whole of Oakeshott and Arendt's writings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comparative Critical Perspectives on the AnthropoceneAn IntroductionAdeline Johns-Putra (bio) and Xianmin Shen (bio)Ever since Eugene Stoermer coined the term Anthropocene in the 1980s and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen identified the present period as the Anthropocene, this ecological and geographical concept has been adopted in other disciplines beyond the realm of science and has taken on particular resonance in the environmental humanities. This is because the advent of the (...) Anthropocene not only connotes a physical phenomenon, that is, a possible new geological epoch in which the damaging effect of the human species on all other species and on our planetary home has become so great as to leave a mark in the planet's fabric. It is also a revelation of human liability and responsibility, in which that stratigraphical scar must be recognized and the global socioeconomic dynamics of exceptionalism and exploitation that it belies reckoned with. This reckoning is one between those with the greatest responsibility for that impact, who are also the ones who will feel that impact least, and those with the least responsibility, who will feel that impact most. Moreover, those vulnerabilities lie with both human and nonhuman individuals: the Anthropocene demands that human-nonhuman as well as intra-human injustices are dealt with, that the ways in which global systems are interlocked with planetary ones are properly understood.Such questions of justice require a critical response, in various senses of the word and its origins. This encompasses a measure of scrutiny and critique; an honest judgment and even criticism of faults and shortcomings; and an awareness of urgency and crisis. With this in mind, and with both planetary and global questions of justice before us, we have [End Page 1] sought with this special issue of Intertexts to bring together analyses of sociocultural representations and discourse in the widest sense (not just literary or other artistic texts, but political events). We asked that these analyses consider how such discourse has been shaped by global workings now taken for granted—the trappings of modernity and the impulses of capitalism—and also to ponder the potential for reshaping those dynamics as part of a collective consciousness.Anthropocene Criticality: The Planetary, the Global, and the WorldWhat kind of Anthropocene criticality would be both an act of recognition of human responsibility and a reckoning across boundaries (whether intra- or interspecies) of agency, power, and vulnerability? How, in other words, do we take full stock of what is signified by anthropos in the term Anthropocene? We invoke here a range of frames for understanding the place of anthropos both as and within the collective that experiences—altogether but not all the same—the Anthropocene. We call these the "planetary," the "global," and the "world."1 We are not the first to distinguish between these terms and to employ them as devices for (re)framing and (re)visualizing the web of human-nonhuman as well as human-human relationships. In 1999, Gayatri Spivak spoke of the "imperative to re-imagine the planet" and, in this talk and updates of it in 2012 and 2014, outlined the need to contemplate "planetarity" instead of "globalism" (An Aesthetic Education, 335–50). In the fields of comparative literature and world literature, debates have occurred over what Pheng Cheah suggests is the encroachment of ideas of "globalization" on to notions of "worldliness" (28), with the question complicated more recently by what Sarah Nuttall sees as the possibility for a "planetary literature" (924–41). What we offer here adopts and adapts these conversations, and as we define and deploy our terms below we will indicate how these overlap.Under the rubric of the "planetary" we place Anthropocene discussions of how to truly comprehend the human as species and as geological agent, that is, both as one species of many and as a species that has occupied an outsized positionality alongside any other species (even [End Page 2] the idea of an "alpha species" seems hardly to do justice to the magnitude of anthropogenic effect on every inch of the biospheric fabric, from the deepest oceans to the upper levels of atmosphere, lasting for millennia). This is not merely about sentimental catch-phrasing... (shrink)

Commentators have sometimes interpreted Arendt’s criticism of the use of measures in politics as leading to an anti-idealistic vision of politics that prioritizes sui generis action over normatively guided action. In this essay, I argue that Arendt was more ambivalent on the role of measures in politics than has often been supposed. I argue, first, that Arendt’s criticism of measures in The Human Condition extends only as far as instrumental kinds derived from extra-worldly sources, like a transcendent realm of forms (...) or an immanent realm of passions or cognitions. Second, I argue that Arendt prepares for an appropriately political conception of measures within The Human Condition, thus linking that text to her later writings on judgment where exempla are suggested as fulfilling this role. Finally, I summarize how exempla satisfy a conception of measures consistent with worldliness, plurality and natality. (shrink)

The study of the virtues has largely dropped out of modern philosophy, yet it was the predominant tradition in ethics fom the ancient Greeks until Kant. Traditionally the study of the virtues was also the study of what constituted a successful and happy life. Drawing on such diverse sources as Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Hume, Jane Austen, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Sartre, Casey here argues that the classical virtues of courage, temperance, practical wisdom, and justice centrally define the good for humans, (...) and that they are insufficiently acknowledged in modern moral philosophy. He suggests that values of success, worldliness, and pride are active parts of our moral thinking, and that the conflict between these and our equally important Christian inheritance leads to tensions and contradictions in our understanding of the moral life. (shrink)

‘Virtue ethics’ is prominent, if not pre-eminent, in contemporary moral philosophy. The philosophical model for most of those urging a ‘virtues approach’ to ethics is of course Aristotle. Some features, at least, of the motivation to this renewed concern with Aristotelian ethical thought are fairly clear. Notoriously, Kant held that the only thing good without qualification is the good will; and he then made it difficult to grasp what made the will good when he denied that it could be its (...) preoccupation with or attention to anything in the world. The idea of the good will then seems to be an idea of something which transcends the world, and therefore to be no easier to make sense of, or to believe in, than Plato′s form of the good is usually thought to be. The first obvious attraction of Aristotle′s ethics, then—at least to those of an empiricist or worldly cast of mind—is that it promises an understanding of the ethical which locates that robustly within the world. Aristotle′s virtues are real this-worldly existences. They are, moreover, qualities whose place in our lives seems to be explained readily, and attractively, in Aristotelian terms. Moral virtue is essentially connected with eudaimonia, a concept variously construed as happiness, as living well, or even as flourishing. Morality is important because of the contribution it makes to the living of a fully human life. And a ‘fully human’ life is characterizable in what modernity calls ‘humanist’, or sometimes ‘naturalistic’, terms: it requires no invocation of transcendence or other-worldliness. (shrink)

This chapter describes the phenomenology of the political world. Phenomenology must get underway with an analysis of the political world. The chapter evaluates more precisely the relation between the concept of world or worldliness and the openness of the political. Using the term ‘political world’ is preferred to utilising the traditional terms because it is less burdened by prejudice. The guiding impulse towards the clarification of the Sache of political philosophy as political world stems from Hannah Arendt, who does (...) not make use of the phenomenological conception of ‘horizon’. Science's confidence that it can attain a knowledge free of all horizonal plurality is among the most fundamental prejudices that phenomenology endeavours to overcome. Phenomenology is the decided present renewal of the most ancient idea of epistêmê. (shrink)

One of the critical crises observed in human society, especially in the so-called advanced and industrial societies, is the spiritual crisis. Spirituality in various types of cultural and religious concepts is considered a spiritual path one in which can achieve something like a high level of consciousness, wisdom or union with God. In addition, self-esteem is a sense of worth. This feeling comes from the sum of our thoughts, feelings, emotions and experiences throughout life. Dignity also means honour and pride, (...) which has been mentioned many times in the Qur'an. In contrast to dignity, there is humiliation, which means lack of dignity in which one simply accepts defeat. Religious teachings, especially Islamic teachings, do not summarise dignity as wealth, luxury and the enjoyment of material possibilities, but interprets dignity as spirituality, and liberation from the shackles of worldliness, which give Muslims a moral identity. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating role of moral identity between spiritual intelligence and self-esteem of Muslims. The statistical population includes 834 Muslim employees working in 20 branches of one Iranian university. Necessary data were collected by standard questionnaires. Pearson's correlation coefficient and regression analysis in SPSS software (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) were used to analyse the data. According to the results of the analysis, there is a positive relationship between spiritual intelligence and self-esteem of Muslims. There is also a positive relationship between moral identity and self-esteem. Furthermore, moral identity plays a mediating role in the relationship between spiritual intelligence and self-esteem, and it strengthens this relationship. CONTRIBUTION: The present study proves the mediating role of ethical identity on the relationship between spiritual intelligence and self-esteem in an Islamic society. (shrink)

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was born in Trèves in the Rhineland. He studied law in Bonn, philosophy and history in Berlin, and received a doctorate from the University of Jena for a thesis on Epicurus (341–270 BC). (Epicurus' philosophy was a reaction against the ‘other-worldliness’ of Plato's theory of Forms. Whereas for Plato knowledge was of intelligible Forms, and the criterion of the truth of a hypothesis about the definition of a Form was that it should survive a Socratic testing (...) by question and answer, for Epicurus the criterion of truth was sensation, and employment of this criterion favoured the theory with which Plato explicitly contrasted the theory of Forms (Sophist 246a–d), namely, the materialism of the atomists, Leucippus and Democritus.) Marx was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung of Cologne, 1842–1843. The paper was suppressed and he moved to Paris, becoming co-editor of the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, the one and only issue of which contained two articles by Marx and two by his friend, Friedrich Engels (1829–1895). Together they wrote The German Ideology (1846) and their most influential work, The Communist Manifesto (1848). Marx had been expelled from France in 1845, and went to Brussels, from where he was expelled during the 1848 revolutions. He went to Cologne to start, with Engels and others, a paper with a revolutionary editorial policy, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Expelled once again, Marx finally settled in London, working in the British Museum on his great historical analysis of capitalism, Das Kapital. The first volume was published in 1867, the remaining two volumes, completed by Engels after Marx's death, in 1885 and 1895. (shrink)