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 Meditations on Nausea:: Sartre's Phenomenological Ontology

Robert C. Solomon

in Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre

Sartre’s first novel, Nausea, is quite clearly a working out of the phenomenological insights he was developing at the time in such works as “Transcendence of the Ego” and “The Emotions”. This ... More

Sartre’s first novel, Nausea, is quite clearly a working out of the phenomenological insights he was developing at the time in such works as “Transcendence of the Ego” and “The Emotions”. This chapter explores the basic tenets of Sartre’s phenomenology, focusing in particular on his rejection of certain themes in his mentor, Edmund Husserl. It also spends considerable time looking at the perversity of Sartre’s central character, Roquentin, who quite clearly resembles Sartre himself at that time in his situation and his provincial circumstances.Less

New Perspectives on Time and Space

William A. Richards and G. William Barnard

in Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences

This chapter is written to highlight the category called Transcendence of Time and Space included in the definition of mystical consciousness.

Music Transcendent and Sublime: Herder’s “Von Musik” (1800)

Philip V. Bohlman

in Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism

The translations in Song Loves the Masses close with Herder’s final large-scale essay on music, published in 1800 as a chapter in Kalligone, the culmination of his aesthetic work. With this late ... More

The translations in Song Loves the Masses close with Herder’s final large-scale essay on music, published in 1800 as a chapter in Kalligone, the culmination of his aesthetic work. With this late essay Herder, a polemic against his former teacher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), reveals the extent to which he has moved into a fully aesthetic domain in his concern for the universal history of humanity. Embodying the subjectivity of song and singing, music acquires the force of transcendence, and it therefore aspires to the Enlightenment ideals of the sublime. In Herder’s “On Music,” human beings are endowed with a degree of understanding that allows them to perceive the traits that make music unlike any other form of expression.Less

Middle and Neoplatonism

Filippo Del Lucchese

in Monstrosity and Philosophy: Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture

This is the longest chapter of the book, because of the number, nature, and importance of the philosophers that take the side of Plato and develop his teleological idealism in different directions. ... More

This is the longest chapter of the book, because of the number, nature, and importance of the philosophers that take the side of Plato and develop his teleological idealism in different directions. It also includes several early Christian thinkers – Augustin among them – whose philosophical background and inspiration are largely Platonic. For reasons of consistency, this chapter explores this complex and long-lived philosophical movement through the same categories that have been used in previous chapters, namely the conflict between immanence and transcendence, the questions of nature’s hierarchies, teleology and providence, as well as the origin of evil. However, new elements are introduced because of the puculiar reworking of these ideas within the new and original monotheism of the Judeo-Christian early tradition, as well as their importance for the later medieval and early modern philosophy.Less

Disenchantment Deferred

Sudipta Kaviraj

in Beyond the Secular West

This essay relates Taylor’s thesis to arguments in Indian history over the relationship of religious diversity to conflict and strategies of accommodation in premodern and modern times.

Introduction: The Noetics of Nature

Bruce V. Foltz

in The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible

Modern materialism has failed nature, let it down or betrayed it, through rejecting a “noetic” or contemplative vision of it. Yet since Parmenides and Plato, nous (the highest faculty of knowing ... More

Modern materialism has failed nature, let it down or betrayed it, through rejecting a “noetic” or contemplative vision of it. Yet since Parmenides and Plato, nous (the highest faculty of knowing apprehension, which German Idealism called “intellectual intuition”) was directed away from the earth toward what transcended (meta) nature (physis). Proceeding through the Latin Middle Ages into Modern Metaphysics, it is argued that since materialism has ignored the noetic, and the noetic has neglected nature, the West (including Heidegger) has never philosophically articulated a noetics of nature. Nevertheless, Byzantine and Russian thought, art, and spirituality have emphasized the eruption of the transcendent within the immanent, the invisible into the invisible, God into creation, while Western poets and nature writers have also addressed this theme. This “marriage of heaven and earth,” apprehended noetically, served as the initial impetus for environmental thought, and remains the best prospect for its further development.Less

God

Dale B. Martin

in Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-first Century

Even if ancient biblical writers did not have the philosophical training to have anticipated later Christian doctrines such as the transcendence or immanence of God, divine simplicity, even the ... More

Even if ancient biblical writers did not have the philosophical training to have anticipated later Christian doctrines such as the transcendence or immanence of God, divine simplicity, even the doctrine of the trinity, postmodern Christians should not be constrained by those historical limits from reading the New Testament to arrive at robust, though sometimes complex, theologies of the nature of God and of what it means to say, in the 21st century, “I believe in God.”Less

Post-Secularity and (Global) Politics: A Need for Radical Redefinition

Fred Dallmayr

in Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis

Chapter nine proposes a reformulation of the meaning of “secularism” and its relation to religious faith. Taking its departure from Jü;rgen Habermas’s term “post-secularity,” the chapter explores two ... More

Chapter nine proposes a reformulation of the meaning of “secularism” and its relation to religious faith. Taking its departure from Jü;rgen Habermas’s term “post-secularity,” the chapter explores two main directions in which the expression has been interpreted: one direction where religious faith in secularized and another direction where faith triumphs over secularism. Dallmayr examines a new version of the immanence-transcendence conundrum, which he claims accentuates the significance of language to these thoughts. The chapter insists on the primacy of ordinary language and on the need of all texts or discourses to undergo interpretation and reflective interrogation. Dallmayr references Hans-Georg Gadamer’s axiom of the “universality of hermeneutics” in distinguishing religion and secularism.Less

Sonorous Desires: Sweet, Spirited, and Stirring Voices in The Sound of Music (1965) and Change of Habit (1969)

Maureen Sabine

in Veiled Desires: Intimate Portrayals of Nuns in Postwar Anglo-American Film

Chapter 4 begins by proposing that the longstanding disagreement between the film critics who hated The Sound of Music and the large general audience who loved it stems from the film's volatile blend ... More

Chapter 4 begins by proposing that the longstanding disagreement between the film critics who hated The Sound of Music and the large general audience who loved it stems from the film's volatile blend of the beautiful, the sublime, the kitsch, the playful, and the sacred. While the nuns in The Sound of Music have been lambasted as silly, saccharine stereotypes, the chapter provides an alternative reading by focusing on the relationship between Julie Andrews's novice Maria and Peggy Wood's Mother Abbess, their solidarity in time of trial, and their spirit of transcendence through fortitude, exertion, and self-giving in the great women's song “Climb Every Mountain.” The chapter concludes with Change of Habit and suggests how the upbeat message that Maria expressed in the songs of The Sound of Music is no longer articulated by the film nun protagonists, but rather by Elvis Presley's male lead who conducts a chaste but melodious romance with Mary Tyler Moore's activist Sister Michelle.Less

Philosophies of Immanence and Transcendence: Reading History of Madness with Derrida and Habermas

Amy Allen

in Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics

This paper embarks from the argument that both Derrida and Habermas made similar kinds of “performative contradiction” objections to Foucault's argument in History of Madness. This can be connected ... More

This paper embarks from the argument that both Derrida and Habermas made similar kinds of “performative contradiction” objections to Foucault's argument in History of Madness. This can be connected with a larger claim: both Derrida and Habermas can be considered thinkers of transcendence. Within the notion of transcendence offered by Habermas are elements which can be compared with Derrida's notions of the trace, l’avenir and messianicity without messianism. By contrast with both, Foucault is a thinker of immanence—of the historical a priori or what Deleuze would call the immanent transcendental. This paper argues that both Derrida and Habermas misunderstand the nature of Foucault's project in History of Madness. Both construe it as what Habermas would call a rejection of Enlightenment reason or what Derrida calls a revolution against reason—and perhaps this could be connected to their own philosophical assumptions about transcendence. Neither succeeds in fully factoring the degree to which Foucault’s project is contingent and historical. Foucault is best understood as undertaking a history of a form of rationality, and this is to be differentiated from a critique of Reason as such.Less

The End of Fundamental Ontology

Daniel Dahlstrom

in Division III of Heidegger's Being and Time: The Unanswered Question of Being

This essay reconstructs the main theme of Being and Time’s Division III as the end of fundamental ontology. The ‘end’ here signifies both what Heidegger initially intended as its culmination and what ... More

This essay reconstructs the main theme of Being and Time’s Division III as the end of fundamental ontology. The ‘end’ here signifies both what Heidegger initially intended as its culmination and what he quickly came to see as the reason for terminating it. The reason, it is argued, is the failure of the pretension of tying the senses of being in general to a notion of temporality derived from the timely character of being-in-the-world. The essay concludes with suggestions of how the contents of the fated Division III anticipate dimensions of his later thinking.Less

Development

Tim Lomas

in Translating Happiness: A Cross-Cultural Lexicon of Well-Being

This chapter outlines the third of the three meta-categories that together constitute the theory of wellbeing presented in the book. Its focus is personal development, which constitutes the main way ... More

This chapter outlines the third of the three meta-categories that together constitute the theory of wellbeing presented in the book. Its focus is personal development, which constitutes the main way in which wellbeing is cultivated. This meta-category comprises two subsidiary categories: character (e.g., flourishing and fulfilling one’s potential); and spirituality (e.g., reaching higher states and stages of development through spiritual practice). These categories in turn are woven together from multiple themes, identified through the analysis of untranslatable words. Character was found to involve five interrelated themes: virtue; considerateness; wisdom; self-determination; and skill. The inclusion of spirituality reflects the notion, found in many cultures, that to truly reach the peaks of development, it necessary to experience or cultivate some mode of spirituality. The analysis suggested this involves three key elements: the sacred (as variously conceived); contemplative practices (as a means of engaging with it); and self-transcendence (as a result of such practices). Together, these categories and themes show the ways in which wellbeing can be cultivated through processes of personal development.Less

“The World was Paradise Malformed”: Poetic Language, Anthropomorphism, and Secularism in Wallace Stevens

Matthew Mutter

in Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance

That Stevens’s poetry repeatedly returns to the death of God as a condition of existential vertigo is a scholarly commonplace, but this chapter argues that for Stevens, language itself harbors a ... More

That Stevens’s poetry repeatedly returns to the death of God as a condition of existential vertigo is a scholarly commonplace, but this chapter argues that for Stevens, language itself harbors a dangerous bias toward transcendence. Stevens is mistrustful of the way metaphor slides into metaphysics, the way an analogical worldview becomes a theological one, and the ways in which signs and symbols tend to refer solid, immanent things to supersensible narratives or “meanings.” In the face of this danger, he develops a poetics of tautology meant to divest language of such bias. Yet later in his career, this chapter contends, he returns to analogy as a mode of transcendence-in-immanence, and establishes a concept of “description without place” in which imagined goods, which have no immanent existence, correspond to details of a particular scene. Stevens is, in other words, working out a version of Nietzsche’s famous claim that we are not rid of God until we are rid of grammar while simultaneously harnessing the religious possibilities of language.Less

“Tangled in a Golden Mesh”: Virginia Woolf and the “Deceptiveness” of Beauty

Matthew Mutter

in Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance

There has been a small movement among recent critics and philosophers to rehabilitate the reputation of beauty, which suffered under the modernist fascination with ugliness, Romantic and postmodern ... More

There has been a small movement among recent critics and philosophers to rehabilitate the reputation of beauty, which suffered under the modernist fascination with ugliness, Romantic and postmodern prejudice in favor of the sublime, and political criticism of beauty as elitist, inefficacious, and complicit with injustice. This chapter seeks to reframe these debates by examining the link between beauty and religious ontologies. Weber, following Nietzsche, insisted that secular modernity had broken sympathetic relations between beauty and goodness, but in Woolf’s novels the beautiful cannot shed its theological aura: its promise of reconciliation, peace, and divine benevolence. Woolf’s famous conception of “the world as a work of art”—which has, nevertheless, no “creator”—remains entangled in the aesthetic theodicies she repudiates. Her novels struggle to conceptualize secular, mundane models of beauty while simultaneously clinging to intimations of a metaphysical and moral order implicit in aesthetic experience. Beauty is, in her writing, the last and most intractable stronghold of mystical feeling.Less

Conclusion: Evil and the Adequacy of the Earth

Matthew Mutter

in Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance

This chapter contends that modernists find themselves entangled in a distinctly secular version of the “problem of evil.” As secularists they want to affirm the abundance of the immanent, material ... More

This chapter contends that modernists find themselves entangled in a distinctly secular version of the “problem of evil.” As secularists they want to affirm the abundance of the immanent, material world, but this very world seems to resist the desires and needs specific to human personhood. This leads, in different writers, to a critique of “secular humanism” or to a valorization of the world as a scene of conflict. The chapter suggests, however, that Auden’s Christian understanding of secularity is able to elude this problem of evil by relinquishing the expectation that the material world satisfy the desires proper to embodied persons.Less

The Concept of Meaning

Thaddeus Metz

in Meaning in Life

This chapter articulates what contemporary philosophers are asking when enquiring into the meaning of life, or what the concept of meaning in life is that unites competing conceptions of it. The ... More

This chapter articulates what contemporary philosophers are asking when enquiring into the meaning of life, or what the concept of meaning in life is that unites competing conceptions of it. The chapter mainly examines three major monist proposals, according to which a theory is about meaning in life just insofar as it addresses: purposiveness, as per G. E. Moore and Kai Nielsen; transcendence, as suggested by Robert Nozick; or the aptness of emotions such as admiration and esteem, ò la Charles Taylor. Each of these three ideas is shown to capture a large array of theoretical work in the philosophical literature, but not to capture everything. The chapter concludes that a pluralist, family resemblance model is most defensible at this point.Less