Search Results

An examination is made of Rosemary Radford Ruether's naturalist moral realism, whose naturalist, ecofeminist ethic locates both God (divine presence) and human norms in natural processes, particularly in evolution. Transcendence of immediate context and experience is possible through conscious participation in natural evolutionary development into the future. Ruether's moral realism is evident in her confidence that humans can know the good by looking to nature, including human nature, and this same confidence makes her an idealist about the potential to eliminate domination by creating new selves, theologies, and social structures. Moreover, Ruether's description of normative human nature focuses on boundedness to nature and the self's unique faculty of consciousness as an expression of nature; it does not include the human capacity for radical transcendence of or freedom over nature and consciousness. Thus, it is argued, Ruether offers grounding for moral norms in her naturalist moral realism, but she lacks a mechanism to judge those norms and to account for the resilience of human sin and the potential of human creativity to transmute nature.

This chapter describes the model of aesthetic realism developed by the Hungarian theorist György Lukács, and sets out the parameters of a Lukácsian theory of cinematic realism. It discusses one of the most trenchant criticisms levelled against Lukács: that the model of realism is umbilically associated with a particular form of literature: the nineteenth-century realist novel. As a consequence of this concentrated focus, the chapter dismisses some of the most vital artistic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including naturalism, and most forms of modernism. It establishes the link as to how Lukács appropriated the nineteenth-century realist tradition and examines the two central aspects of Lukács's theory: the notion of alienation and the model of the intensive totality. Lukács's writings on cinematic realism are also considered and contradicted for the type of naturalist/impressionist realism.

This chapter accepts for the sake of argument Ronald Dworkin’s point that the only viable form of normative skepticism is internal, and develops an internal skeptical argument directed specifically at normative realism. There is a striking and puzzling coincidence between normative judgments that are true, and normative judgments that causal forces led us to believe—a practical/theoretical puzzle to which the constructivist view has a solution. Normative realists have no solution, but are driven to conclude that we are probably hopeless at recognizing the independent normative truths they posit. Since this is an unacceptable conclusion, we must conclude that normative realism is false. Drawing on evolutionary considerations, it is explained why this internal skeptical argument does not carry over to our knowledge of objects in our manifest surroundings, and why the challenge does not depend on any assumption that the epistemology of the normative domain must be a causal one.

Before Gao Xingjian left China in 1987, eighteen of his short stories were published. Like his essays on modernism, these stories show a similar transition from a relatively conservative to a more experimental position. This change is most obviously marked by a shift from the dominance of naturalist realism to psychological realism. It is worth noting that the act of narration is presented as a conscious action in both “Stars” and “Pigeon,” although it serves different purposes respectively. Such an awareness later becomes a consistent feature in the repertoire of Gao's writings. In “Stars” it highlights the existence of a source of the story and promotes a sense of factuality, whereas in “Pigeon” it celebrates fictionality by demonstrating the narrative capacity of the artistic imagination. This view is very close to the one suggested in his call for modernism in A Preliminary Exploration.