Eric Sean Nelson, "Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher and Dilthey" (Summary)

Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey are often considered representatives of nineteenth-century hermeneutics and hermeneutical philosophy. Schleiermacher's thought is rooted in the modern appropriation and transformation of traditional metaphysics and Protestant theology, with his early Romantic works focusing on the intuition of the infinite and his absolute dependence on God. In contrast, Dilthey developed an epistemic pluralism and moderate skepticism in response to metaphysics, distinguishing between natural and human sciences based on their contexts, methodologies, and objects.

Schleiermacher was a post-Katian thinker of religious transcendence and the ethical ideal of the highest good that informs and orients ordinary life. Dilthey, on the other hand, interpreted modernity as an irrevocable break with premodern forms of thought, including Schleiermacher's dialectics. Schleiermacher's faith and intuition of the divine lost priority as they became one way of expressing lived-experience, mood, and worldview, and infinity became an immanent yet self-interrupting characteristic of life.

Dilthey's works explore the central thread in his critique of historical reason, focusing on the idea that understanding is an art rather than a doctrine of science. Hermeneutics is a doctrine of art oriented according to the idea of understanding given the universality of misunderstanding, and it requires judgment or a sense of appropriate application that is cultivated.

Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, a philosophical, theological, and scientific inquiry, emphasizes understanding, judgment, and the role of feeling, desire, and affectivity in linguistic interaction, interpretation, and individuation. He critiques rule-based hermeneutics and emphasizes the need for contextualization and mediation to articulate God's word. Schleiermacher also discusses psychological interpretation, which involves receptiveness to the traces of the singularity of the other.

Individuals are irreducible to language, and language is used and created through the language-forming power and style of individuals. Schleiermacher's approach is not mere "external reconstruction" aiming at correctness, but is oriented toward the question of truth through receptivity to what addresses and claims us.

Language is the only presupposition and defines the scope of hermeneutics, but it cannot close itself to what is other than language in a pure immanence of linguistic integration or mediation. The infinitity of sense confronts language on the side of both the whole and the individual.

Jean Grondin has emphasized the quest for the whole understood as completeness in Romantic hermeneutics, but the whole is not so much a complete system as an infinity of intercrossing relations that are ultimately referred to the nonrelational. Dilthey characterized three senses of "whole" in Schleiermacher's thought: organizing inner form, system, and relational context or Zusammenhang.

Schleiermacher's hermeneutics emphasized the correctness of understanding through theoretical articulation, but he did not presuppose correctness as the sole model of truth. Interpretation calls for responsive feeling and imagination, and Schleiermacher also called traces and seeds, which are the presence of something that cannot be thought as presence, disclosure of nondisclosedness, and revelation of that which is concealed as concealed. Werner Hamacher explored Schleiermacher's appeal to the "trace" in the context of recent literary theory.

Dilthey argued for a nonreductive experientialism in epistemology, expanding it beyond cognitive or theoretical knowledge and transformating it. He interpreted the processes of life immanently and in relation to a dynamic context that is never fully visible. Dilthey believed that the metaphysical unity of the world is incommensurable and cannot be conclusively combined. He rejected strong holism in the philosophy of the social sciences and remained a role for weak holism.

The primary intention of the human sciences is the empirical description of individuality in its life-context. Dilthey's writings from the early 1890s should be interpreted in the context of an interpretive psychology occurring in the space and intersection of epistemology and life. Understanding is the unending and irreducible intersection of prereflective elementary understanding and reflexive interpretation between self and other, individual and context, and singular and whole.

Dilthey's theory of the human sciences is not merely an epistemology but a theory of knowledge that relates knowing to its context. The human sciences involve the study of dynamic interconnected systems that articulate the intersection of meaning, value, purpose, and force. Understanding, which should be construed verbally as "to understand" (verstehen), is intrinsically interpretive for Dilthey.

Wilhelm Dilthey's hermeneutic approach to studying history and culture critiques historical reason, focusing on the complexity and concreteness of life. Understanding is not merely subjective but mediated through human expressions and practices, providing more than just scientific access to objects. Dilthey's phenomenological descriptions show how historical life is both about and matters to the individual in its relational context.

The human sciences aim for objectivity, universality, and truth, linking lived experiences with social-historical structures. Schleiermacher and Dilthey focus on the individuality, personality, style, and sensibility of the author in their historical context. Their thought has been retrospectively designated as "hermeneutical" owing to their interest in associated issues of sense and meaning, context and historicity, understanding and interpretation, and in the communicative and explicative dimensions of human life and inquiry.

Twentieth-century hermeneutics, beginning with Heidegger's critical reception of Dilthey in the 1920s, emphasizes not only the linguistic character of thought and the disclosive power of language but also its reversals, limitations, and breakdowns. Interpretation is aimed at the individual and the singular, as well as the context and the whole in their relational interdependence. The hermeneutical circle occurs through both contextualization and individuation, and is provisional and can always begin anew as more is learned about the individual and the context.

Self-understanding is a complex and questionable concept, as the individual does not have direct or unmediated self-knowledge. Meaning is inevitably of "diverse provenance," or pluralistic, and involves a multiplicity of elements and sources that entail addressing and researching the text, author, context, and truth claims of a work to interpret and evaluate it.

Bart Vandenabeele, " Schopenhauer on Empirical and Aesthetic Perception ...

Arthur Schopenhauer was a cosmopolitan philosopher who incorporated Hindu and Buddhist writings into his philosophical system. He saw the world as a blind, purposeless, and irrational will dominating the world, including humans. Schopenhauer's philosophy is often attributed to his analysis of the self and the world as the product of an irrational, unconscious, and purposeless drive called "will." He argued that life is purposeless, with no ultimate goal or meaning, and that the only way to escape from these torments is by "seeing the world aright," acknowledging the pointlessness and insignificance of our own willing existence. Schopenhauer's theory of perception and cognition moved him away from German idealism and towards British empiricists like Berkeley, Hume, Locke, Reid, and Kant. He used this view of the "intellectual" nature of perception to argue for the ideality of the perceived world. Schopenhauer's basic idea of the world as representation had serious consequences for the reception of his thinking, especially in Anglo-American philosophy in the early twentieth century.

Friedrich Schopenhauer, a philosopher, argued that the world is an object in relation to a subject, as the subject is the supporter of the world and the universal condition of all that appears. He distinguished his position from skepticism, realism, and idealism, which he accused of making the object the effect of the subject. Schopenhauer argued that subject and object necessarily presuppose one another, and the law of causality applies only within the world of representations and objects. He argued that all causality is only in the understanding and for the understanding. Schopenhauer was inspired by Plato, Calderón de la Barca, and Shakespeare, who describe life and dreams as pages from the same book. He agreed with Kant that experience is dependent on the nature of the cognitive faculties and that the world cannot exist independently of the cognizing subject. Schopenhauer's arguments are not very convincing, as he is right to hold that the representation of a world free from a subject presupposes a subject but not that the existence of a world independent of a subject also does. He also criticizes Kant's "Transcendental Aesthetic" and his transcendental idealism.

In "Transcendental Logic," Karl Kant discusses the role of understanding in our intuitive perceptions. He argues that our knowledge comes from two sources: receptivity of impressions and spontaneity of concepts. Schopenhauer criticizes Kant's vague use of terms like Anschauung, Perzeption, and Wahrnehmung, and uses the concepts "perception" and "intuition" interchangeably.

Kant divides objective perception into intuition (immediate) and concept (mediate). Schopenhauer characterizes the understanding's activity as phenomenologically "immediate" instead of inferential or discursive. In visual perception, the understanding connects subjective sensations with an external cause, creating a world of objects through the application of time and space and the category of causality.

However, Schopenhauer's account of perception and the role of the understanding is called for. He unjustly identifies subjective sensations with physiological elements and fails to make clear how the manifold of light's affections on the retina can provide anything like an "image." Paul Guyer argues that Kant's transcendental method has been replaced by a phenomenological approach, suggesting that sense impressions do not correspond with the objective intuition of a world of physical objects.

Schopenhauer's hierarchy of the senses is remarkably close to Kant's, focusing on the senses that Schopenhauer considers the "most noble" of all: hearing and sight. He believes that the less noise one can bear, the more intellectually gifted one is, and that the amount of noise we can bear is inversely proportionate with intelligence. Hearing, along with sight, is the sense of language and reason, the faculty of abstract reasoning, and distracts great minds easily from their noble art of thinking.

Schopenhauer's theory of knowledge, aesthetics, and ethics emphasizes the importance of sight and intuition in our experiences. He argues that sight is the most important sense because it is not directly connected to the will, making it the aesthetic organ par excellence. Schopenhauer's theory of perception and cognition explores the concept of pure knowledge, which is experienced through the senses. He argues that visual perception is the easiest way to experience purely aesthetic pleasure, as it has no direct connection with the will.

Schopenhauer's view of sight as the only truly objective senses is controversial, as it threatens to disturb Schopenhauer's hierarchy of the senses and seems to underestimate the sense of hearing. Additionally, there is an unprecedented privilege attached to the transcendental form of space.

In Fourfold Root, Schopenhauer states that perceptions of sight ultimately refer to touch, and sight can be regarded as an imperfect touch extending to a distance and using rays of light as long feelers. This raises questions about the nature of pure knowledge and the role of the senses in our experiences.

Schopenhauer posits that visual perception occurs unconsciously and is accompanied by two systematic forms of "deceit": the illusion of immediacy (time) and the illusion of the sensation itself giving us the objects directly. The illusion of immediacy is strongest in visual perception and is also the most deceitful.

Schopenhauer's theory of perception and cognition raises questions about the nature of pure knowledge and the role of the senses in our experiences. While he acknowledges the potential benefits of seeing and touch, he also acknowledges the challenges and paradoxes associated with these concepts.

Schopenhauer's theory of perception and cognition posits that the intellect, a physiologically linked to the brain, is an instrument of the will. He believes that empirical cognition is driven by human needs, interests, and affects, and that the intellect can be disturbed by the will. In aesthetic consciousness, the "real self" appears to have vanished and is replaced by a "better" or "higher" consciousness, which turns away from the will and considers things as non-related to it. Schopenhauer distances himself from the Western tradition's belief that intellect and reason are the most perfect hallmark of humanity. Instead, he believes that cognition that is not in service of the will remains possible, known as aesthetic cognition. This state of awareness occurs when we perceive external objects and become empirically aware of the world. Schopenhauer's aesthetic experience is characterized by a state of extraordinary tranquility, where individual striving, suffering, desiring, and worrying no longer occur. This heightened, "objective" state of consciousness discards the embodied, willing self and frees us from the pressures and torments of will.

Aesthetic perception, according to Schopenhauer, is a state of awareness that transcends personal desires and offers freedom from the constant striving and suffering. It is not just a heightened state of awareness but also a superior form of cognition, as ordinary empirical cognition is guided by personal needs, affects, and interests. Schopenhauer believes that aesthetic perception is a sign of "the gift of genius" to attain and maintain a pure state of dispassionate, "pure perception" and cognition.

Aesthetic, will-less perception, which Schopenhauer identifies with Spinoza's notion of knowledge "sub aeternitatis specie," offers insight into the timeless kernel of things, the universal essences of the perceived objects, beyond mere appearance. These eternal essences are called the (Platonic) Ideas, the "eternal forms" behind the mere appearances of common empirical cognition.

Schopenhauer's aesthetics theory differs from Kant's view that aesthetic judgment cannot be based on certain concepts. He argues that the forms of space and time, and the understanding or intellect, ground and construct the world as representation, characterized by plurality. However, his metaphysical view of the thing-in-self is enmeshed in his claims, and his semi-Platonic account of the Ideas is more Platonic than Kantian.

Schopenhauer's accounts of ordinary and aesthetic perception offer a critical supplement to empiricist and Kantian theories of cognition and perception. He suggests that the intellect is driven by human willing, and that aesthetic perception allows the cerebral system to operate detached from the will. This will-less aesthetic cognition is pleasurable, offering relief from suffering and generating deeper insight into the timeless universals behind the mere appearances of things.

 

Cary Wolfe, "Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities" ...

Animal studies is a growing field that explores the relationship between humans and animals in literature, art, and culture. It encompasses various works such as William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, and Ernest Hemingway's Go Down, as well as works by Damien Hirst, Joseph Beuys, Sue Coe, William Wegman, Bill Viola, Carolee Schneeman, Lynn Randolph, and Patricia Piccinini. The concept of the animal has been central in earlier periods, with scholars suggesting that the idea of the animal was inherited from the Enlightenment and thinkers like Descartes and Kant. Beyond literature, art, and culture, the Western philosophical canon and its thinking of the animal/human difference are being reconfigured and reinterpreted. There is also a crossover between philosophy and the legal sphere in animal rights law, animal television, and popular texts like Michael Polllan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.

The emergence of animal studies has been marked by a growing number of conferences, symposiums, publication venues, and special journal issues devoted to the topic in North America and abroad. This interdisciplinarity is inseparable from its very genesis, making it more justifiable for animal studies than it was for feminist scholarship or queer theory in its early days. Animal studies would not exist without the work done in field ecology and cognitive ethology over the past twenty to thirty years.

Scattered work on the animal was carried out in various fields in the humanities and social sciences as far back as the 1980s, with the landmark publication of Donna Haraway's Primate Visions opeing the 1990s with a remarkable interdisciplinary synthesis that defined a new, resolutely cultural studies era in what would come to be called animal studies. However, what appears different about the emergence of animal studies in our moment is the gradual opening up of a theoretical and critical space of its own.

The series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press has published important titles by Leonard Lawlor, Gary Francione, Stanley Cavell and cocontributors, and Matthew Calarco, among others. The number of special journal issues over the past few years has also increased, with the new online journal Humanimalia, the robust H-Animal corner of the H-Net humanities online forum, the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, and Society and Animals published by the Animals and Society Institute.

New work on animals, such as Nigel Rothfels's, moves away from an earlier form of history that focused on human ideas and attitudes towards animals. Instead, it traces the ways in which humans construct and are constructed by animals in the past. This raises the question of how the internal disciplinarity of history, literary studies, and philosophy is unsettled when animals are taken seriously, not just as another topic but as one with unique demands. Scholars in animal studies are challenged by the discourses and conceptual schemata that have shaped our understanding of and relations to animals, as well as the specificity of nonhuman animals and their nongeneric nature. This irreducibility of the question of the animal is linked to the problem of animals' ethical standing as direct or indirect subjects of justice.

Animal studies, a field of study that focuses on the human connection to animals, has been gaining attention in recent years. This field has been influenced by fields like cognitive ethology, which has explored the relationship between animals and humans. Animal studies studies both a material entity (nonhuman beings) and a discourse of species difference, which is not limited to their application to nonhumans alone. It is a socially and ethically responsive cultural studies working to stay ahead of new social movements, such as "animal rights," which is an academic expression of a larger democratic impulse towards greater inclusiveness of every gender, race, sexual orientation, or species. However, the rapid adoption of the cultural studies template for animal studies poses a challenge to the disciplinarity of the humanities and cultural studies. Animal studies can only be addressed adequately if they confront questions on two levels: content, thematics, and the object of knowledge, and the theoretical and methodological approach. This approach allows for the incorporation of humanism and liberalism, extending the sphere of consideration to previously marginalized groups.

Animal studies, a subfield of cultural studies, has faced challenges in its pursuit of a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior and the world around us. The field has been criticized for its disciplinary incoherence and vagueness, which has led to the preservation of a historically, ideologically, and intellectually specific form of subjectivity while masking it as pluralism. This incoherence serves to maintain a certain historically, ideologically, and intellectually specific form of subjectivity while masking it as pluralism, including the extension of pluralism to nonhuman animals.

Animal studies challenges the schema of the knowing subject and its anthropocentric underpinnings, which are sustained and reproduced in current disciplinary protocols of cultural studies and literary studies. This has led to the reproduction of an ideologically familiar mode of subjectivity based on liberal humanism.

An interdisciplinary field of inquiry, animal studies should not be viewed as simply the latest flavor of the month. While the distinction between "subjectivity" and "agency" is useful in understanding how animals and our interactions with them have historically shaped our world, it does not provide insight into the ethical differences that occur in our interactions with inanimate and sentient agents. The literary and philosophical end of animal studies has been interested in these differences, but this perspective differs from the Gramscian notion of critical consciousness that underpins many diverse approaches in cultural studies.

The text explores the relationship between the human and the animal in animal studies, arguing that critical consciousness exposes the intersubjectivity of meaning and exposes the structures that organize how we know and how knowledge is transmitted and accepted. It also highlights the cultural studies model, where animals are now recognized as agents in the enterprise. This picture of critical consciousness closes off the human from the animal, reinforcing the human/animal divide in a less visible but more fundamental way.

Derrida's essay "The Animal That Therefore I Am" is arguably the single most important event in the brief history of animal studies. He questions the nature of the "auto-" of the human as the "autobiographical animal" and the concept of the human that "man" "recounts to himself" to enable his recognition of the nonhuman other in a gesture of "benevolence" characteristic of liberal humanism.

Derrida's work on the animal enables us to address the problem of ethnocentrism raised earlier in Diamond's observation about what we have made of our relations to animals, without leaving us impaled on the other horn of the dilemma—either Gramscian critical consciousness or the broader issue of the human-animal divide. By examining the nature of the "auto-" of humanist subjectivity, we can better understand the embodied finitude that we share with nonhuman animals and the implications of our understanding of the human-animal relationship.

Derrida's argument in animal studies argues that human beings are not the "auto-" of humanism, but rather radically other and already in- or ahuman in their very being. This means that what we call "we" covers over a more radical not being able that makes our conceptual life possible. Animal studies should be more invested in fundamentally rethinking the question of what knowledge is, how it is limited by the overdeterminations and partialities of our "species-being." This second type of finitude is shared by humans and nonhumans when they begin to interact and communicate.

Animal studies intersects with the larger problematic of posthumanism, returning us to the thickness and finitude of human embodiment and to human evolution as itself a specific form of animality. By paying serious attention to the diversity of animal forms and ways of being in the world, we are forced to conclude that the human/animal distinction is nonsensical. On the strength of that weakness, we are returned to a new sense of the materiality and particularity not just of the animal and its multitude of forms but also of that animal called the human.

In the second half of the rubric animal studies, it is important to emphasize that one can engage in a humanist or a posthumanist practice of a discipline. Just because a historian or literary critic devotes attention to the topic or theme of nonhuman animals doesn't mean that a familiar form of humanism isn't being maintained through internal disciplinary practices that rely on a specific schema of the knowing subject and the kind of knowledge they can have.

 

Stacy Alaimo, "Bodily Natures:Science, Environment, and the Material Sel...

The linguistic turn that dominated humanist academia in the latter half of the twentieth century is now waning, as scholars seek to move beyond its perceived limitations. The conviction that language alone shapes our world is being methodically challenged, and while not entirely dismissed, it is now viewed with suspicion for its inadequacies. The current academic discourse emphasizes the material dimensions of the world, moving away from traditional realist epistemologies, Marxist materialisms, or biological determinism. Instead, there is a focus on rethinking matter itself as possessing agency, intention, and purpose.

This shift is particularly evident in feminist theory, science studies, environmental humanities, and animal studies, where the agency and significance of material forces and their interactions with human and nonhuman entities are at the forefront of inquiry. This emerging material turn is driving significant theoretical transformations, leading to new conceptualizations of matter in a posthuman age. This era is characterized by the diminishing distinctions between the human and the more-than-human world, with a renewed focus on the material interchanges between bodies and environments. While the cultural and communicative aspects of the body are still acknowledged, the primary focus is no longer on viewing the body solely as a socio-culturally constructed object. Instead, the material environment and its implications are gaining prominence in contemporary theory.

The material turn is thus effectively challenging and reshaping contemporary intellectual trends without reverting to anthropocentrism or Cartesian dualism. Leading this charge are female theorists like Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo. Barad is celebrated as a key figure in the material turn, while Alaimo is recognized for her work on trans-corporeality. Alaimo’s book, "Bodily Natures," is an interdisciplinary study that offers a new critical model to understand the complex interactions between human bodies, nonhuman entities, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.

Alaimo defines trans-corporeality as the movement across bodies, interconnections between various bodily natures, and the material linkages between human corporeality and the more-than-human world. Her argument highlights the necessity of more comprehensive scientific, sociological, and textual knowledge practices to account for the often-invisible material forces that flow between people, places, and economic/political systems. Trans-corporeality is thus proposed as a new theoretical direction, aiming to account for how nature, the environment, and the material world impact human bodies, knowledge, and practices.

Alaimo contends that trans-corporeality reorients the body within the material world, countering late twentieth-century constructivist theories that cultivated disembodied and transcendent subjects. While acknowledging the valuable insights these theories have provided into race, gender, class, and sexuality, she argues that they have often neglected the significance of matter itself. In contrast, trans-corporeality “naturalizes” the body by situating it within a world of biological creatures, ecosystems, and human-made substances. This perspective seeks to integrate the body more fully into its material environment, emphasizing the dynamic interactions and interdependencies that shape our existence.

Among the theorists she engages with are Karen Barad, Ulrich Beck, Bruno Latour, Val Plumwood, Elizabeth Wilson, Nancy Tuana, Teresa de Lauretis, Donna Haraway, David Abram, Elizabeth Grosz, Ladelle McWhorter, Vicky Kirby, Katherine Hayles, Timothy W. Luke, and Andrew Pickering. She also references environmental activists such as Susan G. Koben, Robert N. Proctor, Sandra Steingraber, Breast Cancer Action, and Greenpeace, alongside literary authors like Meridel Le Sueur, Muriel Rukeyser, Ana Castillo, and Simon Ortiz.

Alaimo argues that the material interconnections between the human and the more-than-human world are best understood through the theoretical framework of trans-corporeality, where “corporeal theories, environmental theories, and science studies meet and mingle in productive ways”. She introduces the concept of "material memoirs" by authors such as Audre Lorde, Candida Lawrence, Zillah Eisenstein, Susanne Antonetta, and Sandra Steingraber to exemplify how the material self is entangled within economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial networks.

Alaimo’s central theme is the need to move beyond the binary divide between material and discursive analyses of the body toward recognizing the complex "intra-action" between the two. This concept, derived from Barad, refers to the mutual constitution of all objects and agencies within an undivided field of existence. Alaimo employs Barad's notion to bridge the gap between discursive and material practices, proposing an environmental ethics that focuses on the interfaces, interchanges, and transformative material/discursive practices. Her originality lies in theorizing the body—both human and nonhuman—as a trans-corporeal agency that interacts with social, ecological, political, cultural, and material forces, which are often hazardously interconnected.

She uses the example of toxic bodies to illustrate trans-corporeal space, highlighting how harmful substances in water, air, and soil impact the body in profound ways. These toxic bodies exemplify the need for an environmental ethics that addresses the interconnectedness of human corporeality and the more-than-human world, resisting ideological forces of disconnection. Alaimo asserts that "toxic bodies may provoke material, trans-corporeal ethics that turn from the disembodied values and ideals of bounded individuals toward an attention to situated, evolving practices". This shift in focus brings the context for ethics to encompass not only social but also material dimensions, involving the interactions of biological, climatic, economic, and political forces.

Alaimo argues that a trans-corporeal understanding of the world enhances our grasp of environmental justice, health, hazards, and risks, which is the central tenet of Bodily Natures. She states, "Bodily Natures grapples with the ways in which environmental ethics, social theories, popular understandings of science, and conceptions of the human self are profoundly altered by the recognition that 'the environment' is not located somewhere out there, but is always the very substance of ourselves".

The book is divided into six chapters, with the first part addressing environmental justice models and the second part probing environmental health issues. Throughout, Alaimo raises questions about the material dimensions of self, race, class, and gender, as well as toxic environments, biomedical truths, scientific mediation of knowledge, and epidemiological studies. She offers new models of environmental justice and personal knowledge practices to counteract the effects of environmental illness. By linking biology and politics, she constructs powerful instances of trans-corporeality in a risk society where people are confronted daily with toxic substances. For instance, the concept of the “proletarian lung” from Richard Charles Lewontin and Richard Levins symbolizes the corporeal manifestations of class. This concept serves as the starting point for chapter two, which examines works by Meridel Le Sueur and Muriel Rukeyser that emphasize the palpable interrelations between bodies and natures.

Chapter three, “Invisible Matters: The Sciences of Environmental Justice,” connects environmental justice science, literature, and activism with toxic environments and raced bodies. Here, Alaimo analyzes novels by Percival Everett and Ana Castillo, and Simon Ortiz’s poems, alongside various activists, to explore environmental justice struggles. Chapters four and five delve into environmental health issues, particularly focusing on the material memoirs of women writers and the concept of multiple chemical sensitivity as a form of trans-corporeal space.

Chapter four is particularly compelling as it showcases how ordinary individuals undertake epidemiological projects to confront environmental dangers, illustrating how the self is co-extensive with the environment and its vast biological, economic, and industrial systems. Chapter five continues this exploration by discussing multiple chemical sensitivity and its implications for posthuman environmental ethics. The concluding chapter examines the assumptions of genetic engineering through Greg Bear’s Darwin series, arguing that materiality, rather than humans, has the power to transform.

 

American Pragmatism

Pragmatism, the most significant intellectual movement in the United States, was influenced by the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, William James, George Santayana, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead in the first half of the twentieth century, and Wilfrid Sellars, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Rorty in the second half. The various forms of pragmatism differ mainly in terms of their dependence on experience or language, and the paradigmatic status accorded to natural science.

American philosophers who dealt with religion from the 1870s to the 1930s brought both naturalism and pragmatism to bear on topics such as religious experience, the meaning and reference of "God," the nature of religious truth, and the community of interpreters. Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, worked as a logician, experimental scientist, and mathematician, and his theories were governed by a conception of evolutionary change. He believed that beliefs were treated as habits of action, and truth was defined as inquiry.

Peirce was an early anti-foundalist, abandoning the Cartesian quest for incorrigible grounds for knowledge claims. His metaphysical investigations defended the threefold claim of synechism, tychism, and agapeism, and developed a complex and intricate system out of three simple categories of possibility, actuality, and necessity or law.

In his 1908 essay, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," philosopher John Peirce introduced the Humble Argument, which concluded that God is real and rational belief in God is universally accessible. The argument highlighted musement and abduction as common stages of scientific or religious inquiry. Musement was a process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definitive belief, while abduction was a generative process neither deduced from evidential premises nor inductively generalized from them.

Peirce believed religion was a universal sentiment, more a way of living than a way of believing. His theism was left somewhat vague, functioning as a regulative hope of the possibility of inquiry. Commentators are divided on whether Peirce's theism should be interpreted according to process philosophy in a panentheistic way (Donna Orange) or in a more traditional Thomistic direction (Michael Raposa).

William James' chief contributions to philosophy of religion are often associated only with his arguments in The Will to Believe (1897) and his conclusions in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). He argued that an individual has a right to believe a hypothesis that cannot be proved by direct evidence, but overinflationated the distinction between intellectual and passional interests and problematically defined the religious hypothesis to mean " perfection is eternal."

James became too good a historicist over the course of his career to remain content with stale dualisms between nature and supernature, the temporal and the eternal, the physical and the mental. Radical empiricism complemented his pragmatism, providing a notion of "experience" that could bear the weight of a naturalized theory of religious experience while avoiding the charge of subjectivism invited by The Varieties.

Peirce's Humble Argument and James' radical empiricism were significant contributions to the field of philosophy of religion. While they both contributed to the understanding of religious experience, their differing approaches and perspectives have shaped our understanding of the world around us.

James formulated his pluralistic pantheism, rejecting the monistic view that the divine exists authentically only when the world is experienced all at once in its absolute totality. He envisioned a single universe of nature in which the whole is neither absolutely one nor absolutely many, and both human and non-human powers cooperate together. The whole exhibits "concatenated unity" or a multiplicity of irreducibly particular events in the midst of intricate patterns of relatedness.

James was willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected, and that some of it may remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made. The pluralistic world is more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. While monism and pluralism can stimulate stressful moods, James believed that the world's salvation depend upon the energizing of its several parts, among which we are.

John Dewey aimed to divorce the meaning of the adjective "religious" from the traditional sense of the noun "religion." He defined the religious as any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value. Life was lived with a religious quality whenever and wherever anyone experienced a sense of human nature as a cooperating part of a larger whole.

Dewey proposed three proposals for how the self is integrated as a whole: first, the religious aspect of experience pointed to some complex of conditions that operated to effect a significant adjustment in life, a transformative and integrative reorientation. Second, imagination played a key role in unifying the self in harmony with its surroundings. Both the ideal of the whole self and the American pragmatism ideal of the totality of the world were held as imaginative projections, but the work of self-integration was dependent on an inflow from sources beyond conscious deliberation and purpose.

Dewey's pragmatic naturalism captured the evolutionary, processive-relational sense of "uniting" as an ongoing activity. He struggled to slough off the vestiges of idealism by affiliating the "continuity" of the many with each other as many, but not their literal oneness.

Dewey's philosophy of religion, criticized for offering only a form of secular humanism and excessive optimism, had more resonance and breadth than A Common Faith alone reveals. He believed that consummatory experiences of quality or value were the very aim of human praxis. In aesthetic experience, the continuities of form and matter appeared directly and with consummatory power that was a good in itself. Works of art created a sense of communion which could generate or shade off into religious quality. The sense of belonging to a whole which accompanied intense aesthetic perception also explained the religious feeling.

Nature in turn was understood as both thwarting and supporting human efforts. Humankind was continuous with and dependent upon an environing world which should evoke heartfelt piety as the source of ideals, possibilities, and aspirations. This made natural piety a genuine and valuable part of human life in the world, needing more careful cultivation and expression to play a positive role in the development of society and culture.

Dewey repeatedly appealed to "a sense of the whole," "the sense of an enveloping whole," that is experienced as a natural response of the human organism to its environment. The religious, reconstructed naturalistically, represented an intensification and broadening of the aesthetic quality of experience, having to do with what Dewey called "consummatory moments" involving fulfillments and immediately enjoyed meanings. Wholeness was the quality that linked aesthetic experiences, ordinary secular experiences, and religious experiences.

Dewey's final verdict was that the conditions and forces in nature and culture that promote human well-being were plural. In contrast to H. N. Wieman's thesis, he found no inherent unity to the forces and factors which made for good, and the organizing and integrating of these forces or factors was the work of human imagination and action.

Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that emphasizes antifoundationalism, pluralism, and secular forms of transcendence without otherworldliness. It is influenced by various American philosophers of religion, such as Jeffrey Stout's modest pragmatism, H.S. Levinson's festive Jewish American pragmatic naturalism, Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism, William Dean's naturalistic historicism, and Sheila Davaney's pragmatic historicism. These authors emphasize that religious beliefs are tools for dealing with reality, focusing on historically contingent forms of consensus and social practice within religious communities. They view commitment to democratic communal activism as a consequence of pragmatism in religious American life and thought.

A significant shift in contemporary pragmatism occurred with the work of Willard V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty. These "linguistic pragmatists" combined a naturalistic, Darwinian view of human life with an antifoundationalist, holist account of meaning and truth. A fruitful area of research for philosophy of religion's habitual interest in the concept of "truth" is now open, with some pragmatist philosophers of religion ready to jettison the pragmatist theory of truth in favor of the holist account.

Pragmatism also challenges the use of distinctions such as cognitive-noncognitive, scheme-content, objective-subjective, intellectual-emotionive, and the reinstatement of the vague in human understanding. Exploring the transitions, felt qualities, and indeterminacies of experience is essential for a pragmatist reconstruction of the causes, consequences, and reference range of religious phenomena.

 

J P. Lawrence, "Schelling: Philosopher of Tragic Dissonance" (Summary)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was a philosopher who emerged as fully formed as Mozart in his early childhood. He made a significant distinction between negative philosophy, which has its source in pure reason, and positive philosophy, which draws its insights from art, literature, and religious scriptures of all ages and traditions. Schelling's "nature mysticism" was influenced by his appreciation for Protestant mystics such as Bengel and Oetinger. He later accorded natural language apriority to the concept, asserting that the "Book of Nature" is the deepest source of positive philosophy.

Schelling's capacity to resurface in astonishingly diverse ways reflects the kind of genius that gives rise to inspiration rather than imitation. Heidegger regarded Schelling as "more profound" than Hegel, but presumably not more "important." Eric Voegelin went even further, effectively according him a rank equalled or surpassed only by Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas.

Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin were in full agreement that philosophical thinking demanded the boldest possible denial of orthodoxy and the capacity to envision the approaching "Kingdom of God." What distinguished the three young thinkers from Fichte was a decisively this-worldly emphasis that embraced nature as fully as history.

Schelling's earliest phase is usually described as a purely Fichtean form of subjective idealism. However, Schelling insisted that the "I," when invoked as the "principle of philosophy," has to be understood on the basis of its transreflective origin. He agreed with Fichte that the idealist's faith in freedom and the realist's attachment to nature both generate equally viable metaphysical systems.

Schelling's real endeavor was to understand freedom in its finite nature, which means in its relationship to nature. He anticipated Heidegger as the prophetic voice that warns of tragedy's renewal.

Friedrich Schelling, a German philosopher, was renowned for his contributions to the philosophy of nature and his exploration of the unconscious. He believed that freedom arises from an unconscious origin and that life is suffered before it is lived. Schelling's work, particularly his poem "Epikurische Glaubensbekenntnis Heinz Widerporstens," challenged conventional Christianity and advocated for a pantheistic religiosity that finds God in various forms.

Schelling's philosophy was not just about expanding Fichte's idealism but also about uncovering the preconscious origins of the self, which would account for his profound sense of destiny. His ideas about tragedy and the concept of the unconscious are deeply intertwined, as he believed that nature speaks more intelligibly when understood in a reflective way.

Schelling's speculative metaphysics of nature was influenced by empirical observations and forces of expansion and contraction. He believed that the cosmic "breathing" that gives life to nature as a whole is concretely expressed in natural polarities, such as electric and magnetic forces animating chemical processes, sexual polarity that underlies organic reproduction, and the internal division between sensation and irritation within animal life.

Schelling's view was dynamic and anticipated important features of post-Naturphilosophian physics of the twentieth century. It restored the Platonic and Aristotelian view that nature has nothing "inert" within it but is the actualization of the slumbering potency of matter. The early Naturphilosophie advanced the view that matter itself is an always-wavering equilibrium of opposed forces.

Despite Schelling's objections to the Newtonian bias of most nineteenth-century natural science, there are still areas of conflict with some important new developments, such as Faraday's experimental confirmation of Oersted's electromagnetic theory. The Naturphilosophie must be understood as a sustained critique of modern science's mechanical presuppositions and its tendency to reduce the physical to the mathematical.

Schelling, a philosopher, opposed empirical sciences that focused on experience and metaphysical origin, believing that self-knowledge could serve as the basis for understanding reality. He introduced the notion of intellectual intuition, which he compared to a state of death. Schelling's work, The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), is idealist in conception and aims to reveal unconscious productivity at work in humanity.

The system focuses on theoretical necessity, as knowledge theoretically determines the impossibility of changing it, followed by contrasting practical philosophy, emphasizing that nothing can truly be known apart from the world we actively shape. Schelling claims that art in general (not logic) is the proper organon of philosophy, as artistic creation involves a form of knowing that transcends both theoretical and practical reason.

In the System of Transcendental Idealism, nature ultimately prevails, and Schelling and Hegel sought the philosophical comprehension of the absolute. However, Schelling believed that reason is a powerful enough instrument to reveal its own limits, unlike Jacobi who believed in the unconditioned absolute and the need for faith.

Schelling's commitment to rationality led him to provide compelling arguments for the tragic view in philosophy, which he remained committed to even during his brief collaboration with Hegel (1801-1803). This period is often referred to as his "system of identity," but it is more appropriate to call it Naturphilosophie.

The dominant figure of the system is the image of magnetic polarity, which combines opposition with unity, as negative and positive poles attract rather than repel one another. The relationship between subject and object grounds the consciousness of reality, and the lower so consistently presupposes the higher that the full multiplicity of what exists can be understood as everywhere one and the same.

In conclusion, Schelling's commitment to rationality and his collaboration with Hegel marked the final and most impressive blossoming of Neoplatonism in the history of Western thought.

Neoplatonism is a philosophical approach that reconciles the deepest impulses of both rationalism and mysticism. It is characterized by the Unbedingte or unconditioned, primordial No-thing that contains reality within it and serves as the ontological ground for all of rationality. Schelling's philosophy, known as Naturphilosophie, celebrates the divinity of the universe and presents nature as the throbbing heart of an Aristotelian God. This philosophy forms the background for a philosophy of history that includes nature within it, resurrecting Schelling's deepest insights into the tragic nature of being as such.

Schelling's most difficult and characteristic thought is the barbaric principle of nature must itself be comprehended as something contained within God, as the ground of his very possibility. This philosophy of thought is a testament to the power of the human mind and the ability to understand the tragic nature of being.

In 1809, Schelling became the secretary of the Academy of Art in Munich, and his break with Hegel became permanent and irresolvable. He realized the fragility of the absolute and the dark and mysterious nature of the finite. In 1809, Schelling's last significant publication, the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, emphasized the importance of understanding human freedom in its finiteness as a specific form of human freedom.

F. W. J. Schelling had a profound impact on the philosophy of German idealism and the entire tradition of Christian theosophy. His main work, The Ages of the World, was a long narrative description of God's life, divided into "past, present, and future."

Schelling's hope for future reconciliation involves the redemption of nature as a whole, with his "heaven" being a world inhabited by translucent bodies. His theory of powers or "potencies" allows him to traverse this vast territory. Schelling's movement "preceded the world" and can be expressed in purely formal terms, symbolizing the primordial accident of existence and giving expression to his fundamental materialism.

Schelling's lectures, such as "On the Nature of Philosophy as Science," serve as a gateway into his last phase of his career. He believes that spiritual wisdom is a real possibility, but only in the form of knowing ignorance, which is associated with Socrates. Wisdom is Gelassenheit (releasement), which must ultimately extend to the religious belief in God.

Schelling's philosophy of history is more oriented around the future than around the past, and he looks forward to Nietzsche and Heidegger's talk of the "end of metaphysics" and the possibility of "a new beginning." His purpose was to renew philosophy by appropriating the foundational energy of a lost, but retrievable origin.

Schelling's last period of his career was controversial in his own time, but given the contemporary "clash of civilizations," this latest phase of his long career may be the most important for us today. The idea of philosophical religion offers the possibility of freeing religion into its essence, which lies beyond sectarian division and is ultimately a matter of spirit and understanding.

 

Terrell Carver, "Marx and Marxism" (Summary)

Karl Marx believed that academic philosophers were too little engaged with social questions and that philosophy as a profession would never engage properly with the politics of thoroughgoing social change. His interpretation of some of his works as philosophical or stating philosophical doctrines developed in his later lifetime, and was the work of Friedrich Engels, his lifelong friend and occasional collaborator. After Engels's death, Marxism emerged as a comprehensive philosophy and political practice through which many of the twentieth century's most important social and economic transformations were envisioned and pursued.

Marx's early life has almost always been read as more aligned with reason than with faith, although his parents were not radicals. His father encouraged him to study at university, first at Bonn and then at Berlin, to become a lawyer. However, open confrontations with the truths that were the bedrock of Christian faith had to be avoided, and atheism or skepticism that would question the tenets and position of Christianity was an obvious ground for exclusion and dismissal in universities and the professions.

Historicization, a methodological thread in "free-thinking," was derived from the late eighteenth century through German scholars' research into ancient civilizations and languages. Both Strauss and Feuerbach proposed versions of philosophy that would effectively transcend confessional Christianity, at least for the educated classes where free-thinking had the wherewithal to flourish. Friedrich von Schelling was appointed to the Berlin Academy in 1841 to deradicalize the Hegelian legacy and discourage radicalism among "Young Hegelians."

Karl Marx, a prominent German philosopher and journalist, participated in the '48 revolutions in central Europe and emigrated to England in 1849. He worked as a journalist and publicist for working-class political struggles worldwide. In his autobiography, written in 1859, Marx presents himself as a social critic and political activist, rather than a philosopher. He began his account with an allusion to some of the few articles he wrote and published in his time as a liberal journalist on the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Gazette), a legal and moderate paper in Cologne.

Marx's engagement with Hegel is framed as a detailed critique of the latter's political philosophy as such, allied to a critique of his overall dialectic as a general method. Marx's critical use of Hegel was not a simple reversal or inversion, but rather a critique of the Hegelian philosophy of law.

Marx's political perspective on change and reform was more radical and thoroughgoing than any adopted by political economists. He believed that mere redistribution of goods and services would not resolve the social question of inequality. Marx's engagement with any philosophy as such was secondary to or explicitly in aid of his chosen political project, a politically motivated critique of political economy.

Nineteenth-century socialism and communism were not consistently distinguished from each other, but they comprised a wide variety of views on human nature, ideal societies, and political tactics. Communists, such as Marx, were generally more radical in focusing on working-class politics and calling for large-scale, revolutionary change, using violence if necessary.

Marx's analysis of society, society, and politics is complex, focusing on the relationship between humans and their relationships, such as property and work relations. He links economic and political structures to the technologies and practices through which production occurs, referring to this as a real foundation. Marx believes that ideological generalizations are misleading and selectively tendentious rather than enlightening.

Marx's outlook on history, society, and politics is summarized by asserting that the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. He suggests four epochs in history: ancient, Asiatic, feudal, and modern bourgeois society. Changes in social formations have arisen from conflicts between productive forces and productive relations, particularly when the property system restricts technological and workplace developments that enhance productivity and innovation. Marx believes that Bourgeois society will be under pressure from similar contradictions as increasing productivity reduces employment and consumption, and the dysfunctionality of a market system based on "private" ownership becomes evident.

Marx's manuscript works of 1845-46, which were first published in part in the 1920s, have attracted the attentions of philosophers to an increasing and now dominant degree. Engels, a prominent publicist of Marx, worked to make him visible and gain political capital by making him a philosopher. Influential works of the late 1870s and early 1880s, particularly Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1878), were derived from unpublished notebooks and manuscripts and produced with suitable flourishes by a Russo-German team of Marxist scholars anxious to link Marxism with scientific certainty.

Marxist philosophy was initially marginalized by professional philosophers and regarded with suspicion due to its purported political commitment to revolutionary transformation of society. The Frankfurt School, established in the 1930s, made early use of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and German Ideology, which had not been incorporated by Engels into his Marxist dialectics and materialism.

Marxist philosophers in France and the Soviet Union applied Marxian notions of social production, class structure, and ideological critique to cultural criticism, social science, and historical research. Antonio Gramsci, a Communist Party worker in Italy, argued against materialism of matter-in-motion and instead favored a "praxis" account where intersubjective categories of practical life and cultural understanding constitute the human realm for political judgments. This approach to Marxism has been influenced by philosophers and activists throughout history, including Hegel, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Lefebvre.

Postwar international political and economic settlements led to a significant shift in philosophy practice and promotion. Marxist philosophers' political commitment and interest in Marx's "theory of history" became respectable, though not universally accepted. The continental tradition in philosophy admitted Marx and his historicizing and Hegelianizing successors, but not the dialectics and materialism promoted by Engels.

In the postwar period, Marx was re-read independently of Engels's systematizing materialism and determinism, but in a more Hegelian manner. New texts, such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the German Ideology manuscripts of 1845–46, were suited to the construction of Marx's work as a philosophy.

The philosophical "new Marx" was somewhat depoliticized in the postwar period, with philosophers excited by Marx's terminology of alienation, estrangement, species-being, and other humanist ways of setting out his concerns.

The analytical school of Marxist thought, initiated in the mid-1970s by G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer, Robert Brenner, and Erik Olin Wright, rejected Hegelianism and the continental tradition as methodologically unrigorous. Instead, rigor was identified with various presuppositions and methodologies, such as individualism, propositional hypothesis, and clarity in language. Marx's role in the philosophical debate was to resolve two significant puzzles: the validity of his "guiding principle" and the validity of his theory of exploitation. Analytical Marxists argued that Marx could be shown to be right after all, while Roemer and others adopted strict assumptions from economic modeling and game theory.

The "Marx and justice" controversy of the later 1970s and early 1980s involved a wide range of Marx's texts, reflecting the increased availability and respectability of standard and collected texts of Marx and Engels. Marx praised Hegel for presenting basic human social institutions as historically varied, malleable, and developmental, but criticized Hegel for a teleology of progress and his view that human life and change were all ultimately a matter of ideas. Marx countered that the universal human subject was the proletarian or homo faber, "man the worker," who collectively would produce the most decisive change in human history.

Hegel's dialectic is difficult to summarize, but Marx found it stimulating and useful as a mode of critical thinking founded on assumptions of change and development. Marx's twentieth-century reception of him follows Engels' general outlines, which include materialism, idealism, and dialectic. However, Marx's work has been rejected by postmodernists within the continental tradition of philosophizing, who focus on historicizing the categories of consciousness through which human experience is intersubjectively constructed and producing language-centered accounts of meaning and communication.

The classic critique of both positions is that of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which counterpose Gramsci's flexible and contingent constructions of cultural power to alternative readings of Marx, including Gramsci's own. Marx's intellectual and political trajectory from 1842 was toward the social question of class power and oppression, and his historical works appear as investigative and exploratory, drawing out contradictions between events as he understood them and his own generalizing theories.

Marx's relationship to philosophy and any continental tradition is highly problematic at the outset, although there are affinites with other antiphilosophical philosophies, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Marx was disinclined to find certainties in the commonplace antiskeptical small change of ordinary life, as he argued that these are areas of mystification where political power accumulates in the hands of the hands. His writings that are taken to be of most philosophical interest were themselves produced as an antiphilosophy, yet they were written in the terms through which certain philosophies were articulated at the time.

 

Raymond Williams, 11 Traditions, Institutions, and Formations (Marxism ...

Hegemony is an active process that involves the organization and interconnection of various distinct practices, which it specifically incorporates into a significant culture and effective social order. This process of incorporation is of major cultural importance and can be understood through three aspects: traditions, institutions, and formations.

Tradition has been neglected in Marxist cultural thought, often seen as a secondary factor that does not modify other decisive historical processes. However, tradition is more than an inert historicized segment; it is an actively shaping force. Tradition is not just a tradition but a selective tradition, intentionally selective and connected to the present. It is a veil of the past intended to connect with and ratify the present, offering a sense of predisposed continuity.

There are weaker senses of tradition, such as innovation and the contemporary, which are often points of retreat for groups left stranded by hegemonic development. These are often the retrospective affirmation of traditional values or isolation of traditional habits by current hegemonic development. The overt argument about tradition is conducted between representatives of these two positions. However, at a deeper level, the hegemonic sense of tradition is always the most active, a deliberately selective and connecting process that offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order.

Tradition is a powerful process, tied to many practical continuity, such as families, places, institutions, and language. It is also vulnerable, as it may discard whole areas of significance or convert them into forms that support or do not contradict the important elements of the current hegemony. Much of the most accessible and influential forms of hegemony are historical, focusing on the recovery of abandoned areas.

The selective approach to selection and reductive ideologies can have a significant impact on the present and future of a culture. A selective tradition is both powerful and vulnerable, as it can dismiss those it does not want as outdated or irrelevant, and attack those it cannot incorporate as outdated or alien. This vulnerability is due to the fact that the real record is effectively recoverable, and many alternative or opposing practical continuities are difficult to verify.

The selective version of a living tradition is always tied to specific questions and limits, and its practices may be encouraged or discouraged by the dominant cultural activity. However, its selective privileges and interests, material in substance but also embedded in complex elements of style, tone, and basic method, can still be recognized, guided, and broken.

The effective establishment of a selective tradition can be said to depend on lentifiable institutions, but it is an underestimate of the process that depends on institutions alone. The relations between cultural, political, and economic institutions are complex, and the substance of these relations is a direct indication of the character of the culture in the wider sense.

Formal institutions have a profound influence on the active social process. Institutions such as churches are explicitly incorporative, exerting powerful and immediate pressures on the conditions of living and making a living. In modern societies, major communications systems materialize selected news, opinion, and a wide range of selected perceptions and attitudes.

However, it cannot be assumed that the sum of all these institutions is an organic hegemony. Instead, it is a specific and complex natural process that is a product of contradictory and resolve-d conflicts. This is why it must not be reduced to the acts of an individual.

The process of hegemony is a complex and multifaceted one, involving various institutions, formations, and cultural activities. These processes are specific but self-generating, with different purposes and relations with the short term. This results in confusion and conflict between different factions, as they must achieve a class society to maintain it. However, achieving hegemony requires recognizing the inevitable and necessary aspects of society.

An effective society is more than just its institutions, as these can derive much of its character from them. These formations are often articulative movements that cannot be fully identified with formal meanings or values, which can sometimes lie paradoxically contrary to their social roles. This is particularly important for intellectual and artistic life, which is specialized in this context.

The relationship between institutions and formations of a culture is generally characteristic of developed complex societies, where formations play an increasingly important role. These formations relate to real social structures and have highly variable and often oblique relations with formally discernible social institutions. Cultural analysis of these formations requires a careful examination of the complexity of cultural activity.

Some people in real contact with such formations and their work retreat to an indifferent emphasis on the complexity of cultural activity, while others deny the relation between these formations and social derivation or superstructural function. This displacement of formations and their work is not only temporary but also hegemonic, as it makes them less active in the immediate cultural process.

In conclusion, understanding the complex relationship between institutions, formations, and culture is crucial for understanding the dynamics of hegemony and the role of these formations in shaping society.

 

D. Dahlstrom, "Play and Irony: Schiller and Schlegel on the Liberating P...

Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel were influential in shaping aesthetics, literature, and criticism for centuries after Kant. Both writers believed that freedom defines what it means to be human and that literature is uniquely capable of embodying and expressing that freedom. They both believe that literature is transformative, personally, morally, and politically.

Schiller's conception of an aesthetic education centers around a holistic notion of play, while Schlegel views Romantic poetry as a fragmentary combination of wit and irony. Schiller asserts the liberating potential of art's capacity to express the ideal satisfaction of human striving, while Schlegel counters by asserting the equally liberating potential of art's capacity to disillusion or remind itself that any such expression reproduces the "endless play of the world."

Schiller's account of tragedy and its pleasure is framed by Lessing's interpretation of sympathy and Kant's analysis of dynamic sublimity. He distinguishes two sorts of sympathy in terms of what he takes to be the two competing sources of pleasure and pain: sensual and moral. He acknowledges that sympathy with another's suffering can be largely sensual, but to the degree that moral capacities get the upper hand in someone, they are more likely to be sensitive to the pleasure that, thanks to a connection with morality, combines with even the most painful state.

Schiller links sympathy directly to our capacity for empathy, our ability to put ourselves in someone else's situation, which requires in turn that we have already been in the same sort of situation. The pleasure of sympathy is the pleasure that derives from putting ourselves in a condition or situation in which someone like ourselves finds herself and doing so in such a way that we share in the action that is her moral response to that condition or situation.

Schiller also characterizes this moral struggle as something sublime, contrasting representations of what is stirring and sublime from representations of beauty. A sublime theme or object makes us feel the pain of our impotence (Ohnmacht) on the one hand and exult at the existence of a power in us superior (Übermacht) to nature on the other. In "On the Sublime," Schiller revises Kant's notion of the dynamic sublime into the "practically sublime," the moral neutralization of nature's physical power over us.

Schiller's account of tragedy emphasizes the importance of power and a clash of powers in portraying human phenomena that are contrary to or not determined by instinct. The tragedy has the job of presenting both suffering and resistance, or pathos and sublimity. The ethical propensity or "independence of spirit in a state of suffering" can take two forms: negative or positive, depending on whether a person's suffering has no effect on their moral disposition or issues from their moral character.

Schiller distinguishes between sublime composure and sublime action, which include both those who suffer for doing their duty and those who suffer for violating their duty. He believes that the purpose of theatrical art is pleasure and not moral improvement, and that aesthetic judgments have a more liberating potential than moral judgments. According to Kant, the sublime can determine the mind to think "the unattainability of nature as a presentation of ideas."

Schiller's account of a sublimity beyond good and evil further embellishes his explanation of the sympathy that the tragic stage calls for. We sympathize with the moral potency of scoundrels, sinners, heroes, and saints, as it is the capacity for a similar dutifulness that we share with them and the fact that we see our own capacity in him that explain why we feel our spiritual power elevated.

The art's capacity to "shape humans morally" is put great stock in the dramatic artist's attempts to please. The greatest pleasure is accorded by creating sublime characters with whom we can sympathize, protagonists caught up in a moral conflict, because this sort of sympathy confirms and even enhances a power within us as rational beings to transcend or overcome ourselves as creatures of instinct.

Schiller argues that humanity is diminished in the arts and taste, and that to solve the problem of politics, one must approach it through the aesthetic. He rejects Rousseau's historical argument for educating humanity aesthetically and proposes a transcendental path to a rational conception of beauty as a necessary condition of humanity. He believes that every human being has an enduring person and a transient condition, each dependent on the other and demanding its due.

Schiller's notion of formal drive's connection with universal laws is inspired by Kantian inspiration but takes cues from Fichte's conception of reciprocity to elaborate a notion of freedom that requires coordination of both drives. He constructs play as an experience where feelings and thought merge, stating that man only plays when he is fully a human being.

In this aesthetics of play, beauty cannot be adequately understood in strictly subjective or objective terms. Instead, it points to the subjective or imaginative dimension of the human spirit, which enjoys complete freedom relative to matter and form, passivity and activity, sensuousness and thought. This will is grounded in the "mixed nature" of human beings and is capable of being furthered or thwarted by natural means.

Schiller believes that the aesthetic condition is necessary for human beings to move beyond the dismal state of nature and the demands of animal self-love. Human beings are sensual and cannot be made rational until they have first been aesthetic. The transition to the aesthetic condition is the most challenging due to its emancipatory nature, which anticipates the moral condition.

Schiller introduces the concept of "the realm of aesthetic semblance" or the "aesthetic state" in the Letters, highlighting beauty's capacity to transform sexual desire into love and resolve competing desires in society. In an aesthetic state, individuals can confront each other as free and equal citizens, transforming into the third joyous kingdom of play and semblance.

In his final major work in aesthetics, Schiller contrasts the naturalness of naive poets with the more self-conscious and sentimental style typical of modern writers like Ariosto. He traces the difference between naive and sentimental poetry to antithetical modes of poetic consciousness, ancient or modern, and even between contrary traits within a single poet (e.g. Goethe). The central contrast lies in the fact that the sentimental poet alone calls attention to a particular sense of the difference between reality and his ideas and idealizations.

Schiller is less sanguine about the prospect of such a union than he is at the conclusion of Letters. Underlying the poetic difference between the naïve and sentimental is, he submits, a fundamental and debilitating psychological antagonism resolved only in "a few, rare individuals" – the difference between permitting nature (realists) or reason (idealists) to determine theory and practice. Yet even on these final pages, Schiller remains confident in poetry's paradigmatic capacity to reconcile basic oppositions.

In his early efforts to do for Greek poetry what Winckelmann had done for the plastic arts of antiquity, Schlegel used "interesting" as a metonym for "modern" and defined "interesting" as an unflattering and ultimately incongruous characteristic of the goal of modern poetry. For a certain stripe of modern aesthetes, Schlegel contends that it is more important for art to be interesting than for it to be beautiful, even if what makes it interesting is quite individualistic or subjective and permanently transient, not least for the individual who initially finds it interesting. In this sense, mixing genres and even mixing philosophy with poetry can make for interesting art.

Schlegel, a prominent figure in the early German Romanticism movement, is known for his fragment-style writings, such as his entries to Athenaeum. The journal, which became the main literary and philosophical organ of the "Romantic school," was the fruit of a circle of close friends including Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Caroline Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ludwig Tieck, Dorothea Veit, and Wilhelm Wackenroder. Schlegel's most famous gloss of Romantic poetry is "a progressive universal poetry." This universal character lies in its refusal to identify poetry with any particular genre or marks of a piece of writing that can be simply read off it. The sense of its "universality" extends even further, as it aims to unite separate genres and put poetry in contact with philosophy, making poetry alive and social, making life and society poetic, poeticizing wit, and filling and saturating the forms of art with matters of genuine cultural value.

The progressive character of Romantic poetry is tied to the fact that it is self-reflective. Self-reflection is a transcendental notion in the Kantian sense that it is the condition that enables every other consciousness (unreflected or not, self-styled as poetic or not). For Schlegel, Romantic poetry is not the antipode to philosophy; it is integral to philosophy's telos. He criticizes the transcendental philosophies of Kant and Fichte for being too linear and not sufficiently cyclical.

In his extensive work on fine art, dramatic arts, and literature, Schlegel played a significant role in spreading the basic ideas of Romanticism across Europe. His understanding of Romantic poetry incorporates various senses of transcendentality, such as the relation between the ideal and real, and the potential for reflection on that reflection or "progressive" self-reflection. Romantic poetry can hover on the wings of poetic reflection, free of all real and ideal self-interest, raising that reflection again and again to a higher power.

Schiller and Schlegel share many similarities in their aesthetics, placing philosophical speculation at the center of criticism and literature, drawing critically on the transcendental philosophies of Kant and Fichte. They both extol the distinctiveness of modern poetry and appreciate the moral and political import of art and literature.

 

D Abram, "The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-t...

David Abram begins "The Spell of the Sensuous" with an account of his experiences as a slight-of-hand magician in Bali. During his time there, he discovered a profound similarity between himself and the indigenous shaman/sorcerers: a shared ability to alter consciousness and perception at will. In Bali, this ability is employed to shift out of the common state of consciousness to connect with other forms of sensitivity and awareness entwined with human existence. Abram learned to open his body and mind to the deliberate communicative signals from the other-than-human world, which is alive with meaningful messages conveyed through cries, calls, songs, coloration, posture, and gesture. The shaman's communication with spirits is actually an engagement with the myriad other-than-human consciousnesses present in the actual world, as opposed to an imaginary transcendent realm.

 

Upon returning to the United States, Abram noticed that his heightened awareness of these communicative signals grew dimmer. He attributed this decline to the transition from an oral culture in Bali to a literate one in the United States. In an oral culture, the richness of direct, sensory experience is paramount, while in a literate culture, written language and abstract thinking take precedence, dulling the immediacy of sensory perception and connection with the natural world.

 

Abram then transitions to a discussion of phenomenology, a branch of twentieth-century academic philosophy that is central to his project. Phenomenology emphasizes the primacy of immediate experience over unexperienced theoretical entities such as molecules and atoms proposed by Greco-modern science. It highlights the intersubjectivity and reciprocity of perception, challenging the solipsistic and passive views of Cartesian consciousness. Phenomenology also underscores the embodied nature of consciousness, acknowledging our animality rather than viewing consciousness as disembodied.

 

Language, from a phenomenological perspective, is a whole-bodied activity rather than a mere relationship between a sign and its signified, as analytic philosophers suggest. It is a holistic, systematic phenomenon where words derive meaning within the context of the entire language system, as demonstrated by Ferdinand de Saussure. With this enriched understanding of language, we can begin to perceive that the world in which we are embedded is constantly communicating with us. This world speaks to us and through us continuously, but we have lost the ability to listen. The primary reason for this loss is our literacy.

 

Abram argues that learning to read and write has distanced us from the direct, sensory engagement with the world that oral cultures maintain. In literate cultures, the focus shifts to abstract, theoretical knowledge, and the immediacy of sensory experience diminishes. This shift has profound implications for our connection with the natural world and the other-than-human forms of consciousness that inhabit it. To regain this connection, Abram suggests that we need to cultivate a phenomenological appreciation of language and perception, recognizing the world as an active participant in a continuous dialogue with us. By doing so, we can restore our capacity to listen to the myriad voices of the natural world and reestablish a deeper, more meaningful relationship with the environment.

After a digression into phenomenology, he returns to storytelling and the history of literacy. Literacy, he notes, has constrained communication to the human voice emanating from printed pages. We now hear voices and see visions through books—stacks of paper adorned with small, intricately inscribed black squiggles—allowing us to journey through space and time as we read. For instance, reading Thucydides's The History of the Peloponnesian War becomes a magical, shamanic journey we can undertake at will. However, this "spellbinding logomancy" comes at a cost: we abandon our bodies to live in our heads, engaging exclusively with human interlocutors. This fosters anthropocentrism and creates dichotomies such as subject/object, mind/body, and nature/culture, a hallmark of Greco-modern Western thought. Moreover, literacy enables abstract thought by separating the meaning (form) of a word from its audible and visible embodiments (matter).

 

Abram traces the evolution of literacy, culminating in the Greek alphabet. Paleolithic humans read natural signs, while Neolithic ancestors used pictographs, hieroglyphs, and ideograms. Reading pre-alphabetic scripts, like Hebrew—which lacks vowel representation—requires active interpretation, thus engaging with the world to co-create meaning. The breath that produces vowel sounds animates the text, reflecting an ancient belief where breath (air) is synonymous with soul, a notion echoed in early Greek philosophy and the etymology of the word "spirit."

 

As the Hebrew script evolved into the Greek alphabet, letters became so stylized they lost their pictorial meanings, becoming mere vehicles for inscribed human speech. Abram also explores alternatives to literate consciousness found in largely oral cultures, such as those of North American Indians and Australian Aborigines, where the land itself communicates. However, he argues that while we cannot appropriate these cultures, we need to address how to "break the spell of spelling."

 

Abram suggests that historiography and phenomenological self-discipline might break this spell, but these solutions seem limited in reach. He overlooks a significant contemporary development: the transformation of communication through television and the internet. This new electronic mode of communication is supplanting literacy, yet it does not signal a return to orality. The pertinent questions concern the state of the emerging electronic human mind: Will it further alienate us from the more-than-human world or help restore our relationship with it?

 

 

 

 

Felicity A Nussbaum, "The Autobiographical Subject" (Book Note)

In "The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England," Felicity A. Nussbaum offers a theoretically rich and nuanced study of the emergence of the bourgeois subject and the concurrent rise of autobiographical writing, such as journals and diaries, in the eighteenth century. Grounded in a materialist feminist framework, Nussbaum integrates the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, yet her own revisionist feminist perspective remains at the forefront. She highlights the central role of gender in the consolidation of the bourgeois subject, a theme she addresses consistently throughout her work.

 

Nussbaum's fascination with eighteenth-century autobiographical writing stems from its unique historical context. As she notes, autobiography was first conceptualized as a genre in the late eighteenth century, a period that also saw the emergence of women’s public writing. This convergence of new forms of self-writing, women’s entry into public discourse, and the development of bourgeois subjectivity provides a rich field for exploration.

 

The book begins by tracing the history of the term "autobiography," critiquing how scholars have traditionally conceptualized the autobiographical subject. Nussbaum argues that these conceptualizations often impose metaphysical notions of selfhood that obscure the social and contractual bonds shaping individuals. She proposes an alternative approach, viewing autobiographical writing as an ideological construct intertwined with economic and political practices. This perspective allows her to move beyond a poetics of autobiography, which focuses on structural models and narratives of an essential self, to a politics of autobiography that considers how these texts engage with and reflect broader ideological conflicts.

 

Nussbaum grounds subjectivity in historical specificity, exploring the various discourses on "character" and "identity" in eighteenth-century life. She examines how these terms acquired contradictory meanings and how autobiographical texts serve as sites where individuals experiment with different discourses and subject positions. This experimentation reflects the broader societal struggles with identity, as individuals both contest and consolidate class and gender identifications within the emerging bourgeois order.

 

The book is divided into two sections. The first section offers readings of men’s texts, including those of John Bunyan, John Wesley, and James Boswell. Nussbaum’s analysis of Bunyan's "Grace Abounding" reveals the contradictions inherent in the dissenting subject's relationship to conversion. Bunyan's narrative oscillates between Christian self-denial and vigilant self-scrutiny, reflecting the tension between paradigmatic conversion and the ongoing vigilance required to maintain it. Nussbaum links these tensions to the historical conditions of emergent capitalism, which demanded self-inspecting private individuals for the burgeoning bourgeoisie. Thus, Bunyan's text depicts a subject bound to the control of state and church while simultaneously promoting individual salvation and freedom of choice.

 

In her analysis of Wesley and Boswell, Nussbaum continues to explore how eighteenth-century autobiographical texts navigate the complexities of self-construction within the context of emerging bourgeois ideologies. Wesley's journals, for instance, reflect the interplay between personal piety and public religious movements, illustrating the ways in which individual religious experiences are shaped by broader social and ideological forces. Similarly, Boswell’s extensive diaries offer a window into the evolving notions of masculinity, personal identity, and social status, revealing how these texts negotiate the tensions between private desires and public expectations.

 

The second section of the book shifts focus to women's autobiographical texts, though Nussbaum often traverses multiple texts rather than concentrating on specific works. She examines how women’s writing negotiates the public and private spheres, challenging traditional gender roles and expanding the boundaries of autobiographical expression. Women's entry into public writing is seen as a significant development, reflecting and contributing to the broader changes in gender dynamics and bourgeois subjectivity.

 

Nussbaum's analysis highlights how women’s autobiographical texts both reflect and subvert the ideological constructs of their time. She explores how these texts engage with various discourses on femininity, identity, and agency, often revealing the contradictions and tensions inherent in these constructs. By doing so, women writers both contest and consolidate the emerging bourgeois subject, navigating the complexities of their historical and social contexts.

 

Throughout her study, Nussbaum emphasizes the importance of considering how texts were produced, circulated, and read, as well as how selves were constructed within and by these texts. She argues that understanding the material conditions of textual production and reception is crucial for comprehending the ideological work these texts perform. By situating autobiographical writing within its broader economic, political, and social contexts, Nussbaum offers a comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of the genre and its role in the formation of bourgeois subjectivity.

Nussbaum provides a sophisticated exploration of the rise of autobiographical writing in the eighteenth century and its relationship to the formation of bourgeois subjectivity. Her analysis, grounded in materialist feminist theory, particularly emphasizes the role of gender in this process. Nussbaum's work engages with the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser but maintains a distinct focus on the intersections of gender, class, and ideology.

 

In the chapter "Methodized Subjects," Nussbaum examines the kind of subject that emerges through the serial journal-writing advocated by John Wesley. Wesley's journals encouraged continuous self-regulation among his followers, transforming journal writing into a productive space for self-scrutiny. This practice was particularly significant for Wesley’s followers, who were predominantly from the laboring classes undergoing significant social upheaval. Journals provided these individuals with a means to document their experiences and engage in the practices of self-regulation and accumulation of textual capital necessary for upward social mobility, effectively transforming them into bourgeois subjects.

 

Nussbaum argues that Wesley’s writings played a crucial role in empowering an upwardly mobile self among the previously marginal, illiterate, and disenfranchised. By fostering a consistent public character, these writings helped shape an identity rooted in the accumulation of lived experience and self-possession, aligning with the needs of emergent capitalism.

 

In her analysis of James Boswell's journals, Nussbaum identifies pervasive contradictions that cannot be reconciled through any single explanatory model. Boswell’s writings reveal a tension between his public and private selves, differentiated as the "retenu" (constrained) and the "etourdi" (uncontrolled) selves. This tension underscores the exclusions necessary to construct a consistent public character, particularly along lines of gender, class, and race. Boswell's public persona is inherently male, middle-class, and white, highlighting the normative boundaries of eighteenth-century bourgeois identity.

 

Nussbaum concludes her discussion of male texts with an examination of Boswell’s "Life of Johnson." She interprets this work as a contestation of the encroachment of feminine authority on eighteenth-century life. Boswell's portrayal of Johnson’s authoritative male character serves to reclaim literary character and its artful representation for men, positioning men as the primary authors and arbiters of the private biographical subject.

 

The second section of the book shifts to women's autobiographical writing, where Nussbaum critiques ahistorical theories and explores the specific ideologies of gender at play in the eighteenth century. She examines how competing ideologies pull female subjects into particular subject positions or draw them away from those positions.

 

Nussbaum first considers spiritual autobiographies, noting how forms such as the diary both liberate and constrain the female voice. While these autobiographies release women from silence and enable subversion of patriarchal authority, they also contain women within prevailing generic models. Nussbaum is particularly interested in how new ideologies of salvation and conversion empower women to speak and act independently, challenging traditional gender roles.

 

In her analysis of "scandalous memoirs," Nussbaum investigates what constitutes scandal. While public confessions of sexual experiences are part of the scandal, the real transgression lies in the power of producing an economically independent female public character that deviates from societal norms. However, these memoirs also complicate the formation of the bourgeois subject. By writing themselves into a form of heteroclite individualism, these women regard themselves as anomalies, thus isolating themselves from collective concerns. This individuality, while encouraging public speech, simultaneously contains the power of transgression by framing individual difficulties as private failings rather than systemic issues that restrict female opportunities and require female virtue for social privilege.

 

Nussbaum concludes the book with a discussion of Hester Thrale’s autobiographical writings. Thrale's texts, neither sacred nor scandalous, are situated within multiple discourses of the century, including medicine, female traditions, and famous men's aphorisms. Nussbaum positions Thrale as embodying the managing woman of the middle class, whose rank is determined by capital rather than birth. Thrale navigates these discourses, pushing against their confinements while simultaneously inhabiting them. By juxtaposing the minutiae of female life against the broader public sphere, Thrale challenges conventional hierarchies and cultural inscriptions.

 

Throughout her work, Nussbaum rejects the language and theory of essential sexual difference and transhistorical, universalized autobiographical subjects. Instead, she focuses on subjects of history, culture, and ideology. Her analysis emphasizes that while individuals are shaped by ideological forces, they are also agents of their own resistances, even if inconsistent. This agency reveals gaps in the otherwise secure anchorage of ideologies, highlighting the dynamic interplay between individual subjectivity and broader social structures.

 

Nussbaum’s study offers a compelling exploration of the ways in which eighteenth-century autobiographical writing contributes to the formation of bourgeois subjectivity. By situating these texts within their historical and ideological contexts, she provides valuable insights into the complex processes through which individuals navigate and negotiate their identities, making significant contributions to the study of autobiography and the intersections of gender, class, and ideology.