Coincidence Of Opposites Research Articles

Стиль как способ философствования И. Г. Гамана в «Сократических достопамятностях

Article deals with the problem of interpretation of “Socratic memorabilia”, the first public work of J. G. Hamann. In this work the style itself serves as a method or means of doing philosophy. Using hermeneutical approach and intertextual analysis, the following features implemented in Hamann’s style are laid out: holistic character, analogy, irony, typology, metaschematism, hiddenness, coincidence of opposites. This research results in reconstruction of the 4 levels of narrative including three-fold typology presented as a chart. Hamann describes historical Socrates whom he views as a type of Christ, on the one hand, and of himself, on the other, for the purpose of providing apologetic of his own position for the addressees I. K. Berens and I. Kant. In addition, there is given translation of Hamann’s letter where he provides an outline of his work and gives some explanation as to its purpose.

The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

The Coincidence of Opposites in John Henry Newman According to Erich Przywara, S. J.

ABSTRACT: For Erich Przywara S. J. (1889-1972), Newman stands in a line of philosophers that deal with the "coincidence of opposites," stretching back to Heraclitus. But how are coinciding opposites to be understood in the context of the Christian life? Are they not in fact contradictions which compel a choosing of one opposite to the exclusion of the other? Although Newman's relationship to Augustine in particular is key to Przywara's analysis, it is to Newman's specific contributions that Przywara turns in order to answer these questions. Przywara finds in Newman a sophisticated deployment of analogy, manifest in his sensitivity to the concrete coinciding opposites of the Christian life. Tracing the particular themes which display these coincidences of opposites from across Newman's homilies, letters, poetry, and fiction, this article contextualises Przywara's engagement with Newman, and shows how these different literary genres underscore Przywara's conclusion that Newman simultaneously stands in both the Augustinian and Thomistic traditions whilst yielding new and innovative explorations of the Christian life.

The Trinitarian Theologies of Bonaventure and Balthasar and the Ontological Objection to the Ordination of Women

The article aims to show that the ontological objection to women’s ordination fails to convince when examined in light of the trinitarian theologies of Bonaventure and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The former argued for the Incarnate Son of God as the coincidence of opposites of the Father and the Holy Spirit, and of Creator and creature; the latter expressed the difference between the immanent and economic Trinity by means of ‘trinitarian inversion,’ where the roles of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the immanent Trinity are reversed in the economic Trinity. Trinitarian inversion becomes central to the full configuration of men and women to Christ the High Priest. Restricting the ministerial priesthood to men is theologically unsound. Since both women and men, who have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ (the ‘coincidence of opposites’), both are the face of Christ to and for the world.

Religious and Philosophical Concept of Semyon Frank in the Context of Western Christian Theology

The article examines the theological concepts of Semyon Frank that derive from the system of Nicholas of Cusa’s Neoplatonism. The ideas of Frank are problematic in origin, as they are attributed to different religious traditions. The paper disputes the compliance of the Frank’s Cusa-like Neoplatonism with the provisions of Catholic theology. The methodological foundation underlying the research is based on method of content reconstruction and historical and comparative method. With the view to scrutinizing the ideas of theologians, the content of Frank’s concept was reconstructed. It presents God as a spiritual Absolute and focuses on the problem of the balance stroked between God and the world, human beings and society as a whole. The leading methodological idea applied by Frank is the principle of antinomic monodualism as the coincidence of opposites in the formula unity of two or duality is one. Theological steps of argumentation in favour of the religious philosopher’s keeping aside of the Catholic path are as follows. Firstly, the critical attitude the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa takes when facing the Catholic philosophy of those times serves as the evidence base and the obstacle for Frank to become a close ally of the Catholic thought. Secondly, the article notes the criticism Semyon Frank has of the Augustinian proposition about the insignificance of human being before God, which is foundational for Catholicism. Third, the article substantiates the compatibility of Frank’s ideas with the Orthodox ideal of sobriety and the system of external change of human being as the foundation of the system of Orthodox education and selfimprovement, thus obscuring the thoughts of his ties with Roman Latinism. Another research line treats the common features philosopher has with the third Christian confession. When comparing Frank with the Protestant theology, parallels occur (i.e. the Frank–Niebuhr Christian realism), but they are insufficient to claim the Protestant turn of Semyon Frank. As a result, it is concluded that Frank’s religious and philosophical conception is a theology of philosophical theism developed by a bearer of the Orthodox faith, not Catholicism. In relation to Orthodox theology, it is a soft, non-radical version of Orthodox modernism, in which solutions of problems that were contemporary to Frank are combined with maximum possible preservation of the provisions of the Orthodox theology.

Beauty and Ugliness in Italian Renaissance Art: Antithesis, Paradox, Oxymoron and Coincidence of Opposites

This paper analyses the way Italian paintings and artistic theory from the late Renaissance conceptualised ugliness, and gradually drew it closer to beauty. The first part of this article focuses on the traditional notion of ugliness as the mere opposite of beauty, in other words, ugliness as an expression of formal disharmony. The second part deals with the evolution from this conceptual antithesis to the paradoxical entwinement of these two notions, which led some authors to endow ugliness with qualities which had hitherto been applied to beauty. We consider several forms of ‘beautiful ugliness’: those of the “cruel and horrible” (Gabriele Paleotti) sacred paintings whose beauty resides in their faithful rendering of the Scriptures, or, in other words, in their truthfulness; those of the Silenus-like characters whose kindness pierces through revolting physical traits; those of the artistic ‘capricci’ who, under their apparent deformity, hide the ingenuity of their creator; and those who take up the Aristotelian paradox, according to which the correct imitation of ugliness arouses a feeling of pleasure among the spectator. In the Baroque aesthetic (third part), the ‘beautiful ugliness’ is an oxymoronic creation in which the horrifying content of the mimesis is consciously used in order to highlight, by contrast, the transformative power of the artist. The conceptualisation of caricature in the 17th century, which we mention in the fourth part of this work, suggests that beauty and ugliness, at least in their ideal forms, are in fact the two sides of a same coin.

Antaios: a mythical and symbolic Hermeneutics

The aim of my research is to define the Religious Hermeneutics that can be identified as the specific core of Antaios (1959-1971), the German journal directed by the historian of religions Mircea Eliade and the writer and philosopher Ernst Jünger. We’ll focus on the philosophical-religious interpretation of Antaios contents: the so called “mythical-symbolic hermeneutics” is probably the most interesting theoretical theme connected to the Weltanschauung of Antaios. This cultural journal could embodies a counter-philosophical perspective that is at the same time intrinsic to Western speculation. This position has been repeatedly emerged in many phases of our cultural history. I am referring to a mythical-symbolic thought, characterized by an analogical interpretation of the world, whose structure is considered as a stratification of truth levels, that are complementary ontological levels of reality. This tradition sees reality as a specific kind of totality that allows human perception to take place through the structures of myth and symbols. The theoretical unity of the project is rooted in the mythical-symbolic tradition that, starting from the religious and esoteric pre-philosophical meditations, crosses the Platonic thought, the various neoplatonisms, passes through medieval mysticism and alchemy, reappears in Romanticism and is revealed in the twentieth century by the reflections of the “thinkers of Tradition”. With this paper I would like to communicate the main topics that from this Hermeneutics can be identified: speculations about symbol, myth, coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites), archetypes, ontological pluralism are at the core of this paradigm.

Dialectical logic for mythical and mystical superstructural systems (ii)

Purpose The distinction between essence and existence cannot be a distinction in God: in the actual infinite, essence and existence coincide and are one. In it, maximum and minimum coincide. Coincidentia oppositorum is a Latin phrase meaning coincidence of opposites. It is a neo-Platonic term, attributed to the fifteenth-century German scholar Nicholas of Cusa in his essay, Docta Ignorantia. God (coincidentia oppositorum) is the synthesis of opposites in a unique and absolutely infinite being. God transcends all distinctions and oppositions that are found in creatures. The purpose of this paper is to study Cusanus’s thought in respect to infinity (actual and potential), Spinoza’s relationship with Cusanus, and present a mathematical theory of coincidentia oppositorum based on complex numbers. Design/methodology/approach Mathematical development of a dialectical logic is carried out with truth values in a complex field. Findings The conclusion is the same as has been made by thinkers and mystics throughout time: the inability to know and understand the idea of God. Originality/value The history of the Infinite thus reveals in both mathematics and philosophy a development of increasingly subtle thought in the form of a dialectical dance around the ineffable and incomprehensible Infinite. First, the authors step toward it, reaching with their intuition beyond the limits of rationality and thought into the realm of the paradoxical. Then, they step back, struggling to express their insight within the limited scope of reason. But the Absolute Infinite remains, at the border of comprehensibility, inviting them with its paradoxes, to once again step forward and transcend the apparent division between finite and Infinite.

Oswald Mathias Ungers: dialectical principles of design

An important contributor to the post-war debate on architecture’s relationship to the city was the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers (1926–2007). Starting in the early 1960s, he became increasingly interested in questions of typological organisation and morphological transformation, positing their relationship in dialectical principles. This article traces some of the shifts in Ungers’s understanding of architecture through a utilisation of typology as a design theme, the morphological transformation of architectural form and the coincidence of opposites in urban building complexes. It does this by reviewing a selection of closely linked pieces of design research (lectures, writings and large-scale housing projects) from the 1960s to 1980s.The paper also examines how Ungers’s interest in rational design as a problem of serial formal and social transformations led him to new understandings of architectural and urban design. The concepts of typology and morphology hereby played a central role in reclaiming architecture as a formal and intellectual, but also a social and imaginative project, through which the city could be reasoned, always, however, through the problems arising from architectural form itself.

The Romantic Quest for Identity: Re-reading the First Part of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

This paper proposes a re-reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetic masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in an attempt to deepen the critical discussion about one of the major themes explored in the poem, that is the search for identity. In particular, this attempt will consist of a close reading of the first section of the ballad, inasmuch as it contains the fundamental pattern of the whole text. The conceptual framework underlying this analysis is based on Coleridge’s key principle of “the coincidence of opposites”, which the Author develops in his critical work Biographia Literaria. Indeed, the whole of Coleridge’s oeuvre is permeated by the idea of a dialectical tension between contrary forces, which struggle against each other so as to be joined, at last, in the dynamic unity of a superior harmony. In the light of this conception, the Romantic quest for identity takes the form of a struggle between two opposing forces: the impact of otherness with its confounding effects on the one side, and the irrepressible aspiration towards a unified self on the other. Such a conflicting dynamics appears to structure the entire ballad, starting from the incipit of the poem and involving all the characters – especially the two opposite figures of the ancient Mariner and the Wedding Guest.

Schleiermacher’s Perspective on Redemption

This article analyzes the philosophical background of Schleiermacher’s doctrine of redemption. The two philosophical strands of dialectic Neoplatonism and Romanticism form the basis of Schleiermacher’s soteriology, in which Christ’s redemption is seen not just as an act to liberate from sin, but the fulfillment of the coincidentia oppositorum (the coincidence of opposites) between the finite (individual) and the Infinite (the whole) within the dynamic dialectical interrelationship between them. By participating in Christ’s perfect God-consciousness through receptivity to “absolute dependence,” the individual experiences redemption. In its philosophical context, Schleiermacher’s soteriology may be labeled as Christ-Centered Dialectic-Neoplatonic-Romantic-Soteriology.

The Interreligious Dialogue in De docta ignorantia of Nicholas of Cusa

This article explains the method followed by Nicolaus Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa, 1401–1464) to develop the theme of difference in relation to identity, and the way in which, following this perspective, Cusanus first comes to formulate a discourse of interreligious dialogue. We can interpret the theory on conjecturality expounded by Cusanus in De docta ignorantia as a system of thought that proves essential to understand the irenic model of De pace fidei, because it is in virtue of this metaphysical assumption that he affirms that absolute truth cannot be reached and infinity is incomprehensible to all. By developing the theme of concordantia differentiarum (concordance of differences), Cusanus elaborates in De docta ignorantia the theme of the coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites). In exploring this connection, I shall consider his work for the purpose of underlining the relevance of the themes of identity and difference to the focus on interreligious dialogue.

현대 건축에서 나타난 현상적 공간에 관한 연구 - 스위스건축가 작품을 중심으로 -

The purpose of this study clarifies an expression characteristic of the phenomenal space. The architecture is an interface between human and nature. Nature presents herself as phenomena. Thus, the phenomenal space should be approached as the essence of architecture that is to accommodate nature. Phenomenon is related to everyday life and shares flow naturally within it. The phenomenon and everyday life form a relationship through the mediating elements that are time, place, and image. If these mediating elements are developed as spatialized elements, time becomes the converse, place becomes the overlap, and shape becomes the revealing. Also, spatial components that are substituted with these elements are void/solid, form, and materials. The relational characteristics of phenomenal space can be identified through these, and such characteristics are one-ness, continuity, and coincidence of opposites. Phenomenal space is expressed with spatial tones and accepted as spatial atmospheres. For the analysis, 15 works of swiss architects were selected to which spatial elements were applied. And It were composed that analysis by arranging these components as the relational network found that expression characteristics. Trough the analysis, It was found that expression characteristics of phenomenal space of the architecture of Swiss architects were prototypicality, primitiveness, and originality. As a results, It is considered that the role of the space that contains the value of everyday life, the value of the phenomenon is necessary.

Coincidentia Oppositorum to Ai

In 1919, Nishida Kitarō delivered a speech at Ōtani University discussing the relationship between Nicolaus of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum (the coincidence of opposites) and love. The address, given within weeks of a disabling injury suffered by Nishida’s wife, Kotomi, gives evidence of how severe personal crisis would come to influence his philosophical work, and highlights several themes that would dominate the writings of the last twenty-five years of his life.

The Chimera in the Garden: Mystical Discourse, Paradox, and the Coincidence of Opposites in Meister Eckhart and Michel de Certeau

The Chimera in the Garden: Mystical Discourse, Paradox, and the Coincidence of Opposites in Meister Eckhart and Michel de Certeau Charlotte C. Radler (bio) When I was a young child, my father made the questionable parental decision of hanging a print of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights above my bed. My sister and I would spend hours in wonderment, intently studying the profuse landscape of the triptych. Grafted into my memory are the images of the chimeras: the bird with a human-like body that consumes a human being; the human face with a cracked egg-like body and with trunk-like legs that rest in boats on a frozen lake where creatures are drowning; the half bird-half lion whirling in the parade of animals and human beings; the human being with a blueberry for a head who leans in towards his lover, to mention but a few. These chimeras in Bosch’s painting and Michel de Certeau’s analysis of it in his 1982 The Mystic Fable offer me an entrée into a discussion of de Certeau and the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart in terms of their shared understanding of mystical language, paradox, and the coincidence of opposites. In these brief reflections, I want to suggest that both thinkers engage in a complicated and frequently opaque apophatic process of what mystic Henry Suso calls driving out images with images, thus moving into a “beyond” afforded by the slippage between experience and image.1 Following a dialectical cadence that embraces otherness and sameness, the process moves beyond into what de Certeau refers to as the “delicious nowhere” of the Garden or into what, for Eckhart, is the blooming desert of the One, only to spring forth evermore into the motion between alterity and sameness and beyond.2 The chimeras in Bosch’s garden become, in a way, apt metaphors for this pulsating, dialectical procedure. An astonishing union of disparate parts, they gesture beyond themselves. In their heterogeneity, they constantly displace ossified meanings and orders, evoke a change of perspectives, and render reality nomadic. In the twenty-six years since de Certeau’s death, many different theories and trends have shaped interpretations of mystical and spiritual discourse and practices. Some postmodern thinkers, for example, have problematized metaphysics and meta-narrative discourse and attended to alterity, but they have sometimes embraced esotericism at the expense of robust communal spiritual [End Page 180] experiences. Other interpreters, perhaps influenced by analytic theology and philosophy, have tended to domesticate mystical discourse and the range of meanings within the spiritual imagination. How can mystical discourse, tethered to spiritual practices, express divine presence without subjugating it? This is one of the questions that preoccupied de Certeau throughout his work. And his distinctive approach to the question of apophatic experience retains considerable value for us today. In this essay, I want to consider how the kind of apophatic discursive procedures advocated by de Certeau can help scholars of spirituality and mysticism to address the complexities of engaging apophatic experience. I believe that de Certeau’s work—in its insistent attention to the need to continuously deconstruct and reconstruct discourse about the Divine—can be particularly useful in helping us circumvent the double perils of nihilism (sheer meaninglessness and the absence of transcendence) and reductionism (the flattening and domestication of transcendence and the fashioning of idols). De Certeau was himself aware of the important contributions that had been made to the conversation about these questions by earlier figures in the Christian spiritual tradition. But was it possible or meaningful to retrieve and extend such apophatic discourse in the postmodern world? De Certeau’s responses to this question were remarkably varied and creative and point the way toward how we might engage in a critical reappropriation of apophatic discourse in our own cultural moment. In what follows, I want to offer a modest contribution to this creative work by considering the remarkable correspondence between the approach to these questions undertaken by de Certeau and Meister Eckhart (whose influence on de Certeau’s thinking was profound). By placing Eckhart and de Certeau in each other’s company, their mystical, apophatic discourses—paradoxical and chimeric—open up...

The Exception: Force of Argument in Terry Eagleton's William Shakespeare

An English text of Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba makes it vital to question the turn from French theory to Germany philosophy in Shakespeare studies, given a Left flirtation with Schmitt's Political Theology begun by Walter Benjamin. The Marxist critic's fascination with fascism was decried by Terry Eagleton as a theoretical error. So it is ironic that Eagleton's William Shakespeare was driven by the same Schmittian idea that “sovereign is he who decides the exception” in language or law. Eagleton backtracked on its cult of violence after 9/11. But 25 years on, his introduction to the plays shows the danger of using Shakespeare to decide necessary violence, not least in its own exceptional force of argument. This article thus considers Eagleton's book to be an early example of the coincidence of opposites that currently attracts Shakespeareans to dubious existentialist notions of decision and risk.

THE TEETH OF TIME: PIERRE HADOT ON MEANING AND MISUNDERSTANDING IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS1

ABSTRACTThe French philosopher and intellectual historian Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) is known primarily for his conception of philosophy as spiritual exercise, which was an essential reference for the later Foucault. An aspect of his work that has received less attention is a set of methodological reflections on intellectual history and on the relationship between philosophy and history. Hadot was trained initially as a philosopher and was interested in existentialism as well as in the convergence between philosophy and poetry. Yet he chose to become a historian of philosophy and produced extensive philological work on neo‐Platonism and ancient philosophy in general. He found a philosophical rationale for this shift in his encounter with Wittgenstein's philosophy in the mid‐1950s (Hadot was one of Wittgenstein's earliest French readers and interpreters). For Hadot, ancient philosophy must be understood as a series of language games, and each language game must be situated within the concrete conditions in which it happened. The reference to Wittgenstein therefore supports a strongly contextualist and historicist stance. It also supports its exact opposite: presentist appropriations of ancient texts are entirely legitimate, and they are the only way ancient philosophy can be existentially meaningful to us. Hadot addresses the contradiction by embracing it fully and claiming that his own practice aims at a coincidence of opposites (a concept borrowed from the Heraclitean tradition). For Hadot the fullest and truest way of doing philosophy is to be a philosopher and a historian at the same time.

Coincidence of Opposites: Bruno, Calderón, and a Drama of Ideas

Coincidence of Opposites: Bruno, Calderón, and a Drama of Ideas

Religious Pluralism and the Coincidence of Opposites

The author discusses a theology of religious pluralism in light of the Trinity-Christ relationship. As the Trinity is the paradigm for interpreting religious diversity from a Christian perspective, so the significance of Christ as mediating center of a relational God is explored. Bonaventure's coincidence of opposites helps break open the Christ mystery as one that engages plurality and difference. Based on this paradigm Christian life is to be lived as a center of unity and from a new depth of love.

In Memoriam: Ewert Cousins 1927–2009

Ewert H. Cousins, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus at Fordham University, and internationally renowned theologian, died in his home on Saturday, May 30, at age 82 after enduring 2 years of difficult health challenges. Dr. Cousins served as the Director of Fordham' s Spirituality Program. As the chief editorial consultant for the innovative 107 volume Paulist Press series, The Classics of Western Spirituality, he forged new ground in inspiring interreligious dialogue. This seminal opus brought together the best scholarship in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions and created the impetus for numerous worldwide interreligious conferences, bringing members of different faiths together in dialogue. Dr. Cousins was the General Editor of the 25-volume series, World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest (Crossroads). He authored the provocative and prophetic text, Christ of the 21st Century and Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites. His other publications include Process theology: Basic Writings, Bonaventure: The Soul's Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of Saint Francis; Global Spirituality Toward the Meeting of Mystical Paths, and Hope and the Future of Man. Cousins had a profound ability to integrate the wisdom of religion, spirituality, theology, philosophy, depth psychology, and literature. His vast and synthetic mind could easily encompass the nature of the psyche, according to Carl Jung, a psychological perspective that he found most harmonious in relation to some of the most critical and reflective insights of religion and theology. The Journal of Religion and Health: Psychology, Spirituality, and Medicine was most honored to have him serve on our Editorial Advisory Board for nearly 10 years. Cousins was born and raised in New Orleans, joined the Society of Jesus at age 1 8, and entered seminary studies at Grand Coteau, LA. In his early Jesuit years, he worked on the Rosebud Reservation where he found himself deeply drawn to the vibrancy and depth of Native American spirituality. This experience ignited a yearning to explore the religious experience of a diversity of cultural traditions, including a 1-year study of Islam at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Bethlehem, Palestine, and many trips to India to study