Concept Of Enlightenment Research Articles

Modernity through the Eyes of Witchcraft: A Radical Critique of Categorisation

The Enlightenment has come to dominate global discourse. In so many ways it has disseminated, often through imperial/colonial actions, a knowledge system which has prioritised objectivity and rationality and excluded as superfluous or vacuous entire cultures of knowing and perceiving. That most important of Enlightenment concepts, progress, is, itself, built on replacing indigenous knowledge systems with sound scientific thinking – of transforming from traditional to modern. However, this progress has stuttered. Modernity has not replaced all tradition, and traditional ways of knowing and perceiving and the place of humans in it continue to be the basis of human experience. Many core Enlightenment tenets have faced stern opposition both, within Western society, by a plethora of anti-foundationalist philosophers, and, beyond Western society, by, for example, the East Asian contributors to the Asian values debate. The universality of rights, the objectivity of science and the merits of modern technology have all faced intense academic and popular scrutiny. However, there are examples of cultural opposition to such tenets which have been often overlooked and which, if given suitable attention, would enable us to explain and understand the distinctive ways in which Enlightenment has the potential to injure human beings. In this essay, I shall seek to illustrate the rich way in which a particular cultural tradition can articulate key deficits in the Enlightenment project. The tradition to which I refer is witchcraft in Africa. While my focus in this essay lies in the African incarnation, belief in witchcraft, as a power which operates within an occult or spiritual dimension on reality, is not limited to the continent. It exists, or has existed, in most parts of the world (Moore and Sanders 2001: 11). In its African form, it has developed a series of important responses to modernity which, as I shall argue, highlight some core internal contradictions within Enlightenment. I come to dissect and explain the ways in which witchcraft highlights these contradictions in the following manner. First, I discuss some of the most explicit issues with modernity in (without wishing to appear tautological) the contemporary period. I then introduce the response of witchcraft to these issues. Finally, I employ the civilisational categorisations of Cox (2000) to explain the foundations of the critical response of witchcraft traditions to modernity. I argue that divergent notions of time and space, the tension between the individual and community, and contradictory understandings of matter and spirit in spirituality and cosmology, enable people operating within the paradigm of witchcraft in Africa to produce a distinctive critique of modernity. I begin by discussing some explicit issues with modernity and the strident and uncritical way in which these are reproduced in the African context. Socially, modernity is about hope and guilt; psychologically, it is about identity (Bauman 1998: 23). In an extremely unequal world, modernity is

The Discourse of Development: has it reached maturity?

Like most other concepts in the social sciences, ‘development’ does not entail a commonly agreed upon meaning, context or programme of action. It is defined in different ways depending on the time, space, context, professional and organisational interests of the one who does the business of defining. The meaning of development has also undergone a remarkable transformation over the course of history from the Enlightenment concept of ‘Progress’ to encompass a great variety of human needs. This paper analyses how the contemporary discourse of development has reached a mature state and how it enables us to understand development in context- and culture-sensitive ways. It is now possible to determine what development means in different settings, and how to bring in material and non-material prosperity to people living in different contexts and cultures. After a theoretical discussion an empirical study in Sri Lanka is presented which attempts to arrive at a more refined context- and culture-sensitive definition of development. The paper argues that, in order to understand development at micro-settings, it is better to construct our own indexes of development rather than using global measures. It shows how the current state of the discourse of development can lend insights into construction of a development index.

“Our Most Serious Deficiency-Disease”– Reason, Faith and the Rediscovery of Sensibility

AbstractThe essay addresses the complex cultural historical claim that with modernity the earlier unity of reason and sensibility underwent a dissociation that has important consequences for our current predicament and for our present understanding of the relationship between reason, faith and sensibility. Three case studies (Géza Ottlik, T. S. Eliot and Blaise Pascal) are examined in order to establish the nature of the divide and provide an archaeology (with the help of Pascal) of one of its first conceptualisations as well as of an early attempt to heal the growing fissure between what is termed by Pascal as reason and the heart. The second part examines current thought concerning the need to enlarge the narrow Enlightenment conception of reason and the recent call to re-envision its theological contours. The argument is then made that the same procedure should be applied to the theologically long-neglected domain of human sensibility. Theology is registered as also being accountable for internalising and perpetuating the cultural dissociation due to its failure to preserve the traditional theological contours of affectivity and its naivety in leaving the exploration of this domain entirely to the competence of secular philosophy.

The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (review)

Reviewed by: The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna Louis Dupré The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. By David Sorkin. [Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World](Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2008. Pp. xviii, 339. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-691-13502-1.) On the basis of six influential thinkers of the eighteenth century, the author shows how, in contrast to a secularist interpretation, the Enlighten­ment contributed toward a renewal and purgation of religion both in theory and in practice. The Anglican theologian William Warburton was, above all, an apologist of religious tolerance in a country that had been torn apart by reli­gious strife. In following the Enlightenment's ideal of toleration, he unques­tionably promoted the well-being of religion. The Calvinist theologian Jacob Vernet found strong support in the Enlightenment for the Arminian position as it was struggling with the strict predestinarian one. At the same time he tried to reconcile the opposing parties by insisting on the essentially practi­cal nature of Christianity and by arguing that natural religion was an essential part of its doctrine. [End Page 842] The two intellectually most impressive figures in this collection are Siegmund Baumgarten and Moses Mendelssohn. Raised in Pietist theology, Baumgarten eventually came to teach at the University of Halle, where the dominating Pietists were at odds with the Enlightenment philosophy of Wolff and Thomasius on one side and orthodox Lutheran theology on the other. Impressed by Wolff's ideas, Baumgarten concluded that Enlightenment phi­losophy posed no doctrinal obstacle to Pietist theology, of which the essence consisted in the union of the soul with God. Building his own theology on Wolffian principles, he succeeded in reconciling the Pietists with moderate Enlightenment philosophers and theologians. Mendelssohn, influenced by Wolff, Baumgarten, and Lessing, attempted an even more perfect union between religion and the philosophy of the Enlightenment. According to him, the Mosaic revelation had added no theoretical truth to the natural reli­gion of the philosophers. But the Judaic law had been a strong force in pre­serving the moral truths of reason. It thereby occupied a favorable position for reconciling religions with one other. It also implied that Jews were enti­tled to the same rights as others. Joseph Eybel's impact was primarily political. A former seminarian in Austria, he became a teacher of canon law and a close collaborator with the Empress Maria-Theresa and later with her son Joseph II in their attempts to reform Catholicism according to the principles of the Enlightenment. He assisted them in breaking down those prohibitions of the Counter-Reformation that obstructed the Enlightenment concept of public policy. In his Introduction to Church Law(1777) and in a number of pamphlets he argued for restoring the original authority of the bishops and replacing the virtual monarchy of the bishop of Rome. Not surprisingly, his theories were condemned by the Vatican. Adrien Lamourette, a French priest who eventually became a seminary teacher and a bishop, was trained in Jesuit theology, but gradually moved over to a more Jansenist position. Lamourette strongly supported the French Revolution as being essential to a purified Christianity: it would lead to a more equitable distribution of goods and free France from an unchristian despot­ism of clergy, nobility, and king. Together with Mirabeau, he tried to overcome the polarization caused by the Revolution. But few Catholics followed him, particularly after he became a state- appointed bishop of Lyon. In the Terreurof 1794 he was executed. Sorkin's study presents a valuable contribution to the ongoing reassess­ment of the Enlightenment. There unquestionably was a strong religious ele­ment in it, and in [End Page 843]some cases the Enlightenment proved to be a stimulus for a religious awakening, or at least for a tolerant religious attitude. The beauti­fully written essays display an uncommon fairness to each faith and are sup­ported by an admirable historical erudition. Yet I am not altogether clear about the author's precise intention. Does he want to show that a vigorous religious life continued to exist all through the Enlightenment that, at least in some...

カントの啓蒙意識に見る「導く」ことの問題:カントの「成人性 (Mündigkeit) 」をめぐって

カントの啓蒙意識に見る「導く」ことの問題:カントの「成人性 (Mündigkeit) 」をめぐって

Under the Name of Method: On Jacques Rancière's Presumptive Tautology

This paper investigates the philosophical method of Jacques Rancière, with special attention to use of the ‘presumptive tautology’. It distinguishes between the Enlightenment conception of method as universally applicable technique, and the philosophical conception of method as a certain style that has been invented by a certain person. Ultimately, the paper puts the methodology of Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster under scrutiny.

A response to Diller and Lattal’s “Radical Behaviorism and Buddhism”

In a recent article published in The Behavior Analyst, Diller and Lattal (2008) draw comparisons between radical behaviorism and Buddhism. The authors compare these two philosophies and conclude that showing commonalities may enhance an understanding of both philosophical systems. The purpose of this paper is to provide a clearer understanding of what Buddhists refer to as enlightenment and then discuss how including a central concept of Buddhism (i.e., nondoership; nonvolitional living) may well support the argument that the systems of thought have several common themes. In their article, Diller and Lattal (2008) state that the goal of Buddhism is for the individual to “achieve enlightenment and escape from the suffering inherent in the world” (p. 167). They also state that when the rules of the Eightfold Path are followed, “it is possible to identify the impermanent and interdependent nature of all things” (p. 167). Furthermore, they cite Mitchell (2002) and state, “Once an individual becomes enlightened, attachment to the world ceases, and craving and suffering also end” (p. 167). A closer inspection of the concept of enlightenment will yield an understanding that enlightenment is an impersonal event defined by the dissolution of the ego (the individual; the one who is seeking). Therefore, there can be no sense of “achievement or identification with the impermanent of interdependent nature of things.” The saying “there are no enlightened individuals” is applicable here (Balsekar, 2000; Liqourman, 2004). Buddhists promote the concepts of nondoership or nonvolitional living and point out that there is “no self in the chariot” and there is no permanent individual self in humans (Balsekar, 2000). Radical behaviorists echo these statements when they state that there is not a “little person” existing within the individual who controls actions (Skinner, 1974). Furthermore, in the Buddhist literature there are common phrases such as, “thoughts without a thinker, feelings without a feeler, and actions without an actor” (Balsekar; Epstein, 1995). Balsekar summarizes the words of the Buddha to illustrate nonvolitional living: “Paradoxical though it may seem: there is a path to walk on, there is walking being done, but there is no traveler. There are deeds being done, but there is no doer” (p. 42). Buddhists cite mara (illusion) as a psychological force that obstructs the apprehension of nonvolitional living. However, after the removal of mara and the addition of clear knowledge (vijja), there is the deep intuitive understanding that individuals merely respond to environmental stimuli (Balsekar, 2000), according to learning histories, environmental conditioning, and genetic tendencies (Skinner, 1974). Thus, there are no internal states that cause our behavior, there is no free will, and as Skinner (n.d.) stated, “and eventually I think we need to attribute nothing to it [free will].” The purpose of this response is to provide supplemental material to Diller and Lattal's (2008) original paper so the reader can gain an understanding of commonalities between Buddhism and radical behaviorism. Obviously, in a limited space, an in-depth discussion cannot be provided; however, the intention of this response is to provide the reader with a beginning understanding of these concepts.

‘Africa Thina’? Xenophobic and Cosmopolitan Agency in Johannesburg's Film and Television Drama**

The characterisation of Johannesburg as a city of crime perpetrated by foreigners and other outsiders is as old as the city itself. What is new in the post-apartheid period is the tension between the fear of foreigners as shadowy figures who allegedly spirit away the livelihoods of locals, and the attempt, in planning as well as imaginative initiatives, to reconceive of strangers as cosmopolitan agents of new modes of ‘belonging and becoming’. The cosmopolitan invoked here is less the Enlightenment concept of the knowing and usually wealthy citizen of the world who might transcend difference and conflict, than the informal cosmopolitan, the transnational migrant engaged in improvised economic, social and cultural exchange. Set in Johannesburg, films such as The Foreigner (1997), and television serials from The Line (1994) to Yizo Yizo (2000–2002), Gaz'lam (2002–2006) and A Place Called Home (2006), suggest, in their portrayals of encounters between locals and strangers, the effects of built environments on character and action, and posit the roles of ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’ as alternatives to violent nativist attempts to expel strangers even if those ‘strangers’ turn out to be citizens. While South African official discourse has only recently addressed migrants, cinematic fictions have for at least a decade offered narratives of city life that look hopefully, but also plausibly, to a more cosmopolitan future.

Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World

Histories of race and empire have shaped the field imaginary of species studies from its inception. Politically, the field's animal-activist heritage models its critique on movements for racial justice. Historically, this move links to Enlightenment conceptions of animals that relied on the same objectifying methods used to represent slaves and the poor: sentimentality, representations of cruelty, humane manifestos. Epistemologically, the taxonomic tools that name the objects of analysis have been deployed to define non-Europeans as subspecies or independent species. Geographically, the field's intellectual production is centered in the United States, Australia, and Britain, tied to neocolonial institutions of animal advocacy, and slow in recognizing internal critiques of animal and ecological movements by activists of color.

Enlightenment and the Kemalist Republic: A Predicament

The notion of enlightenment plays a crucial but increasingly contested role in the political intellectual discourse in the Republic of Turkey. The paper aims at reconstructing important elements of this discourse in the example of several representative texts and intends to demonstrate that the concept of enlightenment in Turkey while serving as the key element for modernity as defined in Kemalism continues to signify the Western ‘Other’, thus inherently diminishing the credibility of the argument by creating an orientalised and subaltern version of Turkey's ‘own’ history and tradition. The paper also tentatively investigates a ‘de-orientalising’ proposal of the historical process that may have caused the ‘forgetting’ of autochthonous traditions of enlightenment and the assimilation to the European strand.

<i>Gypsies and orientalism in German literature and anthropology of the long nineteenth century</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Gypsies and orientalism in German literature and anthropology of the long nineteenth century Gertrud Reershemius (bio) Gypsies and orientalism in German literature and anthropology of the long nineteenth century. Nicholas Saul. London: Legenda. 2007. 197 pp. ISBN 978- 1900755887 (hardback) In this book Nicholas Saul endeavours to "reconstruct the shifts in the representation of the Gypsy in German culture through the medium of literature and anthropology from around 1850 to the First World War" (Saul 2007: 6). Only the first chapter is dedicated to anthropology, where Saul refers to the writings of Jacob Thomasius, Heinrich Grellmann, Theodor Tetzner, Michael von Kogalnitchan, Carl von Heister and Franz Liszt. Franz Liszt's book Die Zigeuner und ihre Musik in Ungarn, first published in 1859 in French, perhaps did not receive as much attention as it deserved, either from contemporary readers or from modern scholarship analyzing anthropological writing on Romanies. Liszt, who actually spent longer periods of time among Romanies, grasps the uniqueness and the value of a culture in which, as he claims from a Hegelian point of view, pure instrumental music takes the place of writing, the creation of epic art and historiography. From this point of view, he can look at the Romanies as equal others, not as inferior others. The German discourse on Romanies during the nineteenth century and beyond, however, has been dominated by Heinrich Grellmann's book Historischer Versuch über die Zigeuner betreffend die Lebensart und Verfassung, Sitten und Schicksale dieses Volkes seit seiner Erscheinung in Europa, und dessen Ursprung, first published in 1783. The image of the Romanies, as created by Grellmann, became according to Saul "an expression of Germany's particular Orientalist tradition" (Saul 2007: 6). Grellmann creates the image of the Romanies as a pre-civilized Naturvolk with serious shortcomings in terms of intellect and work-ethos on the one hand. On the other hand, as Saul points out, Grellman glamourizes the Romanies by emphasizing their physical beauty, especially in their women. Thus, with the authority of the enlightened scholar, he builds the foundation for political intervention and oppression while at the same time he starts to create the myth of the Romanies as the desirable Romantic Others. Having thus established the origins of the orientalist discourse on Romanies, Saul dedicates the following seven chapters to analyses of a long list of German authors who wrote about Romanies, from Romantic poets like Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, writers connected with nineteenth-century Realism like Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe or Adalbert Stifter, to the early [End Page 183] twentieth-century author Carl Hauptmann. Commendably, Saul not only examines the A-list of German literature but also writers popular at the time but now largely forgotten, for example Karl May. It becomes apparent that very few of these writers and poets are familiar with or interested in the social and mostly grim reality of the Romanies' life during the nineteenth century. In the novels, plays and stories examined masterly by Saul, the image of the Gypsy serves as a projection for German authors trying to come to terms with modernity: the Gypsy as the pre-modern, pre-intellectual, sensual, unrestricted human being in opposition to modern man with all his self-inflicted limitations and obligations, also with more or less explicit sexual implications. For some authors like Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, this romantic projection leads, as Saul puts it, to a form of "obsessive self-identification with the Romany nation" (Saul 2007: 20). Interestingly, these two writers especially combined a positive image and identification with Romanies with antisemitism. This aspect, although mentioned in Saul's book, deserves in my view more attention and thought: nineteenth-century Germans found themselves presented with two ethnic minority groups in their midst who were perceived as "Others", Romanies and Jews. Whereas the majority of German Jews subscribed wholeheartedly to the concepts of enlightenment and modern society, actively assimilated into German language, culture and society, and became remarkably successful in many areas, Romanies did not. (They may not have had the chance to do so, but that was presumably not obvious to the majority of Germans during the nineteenth century.) Many German writers like Raabe, Keller...

Deleuze and Normativity

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany systematically dismantled German democracy, violated international law, and perpetrated countless horrific crimes against humanity - chief among them the extermination of ten million people, approximately six million of whom were Jews. Between 1948 and 1994, Nelson Mandela and other activists engaged in a bloody but ultimately successful battle against the racist government of South Africa in an effort to abolish apartheid. Most people would regard the actions of the Nazis as morally reprehensible and the actions of the anti-apartheid freedom fighters as morally praiseworthy. Although both used violence in the pursuit of political ends, only the latter were allegedly morally justified in doing so. Why is this the case? On what grounds do we morally condemn the Nazis but morally praise the freedom fighters? These and similar questions are questions about political normativity - the moral criteria by which we judge the actions, policies, and, in some instances, the very existence of political entities. Politico-normative criteria often involve moral concepts such as justice, rights, and equality which, though related to other moral concepts such as the right and the good, apply specifically to political entities rather than individual persons. The overarching concern of political normativity, therefore, is: how ought political institutions to conduct themselves? This includes internal questions (e.g., what laws, policies, or principles ought states to implement?) as well as external questions (e.g., how ought states to act with regard to other states?). Theories of political normativity often attempt to provide answers to the sorts of questions mentioned above in terms of justice, which is without a doubt the preeminent value of modern political philosophy. Generally speaking, a state is regarded as if it implements just laws, policies, and social norms and acts justly toward its own citizens as well as those of other states. But this merely begs a further question, one that lies at the heart of the Western political tradition, namely, what is justice? Answers to this question are, of course, many and varied, but all of them take for granted that justice is the fundamental value in determining how political entities ought to conduct their affairs. Although this approach to political philosophy is hardly new (Plato and Aristotle, not to speak of countless other ancients, were all preoccupied with questions of justice),1 it did not come of age, as it were, until the Enlightenment. For thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, normativity (both moral and political) was inexorably connected to related liberal concepts such as universal rationality and autonomous subjectivity. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, such concepts fell prey to severe criticisms by the likes of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Since that time, postmodern philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze have pushed these criticisms to their limit, completely jettisoning the ontological, epistemological, and moral presuppositions upon which much of Enlightenment thought is founded. At the same time, it is clear that Deleuze - both in his work as a philosopher and as a political activist - believed that certain political institutions are to be recommended and others rejected.2 How is this possible given Deleuze's wholesale rejection of Enlightenment concepts such as justice, autonomy, and transcendental normativity? In this essay, my aim is to provide an answer to this question by exploring Deleuze's political philosophy. As I shall argue, although Deleuze rejects certain conceptions of normativity - most importantly the transcendental and universalizable normativity underlying liberal thought - he does not reject normativity tout court. Rather, he formulates an entirely new concept of normativity which is categorical without being transcendental - in other words, an immanent conception of normativity. …

¿Qué queda de la Ilustración? Apuntes para un debate

The present article is a contribution to the discussion about the significance and the content of truth we confer to the concept of Enlightenment. It covers the most important critiques that the Enlightenment has historically received from different sides and reflects about whether these affect its normative core. Besides, it wants to show the necessity of rethinking the validity of this normative core for the coordinates of our paradoxical world, in which a globalization said to have imperialist features confronts a reflexive pluralism which questions western ethnocentrism.

Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Heinrich Heine (review)

Reviewed by: Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Heinrich Heine Jill Scott Lucia Ruprecht . Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Heinrich Heine. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 158 pp. £ 45. ISBN 978-0-7546-5361-5. The intermedial study of dance and literature has been developing since the early 1990s as part of a larger trend towards interdisciplinary studies. Important contributions to this subfield, such as Sarah Davies Cordova's Paris Dances (1999) and Felicia McCarren's Dance Pathologies (1998), have tended to focus on late-nineteenth-century or modernist examples from French literature. The reasons for this focus are twofold: classical and romantic ballet developed primarily in France, and French literature echoed these developments. Studies on dance and literature have been slower to emerge in German studies, and Lucia Ruprecht's Dances of the Self adds several new dimensions to the intersecting discourses of movement and textuality: 1) she considers dance in the work of three major German writers, 2) she takes us back almost a full century from the symbolist dancophiles of Mallarmé, Valéry, or even Hofmannsthal, and 3) she moves away from a purely textual metaphor of dance to discuss the actual dances of the period and the ways in which these are represented in language. She documents choreography and dance history, and she brings into discussion real dancers who influenced these authors. Though one might assume a book on dance to treat the frivolous entertainment for the bourgeoisie, Ruprecht's book is anything but lighthearted. At least as much philosopher and theorist as literary scholar, she takes us on a swift trip through Enlightenment concepts of the body to poststructuralist positions on subjectivity. Her readings of Kant are framed in a post-Foucauldian rhetoric. At times, the pace at which new ideas are introduced – Winckelmann, Kant, and Schiller, then on to Foucault (disciplining the body and the care of the self), Butler (gender performativity), Austin (performative utterances), Derrida (reiteration and iterability), Freud (primacy of the visual in psychosexual development), Lacan (mirror stage), Kristeva (subject in process), and [End Page 477] Benjamin (politics and poetics of allegory) – is dizzying, and leaves one struggling to follow Ruprecht's own thread. On the one hand, the book has the feel of a dissertation in its efforts to cover all the bases and demonstrate breadth and erudition. On the other hand, it is all the richer because Ruprecht casts such a wide net. The principle argument is that Kleist, Hoffmann, and Heine, each in his own way, pick up on Winckelmann's classicist body idealized in the Greek statue, but challenge this harmonious perfection by contaminating its static purity with movement and erotic sensuality. Each author uses the paradoxes of form and expression within dance, but also the tensions between writing and dancing to extend and even modernize notions of corporeality. Furthermore, through extended metaphors of dance and movement, the three writers in question produce new configurations of subjectivity. Terpsichorical allegories create movement landscapes that enable these writers to produce a counteraesthetics and a counterpolitics of the self all in one sweep. While ballet is at the core of dance aesthetics in the eighteenth century, Kleist, Hoffmann, and Heine turn to other related movement arts – puppet theatre, commedia dell'arte, mime, and cancan – to explore alternative corporeal and textual expressions. The writers use self-reflexivity and rhetorical playfulness, argues Ruprecht, as forms of both entertainment and "performative exercises for the articulation of cultural and personal narratives embodied in the dances of the self." Kleist's marionettes, functioning as prosthetic limbs and uncanny pseudohumans, do not meet the aesthetic requirements for the ideal body, but instead perform clumsy, mechanical, or even dysfunctional dances. As such, Kleist counters Schiller's discourses on grace as well as thwarting practices of ballet around 1800. Moving away from Kant's Critique of Judgment and the disinterested gaze, Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater and Schiller's Gracefulness and Dignity perform beauty as relative, and devise a concept of grace that includes gravity. Romantic ballet goes to great lengths to create illusions of antigravity, but can go no further than pointe, the result of...

Vision and Virtue in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: Anatta and Its Implications for Social Responsibility

Buddhism and psychoanalysis have long been accused of privileging internal transformation over active social and political engagement. Yet, as representatives of non-theistic and secular paths toward the realization of human potential, both traditions embody an important aspect of the Romantic quest for progress, that is, the transcendence of internal and external division. Insight into the Buddhist notion of self as ontologically interdependent and non-dualistic optimally yields not only personal transformation but also an expanded circle of identification, with important implications for social responsibility. Erich Fromm, in interpreting the influential work of D. T. Suzuki, represents a historical and philosophical link between the psychoanalytic legacy of social responsibility and the Buddhist concept of Enlightenment. With dewdrops dripping, I wish somehow I could wash this perishing world. —Basho (1643–1694)

Humanity’s Imaginary Body The Concepts of Empathy and Sympathy and the New Theater Experience in the 18th Century

This article explores the corporeal dimension of the enlightenment concepts of empathy and sympathy with regard to their dramaturgical function. My thesis is that the new theater of the so-called fourth wall was meant to produce a spiritual bonding of the audience. This provided not only a model for the abstract collectives of modernity, but opened the transition from older notions of collectives to the latter to concrete experience.

Literary Alternatives to Rational Choice: Historical Psychology and Semi-Detached Marriages

Literary Alternatives to Rational Choice:Historical Psychology and Semi-Detached Marriages Regenia Gagnier In The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society, I traced a broad cultural shift during the second half of the nineteenth century from an Enlightenment conception of Reason as the mind's ability to understand and improve the world to rationality as the individual's chosen path towards a goal irrespective of the quality of the choice.1 Under this shift, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as universal or collective consensus, sensus communis, would give way to individual choice as Taste, or mood, or lifestyle. The goal of Rational Choice theory is not the particular substantive end or product but rather the formal mapping or modelling that leads to a desired end (whatever it is) in the form of subjectively ranked preferences. In these mappings and rankings, any attempt to comment on the quality of revealed preference is typically labelled "paternalism," and the preferences are "revealed" by the choices. Any constraints on choice are typically left to one side as "exogenous." While Rational Choice theory was colonising most social science disciplines, when I published my book in 2000 it had received no other attention in literary and cultural criticism. Yet two philosophers in particular have used literature, specifically nineteenth-century fiction, to reflect on the limits of Rational Choice theory. In Poetic Justice (1995), Martha Nussbaum found that Rational Choice was inadequate to human experience in its reduction of quality to quantity; aggregation to total or average utility without concern for distribution; sum-raking or maximizing procedure; conception of self-interest as motivation; and exogenous preferences as simply given rather than socially mutable.2 Nussbaum proposed literature as an alternative that allowed us to assess quality of life and that through sympathetic imagination involved [End Page 23] the reader in the assessment. Reading literature, she thought, gave us a basis of sympathy with each individual life and a state of judicious spectatorship essential to human flourishing. In Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (1999) and Ulysses Unbound (2000) Jon Elster argued that the main value of art is emotional, not cognitive nor perceptual, and that the emotions matter "because many forms of human behaviour would be unintelligible if we did not see them through the prism of emotion." In his more recent Closing the Books (2004), he considers how transitional justice, or retribution and reparation after a change of political regime, may be shaped by the immediate urgency of emotion and by the decay of emotion over time.3 For Elster, the interaction between emotions and incentives is more complex than most cost-benefit models, and he called for an "historical psychology" that would include anthropology, sociology, and neurobiology, plus fiction for a "fine-grained understanding of real-life emotional phenomena."4 In claiming that the "main value of art is emotional not perceptual nor cognitive,"5 Elster, and to a lesser extent Nussbaum, endorsed a dualism only too acceptable to social scientists. Interestingly, when Elster lists the disciplines to be consulted in historical psychology—anthropology, sociology, neurobiology—he does not then include literary criticism, but rather "fiction." Yet the first three are disciplines; their objects are human kinds, society, the body. The last, fiction, is the object or field of the discipline of literary or cultural studies. Elster should have written anthropology, sociology, neurobiology, and literary and cultural studies or humankind, society, the nervous system, and literature, but not three disciplines plus raw fiction, the object of a discipline. This article proposes a less dualistic historical psychology, in which reason is not the province of science and emotion not that of literature, and in which we are not asked to choose between what Elster sees as "the economic imperialism" that explains emotions by the Rational Choice paradigm and the "cultural-studies imperialism" that sees emotions as endlessly malleable social constructions.6 C. Wright Mills argued as early as The Sociological Imagination (1959) that the genre of biography joined historical change and social structure within the dynamics of particular lives and that only biography could make available to us the detailed processes of historical change.7 It is well...

Practicing Progress: The Promise and Limitations of Enlightenment. Festschrift for John A. Mccarthy by Richard E. Schade, Dieter Sevin, John A. McCarthy

II50 Reviews not yet sufficientlyknown. A good example isKevin Hilliard's noteworthy account of Sophie von laRoche, whose occasional attempts toadapt Richardson's manner toGer man material are particularly interesting; so, too, is the essay on her granddaughter, Bettine von Arnim, by Ursula Hudson-Wiedemann, whose unfortunate and surely unintentional conflation ofPygmalion and his 'idealwoman' provokes a passing smile. Otherwise there is little to smile at, still less to laugh about, in this collection, which becomes evermore serious as the focus shifts toMarie von Ebner-Eschenbach, ably presented by Charlotte Woodford, and Lou Andreas-Salome, the subject of one of thebest-presented pieces in thisvolume, cool, controlled, and lucidly thought out by David Midgley with a clear sense of context and direction. By comparison, Andrew Webber's account of Else Lasker-Schiiler may seem somewhat wordy and opaque, its insights sometimes obscured by all too close exposure to her poems: on closer scrutiny,however, his portrayal succeeds in conveying theoriginality of its subject. The final fourcontributions focus onmore recentwriters. Andrea Capovilla's por trayalof Irmgard Keun makes a persuasive case fora complex author writing during difficult times about theobstacles thenencountered bywomen. The collection, which opened with a somewhat obscure essay byBettina Bildhauer onMechtild vonMagde burg, the thirteenth-centuryBenedictine pioneer ofmystical writing inGerman, is rounded offby accounts of three of the best-known women writers of the post-war period. Stephanie Bird deals with Ingeborg Bachmann, Anita Bunyan with Christa Wolf, while Elfriede Jelinek is considered by Ben Morgan. These will be read with interestand advantage by anyone eager toknowmore about post-war German writing and thewomen who made such an important contribution to it. In her introduction theeditor reminds us that 'theabsence ofwomen from the canon has not gone unno ticed by scholars'. Not by scholars inBritain, at any rate, to judge by the contents of thiswelcome volume. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL PETER SKRINE PracticingProgress: The Promise and Limitations ofEnlightenment. FestschriftforJohn A. McCarthy. Ed. by RICHARD E. SCHADE and DIETER SEVIN. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, Io6) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2007. 234 pp. E48; $65. ISBN 978-go 420-2I46-4. Twelve distinguished Germanists, mostly North American, have honoured theEn lightenment scholar JohnMcCarthy with a richly deserved Festschrift. All articles save one are inEnglish, thoughGerman quotations are not translated. Their quality ismostly high, though often one feels an author might have pressed arguments fur ther or exposed them tomore challenges. That, however, would have required the resolutelymaieutic editing which is inappropriate for a Festschrift, where an editor isoften glad to receive contributions at all. The Enlightenment and its reception shade into discussions of 'enlightenment' in general. A central Enlightenment concept, 'Bestimmung', is treated informativelyby Wolfgang Albrecht, who rangeswidely from the theologian Johann Joachim Spalding via Lessing and Mendelssohn to Joachim Heinrich Campe's definition ofwomen's destiny in Vdterlicher Rathfuir meine Tochter and the philanthropic version of 'Be stimmung' formulated in I8 I6 by theex-Jacobin Georg Wedekind. Herbert Rowland summarizes American reviews of thenineteenth-century translations ofLaokoon and Nathan by Ellen Frothingham, and Liliane Weissberg describes how Hannah Arendt extracted fromNathan solutions to specifically twentieth-century problems. Laurie Johnson offersa somewhat under-researched but stimulating account of thephilosophe MLR, I03.4, 2oo8 I I 5 I Don Alfonso inCosz fan tutte. Other essays are on more general eighteenth-century topics: Richard T. Gray on physiocracy, Thomas P. Saine on Lutheran settlers in America, and Simon Richter with awealth of ideas about Goethe's Faust. A broader concept of 'enlightenment' is shown by Robert C. Holub to change into itsopposite inNietzsche as he moves from biology as a means of enlightened planning to an enthusiasm foreugenics that anticipates Nazi excesses. Frank Trommler maintains that the I960s studentmovement derived an enlightened critical attitude fromBrecht and theFrankfurt School; he does not consider that theauthoritarian New Left, with itsbinary opposition of salvific 'rationality' and irredeemable 'irrationality', likewise illustrates enlightenment's transformation into itsopposite. Two essays stand out. Noting that the Enlightenment failed to end witch trials, Susanne Kord examines the trialand execution ofAnna Goldi atGlarus in I782 and suggests a connection between the 'evil eye' ascribed towitches and the 'science' of physiognomy. This fascinating and deeply researched study almost bursts...

The Decline and Fall of Virgil in Eighteenth-Century Germany: The Repressed Muse (review)

Geoffrey Atherton, The Decline and Fall of Virgil in Eighteenth-Century Germany: The Repressed Muse. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. xx + 312 pp. The reception of the Roman poet Virgil underwent profound changes in the eighteenth-century, especially in the German-speaking world.At the beginning of this period Virgil exemplified the aesthetic ideal for poetry, the Aeneid standing as the archetype of the epic. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, many concurred with Schlegel in dismissing the Aeneid as derivative, claiming that Virgil's work did not even qualify as poetry, that he was unable to comprehend beauty. To some degree this view held until Richard Heinze's Virgils epische Technik (1903) helped to establish modern Virgilian scholarship, refocusing on the epic style. Part of the decline in Virgil's fortunes can be attributed to the recovery of Homer and the assertion that the Greeks articulated a more authentic form of art, a view that helped to underwrite the claim of a strong spiritual affinity between ancient Greek and German culture. Also at play was an Enlightenment discomfort with the Aeneid's role in supporting the political authority of Augustus and the empire. In turn, part of the decline of Virgil's popularity can also be attributed to the receding influence of Latin culture and the epic as the highest expression of art, especially as German culture labored to establish an identity distinct from French (and by extension Roman) hegemony. That said, Virgil remained a profound, if unacknowledged presence in the writings of Klopstock.Wieland, Goethe, and Novalis, among many others. Geoffrey Atherton proposes to elaborate on this paradoxical state of affairs. He offers close analyses of the early critical and poetic reception of Virgil in the eighteenth century in order to set it in sharper relief, and to trace the persistence of Virgil's (submerged) influence on the German epic and the idyll. Atherton writes with clarity, his readings both nuanced and illuminating. The case of Winckelmann illustrates the paradoxes. On one hand, he played a central role in German philhellenism. Underlying this was the Enlightenment conception of nature found in Rousseau, and the corresponding notion that civilization distanced humans from their ideal condition. For Winckelmann the Greeks seemed to possess a closer, more authentic sympathy with nature, while the Romans merely copied them. Thus the famous statue Laocoon exemplified Greek naturalness, with its expression of stoic sublimity, while Virgil's account in the Aeneid exemplified Roman falseness. For Winckelmann and other German critics, Virgil was simply indulging in a rhetorical display rather than expressing deeply felt emotions. …

Custom and Tradition Versus Reason in Modern Secular and Religious Moral Reasoning and in Modern Constitutional Law

As discussed in Part I of this article, contemporary debates over values, the so-called Culture Wars, are best understood not as a debate between religious and secular ideologies, but rather a debate between traditional ideologies, whether religious or secular, which reflect customary or traditional norms, versus progressive ideology, whether religious or secular, which reflect rational deliberation about moral reasoning. As discussed in Part II of the article, customary or traditional attitudes, both secular and religious, have supported, among other things, slavery, segregation and anti-miscegenation laws, denial of rights for women, anti-Semitism, rejection of the cosmology of Galileo, rejection of Darwinian evolution, limitations on access to birth control, limitations on stem-cell research, limitations on choice regarding abortion pre-viability, and denial of rights to gays and lesbians. In contrast, the perspective of adult reason commits one to the logical and rational elaboration of giving each individual what Ronald Dworkin has called equal concern and respect, reflected in religious traditions by rational elaboration of the biblical imperative of love of neighbor as oneself, or in classic Enlightenment terms by Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment's concept of behaving according to the logic of an impartial spectator. In Part III of the article, it is noted that a major difference among Supreme Court Justices is the extent to which broad terms in the Constitution, like liberty or equality, should be read consistent with customary and traditional beliefs, a view supported by Justices Scalia and Thomas, or should be read in light of the demands of reason, the position of Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer. It is too early to tell how the Chief Justice Roberts, replacing Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Justice Alito, replacing Justice O'Connor will resolve this issue in cases coming before them, but they may adopt more the perspective of Justices Scalia and Thomas. In Part IV of the article, assuming a majority of Supreme Court Justices remain committed to doctrinal development consistent with reason, Part IV sketches aspects of current constitutional doctrine, and possible doctrinal development in the future, consistent with that vision.