Concrete Particulars Research Articles

Critical Intellectuals and Identity Logic: Politics, Representation and Community

Abstract In his introduction to the special Telos issue on the French New Right Paul Piccone locates the main thrust of the Frankfurt School's attack on modernity in its critique of identity logic. The violence of fascism in pre-war Europe and the failure of liberalism in today's US, he specifies, have a common origin in the “identity logic of Enlightenment ideology,” whose “abstract universalism … comes to dominate concrete particularity … The abstract concept redefines the concrete particular in its own image while delegitimating all that is left out of this exercise in conceptual engineering…” Modernity's violence is a legacy of failed enlightenment strategies of representation which attempt to articulate power, reason, and rights.

Geomorphological understanding of floods

The summer 1993 flooding of the upper Mississippi River valley reminds us that floods are the most globally pervasive, environmentally diverse and continually destructive of all natural hazards. The fact that flood damages continue to rise raises commonsense questions about conventional flood science. Like much modern environmental science, conventional flood science has followed the model of theoretical physics. It advanced from early emphasis on streamflow measurement to the use of simple formulae, and finally to the abstract theoretical sophistication of modern modeling studies. Two approaches are now used to “predict” flood phenomena: (1) beginning with the conventional database of measured properties of small common floods, a conceptual generalization is made to the idealized properties of the large, rare floods from which society is assumed to be at risk, and (2) explanation of detailed, specific flood phenomena is achieved through theoretical generalization (models) based on “first principles”, which are assumed to apply to the entire class of phenomena. Unfortunately, both approaches devote almost all their attention to methodology, increasingly mathematical, without questioning basic underlying assumptions. Increasingly it is the assumptions, often unstated, that serve to embody the understanding of floods as real-world particular phenomena, rather than as conceptual generalities. Such trends lead to an unease that it is not floods that are being researched by much of conventional flood science. Rather, such flood “science” is increasingly becoming the mathematical manipulation of idealized parameters that are assumed to have flood-like properties. These idealizations of flood attributes are generalized, and the resulting predicted consequences are imposed upon society through engineering designs, flood-hazard zonations, and the like. Geomorphological understanding of floods derives a from along geological tradition of studying indices of real processes operating in the past. In contrast to the conceptual, theoretical treatment of floods as classes or generalizations, geomorphologists study particular floods revealed as a natural experience that is recorded in the sediments, landforms, and erosional scars of past floods. The strength of this approach is in its affinity to the commonsense perceptional basis that underpins human action. Geomorphological flood studies, including recent advances in paleoflood hydrology, are needed as a complement to conventional hydrological approaches. The resulting complementarity will allow the predictions of the conventional approach to be grounded in the concrete particulars of experience. Without such grounding, flood science risks continuing as an empty quest for universal ideals while humanity, paralyzed by inaction, continues to suffer from the reality of particular floods.

Making a Classic: The Advent of the Literary Series

In his Plan and Catalogue of Cooke's Uniform, Cheap, and Elegant Pocket Library printed in 1794, publisher John Cooke declared that such an enterprise, creation of complete Library, comprising all most esteemd Works in English Language, each printed on same Type, on same Size, on same Paper, and embellished by same Artists, was never before attempted in this kingdom.' Like most advertising claims then and now, Cooke manages to stay just within bounds of truth; Cooke's Pocket Edition of Select British Poets was perhaps most ambitious literary series of its day, but it was by no means first The practice of assembling multi-author, uniform volume series by booksellers had its beginning in mid-eighteenth century; explosion of popularity for format by end of that century and its subsequent secure place in publishing practices to this day is a revealing episode not only as an innovative moment in history of publishing, but also as a first step in creation of a format for national literary histories. The pervasive use of such marketing methods, which package and present literary materials not as individual works of art but as commodities forming part of a multi-piece series to be collected, consumed, and displayed as a unit, also raises questions concerning ways in which literary aesthetics, a concept of national identity, and concrete particulars of economics of writing and reading intersect at certain historical moments. We can use this historical case of advent of a new method of selling and promoting literary texts in eighteenth century in order to provide a different perspective on ways in which current canons of the classics, or that group of texts literate portion of population is presumed to be acquainted with, have been shaped. Investigating advent of a new method of presenting a work of literature to a commercial public lets us see more clearly dynamics at play in what appears to be a shift to institutionalize and commodify both practice of authorship, or act of producing texts, and of readership, or act of acquiring and consuming them.

ETHIEK EN SUBJECTIVITES

Summary The position of subjectivity in ethics is controversial. In classic rationalistic ethics it is mostly identified with arbitrariness, being elevated by a universal order. In post-ethics it is put on a par with the modern autonomous consciousness, abstracting from the concrete ethos. In this paper I plead for a third way. The starting point is the idea that the arbitrary self only can be dethroned by a reversal in the subject itself. This radical change makes the subject into a universal one. Only being a concrete self, it finds a universality which binds it together with the community, the cosmos, the ground of every reality. So my pleading doesn't aim at a synthesis, but at a reversal of perspective: neither objectivity nor universality are to be found beyond the singular subject, but only in the concrete particularity of the ethical self.

Bonebound Spirituality

The hall-mark of a genuine spirituality must lie in the honest recognition of our rootedness in the world of matter. It is the theme of poets as various as John Donne and Dylan Thomas. Perhaps in Donne we find its chief expression in the Devotions on Emergent Occasions and Severall Steps in my Sickness of 1624, but it is present as the background of many of his poems: To our bodies tume we then, that so Weake men on love reveal’d may look;Loves mysteries in soules doe grow,But yet the body is his booke.Dylan Thomas refers to Donne with approval and comments in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson in similar vein: Through my small bonebound island I have learnt all that I know, experienced all and sensed all. All I write is inseparable from the island. As much as possible, therefore, I employ the scenery of the island to describe the scenery of my thoughts, the earthquakes of the body to describe the earthquakes of the heart.This rootedness is our greatest glory. It must drive us towards engagement with the stuff of creation, in contrast to a spirituality which offers us ways of putting up with things as they are.This suggests a spirituality which must face up to the concrete particularity of our daily life. As Jon Sobrino has remarked recently: The ‘being human-with-spirit’ that will measure up to reality’s cargo of crisis and promise, that will unify the various dements of reality in such wise that reality be, in the event, more promise than crisis, is what I call spirituality.

From Extroverted Realism to Correspondence: A Modest Proposal

Once upon a time realists seemed to exhibit an understandable complacency. They had a metaphysics that seemed simple, highly explanatory, and obviously true. And they had a semantics that was formally appealing, was again explanatory, and was harmonious with the metaphysics. They believed that the things they encountered in their lives, including the things they encountered in the pursuit of such intellectual activities as science, existed. And they believed there were important relationships between these things and the languages used to talk about them, which in turn determined if the sentences of their language were true. Sentences were true if there was an appropriate correspondence between the words they contain and the things that exist, and false otherwise. This correspondence provided them in turn with a reason for believing in the existence of other things. If sentences, or truthbearers of any sort, were true, there would have to be things, or truthmakers, in existence to make them true. So realists came to believe in the existence of properties and relations, numbers, sets, certain other abstract entities, and even possible worlds and similar possibilia. But realists can no longer be so complacent. They face a profound threat from without. Instrumentalists, idealists, and anti-realists query the rationality of their realism, and scorn their use of the correspondence theory of truth. And even more disturbing is the fifth column activity of some supposed realists. Some try to purge realism nominalists and others, for instance, deny reality to all but concrete particulars, shunning universals, numbers, and various categories of possibilia. Others drive a wedge between realism and the correspondence theory of truth, either by rejecting the theory altogether or else by making its connection with realism far more tenuous,

Events: A Metaphysical Study.

Originally published in 1986. The theory of events presented is one that construes events to be concrete particulars; and it embodies an attempt to take seriously the idea that events are the changes that objects undergo when they change. The theory is about what an event really is, about when events are identical, about what properties events have essentially, and about what relations events bear to entities of other kinds. In addition, this book contains an account of what philosophers are up to when they provide reasons for thinking that objects belonging to metaphysically interesting kinds exist. It also gives an account of the role of criteria of identity (eg. identical sets must have the same members) in such reasons, and an account of what criteria of identity must be like in order for them to be able to play such a role.

Bleak House: The Emergence of Theme

Research Article| June 01 1987 Bleak House: The Emergence of Theme Paul Pickrel Paul Pickrel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (1987) 42 (1): 73–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/3044914 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paul Pickrel; Bleak House: The Emergence of Theme. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 June 1987; 42 (1): 73–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3044914 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1987 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Continuity Theory of Reality in Plato's Hippias Major

The Continuity Theory of Reality in Plato's HippiasMajor MICHAEL L. MORGAN THE PRIMARY REASON that students of Plato have recently returned to the Hippias Major is to assess its role in Plato's philosophical development.' In the most important among recent treatments, John Malcolm argues for a kinship between the Hippias Major and Plato's middle Theory of Forms, while Paul Woodruff" defends the Hippias Major's neutrality on metaphysical questions. The case seems to turn on three doctrines and whether they are present in the dialogue. They are (1) the Xc%)to~6g or separation between Forms and concrete particulars, (z) the compresence of opposites in concrete particulars and the purity of Forms, and (3) so-called self-predication. Once this well-known trio is examined and clarified, the Hippias Major can he plundered for evidence of their presence. Malcolm, while admitting that (i) is not explicit in the dialogue, argues that (2) ~ and (3) are. Clearly he takes separation to contain something more than, or at least different from, the compresence of opposites. Woodruff argues vigorously against (i) but takes all three to be closely related. :3 ' On the Hippias Major (hereafter HM), see Dorothy Tarrant, The Hippia,~Major (Cambridge , 1998); John Malcolm, "On the Place of the HzppiasMajorin the Development of Plato's Thought," Archivfiir Geschichteder Phi&sophie5o, 3 (1968), 189-195; Paul Woodruff, "Socrates and Ontology: The Evidence of the HippiasMajor,"Phronesis23,2 (1978), ml-117; R.E.Allen, Plato~ Euthyphro and the Earlier Theory of Forms (London,197o), passim; Marion Soreth, Der PlatonischeDialog Hippias Maior (Munich, 1953); A. Croiset, HippiasMajeur, Charmide,Lache,~, Lysis (Paris , 19~1). I have nothing to add to the debate concerning the authenticity of the HM. I agree with Grube and Malcolm in behalf of its authenticity. Cf. W.K.C. Guthrie, A Historyof GreekPhilosophy , IV (Cambridge, 1975), p. 175-6. Allen claims (2) in Plato~Euthyphro73-4. :~ Guthrie (IV, 176-6) argues that none of Plato's language in the HM requires a theory of transcendent Forms. [133] 134 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Late in the Hippias Major, as part of a refutation of the proposal that z6 • is visual and auditory pleasure, Socrates and Hippias debate the merits of a theory, which Socrates calls "Hippias's continuity theory of reality." The result of Socratic criticism, it is a theory of two kinds of properties and how they are distributed throughout wholes and their parts. Among older commentators, Tarrant and Ross have discussed this theory and the elenchos of which it is a part, but their treatments are inadequate. 4 My proposal is to look first at the setting for this metaphysical view, then to describe it, arguing that it is a theory about properties, parts, and wholes, and finally to explore its relations to (1), (2), and (3) above. The Hippias Major, in short, may exhibit an early stage in Plato's metaphysical thinking, but whether that stage includes (1), (2), or (3) might best be assessed by couching our examination in the framework of a metaphysical theory explicitly presented in the dialogue. THE FINAL ARGUMENT IN THE HIPPIAS MAJOR In the Hippias Major Socrates and the sophist Hippias discuss a number of definitions of the beautiful (~6 • 5 At first Hippias offers his own proposals , but eventually Socrates is himself compelled to make suggestions, although these too---for example, that the beautiful is the fitting (T6 nQ~rov) and that it is the useful (Xff~,ot~ov)--are subsequently rejected. The final major one of these proposals, introduced by Socrates and endorsed by Hippias , requires extensive discussion (297e5-3o3d lo); it is that "the beautiful is the pleasure which comes through hearing and seeing" (~98a6-7). 6 The elenchos that follows has three parts: (I) 298d5-3oob3; (II) 3oob4 3o2c7 ; (III) 3o2c7-3o3dlo. In (I) Socrates begins his refutation by seeking to establish two things: that if a pair of things are beautiful, then each too must be beautiful and that if both a pair and a member are beautiful, all must possess something, indeed some identical thing, that makes them all beautiful. At least the second part of this conclusion, that beautiful things have some one thing in...

Edmund Burke's Indian Idyll

EdmundBurke's Indian Idyll REGINA JANES Most of us who think of Burke at all think of him as the political philosopher in action, a man firmly grounded in the real. He has for us the allure that Cabrera Infante says action has for intellectuals, the appeal of sex to the impotent. Because we cannot do it ourselves, we attribute magical powers to those who can, and we secretly suspect that it provides them with miraculous enjoyments and fulfillments from which we are forever excluded. Burke humiliates us more than most men of action because he was also a powerful writer and thinker: he not only did what we can’t, but he also did what we can do better than we do. It all seems a little unfair. But there is a chink in Burke’s practicality. That exquisite grasp of general priciples and concrete particulars masks a view of civilization as idyll. The value that earlier and some contemporaneous and later writers attributed to virtuous pastoralism, Burke attributed to civilization itself. The same element ofprojection so evident in others’ pas­ toral fantasies and utopian visions appears in Burke’s representations of society in general and, for our present purposes, of India in particu­ lar. For Burke’s India, like his France, his America, even his Ireland and his England, is an imaginary world, but unlike his France or his America, Burke’s India is a pastoral landscape, stable and dynamic, enduring through time, yet pitifully vulnerable to external attack. 3 4 / REGINA JANES In his treatment of India, Burke elaborated an image of an Indian golden age that is preeminently a pastoral of civility. Images of gar­ dens, fields carefully tended, considerate paternal rulers, flourishing industry and manufactures, trade and commerce work together to flesh out his portrayal of a dynamic and self-sustaining organism. He constructed that image out of books, conversations, and records in conscious opposition to other equally forcible interpretations of In­ dian society, and his rendering of that society is clearly idealized and clearly polemical. In Daniel Martin, John Fowles observes that “The desire to create imaginary worlds . . . this desire, or need, has always been strongly linked, at least in my own experience, with the notion of retreat, in both the religious and military sense; of the secret place that is also a redoubt.”1 For Burke, the imaginary world that is his In­ dia served as the secret place and redoubt from which the force of his disapproval of the present emerged armed and invigorated, fresh for battle with justifications at the ready. In prosecuting Hastings, Burke had to refute both Hastings’ defense of his own behavior and the image of India that Hastings and his counsel presented in order to justify that behavior. The interpreta­ tion of Indian society offered by Hastings and his counsel was a popu­ lar one with considerable support in the literature on India and in the public mind. Regarded as a ruinous civilization, age-old, unimagin­ ably rich and unimaginably decrepit, India also appeared to many a war-torn, despot-ridden anarchy. Focusing on the disruptions in the Mogul empire and the quarrels among Muslim princes, such return­ ing travelers as Francois Bernier had argued that India had no system of law, no security for property, and a plethora of ruthless despots, ruling arbitrarily with no restraints upon their will, impoverishing their people, and keeping them in subjection only with the whip. Ac­ cording to this view of Indian society, when there was peace, which was hardly ever (Bernier said there had been none since 1200 and the first Mohammedan invasions),2 the Mogul plundered the Nabob who plundered the Phousdar who plundered the Zemindar who fleeced the Havildar who plundered the village.3 To maintain production of agricultural and commercial goods, the whip and the army were the only means. When this happy state of affairs was disturbed by war, as Burke’s Indian Idyll / 5 it was most ofthe time, then famine, murder, rape, and general havoc were the order of the day, while the natives supinely tolerated the imposition of one tyranny after another. In this India, quite a vivid one and excellent copy...

Methods in Drama Criticism

Methods in Drama Criticism Roy Battenhouse Richard Levin’s New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Drama (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), parts of which have appeared previously in journals, challenges three major approaches in drama criti­ cism: the thematic, the ironic, and the historical. While acknow­ ledging that these have been dominant in recent decades, Pro­ fessor Levin regards them as intrinsically invalid and generative of “most of the misreadings we encounter.” He therefore attacks with what the book’s dustjacket calls “exemplary thoroughness and devastating effect.”Whetherhis analyses are in fact thorough and devastating will be the subject of my comments. That they are being accepted asvalid in some quarters isevident in a recent Harper’s article (October 1979) entitled “Degenerate Criticism: The Dismal State of English Studies,” by Peter Shaw, Levin’s colleague at Stony Brook. But I am unpersuaded by character­ izations which rest on a wholesale denigrating. Granted that any approach can be misused by a clumsy practitioner, does this warrant our tarring with the same brush a competent and informed user? The author replies to this ob­ jection (p. 9) by saying that although skilful use of a bad approach will yield better results (better by what norm?) than an unskilful, he believes it possible to judge quite independently of individual ability the value of the three approaches, since within the definition he has given of each there are common assumptions and consequences inherent in the nature of the approach itself. He replies also to a second objection to his pro­ cedure—that it is entirely negative and unfairly fires at col­ leagues without giving them a target in return by offering his own interpretation. His answer is that his purpose here is not to advocate his own approach or any other, but simply to argue the invalidity of the three approaches he is discussing. There is an evasiveness in these replies and also a contradiction in logic. 230 Roy Battenhouse 231 For is he not advocating his own norms when formulating definitions which in themselves negate the value of those ap­ proaches? The real question (though he never admits this) is the adequacy of his own assumptions to do justice to the read­ ing of a text. In his chapter on “Thematic Readings,” for instance, let us notice how he defines their approach. It begins, he says, “with the assumption that a play cannot be about what it obviously seems to be about—namely particular characters engaged in particular actions—because it must be about something entirely different—a general idea—which is not at all obvious” (p. 21). Here he is evidently intent on driving a wedge between charac­ ters in action and what the actions signify. His own assumption is that any idea of the action’s significance is not in the play at all (p. 17). Rather it is an abstract concept which “replaces” the literal subject with one of a totally different order. It is arbitrarily supplied by the question the thematist asks, since the play itself does not present us with questions at all. The play is simply particular actions. To these the thematist brings his hypothesis which then is inevitably “proved” by detaching from their context selected aspects of data to fit his hypothesis. Using this definition, Professor Levin accuses the whole approach of a “thematic leap” out of the play into a world of concepts de­ termined only by each abstractor’s temperament and interests. Each thematist’s gestalt, he suggests, is like those first investi­ gated by gestalt psychology—“really a form of optical illusion residing in the eye of the beholder rather than in the object beheld” (p. 30). Is he suggesting here a kind of inkblot-theory of play design? Or is he under the sway of the sceptical premises of some of today’s structuralists who consider a play’s text indeterminate? In any case, he is challenging any approach that assumes for old plays (apart from those obviously presented as Morality plays) a “governing idea” which informs the shaping of their concrete particularity. Critics who make such a claim, he suggests, might be described (in...

Whitehead’s Transformation of Pure Act

WHITEHEAD'S TRANSFORMATION OF PURE ACT IN AN EFFORT to avoid any final bifurcation into two realms of being and becoming, as in Plato, Aristotle argued that only concrete particulars were fully actual, with forms only derivatively existent as the forms of these actualities. Yet under pressure from his understanding of the basic contrast between matter and form in terms of potentiality and actuality, Aristotle was driven more and more to identify form and actuality .1 Thus the immaterial reality of God becomes a pure, unchanging actuality not readily distinguishable from Plato's form of the Good, although Aristotle seeks to endow it with an interior life of ceaseless activity of "thinking." As pure actuality God is thus conceived as pure form, without matter. How pure form can engage in ceaseless activity of any sort is not clearly explained. Thomas Aquinas was able to explain the activity of immaterial being primarily by freeing the basic polarity of potentiality and actuality from its exclusive identification with matter and form. It was also possible to apply this contrast to form and esse or the act of being. Purely immaterial forms, such as angelic intelligences, could not create themselves by their own power, but were dependent upon the creative act of God whereby they received their own act of being. Thus pure form was in potency to this act of being. As infinite esse, God was pure actuality without any admixture of potentiality, and by the same token he was pure activity in no wise limited by any element of form.2 1 Here see Ivor Leclerc, " Form and Actuality," pp. 169-89 in the book he edited, The Rdevance of Whitehead (London: George Allen &Unwin, 1961). Pages 169-71 summarize this problem for Aristotle; the rest of the essay shows how Whitehead successfully maintains the distinction between form and actuality. • The nature of the act of being is ably explained by Etienne Gilson in his Being and Some Phuosophm-s (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 381 382 LEWIS S. FORD This solution was not without its difficulties. God's relation to form is not clarified thereby. We have the formula, that his essence is his existence, i.e. his infinite esse, but this seems to have the force of making him sheer existence devoid of any essence whatever, since any element of form would in him represent a potentiality not fully enacted. Then God becomes radically unknowable, except insofar as it is possible to know him without the mediation of form. The most acute difficulty, however, emerges from religious concerns. The perfection of God is expressed as pure act, but pure act appears to be devoid of all receptivity. Receptivity is understood in terms of passive potentiality, which pure act emphatically excludes. Besides, divine perfection must be unchanging, for that which is already perfect can only change for the worse. Yet receptivity to the world and to our sorrows and achievements is undeniably part of divine perfection, as Charles Hartshorne has eloquently shown us years ago.8 He speaks for a widespread contemporary sensitivity, a sensitivity implicitly acknowledged hy ingenious attempts to affirm such personal receptivity while at the same time preserving the classical immutability of God.4 In addition, if none of our achievements are received into the divine life and have an effect upon his, they seem lacking in any ultimate significance . Though in itself pure self-giving activity, the Thomistic God of pure act, because utterly devoid of all receptivity, strikes many of our contemporaries just as static and unyielding as the unity of pure form. Thomas succeeded in transforming pure act from pure form to pure activity. We must now complete the transformation by reconceiving this activity in a way so as to include receptivity. 195~), chapter five, and The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1956), chapter one. •The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale Univerity Press, 1948). •See particularly W. Norris Clarke, S. J. "A New Look at the Immutability of God," in God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Robert J. Roth, S. J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1978) , and my response, " The Immutable God and Father Clarke " in The New Scholasticism, 49...

Particulars in Phaedo, 95e — 107a

In this paper there are two claims that I wish to defend. One is that in Socrates’ much discussed “causal” theory concrete particulars are more central than Forms. The other is that these concrete particulars are held by Plato to be not simply bundles of characteristics, not mere meeting-points of Forms, but independent individuals, existing in their own right.It will not, I believe, be questioned that from one point of view the prime concern of the Phaedo is with concrete particulars; not with Forms, characteristics, or anything else. For, the overriding aim of the dialogue is, surely, to persuade us each to care for his own soul; it is for this reason that arguments are put forward to show that souls are indestructible. But there is no doubt that these souls are particulars.

Frithjof Schuon's The Transcendent Unity of Religions: Pro

HAVE not seen Richard Bush's review, but he has informed me of the points he intends to make. I welcome the invitation of the Editor of the JAAR to respond to these points, and for a specific reason. Schuon's position polarizes. Part of me regrets this, for I enjoy togetherness as much as the next man. But if the togetherness is not going to be on my side which is to say, if it isn't going to happen polarization can be useful throwing differences into sharp relief. In the almost diametrically opposite responses of Bush and myself to Schuon's book I see a window onto the central theological divide, not of our time only, but of all times. The divide is between spiritual constitutions; spiritual types or dispositions, if you will. And because it is fundamental to the book question, I shall summarize it before remarking on Professor Bush's critique. In Schuon's vocabulary, the types are esoteric and exoteric. Esoterics are persons whose key meanings are more abstract than are those of exoterics. Abstract here is not, however, opposed to concrete if the latter means that which is fully real. Or to be precise, for esoterics it is not thus opposed, this being precisely the divide. For esoterics, universals with their generality and abstractness are more real than are the particulars that embody them. For exoterics they are less real. The distinction arises Christianity to cite the case closest to home because theologically it can stabilize at a number of points along the concrete-to-abstract continuum. Where fact it does dig in depends on the spiritual type (exoteric or esoteric) of the Christian question. For the Disciples the focus was originally Jesus of Nazareth; later it became the Risen Christ. Still later Christ was identified as the Logos, while for certain mystics the Logos itself derives from the Godhead which exceeds it categorically. The meanings these several specifications flow into and to some extent condition one another, but this does not alter the fact that minds differ the point on the continuum where they find reality centering and from which, consequently, meaning ultimately derives. As theology works its way from particulars toward universals, from the specific toward the general, exoterics arrive earlier than esoterics at a point where they feel that meaning is becoming attenuated. Why attenuated? Because the longer the ladder of abstraction the shakier its grip on the ground from which meaning for exoterics rises: the terrafirma of concrete particularity. In Christendom this terra firma is the historical Jesus. From this fundamental distinction a number of corollaries follow: 1. Exoterism, planted firmly the spatio-temporal world which is at once (a)

Ideology and Literature

OW CAN LITERATURE be ideological? Should we admit that all cultural creations-including literature-have an ideological dimension? Ideology is a concern of sociology and other social sciences. But all sciences attempt to reach more cumulative and verifiable knowledge by generalization and abstraction, by explanation and prediction. In sharp contrast, literary knowledge is rightly concerned with unique, concrete particulars. And literary criticism is concerned with explaining how literary treatment of some of these concrete particulars sometimes creates aesthetic objects. Thus it would seem that the attempt to do science, and the attempt to do literary history or literary criticism, are projects that can only be paradoxically conjoined. As a discipline sociology is distinguished by locating causes among differential characteristics of group membership (e.g., socioeconomic class, ethnicity, religion, etc.) and locating effects among differential rates of group life conditions or behavior (e.g., voting behavior, sexual behavior, rates of suicide or homicide or mental illness, etc.). The point here is that by its very nature sociology operates at the group level, and has nothing to say about any one individual or individual subjectivity. But it is precisely this individual subjectivity (actual or fictional) which is of central concern to the literary artist or the literary critic. As a result, literary craftsmen or critics are likely to meet the attempt at a sociology of literature with considerable suspicion. What follows is a critique and evaluation of three theoretical models developed by Karl Marx, Georg Lukics, and Lucien Goldmann for the analysis of ideology and literature. Together with a few explanatorypredictive hypotheses, these three models make up the theoretical core of the new discipline of sociology of literature. As I have shown elsewhere,' Marx uses a three-factor notion of ideology, as falsity, role, and isomorphism. For him an ideology is not a new object or symbol, but a way of examining cultural creations along

Aristotle: the Growth and Structure of His Thought (review)

Book Reviews Aristotle: the Growth and Structure of His Thought. By G. E. R. Lloyd. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Pp. ix+324. $7.00) When one sees yet another book on the philosophy of Aristotle, one is entitled to ask, why has this book been written? The answer Lloyd gives to this question is, to provide an introductory study of Aristotle's thought which will be useful to undergraduates in philosophy and to that dwindling (if not mythological) class of interested laymen. Insofar as Lloyd has dealt with the variety of philosophical and scientific enterprises which Aristotle concerned himself with, he has satisfied his original intention . A secondary concern is to show the development of Aristotle's thought d la J. E. Raven's short work on Plato's Thought in the Making. As one might expect, Lloyd deals with the early influence of Plato on Aristotle and the gradual breaking away of Aristotle from this standpoint, especially in regard to his concern with empirical data, ta phainfmena, or the problematic opinions of men in general. The author divides his study into a brief discussion of the early writings of Aristotle, the development of the Lyceum (there is such a great deal of space spent on this subject that one wonders what kind of introductory students of Aristotle the author has in mind), the 'evolution' of Aristotle's fundamental presuppositions and metaphysical categories, the range of his interests, and discussions of most of his major works. While generally agreeing with Werner Jaeger's thesis concerning Aristotle's development , Lloyd holds that Jaeger's distinctions between Aristotle's dogmatism and his empiricism, his metaphysical concerns and his attention to research reveal an oversimplification of Aristotle's intellectual development. Although it is said (p. 41) that Aristotle adhered to Plato's theory of forms for only a relatively short period of time (since he rejected it in his early work On Forms), no mention is made of the account given of Plato's theory of forms in the Metaphysics, an account which stresses the concept of mathematical forms. The obvious discrepancy between the traditional accounts of the theory of the forms and Aristotle's delineation of it in the Metaphysics is rarely analyzed in Aristotelian studies even though it raises a number of questions about Aristotle's understanding of Plato, the nature of Plato's theory, or the evolution of the theory after Plato. At any rate, Lloyd provides a brief, but interesting, exposition of the development of Aristotle's thought in antagonism to Platonism. En passant, he makes some interesting comments about the notion of ousia. In ordinary Greek usage ousia meant wealth or property, consonant with the English usage, 'a man of substance'. However, Aristotle reversed the Platonic priorities by averring that substance in its primary sense meant 'this man', 'this individual'. A view diametrically opposed to the notion that invisible forms are prior to, and superior to, concrete particulars (pp. 52-53). Despite the brilliance of his analysis of the different modes of ousia, Lloyd quite rightly points out that the notion is ambiguous (e.g., matter is said [793 80 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY both to be and not to be ousia). The underlying paradox generated by Aristotle's view that particular beings are substances in the primary sense, but that knowledge (in the strictest sense) is of universal forms does, as Lloyd points out, lead to a fundamental problem in Aristotle's metaphysics. Unfortunately, the author has nothing illuminating to say about this problem. This is a persistent weakness in Lloyd's book: that is, everytime a serious problem is encountered in his analysis of Aristotle's thought he simply points to it and leaves the reader to work it out for himself. For this reason one will find little of interest in this study if one is looking for philosophical analysis. This might seem an unfair criticism of a book of this type, but it is legitimate if an author raises purely philosophical questions and not merely questions of textual accuracy. In regard to his biological studies, Lloyd maintains that Aristotle did not develop the concepts of form and matter or potentiality and actuality on the...

The Mayor of Casterbridge and the Old Testament's First Book of Samuel: A Study of Some Literary Relationships

From one standpoint, the major theme of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is not “character is fate” or “man against himself,” but rather it is the conflict between generations. This is a very ancient subject matter, one of the archetypal themes noted by the Jungian literary psychologist Maud Bodkin, who traces it in classical Greek drama and in Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear? In Hardy's novel the conflicting generations are represented by Michael Henchard, the middle-aged corn factor and mayor, and Donald Farfrae, the energetic young Scotchman whose two-fold abilities, “the commercial and the romantic” (p. 162), while exercised with the best of intentions, prove deadly to his patron. Because of the ineluctability of this theme, it is necessary that the affection between the two men should turn to hate and that Henchard, as the older, should go under. The special bitterness of Henchard's inevitable failure is perhaps Hardy's characteristically pessimistic contribution. But we might also relate this quality of bitterness to the lack—increasingly in Hardy's time and almost totally in ours—of a generally accepted religious outlook which could transform Henchard's sufferings into a mitigating ritual and his death into a sacrificial symbol. Whereas Lear dies in the bosom of his family, as it were, surrounded by both his living and dead relatives, in full view of an awed and edified audience, Henchard's death is hidden from the eyes of all men except the faithful “fool” Whittle, whose report is necessarily limited to a few concrete particulars. Under the circumstances, Elizabeth–Jane's “what bitterness lies there!” (p. 337) is, at least on one level of the narrative, a final comment which every reader must echo.

Generalization

Generalization as a principle of teaching mathematics is often neglected. We are not thinking here of generalization as simply a process of passing from particulars to generals; rather we wish to consider that attitude of mind which continually gives attention to the relations and significance of facts. Learning is a continuous process, a growth, a development, a passing from one thing to something else. In the process of learning there must be concrete particulars; these particulars are the means to intellectual growth and form the material of which knowledge is made. But so long as they remain just isolated particulars they are of little value, they are mere excitations and possible irritations. To be of value these particulars must be related, organized, given meaning and significance. The mere encyclopaedic collection of facts is not our conception of valuable learning; rather it is the interpreting and application of facts, the relation and organization of facts, the careful study of the meaning and significance of particulars which rounds out and carries forward the learning process. This continual seeking for significance and organization is generalization.