Empirical Self Research Articles

What is Necessary and What is Contingent in Kant’s Empirical Self?

How does Kant understand the representation of an empirical self? For Kant, the sources of the representation must be both a priori and a posteriori. Several scholars claim that the a priori part of the ‘self’ representation is supplied by the category of ‘substance,’ either a regular substance (Andrew Chignell), a minimal substance (Karl Ameriks) or a substance analog (Katharina Kraus). However, Kant opens the Paralogisms chapter by announcing that there is a thirteenth ‘transcendental’ concept or category: “We now come to a concept that was not entered in the above general list of transcendental concepts, and that must yet be classed with them … This is the concept – or, if one prefers, the judgment – I think.” (A341/B399). I argue that it is the ‘I think’ that provides the a priori framework for the representation of the empirical self.

Editorial Introduction: Poetics of Self-construal in Postcolonial Literature

How man is made and how he makes himself was at the crux of the anthropological inquiry launched by Immanuel Kant in his 1798 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The subsequent story of the discipline, progressively aided by others, both from the field of humanities (philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethnography) and of sciences (biology, physics, physiology, psychiatry), followed one or the other paths opened by the Königsberg philosopher. The self grounded in physiology is considered by Kant egoistic, self-centred and motivated by irrational drives: involuntary perception, subconscious associations, arbitrary taste or unaccountable desires. On the contrary, the pragmatic self is historically and culturally generated in an individual who has a motivation and a purpose in his effort to civilize himself, living in the spirit of law and morality. As values transcend the empirical self and are shared in common with peers, these constitutive states and activities of the psyche point to the existence of a common human nature which, however, changes across time and space.

Friedrich Schleiermachers Monologen und der Athenaeums-Kreis Wirkungsabsicht und Wirkungswandel einer frühromantischen Schrift

Abstract Schleiermacher’s anonymous Soliloquies of 1800 were written as a Supplement to his likewise anonymous book On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers of 1799. They are addressed to the circle of intellectuals around the early Romantic periodical Athenaeum, to the „Holy family“ (Friedrich Schlegel), and moreover to the despisers of Transcendental philosophy whose state of discussion is reflected. Thus they belong to the history of modern individual thought. The form of the book follows the contemporary imitation of classical poetic form (Hölderlin) which was prevalent among the Athenaeum Circle as well. Schleiermacher discusses the separation of philosophy and life (Fichte), the forming one’s self and the forming of artistic works (Goethe), i. e. the dichotomy of individuality and artistry. He confesses himself not to be an artist. Schleiermacher’s intention in Soliloquies was to give philosophical idealism a personal depth beyond intellectual speculation. Looking back in 1803 he realizes, in the draft of a poem, that he had idealized his empirical self in his literary self. Except for a few remarks by Schlegel, who at first did not umask the author‘s anonymity, there was no reaction whatever from the Athenaeum Circle. Soliloquies later became a popular Protestant book for spiritual edification.

CROSS-CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN THE SELF

Self may be considered with the content given in the cultural model, and it is also possible to consider the empirical self, from the point of view of subjective experience. Some researchers often, equating cultural concepts of the self (which may be idealized) with the empirical self, thereby they exaggerate the distinction between the “Western” self and the “non-Western” self, of which the former being considered as individualized, egocentric, and autonomous, while the latter is relational, sociocentric in nature. By studying both Western and non-Western people the author makes highly predictable the exaggeration of the sharp differences often drawn between “Western” and “non-Western” selfies. In some contexts, relational self has been found among Americans and autonomous self have been found among Toraja (Indonesia). Thus, according to the researches data, it is possible to assume that cultural models of the self can not directly reflect the subjective experiences of individuals who belong to this culture.

Aesthetic Experience in Self-identifying Perspective

This article reveals the relationship between individual self-awareness, an aesthetic attitude to reality, and art. The basis of the study of their relationship is the analysis of empirical self- consciousness or everyday consciousness, which differs from the pure self-consciousness presented in the classical philosophical tradition. Consideration of features of worldview construction in everyday life and aesthetic orientation of everyday consciousness allows, on the one hand, the reconsideration of the role of art in the formation of personality, and on the other hand, the revelation of the illusory nature of the classical view of the “I” as a monolithic, substantial unity. Contemporary art in particular stimulates us to play with images of the “I,” but at the same time it teaches us to keep distance between game situations and what is constitutive in relation to the “I,” allowing us to consolidate an integral image of ourselves in personality. Art goes beyond museums, actively invades the world of everyday life, and elicits the question of how much we have mastered the “art of being ourselves.”

The hammer, the mallet, and the nail

The hammer, the mallet, and the nail

Why Schizophrenia Is so Relevant to Enaction and to Clinical Ethics: Naturalizing the Transcendental and the Risk of Stigmatizing

Why Schizophrenia Is so Relevant to Enaction and to Clinical Ethics:Naturalizing the Transcendental and the Risk of Stigmatizing Daria Dibitonto (bio) The mutual interest between embodied cognitive sciences, in particular enactivism, and phenomenological psychopathology has significantly increased in the last 15 years (Colombetti, 2013; Dibitonto, 2014; Fuchs, 2009; Fuchs, Sattel, & Henningsen, 2010; Parnas et al., 2011; Sass & Parnas, 2003, 2007; Sass, Parnas, Zahavi, 2011; Stanghellini, 2004). Gipps's article contributes to this field of research by defining ego boundaries in an enactivist framework to explain how the distinction self-other emerges and is maintained in ordinary healthy conditions, and how it is weakened and impaired in cases of schizophrenia. Gipps's first tenet is: The ego-boundary is enacted equiprimordially with experience, that is, it coarises with the self's perception of its world. Nevertheless, it cannot be considered a mere part of experience, as it is rather its condition of possibility: the ego-boundary is a formal and transcendental (i.e. structural and constitutive) aspect of experi ence. The corresponding schizophrenia-tenet is: schizophrenic disturbances of the ego-boundary are disturbances of alterity: primary disturbances of the very constitution of the self as it arises in defining itself in contradistinction to a perceived other or to a perceived environment. The enactivist account is then presented as an ontological account, describing biologically existing phenomena that are, as such, naturalistically investigable - in contrast to the mainstream epistemological account that considers schizophrenia as a theoretical construct. For example, instead of regarding voice-hearing or thought insertion as failures in self-awareness (in the form of a mistaken inference: "I am not aware of being the author of this piece of inner mulling, therefore it must be ego alien"), the enactivist account regards such phenomena as truly and originally ego-alien, as constituted ab initio as non-ego. According to Gipps, subjective feelings of 'ontological insecurity' (Laing, 1959), [End Page 107] such as "I cannot know whether I exist" (Hesnard, 1909), thus correspond to a de facto disordered constitution of the ego-boundary. Gipps's account shows the theoretical usefulness of the distinction between the empirical (lived) ego and transcendental (structural and constitutive) ego. As Gipps explicitly mentions this key philosophical point, it is odd that there are no references to Blankenburg's The Loss of Natural Self-Evidence (1971). Regarding the constitution of the self, Blankenburg differentiates the natural, empirical, experiencing self, from the transcendental self that structures one's experiences. The clinical relevance of this theoretical distinction is that it allows us to distinguish between neurotic and schizophrenic insecurity: neurotic insecurity pertains to the empirical self, whereas schizophrenic insecurity concerns the transcendental self. A disorder in the empirical self does not imply a disorder in the transcendental self—and vice versa. The schizophrenic patient can indeed show a certain self-assurance (or reassurance), especially regarding delusions or hallucinations, whereas the neurotic patient can be highly insecure without any weakening of her ego-boundary (Blankenburg, 1971, 100–101). But Blankenburg, even though he considers the relation between the empirical and transcendental self as a continuous, dynamical process, repeatedly underlines the a priori character of the transcendental self: it is something occurring "before" the empirical self. His patient Anne for instance precisely complains of the lack of something preceding experience which she calls something "before that," before that ordinary practical understanding also known as "common sense." Blankenburg thus shows the relevance of the a priori for the life-world by engaging with psychopathology: according to him the structuring self can be experienced in its a priori function only when it is weakened or disordered; otherwise it is transparent to experience (Blankenburg, 1971, pp. 83–92). Following Blankenburg's view, it is then doubtful that the transcendental enaction of the ego-boundary is equiprimordial with experience, as Gipps maintains. This is a key theoretical point: if the transcendental self is no longer considered as an a priori given boundedness of the self, but rather as a self-boundary that is equiprimordially constituted with active and receptive experience, the transcendental level of experience as such can be reconceived as to become naturalistically investigable. Such enaction of the ego-boundary as equiprimordial with experience...

Генезис психологической суверенности: фактор порядка рождения

The ability to defend the boundaries of one’s empirical self — dispositional sovereignty — is a personality trait with a great adaptive value. It develops through the generalization of everyday actions aimed at protecting the boundaries in discrete situations with other people, first, with one’s family. This paper explores the role of sibling status (birth order) in the development of this trait. Two empirical studies were conducted. In the first of them, carried out with the participation of children aged from two to ten, it is shown that the most mature ways of protection are for only children in the family, the least mature are the first children, and the second children in the family demonstrate an intermediate level of development of boundary protection skills. In the second study conducted on the youth sample, it is shown that the relationship between sovereignty and the order of birth depends on gender: sovereignty hits its peak among younger girls and older boys.

British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, edited by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou

Reviewed by: British Idealism and the Concept of the Self ed. by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou Adela Pinch (bio) British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, edited by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou; pp. xii + 335. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, £89.99, $119.99. It is not often that philosophy books are reviewed in the pages of Victorian Studies. While the authors in this collection of essays, British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, clearly feel they fight an uphill battle in encouraging their colleagues in their own discipline to take seriously what these Victorian writers can contribute to philosophical discussions about the nature of the self, my task is to persuade readers of this journal how relevant this book is to Victorian studies in other fields. Scholars of Victorian cultural history and literature have long pondered what is distinctive about what Victorians thought and felt about being, or having, a self, but recent decades have largely sent us running to empiricist psychology for answers. The work of associationists and physiologists such as Alexander Bain, George Henry Lewes, James Sully, and others has appealed because its principles chime well with our own: the self is located at the intersection of body and experience; it is a bundle of sensations, and hence contingent, fragmented, in flux. British Idealism and the Concept of the Self is a fine gateway drug for readers interested in learning about an alternative, adjacent body of thinking. The outstanding introduction by the editors, W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou, clearly lays out what is distinctive, intriguing, and challenging about ideas of the self in the major British Idealists treated in the book: James Frederick Ferrier, F. H. Bradley, Edward Caird, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, R. G. Collingwood, and J. M. E. McTaggart. Mander and Panagakou provide historical background for the flourishing of Idealism in Victorian Britain: it arose not only from the impact of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, but also from dissatisfaction with the shriveled understanding of self implicit in empiricist theories of knowledge, and with the narrowed ethical responsibilities for the self under utilitarianism. In response, the Victorian Idealists crafted concepts of a self that—while immanent in the empirical self—exists fundamentally outside of time and space. By positing a self that is "connected with the spiritual world of values which expands before and beyond their immediate existence," they sought above all to provide a new model for the self's relation to community (158). The sequence of the fourteen essays in British Idealism and the Concept of the Self largely follows chronology, and moves as well from historically focused pieces on individual philosophers to broader essays that address the ways the Victorian and early-twentieth-century [End Page 494] British Idealists speak to enduring philosophical issues. Thus, for example, in the first essay, Jenny Keefe explains how and why the earliest Victorian Idealist, Ferrier, devoted An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness (1838–39) to demolishing the notion of the "mind" that was the object of study in the empiricist psychology of the era, and to replacing it with philosophical reflection on the nature of subjectivity. Thence follow several essays each on the central figures of the 1870s and 1880s—Bradley, Caird, Green, and Bosanquet—focusing in many cases on the relation between these writers' metaphysics of the self and their ethical and political thought. They argued that if there is to be an ethics of free will, personal agency, and responsibility, there must be a continuous, non-contingent self. In the last of the author-focused essays, Gary L. Cesarz considers the ways in which McTaggart's account of the self as immaterial substance (in Some Dogmas of Religion [1906], but I would add "The Further Determination of the Absolute" [1890]) solves some logical problems in both materialist and social-constructionist accounts of the self, both then and now. In my view, the chapter that may be most helpful in clarifying what was at stake in the Victorian Idealists' non-empirical self is Mander's penultimate summary essay, "Idealism and the True Self." If one of the surprises in this book...

Autoficção e experiência em O pai da menina morta, de Tiago Ferro

Resumo Com base nos conceitos de “experiência do fora” de Maurice Blanchot e “experiência interior” de Georges Bataille, neste artigo analiso o deslocamento do sujeito para o fora no romance O pai da menina morta, de Tiago Ferro. Embora Blanchot recuse o Eu que fala na obra literária e seu discurso pessoal, proponho, ainda assim, como chave de leitura, a autoficção, que se concretiza no texto não como recurso estilístico e crítico (como se observa com frequência na literatura contemporânea), mas enquanto deslocamento do eu empírico do escritor para outro, dando origem a um duplo que não mais remete a um real precedente e tampouco constitui uma cópia, cujo sentido só se concretiza com o leitor e sua experiência pessoal que preencherá os espaços vazios da narrativa. Objetivo demonstrar, portanto, como as duas leituras não são contraditórias, mas complementares na medida em que o centro da narrativa está no deslocamento, depois da experiência de perda vivenciada pelo personagem anônimo e sua necessidade de se ajustar diante da ausência. A partir de sua própria experiência, Ferro cria um romance lírico e fragmentado que, nascido da morte, busca pelo que ainda resta de vivo nesse sujeito que não quer, e nem pode, ser chamado de Eu.

Poesia, experiência e autobiografia: João Cabral e a “Descoberta da Literatura”

O objetivo deste artigo é propor uma leitura do poema “Descoberta da literatura”, de João Cabral de Melo Neto, que, pela tematização da memória da infância, parece destoar da poesia cabralina, avessa à expressão lírica do eu. Para tal, apontamos que a noção de pacto autobiográfico, formulada por Philippe Lejeune, é insuficiente para dar conta da complexidade do fenômeno do eu lírico quanto a sua relação com o eu empírico. Desse modo, apresentamos uma leitura que desloca o foco dos elementos autobiográficos do eu empírico para enfatizar uma determinada experiência literária e intelectual do poeta, sobretudo a importância da literatura popular na construção desse itinerário poético.

The Politics of Escapistry: Harry Houdini, Nostalgia, and the Turn from Critique in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Politics of Escapistry:Harry Houdini, Nostalgia, and the Turn from Critique in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Iain Bernhoft (bio) Late in Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Joe Kavalier returns home from years of self-imposed exile with 102 boxes of old comics in tow. Having endured the Holocaust, warfare, and addiction, Joe loves these comics for the escape they offer: when he is immersed in their pages, the ever-present "pain of his loss … melted away without him even noticing" (576). "[S]uch a feat of escape," the narrator declares, is "the genuine magic of art," and the fact that escapism "remain[s] so universally despised" indicates only how "fucked-up and broken" the real world is. In Kavalier & Clay, Chabon aims to correct this injustice by illuminating the therapeutic value of escapist entertainments. A defense of entertainment features prominently throughout Chabon's writing, as he consistently puts popular genres to serious purposes [End Page 1] (for instance, detective fiction in The Final Solution, or hardboiled in The Yiddish Policemen's Union).1 The politics and consequences of this escapism, however, merit closer consideration. Kavalier & Clay tells the story of Sammy Klayman, a Jewish teen in Brooklyn, and his Czech cousin Josef Kavalier, who arrives in New York as a refugee from Hitler-occupied Europe. Pairing Joe's drawing skills with Sammy's knack for yarns and entrepreneurial spirit, they find success in creating comic books about a Superman-style magician, titled (after its hero) The Escapist. The novel follows the cousins through their personal and professional maturation as they navigate the mass-culture industry, World War II, family, midlife crisis, and the McCarthy years. When Joe abandons his life in New York to join the war, the closeted Sammy marries Joe's pregnant lover Rosa and raises Joe's son as his own, preserving (with Rosa) a dwindling role in the comic book industry. Throughout, Kavalier & Clay underscores the idea that the primary good of imaginative entertainment is escapism, which it serves up in an immersive, harmoniously ordered narrative that reaches a satisfying closure. Criticism on Kavalier & Clay has largely taken for granted its premises concerning the merits of escapism, reading the novel as a vehicle for addressing representational issues of graphic narrative or post-Holocaust fiction. Marc Singer argues that the novel demonstrates how the literalized tropes of comics "have proven effective at embodying the real through hypostasis" because they offer a representative strategy for "transcending the symbolic" (275). Andrzej Gąsiorek views Kavalier & Clay as offering through ekphrasis "a meta-account of the act of creation itself," which thereby self-reflexively speaks to the dilemmas of post-Holocaust fiction (877). In a similar vein, Hillary Chute presents Kavalier & Clay as asking "how one responds to or registers history—especially traumatic history—in a popular medium" (280). She suggests that through graphic narrative it "enumerat[es] the new possibilities of popular forms to confront and articulate history" (291). This favorable disposition toward escapism, manifested by Kavalier & Clay and its critics, points to a larger trend in contemporary literary and cultural discourse: namely, the ongoing elevation of popular entertainment. So-called serious literature increasingly adopts the forms of genre fiction, while fantasy is lauded as a critically valuable activity precisely for its capacity to depart from existing conditions. Distinct from the postmodern blurring of high and low culture, this turn calls into question the superiority of critical distance to affective immersion. Seeking alternatives to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick dubs the "tracing-and-exposure" habit of critical hermeneutics, a [End Page 2] number of scholars have offered accounts of literature's function and relevance beyond critique (124). These approaches—surface reading, affect theory, the new sincerity—aim to "engage seriously with ordinary motives for reading," not the least of which is escape from the limits of quotidian life and the self (Felski 14). As Charles Altieri argues, "many readers see their interest in reading precisely as an opportunity to escape the empirical self, to undergo through imagination protean changes of identity and sympathy" (29). Imaginative escape from the self, the thinking goes, fosters greater empathy, sensitivity, and...

Towards a literary account of mental health from James' Principles of Psychology

Abstract The field of mental health tends to treat its literary metaphors as literal realities with the concomitant loss of vague “feelings of tendency” in “unusual experiences”. I develop this argument through the prism of William James’ (1890) “The Principles of Psychology”. In the first part of the paper, I reflect upon the relevance of James' “The Psychologist's Fallacy” to a literary account of mental health. In the second part of the paper, I develop the argument that “connotations” and “feelings of tendency” are central to resolving some of the more difficult challenges of this fallacy. I proceed to do this in James' spirit of generating imaginative metaphors to understand experience. Curiously, however, mental health presents a strange paradox in William James’ (1890) Principles of Psychology . He constructs an elaborate conception of the “empirical self” and “stream of thought” but chooses not to use these to understand unusual experiences – largely relying instead on the concept of a “secondary self.” In this article, I attempt to make more use of James' central division between the “stream of thought” and the “empirical self” to understand unusual experiences. I suggest that they can be usefully understood using the loose metaphor of a “binary star” where the “secondary self” can be seen as an “accretion disk” around one of the stars. Understood as literary rather the literal, this metaphor is quite different to more unitary models of self-breakdown in mental health, particularly in its separation of “self” from “the stream of thought” and I suggest it has the potential to start a re-imagination of the academic discourse around mental health.

Against Autobiography: Henri Matisse's Essays on Art

This article examines Henri Matisse's essays on art as a form of life writing that eschews autobiography. It is argued that in his early essays Matisse used the written word to communicate an image of the self that was devoid of personal detail and to counter biographical approaches to the interpretation of artworks that had reached a height in French critical literature about the arts during the nineteenth century. Illustrating this point, a parallel is drawn between concepts of the self expressed in Matisse's writings and Marcel Proust's Against Sainte-Beuve. The article traces Matisse's growing suspicion of the written word and examines his identification of the transcendental ego as the organizing principle of the artwork. Finally, a thematic continuity is proposed between Matisse's ‘Notes of a Painter’ (1908) and his artist's book Jazz (1947). Jazz is interpreted as the culmination of a form of life writing begun in the earlier essay in its use of handwriting to serve two contrasting purposes: the narration of an empirical (autobiographical) self and the staging of a transcendental (artistic) self. Writing is cast as a form of physical making and becomes simultaneously a demonstration of, and reflection on, the unique ‘handwork’ (‘signe-main’) of the artist.

The Poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez: An Example of Modern Subjectivity by Julio Jensen (review)

Reviewed by: The Poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez: An Example of Modern Subjectivity by Julio Jensen John C. Wilcox Jensen, Julio. The Poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez: An Example of Modern Subjectivity. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum, 2012. Pp. 211. ISBN 978-87-635-3647-9. In The Poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez: An Example of Modern Subjectivity, Julio Jenson has crafted a philosophical reading of subjectivity in Jiménez’s “obra.” His thoroughly painstaking, in-depth, even fastidious analysis is structured, he writes, around the split between an “absolute self” of plenitude and “an empirical self” of transience. In broad terms, the first half of his monograph focuses on Juan Ramón’s spatial metaphors and symbols, while the second half reflects on time and temporal figures. There is a detailed reading of texts that manifest a dichotomous subject: heaven/earth, sacred/profane, sun/moon polarities. This is followed by a demonstration of the fact that space in Jiménez’s work is “intrinsically dynamic” because the lyrical subject is forever projecting on to spatial imagery his infinite longing for perfection. Jensen, then, proceeds to discuss the notion that pantheism permits an empirical subject to participate in a cosmic totality and thereby avails itself of an “anonymous voice” to express the self-consciousness of the universe. He also argues that the perfection achieved in numerous parts of Jiménez’s work should be seen as “monadic” plenitude: a perfect fullness that recurs eternally as, and when, future readers intuit such ecstatic fullness in their multifarious readings. Jensen also contrasts the lyrical subject’s construction of an atemporal, self-enclosed, aesthetic realm with the agonized realization, achieved in the poet’s late work, of the need to reconfigure such a realm in every moment of creative time (for example, “Estás viniendo hacia mi imán” from Animal de fondo). Added to this is an intriguing reading of the Diario in whose texts, Jensen argues, the lyrical subject attains an “ahistorical temporality” (as opposed, for example, to merely annotating an autobiographical snippet of a fleeting New York experience). A final chapter focuses on the concept of the “obra” itself: on the one hand, it expresses the perfection achieved by a divine, atemporal “I”; on the other, it will express, in Juan Ramón’s late work, a fragmentation of the self that is impossible to overcome. Readers can encounter in this study a variety of thought-provoking insights and fascinating ideas. In addition, they can benefit, in each one of these six chapters, from the numerous, patient textual explications Jensen provides from every phase—early, mid, and late—of Jiménez’s poetic evolution. But, in all likelihood, it will be readers who are at ease with modern European philosophical thought on subjectivity (and its dense manner of expression) who will derive inspiration and satisfaction from this study. If Jensen had managed to present these thoughts in terms more accessible to those in literature rather than philosophy, his work would, no doubt, have reached a wider audience. A further caveat concerns the author’s oversight of prior readings of Jiménez’s poetry. A single example must suffice: Jensen lists this reviewer’s 1987 Self and Image in Juan Ramón Jiménez in his bibliography but never once addresses it in his monograph; as Jensen advances a reading of Espacio’s “Fragmento Tercero” that is comparable to this reviewer’s, such an omission could raise serious questions. Hence, if Julio Jensen had incorporated into his analyses much more prior criticism of the Jiménez opus, his contribution to the field would have been stronger. John C. Wilcox University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA Copyright © 2013 American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, Inc

Aesthetics of Affects

(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Charles Altieri on Aesthetics of Affects. Mr Aryal is focusing on what can affect tell us about expression of value, judgment, subjectivity and aesthetic experience itself in literature.) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Y. A.: You wrote on your homepage also recently wrote a book on the affects and that shapes my thinking on most topics. But I am in transition. I have been teaching Shakespeare and Hegel and will teach the epic because I want a stage on which to figure out what I can say about affect in literature. What kind of transition are you talking about? Does this transition signal the change in your position of theory of meaning in interpretation of literature? What is that grand stage, which allows you to say something in literature, which was not possible before? C. A.: I felt I was in transition in many respects. I had written all I had to say about feeling and about mood. I did not feel I had anything original to say about other affective states. And I was dismayed that the position setting emotion against subjectivity seemed to dominate literary theory while philosophers did not even mention my book in their bibliographies. I also knew that what I was writing on Wallace Stevens was probably pretty good, but after that I thought I would have nothing new to say about Modernism and Modernist writers. This is the negative side. Positively I wanted to teach Shakespeare and the epic because any literary theory seems to me to have to fully appreciate the many aspects of such work. And it, along with my continuing fascination with Wittgenstein, has considerably transformed my thinking. The most important change is that I want to talk about values and valuing rather than affect per se. Much of affect theory can be focused on how we make valuations, since value seems to me to depend on feeling plus a reflection that wants the feeling to continue or appreciates where it is leading. My dream is to reconsider formalist claims as in fact claims about invitations to perform acts of valuing. Then formalism is not an instrument for securing autonomy but rather an education in distinctive possibilities for aligning our senses of value with what occurs as we read. And the patterns in our valuings tend to produce an actual orientation toward what we take as significant values worth fighting for and adapting in general contexts. Also reading those texts makes me think about how almost all literary theory seeks ways of talking about the worldliness of the text. We argue really only about to what degree this worldliness can or should be based distinctively on modes of reading and engaging the work that we can teach as literary and so shared by texts from different historical epochs. For me this worldliness is captured best by theories of expression, that is theories trying to explain how self-consciousness can take overt responsibility for what had been inchoate senses of who one is that become articulate in the process of writing. I do not equate self-consciousness with individual characters or authors but it is a property of the sources of energy and direction that seem to thrive on increasing levels of articulation that the text can take on. Expressive self-consciousness is more capacious than any empirical self in part because it takes in part the role of force demanding emotional investment and projecting possible futures for what is given in the text. No one can read far in Shakespeare or in the epic without having to face the roles of grief and mourning in literary experience. But also no one can read far in those works without also feeling the need to be able to talk about how these works also try to contextualize such grief as a condition of seeking through art more capacious forms of self-consciousness that are oriented toward collective modes of awareness. I find Hegel obviously our greatest thinker about what expression involves. …

O exercício da epoché e as variações do transcendente na fenomenologia de Edmund Husserl

The epoche is initially on what is transcendent in the sense of what is outside intellectual experience. Attention is focused on what is revealed in the cogitatio. But Husserl goes beyond of the so-called “certainty of cogitatio” by generalizing the suspension of judgment. The transcendent is to be understood as the domain where we cannot eliminate the possibility of doubt as to the position of existence of things and the empirical self. Despite immanence, the intended object does not lose, in its reduced version, its otherness. We then see a third use of the term “transcendent”. This reduction reveals a new dimension of the relationship between consciousness and the world, preventing authentic immanent objectivity from disappearing. Key words: phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, consciousness, world, transcendent.

Tradução behaviorista do conceito jamesiano de eu

Realizou-se um estudo comparativo entre os conceitos de eu tal como formulados pelos psicólogos William James (1842-1910) e B. F. Skinner (1904-1990). No caso de James, a fonte foi o capítulo “The consciousness of self” de sua obra The principles of psychology, a partir do qual se relataram os constituintes do eu empírico, a reflexão do autor sobre o ego puro e a descrição dos sentimentos, emoções e ações do eu. No caso de Skinner, as fontes foram a seção “The individual as a whole”, da obra Science and human behavior, e o capítulo “Thinking”, da obra Verbal behavior, além de alguns outros artigos. Traduziu-se o conceito de eu de James em referência a contingências de reforço: o eu material em termos de filogênese e ontogênese, o eu social em termos de controle de estímulo, o eu espiritual como repertório modelado pela comunidade verbal e o ego puro no contexto dos três níveis de seleção do comportamento humano. Palavras-chave: eu, William James, B. F. Skinner, behaviorismo radical, fluxo de pensamento.

Thinking and Unconscious Nineteenth-Century German Thought (review)

Reviewed by: Thinking and Unconscious Nineteenth-Century German Thought Thomas L. Cooksey Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher (eds.), Thinking and Unconscious Nineteenth-Century German Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ix + 327 pp. Concepts of the unconscious are central to most contemporary developments in dynamic psychology, psychopathology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. They have also assumed a prominent position in modern culture, shaping our views on ethics, aesthetics, and the nature of the self. Much of this derives from the influence of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and by extension Lacan. That said, the notion of the unconscious, as Sonu Shamdasani points out in the epilogue to this book, remains problematic. Given the role of Freud and Jung in our contemporary thinking on the matter, an examination of the philosophical, scientific, and literary contexts provides an important jumping off place for a fuller treatment of the concept of the unconscious, illuminating the complexities of this contested ground. Nicholls and Liebscher have commissioned ten essays and an epilogue by leading scholars that explore various competing conceptualizations, broadly tracing their interrelated developments. The results are deeply informed and uniformly stimulating. While versions of an unconscious can be attributed to philosophers as early as Plato or St. Augustine, the modern formulations began in response to Descartes’s equation of the self with the res cogitans (the thinking thing), and his claim that it would be logically impossible to be conscious of something unconscious. Leibniz tried to preserve this position with his petites perceptions, perceptions of which we are actually conscious, but only collectively, much as we hear the roar of the ocean, but not the individual waves. Others such as Wolff argued in Cartesian terms that there are “dark” places in the soul, matters we are conscious of, but that are not clear and distinct, a position that anticipates Kant’s “dark thoughts” (dunkle Vorstellungen) and the splitting of the subject. It was the nineteenth century and the romantic response to the Enlightenment that marked a profound turn, spurring subsequent developments in concepts of the unconscious. Following the scheme laid out by Günther Gödde in his discussion of Freud (chapter 10), Nicholls and Liebscher distinguish three lines of influence. The first, beginning with Leibniz, focuses on the unconscious in relation to cognitive thresholds. In this line Michael Heidelberger (chapter 8) offers a detailed discussion [End Page 301] of Gustav Fechner’s psychophysics, which built partly on Schelling and partly on Johann Friedrich Herbart’s “laws of the threshold,” to trace a continuity between the physical and the psychological, rejecting metaphysical claims. The second line of influence derives from romanticism, relating the unconscious to the irrational and the role of a larger a priori mind. Paul Bishop (chapter 1) discusses this in relation to Goethe and the dialectic between time and pleasure, that is, our awareness of desires for things in the future which were past, but not in the present consciousness. Andrew Bowie (chapter 2) addresses Schelling’s version of the unconscious in terms of our aesthetic awareness of the non-conceptual. Nicholls (chapter 3) examines both the centrality, but also the ambivalence of Goethe’s shifting views, partly linking the unconscious to a Spinozian pantheism and partly to a source of genius. Finally, Rüdiger Görner (chapter 4) surveys versions of the unconscious in relation to a subconscious among the romantics and its role in the agency of the self. The remaining chapters deal with aspects of a third line of influence, representing reactions against the German idealism of Fichte and Hegel, and Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. In this there was a desire to distance notions of the mind from philosophy, and a movement toward a monistic continuity between the mind and the world. Christopher Janeway (chapter 5) addresses Schopenhauer and the unconscious will. Matthew Bell (chapter 6) turns to the physician, philosopher, painter, Carl Gustav Carus, the first to make the unconscious central to a theory of mind as a way of addressing the problem of how a subject (soul) could transcend the subject’s empirical self. Sebastian Gardner (chapter 7) examines the theories of the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann’s influential but problematic Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten...

William Blake on Self and Soul by Laura Quinney

98 BOOK REVIEWS tionship of that history to philosophy, religion, and the process of secular­ ization. Robert Mitchell Duke University Laura Quinney. William Blake on Selfand Soul. Cambridge, MA, and Lon­ don, UK: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. xx+195. $39.95. The historical and political drive of much recent Blake scholarship, one might argue, treats Blake as a historical curiosity, the province ofspecialists, with little relevance to a wider readership. Laura Quinney’s book has the virtue of treating Blake as a writer who addresses an issue of universal con­ cern. It identifies his central theme as the confusion and unhappiness inher­ ent in the very experience of selfhood. In defining her approach to this issue, Quinney has little time for those who simply view “the discourses ofsoul, self, and subject as anachronisms.” According to Quinney, such a view is “malformed” because it tends to dis­ miss not only the theoretical models of selfhood but also “the actual experi­ ence of subjectivity”: The self supposed to be obsolete is the unitary subject, the integral, transcendent self linked to the traditional religious idea of the immor­ tal soul. I state categorically that the actual subject has never mistaken itself for a Subject of this kind. Modern skeptical thought congratu­ lates itselffor a work ofdemystification that the subject by virtue ofits subjectivity performs every day. (2) Her own approach rests upon a direct appeal to the ordinary experience of subjectivity, to an “actual ‘self’” that always “fails to coincide with its own self-definition” (2). Quinney implicitly sets this self apart from historicallyspecific modes of conceptualizing selfhood and from the changing histori­ cal conditions in which selfhood is experienced. The “actual experience” of mundane subjectivity is ultimately ahistorical and universal, and Quinney’s Blake, for all his obvious interest in the accumulating errors of history, seems ultimately to arrive at this view. In his earlier work, Blake may show that the major religions and philosophical movements of the West have built upon and strengthened the intuition of the self’s unhappiness, and that Empiricism and the New Science (for Blake “the most recent avatars of this error”) encourage the “I” “to regard itself as passive and helpless” (12). But Quinney insists that the subject would come to regard itself in this way “if Bacon and Newton and Locke had never existed” (14); and SiR, 51 (Spring 2012) BOOK REVIEWS 99 Blake, who in his later work becomes increasingly preoccupied with “self­ obstruction,” apparently concurs. There is a sense in which Blake must find this dire view ofselfhood un­ avoidable. Every attempt to imagine a “fall” must reveal that the potential for falling is already present within the unfallen condition. As The Book of Urizen demonstrates, Blake must place the symptoms of alienated selfhood within the condition of “Eternity” as well as at the end of a long and com­ plicated history of creation-as-fall. The problem of selfhood is inevitably both inside and outside of history, both a cause and a product of the fall. Indeed, in Blake’s poems the sense of alienation that produces the fall also reverberates through every stage of fallen history. His narratives of change are haunted by sameness-in-difference. Quinney’s approach boldly empha­ sizes the sameness at the expense of the differences. This works to produce a Blake who seems close to our own ordinary concerns, but it also leads to much simplification, and some distortion. The most striking virtues of Quinney’s approach are its clear focus and the consistent emphasis on issues that have perennial relevance. The limita­ tions arise from its evasion of complexities or historical contexts that might impede the clear outlines of her argument, or challenge its basic assump­ tions. Quinney’s tendency to emphasize sameness where others might stress difference extends to her use of terminology. At the outset, she decides to treat the terms “ego, self, inner life, phenomenal self, empirical self, central consciousness” as “synonymous” (xiv). This means that sometimes “empir­ ical self” refers to the historically-specific understanding of self fostered by seventeenth-century empiricists, and sometimes it refers simply to the de­ fault or universal experience of selfhood, so naturalizing the term...