Individual Protagonists Research Articles

Orientalism Reconsidered: Turkey in Barbara Frischmuth's Das Verschwinden des Schattens in der Sonne and Hanne Mede-Flock's Im Schatten der Mondsichel

Recent German criticism has demonstrated that the relationships of Austria and Germany with the "Orient" have been more complex than Edward Said's Orientalism makes it appear. Furthermore, Said only touches upon gender issues. Studies like Rana Kabbani's Europe's Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule explore the convergence of race, class, and gender in the conceptualization of the "Orient." Kabbani claims that in Elias Canetti's Die Stimmen von Marrakesch the narrator's identification with the colonizer's position enters into his representation of self as much as does his gender. My essay demonstrates how the Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth and the German writer Hanne Mede-Flock represent their female protagonists' interaction with the "Orient" as more complex and less "colonizing" than that of Canetti's narrator. While Frischmuth rewrites the Bildungsroman to subvert Eurocentric assumptions underlying travel literature, Mede-Flock goes one step further by taking the focus away from the individual protagonist and intellectual life in the city, and by representing the encounter with Turkey as political. However, Turkey remains a Eurocentric construct in the two novels, and their authors, by attempting to undermine some cultural stereotypes, unwittingly reinforce others.

Edward Gibbon and the Roman Empire

(1990). Edward Gibbon and the Roman Empire. The International History Review: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 105-110.

Kant und der Friede (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 273 my judgment, in the fact that he has limited the historical inquiry to the scholarly study of documents and discussions without showing those cultural, social, psychological, and economic motivations which formed an accompaniment to the individual protagonists of the discussions. The motivation for what a philosopher says is not justified by revealing only his most immediate opponent's name and ideas, but by showing, as Goldmann (La communautd humaine chez Kant, Paris, 1948) and, very briefly, Stark (The Sociology of Knowledge) did, the reason for his thinking and his presuppositional needs. In the case of Kant, it is obvious that we cannot leave out his pietist formation, the fears about the French Revolution and Hume's scepticism. The historicity of a study cannot be limited to the history of polemics or to the discovery of documents which, theoretically, add nothing to what an author has already stated in his works. The vast philological material Pupi has gathered, seems to me very good, and it represents, I think, the greatest value of Pupi's work, because of its usefulness in the field of the sociology of knowledge. And to this field I take the liberty of referring Pupi for an example of a method that is historical and not tautological. ANTONELLA GUARALDI Kant und der Friede. By Wilhelm Miiller. (Diisseldorf: Monitor-Verlag, 1962. Pp. 16.) Perpetual Peace records the noble and humane dream of an old man. Such dreams are not without historical precedent, but rarely have they been invested with the earnestness and the conceptual rigor of a Kant--even of a Kant in his declining years. This short essay is at the very least a minor but noteworthy contribution to political theory. Its main thesis call be simply stated. A truly lasting peace can be achieved only through the agency of a world federation of states operating under moral law. The moral law in question is an extension of the guiding principles of Kant's ethics from the private to the public sphere. It is contrary to the dictates of reason as well as of moral conscience to suppose that political order may be conceived or established apart from or even in opposition to moral law. A state or nation, Kant declares, is a free moral person, possessed of an inviolable integrity, not to be exploited as a thing for purposes of aggrandizement on the part of other states. Were that all that Perpetual Peace contained, the essay would stand as testimony to Kant's political idealism. But he pursues with equal seriousness the question of how such an ideal might be realized in practice. Underlying Kant's federalism is his republicanism, his insistence that the only sound civil constitution is one in which each citizen is free, equal, and fully represented under common law publicly promulgated. It is Kant's contention -perhaps less naive today than it might have seemed earlier in this century--that where the consent of the subjects is required, as it is under a republican form of government , to decide whether or not there shall be war, they may be expected to think twice before bringing such sufferings upon themselves. Further, Kant sees in the ever-tightening and expanding web of international relations a natural deterrent to war, since any war will increasingly involve most if not all of mankind. Both considerations appeal, not to the questionable good will of politicians, but to enlightened self-interest. Finally, Kant lays down a series of "preliminary articles" whose purpose is to specify the conditions without which perpetual peace, as things stand, will not even become a real possibility. Among the principles here formulated are that a peace treaty is invalid if made with secret reservations, that the autonomy and constitutional integrity of independent states must be preserved, that standing armies must gradually be abolished, that national debts shall not be contracted externally, and that in the event of war "dishonorable stratagems" such as assassination, 274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY poisoning, spying, etc., which would render postwar mutual confidence impossible, shall not be countenanced. It is mainly with an eye to these preliminary articles that Professor Wilhelm Miiller argues for Kant's relevance to contemporary...

Editorial: What Are the Biological Bases of Responsibility?

PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume V · Number ? · Spring 1962 EDITORIAL: WHAT ARE THE BIOLOGICAL BASES OF RESPONSIBILITY? On the ward ofan institution for the feeble-minded lies a boy with a small body and an enormous head filled with fluid whichhas compressed the braininto athinsheet. Nearby is an ambulatory young adult with a tiny head. In a nursing home an old man lies in restraint; he has lived a useful, exemplary life, but, now a victim ofa senile psychosis, he tries to kill. Almost all decisions are made for each person, but though they may protest feebly, nobody speaks for them or claims diat their rights as citizens are violated. Some who are feeble-minded or mentally ill have identifiable structural or biochemical defects ofthe brain which explain their behavior. But as far as the majority ofbrains ofthefeebleminded and the insane are concerned, there is no direct means of showing the ways in whichthey differ from thenormal. Society accepts the idea ofincompetenceand irresponsibility for the very young and for those designated as senile, feeble-minded, or insane. When is an individual responsible for his acts? Not all individuals who are medically insane arejudged incompetent by the courts. Sometimes individuals are freed ofresponsibility by the courts on the basis of false claims of insanity. Among the voters brought to the polls by the political machines ofour great cities are individuals with feeble minds and others with psychoses who have never been judged incompetent by the courts. In other parts ofthe country local courts may uphold devious means ofdepriving individuals oftheir legal rights solely because they are Negro. Most ofus think that we understand these levels ofcompetence and responsibility and the ways in which relevantjudgments ofthe law and society can go awry. But there are deeper questions which embrace all ofhuman conduct. Can biology bring new insights into ethics? I ask the question without implying that an adequate system of ethics could be developed solely out ofknowledge ofbiology. Treatment ofthe criminal is gradually evolving away from the idea that society must achieve revenge toward the objective ofre-educating the criminal and preventing crime. Most rules ofsociety require that the criminal be held accountable for his acts. However, it can be argued that he is not responsible for his crime; society is responsible, for it did not provide a favorable environment. Theimplication is that society, but not the criminal, is endowed with freedom to choose between right and wrong and could have behaved differently ifit were not perverse and an ass. But, how does society, which is made up of 267 individuals, achieve a freedom ofchoice which is assumed to be lacking in the criminal? Moreover, how does the individual protagonist ofthis philosophy achieve freedom of choice and a special knowledge of truth? The ideathat the criminal is irresponsible is old buthas recently gained favor among social scientists and in some courts, and is sometimesused as an excuse to free thecriminalwithoutprotecting society from the risk of additional crimes. Ifthe criminalact is the product ofseed and soil, are there any citizens who are free and responsible? We assume freedom for ourselves and our fellows except when talking about these special problems. There is a partial resolution of this dilemma which is at least twenty-five hundred years old: the Indian concept "Athman-Brahman" (the personal self equals the omnipresent, allcomprehending external self). Man is the embodiment of innate drives and past experiences —all ofthe internal and external past and present causes. Man is not an unchanging black box in which the output is determined solely by input. He is not a bit offlotsam, but a changing, learning organism with a memory for scanning great stores ofinformation . Man makes the choice, but is it a free or a determined choice? Ifman is the embodiment of bad environment, it may be held that he too is bad. This differs from the idea ofsome religions that man is born tainted by original sin, and it differs from some current concepts ofthe everlasting dignity ofman. There have been abortive attempts to build a body of information on the biology of ethics. I suspect that an appeal for further attempts will bring a retort from philosophers that it...

Fuenteovejuna: Form and Meaning

One of the leading Spanish scholars of the past hundred years, Menéndez y Pelayo, had this to say of Fuenteovejuna: “Peribáñez and El mejor alcalde, el rey . . . have to do with personal justice or private vengeance. In Fuente Ovejuna what we witness is the vengeance of a whole town; there is no individual protagonist; there is no hero but the demos, the town council of Fuente Ovejuna: when the Royal power intervenes, it is only to sanction and consolidate the revolutionary deed. There is no more democratic play in the whole Castilian theatre” (Vol. V, p. 198). “A drama which is reality itself, brutal and throbbing, but magnified and exalted by the historical genius of the poet… . In Fuente Ovejuna the soul of the people found expression without danger, thanks to the.happy state of political unconsciousness in which the poet and his public lived.