Metaphysical Essence Research Articles

Próba artykulacji

Witkacy’s Pure Form expresses the metaphysical essence of art. On the one side, it symbolizes the structure of the world, the unity in plurality (which is demonstrated in the picture’s composition) and, on the other, the notion deals with the processes of creating and perceiving an art work. The moment in which the self feels itself embedded in the wholeness of the world is the moment in which the metaphysical feeling arises, and in which the experience of art is fulfilled. Witkacy provides many examples for situations evoking this feeling. He describes them in his novels, he finds synonyms as suchness, curiosity of existence, mystery of being or unity of identity, he switches from scientific to poetic language. And he emphasizes that this feeling, while defying verbalization, is a real, not a supernatural one: a psychophysical phenomenon accessible to introspection, and inseparable from one's cultural and individual background.

Autonomia podmiotu politycznego w ujęciu Johna Rawlsa

Rawls’s philosophy in general and his conception of the person in particular has undenia- bly Kantian foundations. Kant, in his attempt to find a basis for his ethic, came to a conclusion that it can be found only in the autonomy of the will which has to be independent of any em- pirical determination. Any influence of our social and psychological inclinations leads us to the refusal of freedom and makes our will heteronomous. Therefore we are able to be moral only as participants in a transcendental subject.Rawls preserves Kant’s teaching by detaching it from transcendental idealism and recast- ing in the new context. His social and political theory is founded on a specific anthropology. The metaphysical essence of a person is not determined by any form of the good, ie by the ends we choose, but consists in our capacity to choose them. The reason for that is very clear: If a conception of the good were a part of my identity, I would try to impose it on others in a society we plan to build behind the veil of ignorance. That is why only the persons who are individuated prior to their ends can construct a just society. So in Rawls’s view the autonomy turns out to be our essence.However his anthropology and his political thought as well induce us to raise some objec- tions to his proposals. Rawls sees a human being in a very abstract and artificial way and such characteristic does not show the truth about ourselves but is used by him to justify liberal prin- ciples. Rawls simply constructs a certain notion of the person, which is liberal in its content to convince us that we have to choose to live in a liberal society. If we do not recognise ourselves in his theory of the person and therefore we are reluctant to accept the liberal vision of society, then what?

Michel Foucault e a construção discursiva do corpo do sujeito moderno e sua relação com a psicologia

Michel Foucault investiga "a história das relações que o pensamento mantém com a verdade" e como se estabelece a correlação entre pensamento e verdade, tendo o enunciado do corpo como elemento discursivo fundamental na constituição dos jogos de verdades sobre o sujeito moderno. Através da leitura da bibliografia desse autor, de comentaristas e de outros filósofos modernos, esta pesquisa estuda a questão do corpo na fase arqueológica foucaultiana, principalmente no livro As Palavras e As Coisas, destacando as formações discursivas do corpo, da vida e do homem em seus efeitos subjetivadores, com especial referência à constituição discursiva do sujeito psicológico. Verificou-se que Foucault desnaturaliza o corpo, apresentando-o como conceito-chave (ou grade de especificação) na produção de discursos sobre o homem moderno, o que nos permite também compreender a psiqué não como emanação ou essência metafísica do corpo, mas como instrumento discursivo, singularmente emergente na história do pensamento moderno.

Religious as a first philosophy accordering to Levinas


 The term metaphysics is ascribed to Aristotle, although it does not appear in his own texts. Historically it was introduced while sorting Aristotle’s works. In Greek t„ met„ t„ fusik@ means that which follows after physics. The author of the Metaphysics groups theoretical philosophy into three branches: mathematics, physics and theology. Theoretical sciences are more elevated than the other sciences, while the last one of the three is more elevated than the other two. If there were no substance that would superseed the nature, then physics would be the first among the sciences. If, however, there is sume unchanging substance, then the science of it undoubtedly will rise above all the other and will be called the first philosophy (filosof%a pr_th). Precisely this science has to look at the being as such,kaθ ’aÑtÊ in Greek.According to Levinas, the metaphtysical thinking seeks to think the being as radically separated, solitary and single (kaθ ’aÑtÊ), and this requires a special attention to the absolute exteriority and the other that refuses to be totalized. The metaphysical movement is transcendental, because as a desire for the goodness and generosity does not overcome and does not seek to overcome the primordial distance from the other. The metaphysical relation to the other for Levinas is a social one. The absolutely other first of all is the Other – the other person that is not bound with me neither by appropriation, nor by term, nor by any general level. Between us there is a distance separating the same and the other that is not to be covered. The possibility or the way to relate in this distance without abolishing or overcoming it is language. In the relation of the same to the absolutely other beyond the totality Levinas finds the essence of religion. Here religion coincides or at least closely relates to metaphysics. From this follows that religion can take the place of the first philosophy, without forgetting that the essence of both metaphysics and religion is the fundamental sociability.

Character, Essence, Action: Considerations on Character Traits after Sartre

Two radically different, general accounts of human character traits - the and the accounts - are given critical consideration. The former account is characterized in terms of Saul Kripke's conception of metaphysical essence. Both accounts are discussed with reference to Jean-Paul Sartre's treatment of character traits. The essentialist account cannot withstand considerations relating to personal identity over time. The summary account is also rejected, as is a certain kind of dispositional account. An approach to at least some character traits in terms of persisting aims, beliefs, and so on is recommended.

Marlène Zarader’s The Unthought Debt

We know Marlene Zarader from her first work, Heidegger et les Paroles de l'origine (Vrin, 1986), in which, as she puts it, her only ambition was read Heidegger . . . taking up his work in its entirety from an angle that appeared preeminent.... question of origin. Zarader has now turned second stage of her engagement with Heidegger, notably question about his sources. She challenges Heidegger's understanding of Greek origin in light of she calls tradition, meaning biblical, Talmudic, midrashic, and philosophical Judaism. Zarader is revisiting philosopher, Otto Poggeler's question, Is Heidegger's way of taking itinerary of Western thought in charge required by his thinking, or not?1 To that question Poggeler himself answered yes-Heidegger's interpretation of history of Western thought is required for his thinking of Being. Zarader will answer no same question. Working out justification of her no is stake of her book, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and Hebraic Heritage.2 Her task: show that we do have construct metaphysical, and ontological, traditions in Heidegger's way in order follow his path of thinking. Better, it is encumbent on us set in a clear light influences on his thought that he could acknowledge. Heidegger's Gifts Philosophy or: Why He is Unavoidable Today Heidegger's philosophy, Zarader argues, is unavoidable-for philosophers-today, for essential reasons. She writes, at stake is knowing what it is that allows Heidegger's work occupy this position, recognized today as unavoidable. Zarader argues that Heidegger has given philosophy four signal gifts: First, Heidegger's work allows philosopher reread great texts of Western tradition in light of one overarching question; we can read these texts this way even if question is fully developed in them. She means fundamental question of Being, which Heidegger (re)identified. Of Heidegger's second gift, she writes: beyond diversity of Heidegger's texts, focus on question that shapes them [texts of Western tradition] beneath surface [souterrainement] is grasp them in their unity, which went unnoticed up until Heidegger. This unity is permits Heidegger speak of metaphysics in singular, of metaphysics, and grasp it as a coherent Western affair. Third, she says, to circumscribe metaphysics in its unity is in position grasp it finally in its truth; that is, set forth in ... same movement metaphysics' foundation and reach its essence, which went unthought until now. Fourth, reaching essence of metaphysics... (if it is this unthought character that constitutes metaphysics, at same time as creating its unity), amounts casting a gaze on metaphysics that could not belong it, could be proper it. If Heidegger's perspective belonged metaphysics, it would have fallen into same forgetfulness that always overtakes question of meaning of Being. In a word, Heidegger gives West a metaphysical heritage it could call its own, unified around single question of Being. The question of Being dislodged any particular theological conceptuality, while it declared Western metaphysics complete. Whatever we make of this gift, it involved a radical questioning never before ventured without some notion of divinity, substance, or first cause. However, Heidegger's pursuit of original question: Why is there Being instead of simply nothing?-whose origin Heidegger attributed pre-Socratics, entailed an act of unfolding that Heidegger did acknowledge. It was, Zarader writes, the problem of Andenken [memory] that I attempted restore . . . accompanying it its conclusion. At end of enterprise, it appeared me that, with assumption of Greek heritage, question of our origin was far from being closed; rather, question was perhaps just opening, and . …

Sounding the Frauenseele : Gender, Modernism, and Intertextuality in Alban Berg's "Uber die Grenzen," op. 4, no. 3

When scholars describe societal and intellectual trends in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that affected musical modernism, they often include technological innovation, urbanization, and positivism, among other important factors.1 Frequently omitted from musicians' experience of modernity, however, is the changing situation of women, an omission that can obscure the important aspect of gender discourse from our understanding of modern music.2 In fact, shifts in the circumstances and societal perception of women arguably stand as one of the most significant changes of the modern era. A vociferous intellectual and literary debate had raged from the late nineteenth century onward over the idea of woman—issues ranging from her role in society to her effect on masculine identity and from the negative power of her "metaphysical essence" to her embodiment of Nature.3 In Germanic lands this [End Page 51] discourse came to be known as the Frauenfrage, or "woman question," and in various artistic and musical works the character and nature of woman was a deep-seated, if not explicit, concern.4 How can one argue that gender discourse affected the changing musical aesthetic? Certainly, the characterization or description of woman in a song or opera offers symbolic material for analysis. But what can we say about how an ideological discourse inflects a musical sound and its expression? Alban Berg, through the record of his reading in his books and journals, offers an exceptional insight into one modernist composer's perception and negotiation of the discourse on woman. With a study of Berg's reading of the Frauenfrage I specifically discuss the intertextual impact of its ideology on the musical style of the third song of op. 4, "Über die Grenzen" (Beyond the Boundaries). The idea of intertextuality in music, or the interaction between language, music, and other expressive and symbolic forms, can illuminate complex strands of ideological production in a musical design. Intertextuality goes beyond questions of musical text painting, or the totality of a piece's narrative, and instead situates the local expression of musical gesture in response to the intellectual discursive environment that helped foster its inception, highlighting the interaction between rhythm, pitch, texture, and timbre. Why do particular sounds arise to fulfill the creative impulse of the composer? To study the possible impact of the Frauenfrage on this process, I look into Berg's discursive imagination. Berg's confidence in his knowledge about woman is apparent in a letter he wrote to his American friend Frida Semler in July 1907 when he was twenty-two years old.5 In it he discusses his knowledge and expertise in judging a woman's character, and he assures her that despite his age he had already developed a discerning knowledge of the "soul of woman" (Frauenseele). Previous to the passage quoted here, Berg expressed his excitement about a play Semler had recently written and her other college experiences. [Your personality] is far beyond the best of your female compatriots—and—I can calmly say—stands above the most noble (an expression from Altenberg) of your fellow women!! This looks like only idle flattery: but it is not. It is but a matter of experience. I imagine, and I know I am not wrong, that I know human nature in general, and the soul of woman in particular. This knowledge I have learned less from letters than from personal experience and perspective; and I can say, despite my youth with regard to these things that in these matters I have never been mistaken—on the contrary, I have always gotten it right. [Die Sie weit über die besten Ihrer Landsmanninnen—und—ich kann ja ruhig sagen—über die edelsten (das ist so ein Ausdruck von Altenberg) Ihrer Geschlechtsgenossinnen stellt!! Das schaut nun aus als...

On Remembering and Forgetting Being

This essay consists of (a) an exploration of the relation between Aquinas and Heidegger as this is discussed in the work of J. Caputo, and (b) attentpt, in the light of what is learned from the previous discussion, to rethink the essence of thomistic metaphysics in a way that is both faithful to the spirit of thomism, remaingin attentive to its mystical source, and alive to the mystery of being in a hedeiggerian sense. In this way the argumental structure central to that metaphysics is treated as a wittgensteinian ladder that we can kick away, that is , which auto-deconstructs, thereby placing us befor unlimited, unqualified existence, the difference between existence and nothingness. The essay ends with a suggestion for a transformation of Heidegger's Denken along lines suggested by this rethinking of thomism. A reply by J. Caputo follows the essay.

Nietzsche and the Knowledge of the Child at Play: On the Question of Metaphysics

In his article and the Knowledge of the Child at Play: On the Question of Metaphysics Johannes Welfing raises the question of a Nietzschean metaphysical presence (did Nietzsche define the essence of and of being and thus also implicitly establish an imperative about the way in which one should lead one's life, or did he refrain from all definition, truth, system or law whatsoever?). The controversy continues: while for some critics Nietzsche's philosophy is animated by a desire for truth, others emphasize the novelty of a philosophical project that questions the very premises on which it is based. In particular, the author attempts to establish, by referring to a specific excerpt from the Nietzsche text, that the paradigm of the Nietzschean child at play on the beach of life -argument of an important, contemporary brand of Nietzsche interpretation that situates Nietzsche beyond the metaphysical tradition -cannot be said to be truly based on the Nietzsche text. While focusing on both Alan Schrift's and Mihailo Djuric's argument that Nietzsche attempted to escape the metaphysical tradition by emphasizing the knowledge of the child at play, Welfing argues that for Nietzsche -if knowledge is to secure the escape from the belief in metaphysical essence on the level of practical -this knowledge is generated by the body rather than by the rational mind.. Johannes F. Welfing, and the Knowledge of the Child at Play: On the Question of Metaphysics page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1.3 (1999):

Heidegger on the Experiment

Heidegger's analysis of the experiment in the 1930s is a pivotal moment for his later critique of the modern epoch. In order to show this, I will draw primarily on the Beitrage and Age of the World Picture, but where helpful I will look elsewhere, to explicate Heidegger's analysis of observation as a setting up of the real. I will then trace the implications ofthis analysis to the question of the mathematical representation of nature in the experiment. I thus hope to shed new light on Heidegger's critique of representational thinking, to draw particular attention to the role of the scientific method and quantification in that thinking, and to expose the problem of realism as one Heidegger shares with contemporary analytic philosophers of science. Since Heidegger's work on experimentation is spread over many texts, spanning 40 years of his thought, tracing its development is less than simple. Accordingly, I have divided the analysis into two parts. The first explicates how experimentation is violent in Heidegger's view. It begins by laying out his understanding, worked out from 1916 to 1938, of the difference between ancient and modern science. Then I look specifically at his interpretation of violence in the history of science to argue that observation in modern science is inherently violent in his view. I conclude this section by setting Heidegger's thinking against Ian Hacking's work on the problem of realism to show how for Heidegger the worry goes deeper than the analytic concern that theoretical entities may be fictitious. Heidegger holds that physics gets at the real, but that in doing so it encroaches upon nature by confining it reductively as object. He suggests that the experiment sets up and entraps nature by mastering it in calculation. In the second part, I explore the question of representation. First, I extend the account of calculation by looking at representation in exact science. I show how in Heidegger's view, exactitude secures certainty by representing objects as quantifiable. Finally, by analyzing the world as picture, I argue that for Heidegger the concealment of being in the modern epoch is forgotten in the experimental reduction of the real to quantitative representation. Accordingly, I show that it is Heidegger's consideration of the experiment that is pivotal to his claim that the modern epoch is determined by science. And hence I arguethat his critique of the experimental method is the basis for the critique of the modern epoch Heidegger undertakes in his later years. Experiment and Violence Heidegger holds that the modern experiment is not a passive observation of nature, but rather a setting up of the real that encroaches upon nature by confining it within the parameters of scientific objectivity. Unlike ancient science, phenomenological in the sense that it looks to the thing under inquiry to show itself, modern science entraps the thing as object in the experiment. That contrast between ancient and modern observational method is thus an appropriate starting-point for analysis of modern scientific method. To understand, however, in what sense this method is violent, one must first have a sense of what Heidegger means by violence. Only then can Heidegger's approach to the problem of realism be set against an analytic account to show that his insight is in raising the issue of calculation. Ancient Versus Modern Science Heidegger began thinking through the difference between ancient and modern science as early as 1916 in Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft. Here he noted that in ancient natural philosophy, Aristotle searched for the metaphysical essence and hidden causes arising in immediate actuality.' This is the sense in which Aristotle is an empiricist. He generalizes on the basis of observations, and therefore his account of natural phenomena begins with experience. Indeed, Heidegger repeats this claim about Aristotle's method some 20 years later, in Age of the World Picture, when he argues that it was Aristotle who first understood what empeiria (experientia) means in the investigation of nature. …

The Question of God

The period since Martin Heidegger's death has provided major additional materials for tracing the path of his thinking on the question of god. These include, among others, publication of the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic; the several lecture series on Holderlin; the Parmenides lectures; The Principle of Reasons; as well as major research on Heidegger's thinking prior to Being and Time, notably Theodore Kisiel's The Genesis of Being and Time and John Van Buren's The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King. Most central of all is the Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), written in 193f38 and published in 1989. The Beitrage contains by far the most attention to the question of god of any of Heidegger's known works, and has been decisive for organization and interpretation in the present essay. This essay is in four parts: a delineation of the question of god; a survey of the question of god in Heidegger; an overview of the Beitrage; and a reading of the question of god in the Beitrage. Delineation of the Question of God The question of god is not an optional philosophical topic, which may or may not be taken up in metaphysics or philosophy of religion. The question of god is in our history a question put to human being by be-ing,2 the question anciently driven home with the name of god, put as it were by god to human being, or put by the absence of god, or by the failure of reliance on god or the vacating of the site where god used to be. As an integral component in the construction of the conceptual map of reality and experience constituted in the Western tradition, it is a question implicit in all our discourse, religious and secular. Both in ancient Israel and in early Greece, the question of god arose in dimensions of necessity and death, of responsibility and fault, of meaning and participation, of the context of suffering, of the displacement of desire. It is a temporal and historical question, naming a summons and a recall, invoking an overtopping standard and an abandonment to responsibility. It locates-if not invents-a subject as respondent, within a story, a community, a history, and directs that respondent, in a framework of warning and promise, toward the openness of possibility. The evasion of the question of god begins already at least in the ancient Greek origins of metaphysics. Indeed, it may be that the evasion of the question of god is the concealed essence of metaphysics. The later attempt to fuse Biblical tradition with classical philosophy-in Augustine, for example-effects a systemic ambiguity between god as the other of the radical question and god as the answer, as a guarantee that the domain of the radical question is brought to rest by the answer, by god as the ideally One and Best and Permanent. The same ambiguity persists in Anselm and Aquinas, though in at least the traditional reading they both escape from the radical question by demonstrating the logical necessity of the ideal answer. In the sixteenth century, the question again comes to the fore. At the same time the concern of the Reformation era about the certainty of salvation institutes a new countermove toward precluding the radicality of the question. As a result the religious crisis soon transforms itself into a contest of doctrines. The contestants claim that certainty of salvation is tied up with correctness of doctrine, and thus the risk inherent in the question of god is objectified and externalized as the risk of condemnation for those that do not have the right answer. Disclosive aletheia gives way to enforceable verum: the test of truth, understood as propositional correctness of doctrine, distinguishes those who have the right to kill (the guardians of truth) from those who may rightly be killed (the heretics). So the radical revival of the question of god is met by a radical counter movement, both Protestant and Catholic, intensifying and enforcing its denial and avoidance through dogma and inquisition. …

Kant, Heidegger, and the Upanisads

WE SET BEFORE US three subjects: Heidegger, Kant, the Upanisads. We do not do so accidentally. We select them in order to raise a question, in order to bring forth that astonishment which the Greeks said must pervade all philosophizing. Is it not indeed astonishing to see these three subjects set down side by side, and does not the setting down thus raise the question Why? What have these three in common that we should gather them into each other's company? Why bring them together? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions. We shall indicate at the outset, however, the direction which we shall take. That which unites these three names, which are apparently (but only apparently) so radically separated in essence, is an essential concern with Being. In the Upanisads we have statements of the bringing forth of to man as that which is both ultimately real and identical with man's own being in its innermost nature. In Kant, we have a driving forward, by means of an examination of human reason, to the very limits of man's powers to conceive, at which limits becomes the necessary other which is beyond those limits. In Heidegger, we have an interpretation of which brings us back again to an assertion of man's being essentially a being who is rooted in Being. Man is in relation to or not at all: both Heidegger and the Upanisads firmly state this as a truth. Heidegger does so through an awareness of a long philosophical tradition. The Upanisads do so in a pre-philosophical way. Heidegger must, in virtue of his own position, admit the validity of the Upanisadic bringing forth of to presentness, a bringing forth which is just as closely concerned with the of as are Heidegger's own efforts. We shall try to shed some light on just what this essence of metaphysics is and has been throughout the history of philosophizing. By the term Being we mean here that which is ultimately substantial, eternal, indeterminate, and without the possibility of being exhausted by being given specific content. The totality of phenomena cannot be said to exhaust Being, because is that which stands as a ground to all phe311

The Christian Sacrifice

Anyone who undertakes an impartial appraisement of the book of Canon Eugene Masure “ The Christian Sacrifice “ recently translated by Dom Illtyd Trethowan, O.S.B., has a difficulty in deciding where he ought to begin if the work as a whole is to be viewed in due perspective. Perhaps the first step of the critic should be to eliminate altogether from his purview the section entitled “ The Mystery of the Incarnation,” which constitutes about a quarter of the book. From the Preface of the translator we infer that this section acquired per accidens a domicile in alien territory. We agree with the translator that it would be a pity to abridge this section of Christology. But as we also agree with him that its relevance to the main thesis is rather remote we may proceed to discuss the great variety of material that falls within our scope.The climax of the author’s thoughts is reached in Book Three which treats of the Sacrifice of the Mass. The liturgical element though introduced for its bearing on theology calls for no special comment. The main purpose of the entire volume, so far as I can interpret the intention of the writer, is to give an answer to the question: In what consists the metaphysical essence of the Mass? or in other words: How is the scientific concept of sacrifice realised in the double consecration? Has the author shed light on this controversy on which the ingenuity of learned and holy men has been exercised for centuries?