Metaphysical Experience Research Articles

The irretrievability of the past: nostalgia in Chinese literature from Tang–Song poetry to Ming–Qing san-wen

Nostalgia is an overwhelming trope in Chinese literature. Finding paradigmatic expression in Tang–Song poetry, nostalgia was to become a standard motif in imperial Chinese literature. This article argues that the dominance of the nostalgic motif in Chinese literature is related to the Chinese philosophical conception of time. Unlike the Western tradition which treats time as an inferior to eternal being, the Chinese tradition understands the reality of experience within becoming itself. The remembrance of time’s passing thus becomes a kind of metaphysical experience, to remember the past is to remember that humans are indelibly part of an eternal cycle of change. The self in memory, concomitantly, contra critics who would read autobiography into the “dream reminiscence” (梦忆) genre of late imperial Chinese literature, is thus evoked not as a monument to the self, but to show its ultimate passing. The nostalgic construction of an idealised moment in one’s past, pregnant with the tragic presumption of a happiness never realised in actuality, is paralleled by the literary topos of paradise. Structurally similar to the operation of nostalgia, the encounter with paradise in folklores such as 《刘晨阮肇入天台》 and literati essays such as 《桃花源记》, was a halcyon moment in the protagonist’s life which cannot be regained. The literary topos of paradise in the Chinese in contrast to the pastoral of the Western tradition, thus exists within time. Nostalgia as does paradise, points toward the metaphysical promise of happiness lost in an irretrievable past.

Russian

Russian

Religious culture and health promotion: care, practice, object

Religious culture and health promotion: care, practice, object

Caps and tales.

Caps and tales.

The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics ed. by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (review)

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics ed. by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis Enoch S. A. Jacobus The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. (Oxford Handbooks Series.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [x, 735 p. ISBN 9780199733866. $150.] Illustrations, multimedia companion Web site, bibliographic references, index. A wide variety of perspectives and interests tend to huddle together beneath the academic umbrella of the audiovisual. For this reason, The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics collects essays that appeal to a wide readership interested in the relationship between sight and sound. Even so, there is only so much ground one can cover in one volume. Editors John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis take Part I of the book to introduce the varied scenes set by the term audiovisual, most notably by inclusion of “nonor extracinematic forms” (p. 4), even as they acknowledge the debt that so many audiovisual media owe cinema (pp. 5–6). The introduction contains some unnecessary meandering, especially given the page count, but they strike a rich vein when they list fifteen points of consideration that face the broader field of audiovisual studies: 1. Audiovisual interrelations (how sound and vision interact) 2. Beyond audiovisuality (how other senses are, or might be, incorporated into the experience) 3. Narrativity, semiotics, and stylistic conventions (diegesis, interpretation, coded meanings) 4. Intertextuality (the relations of given audiovisual performances to other texts) 5. Intermediality (mode of performance as influenced by other media) 6. Technology (how it is used/what is being said about it through its use) 7. Space and place (onscreen/offscreen, diegetic/nondiegetic, natural/imaginary) 8. Temporality and synchronization (time’s relation to audiovisual elements, content, and experience) 9. Aestheticism and affect as resistance (affect of tone and mood through visual/aural experience) 10. Economic factors (what economic conditions liberate/constrain content and media of dissemination) 11. Interactivity and immersion (receiver participation in and suspension of disbelief in audiovisual experience) 12. The voice (use of human voice, how it manipulates and is manipulated to affect experience) 13. Soundtrack elements (interaction of music, Foley, dialogue, and environmental noises) 14. Audiovisual ecology (nature of sound in audiovisual performances and its relation to its surroundings) 15. Cultural identity, affiliation, and spec-tatorship (the biases of the intended audio-viewer) Most of these issues are addressed (to varying degrees) over the course of the volume, with some whole sections given over to them. I will treat each of the book’s sections in turn. This first section (“Theoretical Pressure Points”) comprises five chapters of a more philosophical nature. The first two chapters in this section address ideas just as relevant to readers with audio-only concerns as to those with an audiovisual bent, addressing the affects and notions of technology and embodiment (Lawrence Kramer) and the mentality of remix culture, musical ownership, and copyright law (Nicholas Cook). Obviously, these are music-heavy concerns, but are nonetheless tangential to the audiovisual [End Page 514] realm as a whole. To balance this, Michel Chion’s fascinating contribution narrows in on the non-musical audiovisual complexities presented by the translation of film dialogue into other languages. Broadly applicable in any narrative audiovisual medium is Anahid Kassabian’s suggested revision of the old diegetic/nondiegetic dichotomy, or even Ben Winters’s theoretical trident of diegetic/intradiegetic/extradiegetic (Ben Winters, “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,” Music & Letters 91, no. 2 [2010]: 224–44). Given the proliferation of video games, viral videos, and Web sites, the binary (or trinary) distinctions of diegesis may be less central than in older media. Steven Connor’s chapter discusses the metaphysical experience of film as though it were a living creature with which we share eyes and ears. Specifically, he discusses the peculiarities that sharing a body with the film presents and how we suspend the expectations of our normal experience (e.g., distracting noise or out-of-sight objects emitting sound). Part III, “Narrative, Genre, Meaning,” is divided into three subsections. The first of these, entitled “Changing Times, Changing Practices,” contains fascinating essays on documentary films, television serials, and big Hollywood blockbusters. This section even...

Acrobats and Ascetics

In his 2009 work You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk proposes an anthropology of the acrobat. ‘Whoever looks for humans will find ascetics,’ Sloterdijk declares programmatically at one point, ‘and whoever observes ascetics will discover acrobats.’ This essay shows that the topological shift Sloterdijk traces in You Must Change Your Life from asceticism to acrobatics indicates a shift from a religious to a decidedly creaturely experience of verticality. The acrobat, for Sloterdijk, figures the nonchalance with which humans conquer the downward force of gravity. But in developing this vertical metaphor of the human-as-acrobat, Sloterdijk ignores what the author wants to call the topology of affect – the sense in which humans respond emotionally to their topological orientation. To demonstrate Sloterdijk’s insensitivity to the emotional implications of the vertical orientation of humans, the author re-examines two of the main sources of his acrobat metaphor: the tightrope walker scene in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Franz Kafka’s 1924 short story about an eccentric trapeze artist, ‘First Sorrow’. When we re-examine these texts in light of their treatment of verticality, we notice that they are actually both about the physical, metaphysical and emotional experience of falling.

Metaphysical Experiences in Gražina Cieškaitė’s poetry

This paper analyses and discusses the signs of metaphysical experience in the work of the contemporary Lithuanian poetess Gražina Cieškaitė. The paper was inspired by Vytautas Kavolis’ provoking thought that in Cieškaitė’s poetry attempt is made to analyse and criticise the key myths of Western civilisation, and female mythology, very old and going back to pre-civilisation conscience, is recreated from the shards of the broken myth of Western civilisation. In this paper, Cieškaitė’s work is analysed in several stages that are reflected in the headlines of the sections. Recognisable are the landmarks of metaphysical thinking, mythical personages and plots; discussed are the outcomes of the interaction of eclectic metaphysical and mythical thinking; finally, an attempt is made at recognising the central idea of this metaphysical lyric and at reconstructing the version of myth so closely linked with this idea. All parts of the paper are concerned with the issue of poetic language, and the key features of Cieškaitė’s poetics are recorded. The paper asserts that in Cieškaitė’s work it is really possible to restore an extremely old version of female mythology, which is embodied in the figure of the goddess Aphrodite that had acquired Promethean creative powers. Yet here metaphysical experiences can hardly be generalised as one comprehensive metaphysical theory. In Cieškaitė’s work, metaphysical thinking based on language and logic frequently yields ground to spontaneous mystical experiences, which are not controlled by either logic or language.

Embodied Disagreements

In this paper, I suggest that embodied metaphysical experience underlies many of our everyday judgements, which are expressed in our bodily comportments and actions, through which disagreements in our ontological experiences are highlighted. I propose attending to such concrete, situated disagreements as a way of challenging the tradition of metaphysics as an enterprise of objective and universal theory, and as a way of promoting feminist, anti-racist, and queer practices of responsibility.

"Ofrendas del tiempo" de Leonel Calderón Acuña

El filósofo Alejandro Serrano Caldera, sobre la obra poética “Ofrendas del Tiempo” de Leonel Calderón Acuña, señala que transcurre entre la angustia existencial y la experiencia metafísica como diálogo que surge de la raíz misma del ser y de fe y esperanza.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5377/cultura.v20i62.1473 Cultura de Paz Vol.20 No.62 2014; 32-33

Feeling at home: an autoethnographic account of an immigrant football fan in Western Sydney

Despite the relocation, pressures that usually restrict time available for leisure activities, football fandom is one distraction new immigrants continue to enjoy after moving to a new country. In this paper, I explore my own connection to the Western Sydney Wanderers Football Club (WSWFC), a relationship that helped me integrate into a new society after what had been a challenging migration experience. I use an autoethnographic approach and a theoretical background that characterises football fandom as a metaphysical experience of the ordinary people. The story of my involvement with the WSWFC and its fans shows how football fandom can be an effective tool for new immigrants, assisting with socialisation and integration into the new society.

MERE LIFE, DAMAGED LIFE AND EPHEMERAL LIFE

This paper analyses three concepts of life in Adorno's philosophy and considers the relationship between these concepts and the idea of a speculative materialism. The paper is concerned with Adorno's late concept of metaphysical experience and articulates a response to two key problems for the interpretation of this concept. First, given Adorno's emphasis on a purely negative philosophy, how does transcendence arise? Second, how can we give an experiential content to this idea of transcendence? A response to these two questions is configured through an analysis of three concepts of life; mere life, damaged life and ephemeral life.

Postcolonial Betrayal? Mysticism and the Past in Nicole Brossard’s Hier and Diane Schoemperlen’s Our Lady of the Lost and Found

Nicole Brossard’s Hier and Diane Schoemperlen’s Our Lady of the Lost and Found were published in 2001. Both novels explore contemporary “turns” in the humanities—turns that can be seen as a betrayal of the secular worldview and the focus on the New World that dominated our literary concerns of the late twentieth century. Brossard’s text “betrays” contemporary literary and cultural considerations in its foregrounding of accumulated Old World knowledge and religious art. In Hier, Brossard makes multiple references to two religious figures of Catholicism: Marie Guyart—Marie de l’Incarnation, the founder of the Ursuline order in Québec—and the Virgin Mary. In this novel, Brossard is beginning to explore the idea of looking to those women associated with the mystical world, knowledge of whom is buried in our collective memories, in order to turn to mysticism as a way of accessing that “high” provided by metaphysical experiences. Diane Schoemperlen’s novel, Our Lady of the Lost and Found (Our Lady), reveals a number of similar preoccupations to those found in Brossard’s Hier. In Our Lady, a narrator/writer, is “visited” by the Virgin Mary near the beginning of the novel, and the text then alternates between credible domestic scenes and stories of other Marian apparitions, most of which, as Schoemperlen assures us in an afterword, are “based on actual documented accounts” (Our Lady 339). Our Lady contains many reflective passages: comments on historiography; philosophy; and reflections on the nature of story, truth, science and history. The didactic impulse is very strong in both novels, and the urge to teach is centered on works of religious art from Old World civilizations. Faced with the turmoil of the contemporary world, the narrator of Our Lady explores that other world: the world of miracles, Marian apparitions and the thin place to which the act of writing takes one. In this article, Marie Vautier explores how these two 2001 novels highlight mystical women of the religious past, in their discussion of art, culture, the Old World versus the New World, and the limits of the contemporary worldview in a (re)turn to mysticism and summa plus ultra experiences.

Metaphysical Aspects of Rose Ausländer’s Poetry

This article analyzes six poems by Rose Ausländer, a poet of Jewish origin, who lived in the years 1901–1988. She was born at Chernivtsi (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and died in Düsseldorf (Germany). Ausländer wrote in German and in English. The aim of this paper is to discuss the metaphysical aspects of Ausländer’s poems and to demonstrate that these aspects are manifested on the semantic, lexical and axiological levels. My interest is in the spiritual experience evoked by her poetry, resulting from a transcendence-and Absolute-oriented existence, experienced in terms of mystery. Another objective is to determine whether the said metaphysical experience receives religious specification. The ergocentric method, as proposed by Zofia Zarębianka in her research into the sacred in literature, is based on the assumption that this phenomenon is inherent in the text itself and can thus be investigated without referring to external circumstances or searching therein for itsorigins. This allows for a greater concentration onthe very phenomenon of the sacred as present ina literary text.The analysis of the poems shows that references to God the Creator tend to be frequent, and that human participation in the act of creation is repeatedly stressed. The speaker assumes a posture of dependence on, respect for and admiration of the Absolute. Significant to the spiritual dimension of this poetry is seeing material reality and the affairs “of this world” in eschatological terms. Ausländer’s poetry reveals a system of Bible-based beliefs, such as those concerning the love for one’s neighbour. An adequate reading of the meanings evoked in Ausländer’s lyrical texts becomes possible when the Bible is seen as the prototype of the lyrical situations presented in her poems. The primacy of spiritual meanings, as well as the search for identity, eternity, fullness and the creative powers of God, become clear indeed. The religious vocabulary of the poems under discussion is rather poor. Instead, it is axiological references and allusions to Biblical fragments, such as psalm verses, that construct the poems’ metaphysical aspects. These are then made more specific with the use of notions typical of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Metaphysical Experience and Constitutive Error in Adorno's “Meditations on Metaphysics”

That current ideals of cognition impoverish experience is a classical observation, and complaint, of the early Frankfurt School. Adorno reacts to this phenomenon in several ways, among them his conception of metaphysical experiences. Metaphysical experiences are conventionally understood as promissory notes, as metaphors for rich experiences. This article takes a different view of metaphysical experiences. It discusses them in light of Adorno's notion that objects have priority in experience and of his further remark that metaphysical experiences are constituted by error. It argues that rather than promissory notes or metaphors for rich experiences, metaphysical experiences are attempts at taking things literally.

Beauty contra God

The mainstream of sociology has argued that the process of modernization is inevitably accompanied by secularization. In spite of some recent questioning of the argument, the churches of the Western world, with the partial exception of the United States, have continued to steadily empty. Yet signs abound that individuals still seek metaphysical experience, but are more likely to do so in the secular realm. Above all, transcendence is sought aesthetically, through the experience of beauty, whether, to name a few domains, in Romance, through sport or out in nature. Nietzsche asserted that existence and the world can only be justified aesthetically. Major modern poets have agreed with him. This article takes up the question of whether aesthetic experience has replaced the religious in modernity.

Gambling on negativity: The promise of philosophy in Adorno’s thought

Against the common supposition that Adorno’s thinking remains caught in a distressing form of pessimism rendering it impotent in the face of modern capitalism and the fungibility of subjects, the article argues that the operation of negative dialectics inherently contains a productive moment that suggests the promise of a qualitatively different philosophy. Through an analysis that employs the multivalent senses of play at work in Adornian thinking — and particularly the notions of gamble, risk and chance — as its primary interpretive key, the article shows that this promise for a philosophy ‘to come’ is at work in the use of parataxis and the practice of constellating concepts; in the invocation of metaphysical experience and affective language; and in the descriptions of critical philosophy as engaged in a practice of ‘critique and rescue’ or ‘wounded healing’.

Struktura symboliczna architektury świątyni: wprowadzenie do teologii wyrazu sztuki sakralnej

Symbol has always been an intrinsic part of a person. The human being – homo religiosus – is by nature also a homo symbolicus, who thinks and feels symbolically, who lives symbolically. In the domain of sacrum, in the temple, life is realized through holy symbols. In the past, this was directly reflected in the architecture and in the art of all religions. They have their special compensation in the temple and vice versa; the temple is a concrete manifestation of the function of a symbol. Thanks to them, art could manifest itself, could naturally pass from the level of aesthetics to the level of religion. Nowadays we face a kind of crisis of symbol in the sphere of art, certain reluctance towards symbols. The language of symbols seems to be dying out. Two thousand years of history of Christianity proved that a main criterion of a value of church architecture was not based on architectural precursors. This architecture was sacred because it was a carrier of a „truth of God” and – like a liturgical mysterion and iconography art – it was a theological comment. It was a codified language of the transposes of religions essences and orders, into the form of architectural expression. This was in a East Christianity and this happens there up to this day. One of the proofs to confirmate this thesis is an example of dome. It has been in existence since the beginning of forming the traditional architecture structure of the orthodox temple; it manifested symbolical and archetype essence – as an interior space and as an exterior form. In the history of architecture as well as the history of religion it had precisely defined symbolic meanings. They designated its significance in the temple, they gave rise to its long duration in the history, and eventually they gave it a status of an essential element, an everlasting witness of Divine mystery”. Presentation of this essence and orders constructs indispensable context to a value of the contemporary copulas solutions, in the range of preservation the traditional status of copula in the orthodox temple. In short draft, across calling of form of dome and her hermeneutical partition was tried to appear rule of working of symbolism of sacred arts and her possibilities as special kind of theology of artistic word in architecture. A person’s life is marked with symbols. There is no lay art and all crises of art are not so much of aesthetic nature as of religious character. They are caused by disappearing symbolism, and, consequently, by debasement of the sense of mystic sacrum. We need tradition and the canons, we need to be reminded of holy symbols. If the sacral art is to provide an authentic description of teophanic reality and, at the same time, if it is to be a source of all human metaphysical experience and not only intellectual speculation or a mere naturalistic representation of things, we have to find a way of regaining harmony with former symbols. “Beauty shall save the world” – as Fiodor Dostoyevsky rightly said. In art, redemption is realized by holy symbols. Thanks to them “Mute art is able speak” (St. Gregory of Nyssa).

‘A Figure of Annihilated Human Existence’: Agamben and Adorno on Gesture

In this paper, I consider Giorgio Agamben’s essays on gesture, and the loss of gesture, in relation to Theodor Adorno’s account of gesture given in his work on Kafka. I argue that both share an account of gesture as an involuntary, yet non-intentional figure of a generalised destruction of experience. However, in their respective accounts of an emphatic possibility that can be located in the loss of gesture, Agamben and Adorno move in fundamentally different philosophical directions. For Agamben, the loss of gesture opens up the possibility of a space of existing within the pure possibility of speaking itself. For Adorno, the loss of gesture returns us to a reified embodiment that can nevertheless image the possibility of a different way of relating to materiality. I argue that, in the attempt to immanently construct forms of resistance within a generalised destruction of experience, Agamben’s articulation of an absolute gesturality tends towards an immuring of the subject within the repetitive space of what Adorno terms ‘objectless inwardness’. Although Adorno’s account of gesture and its relation to metaphysics and politics is equally problematic in many ways, I argue that his account of a metaphysical experience that appears within alienated gestures offers the possibility for moving beyond the destruction of experience.

Filozofia sensu jako odpowiedź na kryzys metafizyki. W stronę nowej „filozofii pierwszej"

The desire to validate one’s existence which we call the ultimate and overall sense of life is an inalienable meta-physical experience specific to all humans in their everyday lives. Even if we only speak about the concept of the sense of life, it is always in close relation to a metaphysical experience of validating life as a whole. Such a validation also seeks to express itself in philosophical thinking and that is why the basic question that underpins considerations presented in the paper is as follows: What problem-shape could “first philosophy” assume if it is engaged in the attempt to answer the question that ultimately concerns each of us: the question about the sense of our own existence? Asking about the “problem-shape” of such a philosophy we mean reflection on the philosophy of sense directed to its meta-physical source and not to the formal shape that it could assume. We are not interested in constructing philosophy for philosophy’s sake but our concern is to reflect critically on the “metaphysics-creating experience” which builds and develops the philosophy of the sense of life. The philosophy of sense as a new „first philosophy” will no longer be a philosophy of „being as being” (substance), where that which is most important, „what is first”, pertains either to essence or existence or universal principles of what is labeled as „being”. This new philosophy purports to engage in the most vital problem of life, that is why its task will be, among others, a critical separation of sense and end, thematization of the sense of life in man’s relation to the world, a quest for sense outside a unilateral objectivization (the category of being), reflection on human life in all its manifestations, historical changeability and dramatism, sense as seeking hope greater than “being”, nonidentity of the ultimate sense of life with the ultimate “Safeguardian of Sense” - i.e. God.

THE CONCEPT OF PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIENCE

Abstract: We often speak about religious experience, and sometimes we speak about metaphysical experience. Yet we seldom hear about philosophical experience. Is philosophy purely a matter of theories and theses, or does it have an experiential aspect? In this article, I argue for the following three claims. First, there is something we might call philosophical experience, and there is nothing mystical about it. Second, philosophical experiences are expressed in something quite similar to what Kant called “aesthetic judgements.” Third, philosophical experiences are expressed by using words in what Wittgenstein called “secondary sense.” Finally, I try to show the educational significance of pursing philosophical experiences. Through articulating them one might find one's ground, and through articulating them in a less private and more universal form one might raise oneself to universality. Thus, in expressing philosophical experiences one aspires to speak in a universal voice.