Moments Of Vision Research Articles

The Conciliarist Idea of Islam in the Quattrocento—Prelude and Legacy

This contribution intends to examine the impact of Conciliarism (1414–1439) on the Christian vision of Islam in the Quattrocento. The analysis of the thought of bishops such as Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) and John of Segovia (d. 1458) is understandable only through the evolution of the Latin world with regard to Islam, moving from the Corpus Toletanum (12th century) and the impact of the Crusades in the Levant (1096–1291) and in Europe. This forwardness is rooted in the process of “Islamic Christianization,” an analytical operation lasting three centuries, during which Koranic Christology was to play a primary role. It will be through this “Christ-centric” process that from the Renaissance, the Ottoman empire, the great enemy of Western Christianity, will be appreciated for some of its peculiar facets. The weakening of the concept of heresy and of Catholic ecclesiastical authoritarianism in decreeing what heresy was probably one of the “indirect” outcomes of that dialogical “Moment of Vision” between Christianity and Islam. The further fragmentation of the Church of Rome, after the failure of Conciliarism and the outgrowth of the reformed Churches in the 16th century, favored a preliminary different understanding of the religiosity of others.

Kairos and Crisis: Responsibility and Time in Benjamin, Heidegger, and Tillich

ABSTRACT The sense of kairos is of time as having an event-like character. Fundamental here is a split between quantitative time and a qualitatively distinct moment. The decisive moment connects the kairological to crisis. By exploring the accounts of kairos in three contemporaries responding to the sense of crisis in 1920s Germany—Benjamin, Heidegger, and Tillich—this article shows the manner in action in the kairos can be understood as both responsive and non-opportunist. Themes such as the “tiger leap” (Benjamin), the “moment of vision” (Heidegger), and the “shuddering” of time (Tillich) are analyzed to demonstrate how these accounts taken in dialogue with one another give an understanding of kairos, as a displacement and disruption of time as chronos and not simply as an interruption in chronological time. Such a disruption of chronological time is a necessary condition for responsible action, giving a measure also for the present.

The Visionary Moment: On the Work of B. W. Powe

The Visionary Moment: On the Work of B. W. Powe

“I dreamt that the world was on fire”: Boston King’s Memoirs , Visionary Discourse, and Colonial Salvation

Abstract: Memoirs of Boston King, a Black Preacher appeared in serial form in The Methodist Magazine between March and June 1798. King escaped slavery in South Carolina, joined the British army to fight in the Revolutionary War, eventually resettled in Nova Scotia, and emigrated to Sierra Leone. This essay argues that readings of King’s Memoirs solely as a historical document are inadequate. The essay first summarizes King’s biography and contextualizes it within early Methodist history; a second section reads epiphanic visionary moments in King’s narrative; and a third section considers how colonial and white supremacist thought in the early Methodist church employed King’s narrative as a conversionary instrument.

Moments Of (Re)vision: Thomas Hardy Making Amends

Abstract Considered far less critically rewarding resources than those of the author’s prose, the manuscripts of Thomas Hardy’s verse have long been neglected. This essay seeks, in part, to challenge the ways in which we attribute significance to such documents, attempting a close textual study of the ‘fair’ copy of Moments of Vision (1917) – a late draft of the volume only minimally revised. The collection is one which invites us to attend to the hitherto overlooked, and in remaining attentive to the seemingly minor alterations of the manuscript itself, I work to uncover Hardy’s attempt to address an oversight of his own. Focusing upon the poems penned for Emma following her death, I read them against the narrative which has traditionally surrounded them: one of a re-visioning of a period of discontent. The manuscript’s revisions are rather those which work against the initial impulse to smooth over animosity, striving consistently to paint a harsher version of events, and to acknowledge differences now past alteration. The way in which an endlessly mutable form allows for reflection upon an ‘immutable’ division holds central focus, as I trace the ways in which this tension complicates the long-established view of the Emma verses as an ‘expiation’. I suggest, rather, that in keeping with a much wider sensibility found running through Hardy’s verse, these revisions work to undermine his attempt to offer the famously neglected Emma a long overdue attention; they are amendments, in short, which problematize the very possibility of amends.

Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution. Ian Duncan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii+290.

<i>Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution</i>. Ian Duncan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii+290.

ДЖОЙСОВСКАЯ ТРАДИЦИЯ ПИСЬМА В ПРОЗЕ МИХАИЛА ШИШКИНА И ЕЕ ВОПЛОЩЕНИЕ В ПОВЕСТИ «СЛЕПОЙ МУЗЫКАНТ»

In this article, Mikhail Shishkin is presented as a literary successor to James Joyce’s modernist tradition of writing. The nature of the ties connecting his creative method with that of Joyce is considered in two aspects which also qualify the narrative structure of his texts, namely the autobiographical and intertextual ones. While the autobiographical features of Joyce’s works can be estimated by his numerous biographies and archives, the facts from Shishkin’s life, the writer being our contemporary, can mostly be judged on by their creative interpretations in his own literary works. However, in its degree of truthiness, Shishkin’s autobiographical prose is in large excess over that of Joyce’s who would rather tend to aesthetic transformations of his life in the art forms. The two writers’ life stories themselves demonstrate a noticeable parallelism: both are linguistically sensitive; both did similar jobs along with their primary, literary occupation (a teacher, a journalist, a lecturer, a translator); for both, mother’s death of cancer and the child’s illness are reflected in recurrent literary motifs; both left for Switzerland to write about homeland from the meta-distance of the artist. Shishkin follows Joyce’s strategy of interlacing the intimate, painful episodes of his personal life into the literary texture of his writings. The very episodes of the lives of the two writers belonging to different national and historical cultures are quite identical, too. It is only that Shishkin goes further than Joyce in directness and candour, thus putting Joyce’s principle of mimesis on edge. This ultimate autobiographicity makes Shishkin, on the one hand, a successor to the tradition of Russian classical literature (remember his “love for Akaki Akakievitch”), as well as the tradition of truth in the 20th-century literature. On the other hand, it attaches him to the postmodern trend of transforming text into reality. Anyway, unlike postmodernists who are destroying literary discourse together with the characters articulating it, Shishkin “plays” with it in order to bring the novel back to life. Aesthetically, Shishkin reproduces and expounds Joyce’s theory of the “rhythm of beauty”, his technique of radical intertextuality and anastomosis connections of “all in all”. The story “The Blind Musician” has every trait of modernist poetics outlined above. The plays with light and darkness set by the cyclic rhythm of the day/night alternation and by regular shifts from mimetic to mythopoetic (intertextual) discourse are the structural narrative devices similar to those used by Joyce. Joyce’s characters, like Minotaurs, are wandering blindly through the labyrinth of Dublin until they arrive at the visionary moment of epiphany, when the beauty of a trivial truth lights up in their minds. Shishkin’s ideology is also modernist in character, since his “new linguoworld” is created as a mode of reconciling man with this world’s imperfections and as a mode of clarifying its sense.

Pathographies and Epiphanies: Communicating about Illness

AbstractEpiphany is a literary device bringing forth an experience of sudden wisdom or insight and is particularly applied to literature from the romantic era. However, epiphanies are also present within contemporary autobiographical patient stories (pathographies) expressing something that is difficult and perhaps otherwise left unspoken. Kristian Gidlund’s pathographyI kroppen min. Resan mot livets slut och alltings början(2013) deals with the author’s experience of having severe cancer. Gidlund was a non-religious person but at the end of his life, his blogposts included epiphanies or visionary moments regarding his afterlife. In this article the author shows how the use of epiphanies can be a subtle means of expressing thoughts and feelings when facing severe illness. Knowing how to identify and interpret epiphanies in pathographies can improve the abilities of relatives and medical staff to communicate with patients about existential matters and emotional distress. KAKA I would like to thank Rachael Reynolds and Paul Farmer for their most conscientious proofreading, and Dr. Christopher Oscarson for the accurate translation of the quotes from Kristian Gidlund’s book.

The Fateful Releasement into World-Time: On the Temporality of Freedom in Heidegger, 1927-1937

Heidegger’s notion of freedom depends on an original temporality more fundamental than world-time (the time of determinism). This paper asks whether freedom means a withdrawal from world-time or a releasement into it. Being and Time discloses Dasein’s drifting-along in world-time as inauthentic. In this way, it secures freedom from determinism, but also gives the impression that authenticity, as a resoluteness, entails a withdrawal from world-time. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics shows that Heidegger is well aware of the problem of withdrawal. He focuses on the attunement of boredom, which delivers Dasein back into world-time. The tension of the authentic moment of vision is too intense to endure, therefore Dasein has to remove this tension and thus to release itself into world-time. “The Origin of the Work of Art” extends the boredom of Dasein to a metaphysical boredom of Being in general. The earth, the undifferentiated ground of Being, cannot be given at once in totality. Instead, it bears an impulse toward the work, in which Being is individuated in world-time. “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same” refigures this tension in Nietzsche’s metaphysics between creative Becoming and fixated Being and concludes that Becoming, in order to create or subsist at all, has to be “infected” by Being, thus entering world-time. Freedom is better understood as a releasement into world-time. This is a tragic event, but it is also the only way freedom may overcome the bondage of world-time: by incorporating the latter as a transient stage of its own.

‘A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust’: The World and Self in Thomas Hardy's Poems

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.

Repetition and everydayness

In this paper, I will point to the temporality of the everydayness in Zbigniew Rybcynski’s Tango in comparison to Heideggerian notion of temporality and handiness. Firstly, I will discuss the Heideggerian subjectivity as agency and show that subjectivity for the philosophy of life is in a temporal mood of intentionality, Sichbewegen as Heidegger says. I will point to the temporal functionality of objects as tools through which their extentional existence is negated and respond to our goal directedness as handy equipment. The availability of the handy tools is nothing but a temporal span in which objects are no longer meaningful for us as isolated extant beings but parts of an undifferentiated functional totality. The handy tools are available for us as parts of handiness in this temporal functionality. Heidegger sees this functionality as a possibility of proximity with the original temporality as a special coming to presence in repetition and says that, in repetition the meaning of life as a whole calls for our awareness. Subsequently, I will discuss the Tango characters in relation to the Heideggerian understanding of everydayness and repetition. I will state that in Tango , the inhabitants of the room are absolutely disentangled and ignorant of one other despite their apparent closeness. Even though they spatially share the small room, all the characters act as if the others do not exist. Tango characters are stuck in the repetition of the same moment and cannot let the temporalization of life flow in its spontaneity. I will refer to the Heideggerian understanding of the moment of vision in repetition out of which the meaning of life as a whole outstands and conclude that, unlike the Heideggerian interpretation of repetition, Tango characters remain in a Sisyphosian vein.

Souls at the White Heat

Souls at the White Heat Daniel T. O’Hara (bio) The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime Harold Bloom Spiegel and Grau www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books 544 Pages; Print. $35.00 What the daemon knows is, of course, literary greatness and the American sublime. So what is the daemon? It is that creative power which arises when writing and reading that transports us beyond the everyday self. Author and reader become amalgamated (but not one), in the moment of vision, which is a passage marked by imaginative genius. So great is this experience of knowing (and being known, as Bloom has taught us), that it feels like we tap into another realm of, perhaps even beyond, being. This uncanny, and often terrifying recognition, following Longinus’s lead, is “the sublime tribunal” of judgment: “more, less than, incommensurate.” Bloom, borrowing here primarily from Orphic myths, presents this sublime knowledge of our own divinity in the figure of the daemon: the poet as poet. We often feel that such power is borrowed or stolen. Guilt at not being able to reciprocate can accumulate to paralyze, so built up to become resentment at others’ gifts, and self-destruction of one’s own. This complex belief is no organized religious faith, but is a creative fiction known to be a fiction, composing a rough ethics of revisionary reading. One of the lasting healing effects of Bloom’s work, however, is that this distinction between reading and writing, between mere passive reception and active creative imagination, can no longer be made with categorical certainty. However, in particular instances, we must make them. We thereby read in thanks, due to Bloom, with a greater sense of life within us, even as we read without softening illusion about the costs of ecstatic flights. The Daemon Knows consists of six large “chapters,” pairing twelve incontestably great American writers, as follows: Whitman and Melville, Emerson and Dickinson, Hawthorne and James, Twain and Frost, Stevens and Eliot, Faulkner and Hart Crane. I use scare quotes around “chapters” because when the longest is 120 plus pages in print, a chapter is more like a small book. To his credit and the reader’s enlightenment, Bloom keeps connecting his authors, looking ahead, back and forth, via both critical remarks but also many personal ones, which connect not only these authors to each other, but his life and his conversations with other critics, especially Kenneth Burke and Angus Fletcher (two of my own favorites). The reader, in this fuller way, thus feels capable of also connecting to his or her own life of reading. The most extraordinary thing about the book is that, in writing about figures he has often discussed, Bloom gives us new insights. Whether it fits neatly with what he has said before matters not. What matters is the cast of new insights. No foolish consistencies haunt him. We see a great critic, who is in his mid-eighties, animatedly at work learning anew. In following him, we can also incorporate both the particular insight and the greater lesson of being open to such humanistic continuities. For instance, Bloom changes his mind about figures, including T. S. Eliot, whom he admits into his personal pairings (Bloom refuses the term “canon,” rightly, given that idea’s distractions). Reading “Little Gidding,” the last of Four Quartets, he celebrates Eliot’s achievement in the “familiar compound ghost” section, even as he concludes by condemning him, despite his “daemonic gift,” for his Anti-Semitism and misogyny. The Daemon Knows is so copious, Rabelaisian in this respect, I cannot hope to encompass its new riches. The long first part on Whitman and Melville alone is filled with them and is sure to inspire many other critics’ books. But I can give some taste of them by what is a return for me to Emily Dickinson, about whom I once wrote for a special journal issue devoted to “revising the tradition.” In “‘The Designated Light’: Irony in Emily Dickinson,” I was inspired to do so by Bloom’s two-week visit to the university where I then happened to be an assistant professor. Along with giving two...

A Companion to George Eliot

A Companion to George Eliot

The Excursion: Life, Lives, and Writing

This essay aims to advance critical conversation about ways of reading The Excursion by proposing that, in twenty-first century, poem appears at its most provocative and rewarding when is read as life-writing: as a poem that tells stories of many lives, in order to raise questions about what an individual might mean, and what act of narrating might involve. (1) Such a reading is active, in sense best summarized by Sally Bushell: narrative should be responded to in complete isolation ... each demands to be re-read ... in light of what comes before and after it (Bushell 1). The need to consider multiple points-of-view results from very form of work, which appropriates genres of life-writing within framework of a or--to use Charles Lamb's term--conversational poem. (2) In this kind of reading, no subjectivity is privileged: not Poet's, and not even Wanderer's. Every narrative of a is explicitly or implicitly questioned, and even subverted, by other narratives that surround it. Recognizing centrality of life-writing in poem also develops a point first made by William Galperin: that Book I of poem already documents a between narrative and life that testifies to the inadequacy of narratives in general, and to very selfhood, which is neither so autonomous nor so authoritative as we may want to believe (37). Galperin argues that, as Wordsworth moved further away from visionary moment and its promise of reconciliation with an active universe, he was forced into questioning autonomy of poetic self, and an exploration of those sources of a poet's authority that might lie outside self. This move, by which Wordsworth voluntarily relinquishes stance of inspired son for a more relational one, that of a man among men, is figured in poem as Poet's resignation of self' (Galperin 33), yielding priority, for most of poem, to Wanderer, Solitary, and Pastor. The Excursion is life-writing in sense that dramatizes and debates question that is implicit in all biography and autobiography: how a person should live. It raises this question, not abstractly, but by locating in contemporary political and social context, in a Britain riven by political conflict and damaged both socially and economically by nearly two decades of war. Therefore, to recognize that a large proportion of poem is given to narratives of lives is not to propose a flight from history back into subjective. The dialogic structure, as Adam Potkay has argued, moves reader toward a project of knowing together (Potkay 170)--though an attentive reading of poem tends to reveal something rather different from ideal that Wordsworth longingly anticipated in Home at Grasmere-. true community, noblest Frame / Of many into one incorporate (Home at Grasmere 90 [MS B Reading Text, 11.819-820]). Hazlitt and Coleridge both believed that life-narratives were a digression from real aims of poem. Coleridge announced that The Excursion disappointed [his] expectations (Letters, 4:572-3), evidently because fell short of delivering ambitious philosophical poem he thought Wordsworth had planned. (3) Hazlitt was still more explicit about what he took to be discrepancy between philosophical ambitions and narrative method: We could have wished that our author had given to his work form of a didactic poem altogether, with only occasional digressions or allusions to particular instances. But he has chosen to encumber himself with a of narrative and description, which sometimes progress and effect of general reasoning, and which, instead of being inwoven with text, would have come in better in plain prose as notes at end of volume (Works, ed. Howe, 4:113). Hazlitt's impatience with load of narrative and description and his complaint that hinders . …

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and the Watch for Spots of Time

La maison du silence

The poem was originally published by Hardy in his fifth collection of verse, Moments of Vision (Macmillan & Co., 1917). It had never been translated into French.

The Onset of the Image in Individual and Historical Consciousness: Visionary Moments in the Texts of Carlos Fuentes

Gaston Bachelard, justifying his phenomenological method, emphasizes “the onset of the image in an individual consciousness,” provocatively states that “the poetic act has no past,” and asserts that “the image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship” (xv, xi, xv). Bachelard hedges his bets, qualifying the statement about the poetic act's having “no past” with “at least no recent past” (xi). And soon, admitting that while for him the image's primary effect “involves bringing about a veritable awakening of poetic creation, even in the soul of the reader, through the reverberations of a single poetic image,” a reverberation through which, “by going immediately beyond all psychology or psychoanalysis, we feel a poetic power rising naively within us,” nevertheless, “after the original reverberation, we are able to experience resonances, sentimental repercussions, reminders of our past.” But, he hastens to add, “the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface” (xix).

Editor's Introduction: Organisms and Machines

In a lively and ingenious new book, The Maiden Machine (Edgewise Press, 2012), the Italian philosopher of aesthetics Brunella Antomarini contemplates “a dual vocation: the machine’s desire to become organic and the organism’s desire to become a machine” (65). That dual vocation is at the heart of this issue, which itself offers lively and ingenious views about the desires Antomarini names. Suppose mechanical inventions desire to become organic by reaching the human organism through the medium of fiction. Three essays at the near-start of the issue suggest as much. Matthew Schilleman hypothesizes that the typewriter worked a “mechano-inscriptive effect” on Henry James, whose late prose then virtually seeks to become the typewriter; Alicia Rix sees the automobile add itself on to James’s body of work; and Kate McLoughlin argues the telephone’s takeover of Ford Madox Ford’s narrative form. The writers appear to become the machines, because the machines appear to become the writers — and their texts. Antomarini quotes the Russian electrical engineer, physicist, and mystic Pavel Florensky who says, “Technology is a fragment that tears itself away from the living body.” Our leading off with Martin Lockerd’s address to the living body in Georgian writing suggests that the bodily organism comes first, and technology comes after. It is the decadent, self-destructive body that Lockerd focuses on, one in need of recovery. T.S. Eliot’s poetry does the healing. No mechanical or technological supplement appears to be needed. The same seems true of bodily sight as Virginia Woolf ’s prose portrays it, in Rosemary Luttrell’s account of To the Lighthouse. There the bodily organ supplements its already constituted adequacy with transcendent vision. Yet the very transcendence argues the desire of the organ and the organism to escape themselves, to become some radical alternative. Just what is organically human, if humanity desires to move beyond what it is, bodily and mentally? Samuel Beckett’s moments of vision, as he looked at postwar painting in Paris, abetted his turn away from conventional human interests. Kevin Brazil traces Beckett’s consequent “negative anthropology,” his appearing to desire the life of objects in preference to the life of the political animal, man. Negative anthropology is perhaps a variant of the organism’s desire to become a machine.

Life-Lyrics: Autobiography, Poetic Form, and Personal Loss in Hardy’s Moments of Vision

In 1951 Edmund Blunden, writing in response C. Day Lewis' Wharton Lecture at Oxford on Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy, coined compound term life-lyric capture an apparent paradox at heart of Hardy's poetry. Day Lewis had argued in his lecture that Hardy's was deeply, nakedly hence seldom as lyric but always clouded by personal experience; ... even when poem seems be pure distillation, it almost certainly had its sources in some real incident or flesh-and-blood person. (1) Are we therefore read Hardy's poems, Blunden mused, as the chronicle of single life in 'annotations'? Should we look upon [them] ... as on whole biographical series? (p. 373). Surely, he reasoned, any explicitly autobiographical project would necessarily be at odds with impulse of lyric poetry transmute personal into impersonal: submit poet's desire for representation of lived experience-of self, and of one's family, neighbors, and friends, and loved ones-to the formal order of poetry, as Jonathan Culler has it, where and you are finally only constructs? (2) When Blunden was asking himself these questions, T. S. Eliot's modernist poetics were still highly influential and Hardy's place in lyric tradition still unclear. Eliot had argued in Tradition and Individual Talent (1919) that poem contains significant only when that is distanced from poet's affective life and personality: when emotion ... has its life in poem. (3) Poets should therefore aspire extinction of personal feeling, subordination of human aesthetic with its deep history of shared conventions, tropes, and forms. At that time, too, Robert Lowell's revolutionary autobiographical Life Studies was still nearly decade away, and modernism remained largely committed purging poetry of what Charles Olson had called lyrical interference of individual. (4) To claim that poet's work was in some way essentially autobiographical, therefore, as Day Lewis did, made it sound (to borrow Paul de Man's words) slightly disreputable and self-indulgent in way that may be symptomatic of [autobiography's] incompatibility with monumental dignity of aesthetic values. (5) The tension between aesthetic value and value of authentic self-expression, with its qualities of sincerity and emotional intensity, is central Romantic and post-Romantic poetics. For Wordsworth, exemplar of poetic autobiographer, work like The Prelude could never be merely autobiographical or it would relinquish its integrity and power as one of most profound meditations on nature of memory and poetic consciousness. Indeed, call it poetic autobiography at all is risk charge of heresy, as James Olney remarks, (6) and Wordsworth himself was so uncomfortable with imputation of an epic self-absorption that he never published poem or even gave it title, remarking nervously that it was a thing unprecedented in Literary history that man should talk so much about himself. (7) In second half of twentieth century, too, when lyric poets began writing openly about their lives once more, same tension resurfaced. After reading Life Studies Elizabeth Bishop admitted her close friend Lowell that she thought poems in his collection had an egocentricity that was --what would be reverse of sublimated, I wonder?--anyway, made intensely interesting, and painfully applicable every (8) This is tactfully worded praise from scrupulously impersonal poet who will not permit herself say directly that poetic form should, precisely, sublimate egregious self-centerdness of confessional poet: transmute it, that is, into something which is be higher and implicitly more refined if it is be applicable every reader. Yet when readers are explicitly invited to connect words on page with actual lived experience of author, (9) as they often are in Hardy's there is perceived danger, against which criticism is quick caution, of finding autobiographical situation intensely interesting in itself, and painfully applicable only in so far as it encourages us identify with emotional power of lived experience, not emotional power of aesthetic experience. …

Huebner’s Critical Encounter with the Philosophy of Heidegger in Being and Time: Learning, Understanding, and the Authentic Unfolding of History in the Curriculum

This paper responds to the following question: “What are the issues concerned with potential educational reform that arise from Huebner’s critical encounter with Heidegger and the tradition in education and curriculum theory?” In attempting a rejoinder, I revisit Huebner’s groundbreaking essay, “Curriculum as Concern for Man’s Temporality,” which introduces the phenomenological method in education and curriculum studies, with the goal of examining in detail the underlying themes, issues, and concepts, which ground Huebner’s reconceptualization of curriculum reform, as they emerge from Heidegger’s philosophy. I show that Huebner’s understanding of Beingin-the-world in terms of the design of the educational environment, not only mirrors, but as well, embodies the flux, flow, and rhythmic dynamics of history’s “dialectic” unfolding as a temporal phenomenon, which for Heidegger represents our authentic “historizing” in the “moment of vision,” or Augenblick, and this for Heidegger is the definitive embodiment of Dasein’s authentic mode of existence as historical Being-in-the-world as Being-with Others.