Mutual Illumination Research Articles

An Intertextual Analysis of Jími Sọ ́ lań ké’̣s Òna La (In The Path) via the Multiple Star System Theory of Mutual Illumination and Interaction

The concept of mutual illumination between texts, genres, arts, and disciplines has been used in scholarly work for decades (Weisstein, 1973, 1993). Nevertheless, much of this literature lacks a firm anchor with regard to a literal source of the analogy “mutual illumination.” We argue that by observing natural phenomena that actually mutually illuminate, influence and otherwise affect each other, greater insight into how texts interact in similar ways can be achieved. Thus, drawing concepts from astrophysics, with specific reference to multiple star systems, a conceptual framework is derived in which analogous relations are proposed and interrogated. This framework couches the discussion in a stylistic analysis of our primary text, Jími Sọ ́lańké’̣ sỌ nạ Lạ, which is analyzed both on its own and also with reference to other texts which are interconnected, interrelated, and serve to “mutually illuminate” each other. We find that when considered in light of other related texts, the analysis of Ọ nạ Lạ becomes much richer and, in the process, the understanding of the other texts is also enriched. Stylistic tools used in the analysis include various types of intertextual and intratextual parallelism, repetition, and silence.

An Intertextual Analysis of J i ́ mi S ̣ o ́ la n ́ k e ̣ ́ ’ s O ̣̀ n a L a (In The Path) via the Multiple Star System Theory of Mutual Illumination and Interaction

An Intertextual Analysis of J i ́ mi S ̣ o ́ la n ́ k e ̣ ́ ’ s O ̣̀ n a L a (In The Path) via the Multiple Star System Theory of Mutual Illumination and Interaction

Aftermaths and recuperations in anthropology

The Frazer Lecture was launched in 1921, with the support of scholars from all over Europe, explicitly in the context of the “meeting on common ground” after World War I. In the spirit of anthropologists examining postdisaster processes of any kind, to meet with scholars from other disciplines for mutual illumination, and to revisit its own rich intellectual and empirical archive, my lecture explored processes of recuperation. Recuperation is selective of elements rather than rescuing whole systems, then followed by creative reconfiguration. Sources from classics, recent philosophically inspired anthropology, new ethnography of Africa, and postwar Vietnam are examined as examples that pick up the spirit of the Frazer Lecture itself.

Can Lutheran Theology and Virtue Ethics Be Friends?

AbstractLutheran theology is generally suspicious of virtue ethics. This suspicion arises from (1) the Lutheran commitment to justification by faith in God's unconditional promise; and (2) Luther's corollary understanding of sin as existential self‐absorption. Some Lutheran theologians have sought to incorporate virtue ethics by using it as an orientation for Christian life, while making sure to avoid any contamination of the doctrine of justification by virtue ethics. My project is to consider the possibility of a mutual illumination and interaction between the doctrine of justification and virtue ethics’ focus on formation by habituation. As an aid in exploring this possibility I use the distinction in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics between the “ultimate” and the “penultimate.”

In a Double Way: Nāma-rūpa in Buddhaghosa’s Phenomenology

In this paper, we want to bring together two issues for their mutual illumination: (i) the particular use of that hoary Indian dyad, “nāma-rūpa”, literally, “name-and-form by Buddhaghosa, the influential 5th c Theravāda writer, to organize the categories of the abhidhamma, the canonical classification of phenomenal factors (dhammas) and their formulaic ordering;1 and (ii) an interpretation of phenomenology as a methodology. We argue that Buddhaghosa does not use abhidhamma as a reductive ontological division of the human being into mind and body, but as the contemplative structuring of that human’s phenomenology. This phenomenological methodology expressed in his application of nāma-rūpa is expressed as a set of contemplative practices; we compare this approach to some of the processes explicated within the 20th c Western Phenomenological tradition’s predominantly metaphysical teleology. We suggest that Buddhaghosa’s use of nāma-rūpa should be seen as the analytic by which he understands how experience is undergone, and not his account of how some reality is structured. We can learn from Buddhaghosa something about both how experience is to be analyzed, and how that analysis has a clarificatory purpose not tied to the espousal of any particular ‘view’ of reality.

Spectral Image Analysis of Florescent Objects with Mutual Illumination

Spectral Image Analysis of Florescent Objects with Mutual Illumination

Between tradition and appropriation: mythical method and politics in the poetry of George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos

Venerating the past in the form of tradition and adapting or appropriating it for modern purposes could be seen as two modes of engagement with antiquity, involving a certain hierarchy, either privileging the authority of the past or assigning priority to the present in radically recasting the ancient material. This article will explore whether in the interstices between tradition and appropriation it is possible to position/locate a third approach which would not involve a reverence for the past or radical revisioning of the classical material but could generate a dialogue between source and adaptation, with the aim of encouraging their mutual illumination. It will consider the extent to which this dialogic or interactive mode of classical reception has proved more appealing to modern Greek poets dealing with conceptions of history, time and politics and explore its epistemological implications by focusing on ‘mythological’ poems by George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos that allude to the political developments of the period in which they were written and engage with the past in different ways.

Deleuze and Zen: An Interological Adventure

This article experiments with interology as a mode of inquiry. It creates a multitude of interalities between Deleuze’s works and Zen literature, partly for purposes of mutual illumination, partly for the sake of involution. It is meant as equipment for living, which is incomplete without the reader’s involvement. Its serviceability rests on the reader’s becoming one with it.

Spectral image analysis of mutual illumination between florescent objects.

This paper proposes a method for modeling and component estimation of the spectral images of the mutual illumination phenomenon between two fluorescent objects. First, we briefly describe the bispectral characteristics of a single fluorescent object, which are summarized as a Donaldson matrix. We suppose that two fluorescent objects with different bispectral characteristics are located close together under a uniform illumination. Second, we model the mutual illumination between two objects. It is shown that the spectral composition of the mutual illumination is summarized with four components: (1) diffuse reflection, (2) diffuse-diffuse interreflection, (3) fluorescent self-luminescence, and (4) interreflection by mutual fluorescent illumination. Third, we develop algorithms for estimating the spectral image components from the observed images influenced by the mutual illumination. When the exact Donaldson matrices caused by the mutual illumination influence are unknown, we have to solve a non-linear estimation problem to estimate both the spectral functions and the location weights. An iterative algorithm is then proposed to solve the problem based on the alternate estimation of the spectral functions and the location weights. In our experiments, the feasibility of the proposed method is shown in three cases: the known Donaldson matrices, weak interreflection, and strong interreflection.

Observing Neutrality, circa 1800

Heis mich nicht reden, heis mich schweigen-Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (MA 5:357)FOR HIS SEMINAR held at College de France during spring semester of 1978, Roland Barthes offered his students a series of fragments collected under title Figures of Neutral.1 What he wanted to provide was a dictionary, of definitions but of twinklings (scintillations) (Barthes 10). It was to be a loose collection, reflecting fact appears in a number of widely differing contexts and also embodies a particular kind of resistance with regard to choice or paradigmatic structures-a resistance could, he writes, also be understood as the refusal to dogmatize (Barthes 10). The twenty-three seminar sessions were devoted to topics whose connection to is at times relatively obvious (the androgyne, tact, etc.) and at times less so (the adjective, affirmation, etc.). Barthes's selection frees from any thematic rigidity and allows it to twinkle in unexpected places. By making neutrality an open and prolonged topic of discussion, he also opens door ironic play with one of neutrality's main taboos: production of speech itself. Such discussions might, at best, strive impartiality, but as we will see with regard to neutrality, once first word has been uttered, one can no longer hope to remain where is concerned.The discussion of neutrality in following pages will take its cues from Barthes, who has an approach to neutrality moves lightly between different disciplinary contexts-Barthes mentions in his lecture notes he takes word for a series of walks along a certain number of readings-and is committed to a certain structural definition of as that which outplays paradigm (Barthes 6). In present article, as well, there is an attempt to balance between discursive mobility and structural contour. Here, focus is narrower: both as regards historical parameters, lingering in decades around 1800, and in terms of choosing case studies where problem of is directly addressed in terms of human relations and in scientific contexts. On one hand, neutrality is used to indicate a certain mode of being around others, one defined by a kind of absence, as will be shown in more detail below. On other hand, concept of neutrality also plays an important role in developing science of chemistry, where term neutral salt was (and still is) used to describe a product emerges from certain combinations of acids and bases-a product that, however, has qualities of neither an acid nor a base. I will begin by considering theoretical positions associated with these two modes of neutrality, with reference to examples drawn from scientific, literary, and philosophical sources and with an eye unexpected affinities between them. In each case, we will see neutrality is accompanied by formal expectations; is, it carries with it certain transferrable structural features. Rather than resist this rigidity, as nimbleness of Barthes's approach might tempt us to do, I will instead attempt to navigate a middle (though certainly not neutral) position, such a close attention to particular features of each kind of neutrality-one based on human and other on chemical interactions-will, in fact, allow a kind of mutual illumination. With goal in mind, general discussion of neutrality in first part of article will, in second part, be complemented by three case studies where these two modes of neutrality appear in unexpected proximity to one another. We will see how they rely upon each other in surprising ways, and we will also witness their limits, as shown through emergence and decline of chemical neutrality as a metaphor and figure of thought beyond field of chemistry.Defining NeutralityThe word comes from Latin neutrum, which is itself a composite of ne + utrum, or either: essence of is to negate. …

Mutual illumination photometric stereo without calibration

Mutual illumination photometric stereo without calibration

The paradoxes of democratic life

Recent events have only reinforced the fact that the value of freedom occupies a pre-eminent, but also paradoxical, role in modern societies. Nowhere have the ambiguities and ambivalences of this leading concept been more fully explored than in recent analyses by György Márkus and Axel Honneth. The following paper brings these two theorists together, examining Márkus’s claims for the perplexity that overtakes an investigation of modern freedom against the background of Honneth’s most recent magnum opus. This contrast will provide mutual illumination, allowing us to appreciate both the commonalities and differences in approach and conclusion, but also allowing us to critically contest some of Márkus’s most startling conclusions.

I Will Regret Later

AbstractThis article explores the rhetoric of regret as a way to rethink the aesthetic dimension of two hitherto artificially separated late ancient corpora of thought—rabbinic and “pagan.” Moving away from the thinking in terms of historicist “influences” I arrive at a point of mutual illumination of the corpora, thereby advancing a new model of philosophical and rhetorical analysis that both justifies the importance of the modern discussion of relationships between philosophy, rhetoric, and aesthetics for understanding the Talmud as a late ancient body of text and thought and shows how the Talmud, thus understood, complicates and raises the stakes in that discussion. I first draw on the framework of this bidirectional analysis for probing the rhetoric of the rabbis and of the “pagan” philosophers. I consequently work against the grain of a modern interpretation of late ancient aesthetics to arrive to a comparative study of the aesthetics of rabbinic discourse.

McLuhan and I Ching: An Interological Inquiry

This article explores under-examined resonances between I Ching and McLuhan’s work. It presents I Ching as a metamedium, shows that McLuhan’s four laws of the media have precursors in I Ching, and evaluates the relevance of I Ching in the age of digital mediation. The article illustrates that studying I Ching in comparison with McLuhan’s work opens up numerous opportunities for mutual illumination between the two.

Colour vision in 3D scenes: how much brain is needed to solve the Mach-card problem?

Light fields in the real world are highly complex because they contain multiple illumination sources, including indirect light reflected from other surfaces. Such interreflexions are well compensated by the human visual system, by employing prior knowledge about the nature of the light field (Mach-card experiment: Bloj et al., 1999). Interreflections are the rule in natural environments and therefore a general problem for all organisms relying on colour vision, e.g. bees. Honeybees have excellent colour constancy as demonstrated for flat Mondrian-like scenes (Werner et al., 1988). However, bees have far fewer neurons available for these operations than humans and it is therefore interesting to ask: how can a complex colour vision task, like compensating the effect of light fields in 3D scenes, be solved by a relatively simple system? I will present a Mach-card experiment with free-flying honeybees (apis mellifera), where individual bees were trained to discriminate between green/white cards folded in different spatial configurations: (1) planar (2) concave and (3) convex. The stimuli (paper cards, 2.5 x 2.5 x 6 cm) were presented in front of a vertical, "grey" background (a turntable disc, 80 cm diameter). Previous experiments had shown that bees are able to resolve the depth profile of similar 3D forms. The results show that the bees recognized a trained green/white pattern irrespective of its spatial configuration, in other words, bees compensated the occurring interreflexions. Further experiments, involving simulations of the interreflexions, showed that the compensation depends on the consistency of spatial and chromatic cues. This suggests that bees use their knowledge about the spatial configuration in 3D scenes in order to discount the effects of mutual illuminations. Whether this involves cognitive inference, as it suggested for human colour vision, or is driven by hard-wired interconnections, remains to be solved. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014

On Yijing in Chinese and English Nature Poetry: The Case Study of Wordsworth and WANG Wei

The nature poetry written by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770 AD-1850 AD) is a milestone in English literary history. Its inbuilt aesthetics transcended English poetics and reached the realm of Yijing, which is regarded as the highest achievement in Chinese poetics for nature poetry. In this perspective, poems written by TANG Dynasty poet WANG Wei (王维) can be well compared. Though they share similarities in aesthetical perception, the differences cannot be neglected: One difference is the contrast of emptiness and substantiality; the other lies in clarity and vagueness. This mutual illumination will not only build a channel in comparative literature and enhance cultural communication, more importantly, it also discovers the potential values of the two: First, Wordsworth’s unique aesthetical awareness is forwarded. Second, it helps to promote the value of ancient Chinese poetic theory.

A Chinese Aesthetics Reading of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey ---with a Comparison to Chunjiang Huayue Ye

The nature poetry written by English Romantic poet Wordsworth is a milestone in English literary history. Its inbuilt aesthetics is much similar with that of ancient Chinese Mountain-Water poetry. The most remarkable aspect is the fusion of feeling and scene, in which philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics are interwoven into a thematic unity. In this perspective, one Chinese nature poem Chunjiang Huayue Ye written by early Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Ruoxu can be well compared. This mutual illumination not only yields a dialogical channel, more importantly, it also discovers the potential values of the two: first, Wordsworth’s unique aesthetical awareness is forwarded; second, it helps to globalize and modernize ancient Chinese literary theory

Mutual Illumination: The Xinggan Dramas and the Fanjiulou Ritual of Yongkang, Zhejiang

This article documents the intimate relationship between drama and ritual in rural China. Drama was an indispensable means of entertaining the deities, enticing them down from the heavens to receive human offerings. The xinggan dramas examined in this article, however, were distinctive in that their content was actually thematically related to the Fanjiulou salvation ritual during which they were performed. Xinggan dramas not only entertained the deities but also provided a means by which audiences were able to visualize in the drama the very process of salvation that the simultaneous conduct of the Fanjiulou ritual was meant to effect. Thus, xinggan dramas and the rituals of Fanjiulou were mutually reinforcing, each contributing to a common goal, each shedding light on the significance of the other.

Eurydice at Euston?: Walter Benjamin and Marc Augé Go Underground

Taking as its point of departure Walter Benjamin’s repeatedly unsuccessful attempt to give spatial form to his past, this paper suggests that it is perhaps the contemporary French anthropologist, Marc Augé, who provides the most appropriate envisioning of a ‘map of memories’ in his brief writings on the Parisian métro system. For Augé, the labyrinthine subway network constitutes nothing less than a ‘memory machine’ in which lines and station names serve as mnemonics, recalling long-forgotten childhood encounters and experiences. Mirroring the cityscape above, places themselves unexplored, unknown, the serried toponyms of the métro become an incantation summoning forth the shades of the past. As Augé points out, those stations that provide opportunities to change lines are felicitously termed ‘correspondences’, a Baudelairean term that fascinated Benjamin and informed his key historiographical notion of the ‘dialectical image,’ the intersection and mutual illumination of past and present moments. For me, Augé’s highly suggestive reflections bring to mind my own memories of a London childhood around 1970. Looking at the London underground map today, I cannot but see the sites of many past meetings and partings, dots connected by lines forming complex figures, constellations of memory.

Una modesta proposta per gli studi letterari

The essay examines the current status of literary studies and critical analysis. Reassessing the intellectual tradition within the humanities, the Author discusses the significance of literature, narratology and semiotics to other disciplines. In this perspective, even the interdisciplinary method(s) or approach(es) are re-investigated and re-qualified. The Author emphasizes the power associated to the metaphorical nature of literary language; critically explores the mutual illuminations between hermeneutics and philology; inspects the multifarious morphologies of meanings and the different patterns of words and texts which had moulded literary production.