Paradoxical Principles Research Articles

The Hermeneutical Actuality of the Paradox in Kafka’s The Trial

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that Kafka’s The Trial, when examined for its philosophical content, makes three central claims. The novel highlights (1) the sheer inevitability of presupposing paradoxical principles in modernity; (2) the necessity of grounding those principles in a manner that combines actuality and possibility; and (3) the difficulty of such a grounding in modernity. I attempt to show that the central ethical principle in The Trial, which is presupposed by both the court and the protagonist Josef K., is the paradoxical interconnection between subjective participation and a universal standard. Given the paradoxical interconnections between subjectivity and universality, one side cannot be true unless both sides are true in their paradoxical unity. The clash between Josef K. and the court revolves around the grounding of this paradox. While Josef K. views the paradox as a possibility, the court insists on its actuality. If the narrative is accepted as factual, the novel seems to endorse possibility—every actual beginning is flawed. Nevertheless, the novel provides hermeneutical hints that expose the inadequacy of its own narrator. When the novel’s hermeneutical insights are fully brought out, actuality is redeemed. This shows that, while the paradox of the interconnection between subjectivity and universality must always remain an unexhausted possibility, it must also be grounded in hermeneutical actuality.

Russia’s approach to arms control: caught between asymmetry and the desire for strategic stability

ABSTRACT This paper analyses Russia’s approach to strategic arms control with a particular focus on two central yet largely paradoxical principles: strategic stability and asymmetry. A rise in asymmetries in the capabilities of the United States and the Russian Federation, global shifts in power, and a proceeding deterioration of U.S.–Russia relations have marked the post-Cold War era, challenging traditional arms control regimes based on strategic stability understood in terms of parity in the nuclear arsenals of the two most potent nuclear powers. Somewhat counterintuitively, the developments in the military-technological sphere that undermine the very principle of parity concurrently incentivise Russia to invest in asymmetric solutions to counterbalance these tendencies and maintain strategic stability. By analysing the views of Russian military experts, the article takes a look at the INF Treaty, New START and hypersonic weapons to examine the past, present and future challenges to the U.S.–Russian arms control architecture. It arrives at the conclusion that Russia’s home-grown solution to its security conundrum is a perplexing mix of a desire for strategic stability-cum-parity in strategic arms control and a pragmatic emphasis on asymmetries while it tries to preserve its position, which is symptomatic of the paradoxical nature of strategy itself.

Riflessioni sull'insegnamento linguistico del Greco antico e del Latino nella scuola italiana

Criticism of the teaching of ancient Greek and Latin languages in Italian classical high schools has remote origins, if one is aware that one of the most famous exponents of this current is even Pascoli; over the last twenty years, however, the extensive querelle that has arisen around classical studies has led a large number of intellectuals not only to question the usefulness and relevance of tradere and declensions, but also to reflect on the possibility of questioning the teaching methods, attempting to overcome the secular paradigm of the so-called “traditional” method by adopting innovative techniques and assumptions: this is the case, for example, of the “natura” method, devised by the Danish latinist Ørberg in the 1950s.
 The fervent reflections conducted on Latin and Greek have so far led to a polarisation of positions around “traditionalism”, among whose ranks one can count those who persist in teaching the classical languages by maintaining as a reference the antiquated modus docendi overflowing with philology and devoid of glottodidactics, and to “naturalism”, a trend born of the insights of Ørberg, and before him Berlitz, based on the paradoxical principle of teaching the ghlóssai in the same way as English, French, or any other living language.
 The present study is entrusted with the task of synthesising both factiones, highlighting the strengths of both methods, with the aim of providing a rationalised, objective and fruitful field of investigation for the continuation of the intellectual debate on Greek and Latin, in the hope of reaching a unanimous consensus on the indispensable importance of classical studies, particularly linguistic and literary studies, for the construction of a critical and aware democratic society.

전염병 서사에서 나타나는 혐오의 변증법: 그레그 베어(Greg Bear)의 다윈 시리즈(Darwin Series)를 중심으로

Greg Bear’s Darwin series consisting of Darwin’s Radio (1999) and its sequel Darwin’s Children (2003) portrays the eschatological crisis caused by an endogenous retrovirus named SHEVA which causes a great pandemonium and disgust among people. This retrovirus triggers speciation by rapidly evolving the next generation in utero but does so in a way that plunges the world into chaos. The rapid outbreak and activation of SHEVA triggers widespread panic and social turmoil, which in turn lead to large-scale acts of violence against the infected. The chaos and resultant cruelty shown in both narratives arouse questions as to the paradoxical principles of disgust. On the surface level, Darwin series depicts how social conflicts derive from disgust among people who project their fear and horror onto the minorities while it also grapples with disgust on an evolutionary dimension. Evoking the possibility of redemption of the human world, creating a counter-discourse to human conflict and disgust. The posthuman existence of Shevites, a new species of humanity, represents the blurred distinction between nature and culture, not to speak of that of human and nonhuman; this post-humanity breaks with Cartesian dualism and thereby demands a new epistemology which presupposes network of human and nonhuman and their interrelatedness, negating anthropocentrism.

Critical Potential and Subversiveness of Young Emerging Artists Working Alongside Art Institutions: Milena Ivić What are we supposed to do with all this freedom [Šta da radimo sa svom ovom slobodom

This study concerns the concept of freedom, radically questioning the autonomy of contemporary art and institutions. The issue of freedom of expression, freedom of speech and artistic freedom will be considered through a particular artistic event that serves as a case study. This event happened in October of 2020 in Banja Luka, BiH (Bosnia and Herzegovina). It was a solo exhibition by contemporary artist Milena Ivić from Banja Luka, organized and curated by the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska (MSURS) entitled What are we supposed to do with all this freedom [Šta da radimo sa svom ovom slobodom]. It successfully opened one evening, and by the following day it had to be withdrawn and closed to the public. The text in the first part presents an insight into the context of the mentioned exhibition and the structure of the MSURS as the main art institution in this part of BiH. The second part of the text offers a look at certain patterns within the paradigm of contemporary art, with a look at the feminist framework of the artist. The third and final part points out the paradoxical principles of the autonomy of art and shows how the institution transforms subversiveness and obstructs progressiveness by perpetuating the status quo. Article received: December 24, 2021; Article accepted: February 1, 2022; Published online: April 15, 2022; Review article

The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature. Tina Skouen. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Pp. x+234.

The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature. Tina Skouen. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Pp. x+234.

The counterfactual direct argument

Many have accepted that ordinary counterfactuals and might counterfactuals are duals. In this paper, I show that this thesis leads to paradoxical results when combined with a few different unorthodox yet increasingly popular theses, including the thesis that counterfactuals are strict conditionals. Given Duality and several other theses, we can quickly infer the validity of another paradoxical principle, ‘The Counterfactual Direct Argument’, which says that ‘A> (B or C)’ entails ‘A> (not B> C)’. First, I provide a collapse theorem for the ‘counterfactual direct argument’ (CDA). The counterfactual direct argument entails the logical equivalence of the subjunctive and material conditional, given a variety of assumptions. Second, I provide a semantics that validates the counterfactual direct argument without collapse. This theory further develops extant dynamic accounts of conditionals. I give a new semantics for disjunction, on which A or B is only true in a context when A and B are both unsettled. The resulting framework validates CDA while invalidating other commonly accepted principles concerning the conditional and disjunction.

Turning a home into the common: the micro-politics of subjectivations in a cohousing community in Seoul

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the micro-politics of a cohousing community called Bin-Zib (Empty/Guests’ House) in Seoul, South Korea. In a society where home ownership has become a financial asset, the residents of Bin-Zib have attempted to turn the home into the common. This paper focuses on how paradoxical principles of the community create Bin-Zib as an argumentative space, where disputes constantly arise. The paper then shows how the practice of communing in Bin-Zib is essentially related to the everyday politics of subjectivation. Finally, the meaning of Bin-Zib in the inter-Asian context will be discussed.

Novel Lessons on Behavioral Ethics From the U.S. Military Academy at West Point

After a spate of business ethics crises over the past two decades, management educators were put on notice: considerably more was needed to improve the ethical grounding of our graduating students. Taking stock of our progress, we contend that management education remains well short of achieving this charge and cannot be content with the state of its ethics development. In this essay, grounded on a 2-year research platform, we turn to a unique institute of higher education to comment on the pedagogical assumptions and practices they enact to enhance the ethical behavior of their students. Specifically, this essay will comment on some of the more novel and paradoxical principles and approaches employed by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to support the positive ethical behaviors of its students. We offer meaningful prescriptions touching on core planks of behavioral ethics: moral awareness, moral decision making, and moral motivation. Given the questionable efficacy of some previous approaches at improving ethical behavior, turning our attention to this unique institution may offer some compelling insights that may be employed in management education.

Tourism Soviet-Style

Tourism Soviet-Style Ingrid Kleespies Diane P. Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream. x + 307 pp., illus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0801451539. $39.95. “Everyone must visit Sochi, if only once in their lives.” Many readers will surely recognize this famous line from Vladimir Men´shov’s 1980 Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (Moskva slezam ne verit), perhaps less for its importance in the movie than for its cultural resonance in the late Soviet period. The statement was recognized as a truism of Soviet life, as Diane Koenker shows in her engaging new study of Soviet tourism and leisure. How did it come to be the case that, for most Soviet citizens, a trip to Sochi or another such vacation hotspot was both a desired and an expected reward from the state? Club Red sets out to answer this question, among others, in a full-scale study of the phenomenon of the Soviet vacation, from its somewhat chaotic origins in the 1920s to its enshrinement in late Soviet culture as the ultimate marker of the socialist “good life.” In chronological fashion Koenker details the ways in which the early, ideologically driven practices of “proletarian tourism” and medicalized rest cures evolved into full-fledged institutions of leisure similar to their capitalist counterparts. In so doing, her study engages with a number of larger critical issues surrounding the study of Soviet experience: What were the myths and realities of the socialist good life? How did consumerism shape Soviet society, even if its existence was not acknowledged? What paradoxes did the phenomenon of the state-sponsored vacation embody, and what do these reveal about the interaction between the state and its citizens? Koenker draws from several scholarly approaches to consider these questions, including the theorization of tourism, socialist consumerism, and Soviet institution building; and she approaches her topic with a sharp awareness of the often paradoxical nature of Soviet experience, as elucidated by Alexei Yurchak in his recent study of the late Soviet period and the social [End Page 444] experience of glasnost´.1 In a state where official ideology was based on a glorification of work and labor, the realm of leisure was sure to be understood in complex, even ambivalent, terms. As Koenker shows, important conceptual tensions shaped the practices of state-sponsored travel and vacation from the outset. She skillfully reveals how these tensions played out over seven decades to create specific social institutions of late socialism. In this respect, Club Red is both a success story that details the growth of a bona fide socialist consumer enterprise that became a beloved fixture of Soviet life and a telling document of the many ways in which the state never proved able to deliver on that promise of a trip to Sochi for all. Club Red provides a useful historical overview of the importance of vacation and rest to the Soviet project from early on, as evident from the 1922 labor code that established workers’ right to an annual vacation—the first such document in the world to do so. The “right to rest” was enshrined in the 1936 Soviet constitution 12 years before it would become a key provision in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These provisions reflect the fact that the establishment of a good life for all citizens was a central tenet of the Soviet project, albeit one traditionally less studied. Leisure, specifically vacation, was a core component of this good life. As we can see from Club Red, however, the questions of what this leisure should consist of, how it should be delivered to the population, and to whom it should be accessible, were matters of no small importance or controversy, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. The state’s answers to these questions were in part shaped by an early ideological and administrative divide between turizm, or physically active travel, and rest (otdykh). These twin pillars of the Soviet vacation were viewed as separate, even competing, activities well into the 1960s and 1970s, though both had at their core the paradoxical principle of purposeful relaxation. Club Red examines the way in which these phenomena...

POETRY IN REVIEW

1 6 1 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R Is literary history possible? It is still not clear to me, to respond belatedly to David Perkins’s trenchant question of twenty-some years ago, the degree to which one can really write sound literary history. American poetry, to narrow the field, especially if one has in view the major practitioners, is more like a four-dimensional network than a sequence of periods or a chain of phases linked by causality. That proposition is of course a corollary to one paradoxical principle behind T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’: ‘‘The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’’ My former colleague Robert M. Adams taught a seminar that he called ‘‘Hard, Beautiful Poems.’’ The texts ranged over the centuries. One implication was that the criteria of hardness (which I take to mean intellectual di≈culty rather than but certainly not exclusive of density, which is often a component of the former) and beauty (easier and more troublesome to gloss, it shades o√ into sublimity by way of splendor and radiance) transcended the hisB a r e l y C o m p o s e d , b y A l i c e F u l t o n ( N o r t o n , 9 4 p p . , $ 2 9 . 9 5 ) 1 6 2 Y E N S E R Y torical dimension. I don’t have any of his syllabi, alas – but hooray, since I am free to imagine that the students’ readings included, in an order their professor liked, some of the following: Shakespeare’s Sonnets 94, 107, and 112, Donne’s ‘‘Air and Angels’’ and ‘‘The Extasie,’’ Pope’s ‘‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,’’ Keats’s ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’ (familiarity does not obviate difficulty), and Browning ’s ‘‘A Grammarian’s Funeral,’’ ‘‘Fra Lippo Lippi,’’ and ‘‘Caliban upon Setebos.’’ Though ‘‘difficulty’’ in this context is not a contingent quality but an absolute one, which graces the temporal work now and then, it must also be said that since the beginning of the past century it has been especially prized in some aesthetic quarters. Eliot writes (in his ‘‘Conclusion’’ to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism) of its exigency for the modern poem, and when Wallace Stevens insists (in his Adagia) that a good poem ‘‘must resist the intelligence almost successfully,’’ the adverb comes across as something of a hedge. Indeed, one might argue that ‘‘Hard, Beautiful Poems’’ is a seminar title itself symptomatic of an era – the modern, say. More recent poets who might be assigned in the seminar would surely include those who invented their own ‘‘language within’’ a ‘‘common’’ language, to appropriate James Merrill’s definition from his sonnet ‘‘The Parnassians,’’ a celebration cum critique of aestheticism. In addition to Mallarmé they might include Emily Dickinson (selected poems, mind you), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein (in Tender Buttons), Ezra Pound (‘‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’’), John Berryman (especially in the ‘‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet’’), and Geoffrey Hill. A glance at that list of names will tell the reader that for this reviewer the pertinent difficulty is inextricable from linguistic extravagance and idiosyncrasy. ‘‘Hard’’ is a hard word, and no one would dispute the notion that Robert Frost can be as adamant as corundum (not to mentionasabrasive),ascan,intheirdifferentways,poetsasvarious as Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Donald Justice, Fredrick Seidel, and Louise Glück. The difficulty I have in mind, however, relates to excess, eccentricity, and obscurity, and it is separable from the ‘‘beautiful.’’ Elizabeth Bishop, surely one of thehandfuloflate-twentieth-centurypoetswhowillbereadonthe lunar frontier, extravagant though she is in a narrow sense of the term, is not ‘‘hard’’ the way that Dickinson can be. P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 6 3 R Among the work of contemporary American poets, none, it seems to me, comports better with our two criteria than that of Alice Fulton, most...

The Peter principle revisited: A computational study

In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: ‘Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence’. Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the mechanism of promotion rewards the best members and where the competence at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different to each other. Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization. Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.

"The Paradoxical Principle and Salutary Practice": Hume on Toleration

David Hume is an ardent supporter of practice of religions toleration. For Hume, toleration forms part of background that makes progress in philosophy possible, and it accounts for superiority of philosophical thought in England in eighteenth century. As he puts it in introduction to Treatise: the improvements in reason and philosophy can only be owing to a land of toleration and of liberty (T Intro. 7; SBN xvii)} Similarly, narrator of part 11 of First Enquiry comments:

Militant Democracy, Legal Pluralism, and the Paradox of Self-Determination

The international legality of militant democracy - when and how a constitutional democracy can legally act in an antidemocratic manner to combat threats to its democratic existence - is far from clear. The legality of legal pluralism - the extent to which international law authorizes transformative political agendas that seek to implement forms of religious, cultural or national autonomy - is also unclear. The elusive legality of these political developments creates conditions for the abuse of power both by states acting in defense of democracy, and by religious, cultural and national communities seeking a measure of legal autonomy. Marked by a shared normative commitment to the paradoxical principle of self-determination, the relationship between legal pluralism and militant democracy provides insight into the legality of both developments in ways that might be overlooked by viewing each in isolation. That this is the case is revealed dramatically by the recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Refah v. Turkey, in which the Court upheld the banning of a political party that advocated a form of legal pluralism which would introduce elements of Islamic law into the Turkish legal order. Refah v. Turkey establishes a legal site in which contestations over the boundaries of legal pluralism and militant democracy will take place in the future, and reveals how European human rights law seeks to realize the democratic potential of self-determination.

A Reconstruction of Morals for Humanity through the Restitutory Law

In this paper, I examine the concepts of primitive, modern and contemporary law in Emile Durkheim's legal theory with reference to Jean Carbonnier's concept of internormative relationships. According to Durkheim, laws including religious taboos in early societies are almost exclusively of penal and repressive nature. On the other hand, in modern society, laws are no longer repressive in nature. In addition, regulation of modern laws also became abstract. Therefore, the modern law, which Durkheim classified as restitutory law, seems to be as if it were permitting consensual contract by free will. However, the regression of repressive law in modern society does not result in an absence of the social norms which regulate the consensual contract, but the development of respect for the dignity of human person based on the morals of humanity. According to Carbonnier, the law limits itself to allotting its task to non-legal social norms which are not well crystallized, like morals. The law developing in contemporary society is said to be an inappropriate regulation in a relatively closed and automatized system, which prevents voluntary communication and consensus by citizens. But originally, the development of the law in present day society is caused and promoted by the decay of morals, which regulated consensual contract by citizens. Nowadays, conflicts occur more and more in consensual contract due to the moral decay in our daily life. Hence, regulation of present laws needs to be more concrete to restore and reconstruct the lost moral order. This is the cause of the development of law in present society. The simultaneous occurrence of the decline of morals and the development of restitutory law illustrates the paradoxical principle that society has to first fall ill in order to become healthy.

Improvising Gestalt with Children

"Abstract: This paper delineates four major ‘F’ principles of doing Gestalt therapy with children: therapeutic client-friendship, facilitating figure-formation, the therapeutic use of fantasy, and intervention in the field. These principles are based on fundamental Gestalt theory. They are illustrated with case material drawn from the author’s experiences of working with children in a rural area of Wyoming, USA. Key words: therapeutic friendship, figure-formation, fantasy, field, contact, ground, phenomenological method, paradoxical principle of change, active listening, choice- centred discipline."

The Crack in Everything (review)

Reviewed by: The Crack in Everything Harold Schweizer (bio) Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Crack in Everything. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. 100 pp. Paperback, $10.95. In each of her eight books of poetry, Alicia Ostriker has pondered the elusive meaning of sexuality, the looming catastrophes of marriage, the ongoing atavistic bloodshed of history. In all of her books she has held sons, daughters, and husband, sanity and justice, beauty and God, in a precarious balance between disenchantment and epiphany. Her poems are frequently launched as possible elegies should they fail as pieces of resistance. The world through which she travels “records catastrophe. / Literature,” she adds laconically, “does the same.” 1 It is a world whose catastrophes elicit such metaphors as, “hill of illness,” “hard breast,” “stone blister.”2 It is, throughout Ostriker’s work, a “wounded / World that we cannot heal,” but that is yet “our bride.”3 The elegist of Ostriker’s splendid “A Meditation in Seven Days” in Green Age encounters her god on the seventh day, resting, murderous, drunken, exhausted but loved. God’s excessively human qualities epitomize Ostriker’s disillusioned view of history and its various subtle and not-so-subtle traditions of violence, many of which have their causes in patriarchy, some of which trace themselves through Ostriker’s Jewish heritage. When, out of the struggle with those traditions, she seeks to revise and rewrite the master narratives, her poetry, she insists, will attempt neither the “words addressed to an atomic father” nor the emotional distance of (male) “speculation” nor the self-validating “wisdom of the wise” if only “so that suddenly / Our human grief illuminated, we’re a circle / Practical and magical.”4 To such a circle, to such grief and illumination, we are invited in Ostriker’s eighth volume of poetry, The Crack in Everything. The title is repeated in an epigraph from Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” It is a redemptive, but paradoxical principle that structures the poetic vision of this book. The incurability of history, the violence of cities, the randomness of illness, the incomprehensibility of pain: these are the cracks. And while they elicit Ostriker’s warning against “the old myth that suffering is virtue” (“The Russian Army Goes into Baku,” 27), in her poem titled “The Class” the light nevertheless gets in: Against evidence, the teacher believes Poetry heals, or redeems suffering, If we can enter its house of judgment. (P. 61) [End Page 273] Unlike the judgment of history (which is that the mistakes of the past shall be repeated), the poetic house of judgment would liberate rather than condemn, would forgive rather than indict, would “give...permission / To gather pain into language” (p. 60). Although “The Class” ends with Ostriker’s wistful contemplation of such redemptive possibility, it is “against evidence.” Poetry is no “safe-house.” All the teacher can do is to lead her students into (and hopefully through) their private infernos: The teacher helps them descend to hell, Where she cannot reach them, where books are ashes, Where language is hieroglyphs carved in walls Running with slime, which they’ll have to feel for In the steamy mist, while the whip opens their backs. (P. 61) The Crack in Everything testifies to the effort, often a vain effort, of entering the poetic house of judgment—life is unforgivable. When Ostriker seeks out those supremely (for)given moments—Wordsworthian spots of time as in “Appearance and Reality” or in “Taylor Lake,” or in “Still Life: A Glassful of Zinnias on My Daughter’s Kitchen Table”— such purely aesthetic, redemptive moments are rare. In “After Illness” she laments: Whatever I can consciously intend By definition isn’t it! What I want Is to listen, what I want Is to follow instructions. (P. 53) But the instructions emanate from indeterminate sources. Ostriker’s “guides” are “presences” (p. 52) and her presences are fortuitous and temporary: “It never lasts” (“Still Life,” 81). “The Nature of Beauty” ends with an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s aesthetic/spiritual quest: A brief raid on the inarticulate Is what we get, and in retreat we cannot Tell...

A Paradoxical Approach to Teaching Group Dynamics: First Thoughts, First Findings

This article reports on an attempt to create an experiential group learning structure based on the paradoxical principles described in Smith and Berg's 1987 work, Paradoxes of Group Life. This learning structure departs from the group-on-group design described by Gillette and McCollom in their 1990 work, Groups in Context, in the role prescribed for the facilitator. In this structure, the facilitator is active in providing directions for each of the first five experiential sessions, directions that are intended to prompt members to explore together the influence on group life of (a) contradiction, (b) group membership, (c) opposition, and (d) negotiation with authority. The article includes case material from a single course in which this method was used and includes the authors' reflections on the opportunities and risks they observed in their initial attempt to put this approach into practice.

Chaadaev and Tiutchev

Peter Chaadaev and Fedor Tiutchev were figures of a type: brilliant, aphoristic, melancholic, sceptical, comme il faut to a fault; moulded by their sojourns abroad, they struck their countrymen as "Russian ?migr?s from Europe" (I. Aksakov)1; superb speakers and writers of French, they produced what is perhaps the best prose in the language ever penned by a Russian hand; both suffered much, and in private: Chaadaev because of the Telescope affair and the consequent legend of his insanity, Tiutchev because of his passionate and doomed love affair with Elena Denis'eva. In the 1840s and 1850s Chaadaev and Tiutchev enjoyed a position of special prestige in their respective spheres: the former in the salons of Moscow, the latter in the Petersburg beau monde. Their impact went beyond the immediate circles of Westernisers and Slavophiles: Chaadaev and Tiutchev were socially fashionable, Tiutchev even more than the thinker. This was still an age when novel theories, strange dogmas and paradoxical principles were in great vogue among the significant section of high society that affected an interest in matters literary, philosophical and historical. Pushkin's biographer Pavel Annenkov speaks of "ideas [which] appeared like idols, with a genealogy that was obscure, demanding unconditional adulation"2; the advent of the thick journals marked the end of this period. The friendship between the thinker and the poet began upon the latter's return to Russia in 1844 after a 22-year absence3: thereafter Tiutchev made yearly visits to the old capital, where he would see Chaadaev; by 1846 we find the poet referring to him in a somewhat amused tone, not unlike the one employed by Viazemskii on similar occasions (letter to Madame Tiutchev of August 14):

Paradoxical Intention, Symptom Prescription, and Principles of Therapeutic Change

Paradoxical Intention, Symptom Prescription, and Principles of Therapeutic Change