Platonic Idealism Research Articles

‘Das Orakel der Deisten’: Shaftesbury und die deutsche Aufklärung by Mark-Georg Dehrmann

272 Reviews An interesting analysis of Burkhard Waldis's Deparabell vam verlorn Szohn (1527), which introduces a repentant brothel-keeper to serve as a stark contrast to the self-righteous elder brother, thus exemplifying the inadequacy of a works-based approach to justification, is followed by discussion of a Catholic response to this text. The study concludes rather disappointingly with a very short discussion of sub sequent developments, mentioning the influence of Jesuitdrama, and the changes brought about by the introduction of fixed stages and troupes of professional play ers. Although Washof wants clearly to distinguish the earlier from the later plays, the brief treatment suggests an over-simplified discontinuity. For themost part this is a useful and clearlywritten study,which offers an introduction to the genre and discusses little-known plays. But one cannot help wondering whether the dramatic strategies employed by thewriters to convey theirhomilies would not have merited greater attention. King's College London Anna Linton 'Das Orakel der Deisten: Shaftesbury und die deutsche Aufklarung. By Mark Georg Dehrmann. Gottingen: Wallstein. 2008. 499 pp. 52. ISBN 978-3 8353-0233-4. Shaftesbury has long been cited as a major influence on eighteenth-century Ger man literature and thought, but no comprehensive study of his reception has yet existed. Mark-Georg Dehrmann's monograph remedies this deficiency. A Whig and opponent of High Church Anglicanism and royalist Toryism, Shaftesbury was perceived by some inGermany as a dangerous subversive (J.L. Mosheim called him 'das Orakel der Deisten'), and by others as a progressive thinkerwho based morality on secular principles. Leibniz, who discovered him in 1709, shared his Platonic proclivities and welcomed him as an ally in the defence of optimism against the scepticism of Bayle. Gottsched praised him forgrounding taste not on courtly convention but on our natural appreciation of cosmic harmony. Towards themiddle of the century,Gleim, Ramler, and Sulzer found confirmation of their own Empfindsamkeit in Shaftesbury's rhapsodic sentiments, and through the Berlin theologian J. J.Spalding, Shaftesbury influenced the rise of neology, that tendency in Lutheran thought to reduce Christian theology to natural reli gion. Mendelssohn, Nicolai, and Lessing were impressed by Shaftesbury's informal manner, and his dialogic style, subtle irony, and elegant diction were imitated by Mendelssohn inhis Briefe tiberdie Empfindungen. Contrary to received opinion, Shaftesbury's influence rapidly waned during the second half of the century. From the start, his reception had been partial and diffuse. Until a more or less complete translation of his Characteristics appeared in 1776-79, readers without access to the original had to rely on second-hand accounts and scattered translations of thework's constituent items such as 'The Moralists' and the 'Letter concerning Enthusiasm'. His unsystematic thought had MLR, 105.1, 2010 273 limited appeal to German philosophers, and his ideas were often assimilated to Wolffian rationalism. Two figures nevertheless continued to take him seriously, namely Wieland and Herder. He played a vital part inWieland's 'metamorphosis' in the early 1760s from ethereal religiosity to a combination of Platonic idealism and wry scepti cism, andWieland's fundamental concepts of 'moral grace', kalokagathia, and the 'virtuoso' are avowedly borrowed from Shaftesbury. In the frequent deflations, in Wieland's novels and poems, of obsessive idealists and Schwarmer, Shaftesbury's 'testof ridicule' is applied as a heuristic device to overcome delusion and restore the victim to normality. In short, from his 'metamorphosis' onwards, Wieland remained Shaftesbury's closest German adherent. For over a century, Shaftesbury's definition of the poet as 'a second Maker, a just Prometheus under Jove' has been described as a major inspiration of the Sturm und Drang cult of genius and ofGoethe's presentation of Prometheus as a rebel against divine authority. It has also been claimed that Shaftesbury was the main source of the nature pantheism ofHerder and Goethe in the 1780s (thereby providing an Aryan substitute for Spinoza as an ancestor ofWeimar classicism). But as Dehrmann convincingly demonstrates, the young Herder's image, subse quently adopted byGoethe, of the genius as a defiant Prometheus stealing fire from heaven is derived not from Shaftesbury, whom he had not yet encountered, but fromEdward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition. And although Herder's 'Hymn...

Der inszenierte Held: Schillers dramenpoetische Anthropologie. (Jenaer Germanistische Forschungen, Neue Folge, 26) by Nikolas Immer

MLR, 105.1, 2010 273 limited appeal to German philosophers, and his ideas were often assimilated to Wolffian rationalism. Two figures nevertheless continued to take him seriously, namely Wieland and Herder. He played a vital part inWieland's 'metamorphosis' in the early 1760s from ethereal religiosity to a combination of Platonic idealism and wry scepti cism, andWieland's fundamental concepts of 'moral grace', kalokagathia, and the 'virtuoso' are avowedly borrowed from Shaftesbury. In the frequent deflations, in Wieland's novels and poems, of obsessive idealists and Schwarmer, Shaftesbury's 'testof ridicule' is applied as a heuristic device to overcome delusion and restore the victim to normality. In short, from his 'metamorphosis' onwards, Wieland remained Shaftesbury's closest German adherent. For over a century, Shaftesbury's definition of the poet as 'a second Maker, a just Prometheus under Jove' has been described as a major inspiration of the Sturm und Drang cult of genius and ofGoethe's presentation of Prometheus as a rebel against divine authority. It has also been claimed that Shaftesbury was the main source of the nature pantheism ofHerder and Goethe in the 1780s (thereby providing an Aryan substitute for Spinoza as an ancestor ofWeimar classicism). But as Dehrmann convincingly demonstrates, the young Herder's image, subse quently adopted byGoethe, of the genius as a defiant Prometheus stealing fire from heaven is derived not from Shaftesbury, whom he had not yet encountered, but fromEdward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition. And although Herder's 'Hymn to Nature' ('Naturhymnus') of 1775 is based on its prose equivalent in Shaftesbury's 'Moralists', Shaftesbury's influencewas eclipsed by that of Spinoza in Herder's pantheistic speculations of the 1780s. This important book, based on prodigious research, performs twomajor func tions. By exhaustive documentation of references to Shaftesbury inGerman litera turebetween 1709 and 1781, itdemonstrates thathis influencewas greatest during the first half of the century. And by careful scrutiny of the aims, interests, and knowledge of each individual who cites him, it frees the study of Shaftesbury's reception from some long-lived and tendentious illusions. Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge H. B. Nisbet Der inszenierteHeld: Schillers dramenpoetische Anthropologie. ByNikolas Immer. (Jenaer Germanistische Forschungen, Neue Folge, 26) Heidelberg: Winter. 2008. 501pp. 59. ISBN 978-3-8253-5505-0. 'Schon wieder Schiller?' Thus commences Nikolas Immer's doctoral thesis,which was published, as luckwould have it,between two grand commemoration years: the bicentenary of Schiller's death in 2005, and the 250th anniversary of Schiller's birth in 2009. However, Immer's monograph attests to the fact that dealing with Schiller?once again?does not necessarily overload themarket. On the contrary: the topic that the study isdevoted to, Schillers anthropological conception of the dramatic hero and heroine, should make us prick up our ears as Immer inhis book 274 Reviews Versucht, einen neuen Sinnhorizont [zu Schillers Dramenfiguren] zu erschliefien' (p. 15). The object of investigation is indeed a captivating one. What Schiller aims at, Immer convincingly asserts, is a humanized heroism that corresponds to Schillers study of the psyche: 'Und menschlich handelt, menschlich fuhlt der Held', to bor row the phrase from Schillers poem 'AnGothe als er den Mahomet von Voltaire auf die Biihne brachte' (1800). Meanwhile, the notion of the hero has enjoyed great popularity among both cultural and literary scholars, and it is Immer's merit comprehensively to tie this surge of secondary literature together. The approach to the topic is as systematic as it is extensive: what one might refer to as preli minary observations amount to 150 pages?an 'introduction, as itwere, that is impressively erudite, ifat times only indirectly related to Schiller. However, '[es] verlagert sich das Interesse vom statisch-vorbildhaften Helden auf den dynamisch gegenbildlichen' (p. 13), and it is precisely this gradual humanization of the hero in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that justifies a seemingly protracted treatment of thematter. Never did Schiller comprehensively reflect on the role of the dramatic hero or the heroine?a challenging fact ofwhich Immer is very much aware. It is to the advantage of the book that Immer himself acknowledges prospective reservations and objections with much care, with the result that his study avoids sliding into vagueness or improvident hypotheses. What...

On Mimesis (and Truth) in Performance

Spring 2009 21 On Mimesis (and Truth) in Performance Jon Erickson In the wake of poststructuralism and deconstruction, the notion of truth and its representation has come in for some hard times in the academic establishment. Due to a perception of Nietzsche as having reduced truth to an arbitrary metaphoric order imposed by human beings on the chaos of reality, as well as a reading of Saussure in which the relation between sign and referent is claimed to be arbitrary, the idea of referential truth becomes nothing but the specific efficacies of competing systems of discursive power.1 This way of thinking doesn’t recognize its own performative contradiction: due to its conclusion of truth as arbitrary, it cannot claim for itself a truer depiction of what is than what it hopes to replace. Both the analytical and continental traditions of philosophy involve engagements with how language represents reality. The major difference is that a large part of the continental tradition has more or less made up its mind in favor of the thesis I’ve just described, made more semantically fluid and uncertain by Derrida and materially imposed upon bodies by Foucault; this is taken as axiomatic by anyone working within its theoretical boundaries. Analytical philosophy, from Frege and Russell to Wittgenstein to Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson, does not share this axiomatic confidence, and continues to ponder how truth works, how reference functions, how we make sense to one another and share meaning.2 Obviously there is an intimate relation between questions of truth and questions of representation, if only in the everyday sense of knowing what to believe when we hear, see, or read something, especially if it is information we need to act upon. But the question becomes more complex when we deal with literary fictions or theatrical performances; at that point the truth we seek or see there is not simply a matter of direct reference. And because what we read or see is a form of makebelieve , willingly entered into if understood as theatre, unknowingly if it is a confidence game, it elicits a level of concern about trusting or mistrusting what we are expected to accept as true in a general sense.3 In theories of the theatre, mimesis or imitation has always been a vexed issue because in the past the enemies of theatre confused the self-conscious use of mimetic illusion or make-believe with lying about reality (hence Sidney’s response about the poet never affirming, therefore never lying). But within the world of the play, theatre artists themselves have shown how easy it is for some to use theatrical means to convey a false picture about what is the case–for Shakespeare the words “art” Jon Erickson is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. 22 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and “seeming” are almost always suspicious signs of pernicious plotting–but also understanding that the same means can be used as tricks to reveal the falsehood of imposture (e.g., Hamlet and Measure for Measure). In more recent times, Brechtian metatheatre has been used as an anti-theatrical weapon against the theatrical illusion of naturalism, intending to reveal the uncritical workings of ideology. In a more aesthetic light, the anti-theatrical aspect of high modernist theatre is explored by Martin Puchner in Stage Fright: “Modernist drama and theater is a Platonist theater, by which I mean not a theater of abstract ideas but a theater infused with types of anti-theatricality first developed in Plato’s closet dramas.”4 Puchner’s reference to Plato’s “closet dramas” gives us a clue as to the real issue: Plato is understood by many to be anti-mimetic, but the irony is that his “closet dramas,” his dialogues, are themselves mimetic productions, with Socrates as the main character.5 In this essay I argue that the notion of mimesis does not have to be automatically consigned to a Platonic idealism or theory of forms, and that Plato–or Socrates, rather–in the Republic is by no means consistently anti-mimetic. It is not simply mimesis in itself that troubles Socrates (though he notes its degraded state with regard to...

The health of a nation

> The season of planting fields is almost done > > When whisper-like through the islands come > > The eager-waited message all to summon; > > 'Tis time to leave your hearth and homely towns > > To leave the merchants launching laden tritemes > > Leave your wives and mothers to the spinning > > And hoplite youth at martial arts for training; > > Once again it is the time for discourse > > Beneath the ancient plane tree at Kos > > In company with Hippocrates the Wise > > And walk the Aesculapion wards > > Be refreshed in vigour, with renewed delight > > In platonic ideals of Health and Hygiene, > > Debate with friends far into star-filled nights. > Upon return each to his dispensary > > Renewed in ardour, with commitment filled > > In philosophy, philanthropy and philotechnia > > Of healing herbs, potion and incantation > > A sense of change among the …

Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate (review)

Reviewed by: Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate Laura Green Wilson, Keith, Ed. Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. xxiii + 304 pp. $65.00. This collection’s subtitle straightforwardly characterizes its contents, a Festschrift for the distinguished Hardy scholar Michael Millgate. The first half of the title, however–Thomas Hardy Reappraised–is more ambiguous. As Keith Wilson writes in his preface, the biographical and historical work on Hardy that Millgate began publishing in the 1970s opened up “an essential context for serious discussion of Hardy’s work” (ix). Millgate himself thus “reappraised” Hardy in two ways: first, by replacing speculation and sensationalism about Hardy’s life with scholarly research; and second, by establishing Hardy’s work as deserving of critical attention. He was soon joined by other scholars, many of them featured here, so that Hardy now “occup[ies] an assured position at the very centre of contemporary literary and cultural studies” (xiii). If Hardy’s position is “assured,” then, in what sense does this collection “reappraise” him? Does the word suggest that it is time to decenter, recenter, or reconsider Hardy’s work or Hardy studies? Or does it signal an homage to and continuation of Millgate’s initial, generative reappraisal? These fifteen previously unpublished essays suggest the latter interpretation. They offer not radical rereadings of Hardy’s work or cultural location but rather careful reconsideration, by distinguished scholars, of its significant themes. The two opening essays, for example, consider Hardy’s relation to religion. Pamela Dalziel places a previously unpublished homiletic exercise, written by Hardy when he was eighteen, in the context of some of his other comments on religion to argue that his Christian convictions were more serious and longer-lasting than many readers have recognized. Mary Rimmer’s essay on Hardy’s “biblical and liturgical allusion” follows nicely from Dalziel’s, surveying Hardy’s poetry and fiction to produce a conclusion similar to Dalziel’s: “Few agnostics present such vexed and contradictory attitudes towards the sacred as Hardy” (32). In favoring such nuanced rereading over more radical claims, these essays typify the volume’s spirit. Wilson has sequenced the essays so as to highlight thematic or methodological connections. The four essays following Dalziel’s and Rimmer’s track allusions (to Hamlet, other poets, children, and stones) in groups of Hardy’s works; among these, Marjorie Garson’s, “Written in Stone: Hardy’s Grotesque Sublime,” stands out for its wide-ranging analysis of Hardy’s representation of stone as a medium that both expresses and resists human history. Drawing on Derrida and Darwin, Garson argues that for Hardy, “though human subjectivity is nothing but writing, it has evolved…in a universe that cannot be written upon,” a situation that “while it renders the human situation ironic, renders the poet’s apprehension of that situation sublime” (112). Each of the next five essays focuses on a single novel to discuss themes ranging from the “erotics of dress” (in Simon Gattrell’s essay on A Pair of Blue Eyes) to [End Page 383] Platonic idealism (in Jeremy Steele’s essay on The Well-Beloved). Of this group, three share a concern with the location of individuals on continuums of natural and social history that also links them to Garson’s essay. Hardy subtitled his second novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, “A Rural Painting of Dutch School,” and Ruth Bernard Yeazell analyzes the tension in the novel between the static scene-painting in Hardy’s description of a group, the Mellstock choir, on the one hand, and his growing “allegiance to plot” (149), adumbrated by the courtship narrative of an individual character, Fancy Day, on the other. J. Hillis Miller’s essay, which follows Yeazell’s, also analyzes a tension in Hardy’s representation of individuals. He juxtaposes Raymond Williams’s emphasis on community with Martin Heidegger’s celebration of radical individuality (“Dasein”) to conclude that Hardy’s pessimistic plotting, in The Return of the Native, endorses neither. The Egdon heath-folk are happy only in their ignorance of “humankind’s true conditions of existence,” but claiming individuality by “detaching onself from the community,” as do Eustacia Vye...

Aristotle and Us: Some Observations on His Philosophical Language

The study discusses Aristotle's special use of Greek language as a historical construct defined by the need to accommodate the communicative needs of an expanding world ( morphoplastic synapses). It addresses the paradoxical synthesis of Platonic idealism and empirical cognition which is expressed in his philosophical language and detects a deep incommensurability in their structural form. It argues that such conflict of paradigms in the work of Aristotle neutralized the interpretive potential of Greek language which focused on commentaries over a long period of time. Aristotle's thinking became important in Thomas Aquinas' philosophical summa by establishing a creative synthesis through the potentialities of Latin. The semantic neutralization of Greek continued until the 20th century when Cornelius Castoriadis proposed a new Aristotelian synthesis by re-interpreting his principle of imagination within a modern understanding of creativity.

America's Global Role after Bush

The next American president's foreign policy will be conducted in the face of two main challenges. One is the legacy of George W. Bush: Iraq in particular, and a substantially weakened US strategic...

E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Aesthetics (review)

Reviewed by: E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Aesthetics Elizabeth Kramer E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Aesthetics. By Abigail Chantler. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [xii, 202 p. ISBN 0-754-60706-2. $89.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index. Given the fact that E. T. A. Hoffmann's writings have proved pivotal to discussions of music—musical listening, the idea of absolute music, the reception of church music, and above all, the music of Beethoven —readers may be surprised to learn that English-language music scholarship has lacked a book-length study of the musical thought of Hoffmann. Abigail Chantler's new account, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Aesthetics, puts forth a vision of Hoffmann's far-reaching significance that considers his writings and musical compositions and that is informed by over a century of previous [End Page 833] scholarship on Hoffmann. Readers of German will recognize the influence of contributions by individuals such as Georg Ellinger (E. T. A. Hoffmann: sein Leben und seine Werke [Hamburg: L. Voss, 1894]), Peter Schnaus (E. T. A. Hoffmann als Beethoven-Rezensent der Allgemeine Musikalischen Zeitung [Munich: Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1977]), and Gerhard Kaiser (E. T. A. Hoffmann [Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1988]). Others will note the shadow of David Charlton and Martyn Clarke's invaluable annotated translations (E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke [New York: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]). Early Romanticism—a movement of ambiguity and ever-widening circles of thought—pervades every aspect of Chantler's account of Hoffmann's aesthetics. Introducing Hoffmann as a "polymath with eclectic interests" (p. vii), Chantler emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of her endeavor and draws on perspectives from the disciplines of religious studies, literature, music, and German history. The result is a fluid interchange of Hoffmann's ideas and those of his time, presented through a large selection of primary and secondary sources. Chantler's first chapter, "Art Religion," acknowledges the wide-reaching nature of spiritual imagery in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century aesthetics. The permeation of ideas such as "spirituality," "divinity," and "religion" in literature of the time has been tied to contemporaneous phenomena of platonic idealism (by Mark Evan Bonds and John Neubauer) and romantic expressivism (by M. H. Abrams and Charles Taylor). For her exposition of spirituality in writings of the early nineteenth century, Chantler chooses the formulation of Carl Dahlhaus (Die Idee der absoluten Musik [Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1978]), who in his account of absolute music draws attention to a Kunstreligion or "art religion" that he cursorily traces as emerging from the writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, and Hoffmann. Chantler's general survey—perfectly appropriate given her purposes—of spiritual ideas at the time does not address the larger conceptual issues circling around the idea of an "art religion," but it does introduce the reader to Schleiermacher's aesthetics and a diverse body of writings about genius. In particular, she draws the reader's attention to descriptions of genius as both active and passive in the writings of Wackenroder, C. F. Michaelis, and Hoffmann, an often neglected paradox that returns in her later arguments about Hoffmann's poetic language and hermeneutics. Chapter 2, "Hoffmann's Romantic Poetry," highlights elements of early romantic thought in Hoffmann's fiction. The exploration of literary techniques such as the arabesque, authorial ambiguity, the fragment, and irony guides her consideration of Hoffmann's Kreisleriana and The Golden Pot, especially as they reflect the "self-detachment" of the author "facilitating the self-cultivation of the reader" (p. 45). Specific consideration of the musical subject matter of Kreisleriana in light of romantic literary techniques is conspicuously absent, and in this respect, Chantler's account differs markedly from Daniel Chua's reading of romantic instrumental music as portrayed as "absolute fragment" (Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 177) in Hoffmann's writings. Elements of self-detachment and active interpretation discussed here are loosely related to references to active and passive genius in chapter 1 and reappear as Chantler addresses Hoffmann's review of Beethoven...

Certainties of Very Low Probability

Certainties of Very Low Probability Edward W. Constant II (bio) Oxymorons are paradoxes gone bad, as our title attests. We learn simple causal relations with great facility. As Clark Glymour has observed, even infants know this: to get the pacifier, tug on the blanket it lies on. But we have a harder time getting our minds around the meaning of very small probabilities over very long time scales, likely because our hominid ancestors never lived long enough to have to worry about them. Some years ago, when I was in graduate school at Northwestern University, we had a Friday noon seminar on aspects of science and technology. I recall one meeting that featured a paper on high-energy physics. One of the senior physicists, Arnold Siegert, who had been a student of Heisenberg's, got into an argument with a charming but not overly reverent mathematician (whose name I regrettably don't remember) about the physical interpretation of mathematical formalisms. It was the ancient quarrel about whose reality was better, the mathematicians' Platonic idealism or the physicists' experimental materialism. At issue was some particle-decay process with a probability of ten to the minus something or other, which, when translated, meant that it should occur approximately once every thirty or so billion years, or once in twice the believed age of the universe. Finally, the mathematician, in some exasperation, asked, "Arnold, what would you do if you observed this phenomenon?" There was a silence. Then Siegert replied, almost impishly, "Not tell anyone." It's a splendid stratagem for improbable events in subatomic physics, but it doesn't scale well for hurricanes. Too big. What's striking about Hurricane Katrina is that, like the nuclear physicists, everybody knew it was going to happen—sooner or later. Certainly anyone who'd lived in New Orleans or in Louisiana or on the Gulf Coast for very long knew. My grandmother was born and raised in New Orleans, in what's now more hopefully than veridically called the Garden District, and [End Page 249] I grew up with the folklore of the River and hurricanes. Later, when I was at Tulane, we lived in an apartment building that faced South Claiborne Avenue, but backed up to the old Sugar Bowl. Between our building and the stadium were the university's practice fields, five or six of them. On each side of each regulation 100-yard field were two or three gently contoured, sodded sumps, perhaps 30 yards long and 10 yards wide, maybe 4 or 5 feet deep, with a large drain at the bottom. When the cloudbursts came, which was often, the sumps would rapidly fill up. South Claiborne is about 60 yards wide at that spot, with two lanes in each direction separated by a broad grass esplanade, which covers one of the several major canals that drain New Orleans. From our sixth-floor apartment we could see the end of South Claiborne as it curved around, and we would watch for the pumps down there to come on. Sooner or later we'd see the smoke from the big diesel engines that drove the pumps, and pretty soon the water in the sumps would go down, usually in only ten or fifteen minutes. When it was later rather than sooner, there wasn't much mystery about what would happen if it were ever never. I also remember one blurry morning sitting in Jackson Square, as gentle night gave way to merciless day, watching the strippers go home, now tired and droopy and flat-footed. I had one of those "what's wrong with this picture?" moments as it dawned on me that the hull of the freighter I was looking up at was visible above the top of the levee. We clambered across the railroad tracks behind the old Jax brewery (in those less troubled days the night watchman only fussed at us a little) and up onto the levee. Sure enough, the river stage was a good 20 or 25 feet higher than where I'd been sitting in Jackson Square. The river levees at New Orleans are challenged, severely, at least once a year, usually more often, and the...

Ideals and Ideas: Platonism inLa Princesse de Clèves

Religious motif, almost totally absent as it is from the narrative of Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cl`ves, cannot by itself stand as the foundation of the protagonist's moral choices. This article undertakes the study of the two parallel ideological influences on the thematics of the heroine's thought. One is the evident Platonism of the Jansenists and Saint Augustine, which was current in Christian thought in seventeenth century France. The other, more pertinent one is the secular Neoplatonism of the Baroque as it derives from Plato's Dialogues. Finally, the opposition between the Princesse's doubly Platonic idealism and her suitor's Aristotelian, neoclassical code of ethics is brought to light.

The Real St. Petersburg

The Petersburg myth is essentially myth of duality-and the key element in larger system of cultural dualities. Though there are many reasons for the existence of such system, without the fact of St. Petersburg I doubt we would understand what Berdiaev is talking about when he dubs his compatriots a people in the highest degree polarized.' Readers of Russian novels are only too familiar with such sentiments; but for scholars the duality of Petersburg and Russia as whole remains an awkward premise, partly because of our prejudice against the romantic notion of national character, and partly because of our poststructuralist misgivings about undeconstructed binary oppositions. We cannot forget Derrida's dismantling of Levi-Strauss-whose pairings turn out to camouflage the ideological privileging of one side over the other.2 Thus the wistful ambivalence with which Vyacheslav Ivanov introduces the latest edition of Vladimir Paperny's influential Kul'tura Dva (a binary-opposition-fest if there ever was one, with chapter headings such as Horizontal Vertical, Collective Individual, Lyric Epic, and so on). Avoiding overt criticism, this leader of Soviet-era structuralism simply acknowledges Paperny's partiality for polar opposites (poliarnye protivopolozhnosti) ('binary oppositions' [binarnye oppozitsii], as we most reverently referred to them at that time when it was precisely in them that we saw the chief fascination of structuralism).3 Be that as it may, there is nothing new in the idea of subverting the classic oppositions of Russian culture (East/West, Moscow/Petersburg, serf/gentry, pagan/Christian, and so on). Derrida has nothing to teach Andrei Belyi, for example. Both are pupils of Nietzsche, who in his Twilight of the Idols tolls the funeral bell for Platonic idealism, for the basic opposition between the world of appearances and that of higher reality. In his novel Petersburg, Belyi expands the Dostoevskian network of psychological, social, and metaphysical dualities to baroque extreme and correspondingly raises the reader's hope of

Nietzsche Contra Homer, Socrates, and Paul

Near the conclusion of Homer's Contest, Nietzsche exclaims, What a problem opens up before us [. . .] when we ask about the relation of the contest to the conception of the world of art!1 He writes this following a discussion of the way in which works of art are not only indebted to but perhaps also intrinsically linked with what their creators were striving to oppose. Problem-posing, as shaping and presenting new sets of challenges by rendering unfamiliar what we take to be nearest to us (GS 345), emerges in Nietzsche's early writings as his modus operandi, and he continues to refine that strategy throughout his works. Nietzsche creates problems and wrestles with new questions that take on labors intended to have effects sim ilar to those of tragedy: Concerned but not disconsolate, we stand aside a little while, contemplative men to whom it has been granted to be witnesses of these tremendous struggles [K?mpfe] and transitions [?berg?nge]. Alas, it is the magic of these struggles that those who behold them must also take part and fight! (BT 15)2 Problems are intended as provocations in response to which Nietzsche hopes his readers will leap into the fray. Contestants are engaged in different ways throughout Nietzsche's career. Nietzsche's account of the development of Greek culture, art, and science? broadly conceived?figures Homer as offering not only the first monumen tal revaluation but also as providing a medium through which other revaluations might be forged. In other words, contest as it is conceived by Homer not only provides the conditions for esteeming human life in light of exemplary and exceptional struggles but it also provides the fuel for revi sioning that very ideal as it draws others to contest the aims and ends of strug gles that characterize human life. Nietzsche reads the production of Platonic philosophy as emerging out of a contest with Homer and philosophy there after as a struggle against and with Platonic ideals. Thus, although Nietzsche takes on numerous other contestants worthy of consideration?Luther, Wagner, Darwin, to name a few?the selection of Homer, Socrates, and Paul is not accidental. In Nietzsche's eyes these particular contests are intrinsically linked: they develop out of each other and together form a kind of unity. Throughout his career, Nietzsche sees it as his task to take on each of these quintessen

The individual and mass housing: the delicate balance

One of Alvar Aalto's major preoccupations throughout his life's work was redefining the place of the individual in modern society in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and the political ideologies of extreme left and right. Unwilling to accept the Communist models of communal living and their rigid architectural suppression of individuality as well as Le Corbusian paradigms of platonic idealism, Aalto set out in MIT's Baker Dormitory to redefine the modern mass housing model with Le Corbusier's Swiss Pavilion as a point of departure.

The Politics of Transcendence: The Pretentious Passivity of Platonic Idealism

The Politics of Transcendence: The Pretentious Passivity of Platonic Idealism

Dynamic Religion, Formative Culture, and the Demonic in History

Modern German thought owed much to classical Greece. Yet in philosophy and theology, beginning with Hegel and his contemporaries, the debt to Platonic idealism was radically modified by insistence on the reality of history. Construed dialectically, history became a key to overcoming difficulties with both Platonic and Cartesian dualism left unresolved by Kant. In theology, after World War I dialectical theologians, including Barth and Tillich, embraced in varying degrees the existentialists' critique of Hegelian essentialism and belief in progress. This affected how they understood incarnation in christology, sacramental presence in ecclesiology, and Christian responses to what they saw as the demonic threat of German National Socialism. Anglo-American critics, especially of Tillich, often miss the dialectical nuances of his admittedly abstract theology and his religious socialist response to Marxism.

Leilani Muir versus the philosopher king: eugenics on trial in Alberta.

The Province of Alberta in Canada was the only jurisdiction in the British Empire where a eugenic sterilization law was passed (in 1928) and vigorously implemented. The pace of sterilization orders accelerated during the Nazi era and remained high after World War II, terminating only in 1972 when the Sexual Sterilization Act was repealed. The Alberta Eugenics Board operated away from public and legislative scrutiny, and many things done in the name of eugenics were clearly illegal. Eugenics was put on trial in Alberta in 1995 and a judge of the Court of Queen's Bench ruled in 1996 that the government had wrongly sterilized Leilani Muir. After hearing evidence about the history of the eugenics movement, the origins of Alberta's Sexual Sterilization Act, the operation of the Eugenics Board, and details of Muir's life, Madam Justice Joanne B. Veit found that 'the damage inflicted by the operation was catastrophic', the 'wrongful stigmatization of Ms. Muir as a moron ... has humiliated Ms. Muir every day of her life', and 'the circumstances of Ms. Muir's sterilization were so high-handed and so contemptuous of the statutory authority to effect sterilization, and were undertaken in an atmosphere that so little respected Ms. Muir's human dignity that the community's, and the court's, sense of decency is offended'. Veit awarded Muir damages of $740,780 CAD and legal costs of $230,000 CAD. The order for Muir's sterilization was signed by John M. MacEachran, founder of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Alberta and chairman of the Eugenics Board from 1929 to 1965. An exponent of Platonic idealism, MacEachran believed sterilization of children with a low IQ test score was a means of 'raising and safeguarding the purity of the race'. However, the Alberta Sterilization Act was passed and implemented with cavalier disregard for the principles of genetics as well as the rights of children.

Breaking moulds, smashing mirrors: the intertextual dynamics of D.H. Lawrence's "The Lovely Lady"

D. H. Lawrence's aversion against Platonic idealism evidences itself in his repeated attempts to debunk in his fictions the way in which women disown their own bodies by unconsciously moulding themselves according to "men's theories of women." One of such fictions would be "The Lovely Lady," a story which characteristically engages in a silent dialogue with traditional discourses about women. In so doing, it cogently exposes the male glance that inhabits the mirror in which the woman protagonist sees herself reflected and, concurrently, subvert the traditional binary paradigm witch/angel in which she has been kept a prisoner all her life.

Rereading Plato's rhetoric

Most interpretations of rhetoric use a version of what is called This standard interpretation, also called Platonic Idealism, imposes a systematic order upon philosophy out of a distinctly unsystematic group of texts. Platonism has become an interpretative construct, or a terministic screen that dominates our understanding of thinking on rhetoric. In order to get a more accurate understanding of the two dialogues that are canonical in rhetorical studies, I will reread rhetoric by exploring the ways in which presents a disclosive view of truth. The disclosive view of exists in a creative tension with the correspondence of that is articulated in Socrates' hypothesis of Ideas. I will argue that rhetoric is an inquiry into the disclosive nature of discourse. Many scholars have argued for the necessary distinction between and Platonism. Platonism is a systematic philosophy that has been constructed by others, out of texts but by himself. In the words of Jirgen Mittelstrass: Plato is no 'Platonist' (134). Emerson also argues that thinking is not a system. [And his] dearest defenders and disciples are at fault for creating the system of Platonism (491). Eric A. Havelock argues that the phrase Plato's Theory of Forms is a scholarly construct that suggests a doctrinal position in which wished to vest his philosophical prestige. But the actual tone of his writing does support (254).2 The correspondence of truth, as the discussion of Heidegger will indicate, is derived from Platonism and relies upon what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the two-world theory. For Gadamer, the two-world theory does accurately describe thought: Plato was a Platonist who taught two worlds (1988, 260). Platonism teaches that reality is bifurcated: There is one world of phenomena, while separate and apart from this there is another more real world of forms or ideas, a world of absolute and static being. Along with Gadamer, I will argue we must reject this argument.3 Martin Heidegger's Plato's Doctrine of Truth argues that the correspondence of originates in Platonism. Although Heidegger's thesis is that the correspondence of presupposes the disclosive nature of truth, he does develop the ways in which notion of is disclosive. His critique of doctrine of truth is based upon a critique of the correspondence theory, which the character Socrates proposes as a

Trolls, Trills, and Tofu: Ibsen, Verdi, and Kabuki

We are the heirs of a great tradition which we can call the GrecoJudeo-Christian. It is made up of Platonic idealism, Aristotelian realism, Judaic monotheism, Cartesian rationalism, and Newtonian mechanism. Perhaps it is time to add Einsteinian relativism. But these gifts from the past, which help shape our identity and give us spiritual strength, can also bind us like prison bars. If we fail to examine them they become, as Ibsen reminds us in one of his most famous plays, like ghosts haunting us, ideas that may be dead but that still cling to us. Mrs. Alving tells Pastor Manders:

Avant-gardism in Bruno Jasieński’s Socialist GrotesquerieThe Mannequin Ball

The remarkable output of Bruno Jasienski (1901-1939) bilingual prose writer, poet, dramatist, whose personal life and literary œuvre in both Russian and Polish were formed by divergent, often conflicting social and cultural traditions stands until today unevaluated in terms of the intrinsic continuity of his writing. Jasienski is acknowledged for his substantial contributions both to the Polish Futurist and the Soviet Socialist Realist literatures.1 Yet, because of the seemingly antinomic features of his works, he has generally been viewed by literary scholars in an exclusivist way: either as one of the most individualistic and innovative figures of Polish Futurism during the 1920s, or as an ideologically orthodox proletarian writer ready to serve the cultural policies of his second homeland, the Soviet Union, during the 1930s. Although he was both calumniated and lionized by the public and literary establishments in Poland, France and the Soviet Union, Jasienski remains diminished in his significance due to an incomplete assessment of his poetics. Viewed either as a flamboyant Futurist or a dogmatic Socialist Realist, he is a writer whose work as a whole has not received its due exegesis in tenus of the stylistic and historical avant-garde principles that inform it. The present paper is premised on the belief that Jasienski's writing offers insight into the relationship between the realm of belles lettres and political society, more specifically, the way ideological beliefs about the contemporary human condition aie conveyed through the postulation of fictional worlds by the only art form that is purely propositional imaginative literature. At the heart of the matter is the need to go beyond the outdated positivistic interpretation of Jasieriski that sees him as a writer who eventually compromised his art in the name of ideology, a categorical view rooted in Platonic idealism which persists in liberal Polish circles today.2 Polish scholars have produced important and absorbing studies of Jasienski's early period but have been intellectually abashed in treating his Soviet period, seeing it as both the personal and literary martyrdom of a writer who succumbed to a well-intentioned but ill-placed ideological loyalty to Marxism a fate common to leading intellectuals between