Theoretical Self-consciousness Research Articles

Streben of the I as the Fundamental Form of Consciousness

This paper aims to show that Fichte’s concept of Streben or striving of the I is the necessary condition of finite or individual consciousness. The I posits itself absolutely, but in doing so it posits the not-I as well, therefore it posits itself absolutely as self-limiting I. If there was no limitation on the infinite striving of the I’s activity, then there would be no I, at least as we know it. Firstly, the paper emphasizes why this activity or striving needs to be infinite, and at the same time determined. Then, why is it necessary for theoretical self-consciousness, regarding the idea of Anstoss, divided self and absolute I. Finally, why is it also necessary for practical standpoint, considering the ideas of practical striving, tendency, longing, drive, and desire (both in individual striving towards self-coherence and social drive for intersubjectivity). It will be concluded that the I possesses a “dual nature” or divided character: it is finite, but it strives towards infinity. The tension arising from this contradiction should be the moving force of the I.

The Chinese Revolution and the Communist International*

This article is an intervention in some controversies concerning the role of the Communist International in and outside China. It seeks to tackle the inappropriate denial of its guidance and aid to the Chinese Revolution. In doing so, this paper makes several arguments. First, it argues that the Communist International provided the Chinese Revolution with valuable guidance, support and assistance. These contributed tremendously to the Communist Party of China’s birth, development, consolidation and maturation and advanced its theoretical self-consciousness. Second, while the Communist International gave its guidance in the sincere hope that the Chinese Revolution would benefit from correct theories and advanced experiences, it absolutised the theoretical conceptions of the classical Marxists and the Russian experience. This led to mistakes or misjudgments that deserve an accurate evaluation. Third, the Communist International was itself conducting theoretical exploration, and was generally able to adjust its own theories and change its strategies. Fourth, for all the Communist International’s guidance, the universal tenets of Marxism had to be integrated with the concrete practice of the Chinese Revolution, and it was the ability of Chinese communists to Sinicise Marxism–Leninism in what amounted to a theoretical revolution under Mao Zedong’s leadership that accounts for the revolution’s ultimate victory.

Expansion of Self-consciousness in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Abstract This paper is a novel attempt at reconstructing Kant’s account of self-consciousness in the first Critique by making evident its gradual expository progression, and at identifying the epistemic status of the two modes of self-consciousness: pure and empirical. I trace the gradual exposition of theoretical self-consciousness across three crucial parts of the book: the Transcendental Deduction, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. In doing so, I show that the account of theoretical self-consciousness is not presented to us all at once, but is progressively expanded and filled in. I also emphasize the importance of the distinction between the subject’s awareness of its existence, “Dasein”, and of its existence, “Existenz”. I conclude by discussing Kant’s preliminary remarks about practical self-consciousness in the Paralogisms, which bear an important relation to theoretical self-consciousness.

Методологический аспект взаимосвязи науки и научного исследования

The present research features the relationship between science and scientific research as internal elements of scientific knowledge. The subject is the methodological aspect in the study, namely, the theoretical self-consciousness of science in a specific historical period, the analysis of the evolution of socio-cultural forms of life of science – monodisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, supra-disciplinary. Each of these forms once had historically formed methodological potential-techniques, methods, principles, ideals, and norms of knowledge. At each stage, new ways of understanding are formed, and new meanings that revolutionize science, practice, and culture are created. The increase in methodological equipment of science expands cognitive horizons. The changes in socio-cultural forms of science and the nature of scientific research are not synchronized, but they are internally determined. Approach as a methodological tool acts as a connecting link. The choice of methodological approach is determined by the methodological culture of the researcher and, as a rule, reflects the dynamics of scientific knowledge. The authors use the following methodological tools: dialectics of the historical and the logical, dialectics of content and form. They highlight the immanent connection of scientific research and science as the most important components of a specific form of cognition, i. e. science; show the interrelation between the socio-cultural form of science and its epistemological content; demonstrate the dynamics of the complexity of methodological tools in the history of science – from techniques and methods of research to such a methodological phenomenon as the approach, which, in turn, has yet to be investigated.

Charles Brockden Brown and the Conundrum of Complicity

Abstract Charles Brockden Brown’s four major novels, all written between 1798 and 1800, are devoted to the conundrum of moral complicity—the impossibility of pinpointing moral accountability for harms in a world where intersubjective life makes it impossible to separate one person’s action from the actions of others. This essay argues that for Brown, this conundrum constituted the narrative precondition of fictional storytelling and served as the source of his fiction’s formal innovation, theoretical self-consciousness, and gothic weirdness. This essay suggests, too, that the conundrum of complicity served as the prompt for a synoptic mode of reading that Brown introduced to American fiction.

The Communist Activities of the First International and the Logic of Socialist Party Politics

Against the backdrop of the 19th century, the First International, guided by Marxism, emerged in the form of the early “International Socialist Federation.” It viewed the seizure of power as the great mission of the proletariat, actively struggled against bourgeois regimes, strongly responded to the call of times for the theoretical self-consciousness and organized struggle of the proletariat, and exerted a profound historical influence on the stirring inauguration and nationally oriented development of the international Communist movement of the 20th century. From the socialist party political perspective, the First International, once the Communist League, had raised the curtain on socialist party politics, changed the political mode of capitalist party politics’ exclusive world domination through the interactive development of new organizational forms, theoretical viewpoints and political practice. It thus left an abundant historical legacy in terms of ideological creation and practical innovation for the subsequent Second International, the Communist International and the emergence and development of socialist party politics within nation-states. Although its socialist party political practice had an obvious “regional,” “preliminary” and “tentative” nature, the First International had foundation-laying significance and pioneering value for the development of socialist party politics, whether in terms of organizational vehicles, value orientation and activity content, or in terms of ideological guidance, practical patterns and strategic principles.

Academic Discourse Right/Power and the Development of Chinese Sociology

作为“权利”的学术话语权,主要有创造更新权、意义赋予权、学术自主权等类 型;作为“权力”的学术话语权,主要有指引导向权、鉴定评判权、行动支配权等类 型。这些也体现在中国社会学百余年的发展历程中。在中国社会学初创阶段,严复等 人在社会学本土化和学术话语创新方面进行了尝试。费孝通经历了中国社会学前期发 展阶段近20年及后期56年全过程,其学术历程对于中国社会学发展史具有典型意义。 在理论自觉基础上努力达致学术话语权的制高点,是中国社会学从世界学术格局边陲 走向中心的一条必由之路。 关键词: 学术话语权 中国社会学 理论自觉 学术话语 As a kind of right (quanli 权利), academic discourse rights include the right to create and innovate, to endow with meaning and to academic autonomy. As a kind of power (quanli 权力), it refers to the power to guide, judge, control and so on. These rights and powers have been pursued as Chinese sociology developed for over a century. At the inception of sociology in China, Yan Fu and other scholars experimented with localizing sociology and innovating academic discourse. Fei Xiaotong’s life covered nearly 20 years of Chinese sociology’s early development and another 56 years of its later development; his academic journey epitomizes the historical development of Chinese sociology. The only way for Chinese sociology to move from the periphery of world academia into the center is to endeavor, on the basis of theoretical self-consciousness, to seize the commanding heights of academic discourse rights.

Два джерела екзистенціального мислення Мартина Гайдеґера

With the help of Martin Heidegger’s early writings the role of Western philosophicaltradition in thinker’s becoming is explored in the paper. Particularly, two basic sources ofthis tradition are examined – Ancient Greek (with the special accent on Aristotle) andChristian (beginning from an apostle Paul to Soeren Kierkegaard). Each of these sourcesin its special way promoted the crystallization of the further Heidegger’s philosophicaldevelopment.The essence of this approach lies in the fact that human existence is considered as concretelyfactual and time-historical. That is, the specific of the man is defined here not withthe help of theoretical self-consciousness but with the ability to interpret one’s own lifetaking into account factuality and historicity of the concrete hermeneutic situation.

Historians and theory: A comment

This comment summarizes the papers delivered by Oliver Daddow, Patrick Finney, Charles Johnson, and Alan Munslow at the session ‘The Politics of History’ sponsored by the Theory and Historiography Network, European Social Science History Conference, Berlin, March 2004. It notes the papers' emphasis on historians' lack of theoretical self-consciousness, accepts their attribution of much of the responsibility for this to the institutional environment in which those historians function, and suggests that psychological factors—particularly of the sort William James elucidated in his celebrated discussion of the relationship between temperament and intellectual style—need to be looked at as well.

'Critique' as Technology of the Self

This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' should be read, after Foucault, as a distinctly modern practice in the care of the self, governed by Kant's famous rubric of the 'primacy of practical reason'. In this way, too, Foucault's later interest in Kant - one which in fact takes up a line present in his work from his complementary thesis on Kant's Anthropology - is cast into distinct relief. Against Habermas and others, I propose that this interest does not represent any 'break' or 'turn' in Foucault's work. In line with Foucault's repeated denials that he was interested after 1976 in a 'return to the ancients', I argue that Foucault's writings on critique represent instead both a deepening theoretical self-consciousness, and part of his project to forge an ethics adequate to the historical present.

Twentieth Century Tort Theory

This article analyzes twentieth-century tort scholarship in terms of a five-sided debate between compensation-deterrence theory, enterprise liability theory, economic deterrence theory, social justice theory, and individual justice theory. It surveys, parses, and analyzes the central interpretive and prescriptive claims made by each of these theories, exploring and exposing to criticism their underlying assumptions and commitments. The article concludes with a plea for greater theoretical self-consciousness among tort scholars, and for a shift in focus away from the strict-liability v. negligence debate.

The Theoretical Foundations of Paul W. Schroeder's International System

historians complain that political scientists are more interested in the elegance of their theoretical models than in the empirical fit between those models and historical reality, political scientists argue that historians' interpretive narratives are based on implicit theoretical assumptions and causal models that influence their interpretations and that ought to be made explicit. Whatever the truth of these claims in general, the charge of a lack of theoretical self-consciousness certainly does not apply to Paul W. Schroeder. In several books and countless articles that span three decades and that demonstrate remarkable thematic consistency, Schroeder has been explicit about his view of the nature of historical explanation and about the analytic assumptions underlying his narrative interpretations. This essay locates Schroeder's work in international relations theory, analyses his conception of an international system, and identifies the theoretical traditions from which he borrows.1

Althusserian Theory: From Scientific Truth to Institutional History

Althusserian Theory: From Scientific Truth to Institutional History

Suppose Theory Is Dead

Joel Weinsheimer SUPPOSE THEORY IS DEAD Let me begin with a simple and no doubt simplistic fiction: Theory is dead. By confessing this to be a fiction at the outset, I mean to make my job easier by obviating any need for documentation or argument . Evidence for the demise of theory could be offered, of course, but anything like proof would depend so much on questions of definition that it would doubdess end up inconclusive.1 In any case I am really not interested in demonstrating here whether the reports of theory's death are much exaggerated or substantially accurate. Rather, I want in what follows simply to make the presumption and to speculate about what the future holds for literary criticism if it turns out to be somehow true that something generally called literary theory has in some undefined sense had its day. Moreover, I want to read the posttheoretical future of literature as if Gadamer held its key. Now this may seem paradoxical in one respect. If literary theory is dead, it hardly seems promising to consult yet another theorist. This objection, however, can be quickly met. Gadamer is not a literary theorist.2 In Truth and Method he had little to say about literature as such; and theory (in the form of methodology, at least) was one of his main targets. Obviating this immediate objection, however , merely raises a larger one. Thirty years after the publication of his great work, Gadamer has still had relatively little impact on literary criticism in the United States.3 The reasons for this are many, but most relevant to thinking about the future of literature is that Gadamer's hermeneutics culminated in no "new and improved" method for interpreting literature or anything else. Not only did Gadamer not tell his readers how they could understand better (better than the author or even better than their predecessors), but the man who wrote "we Philosophy and Literature, © 1992, 16: 251-265 252Philosophy and Literature understand differently, if we understand at all" neglected to mention how we should go about understanding differently. And given the ravening appetite for difference, the rage for innovation typical of theory in the last two decades, Gadamer's silence was unforgivable. On the implications of philosophical hermeneutics Gadamer is perfectly explicit. "These consequences," he says, "do not need to be such that a theory is applied to practice so that the latter is performed differently—i.e., in a way that is technically correct. They could also consist in correcting (and refining) the way in which constandy exercised understanding understands itself" (p. 266).4 It is not that Gadamer has nothing new to offer, then. What he offers is a new understanding of understanding, and what is new about it is that it is a specifically nontheoretical conception of what it means to understand. As Gadamer shows, the practice of understanding neither has been, nor ultimately can be, unpacked in any theory of it. And yet, however untheoretical, understanding is not thereby precluded. Gadamer affirms the ultimate autonomy of practice as such—that is, he affirms that understanding can and does succeed even without the imprimatur of theoretical selfconsciousness . The implications for literature follow from this affirmation : literary study in the wake of theory will come to a new selfunderstanding . It will understand itself, without defensiveness or embarrassment, as practical criticism. The very words summon memories of I. A. Richards and American Formalism, and that past is hardly what I envision for the future of literature—a return to the halcyon days before theory entered the world and all our woe. Rather, if "practical criticism" seems to represent all the pretheoretical naivete we thought we had gotten beyond, I mean to assert that everything that currently goes by the name of theory did not in fact get us beyond anything—certainly not "beyond interpretation ," still less "beyond formalism"—as Culler's and Hartman's titles would seem to promise. Theory did not transport us beyond formalist practical criticism because formalism was in fact not pretheoretical at all, and will seem so only to those who date the dawning of theoretical consciousness from the publication ofSpeech and Phenomena or The...

Writing Ethnography: Representation, Rhetoric, and Institutional Practices

In composition and rhetoric, ethnography has emerged during the last decade just as the anthropological tradition from which it came has undergone radical revision. Beginning with the work of Mina Shaughnessy and Stephen Wilson, a number of early ethnographic works on writing began to appear in the late seventies and early eighties. At the same time, anthropologists interested in Marxist and poststructuralist theories of text, writing, and representation began to question the security with which ethnographers have traditionally presented their work because studies of the way representation reproduces the structures of ideology and power by critics like Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said made it impossible to write ethnography without considering the rhetoric and politics of the ethnographer's discourse. Faced with this critical awareness, researchers who study culture have had to recognize that their own discourse proceeds, like the orientalism Said described, according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections (8). I take up the issue here because I am concerned by the facility with which ethnographic research on writing passes into articles, textbooks, and pedagogy. Along the way, its findings are displaced from their sources in the everyday activity of subjects and become part of a disciplinary discourse whose production of authorized knowledge resists the theoretical self-consciousness of the original research ethos. Put more directly, the reflexivity of postmodern ethnographic theory conflicts with the demands of a professional, institutional practice. The authority generated by textbooks and the daily demands of curriculum and pedagogy often resist the critique of knowledge and representation described by postmodern theory. As members of the research community, we need to understand the way our disciplinary discourse appropriates the experience of the research subject and represents it in our institutions. We need to consider our discourse as both a communally maintained rhetoric and as an institutional practice shaped by the material conditions in which researchers and teachers work. As the experience of penetrating an other world and making it known through written description, ethnography is a thoroughly textual practice. As Carl G. Herndl is an Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University. He is currently working on social rhetoric and critical theory.

Political Science, Disciplinary History and Theoretical Pluralism: A Response to Almond and Eckstein

in separate, recent articles appearing in PS (Almond 1988, Eckstein 1989) two well-known political scientists engage in a bit of disciplinary history in attempts to clear up what appears to some as a state of confusion resulting from the emerging theoretical pluralism that currently characterizes political science. For those like myself who believe, perhaps somewhat naively, that theoretical self-consciousness is inherently and instrumentally good for the discipline, this theoretical self-reflection is encouraging. It is, however, a little disconcerting how Almond and Eckstein distinguish among the various, often competing perspectives in political science and specifically how those perspectives which Almond and Eckstein characterize as soft and negative respectively are presented. I offer here a complementary synopsis of the history of the discipline, an account that I hope helps to keep open the dialogue among different perspectives (or, to use Professor Almond's metaphor, keeps open the conversation among guests seated at separate dining tables) to which both Almond and Eckstein are committed. In his categorization of political science perspectives, Almond divides the discipline along two dimensions, a methodological one (soft, hard) and an ideological one (left, right). Almond admits that this taxonomy oversimplifies things a bit, but he suggests the distortion comes not from his characterizations of the extremes but from the fact that these separate schools receive a disproportionate amount of attention, somewhat like boorish dinner guests who drown out those trying to carry on polite conversation. In the soft-left quadrant Almond places people such as critical theorists, Michael Walzer, as well as several orthodox Marxists such as Perry Anderson and Goran Therborn. Soft-leftism is distinguished by its identity of knowledge with ideology. According to Almond (1988, 830) soft-leftism claims that:

Theoretical Self-Consciousness

This thoughtful essay is in the sociology of (political science) knowledge provocatively charts the boundaries of truth. Normative appraisal and explanatory theory are closely interrelated, Connolly argues, as he indicates the normative implications generated by consensus and conflict perspectives. He notes the difficulty of communicating across different perspectives, urges the responsibility of the social scientist to achieve selfconsciousness about his own and competing theories, and argues tentatively (though some readers may rebel vigorously, despite the author's decent modesty) for giving a certain benefit of the doubt, in instances where the available evidence is inconclusive, to the more optimistic assumption about human nature, because of the practical consequences of the assumptions we make.