Transcendental Principles Research Articles

The Incompletability of Metaphysics

If a metaphysics identifies transcendental principles with formal principles, the inevitable result will be a reductionist collapse, that is, a theory of the nature of reality that will exclude as inessential significant differences among existing things. To avoid this result, we must take some such material differences (those, for example, that distinguish physical, biological and mental phenomena from one another) as transcendental in nature. This produces a metaphysics in which the concept of ontological emergence is central—a metaphysics that will depend essentially on the material content of the natural sciences. While both Aristotle and Hegel provided such a metaphysics, they did not, I argue, accept one of its most important consequences—that it must be as incomplete as our scientific knowledge of these material differences. I examine this failure and suggest some areas in which contemporary scientific conceptions may contribute to a more contemporary metaphysics.

The Adolescent Unbound: Unintentional Influence of Curricula on Ideological Conflict Seeking

Conflict seeking is celebrated in advocacy of civil disobedience as a commitment of youth to transcendent principles that compel activism. Conflict avoidance, however, is far more prevalent as an explanatory theme in political socialization research. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine undercurrents of defiance in the seemingly controlled and disciplinary environments of the home and the classroom. We propose that high schools and families—as overlapping spheres of interpersonal political communication—can engender ideological conflict seeking during election campaigns as activity conducive to moral-political identity development. Ideological conflict seeking was modeled as inclination to openly disagree, which fosters support for confrontational activism. Evidence was obtained from multiple interviews of student-parent dyads across two election cycles in Arizona, Colorado, and Florida. In validating a theoretical model confined to the ordinary political communication that occurs in classrooms and households, we highlight ideological conflict seeking as a focal concept deserving a more explicit role in the theory of civic identity development.

The psychology of Kant’s aesthetics

Contrary to both his own intentions and the views of both older and more recent commentators, I argue that Kant’s aesthetics remains within the confines of eighteenth-century aesthetics as a branch of empirical psychology, as it was then practiced. Kant established a plausible connection between aesthetic experience and judgment on the one hand and cognition in general on the other, through his explanatory concept of the free play of our cognitive powers. However, there is nothing distinctly ‘ a priori’ or ‘transcendental’ in his claim that this state of mind is what causes our pleasure in beauty or other aesthetic properties. Nor did Kant establish a genuinely a priori or transcendental principle that all human beings have the same disposition to experience a free play of their cognitive powers, let alone in response to the same objects. This failure, however, in no way limits the continuing significance of Kant’s aesthetic theory.

Locating the Cosmos in the Divine and the Body in the Soul

For Plotinus, although the One and the Intellect are transcendent sources of the cosmos, they are also omnipresent within it. At first, the mutual omnipresence and transcendence of the One and the Intellect seem contradictory, but their omnipresence and transcendence are perfectly consistent outcomes of the relation of the cosmos to the One and the Intellect. For the perfection of the One entails both that the One has power to generate and that it is mutually transcendent and omnipresent in the universe. Plotinus extends his principles of perfection, transcendence, and omnipresence to include the relation of the body to the soul by explaining that the soul can transcend the body while the body is within it. Hence, Plotinus is able to fashion an efficient and consistent metaphysics in which God contains the universe and the soul contains the body without denying the transcendent perfection of either.

Future Impossible

For more than a decade, work of Carl Schmitt, one-time leading jurist for Third Reich, anti-Semite, and proponent of authoritarian state and German nationalism, has been undergoing a revival. What is surprising about this flood of new interest and new scholarship is source: is not just Right but also Left in both Europe and United States. Why? What is about his political philosophy that appeals to so many people today? Perhaps what is tempting in Carl Schmitt is way in which he seems to speak to our political philosophical condition with his famous definition of political as depending on distinction. Our philosophical condition: that means, thinking in absence of transcendental principles of legitimation such as universal rationality, natural law, or God. Such a world, Max Weber explained, knows only an unceasing struggle of gods with one another. Or, as he says, speaking plainly, ultimately possible attitudes towards life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a conclusion. Thus, he concludes, it is necessary to make a choice. This decision on value, which must, in any case, be made without grounds, means that when we choose to serve one god we must reject others. According to our ultimate standpoint, Weber tells us, the one is devil and other God, and individual has to decide which is God for him and which is devil.1 It is no wonder, then, that discussion of political-especially for those, who like Weber, are influenced by Nietzsche-is dominated by metaphorics of war: agonism, polemos, strategy, tactics, power, resistance, force and violence. A politics grounded only on a decisive choice can be nothing but war as exclusive values or conceptions of good life struggle for position and dominance. Perhaps, then, what is most attractive in Schmitt is his recognition of just this condition and along with his rejection of faith in rational discussion and negotiation as paths towards peace and harmony among competing interests. Schmitt would, in this sense, be one who clearly recognized and unapologetically articulated fact that political is grounded in nothing but a decision out of nothingness2 and that any concept of political has to address irresolvable struggle between threatened and threatening forces fighting for their own preservation and dominance.3 While drawing on Schmitt's recognition of unavoidable necessity of a decision between us and them. and axiom that there are always human groupings that fight other human groupings in name of justice, humanity, order and peace, Mouffe goes on to call for a politics that rejects essentialism especially with regard to political identities. In doing so however, she must give up theses central to Schmitt's very concept of political keeping only positions which could be derived from others in Neitzschean tradition, Foucault for example. For instance, she forswears killing of concrete human being, stipulating that struggle for destruction is to be restricted to subject oppositions and institutions (25). She expands friend/enemy struggle to include any number of groups occurring in multiple political spaces cutting across individuals who may be dominant in one struggle and oppressed in another. But beyond this stripping down of Schmitt's concept of political, we will see that Mouffe's non-essentialist identities nevertheless do not go as far as possible in moving away from subjectivism of Schmitt's decisionism. Her notion of intersecting identities, above all seems to draw on Homi Bhabha's hybridity and may have (regardless of whether this is case in Bhabha's notion) connections with identity politics. However, despite possible affinities with his diagnoses of our times (Zeitdiagnosen), any appropriation of Schmitt's concept of political and decisionism at its core, must proceed with caution. …

Relative Negation als Gleichnis der absoluten? Eine Auseinandersetzung zwischen Karl und Heinrich Barth

Der Einfluss Heinrich Barths auf die diastatische Auffassung der Gott-Mensch-Beziehung in der »dialektischen Theologie« seines Bruders Karl scheint bedeutend gewesen zu sein. Der Autor des vorliegenden Beitrags vertritt jedoch die Ansicht, dass sowohl Karl Barth wie auch eine gängige Einschätzung des Sachverhalts im Blick auf Heinrich Barths Position Opfer eines Missverständnisses geworden sind, demgegenüber diese Position in ihrem dauerhaft haltbaren Sinn zu rekonstruieren und zu rehabilitieren ist. Die für Heinrich Barths philosophisches Werk insgesamt in der Tat kennzeichnende Akzentuierung der Transzendenz (bezüglich der transzendentalen Prinzipien beziehungsweise Gottes) muss mit Bezug auf die Platonische Idee des Guten in erster Linie als Transzendenz gegenüber einer theoretischen Gesamtschau verstanden werden, welche die ethische Lebensproblematik bedenkenlos vereinnahmt und damit um ihre Aktualität bringt. So verstanden bedeutet Heinrich Barths Betonung der Transzendenz nicht das Aufreißen einer kaum mehr überbrückbaren Kluft, sondern verweist vielmehr auf die Aufgabe, das Gott-Mensch-Verhältnis, den Begriff einer »Gotteserkenntnis« und letztlich die Problematik der Transzendenz als solche von einem Gesichtspunkt aus neu zu bestimmen, für den die ethische Lebensproblematik im Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit steht.

The Beauty of the Redemption of the World: The Theological Aesthetics of Maximus the Confessor and Jonathan Edwards

Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in hisHerrlichkeit, laments the eclipse of the aesthetic in modern theology, noting that thebeingof a Christian is itself a thing of beauty inscribed by the grace of God; that is, it is a form of existence “opened up to us by the God-Man's act of redemption. . . . God's incarnation perfects the whole ontology and aesthetics of created being.” Von Balthasar traces the loss of the aesthetic dimension from Protestant theology to the Reformation principle ofsola scriptura, which seeks to abstract “data” of scriptural revelation into objective formulae. This approach leads to the historicism of Hegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Barth, effectively removing the meditative gaze from theological contemplation. Von Balthasar's ultimate argument is that it is necessary for Protestant theology to revive the Alexandrian tradition in order to recover the “transcendent principle of beauty as derived from and most proper to God,” which is to be “for us the very apex and archetype of beauty in the world.”

Cruel and Unusual Punishment and the Eighth Amendment as a Mandate for Human Dignity: Another Look at Original Intent

This Article examines the approach to interpretation of the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause and concludes that restricting the meaning of the Clause to the historical moment contemporary with ratification does an injustice to the truly original intent of the Framers that the Constitution was to serve American posterity in a meaningful way. The piece demonstrates that one can seriously consider the Fifth and Eighth Amendments to the United States Constitution and conclude - reading them together - that the death penalty is cruel and unusual and, therefore, unconstitutional, without doing violence to the original intent of the Framers. In constructing this argument, I address the proposition of the Fifth Amendment's apparent approval of capital punishment and conclude that the Fifth is not an insurmountable hindrance to per se unconstitutionality of the death penalty under the Eighth. I briefly examine the English and American history of the death penalty, explore a comparative analogy of the constitutional position of the death penalty with that of slavery, and briefly look at the international abolitionist perspective via the development of South African constitutional jurisprudence regarding the death penalty. I conclude that the Fifth Amendment's recognition of the death penalty need not be read to exclude the death penalty from constitutional scrutiny and per se invalidation under the Eighth Amendment. The Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause can be used as a device to bring America's penal system in line with the overarching aspirations of life and dignity that abound in our Constitution as they are recognized by a persuasive majority of the world's liberal democracies. Such a recognition of these transcendent principles would herald a truly originalist interpretive ethic.

Social justice in a cold climate: Could social accounting make a difference?

Building on the argument that justice should be the transcendent principle in accounting, we argue that social accounting invokes notions of community, shared social values, and fairness in the distribution of social resources. These ideas are elaborated in relation to local government, which provides a window on how communities make decisions about distributing their social resources and the accounting processes which guide these decisions. Fieldwork in two large but contrasting English local authorities suggests that the potential of social accounting is not reflected in the predominant accounting systems in local government organisations, but in more subtle and successful forms of ‘enacted social accounting’. Its utility relates to the achievement of short-term social goals where social injustices persist and accountants, managers and politicians seek to accommodate financial pressures to protect the most vulnerable members of the community. We identify local government accountants as morally responsible for the further development of social accounting which envisions a future for local government, and establishes links between social justice, environmentalism and localism.

From Christianity to African Religion and back again

This article passes from Christianity to African Religion and back again, in order to gain new insight on reconciliation. Traditional Christian reconciliation models are valuable but also contextual and limited; thus new models should be sought. African myths of community, acceptance and rebellion offer alternative ways of understanding reconciliation. When evaluated according to the principles of integration and transcendence, these myths meet the criteria of better religion and emphasise Christian notions that are often ignored in tradition Christianity. These new African-inspired insights can be used in Christian liturgy as a number of examples prove.

"A Larger Reading of the Human Past"

Science and technology are defining characteristics of our society and, in striving to meet the needs of the public for meaningful narratives about the past, public historians need to pay more attention to their history. Museums, with their educational mandates and historical collections, should be an obvious vehicle for fulfilling this role. The situation, though, has been complicated by the science center movement which emphasizes transcendent scientific principles. The ability of historians and curators to demonstrate the explanatory power of history and make good on the promise of object-based exhibitions and programs will depend on meeting significant institutional and intellectual challenges. It will also depend on support from the wider public history and museum communities.

What is difference? Deleuze and Saint Thomas

The difference between the univocal and the equivocal concept of being marks a firm separation of philosophy from theology. Considering the analogia entis as the core structure of the epistemology of Thomas corresponding to the concept of being as the supreme reference point of his metaphysics, Deleuze misses a positive concept of difference in Thomas, who cannot avoid explaining difference in relation to an external reference or to a transcendent principle. Analogical Being, whenever related to particular beings, can never say what constitutes their individuality. Therefore, Deleuze traces the tradition of ontological univocity, noting it first in Duns Scotus, in order to think about difference in a new way. Only a univocal, anti-hierarchical ontology of immanence is capable of thinking about difference in itself or of providing difference with its own concept.

A cosmopolitan politics of loyalty

While focusing on the thought of Charles Taylor the question whether the politics of loyalty can be part of a transcendental structure for society is discussed in this article. Classical patriotism, for instance, involves loyalty to public institutions and laws to enhance self-rule. In the twentieth century, however, classical patriotism became fused with nationalism (i.e. loyalty to culture), resulting in many instances in human suffering. Part of the explanation for this derailment is to be found in the Taylorian concept of the hypertrophy of autonomous freedom. The argument developed in this article links up with trends in liberalism and Taylor’s own reasoning that hypertrophy can be curbed within a transcendental structure for society (i.e. a cosmopolitan politics of loyalty). However, in the liberalist trends (and also in Taylor’s thought) tension exists between such a structure and the perception that loyalty politics is a mere particularism. As alternative I propose engagement between the cosmopolitan perspective and the various loyalties, with the latter a transcendental principle that needs to be applied in collaboration with other principles.

Organizational rhetoric doomed to fail: R. J. Reynolds and the principle of the oxymoron

In the fall of 1995, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company engaged in a public relations advertising campaign that opposed restrictions on tobacco advertising proposed by President Clinton. This essay argues that in spite of the presence of creative and varied Burkean identification appeals in the messages of the RJR campaign, the campaign was fatally flawed by illegitimate presumptions of similarity and an oxymoron that violated Burke's “principle of the oxymoron.” The essay argues that this transcendent principle is unidirectional; it must offer a rise in social status for it to provide a motive for identification.

The Rule of Law, Inequality, and the International Criminal Court

The rule of law is not a transcendent principle or objective fact but a regulative ideal. The core of this ideal is that different legal subjects are mutually constrained by noninstrumental obligations. Stated somewhat differently, the rule of law means that there are certain legal ends that cannot be legitimately sacrificed or used for some other's purpose(s). Paradoxically, the rule of law is employed or used for different purposes in world order, whether acknowledged or not or whether directly intended or not: The ideal of noninstrumental obligations can function to secure rather instrumental, yet by all means principled, goals. This article examines one of the overlooked and, indeed, masked purposes of the rule of law: regulating or managing (the effects of) inequalities. The rule of law has a complicated relationship to inequality. On the one hand, it promotes the liberal myth of formal equality as constitutive of legal subjects as ends; on the other hand, the rule of law is blind to substantive inequalities among legal subjects. In other words, the rule of law tends to accept and reinforce some forms of (in) equality as given; legal equality is an inherent property of a normatively appropriate system, and substantive inequalities are--indeed, they must be--viewed as facts that are fundamentally and causally outside of that system. To claim that the rule of law is a regulative ideal is to recognize its potential and even power in supporting different political orientations toward world order. There are at least three distinct models of the global rule of law, Westphalian, liberal legalist, and critical. Section 1 of this article outlines and contrasts these distinct models, highlighting how the rule of law functions in different arguments about the nature of legal obligations in world order. The Westphalian and liberal-legalist models assume that a noninstrumental rule of law creates an order in which legal subjects are free from illegitimate coercion or abuse. They differ most fundamentally, however, on who the most important legal subjects ought to be, sovereign states or human beings; additionally, they diverge on whether certain powerful legal subjects ought to be granted exceptional discretionary powers and privileges. By contrast, a critical model is skeptical that the rule of law is really (or solely) about noninstrumental legal relations; it instead focuses on how ideals, and the institutions they support, have purposes that are rooted in prevailing political, social, and economic forces. (1) Drawing from critical models, section 2 examines how the rule of law functions in relation to the inequalities of world order. The rule of law can function in ways that are more conservative or more progressive, even in the context of Westphalian and liberal-legalist models. More conservatively, the rule of law is used simply to manage and to contain (the effects of) substantive inequalities that are assumed to reside outside of the formal requirements of legality. Arguably, however, more progressive visions of the rule of law are possible: The critical realization that the rule of law is seriously undermined, delegitimized, and threatened by substantive and other inequalities potentially leads to extralegal efforts at promoting a fairer or more just distribution of wealth and social power. In other words, the liberal postulates within Westphalian statist and liberal individualist conceptions of the global rule of law are conceivably made sensitive to the contradictions and tensions that underlie the political order and individual freedoms that the rule of law legitimizes. Section 3 extends this analysis by way of examining the fledgling International Criminal Court (ICC). Although normally cast as simply a principled triumph of liberal legalism over the Westphalian model, the ICC is, I argue, also a function of changing perceptions of how the rule of law relates to larger problems of global inequality. …

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Jurisprudence of Opportunity and Equality

Two timeless women embody the ideals of our nation. In New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty proclaims: Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ... .1 In Washington, D.C., the statue Contemplation of Justice sits solemnly before the main entrance to the Supreme Court of the United States.2 Above her head, on the building's architrave, appear the words Equal Justice Under Law. These two promises, of opportunity and equality, have marked our nation's vision since its founding. The pledge of equal justice under law is a profound one, positing a judicial system free of corruption and favoritism as well as one that disdains distinctions of class and caste. The true achievement of our country has been not merely the original expression of this idea, but our willingness to expand our commitment, gradually, to include propertyless white men, former male slaves, other men of color, women of all races, people with disabilities, gay and lesbian citizens, and others within the circle originally reserved for the propertied white men who founded our nation. We began with a transcendent principle, but we have also had the humility to recognize our failings and to revise our behavior to draw closer to our ideal.

Die Soektog na die Etiese Moment in die Teater / The Search for the Ethical Moment in the Theatre

Theatre is often seen as something which makes an important contribution in working for social change—nowhere more so than in South Africa. This article analyses the different ways in which theatre can play such an ethical role, specifically when ethics is interpreted from a poststructural perspective. In this paradigm ethics moves beyond a definition of ‘right and wrong’, towards the search for a non-violent relation with the Other. If theatre can bring about change, is it an ethical process, and if not, why do we value this form of social change? According to both Mamet and Gadamer, theatre confronts the spectator with a form of meaning that transcends their system of reality, and thus can achieve change in their thought patterns. The meaning created in the theatre is traditionally communicated via a network of relations of domination. Since domination implies violence, it is unethical. Even though poststructuralism freed meaning from being the exclusive creation of either the author or the spectator, it is clear that an absolute escape from theatre conventions as power relations is impossible. Violence is equally implied in the mere act of representation. Levinas equates representation with cognition: the ethical relation exists in the moment preceding cognition, but is neutralised as soon as the Other's infinity exceeds its representation, its ‘frame’. This is the ethical paradox of theatre: in an effort to change narrow thought patterns, to reduce stereotypes, theatre must work with identity and representation—tools that are by definition unethical. The ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ and Brecht's Verfremdungstechnik are critically discussed as efforts to escape the necessity of using reductive frames in characterisation. In response to the two problems the article argues firstly that ‘dialogue’—as opposed to rhetoric—should dominate theatre. Here the work of Jacques Derrida becomes relevant. He deconstructs the representation-reality hierarchy by showing that theatre does not reflect life; rather life is a reflection of the transcendental principle which the theatre communicates. For this reason classical theatre's pursuit to represent life will always fail. In addition, he visualizes a conversational relation between the stage and the audience, with the message communicated, always a mere possibility rather than a necessity. In practice this means that the theatre should cease to be a theological space dominated by speech. Similarly, Artaud wants to see a physical language on stage that transcends the spoken word and the metaphysics of presence—and thus creates an opening for the Other to slip inside. This language can communicate a positive conception of metaphysics, because it becomes an incantation, rather than a tool to communicate closed meaning. The emotional response of the audience becomes more important than the intellectual response. The presence of the body implied by Artaud's physical language is discussed in relation to the work of, amongst others, Bakhtin. Here the subject is constituted through his or her body by the look of the Other; an actor is equally constituted through the look of the audience. Bakhtin realizes that this relationship is still bridged by representation—as an alternative he introduces the idea of the carnival, where there is no difference between audience and actor. The article offers a different escape from the impasse of representation: Derrida's concept of closure, “the double refusal both of remaining within the limits of the tradition and of the possibility of transgressing that limit”. This double activity is discussed in relation to a production of Aars! and offers the possibility of regaining the ethical moment in theatre.

Evolutionary transcendence and design

At a recent conversation of the International Systems Institute (ISI), the following trigger question was proposed: “What is a design culture that would enable transcendence?” This essay arose in that context. Such a culture would embody characteristics that are arguably the universal principles of transcendence in the universe. These universal rules/processes/stages are most easily identified in the processes of physical and biological evolution. They can be abstracted from the work of Prigogine, Eigen, and Maturana and Varela. This article presents a sketch of basic evolutionary principles, examples of evolutionary transcendence, and a corresponding list of group characteristics that enable transcendence.

Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power

Koepnick, Lutz. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 277 pp. $50.00 hardcover. As Lutz Koepnick writes in his book, it is one of the ironies of Benjamin criticism (and scholarship on European fascism) that it has often stripped Benjamin's thesis about the aestheticization of politics of any critical force, developing it into unquestioned token of critical discourse, valuable academic commodity ... [that has] often helped support arguments that themselves tend to aestheticize (178). In the last decades, criticism has frequently misunderstood the strengths and shortcomings of Benjamin's thesis, and has consequently also misunderstood the role of the aesthetic both in the Nazi period and in postmodern culture. Koepnick is not the first to call attention to these circumstances, but his book is and will likely remain important for its careful synthesis and analysis of Benjamin's statements on the aestheticization of politics, and for its persistent and imaginative effort to reveal in his writing dialectical patterns of thought that offer a way out of the theoretical dilemmas encountered both by Benjamin himself and by more recent critical traditions informed by his work. Koepnick's work is in large part dedicated to showing that Benjamin's oeuvre in fact yields three versions of the aestheticization thesis. The first, as formulated in Benjamin's work on baroque Trauerspiel, presents aestheticization as a confusion of different forms of representation: the same sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rulers who thought to purge aesthetic concerns from the exercise of power ironically turned political domination into a captivating dramatic spectacle. For the early Benjamin, art itself must disclose the complicity between art and politics. As Koepnick argues, however, Benjamin's later writing shows that this position relies on a transcendental principle of aesthetic autonomy that is historically inflexible, failing to account for the changed roles of the aesthetic in the 19th and 20th centuries. In its second form, as described by Koepnick, Benjamin's aestheticization thesis abandons the concept of the autonomy of the aesthetic as inadequate to the cultural practices of fascism. Aestheticization now refers not to an improper imbrication of the aesthetic and the political, but to the false promise of aura (the aura of autonomous art) in a postauratic world of mechanical reproduction. …

Clock Time and Utopia's Time in Novels of the 1790s

In his Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, To a Noble Lord (1796), the radical John Thelwall argues that the integrity of the principles of "equal rights, and equal laws" must be respected despite the "[e]xcesses and cruelties" of the Terror: "Is time unsteady, because my watch goes wrong? Is it not noon when the sun is in the meridian, because the parish dial is out of repair? Can principles, which are the sun of the intellectual universe, be changed in their nature or their course by the vile actions of a few ruffians?" 1 Thelwall's privileging of a naturally replete order of time over its artificial measure is not simply an occasional, if ingenious, metaphor. 2 For him, as for many radical writers of the period, natural and mechanical time had significant narrative correlatives. The "only means" of securing a future of exactly equal conditions, they believed, was through a "revolution of opinions" that would effect a comprehensive shift of consciousness. 3 Literary forms with the expressive power to make principles appear as constant and self-evident as 'steady' time or the meridian sun would contribute to the achievement of this goal. A radically different future would be made possible by present assertions of transcendent principles.