Western Intellectual Tradition Research Articles

"Unfallable encyclicing": Finnegans Wake and the Encyclopedia Britannica

"Unfallable encyclicing":Finnegans Wake and the Encyclopedia Britannica Len Platt (bio) Finnegans Wake and the Encyclopedia Britannica are both remarkable texts. The first edition of the latter work was produced by "[a] Society of Gentlemen in Scotland" between 1768 and 1771.1 Based in part on principles developed by Dennis de Coetlogon,2 it was both a quintessential product of the Enlightenment and a powerfully authoritative statement about Britain's status in the world. The eleventh edition, from which Joyce worked,3 describes how the project was designed as a "digest of general information," its purpose being nothing less than to "give reasoned discussions on all the great questions of practical or speculative interest."4 The Wake, positioned very differently at the tail end of the modern age, is far from a digest, but it reflects back on the encyclopedic tradition in fascinating ways. To put it simply, Finnegans Wake is a text that has apparently swallowed or "digested" vast amounts of information only to return it in ways that seem outside all reasoned discussion. This essay explores that relationship, not because the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is somehow "key" to any Wakean "metameaning" but, rather, because, in the ambitious and characteristically modern approach it takes to a universal and democratizing epistemology, the Encyclopedia Britannica stands as the antithesis of the Wake. It is, of course, only one of a large number of important intertexts but one that focuses powerfully on the epistemological issues raised by the Wake. The EB is a text that achieves certainty in areas where the Wake "fails," performing in ways the Wake simply cannot. For this reason, it plays a precise part in framing what it is that the Wake articulates against—the knowledge the world claims to have of itself. This essay is concerned, in part, with the technical issue of knowledge about where Joyce used the EB in the Wake and what methodological problems are involved in identifying that usage. Its main focus, however, lies in the larger question of how the Wake engages with the order and authority embodied in a text exemplifying the very idea of the encyclopedia. The central argument here reflects the differences between the Wake and the EB, the latter dedicated in its eleventh edition "by Permission to His Majesty King George the [End Page 107] Fifth King of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions Beyond the Seas Emperor of India and to William Howard Taft President of the United States of America" (EB 1:v). Both, I argue, are instruments "of culture of world-wide influence" (EB 1:x), but Joyce's senses of instrumentality and culture are quite at odds with what the editors of the Encyclopedia have in mind. Their goal is to make available to the public "all extant knowledge" as it is discovered by the "civilized world" (EB 1:ix). The EB's ambition is educative—to produce "a trustworthy guide to sound learning"—but also celebratory (EB 1:x). Above all, the EB is a testimony to the awesome power of the western intellectual tradition, to its authority and universality. At the same time, the EB has a proselytizing mission. Through "the medium of the University Press," it hopes to "maintain direct relations with the whole of the English-speaking world," to bring "all extant knowledge within the reach of every class of readers" (EB 1:ix). The editors have aimed for a traditional order, of course, but also for new levels of uniformity in construction. Dispensing with "the old-fashioned plan of regarding each volume as a separate unit," they instead "arrange their material so as to give an organic unity to the whole work," placing "all the various subjects under their natural headings, in the form which experience has shown to be the most convenient for a work of universal reference" (EB 1:x). It is hard to imagine anything more removed from the Wake's project. Far from maintaining good relations with the empire and the wider "English-speaking world," Joyce's text undermines the very idea of "English-speaking." Rather than formulating knowledge with an alphabetical and progressive coherency, the Wake constitutes an...

Reflections on the Batesian Synthesis1

The argument in "Medicine and the Soul of Science" can be strengthened by understanding that what used to be called "the Western intellectual tradition" is a hodgepodge of Middle Eastern, Greek, Indian, Chinese, and other approaches and methods that converged in the Islamic world before ca. 1000 CE when Europeans began to borrow and adapt it, and by integrating the results of recent research on all of these scientific, technological, and medical traditions.

Medicine and the Soul of Science

Bates argues that understanding the historical relationship between medicine and science can help to clarify what science itself is, and exactly how it differs from other kinds of knowledge. In particular, it is directly relevant to the so-called "Needham question": why did the Scientific Revolution happen in western Europe, even though the East, particularly China, boasted greater achievements in technology? The question needs to be re-framed: it is not technology which made the Scientific Revolution, but mechanism. Medicine as a philosophical inquiry into life-processes, though often dismissed as impervious to the Scientific Revolution, was actually a driving force for mechanism. This is because the new mechanism of the 17th century was a fusion of revived ancient itomism with another ancient style of mechanistic thinking, which Bates called "organic mechanism" or "technism." The primary expression or organic mechanism was in living things-the focus of medical reflection. Medicine's role in developing these ideas of nature as soul in what Don Bates calls Phase I of the Western Intellectual Tradition (Antiquity to the Renaissance), had a crucial impact on the Scientific Revolution, or what Bates refers to as Phase II of the Western Intellectual Tradition. The centrality of medicine to the evolving concept of mechanism truly makes it "the soul of science."

KAREN ARMSTRONG'S AXIAL AGE: ORIGINS AND ETHICS

KAREN ARMSTRONG'S AXIAL AGE: ORIGINS AND ETHICS

Précis ofBayesian Rationality: The Probabilistic Approach to Human Reasoning

According to Aristotle, humans are the rational animal. The borderline between rationality and irrationality is fundamental to many aspects of human life including the law, mental health, and language interpretation. But what is it to be rational? One answer, deeply embedded in the Western intellectual tradition since ancient Greece, is that rationality concerns reasoning according to the rules of logic--the formal theory that specifies the inferential connections that hold with certainty between propositions. Piaget viewed logical reasoning as defining the end-point of cognitive development; and contemporary psychology of reasoning has focussed on comparing human reasoning against logical standards. Bayesian Rationality argues that rationality is defined instead by the ability to reason about uncertainty. Although people are typically poor at numerical reasoning about probability, human thought is sensitive to subtle patterns of qualitative Bayesian, probabilistic reasoning. In Chapters 1-4 of Bayesian Rationality (Oaksford & Chater 2007), the case is made that cognition in general, and human everyday reasoning in particular, is best viewed as solving probabilistic, rather than logical, inference problems. In Chapters 5-7 the psychology of "deductive" reasoning is tackled head-on: It is argued that purportedly "logical" reasoning problems, revealing apparently irrational behaviour, are better understood from a probabilistic point of view. Data from conditional reasoning, Wason's selection task, and syllogistic inference are captured by recasting these problems probabilistically. The probabilistic approach makes a variety of novel predictions which have been experimentally confirmed. The book considers the implications of this work, and the wider "probabilistic turn" in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, for understanding human rationality.

Prologue: Archaeology, Animism and Non-Human Agents

This special issue explores the archaeology of "animism" with attention placed on the material correlates of interactions with potent non-human agents. The topic of animism an ontology in which objects and other non-human beings possess souls, life-force and qualities of personhood (Tylor 1958 [1871]) has reemerged in the social sciences with the blurring of formerly taken-for-granted boundaries separating subject/object, seh7 world, and person/thing (e.g., Bird-Davis 1999; Gell 1998; Latour 1993; Ingold 2006; Viveiros de Castro 2004). Animate objects and non-human beings are active members of many societies today, and presumably were so in the past. Who are these social actors? What do they do? How might we recognize them in an archaeological context? The contributors to this issue explore these questions. Why should archaeologists take animistic religious practices seriously? First, over 150 years of ethnographic literature documents the significance of animated material objects cross-culturally. Yet archaeologists have not developed methods and theories that embrace these perspectives. Recognizing that objects can and do possess purposeful agency for many peoples can move us closer to developing social models that reflect the primacy others placed on interactions with these important community members. Second, serious consideration of animism and non-human agency challenges inherited cultural categories that limit the questions and interpretations we bring to our research. Western intellectual tradition constructs a series of dualisms that slice apart animistic, relational, and indigenous perspectives, and, in the process, devalues peoples' lived experiences. In using terms such as "ascribed," "beliefs," or "symbolic

THE RECEPTION OF DIONYSIUS IN TWENTIETH‐CENTURY EASTERN ORTHODOXY

AbstractThis essay surveys diverse interpretations of the CD by twentieth‐century Eastern Orthodox theologians. This essay argues that the evaluation of Dionysius' contribution crucially depends upon the master narrative within which the CD is considered. For example, for Vladimir Lossky, Dionysius' apophaticism was the “dogmatic ground” of Byzantine mystical theology, whereas according to John Meyendorff, Dionysius' theology was in need of a “Christological corrective” later provided in the theologies of Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas. The points of contact and contrast between Dionysian mystical theology and Russian sophiology are also discussed. Finally, this essay argues that modern Orthodox readings of the CD are characterized by a profound irony: while they are in various degrees indebted to the Western intellectual tradition (as, for example, Christos Yannaras is to Heidegger), Orthodox theologians often use Dionysius to forge an anti‐Western Orthodox theological identity.

Organisational Control and the Self: Critiques and Normative Expectations

This article explores the normative assumptions about the self that are implicitly and explicitly embedded in critiques of organisational control. Two problematic aspects of control are examined – the capacity of some organisations to produce unquestioning commitment, and the elicitation of ‹false’ selves. Drawing on the work of Rom Harre, and some examples of organisational-self processes gone awry, I investigate the dynamics involved and how they violate the normative expectations that we hold regarding the self, particularly its moral autonomy and authenticity. The article concludes by arguing that, despite post-structuralist challenges, some notion of a ‹core’ or ‹real’ self still holds salience for employees negotiating their identities within regimes of control. The assumptions and expectations surrounding this aspect of self are also a pivotal element in the western intellectual tradition that promotes and enables critique.

Human diversity and the genealogy of languages: Noah as the founding ancestor of the Chinese

The characteristics which were held to define the Chinese language within the Western intellectual tradition placed it for a time at the centre in discussions of the genealogy of mankind. The dominant premodern paradigm for the explanation of human linguistic diversity was Biblical exegesis, as discussed and elaborated within the framework of ‘universal history’. A number of Western scholars argued that the Biblical patriarchs could be identified with legendary figures from Chinese history and that there was a direct link between the Chinese language and the pre-Babel linguistic order. The Chinese language, in particular its writing system, had universal characteristics, making it central in the quest for the restoration of the linguistic and conceptual unity of mankind. The rise of a modern linguistics marginalized universal projects of etymological speculation, and it was concluded that there was no cognate relationship between Chinese, Hebrew and the European languages. Both the language and the writing system were increasingly seen as anomalous and unnatural. Western understandings of the Chinese language and the Chinese writing system need to be contextualized within the evolution of conceptualizations of the natural and artificial.

The Protomodern Augustine? Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine

Abstract: The late Colin Gunton often criticized Augustine in two key areas: (1) Augustine's supposed emphasis of the one over the many effectively severed any meaningful link between creation and redemption (contra the theological understanding of Irenaeus); and (2) because of Augustine's supposed emphasis on the timeless essence of God at the expense of the three real persons, Augustine failed to bequeath to the Western intellectual tradition the benefits of a truly Christian ontology (effectively losing the insights of theologians such as the Cappadocian Fathers). This article argues that for all of Gunton's insights – and there are many – a close reading of Augustine actually shows that Augustine is not guilty of such weaknesses and that in fact Augustine provides some of the very theological insights and strengths Gunton wishes to mine from other sources.

UNCOMFORTABLE ISSUES IN 'PHALLACY'

THERE IS A POINT in history, at about time that Thomas Hobbes and Isaac Newton walked Earth, when Western intellectual tradition came to a fork in road. Science and math went left, and art and literature (the humanities) went right. And along with science went society's standard for ascertaining truth. Today, most people spend their lives on one or other of two parallel intellectual tracks. It is heartening, therefore, that several preeminent (older) chemists have recently made names for themselves in arts. The best known of these maybe Carl Djerassi, who became famous as one of inventors of the pill in 1950s but, since 1980s, has turned to writing novels and plays. Djerassi and others—Cornell University's Roald Hoffmann, a poet and Greenwich Village cabaret impresario, comes to mind—seem to harken back to an earlier unified tradition of epistemology more prevalent in life ...

Hans Urs von Balthasar and Some Contemporary Catholic Writers

This Article Has Two Parts. The first is-for lack of a better Word--theoretical and concentrates on Hans Urs von Balthasar and his work as it illuminates the intellectual heritage and confronts, or enters into dialogue with an increasingly secular heritage. The second part is an application of those insights to a work by each of three twentieth-century writers: the novelist Jon Hassler, the playwright Brian Friel, and the poet Denise Levertov. Two amazing things about the intellectual heritage: it is more than intellectual, and it is Catholic--with both the small and capital C. Catholic with a small c means universal. Catholicism is not only multinational but multiethnic and multidisciplinary. It is more than the biblical coat of many colors. It is more than a rainbow. Catholicism is the richness of life itself. As the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes asserts--alluding to the Roman playwright Terence--nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in the hearts of the followers of Christ. (1) Because of the Incarnation, because God became a human being in the person of Jesus, all that belongs to human life was given profound, inestimable value. Catholicism and the doctrine of the Incarnation gave not only value to the world but an attitude toward it--no Platonic aloofness hankering for a world of forms, Roman stoicism, Norse or Teutonic fatalism toward the world. Though Catholicism has engaged and been transformed by all those forces-and many more besides-it continues to be a unique and dynamic living heritage. The portion of the intellectual heritage I shall consider in this article is the intellectual heritage of the West. Maligned by multiculturalists and postcolonialists (to name just a few of its critics), it is the heritage that many of us were born into and within which we live and breathe. It is a birthright, a treasure, a limitation, something of a scandal, and an obligation. Therefore, except for a brief glance or two, I must overlook the East and Africa and Catholicism in parts of the world. A brief aside on my emphasizing the Western tradition: When I think of western-European Catholicism, I often think of the Western priests in Shusaku Endo's novel, Silence, arriving in Japan. I also think of the Jesuit missionary in the film The Mission; actor Jeremy Irons climbing (what is really the Iguazu Falls in Argentina) to the Paraguayan plateau. In each work, the priests enter a new and other world, bringing only themselves, a book or two, and their faith. As western Catholics embodying this heritage, we also go forth--wherever we are sent--to meet and engage all cultures. But to engage all cultures, we must first be imbued with our own. In this article I hope to provide a perspective on that heritage that will help us better understand ourselves within that Western intellectual tradition of Catholicism. The doctrine of the Incarnation is what distinguishes the and Christian faiths from all religions of the world. It could be argued that of all the Christian religions, it is only Catholicism that takes the Incarnation with full seriousness. Whenever a religion is inclined to denigrate the body, earthly life, or fundamental human desires, it is in danger of moving away from the central fact of the Incarnation. God gave his only Son to become human and in that way ennobled--and in fact redeemed and thereby exalted--all of human and earthly life. In an apparent contradiction, the French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel is said to passionately desire the world, not as Christians, but only as pagans before him did. And still Claudel is passionate for the world because he is a Christian. (2) The passage continues: No earthly value can be disdained out of arrogance or resentment, every good is necessary to the Catholic; [the Catholic--WE--] cannot permit ... the smallest no . …

RETHINKING THE SOCIAL IMPACTS OF THE ARTS

The paper presents a critical discussion of the current debate over the social impacts of the arts in the UK. It argues that the accepted understanding of the terms of the debate is rooted in a number of assumptions and beliefs that are rarely questioned. The paper goes on to present the interim findings of a three‐year research project, which aims to rethink the social impact of the arts, with a view to determining how these impacts might be better understood. The desirability of a historical approach is articulated, and a classification of the claims made within the Western intellectual tradition for what the arts “do” to people is presented and discussed.

In Defense of Knowing, In Defense of Doubting: Cicero Engages Totalizing Skepticism, Sensate Materialism, and Pragmatist Realism in "Academica"

Whereas contemporary scholars in the social sciences and humanities often envision themselves as exceptionally, if not uniquely, attentive to the problematics of human knowing and acting, the competing philosophies of totalizing skepticism, sensate materialism, divine worldviews, and pragmatist realism have a much more enduring presence in Western social thought.
 Plato (c420-348BCE) introduces a broad array of philosophic standpoints (theological, idealist, skepticist, materialist, and pragmatist) in his texts and Aristotle (c384-322BCE) addresses human knowing and acting in more distinctively secular, pluralist terms. Still, more scholarly considerations of human knowing and acting would be comparatively neglected by Cicero’s time and even more so after his era.
 Although much overlooked by those in the human sciences, Cicero’s Academica re-engages a number of highly consequential issues pertaining to the matter of human knowing and acting. Likewise, whereas Christian theologians often were hostile to heathen (relativist, materialist, pragmatist) philosophic viewpoints, important residues of these approaches would remain part of the Western intellectual tradition though Augustine’s (c354- 430 BCE) works.
 Academica is centered on the historically sustained skepticist emphases of Plato’s Academy (c350-50CE) but Cicero’s text also attends to some competing viewpoints that developed along the way. In addition to (1) acknowledging some of the intellectual shifts in Plato’s Academy over three centuries, this statement also (2) provides a pragmatist critique of the totalizing skepticism of the Academicians, and (3) illustrates the ways in which Cicero, as a representative and defender of Academician skepticism, deals with critiques pertaining to the problem of human knowing and acting.
 Thus, whereas Cicero is best known as a rhetorician and his text is presented as an instance of rhetorical interchange, Cicero’s Academica also may be seen as “a defense of knowing” and “a defense of doubting,” two of the most central features of scholarship.

Introduction : The Saracen as Narrative Knot

Introduction The Saracen as Narrative Knot Jacqueline De Weever It is an honor to guest-edit this issue ofArthuriana on Saiacens, a subject made spectacularly relevanr to us by cutrent events in the Middle East and in London in 2006, but also a subject growing in importance to medieval studies in English for the last twenty years. Arthuriana has already tackled some ofthe ptoblems posed by Palomides and lesser Saracens appearing in Malory's Morte Darthur in several issues (Summer 2001, Winter 2002, and Summer 2006) so that the dissonances discussed in this issue are not entirely new to Malory students. Much remains, nevertheless, to be uncovered by precise analysis and examination, and we hope that the essays in this issue will furthet refine and enlarge discussion of the subject. Hugh Kennedy observes rhat for studies of Late Antiquity, 'of all the dividing lines set up between academic disciplines in the Western intellectual tradition, the frontier between classical and Islamic studies has proved among the most durable and impenetrable,' and the same may be said about the frontier between medieval English and French studies and Islamic studies.' The situation is, of coutse, different in Spanish intellectual ttaditions because of the history ofMuslim dominance from rhe year 711 to the beginning ofthe Reconquest in the eleventh century. Spain in the medieval centuries as a subjecr ofstudy was almost never offered to students as an adjunct to English medieval studies the way Old French, Middle High German, and Old Norse literatures were offered. Perhaps it was overlooked, as Hugh Kennedy proposes for rhe study ofLateAntiquity, because ofbarriers encountered in learning a new alphabet, new language, and new culture, none ofwhich could be traced to the mythical Indo-European heattland ot to Sanskrit. Yet one encounters those called Saracens (Muslims) in the main themes of the French chansons degeste and theit Middle English translations—for example, Old French Fierabrás and its Middle English translation, The Sowdone ofBabylone and ofFerumbras his Sone who Conquerede Rome. In medieval vetnaculat narrative the Saracen becomes the knot to be untied and functions as Bakhtin's 'chronotope,' that is, one of 'the organizing centets for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. The chronotope is the place where the knots ofnarrative are tied and untied. It can be said without ARTHURIANA 16.4 (2006) INTRODUCTION qualification that to them belongs the meaning that shapes the narrative.' This is certainly ttue ofthe Saracens in romance or epic where their reason for being is to otganize and to dominate time and space as well as to unravel the meaning ofthe whole enterprise of the poem's narrative. The Saracen's entrance complicates the action that ensues because he or she upsets the established notions ofchivalric or romantic behavior. The Saracen princess of rhe chansons degeste challenges the ideals ofbeauty depicred in the heroine's blazon and the ideals ofbehavior in her treachery to her own people when she is awhite Saracen. Marriage to the Frankish knight resolves the dilemma. When black and a knight in the enemy ranks, as Amiete is in Fierabrás, she challenges the very notions ofknighthood. How does the reader or audience in the medieval period comprehend, intellectuallyand emotionally, a ferocious black woman knight? The very idea seems preposterous, yet some medieval vernacular writers have been remarkable in theit conception of the black Saracen woman knight. The untying of the narrative knot comes with the death of such a figure.3 Spenset*s Britomart in the Faerie Queene (1590) is almost a century away. For fifteenth-century readers, Palomides in Malory's Morte Darthur complicates and compels re-definition ofboth love and war. Indeed, the knot of Palomides's love for La Beali Isode is never untied since there is no resolution. Taking refuge in attempting a definition, we find Saracen: aword no longer in use to denote Arab peoples but a wotd with a long life and distinguished pedigree. By Malory's time in the fifteenth century, popular culture as well as lirerary culture associated the word specifically with the peoples of the Middle East, now defined as West Asia.4 The reader of this Introduction to an issue on Saracens in Malory should...

QU QIUBAI’S READING OF MARXIAN “DIALECTICS”

Western and Chinese intellectual traditions are in many ways different from each other. In their studies on correlative thinking in the Chinese tradition, David Hall and Roger Ames argue that the different cosmological assumptions of European cultures on the one hand and the autochthonous philosophical traditions of China on the other are greatly significant and worthy of scholarly attention. The kind of differences Hall and Ames point out may cause a large number of scholars in both the West and China to doubt that the two traditions can be fully understandable to each other in their own categories. My personal experience is that the more understanding gain of the Western intellectual tradition, the more realize that the differences between it and the Chinese tradition are more numerous and run deeper than had previously thought. Some outstanding ideas of the great thinkers in the Western tradition sometimes do not make too much sense to me. (For example, even now still have difficulties in experiencing the well-known thesis of Descartes I think, therefore am as a kind of exciting philosophy.) In the meantime, some ideas of the great thinkers in Chinese tradition have been read and interpreted very differently by various people. realize more and more that in many cases the knowledge gained of the ideas of Western thinkers when was in China was either inaccurate or very different from what read in the English texts when was abroad. Thus have come to believe that while gaining a better understanding of the link between the two cultural traditions is possible, misunderstandings and pitfalls also seem difficult to avoid. Here, would like to draw my colleagues' attention to the possibility that as a historical phenomenon of civilized engagement since the turn of the last century, the Chinese conversation with Marxism in the West is no exception. Many Chinese intellectuals may have since then come to understand Marxism in Chinese terms; and in the meantime, a surprisingly large number of writers have come to believe that Chinese Marxism can be understood fully in terms of Western categories. Many writers for example Stuart Schram, Joseph Needham, and Nick Knight have said that there is something distinctly Chinese about Chinese Marxism, but have failed to make clear what this implies, in terms of both what makes Chinese Marxism distinct, and of how Chinese Marxism differs from the one of Marx or of later Marxists.

FEMINISM AND THE CHANGING STATE

FEMINISM AND THE CHANGING STATE

DRØMME, ÅNDER OG KOGNITION

As a child of the Western intellectual tradition, anthropology has tended not to take its
 informants’ stories about the existence of spiritual beings seriously. Instead, these stories
 tend to be accounted for by using a terminology drawn from the theories of representation,
 which take as their premise that we do not have any direct perceptual access to the
 world, but need to construct it in our minds by means of our language. This article aims
 at developing a radically different approach to the study of indigenous spiritual knowledge.
 It draws on insights from the cognitive sciences, which show that concepts can and do
 exist independently of language and that dreaming shares basic cognitive processes
 with waking life. It concludes that it is possible that children can develop prototypical
 concepts about spirits before they develop language. In this case language would not
 be fundamental for conceptual thought about spiritual beings.

On the Edge of Reason: Planning and Urban Futures in Africa

The shift in planning theory from technical-instrumental to relational conceptions of rationality is helpful in relating to urban environments in Africa that are characterised by the intersection of multiple rationalities and also by spatially extensive and shifting networks of economic and social transaction. However, the relevance of contemporary planning theory is limited by its origins within the intellectual traditions and experiences of the West. If we are to engage effectively with the multiple rationalities that are shaping the cities of the world-cities that are increasingly centred in the global South-then we must bring Western intellectual tradition into a critical relationship with the epistemologies, rationalities and value-based traditions of the non-Occidental world. This paper argues that post-colonial literature and theory may provide some of the intellectual resources needed to sustain such an engagement, as post-colonial thought directs attention to the hybrid intellectual formations and practices that emerge in the on-going interaction between colonised and coloniser. By using Johannesburg as the prism through which to look at cities and at planning, this paper provides some thoughts on how to construct an 'other way' of thinking that is situated both within and outside dominant representations.

The fiction of a thinkable world: body, meaning, and the culture of capitalism

In the culture of the modern West, we see ourselves as thinking subjects, defined by our conscious thought, autonomous and separate from each other and the world we survey. Current research in neurology and cognitive science shows that this picture is false. We think with our bodies, and in interaction with others, and our thought is never completed. The Fiction of a Thinkable World is a wide-ranging exploration of the meaning of this insight for our understanding of history, ethics, and politicsAmbitious but never overwhelming, carrying its immense learning lightly, The Fiction of a Thinkable World shows how the Western conception of the human subject came to be formed historically, how it contrasts with that of Eastern thought, and how it provides the basic justification for the institutions of liberal capitalism. The fiction of a world separated from each of us as we are separated from each other, from which we make our choices in solitary thought, is enacted by the voter in the voting booth and the consumer at the supermarket shelf. The structure of daily experience in capitalist society reinforces the fictions of the Western intellectual tradition, stunt human creativity, and create the illusion that the capitalist order is natural and unsurpassable.Steinberg s critique of the intellectual world of Western capitalism at the same time illuminates the paths that have been closed off in that world. It draws on Chinese ethics to show how our actions can be brought in accord with the world as it is, in its ever-changing interaction and mutual transformation, and sketches a radical political perspective that sheds the illusions of the Western model. Beautifully conceived and written, The Fiction of a Thinkable World provides new ways of thinking and opens new horizons.