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The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After
Abstract
"Modernity" is a troubling concept, not only for scholars but for the general public, for it seems to represent a choice between oppressive traditions and empty, rootless freedom. Seeking a broader understanding of modernity, Kolb first considers the views of Weber and then discusses in detail the pivotal writings of Hegel and Heidegger. He uses the novel strategy of presenting Heidegger's critique of Hegel and then suggesting the critique of Heidegger that Hegel might have made. Kolb offers his own views, proposing the possibility of a meaningful life that is free but still rooted in shared contexts. He concludes with comments on "postmodernity" as discussed by Lyotard and others, arguing persuasively against the presupposition of a unified Modern or Postmodern Age.
... So, the question to ask next is, what has been the fate of the term 'nature' in the modern western culture? Modernity is usually defined through a contrast between modern and traditional society, traditional being characterised by authoritarian, a priori given ties in all spheres of human existence, be they of economic, social, religious, or intellectual type, and modern, in contrast, by the melting of all these ties, one by one and all at the same time (Kolb 1986; Bauman 1987; Giddens 1990; Beck et al. 1994; Lefebvre 1995). This cultural upheaval can be characterised either negatively, as alienation, disenchantment, fragmentation, anomie, or positively as increasing individuality, freedom and rationality. ...
... This cultural upheaval can be characterised either negatively, as alienation, disenchantment, fragmentation, anomie, or positively as increasing individuality, freedom and rationality. The standard story is schematic and usually told from an ideological position (Kolb 1986), but I use the overall description as a starting point. What happened to 'nature'? ...
... Faced with this externalised natural system was the modern, autonomous subject. A dualistic subject – object relationship was emphasised as a central feature in the self-image of modernity by, for instance, Hegel and Heidegger (Kolb 1986). The notion of 'wilderness', as propagated by preservationists in North America and elsewhere, lies squarely within this setting. ...
'Wilderness' has become a widely used term in environmentalist discussion as a symbol for caring about nature. I review first the historical background: the term was adopted by US environmentalists in the 19th century to describe a nostalgic striving to get into contact with pure, unspoiled nature outside of human influence, in a sanctuary of genuineness and originality; this ideal was strengthened by its adoption by American nationalists. The background, however, lies in European Romanticism. Adoration of supposedly untouched nature arose as a counterpart to the depiction of nature as a unified system obeying eternal laws, amenable to human, rational exploitation. This idea of 'wilderness' cannot, however, be given any accurate empirical meaning and it rests on an assumption that a boundary can be drawn between 'natural' and 'unnatural' human activity, but this is impossible; furthermore, all assumed 'wilderness' areas have actually been inhabited by aboriginal people for millenia. The idea of 'wilderness' thus brings forth one example of how nature has been constituted as the 'other' of the western society. In this constitution, 'nature' and 'natural culture' have always belonged together. As an alternative, I discuss the possibility of recognising an element of 'wildness' inside human everyday existence. Henry David Thoreau was a pioneer of this view. Wildness everywhere present is a totally different idea from a wilderness having a concrete reference somewhere 'outside of' human influence. Thus, the fact of ecological crisis actually means rediscovery of nature rather than 'end of nature' as suggested by the famous slogan of Bill McKibben. I finish by suggesting that Thoreau's ever-present 'wildness' might be used as a building block along the path toward a 'nature contract', that is, a changed relationship to nature such that the prevailing attitude of domination and exploitation would be substituted with respect and care. This requires that the radical contextuality of human existence be recognised, and uncontrollable, 'wild' elements in this position be respected.
... The science, and technology that has developed in the last century have created fundamental changes in individual and social life, and the traditional living that people are accustomed to have been degraded over time. The phenomenon of modernity is criticized in the context of its negative effects as it destroys traditional values, creates radical changes in people's lifestyles, and transforms their psychological states (Kolb, 1986). In daily life, individuals are exposed to the negative effects of modernity at different levels, both socially and individually. ...
This research was conducted to determine the optimism, happiness, life meaning, and life satisfaction levels of the Faculty of Theology students. Also, within the scope of the research, it is aimed to determine the relations between these concepts. The research was designed as a correlational survey type that is one of the quantitative research methods.The multi-sample group consisted of 943 students studying in the faculties of theology at the universities of Ankara, Istanbul, Marmara, Ondokuz Mayıs, Ataturk, and Dokuz Eylul. The sample was determined by maximum diversity sampling. ”Oxford Happiness Scale Short Form”, “Life Orientation Test”, “Life Meaning Scale” and “Life Satisfaction Scale” were used to collect data. In addition to descriptive statistics, correlation and hierarchical regression techniques were used to analyze the data. As a result of the research; It was determined that the level of optimism and happiness of the students was medium, whereas the perceptions of life meaning and life satisfaction were low. While women are more optimistic, happy and their life satisfaction is higher than men are, men have more perceptions about the meaning of life than women do. Besides, a significant and positive relationship between optimism, happiness, life meaning, and life satisfaction were determined.
... In general, it is a period of time and a quality of culture that the world has been experiencing for at least the last two centuries. While there are many different ways of dating, defining, and characterizing modernity, we will take the modern world as being born at the point where the individual emerges as a conscious reflecting and reflected subject opposed to the "universal, social body of customs and laws" (Kolb 1986: 67). Bauman (1997: 1) characterizes modernity as an obsession with order. ...
Although the concept of power is central to the study of
politics, there is no agreement as to what power exactly
is. Power is often viewed negatively, as domination,
though it is also the case that power is created by people
acting in concert, in which case it can have positive
effects. Making sense of this puzzle is one of the aims of
this book, which provides the reader with a clear and
coherent way of understanding the various forms and
manifestations of power. It does so by bringing together
the most important and influential perspectives on
power within the political and social sciences.
... For Marx, the 8 In the book under discussion, Arthur offers some lucid accounts of how the Hegelian dialectic works. But see also the valuable accounts in Finlay 1958, Taylor 1975, Pinkard 1985 and Kolb 1986basic and simplest element in capitalism is the commodity. What is essential about the commodity can be simply summarised: it has two sorts of value, use-value and exchange-value. ...
... David Kolb (1939) was an American educational theorist interested in experiential learning and professional education. He is known as the founder of the Experience Based Learning System (EBLS), Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) and the Learning Style Inventory (LSI) (Kolb, 1987). ELT concerns active learning through experience. ...
... 1 Heidegger attacks Hegel for being overly subjectivistic both in the sense that he remains too Cartesian, and in the sense that he looks for a final self presence of spirit to itself which, in Heidegger's mind, means that the role of finitude and difference has been crushed or overridden by self presence in the traditional metaphysical gesture. I have argued against this critique of Hegel (Kolb 1987), and recently Robert Sinnerbrink has treated the topic clearly and in effective new ways (Sinnerbrink 2002(Sinnerbrink , 2008. ...
What are the ontological commitments in Hegel and Heidegger's discussion of the self? In this essay I approach these continental thinkers with a question from analytic philosophy, to see how they might respond. In different ways Hegel and Heidegger try to locate the question (and its goal of one final language with a definitive list of ontological commitments) within a prior discourse about the conditions of the possibility of any local ontological commitments. The priority they claim can be clarified by distinguishing conditions of possibility from conditions of actuality.
... 1 Heidegger attacks Hegel for being overly subjectivistic both in the sense that he remains too Cartesian, and in the sense that he looks for a final self presence of spirit to itself which, in Heidegger's mind, means that the role of finitude and difference has been crushed or overridden by self presence in the traditional metaphysical gesture. I have argued against this critique of Hegel (Kolb 1987), and recently Robert Sinnerbrink has treated the topic clearly and in effective new ways (Sinnerbrink 2002(Sinnerbrink , 2008. ...
... In general, it is a period of time and a quality of culture that the world has been experiencing for at least the last two centuries. While there are many different ways of dating, defining, and characterizing modernity, we will take the modern world as being born at the point where the individual emerges as a conscious reflecting and reflected subject opposed to the "universal, social body of customs and laws" (Kolb 1986: 67). Bauman (1997: 1) characterizes modernity as an obsession with order. ...
... Many observers have explained modernity, over the last two centuries or so, as being a single, uniform, coherent world (see Kolb, 1986). It is for this reason that many currently assume that modernity can be conceptualized either as nearing its end or as an uncompleted project. ...
This article aims to inspire an analysis of modernity that would provide a starting point for conceptualizing multiple modernities. First, I argue that conceptualizing modernity as an open-ended horizon engenders spaces to interpret modernity in multiple ways. A view of modernity is thus developed that questions totalizing and Eurocentric theories of modernity. Then the current state of the plurality and diversity of identities and practices is emphasized as the consequence of the openness of modernity to interpretation. In this respect, it is insisted that the different features of non-western cultures should be seen as the indication for the existence of multiple modernities. Finally, for a sociology of multiple modernities, four basic themes are outlined that need to be worked on: plurality of civilizations, histories, modernizing agents and the projects of modernity.
... In general, it is a period of time and a quality of culture that the world has been experiencing for at least the last two centuries. While there are many different ways of dating, defining, and characterizing modernity, we will take the modern world as being born at the point where the individual emerges as a conscious reflecting and reflected subject opposed to the 'universal, social body of customs and laws' (Kolb 1986: 67). ...
I shall argue that the foundations of organization power were laid down in practice through theories of power – in the sense that they sought to explain power – but through quite pragmatic practices that were not necessarily regarded as embodying a theory of power, which I shall maintain they most assuredly did. Thus, in a second move, I shall argue that while these practices began with a focus on the body of the employee they moved on to consider their consciousness and soul. Third, I shall briefly consider the main themes in organization theories' treatment of power, organized around notions of system rationality and uncertainty. These have an implicit idealism attached to them, I shall suggest. Fourth, I shall switch focus to the broader canvass of social theory in the post‐war era and suggest that this has also displayed a strongly idealist streak, focusing especially on the celebrated structuralist account of power as a matter of layered dimension that Steven Lukes (1974, 2005) produced. Fifth, I shall contrast the idealism of this approach with a more pragmatic conception of power, one that can be found in the perspectives with which I opened the paper, perspectives that derive from more Foucauldian‐influenced currents of contemporary social theory. Drawing on these, I will suggest a different way of understanding Lukes' radical third dimension of power as a means of organizing and rationalizing innovations in power relations, drawing on the literature of the ‘dominant ideology thesis’ (Abercrombie et al.1980) to do so. Finally, I shall suggest switching from the structuralist metaphors of dimensions to an imagery of flows as a more appropriate model for understanding power relations.
... Is it just that the rate of change and reinterpretation has increased, or are there new kinds of societies and institutions, new identities, selves, and thoughts? My first book (Kolb 1987) concentrated on the term modern and its implications in Hegel and Heidegger, and their complex approval and critique of modernity. Then, I began to use the term postmodern. ...
This essay discusses the situation of philosophy today in an era of mixed modern, postmodern, and traditional values and social patterns. It argues, with reference to postmodern architecture and to the German philosophers Hegel and Heidegger, that we should reject polarizing conceptual dualities, and that we need to seek out new kinds of less centered and less hierarchical unities that take advantage of the internal tensions and spacings within intellectual and cultural formations. It concludes with a discussion of the promises and problems of dialogue between Eastern and Western philosophies in today’s world.
Henry A. Giroux is one of the most respected and well-known critical education scholars, social critics, and astute observers of popular culture in the modern world. For those who follow his considerably influential work in critical pedagogy and social criticism, this first-ever collection of his classic writings, augmented by a new essay, is a must-have volume that reveals his evolution as a scholar. In it, he takes on three major considerations central to pedagogy and schooling.The first section offers Girouxs most widely read theoretical critiques on the culture of positivism and technocratic rationality. He contends that by emphasizing the logic of science and rationality rather than taking a holistic worldview, these approaches fail to take account of connections among social, political, and historical forces or to consider the importance of such connections for the process of schooling. In the second section, Giroux expands the theoretical framework for conceptualizing and implementing his version of critical pedagogy. His theory of border pedagogy advocates a democratic public philosophy that embraces the notion of difference as part of a common struggle to extend the quality of public life. For Giroux, a student must function as a border-crosser, as a person moving in and out of physical, cultural, and social borders. He uses the popular medium of Hollywood film to show students how they might understand their own position as partly constructed within a dominant Eurocentric tradition and how power and authority relate to the wider society as well as to the classroom.In the last section, Giroux explores a number of contemporary traditions and issues, including modernism, postmodernism, and feminism, and discusses the matter of cultural difference in the classroom. Finally, in an essay written especially for this volume, Giroux analyzes the assault on education and teachers as public intellectuals that began in the Reagan-Bush era and continues today. Henry A. Giroux is one of the most respected and well-known critical education scholars, social critics, and astute observers of popular culture in the modern world. For those who follow his considerably influential work in critical pedagogy and social criticism, this first-ever collection of his classic writings, augmented by a new essay, is a must-have volume that reveals his evolution as a scholar. In it, he takes on three major considerations central to pedagogy and schooling.The first section offers Girouxs most widely read theoretical critiques on the culture of positivism and technocratic rationality. He contends that by emphasizing the logic of science and rationality rather than taking a holistic worldview, these approaches fail to take account of connections among social, political, and historical forces or to consider the importance of such connections for the process of schooling. In the second section, Giroux expands the theoretical framework for conceptualizing and implementing his version of critical pedagogy. His theory of border pedagogy advocates a democratic public philosophy that embraces the notion of difference as part of a common struggle to extend the quality of public life. For Giroux, a student must function as a border-crosser, as a person moving in and out of physical, cultural, and social borders. He uses the popular medium of Hollywood film to show students how they might understand their own position as partly constructed within a dominant Eurocentric tradition and how power and authority relate to the wider society as well as to the classroom.In the last section, Giroux explores a number of contemporary traditions and issues, including modernism, postmodernism, and feminism, and discusses the matter of cultural difference in the classroom. Finally, in an essay written especially for this volume, Giroux analyzes the assault on education and teachers as public intellectuals that began in the Reagan-Bush era and continues today.
These pages contain a typescript of my 1990 book, Postmodern Sophistications, slightly different from the published version. While writing some recent essays, I have been both delighted and worried to see how much had been foreshadowed 26 years ago. I have obtained the rights to the essays and will make them available separately for current discussions, but there may be some interest in seeing them in their original context. The architectural examples are the most dated, and the word postmodern has gone out of fashion in architecture. But the earlier use of the term for an attempt to bring substantive content into formal modernity retains interest. My conclusions about inability of postmodern architecture to escape modern distance from history remain true, as does my argument that modern distance from history is an illusion, that we are more embedded in history than we moderns have wanted to think, though that embodiment is not as total and restrictive as we have imagined in our image of our ancestors. The opposition between postmodern and modern views on knowledge, in the persons of Lyotard and Habermas, remains relevant although later developments in deconstruction and critical theory have widened and deepened the debate. I think the points made in these older essays remain useful, if not complete. The underlying aim of my book was to get away from the duality between the Sophists and Plato. That classic dispute has been the model for many interpretations of the tensions within our society today. On the one hand you have the clever manipulative salesmen who care nothing about truth. On the other hand the rigorous scientific investigation that never quite makes contact with politics. Rootless nihilism vs. naturally grounded values. Anarchy vs. Rules. In this book I developed a pragmatic middleground using themes from Heidegger and Dewey; in later writings I rely more on Hegel. But the point remains the same: don't listen to the Straussians and others who try to force on us a simple opposition between Socrates and the Sophists. It was not so simple in Greece and it's not so simple today. The text is converted from an older word processor format, and some odd symbols may remain.
The philosophy of Immanuel Kant has been important in education theory, especially in the historical context of the Enlightenment and its legacies on contemporary understandings of global education. Particular reference is given to Kant’s writing on Enlightenment thinking and especially to his 1803 Über Pädagogik/Lectures on pedagogy whose groundwork tends to be thought from an empirical anthropology. This paper aims to question education, though from the perspective of a Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience, a perspective developed initially from my reading of Denis J. Schmidt’s Lyrical and Ethical Subjects (2005). In the Critique of Judgement (1986), Kant develops an ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ that offers transcendental grounds for the possibility of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he discusses, somewhat briefly, training in the fine arts and even more briefly offers, somewhat indirectly, a far-reaching transcendental ground for pedagogy. It is these two brief accounts that form the substance of this paper, requiring a somewhat extended introduction to Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement in order to develop its analysis. From this analysis, two key questions arise: if fine art cannot be learned, and if imitation would ultimately aim at producing an objectively determinable rule—via a determinable concept—for the production of art works, how does one proceed with education in the fine arts? And, secondly, as a corollary, if genius is reserved for precisely what cannot be learned but yet can be conceived and communicated, what possible purpose is served by aesthetic ideas with respect to cognition itself?
When I was first studying Hegel, I encountered quite divergent readings of his views on religion. The teacher who first presented Hegel to me was a Jesuit, Quentin Lauer at Fordham University, who read Hegel as a Christian theologian providing a better metaphysical system for understanding the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. When I studied at Yale University, Kenley Dove read Hegel as the first thoroughly atheistic philosopher who presented the conditions of thought without reference to any foundational absolute being. Meanwhile, also at Yale, John Findlay read us a deeply Neo-Platonic Hegel who taught about absolute forms held in a cosmic mind. In giving my own reading, I want to talkabout the ways Hegel redefines both metaphysics and religion. I would like to approach these issues by way of the medieval controversy over double truth, which was a previous conflict between religion and science.
In the thirteenth century, Aristotle's scientific and philosophical texts were becoming available in European universities from the Muslims in Spain. These texts offered a well-argued, systematic, and more comprehensive scientific view of the universe and its god. Reading Aristotle, people quickly realised that his ideas contradicted some Christian (and Muslim) doctrines. For example, Aristotle argued that the world could not have had a beginning in time, while the religious revelations told of a first moment of divine creation. Aristotle's obscure treatment of the active intellect seemed to argue that there was no individual immortal soul, while the revelations spoke of individual survival after death. And Aristotle's god, the totally self-absorbed first mover, the pure actuality, seemed useless for religious purposes.
This chapter considers the relationship between postmodern discourse and the cultural discourse of trauma, demonstrating the connection between the crisis of language explored by postmodernism and the crisis of language in the world of the trauma victim. Both realms are characterized by parallel processes of dissociation and fragmentation of place, time, and meaning. The link between trauma and literature is illustrated through analysis of the works of Franz Kafka and Cormac McCarthy. Despite the difference in time and cultural context, both writers offer a critical look at literature’s fascination with and unhealthy attraction to trauma. The killing machine in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” and the war machine of American colonization in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West reveal the magical hold that trauma has on the minds of victimizers and victims alike.
In the last decade an explosion of Supreme Court case law has struggled with the question of what makes a regulatory restriction on private property a taking for which just compensation is required by the Constitution.1 Judges, policymakers, and legal scholars have offered various modern approaches to answer this question; but, notwithstanding their efforts, or perhaps because of their meddlings, the problem of regulatory takings has only become more confused and complex than ever. As one commentator of the Court’s recent takings cases has aptly concluded: “[I]t is difficult to imagine a body of case law in greater doctrinal and conceptual disarray” (Peterson 1989, p. 1304).
In recent times it has been argued that thinking with the concept of ‘modernity’ entails, or at least makes one prey to, Eurocentrism. Those who are troubled by this have sought to rethink the concept such that one can ‘think with’ modernity, while avoiding, or even challenging, Eurocentrism. This article surveys some such attempts, before moving on to argue that the question of whether modernity is principally a European phenomenon or not cannot be adequately framed without considering the knowledge within which the question comes to be posed; for the knowledge through which we represent and understand modernity is itself, in its origins, European (and modern), and thus the relations between this knowledge and the ‘real’ that it purports to characterize, also need to be interrogated. Doing so, the article suggests, complicates the task of understanding modernity in non-Eurocentric terms, and leads to the recognition that the concept of modernity is not simply a means by which we describe, grasp or apprehend a phenomenon external to it, but that it is itself involved in the production of the modern. If this is so, we are (West and non-West) modern, though not in the way that we have hitherto presumed.
This article investigates Heidegger\'s views on technology, specifically focussing on whether it is possible to fit Heidegger\'s ideas into an ecologically minded framework. The author concludes that the question of what we should do in the wake of the technological crisis we face is inappropriate in terms of Heidegger\'s philosophy, since he proposes that we should first tackle the question “What should we think?”. The question whether Heidegger\'s ideas on technology provide us with new paths of action, specifically in terms of ecological practice, is flawed.
S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(2) 2003: 157–172
Despite their strong spatial connotations, nearness, remoteness and distance are terms discussed in Martin Heidegger in connection to technology, interpretation, difference and lived time. In this paper, I investigate the nature of nearness, the possibility of its elimination and the meaning of such contingency via Bernard Stiegler's critique. In order to do this, I look into the nature of interpretation as a process of time-synthesis that brings the world near and is conditioned by technology. At the same time, I give special attention to childhood as a unique but telling stage of this process. Furthermore, I look into technologies of nearness, now instantiated as digital technologies, and interpret them as processes that challenge the very notion they appear to promote, that is nearness and difference. Finally, I discuss these technologies in connection to education's possible response and impossible responsibility. Education is discussed as a technology of nearness that forms the child and their interpretive modalities that ultimately allow nearness and the perception of difference in the experience of time. In this light, education's and technology's relation is more complicated than we think.
The current situation of vernacular architecture is a result of the different perspectives of agents who have some sort of direct or indirect relationship with the architecture of the past which has influenced attitudes and ways of thinking, thus guaranteeing its assessment and survival. Therefore, this article reviews recent currents of thought and theories encapsulating the increased value of vernacular architecture. In the eighteenth century, this architecture made the romantic ideals of rural society synonymous with its surroundings, territory and country. In the twentieth century, a select few modernist intellectuals carried out in-depth studies of this architectural type in relation to its formal values. Now, in the twenty-first century, it has become the object of technological and scientific analysis for many experts. The current situation still presents many unresolved problems, which are perhaps the result of little thought having been put into specific aspects of the process of vernacular architecture.
In this paper we critically theorise accountability and transparency, and accounting, in relation to human rights. Consistent with our perspective, we articulate human rights as a complex and very important construct. We link human rights to notions of accountability and transparency (and hence to accounting) and elaborate how theoretical debates and developments in the humanities and social sciences refine but do not displace the argument that governance for human rights is a meaningful pursuit and policy. Indeed, they in some ways promote the mobilisation of accounting in the context. We go on to elaborate further how accounting (we especially focus upon corporate accounting and reporting) may come to the service of human rights. Developing our critical perspective more concretely and positively, we reflect, giving consideration to real world happenings and relevant illustrations, upon the interface of accounting, various actors (especially corporations) and human rights in the context of globalisation. And we reflect upon ways forward.
The concerns of this paper come from an attempt to develop sociological inquiry from women's standpoint and to create a sociology for people. It is a project that must rely on the possibility of “telling the truth.” The poststructuralist/postmodernist critique of representation and reference creates a fundamental problem for this project. It challenges the very possibility of a sociology committed to inquiry into the actualities of the social as people live them.
The poststructuralist/postmodernist critique of the unitary subject of modernity is central. It is argued that the subject and subject‐object relations are inescapably in and of discourse and language. Both subject and object are discursively constituted and there is no beyond to which reference can be made in establishing the truth of statements. Rather subjects are constituted only in discourse and are fragmented, multiple, diverse. This paper argues that, though the unitary subject is rejected, an individuated subject survives though multiplied and that a central failure of poststructuralism/postmodernism is to come to grips with the social as actual socially organized practices.
Using the theories of George Herbert Mead and Mikhail Bakhtin, the paper goes on to offer an alternative understanding of referring and “telling the truth.” Observations of sequences in which people are identifying an object for one another are described to demonstrate the radically and ineluctably social character of the process. The argument is then extrapolated with further examples to offer an alternative account of referring. A description of using a street map in an actual context of “finding our way” exemplifies how a science might be inserted into a local practice. Telling the truth, it is argued, is always and only in just such actual sequences of dialogue among people directly present to one another or indirectly present in the texts they have produced. My own and others' observations are used to reconceptualize “referring” in general as integral to a social act of finding and recognizing an object as a local performance. In conclusion, I suggest that the example of a map offers to sociology a model that does not displace and subordinate people's experience but can be used by them to expand their knowledge beyond it.
Since I am going to argue that there are fundamental weaknesses in the Chris Arthur's value-form reading of Marx, I want first to insist on its merits. Arthur is an outstanding exponent of both Hegel and Marx – not only a naggingly accurate scholar, but someone who in his own thinking is capable of rigorous dialectic argumentation of the highest order. His book, The New Dialectic and Marx's 'Capital', is only partly a reading of Marx: Arthur also presents an original theoretical narrative about capitalism. 1 I believe that the value-form story which Arthur and others have evolved shows deep perceptiveness about dimensions of Marx's account of capitalism which are missed, or marginalised, in many straightforward political-economy accounts. Marx does, at times, make use of metaphysical language to suggest how capitalism operates as a reified system, and how capital is a thing-like automaton whose domination creates inverted forms of society. It is correct that a creative use of Hegel's logic can help us to grasp and explicate the laws of motion of such a dehumanised system.
In this essay we contend that traditional theories of argument are consonant with and enrich the project of postmodernity. Reading postmodernity as ‘a rhetoric’ underscores how the process of discursively resolving conflicts is occasionally threatened by politically motivated efforts to misuse the methods of argument; it alerts us to the egregious acts that are and can be performed ‘in the name of,’ but not because of, rationality. Postmodernity is thus an attempt by a new generation of theorists to recast and draw attention to perennial philosophical problems in the context of contemporary political difficulties.
In the current international literature postmodernity is widely identified with poststructuralism or recent French theoretical avantgardism. It is then suggested that criticism needs to change to keep up with or reduplicate such avantgardism. In this paper I reject the identification of postmodernity with French theoretical avantgardism. Instead, I suggest that postmodernity be taken as an unsatisfactory cipher for changing real world parameters, constraints and conditions. I then outline how criticism might be re-enculturated in light of such changes and the possibilities they open up.
In this chapter, I address a number of the difficult questions surrounding the current decline of the American trial. I begin with a compressed and evaluative account of what the contemporary trial is for us. This involves both an account of what we do at trial and a more global account of its significance. I discuss some of the theoretical issues that such an account poses. I then provide a short account of how we have gotten to where we are (“the past”). I provide a summary of recent social scientific findings that suggest that the trial is in current decline and some preliminary speculations as to the explanations for that decline (“the future”). Finally, I suggest the happy possibility that explanation of the future may be quite limited in this matter.
Advances a theory incorporating the most useful and transformative aspects of critical pedagogy. Border pedagogy acknowledges the shifting borders that undermine and reterritorialize power and knowledge, and links the educational enterprise with the struggle for a democratic society. Attempts to combine an emancipatory modernism with a postmodernism of resistance. (Author/AF)
Despite theoretical weaknesses, postmodernism offers educators important insights that can be incorporated in a broader theory of schooling and critical pedagogy. Argues that the best elements of modernist and postmodernist discourses should be combined to create a pedagogy and politics that reclaim and reinvigorate the possibilities of a radical democracy. (Author/AF)
This article traces the trajectory of Heidegger’s thinking about technology over the course of what is considered to be his early, middle, and late periods. Over the course of the years, Heidegger’s concerns moved from somewhat conventional concerns over the consumerism technology entails, and the damage it causes to the environment, to the more complex position that technicity distorts human nature with an accompanying loss of meaning. The real danger, he said, is not the destruction of nature or culture, nor selfindulgent consumerism, but a new totalizing style of practices that would restrict our openness to people and things by driving out all other styles of practice that enable us to be receptive to realty.
Résumé
La Philosophic de la nature de Hegel élabore une théorie complexe et systématique du monde naturel, qui est passée presque inaperçue dans la littérature secondaire. Selon cette théorie, la nature passe progressivement d'une division originate entre ses deux éléments constitutifs, la pensée et la matiére, à leur unification finale, par une séquence rationnellement nécessaire d'étapes dans le processus. Cette progression naturelle présente une structure identique à celle de la progression que Hegel discerne parmi les formes de la conscience subjective. Une comparaison attentive entre les formes de la conscience et les étapes du développement naturel peut dès lors servir à élucider cette théorie de la nature et à la dégager des longues discussions sur la science contemporaine auxquelles Hegel l'a inutilement associée.
In contrast to what might be expected after the triumph of a colossal revolutionary process and the establishment of a state deriving its power mainly from a strong ideological drive, in Iran the development of socio-political thought did not end with the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Indeed, the post-revolutionary period has witnessed a proliferation of socio-political discourses articulated by groups and individuals inside and outside the country, notwithstanding censorship and attempts to control the flow of information by the government. Within the post-revolutionary religiously oriented discourses, more vigorous than the secular socio-political discourses, two distinct trends are visible. One of these trends consciously seeks accommodation with the forces of the modern world, to an extent unsurpassed by previous religious discourses in Iran, especially with regard to its gradual espousal of modern democratic principles. This trend is closely associated with the thought of Abdulkarim Sorush, the leading figure among a group of philosophers and social thinkers at the forefront of the reform movement in post-revolutionary Iran. He enjoys a large following among the relatively young and well-educated Muslims who seek a more open and democratic society in the post-revolutionary conditions of Iran.
Conceptions of urban space and the daily practices within it, typically demarcate city spaces as “go” and “no go,” as an integral part of the cultural construction of social enclaves. In contrast to studies that demonstrate how powerful social segments utilize cultural demarcations of space as mechanisms of exclusion, this essay shows how spatial demarcations serve, instead, to promote self-preservation for a politically feeble and marginalized ethnic minority. The case of contemporary Casablancan Jews reveals the underlying logic of the self–enclosure of a politically weak ethnic group undergoing continuous demographic decline. [Ethnic identity, urban space, Jews, Casablanca]
This essay seeks to develop and illustrate an approach to comparison based on ad hoc frames. A frame is defined by a question, to which different thinkers can be seen as offering complementary and/or competing responses. Pursuing a middle ground between universalist conceptions of comparison and particularist rejections of comparison, this approach brings various positions into dialogue in a manner that is not inherently totalizing. The article draws extensively on Hegel's philosophy of religion to articulate this approach to comparison and its presuppositions. The second section of the essay seeks to illustrate the value of this approach by using the question of how traditional practices are inherited to frame a comparison of Hegel on habit and the Confucian thinker Xunzi on ritual. This comparison functions principally to indicate the process of comparison and suggest the value of pursuing this comparison in greater depth.
This short programmatic essay, written for a collection celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Karl Llewellyn's paper "On Philosophy in American Law," sketches the elements of an adequate philosophy of law today. It argues that an adequate philosophy of law must be empirical, interpretive, and critical. It suggests that the lines between philosophy and both anthropology and rhetorical studies will blur. Llewellyn was right in stressing the relative importance of legal practices in understanding what law is, but the early realists were without the relatively more adequate philosophies of human practice since developed and relatively greater range of social scientific findings on those practices since made. Because of its interpretive and normative aspects, jurisprudence will remain one of the humanities and will never be fully naturalized, but it may come to be better informed.
This short essay summarizes an understanding of the trial as a medium in which law is realized or actualized, rather than imposed or enforced. It suggests that we should pay close attention to the actual practices that prevail at trial, its "consciously structured hybrid" of languages and practices, if we want to understand the nature of law.
The word "know" has an inevitably normative bite. I can believe that the moon is made of green cheese, but I cannot know it. So the question that forms the title of this essay really contains two questions: (1) What do we do in the trial court? and (2) Does that amount to knowledge? The first question calls for linguistic phenomenology, as Hannah Arendt put it, and the second question for a kind of theorizing that has a long and important history. This essay summarizes that history and then identifies some of the philosophical commitments that would allow us to say that the practical understandings that emerge at trial may fairly be called knowledge.
The Law as Rhetoric: A Conclusory Unscientific PrescriptThe Rhetoric of the TrialHow Trial Rhetoric Realizes the Moral Sources Embedded in the Jury's Forms of LifeThe Significance of Trial Rhetoric
Bohm's world was holistic, as holistic as the unanalyzable interconnections of the quantum or his unified vision of matter and mind. Holism extended, he believed, into human psychology and society itself. He dreamed of developing a group mind and spent his last years organizing dialogue circles in its pursuit. (David Peat, 1997, p. 4) Many groups today are exploring dialogue through the inspiration of the work of the late David Bohm, a quantum physicist and philosopher. This paper examines David Bohm's worldview out of which his vision of dialogue unfolded in the mid-1980s. Dialogue represents an important culminating aspect of Bohm's lifework: a far-reaching inquiry into the nature of reality and the ramifications it suggests for human society. Because few thinkers in our day have grappled so thoroughly with making connections between the physical sciences and the problems facing our world today, it seems apropos to examine the journey Bohm took on his way to developing his proposal of dialogue. My interest in Dialogue began in 1991 after first reading Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline and attending one of David Bohm's seminars on Dialogue in Ojai. The draw for me was intuitive. It seemed that Dialogue might be one remedy for some of the self-defeating ways of interacting that are unconsciously fostered in our society. In the West, we learn from an early age in school and in our families how to defend our position on things. We learn that being right is more important than listening to others. When we grow up, we take these ways of defending our need to be right into our most intimate relationships with others and then wonder why things do not go the way we like. We rarely examine the ways in which we communicate. We rarely consider that the interpersonal problems we encounter may lie with the process rather than with the content. One of the important values of Bohm's proposal of dialogue is that it brings into conscious relief the process by which we share meaning with others. And this rests on the values, skills, and worldview that underpin it. What are these assumptions about the nature of reality that Bohm came to from his work in quantum physics that led him to dialogue? Do they make sense in our world today? Should we take his proposal of dialogue seriously? After first learning about dialogue, I started practicing it in a community group I started in Temecula, California. Later, with my business partner, Glenna Gerard, I began to train others in how to use dialogue in organizational contexts. After a decade of exploring dialogue and co-authoring a book with Glenna, entitled Dialogue: Rediscover the Transforming Power of Conversation, I began to wonder more deeply about the roots of Bohm's proposal of dialogue. How did a quantum physicist come to the conclusion that something like dialogue was imperative in our world today? Why was I, a practicing organizational consultant, coming to the same conclusion as a physicist? The interconnectedness of life, holism, and the constant flowing nature of reality were fundamental for Bohm. In the context of these beliefs, Dialogue is a conscious act of man, representing the élan vital, the force, and the spirit that holds the entire universe together. I will attempt to trace the development of Bohm's thinking from his vision of quantum reality to dialogue.1 I will do so mainly by drawing upon his biography by David Peat, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm. Other sources that have been important to me in my personal work with dialogue have been Bohm's own writings: Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Science, Order, and Creativity (co-written by Bohm and Peat), On Dialogue, and Changing Consciousness (a dialogue by Bohm and Mark Edwards). Also helpful have been interviews with Bohm by Renee Weber in Dialogues with Scientists and Sages, as well as a collection of writings in Quantum Implications: Essays in Honour of David Bohm, edited by B.J. Hiley and F. David Peat.
Artikkel lähtub Hegeli filosoofilise süsteemi mittemetafüüsilisest tõlgendusest ja keskendub ühele aspektile Hegeli dialektilise meetodi juures, mille iseloomustamiseks oleks autori arvates kõige adekvaatsem kasutada narratiivi mõistet. Artikli tees on kokkuvõtlikult järgmine: Hegeli arvates ei ole filosoofiline tõde väljendatav ühe lause või propositsiooniga, vaid (1) see nõuab tervet väidete jada, kusjuures (2) mõistete määratlused selles väidete jadas peavad suutma teiseneda --- nii nagu kirjandusliku jutustuse käigus võivad teiseneda tegelaste iseloom ja arusaamine asjadest (eriti ilmne on see Bildungsroman'ile omase narratiivi puhul). Lisaks neile kahele omadusele on narratiivile iseloomulik talle omaste struktuurielementide (algus, keskpaik ja lõpp) abil loodud (3) terviklikkus, mis võimaldab tal anda edasi sellist mõtet, mis ei sisaldu üheski narratiivi moodustavas lauses üksikult võetuna. Need kolm omadust võimaldavad Hegeli "dialektilisele" meetodile narratiiviteooria vahenditega uut valgust heita ja spekulatiivse tõe loomust paremini mõista.The paper discusses the nature of Hegel's dialectical method and criticizes its wide-spread interpretation according to the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula. It is argued that there is no evidence of triadic structures in Hegel's works. Rather, the elements (usually defined as "moments", "formations" (Gestalten) or "determinations" (Bestimmungen)) that make up the body of Hegel's texts, are organized as "series" (Reihen) that form circles, in which, as Hegel maintains, the last element leads us back to the first. If synthesis means creating something new by using the initial elements then it is problematic whether anything becomes synthesized in Hegel texts. The paper argues against interpreting the every third element of the series (the moment of Becoming being the most obvious candidate in the Science of Logic) or the end-points of the series (such as the final moment of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit) as synthetic unities. Instead, the paper proposes that Hegel's speculative method uses the form of narrative for creating a vessel that is able to express the "speculative truth" which is "fluid" (flüssig) and which requires a "plastic" (plastische) form of presentation. Narrative can accomplish what a singular proposition and a deductive system cannot, because (1) it consists of a series of claims (2) that is able to express the movement of what is said in each claim, and (3) because its ending creates a point at which the story as a whole obtains a meaning that is not expressed in any particular sentence constituting the story.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate contemporary philosophical models for global ethics in light of the Catholic theologian Hans Küng s Global Ethic Project (Projekt Weltethos). Küng s project starts with the motto, No survival without world ethos. No global peace without peace between religions. I will use the philosophically multidimensional potential of Projekt Weltethos in terms of its possible philosophical interpretations to evaluate the general discussion of global ethics within political philosophy today. This is important in its own right, but also because through it, opportunities will emerge to articulate Küng s relatively general argument in a way that leaves less room for mutually contradictory concretizations of what global ethics ultimately should be like. The most important question in this study is the problem of religious and ideological exclusivism and its relation to the ethically consistent articulation of global ethics. I will first explore the question of the role of religion as the basis for ethics in general and what Küng may mean by his claim that only the unconditional can oblige unconditionally. I will reconstruct two different overall philosophical interpretations of the relationship between religious faith and human rationality, each having two different sub-divisions: a liberal interpretation amounts to either a Kantian-Scheiermacherian or a Jaspersian view, whereas what I call postliberal interpretation amounts to either an Aristotelian-Thomistic or an Augustinian view. Thereafter, I will further clarify how Küng views the nature of ethics beyond the question of its principal foundation in religious faith: Küng searches for a middle way between consequentialist and non-consequentialist ethics, a way in which the latter dimension has the final stake. I will then set out to concretize further this more or less general notion of the theoretical potential of Projekt Weltethos in terms of certain precise philosophico-political models. I categorize these models according to their liberal or postliberal orientation. The liberal concretization leads me to consider a wide spectrum of post-Kantian and post-Hegelian models from Rawls to Derrida, while the alternative concretization opens up my ultimate argument in favor of a postliberal type of modus vivendi. I will suggest that the only theoretically and practically plausible way to promote global ethics, in itself a major imperative today, is the recognition of a fundamental and necessary contest between mutually exclusive ideologies in the public sphere. On this basis I will proceed to my postliberal proposal, namely, that a constructive and peaceful encountering of exclusive difference as an ethical vantage point for an intercultural and inter-religious peace dialogue is the most acute challenge for global ethics today. Miltä tuntuu rakastaa ideologista vihollista? Sitä joka tuomitsee minut tai jonka minä tuomitsen moraalittomana jossain asiassa. Helpompaa olisi vihata häntä tai vaihtoehtoisesti uskotella, että pohjimmiltaan olemme kummatkin yhtä oikeassa. Tutkimuksen väite on kuitenkin, että juuri tämän paheksutun moraalisen tuomitsemisen ja tuon vierastetun lähimmäisen rakastamisen yhdistämisen taito on se, mitä moniarvoistuvan globaalin yhteiskunnan kansalainen ja päättäjä palavasti tarvitsevat. Asiantuntijat ovat viime vuosikymmeninä pyörtäneet omat ennustuksensa uskonnon merkityksen vähenemisestä yhteiskunnassa ja politiikassa. Tästä luonnollisena johtopäätöksenä kai olisi, että erilaisten uskonnollisten ja maallisten ideologioiden kamppailu julkisessa politiikassa olisi hyväksyttävä tosiasiana ja alettava ottaa selvää kahdesta asiasta. Ensinnäkin siitä, mikä näistä kamppailevista maailmankatsomuksista voisi todella tarjota oikean päämäärän elämälle yksilönä ja yhteiskuntana ja toiseksi siitä, olisiko mahdollista kamppailla keskinäisen vuoropuhelun kautta rakentavasti ilman manipulointia ja väkivaltaa. Ongelma on kuitenkin se, että vallitsevassa länsimaisessa kulttuurissa näitä johtopäätöksiä ei tehdä. Miksi? Länsimaita ohjaa yksi ylpeä harhakuva ja kaksi tabua. Ylpeä harhakuva on ensinnäkin se, että luullaan olevan mahdollista ja jopa tavoiteltavaa pyrkiä asettumaan perimmäisten maailmankatsomusten ulko- ja yläpuolelle ainakin poliittisessa päätöksenteossa: politiikassa on epäreilua tehdä kaikkia kansalaisia koskevia päätöksiä oman uskonnollisen vakaumuksensa pohjalta. Tästä tullaan kahteen länsimaiseen tabuun: arvoneutraalius sekä miltei rajoittamattomat kansalaisvapaudet. Nämä kaikki kolme aksioomaa ovat yhdessä toiminnan luovuttamaton lähtökohta erityisesti yhteiskunnassa. Kasvatus ja politiikka ovat tästä tyyppiesimerkkejä. Länsimainen ajattelu pyrkii äärimmäisellä suvaitsevaisuudellaan mitätöimään viholliskuvat ja siten välttämään vaikean tien konfliktin ja rakkauden välimaastossa. Suvaitsevuuden kolme aksioomaa ovat kuitenkin länsimainen tabu: niille ei ole olemassa selkeitä perusteita, mutta niiden nimeen vannotaan sitä kiihkeämmin. Dogmatiikan alaan kuuluva väitöskirja on seikkaperäinen filosofinen ja teologinen selvitys vallitsevan länsimaisen yhteiskunnallisen ja eettisen ajattelun heikkoudesta ja tarvittavista vaihtoehtoisista ajattelumalleista. Tutkimuksessa arvioidaan Hans Küngin Maailmaneetos-projektin innoittamana keskeisiä länsimaissa vallitsevaa ajattelutapaa edustavia filosofeja ja heidän kriitikkojaan.
El artículo sitúa la filosofía de la historia de Hegel en relación a la problemática de la Modernidad desde el marco general de la cuestión de la libertad. Por una parte trata de ver en qué medida la concepción dialéctica de la historia propuesta por Hegel supone un auténtico giro respecto a la comprensión moderna de la historia, pero, por otro, se pregunta si la persistente adhesión de su filosofía a la Modernidad le permite o, por el contrario, la incapacita para dar cuenta verdaderamente del cambio o la transformación histórica cualitativa. This paper connects Hegels philosophy of history with the problems posed by the Modern Age within the framework of the question of freedom. On the one hand I try to clarify to which extent the dialectical conception of history that Hegel proposes involves a real turn with regard to the inherited understanding of history. but, on the other hand, I inquire whether the persistent adherence of Hegels philosophy to the Modern Age makes it possible or rather impossible for his historical dialectics to account for the real, i. e., qualitative historical change.
This paper starts with an introductory essay stating the issues and discussing the notion of metafiction. Then it continues in an online hypertext narrative demonstration of the interweaving of story and meta-story. The hypertext attempts to show in action how seemingly unified narratives and narrative voices are surrounded and influenced by other voices and meta-stories. No narrative is un-mediated and no narrative voice is alone. The hypertext concludes with some musings on the complexities of narrative reading and writing, also with counterpoint voices. Throughout, the text comments on issues about the reading and writing of hypertext narratives.
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