Eric S. Nelson

Revisiting the Dialectic of Environment: Nature as Ideology and Ethics in Adorno and the Frankfurt School

I. Introduction: Which Nature, Whose Frankfurt School? The more reified the world becomes, the thicker the veil cast upon nature, the more the thinking weaving that veil in its turn claims ideologically to be nature, primordial experience.1 Theodor Adorno In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that the domination of nature and interhuman domination are bound together in the same historical process, such that each form of domination needs to be addressed in the context of the other. In their account of western modernity, enlightenment and progressive rationalization become myth and…

LEVINAS AND KIERKEGAARD: THE AKEDAH, THE DAO, AND APORETIC ETHICS

In this article, Kierkegaard’s depiction of the teleological suspension of the ethical is contrasted with Levinas’s articulation of the emergence of the ethical in the Akedah narrative drawing on Jewish, Christian, and Chinese philosophical and religious perspectives. The narrative of Abraham’s binding of Isaac illustrates both the distance and nearness between Kierkegaard and Levinas. Both realize that the encounter with God is a traumatic one that cannot be defined, categorized, or sublimated through ordinary ethical reflection or the everyday social-moral life of a community. For Kierkegaard, the self is forced back upon itself, exposed to the otherness of its singular unfathomable source; in Levinas a traumatic exposure and delivery over to the Other occurs. It leads to an inescapable ethical responsibility more fundamental than either religious faith or theoretical cognitive knowledge. The rupture and aporia of Abraham’s sacrifice appears to destroy the categories of the ethical. Yet it might suggest something other than the nihilistic or voluntaristic destruction of ethics. It indicates instead a different modality of the ethical; an aporetic and paradoxical ethics that resonates in part with classical Chinese Daoist sources such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. I. The Akedah and the Dao In this article, by focusing on Emmanuel Levinas’s alternative to Soren Kierkegaard, I bring a crosscultural and comparative perspective—drawing on Jewish, Christian, and Chinese sources—to bear on Kierkegaard’s depiction of the suspension of the ethical through his reading of the narrative Abraham’s binding of Isaac in Fear and Trembling in relation to Levinas’s contrasting articulation of the provocation of the ethical. 1 Their respective analysis of the Akedah—which is the older transliteration of Aqedah used by the authors under discussion—narrative of Abraham’s binding and near

Recognition and Resentment in the Confucian Analects

Early Confucian “moral psychology” developed in the context of undoing reactive emotions in order to promote relationships of reciprocal recognition. Early Confucian texts diagnose the pervasiveness of reactive emotions under specific social conditions and respond with the ethical-psychological mandate to counter them in self-cultivation. Undoing negative affects is a basic element of becoming ethically noble, while the ignoble person is fixated on limited self-interested concerns and feelings of being unrecognized. Western ethical theory typically accepts equality and symmetry as conditions of disentangling resentment; yet this task requires the asymmetrical recognition of others. Confucian ethics integrates a nuanced and realistic moral psychology with the normatively oriented project of self-cultivation necessary for dismantling complex negative emotions in promoting a condition of humane benevolence that is oriented toward others and achieved through self-cultivation.

Heidegger, Misch, and the Origins of Philosophy

I explore how Heidegger and his successors interpret philosophy as an Occidental enterprise based on a particular understanding of history. In contrast to the dominant monistic paradigm, I return to the plural thinking of Dilthey and Misch, who interpret philosophy as a European and a global phenomenon. This reflects Diltheys pluralistic understanding of historical life. Misch developed Diltheys insight by demonstrating the multiple origins of philosophy as critical life-reflection in its Greek context and in the historical matrices of ancient India and China. Mischs approach to Confucius and Zhuangzi reveals a historically informed, interculturally sensitive, and critically oriented life-philosophy.

Demystifying Experience: nothingness and sacredness in heidegger and chan buddhism

Martin Heidegger’s thinking of being and Chan ( ; Zen in Japanese) Buddhism have been portrayed as revealing ‘‘pure experience’’ through a confrontation with the fixated sedimentations of conceptualization and communication. Such dismantling would disclose an originary experience of being (Sein) in Heidegger, and self-nature (zixing ) and original mind (benxin ) in Chan. The process of dereification is enacted through the encounter with nothingness or emptiness as a traceless yet unavoidable moment that allows one to be attentive and responsive toward, or mindful of, the phenomena themselves in their upsurge, sway, and self-disclosure or in the suchness (ru ; Sanskrit tathatā) of the myriad things (wanfa ). Chan Buddhism, like phenomenology, is confronted by issues of how the processes and means of communication become reified such that they block instead of motivate compassion toward the other and responsiveness toward the myriad things. As the history of Buddhism indicates, Buddhist discourses of anti-essentialism and destratification can be conventionalized and reified. Even in the instance of Linji Yixuan (d. 866/67), who was repeatedly stylized and restylized as the prototypical radical Zen master, Chan spontaneity and ‘‘antinomian radicalness’’ transpire in contexts of monastic discipline and ritual. Either spontaneity takes place through and in relation to them or not at all. The once prevalent assessment of Chan as destructuring reified constructs for the sake of a pure intuitive or mystical experience has been criticized as naı̈ve after the historiographical analysis of Chan Buddhism as ideology, propaganda, and rhetoric (Welter 4). Further, due to the lack of a justifiable appeal to an original experience or primordial entity external to language’s ongoing self-reproduction and self-transformation, language is inherently self-deconstructing in Chan such that there is nothing beyond its communicative event and enactment. Critics accordingly deny the claim that Chan Buddhism can offer the enchantment and mysticism of ‘‘pure experience’’ (Faure, Chan 3, 78–80). I acknowledge the validity of recent deconstructive and historiographical critiques of Chan’s self-presentation and its later Eastern and Western appropriations. Still, there is an eric s. nelson

Impure Phenomenology: Dilthey, Epistemology, and Interpretive Psychology

Responding to critiques of Diltheys interpretive psychology, I revisit its relation with epistemology and the human sciences. Rather tnan reducing knowledge to psychology and psychology to subjective understanding, Dilthey articulated the epistemic worth of a psychology involving (1) an impure phenomenology of embodied, historically-situated, and worldly consciousness as individually lived yet complicit with its naturally and socially constituted contexts, (2) experience- and communication-oriented processes of interpreting others, (3) the use of third-person structural-functional analysis and causal explanation, and (4) a recognition of the ungroundability, facticity, and conflict inherent in knowledge and life.

Dilthey and Carnap: The Feeling of Life, the Scientific Worldview, and the Elimination of Metaphysics

In this chapter the author examines how Dilthey’s philosophy formed part of the background of the Vienna Circle’s project of eliminating metaphysics and justifying a scientific life-stance (Lebenshaltung). Dilthey had promoted empirical scientific inquiry and critiqued metaphysics as an indemonstrable attitude rooted in a “feeling of life” (Lebensgefuhl) and articulated as a “worldview.” Concepts of the feeling of life, worldview, and life-stance were mobilized to confront traditional authority while emphasizing the priority of experience and a more critical and experimental scientific and artistic spirit. Carnap adopted elements from Dilthey’s critique and sensitivity to the possibility of a logic of the singular and the historical. Carnap’s early project can be interpreted as a logical empiricist hermeneutics promoting the task of pragmatic formation, cultivation, and education (Bildung) that furthers life by elucidating it.

Heidegger’s Failure to Overcome Transcendental Philosophy

Heidegger engaged in a number of attempts to reformulate transcendental philosophy, such as in terms of fundamental ontology and world-disclosure in the second half of the 1920s, so as to break with it. An early attempt to disentangle himself from the transcendental tradition can be seen in his early post-war turn toward existence- and life-philosophy and hermeneutics, and also in his so-called “turning” (Kehre) in the mid-1930s. In this chapter I argue that, despite his anti-transcendental gestures and rhetoric, and Husserl’s view that he had betrayed transcendental philosophy for the sake of philosophical anthropology, Heidegger could not consistently abandon or overcome the problematic of transcendental philosophy through his displacement of the constitution of sense and meaning from the subject (Dasein) and its horizon of meaning to the event and openness of being (Sein), as advocates of his later thinking have claimed.

Heidegger and Dilthey: Language, History, and Hermeneutics

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger.

The Human and the Inhuman: Ethics and Religion in the zhuangzi

One critique of the early Daoist texts associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi is that they neglect the human and lack a proper sense of ethical personhood in maintaining the primacy of an impersonal dehumanizing “way.” This article offers a reconsideration of the appropriateness of such negative evaluations by exploring whether and to what extent the ethical sensibility unfolded in the Zhuangzi is aporetic, naturalistic, and/or religious. As an ethos of cultivating life and free and easy wandering by performatively enacting openness and responsiveness to things in an immanent this-worldly context, the Zhuangzi is oriented toward the relational attunement of disposition and practice rather than toward metaphysics or religion in a transcendent sense. It consequently suggests an immanent anarchic ethics without principles while neither forgetting nor reifying the sacred and the mundane in its playful illumination of the biospiritual dynamics of cultivating life.