Graham Parkes

Lao‐Zhuang and Heidegger on Nature and Technology

Many of our current environmental problems stem from damage to the natural world through excessive use of modern technologies. Since these problems are now global in scope, it is helpful to take a comparative philosophical approach—in this case by way of Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Martin Heidegger. Heideggers thoughts on these topics are quite consonant with classical Daoist thinking, in part because he was influenced by it. Although Zhuangzi and Heidegger warn against the ways technology can impair rather than promote human flourishing, they are not simply anti-technological in their thinking. Both rather recommend a critical stance that would allow us to shift to a more reflective employment of less disruptive technologies.

Staying Loyal to the Earth: Nietzsche as an Ecological Thinker

It is customary in current discussions of the environmental crisis to ascribe responsibility for the pernicious effects of our technological domination of the earth to a tradition of thinking about the human relation to nature that is characterised as Platonic and/or Judaeo- Christian. Nor is it unreasonable to suppose that a world-view in which the physical universe is denigrated as unreal by comparison with an intelligible realm of unchanging ideas, or in which the natural world has been created for the benefit of humans as the only beings made in the image of God, is unlikely to be conducive to a reverential attitude towards natural phenomena. There is, however, a current of thinking that has been opposed to this mainstream all along. Beginning with the pre-Socratic thinkers, it resurfaces in the Stoics and Epicureans and with certain figures in the Christian mystical tradition and the Italian Renaissance, attains full flow with Goethe and the Naturphilosophen in Germany, and eventually issues in philosophers like Emerson and Thoreau in North America. What is not generally appreciated is that Nietzsche is a major figure in this minor current of thinking, and that his philosophy of nature qualifies him as one of the most powerful ecological thinkers of the modern period. This prominent position derives from his intimate personal relationship to the natural world, in accordance with his principle that philosophical thoughts grow directly out of the life experience.

Wanderers in the shadow of nihilism: Nietzsche's ‘good Europeans’

Thus Nietzsche on the Ouverture to Wagners « Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg », in judgments separated by a period of eighteen years. The major factor behind his eventual ambivalence concerns nationalism in general and Germany in particular

Thinking Rocks, Living Stones: Reflections on Chinese Lithophilia

Chinese culture is distinguished among the world’s other great traditions by the depth and intensity of its love for rock and stone. This enduring passion manifests itself both in the art of garden making, where rocks form the frame and the central focus of the classical Chinese garden, and also on a smaller scale, in the practice of collecting stones to be displayed on trays or on scholars’ desks indoors. This essay sketches a brief history of lithophilia in China, then adduces the most important philosophical presuppositions for it, and concludes by suggesting some implications for our experience of, and interactions with, the realm of stone and rock.

Winds, Waters, and Earth Energies: Fengshui and Sense of Place

When one reflects on the problems that beset nature and the environment at the beginning of the 21 st century, it is clear that China, with its huge population and ongoing modernization and industrialization, is going to be one of the major contributors to those problems as well as an important factor in the search for solutions. What is striking about most of the current discussions of environmental questions is just how parochial are the terms in which they are conducted — presupposing a Cartesian-Newtonian view of the natural world as a mass of “dead matter in motion”, deriving from natural-scientific discourse that arose in western Europe during the seventeenth century. It is worth recalling that most human beings throughout most of human history have understood the natural world in a variety of quite different ways from this.

Nietzsche and East Asian thought

I imagine future thinkers in whom European-American indefatigability is combined with the hundredfold-inherited contemplativeness of the Asians: such a combination will bring the riddle of the world to a solution. (1876) The conjunction signified by the “and ” of the main title is to be taken in three ways. First of all the question of what influence, if any, ideas from Asian philosophies may have exerted on the development of Nietzsches thinking. Conversely, there is the issue of the enormous impact Nietzsches ideas have had in Asia and the enthusiasm with which he continues to be studied there today - especially in China and Japan. A subsidiary theme here concerns the ways his thought has been appropriated by those quite alien cultures and thereby transformed, as well as the relevance of such appropriations to Nietzsche scholarship in the West. And finally the field of comparative research, which embraces a variety of styles of discourse. A comparison of Nietzsches ideas on a certain topic with those of an appropriate Asian philosophy can enhance our appreciation of both sides. For people familiar with Nietzsche, a comparison with an East-Asian thinker might serve as a way into hitherto unfamiliar modes of thought. And since Chinese and Japanese philosophies are for the most part immetaphysical in outlook, insofar as Nietzsches ideas can be shown to resonate sympathetically with features of those quite alien traditions of thinking, such resonances may boost his standing in the competition, among such figures as Hegel and Heidegger, for the distinction of being the first Western thinker to “overcome” the metaphysical tradition.

Imagining Reality in To the Lighthouse

These opening lines from Nietzsches Beyond Good and Evil bear upon the question of why philosophers have been so afraid of Virginia Woolf, and why their approaches to her work have failed to touch the heart of its poetic truth. Perhaps their advances have been so inept because these philosophers (almost all male) think themselves alone suited to woo the goddess of revelation. Uncomfortable with a woman novelists having disclosed some profound truths about human existence, they have supposed that if these truths are in any way philosophical, they must be due to the influence of professional philosophers within her range of acquaintance. In the discussion that follows, I shall demonstrate that the way scholars have so far approached Virginia Woolfs work misses its philosophical import, and I shall present alternative perspectives from which the philosophical achievement of the novels can be more fully appreciated.

Nietzsche on Rock and Stone: The Dead World, Dance and Flight

Abstract Although images of rock and stone play a significant role in Nietzsche’s thinking, from his earliest writings to his ideas in Thus Spoke Zarathustra about will to power and eternal return, this stratum of his imagery has not been much discussed. Initially rocks come across as ‘witnesses of prehistory that are eager to acquire language’, as well as border markers of, and means of entry to, the ‘dead world’, or inanimate realm. Later, stone becomes an image of the raw material that we have to work if we want to make something of our lives by fashioning them, which we can do with all strata of the soul except the deepest. At that level granite signifies what is unalterable, being the sedimentation of a very long past, and so rock comes to be associated with the past that is recalcitrant in the face of will. But when will can will as will to power, stone takes part in the play that is the consummate affirmation of life. It also has to be a dance, a dance on the force-field of will to power, overcoming for the moment the Spirit of Heaviness by lifting lightly from the earth. And finally flight: when ‘the boundary stones themselves fly into the air’, with a few of us shifting along with them.

Reflections on Projections: Changing Conditions in Watching Film

A number of changes have taken place in our perspectives on the medium of film over the past few decades. When films began to be shown on television, our attitude was modified through seeing them on a small cathoderay tube in the privacy of the home. With the advent of the videotape recorder home viewing increased spectacularly. And yet video is a medium more different from film than it first seems, and its popularity is in turn affecting film in ways not yet fully apparent. The differences in viewing conditions occasioned by the shift from a context of public ritual to a domestic situation of privacy and relative intimacy, and from watching a film projected on a reflective screen and seeing it inscribed on a cathoderay tube, have implications which are well worth exploring.