A Confucian in Buddhist clothing? – Interpreting Nishida’s conception of the good as a realisation of the Mandate of Heaven

ABSTRACT

In this study, I examine the Confucian influence upon An Inquiry into the Good, the first publication of Nishida Kitarō. Nishida’s student Kōsaka Masaaki depicts his mentor’s conception of the good in terms of realising the 'Mandate of Heaven'. Taking this to be indicative of the importance of Confucianism for Nishida’s early thought, I compare his philosophy of pure experience and ethical project of ‘self-realisation’ with corresponding ideas found in the Confucian corpus. I especially focus on the Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean as interpreted by the Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-Ming. This study builds upon the pioneering work of Michel Dalissier, Dermott Walsh and David Williams on the Kyoto School and Confucianism. My portrayal of Confucianism is indebted to the ‘philosophical’ translations of Roger Ames, David Hall and Henry Rosemont, Jr., which bring into relief the tradition’s ‘relational ontology’ that Graham Parkes teaches is shared by the Kyoto School.     

A Religiological Analysis of Nursi's View of Sufism Expressed in the ‘Nine Allusions’ (Telvihât-ı Tis'a) of the Risale-i Nur

While Nursi stated explicitly that he was not a Sufi, he nevertheless expressed many Sufi perspectives in his work. In particular, his focus in the section of the Risale-i Nur called ‘Nine Allusions’ (Telvihât-? Tis'a) was Sufism. This article uses a method of analysing religious perspectives called ‘religiology’, in order to coherently and systematically unpack Nursi's attitudes to Sufism. Organizing his Sufi perspectives in the categories of epistemology, ontology (including theology, cosmology, and eschatology), anthropology, psychology, teleology, and methodology, the article demonstrates that he agrees with certain aspects of Sufism and disagrees with others.     

On the motivations for Merleau-Ponty’s ontological research

This paper attempts to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s later work by tracing a hitherto overlooked set of concerns that were of key consequence for the formulation of his ontological research. I argue that his ontology can be understood as a response to a set of problems originating in reflections on the intersubjective use of language in dialogue, undertaken in the early 1950s. His study of dialogue disclosed a structure of meaning-formation and pointed towards a theory of truth (both recurring ontological topics) that post-Phenomenology premises could not account for. A study of dialogue shows that speakers’ positions are interchangeable, that speaking subjects are active and passive in varying degrees, and that the intentional roles of subjects and objects are liable to shift or ‘transgress’ themselves. These observations anticipate the concepts of ‘reversibility’ and ‘narcissism’, his later view of activity and passivity, and his later view of intentionality, and sharpened the need to adopt an intersubjective focus in ontological research.     

Two cheers for Tanhā

The central character in Sartre's 1938 novel La Nausée, Antoine Roquentin, has lost his sense of things, and now the world appears to him as utterly unstable. Roquentin suffers from what he calls ‘nausea,’ a condition caused by an ontological intuition that the self, as well as the world through which that ‘self’ moves, lacks a substantial nature. The novel portrays Sartre's own philosophical account of the self in La transcendence de l'égo. Here Sartre argues that Husserl's account of consciousness is not radical enough; the ‘I’ or ego is a pseudo-source of activity (and Sartre thus draws very close to a particularly Buddhist account of personal identity). My essay questions Roquentin's response to his ontological insight: why is this the occasion for ‘nausea’? Why doesn't Roquentin (as King Milinda famously does) celebrate and embrace his ‘non-self’? I argue that Sartre's depiction of Roquentin's ailment, and the unsatisfactory solution he provides, misunderstands both the aggregate nature of things as well as authentically rendered consciousness-only (vijñaptimātra).     

The Privilege of the Present: Time and the Trace from Heidegger to Derrida

ABSTRACT

One of the starting points of Derrida’s deconstruction is the idea that metaphysics is dominated by an ontological primacy of the present. It is well known that Derrida took up this thesis of the ‘privilege of the present’ in metaphysics from Heidegger. However, this thesis is mentioned without being developed by Heidegger. What is the meaning of this ontological position? How did it originate? Should we try to go beyond it? And if so, how? In this paper, I would like to start out from Heidegger’s view that the understanding of Being, in the metaphysical tradition, is dominated by the ontological primacy of the present: according to this approach, which goes back to Aristotle’s theory of substance (ousia), Being means constant presence; only that which is constantly present really exists. I will then show that Heidegger himself, in his conception of the past, has renewed the privilege of the present, favoring the ‘having been’ (Gewesenheit) over the past as ‘by-gone-ness’ (Vergangenheit). Finally, I will show how Derrida’s concept of trace may help us to go beyond the privilege of the present.     

The moral development in Stoic oikeiôsis and Wang Yang-ming’s ‘wan wu yi ti’

The Neo-Confucian notion of wan wu yi ti 万物一体 (‘form one body’) and Stoic oikeiôsis (‘appropriation’) both come up with a motivational basis for the expansion of concern, but one of the toughest problems in them is how to elaborate on selfhood and self–other relation in moral development. This paper takes a comparative view of Hierocles’ fragments and a few other relevant Stoic texts and Wang Yang-ming’s Inquiry on the Great Learning, and argues that doing so helps eliminate some confusions concerning selfhood and self–other relation. My claim is that the concept of the Stoic oikeiôsis and the concept of Wang’s ‘wan wu yi ti’ have different ideas on selfhood and the self–other relation while showing similarities in basing the ideal of self-development on the original unity between self and world.     

An Introduction to Nicolai Hartmann’s Critical Ontology

Nicolai Hartmann contributed significantly to the revitalization of the discipline of ontology in the early twentieth century. Developing a systematic, post-Kantian critical ontology ‘this side’ of idealism and realism, he subverted the widespread impression that philosophy must either exhaust itself in foundationalist epistemology or engage in system-building metaphysical excess. This essay provides an introduction to Hartmann’s approach in light of the recent translation of his early essay ‘How is Critical Ontology Possible?’ (1923) In it Hartmann criticizes both the pretensions of epistemology as well as the principal errors of classical ontology, and he proposes a series of correctives that lead to his development of a highly original and elaborate stratified categorial ontology. This introduction explains the most important errors of the ‘old’ ontology, his correctives to them, and further fleshes out these correctives with reference to his mature ontological work.     

Moral Emotions,Awareness, and Spiritual Freedom in the Thought of Zhu Xi (1130–1200)

It is well known that the Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi (1130–1200) particularly emphasizes the role of emotions in human life. This paper shows that the four ‘moral emotions’ (e.g. feelings like ‘compassion’ and ‘disdain’ as described in the Mencius) are central to Zhu's thinking, insofar as only their genuine actualization enables the individual to achieve spiritual freedom. Moreover, I discuss the crucial notions of ‘awareness’/‘perception’ (zhījué) and ‘knowledge’/‘wisdom’ (zhī), in order to reveal the complex dynamic that moral emotions are said to create in the moral agent. I also analyse two important passages from the Mencius (1A/7 and 2A/6) and examine how Zhu Xi, in his exegetical glosses, defines the conditions of virtuous agency as based on the moral emotions. Finally, I explain the reasons why Neo-Confucians like Zhu Xi have sometimes been described as Kantian thinkers avant la lettre.     

Personale Seinsweisen bei S.L. Frank: Schnittstellen zwischen Anthropologie und Ontologie

This article strives to combine conceptions of the person by Semën Frank. From his early critical Marxist works to his metaphysical personalism and late Christian anthropology, he covered normative-ethical, transcendent-epistemological, and ‘total unity’—ontological questions in equal measure. This diversity will be synthesized in comparisons of his personalist and ontological thought. The text will highlight Frank’s different schemes of personal modes of being, i.e. correlations between the ‘I–thou’ relationship and the absolute being, and move on to contrast his concepts of ontological personality.     

The disclosure of a metaphysical horizon,or how to escape dialectics

Abstract

In a footnote to The Inoperative Community French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy wonders how to escape Hegelian dialectics. Because Nancy in his later work often returns to this attempt of a ‘disclosure of our metaphysical horizon’, we not only consider this note as a crucial one in his attempt to ‘disclose’ our metaphysical horizon; on top of that, we think this note is really worthwhile considering for our philosophical era in general: how to think after the so called ‘end of metaphysics’? Nancy’s work is an explicit confrontation with this horizon. Therefore, in this paper we prefer to reconstruct his line of thought in this, from the influence of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, over Friedrich Hegel up to Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. We focus on the way attempts for the disclosure of our metaphysical horizon out from the problem of community, one of the central topics in his work. We conclude with a discussion why Nancy’s ontological framework has the potential to break up the metaphysical horizon of our philosophical era.     

What Does Heidegger Mean by the Transcendence of Dasein?

Abstract

In this paper, I shall examine the evolution of Heidegger’s concept of ‘transcendence’ as it appears in Being and Time (1927), ‘On the Essence of Ground’ (1928) and related texts from the late 1920s in relation to his rethinking of subjectivity and intentionality. Heidegger defines Being as ‘transcendence’ in Being and Time and reinterprets intentionality in terms of the transcendence of Dasein. In the critical epistemological tradition of philosophy stemming from Kant, as in Husserl, transcendence and immanence are key notions (see Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 1907, and Ideas I, 1913). Indeed, ‘transcendence in immanence’ is a leitmotif of Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl discusses transcendence in some detail in Cartesian Meditations §11 in a manner that is not dissimilar to Heidegger. Heidegger is critical of Husserl’s understanding of consciousness and intentionality and Heidegger deliberately chooses to discuss transcendence as an exceptional domain for the discussion of beings in his ‘On the Essence of Ground’, his submission to Husserl’s seventieth-birthday Festschrift. Despite his championing of a new concept of transcendence in the late 1920s, Heidegger effectively abandons the term during the early 1930s. In this paper, I shall explore Heidegger’s articulation of his new ontological conception of finite transcendence and compare it with Husserl’s conception of the transcendence of the ego in order to get clearer what is at stake in Heidegger’s conceptions of subjectivity, Dasein and transcendence.     

Nature and Grace: Two Participations in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards

Christian theologians are increasingly interested in both ontological and soteriological forms of participation theology. Paul Gavrilyuk challenges scholars to be more precise in how these relate to each other. This article contributes to the need for further precision by engaging with the thought of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards employed both types of participation, but did not embed one within the other. Ontological participation, dubbed ‘common participation’, undergirds created nature and is a methexis in God for being. Soteriological participation, dubbed ‘special participation’, explains special grace and is a relational koinonia in the love between the Father and the Son. These two participations are complementary and facilitate a clear distinction between nature and grace.     

Ibn al-cArab on the Three Conditions of Tawba

Although generally translated as ‘repentance’, tawba, like its Hebrew equivalent, teshuvah, simply means ‘turn’ or ‘return’. It is used in the Qur'an to describe actions of both human beings and God. Even though the idea of tawba subsumes the notion of ‘repentance’ (from the Latin paenitere, ‘to be sorry’, ‘to grieve’, or ‘to regret’), its meaning is not limited to that. The tendency within much of Western scholarship on Islam to understand tawba simply as repentance, and mostly human repentance, may well reflect certain presumptions about repentance and its place in religious life, which, one might argue, are absent in Islam. This article explores the understanding of tawba in the thought of Ibn al-^cArab (1165–1240 CE), whose most extensive reflections on it appear in chapters 74 and 75 of his Meccan Revelations. It focuses on the first of these chapters which concentrates primarily on the conditions set by many of the religious authorities as the fundamental components of human tawba. Ibn al-^cArab's response reflects certain central motifs that permeate his literary oeuvre. These motifs and their wider relation to his views on tawba will be highlighted as our discussion of this important Sufi maqām (station) unfolds.     

‘There is no brute world,only an elaborated world’: Merleau-Ponty on the intersubjective constitution of the world

In his later works, Merleau-Ponty proposes the notion of ‘the flesh’ (la chair) as a new ‘element’, as he put it, in his ontological monism designed to overcome the legacy of Cartesian dualism with its bifurcation of all things into matter or spirit. Most Merleau-Ponty commentators recognise that Merleau-Ponty's notion of ‘flesh’ is inspired by Edmund Husserl's conceptions of ‘lived body’ (Leib) and ‘vivacity’ or ‘liveliness’ (Leiblichkeit). But it is not always recognised that, for Merleau-Ponty, the constitution of the world of perception, the problem of embodiment or incarnation, is at the very same time one with the problem of the experience of others in what Husserl called Einfühlung or Fremderfahung and indeed one with the problem of the constitution of the commonly shared world ‘for all’. As Merleau-Ponty put it in his late essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ in Signs, ‘the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being, or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there’. In other words, the problem of the apprehension of the other is part of the overall apprehension of the transcendent world. In this paper I want to meditate on the relations between embodiment, experience of others, and experience of the world in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I will take particular note, as in the title of this presentation, of the claim made by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible that ‘there is no brute world, only an elaborated world’ (il n'y a pas de monde brut, il n'y a qu'un monde élaboré).     

The Non-Conceptual Dimension of Social Mediation: Toward a Materialist Aufhebung of Hegel

ABSTRACT

Sellars’s relationship with Hegel is complex and itself ‘dialectical‘ in interesting ways. Sellars follows Hegel in recognizing that the normativity essential to intentionality and conceptuality is a social phenomenon. But Sellars criticizes Hegel for his inability to independently explain the emergence and function of this essential group phenomenon. I shall argue that Sellars’s critique of Hegel on this count is part of a larger, metaphysically ambitious and rigorously realistic position, which, though turning Hegel’s ontology on its head, shares with Hegel the methodological ambition of arriving at a position which is globally explanatorily closed. Further, it will be suggested that although Sellars would surely have been critical of the ontological reification of Hegel’s dialectical method, he nonetheless reserves an important role for conceptual dialectical development right at the heart of his system, namely in his understanding of the conceptual evolution that leads from the manifest to the scientific image. Finally, I shall argue that Sellars thereby aspires to provide nothing less than a materialist aufhebung of idealist Hegelian dialectics.     

The Wonder and Spirit of Phenomenology and Theology: Rubenstein and Derrida on Heidegger's Formal Distinction of Philosophy from Theology

While Heidegger's earlier phenomenological writings inform much contemporary discourse in the continental philosophy of religion, his 1927 essay on ‘Phenomenology and Theology’ offers a largely uncontested distinction between philosophy and theology on the basis of their possibilities as sciences following ontological difference. This paper reconsiders Heidegger's distinction by invoking spirit and wonder, concepts Jacques Derrida and Mary‐Jane Rubenstein have more recently emphasized as central to thought that is open to that which ruptures metaphysical schemas. I contend Heidegger's use of ontological difference as a formal distinction between philosophy and theology distances us from the wonder, spirit, and truth (alētheia) that undoes the binaries behind which we take shelter. However, I temper this critique with the recognition that Heidegger, Derrida, and Rubenstein equally recognize an inescapable repetition of metaphysical thinking in the philosophy of religion.