The metaphysics of disinterestedness: the Chinese gardening style and Shaftesbury's new aesthetics1

Scholars of Shaftesbury generally consider his notion of disinterestedness as the beginning of modern aesthetics while connecting it questionably with a view of modernity as defined in terms of the segregation of truth, beauty, and goodness. To read Shaftesbury differently, it is necessary to look into the textual circumstances of his key aesthetic ideas. In particular, it is important to recognize his implicit use of Sir William Temple's discussion of the Chinese garden immediately before the few justly famous passages about the beauty of the ocean, the vale, and the fruit trees and about the free and spontaneous response of the human character which constitutes the aesthetic experience. As well as a useful illumination for his new understanding of disinterestedness, this unusual involvement of a radically different artistic and philosophical tradition may also be his momentary revelation and acknowledgement of an otherwise hidden metaphysical inspiration for his revolutionary aesthetics.     

Danto on Representation, Identity, and Indiscernibles

Arthur Danto has made important contributions to both aesthetics and philosophy of history. Furthermore, as I shall try to show in this essay, his aesthetics is of great relevance to his philosophy of history, while his philosophy of history is of no less interest for his aesthetics. By focusing on the notions of representation, identity, and the identity of indiscernibles we shall discover how fruitful this cooperation of aesthetics and philosophy of history may be. Crucial to all historical writing and, hence, to all philosophy of history, is the notion of identity through time and change. How could the historian write the history of x if x cannot be said to remain the same in the course of its history? It will become clear that aesthetics will provide us with a satisfactory solution for the problem, for the aestheticist notion of representation will enable us to define the notion of identity that the historian needs. Nevertheless, a certain friction can be observed between Danto's aesthetics and his philosophy of history. At the end of this essay I hope to show that Danto's philosophy of history will be our best guide to dealing adequately with this friction.     

Tapping into a Different Cultural Tradition: Sir William Temple's Aesthetic Innovations

Studies of Sir William Temple usually associate him with the English Battle of the Books. Since his defense of the old against the new in European arts and sciences was known even in his day to be inadequate, his role in the literary history of England has so far been largely trivialized. Challenging this conventional reading, this essay strives to show that the innovation and significance of Temple's aesthetics was closely connected with his somewhat known—but hitherto insufficiently scrutinized—longstanding interest in the cultural tradition of the Far East.     

Hobbes and Schmitt

Many commentators are unconvinced by Carl Schmitt's interpretation of Hobbes's political theory which, to their minds, remakes Hobbes in Schmitt's own authoritarian image. The argument advanced in this essay comprises three claims about Hobbes and Schmitt and the ways in which they are construed. The first claim is that certain commentators are bewitched by a picture of authority which biases their own claims about Hobbes, perhaps in ways that they may not fully appreciate. The second claim relates to Hobbes's individualism. On Schmitt's account, it was this individualism that opened the barely visible crack in the theoretical justification of the state through which it was worm-eaten by liberalism. This essay argues that Hobbes's individualism is not what Schmitt or his critics take it to be. The individualism that figures in Hobbes's discussions of covenant and conscience, pace Schmitt, is an illusion, albeit one that lies at the very heart of his conception of the state and animates his understanding of the relationship between protection and obedience that sustains it. The essay concludes with some remarks about the wider implications of the argument it advances.     

Paul Valéry on Photography: A Poetic Writing of Light and Time

This article studies Paul Valéry's personal reflection on photography, as it appears in his essay “Le Discours du Centenaire de la Photographie,” based on a speech given at the Sorbonne in 1939 to members of the French Academy. It stresses the relationship between this essay and the French poet's writings on painting and aesthetics, in particular his work on Corot. Moreover, it analyzes the synthetic character of Valéry's critical approach, which attempts to bring together the language of poetry, philosophy and science when dealing with this utterly modern visual language. Photography is celebrated here as a unique art form that can at the same time imitate and reproduce nature perfectly, while allowing mankind to create a cosmological vision of life and the universe. In other words, the poet underlines in this text the utmost modernity of photography, at a time when many in France were still reluctant to acknowledge its artistic identity.     

Against epistemology

Rick Tilman's new study, Veblen and his European Contemporaries, explores Veblen's conceptual relationship with a host of seminal European thinkers. Among the continuities and differences that Tilman develops, none stands out more than his strikingly original claim that in important ways Veblen's work parallels that of Ferdinand Tonnies. This essay reviews Tilman's study, with a particular emphasis on Veblen's idea of community, particularly its political and utopian aspects. Most notable in these regards is Veblen's idea that a free and insurgent “spirit of insubordination” is the chief animating principle of self-regulating anarchistic communities. The essay examines tensions between Veblen's embrace of the free spirit of anarchism and his belief in the centralizing thrust of modern technology. It suggests, however, that by dramatically curtailing needs for human labor, Veblen's industrial republic might, as most systems do, fumble its way toward a rough working balance between predominant values in conflict, in this case, industry and insubordination.     

ERNST CASSIRER,MARTIN HEIDEGGER,AND THE LEGACY OF DAVOS

In 1929 Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger participated in a momentous debate in Davos, Switzerland, which is widely held to have marked an important division in twentieth‐century European thought. Peter E. Gordon's recent book, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, centers on this debate between these two philosophical adversaries. In his book Gordon examines the background of the debate, the issues that distinguished the respective positions of Cassirer and Heidegger, and the legacy of the debate for later decades. Throughout the work, Gordon concisely portrays the source of disagreement between the two adversaries in terms of a difference between Cassirer's philosophy of spontaneity and Heidegger's philosophy of receptivity, or of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), into a situation that finite human beings can never hope to master. Although it recognizes that this work provides an important contribution to our understanding of the Davos debate and to twentieth‐century European thought, this review essay subjects Gordon's manner of interpreting the distinction between Cassirer and Heidegger to critical scrutiny. Its purpose is to examine the possibility that important aspects of the debate, which do not conform to the grid imposed by Gordon's interpretation, might have been set aside in the context of his analysis.     

« Techno-Esthétique » de L’Économie Smithienne Valeur et Fonctionnalité des Objets dans L’Angleterre des Lumières

From The Theory of Moral Sentiments to his essay on The Nature of that Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts, Adam Smith offered a vision of aesthetics combining beauty and utility. An echo of exchange value as the “ability to buy other goods” — the “power” to organize and achieve one’s goals — his definition of beauty was premised on the “aptness” of things, that is, the fact that they were also useful. Sustained by the commodification of products, a kind of “techno-aesthetics” thus emerged in England in the 18^th century, one that implied designing, adapting, reducing and showcasing the means of production.     

NOTES ON CAMPS,OR, COUNTERFACTUAL FÜHRERS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE JOKE

In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld's Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld's account of normalization, particularly his claim that aesthetic normalization can undermine our moral judgments regarding the Holocaust. Drawing on Sigmund Freud on jokes, and Susan Sontag on Camp aesthetics, I argue that every effort to normalize the Holocaust, especially ones that work through humor and jokes (a major topic of Rosenfeld's book), actually maintain the Holocaust's status as a series of historical events resistant to “normalization.” If “normalization” is a process through which extraordinary, or morally charged, historical events lose their moral charge, then aesthetic efforts to normalize the Holocaust actually reinscribe the special moral status that Rosenfeld believes they erase.     

‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain

This paper considers Oscar Wilde's ongoing interest in the image of a single brain cell as a souvenir of human autonomy in a world of matter. Taking a long view of Wilde's career that demonstrates the relevance to his literary work of his college interests in physiology and philosophy, this paper shows how Wilde's socialism can be explained by his uniquely aesthetic take on the brain. For many late Victorians brain science threatened both the autonomy of human action and the legitimacy of beauty because it had the potential to invalidate conscious experience, but writers whose work Wilde knew, like Ernst Haeckel, W.K. Clifford and John Tyndall, apply aesthetic vocabularies to their own discussions of cells. Their theories illuminate Wilde's representation of the cell as an aesthetic object. Wilde's art collaborates with science to reject action, as action is conventionally understood, without relinquishing beauty as his ultimate value. His discovery of beauty in matter that is beyond the pale of human experience, yet intimately and strangely constitutive of our experience, directs the senses to a new field of experience that values the molecular life the species holds in common, in which individuals and their actions matter less to the possibility of social change than does the necessity of pleasure.     

Josephus' description of the Essenes illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls

The essay analyses the notion of ‘purity’ in the early writings of Walter Benjamin, focusing more specifically on three essays written around the crucial year 1921: ‘Critique of Violence’, ‘The Task of the Translator’, and ‘Goethe's Elective Affinities’. In these essays, ‘purity’ appears in the notions of ‘pure means’, ‘pure violence’, ‘pure language’, and, indirectly, the ‘expressionless’. The essay argues, on the one hand, that the ‘purity’ of these concepts is one and the same notion, and, on the other, that it is strongly indebted to, if not a by-product of, Kant's theorisation of the moral act. In order to make this claim, the essay analyses Benjamin's intense engagement with Kant's writings in the 1910s and early 1920s: ‘purity’ is a category strongly connoted within the philosophical tradition in which the young Benjamin moved his first steps, namely Kantian transcendental criticism. The essay argues that the notion of ‘purity’ in Benjamin, though deployed outside and often against Kant's theorisation and that of his followers, and moreover influenced by different and diverse philosophical suggestions, retains a strong Kantian tone, especially in reference to its moral and ethical aspects. Whereas Benjamin rejects Kant's model of cognition based on the ‘purity’ of the universal laws of reason, and thus also Kant's theorisation of purity as simply non empirical and a priori, he models nonetheless his politics and aesthetics around suggestions that arise directly from Kant's theorisation of the moral act and of the sublime, and uses a very Kantian vocabulary of negative determinations construed with the privatives-los and -frei (motiv-frei, zweck-los, gewalt-los, ausdrucks-los, intention-frei, etc). The essay explores thus the connections that link ‘pure means’, ‘pure language’ and ‘pure violence’ to one another and to the Kantian tradition.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.     

James A. Smith's The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite

Abstract

This brief essay provides a few particulars about Michael Polanyi's life, showing how his philosophical interests and ideas are deeply grounded in his own experience as a European who lived through much of the twentieth century. It introduces the four essays on Polanyi's political thought that follow.     

“Let no man write my epitaph”: the contributions of Percy Shelley,Thomas Moore and Robert Southey to the memorialisation of Robert Emmet

For centuries elegy has been instrumental to Irish culture and its self-expression. This essay considers the elegies both by and about Robert Emmet written by Thomas Moore, Robert Southey and Percy Bysshe Shelley as well those written by anonymous balladeers. Central to this essay is the examination of the topoi of Irish elegiac verse and song shared by these poems and the way in which they contribute to the evolution of this genre and the radical nationalism associated with it. Their shared discourse is born out of Ireland's colonial experience and contributes to the establishment of Irish national identity, whilst their differing authors and audiences signal the complexities inherent within a colonial textual framework. In particular this essay draws attention to Shelley's neglected Irish poems which reflect the discomfort of a poet and idealist attempting to find his own voice whilst striving to escape the dominant ideology of his own culture.     

Contesting the capital of culture in Antonio Muñoz Molina's Los misterios de Madrid

This essay examines Antonio Muñoz Molina´s use of the Gothic mode and the misterio genre to destabilize Madrid's image as a politicized symbol of cultural modernity in his 1992 novel Los misterios de Madrid. The novel was a return to the form and function of the nineteenth-century urban mystery novel. The year 1992 was one of celebrations throughout Spain, and Madrid was designated the 1992 European Capital of Culture (ECOC). The ECOC title was meant to signal Spain's graduation to democratic modernity and its new identity as a European capital. Madrid of Muñoz Molina contests this politicization of Madrid´s identity by gothicizing the capital. This Madrid is enigmatic and threatening, and it is the home of the conspiracies that undermine the capital's new image. In a year that celebrated Madrid's entree into European modernity, Muñoz Molina uses nineteenth-century literary modes to question Madrid's success story.     

The Later Jefferson and the Problem of Natural Rights

Abstract

The late Jefferson presents a puzzle to scholars. In his last years the author of the Declaration of Independence strongly opposed the Missouri Compromise and set important precedents for the political strategy of the antebellum South. This essay argues that these problematic aspects of Jefferson's career are more closely linked to his natural rights doctrine than is generally recognized and extend tendencies already present in Jefferson's draft of the Declaration. Unlike previous scholars who explain Jefferson's problematic politics by his racism or the inherent selfishness of Lockean natural right, I argue that the core flaw in Jefferson's natural rights doctrine is the encouragement it gives to self-righteousness. Because he responded to the problem of slavery in a spirit of angry self-defense, Jefferson's understanding of natural rights blinded him to the ways in which his actions strengthened slavery and undermined his own most cherished political achievements.     

Die stadt und das reich in der verfassungslehre des marsilius von padua

This essay examines Tocqueville's interest in statistics, and how it informed his analysis of democracy. It explores his early engagement with the discipline and shows how this proved critical to his and Beaumont's 1833 study of the American penitentiary system. It shows that Tocqueville's interest in statistics was long lasting. And it pays particular attention to his links with the British Association for the Advancement of Science, examining his attendance at the statistical section meetings of the BAAS conference in Dublin in 1835. It shows how material presented at this conference appeared in a number of Tocqueville's works. The essay argues against the thesis that Tocqueville resisted the primacy of the social. Rather, it shows that his interest in statistics underscored the importance he attached to the social in his analysis of modern democracy.     

三岛由纪夫美学观的形成和变异

三岛由纪夫是一位非常复杂的作家,其作品中表现出的男性之美以及健壮的肌肉,大海的波涛和南国的太阳等象征性描述,往往使读者感到迷惑,尤其是晚年的政治表现和切腹自杀的那幕闹剧,要使得学界围绕其人和其美学观长期争论不休,本文试图从病迹学的角度解释这位作家美学观的形成和变异。     

Enemy of the people: Simmel,Ibsen, and the Civic legacy of Nietzschean sociology

The fall of Communism continued an ongoing weakening of Marxist ideology, which had been hegemonic among the European Left since the Great War. While the decline of Marxist thought can be justly seen negatively as the historical correlative of globalization, this decline has also produced cultural space for a re-evaluation of non-Marxist critiques of capitalist civilization. One example of a powerful non-Marxist critique of capitalist civilization is Georg Simmel's sociology of money culture. Before turning to Simmel's radical critique, this essay explains how Simmel came to be viewed as a conservative. Simmel's presumed conservatism is challenged via a re-examination of the civic implications of his Nietzschean sociology. A central question is whether Simmel's ethical individualism is conservative. This question is finally answered through an analysis of Ibsen's Enemy of the People. The choice of Ibsen is not random, for it amplifies the close ethical and historical affinity of Naturalist drama and Simmel's philosophy.