Positivism and Inwardness: Schopenhauer's Legacy in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil's unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities is testimony that Arthur Schopenhauer's legacy in early-twentieth-century European culture cuts across the familiar opposition between neo-romantic irrationalism and scientific positivism. I adduce evidence in Musil's unfinished novel and contemporaneous essays and journal entries that his utopian vision of an integration of ethical inwardness and scientific objectivity, an integration productive of an existence without qualities, is symptomatic of a Schopenhauerian outlook that prevailed in Europe êntre deux guerres and yielded a crisis of narratives and consequent moral ambivalence. Musil's literary style achieves a vivid rendering of the causes and conditions of the ethical paralysis afflicting the modern self committed to the exploration of inwardness.     

Dominion of the Spirit over the Flesh: Religion,Gender and Sexual Morality in the German Women's Movement before World War I

This article examines the place of religious values in the thinking of leading figures in the mainstream German women's movement in the period before World War I. Focusing on the debate of sexual morality and abortion within the German League of Women's Associations, it argues that the position taken by these women is best understood as a product of their religious commitments, rather than their political ideas. The article seeks to place these women in the historical context of a particular liberal, Protestant, social and intellectual milieu that flourished in the period before 1914.     

Writers and politics in West Germany

This article argues that Archibald Campbell's Necessity of Revelation (1739) can be viewed as the first application of the ‘science of human nature’, a characteristic branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, to the study of religious belief. Adopting Baconian and Newtonian methodological principles, Campbell set hypotheses, collected historical data, and inferred conclusions about the capabilities of human nature to come to fundamental religious ideas without the aid of revelation. He did so not only to reject the ‘deist’ position on the powers of unassisted human reason, associated with Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), but also to refute Campbell's conservative critics within the Church of Scotland who had earlier tried him for heresy. Campbell's example is that of a university professor using the experimental study of religion to defeat both radical freethinking and Calvinist orthodoxy. His work is another instance of the complicated relationship between science and religion within eighteenth-century Scotland.     

Marriage,Sex, and the Church of Scotland: Exploring Non‐Conformity Amongst the Lower Orders

The history of marriage amongst the Scottish lower orders in the eighteenth century has largely been a story of sexual discipline by the Kirk (Church of Scotland). As much of this history has been produced through kirk session records — the arm of the church that monitored sexual morality and marital conformity — this is often construed as a story of contest between the church and a resistant lower orders, trying to negotiate alternative forms of family life. Using kirk session and secular court records and popular literature, this article explores how religious belief shaped sexual and marital behaviour, particularly non‐conformity, during this period. It examines the Kirk's interpretation of chastity and marriage, how these ideas filtered into popular culture and were used by the lower orders to negotiate their own sexual and marital behaviour and relationship to the Church. It argues that the Kirk's varying attitude to marital and sexual non‐conformity meant that marital non‐conformity was less significant than sexual sin in the popular and religious imagination.     

Silas Marner,Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine: George Eliot's Ethics of Care

‘Silas Marner, Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine’ reads Eliot's novel Silas Marner through the history of medicine, and particularly in the context of Marner's strange cataleptic trances which embody his alienation and suffering. Eliot, I argue, employs catalepsy in order to investigate ideas of illness and care, especially as that relates to professional medicine and to ideas of community. Focusing on cataleptic case histories and on Eliot's personal health concerns I show how issues of care become philosophical questions about ethical responsibility. It is through Silas Marner and his catalepsy, I conclude, that Victorian scholars can come to understand more about what that means within Eliot's canon and, more widely, in the mid-Victorian period. Overall, the article provides a unique reading of Silas Marner, drawing on significant new archival research on catalepsy and in Eliot's writing of illness narratives.     

God,Otherness, and Community: Some Reflections on Hegel and Levinas

Many critics have argued that the alterity of God is negated within Hegel's philosophy of religion. This paper will present the position that Hegel's approach to theology depends on a rigorous hermeneutic which does not negate the meaning and power of religious language and practice as they are found within various Christian traditions, though it does challenge the view that God is absolutely “other” than the human. Further, Hegel's approach to the interpretation of the divine-human relationship need not be limited to Christianity alone. Although Hegel regards Christianity as the highest, most spiritually developed form of religious life, certain fruitful correlations can be established between his work on the ethical dimensions of religious community and Levinas's ethical interpretation of Judaism. These correlations suggest that both Hegel and Levinas offer articulations of what can be seen as a “biblical” mode of thought in which the dialectical relation of God and human beings is central.     

Stigmatized Spaces: Gender and Mobility under crisis in South Sulawesi,Indonesia

The economic downturn in Indonesia (1997‐99) has changed the context of gendered spatial mobility in South Sulawesi. For low-income migrants in the region, the monetary crisis has not only reorganized the labor market, but it has also brought about an intensification of the stigma placed on young women's independent residence in an export processing zone. Household surveys and in-depth interviews with migrants and members of their origin and destination site neighborhoods, both before and during the economic retrenchment, illustrate that ideas about women's sexual morality are a key part of the context within which migration decisions are gendered. The article situates survey and interview findings within an overview of Indonesia's recent development history, economic crisis, and official state gender ideology. The article argues that migrants and their communities have identified the ‘prostitute’ as a female-gendered metaphor for the crisis, and finds that post-1997 narratives of women's mobility increasingly revolve around normative judgements regarding young women's independent mobility and sexual behavior.     

Modern revolutions: An introduction to the analysis of a political phenomenon

This paper provides an interpretation of the movement of Arendt's thought in her Denktagebuch, from 1950 to 1973. This movement results in an incipient political philosophy based on new concepts of freedom, equality, and solidarity. As a contribution to debates on the normative foundations of Arendt's political thought, the paper seeks to show that her incipient political philosophy is based on an ethical understanding of the human condition as constituted by its openness to the divine, the worldly, and the (human) Other. Despite its fragmentary nature and its politically problematic indebtedness to theological traditions, Arendt's private thought nevertheless allows us to rethink her place in the history of European ideas. Beyond that, it also provides a powerful alternative to the view that ethical and political thought must remain ‘political not metaphysical’.     

Machismo and other Intimacies in Twentieth-Century Bolivia: Reflections on Conducting Oral Histories about Sexuality and Reproduction

Through an analysis of two oral history interviews, this article examines the impact of machismo, closed-mindedness and blame on women's sexual experiences in the urban Andes between the mid-1970s and 2009. The testimonies of Marcela and her daughter, Graciela, also shed light on the processes by which gender ideologies and cultural values concerning sexuality are transmitted across generations. The article further addresses the ethical and methodological challenges of conducting interviews on sensitive themes and interpreting the resulting testimonies. It argues that interviewing individuals about their sexual and reproductive lives, while forcing oral historians to confront personal and political fears, enriches our understanding of a range of gender-related phenomena.     

Sex, religion, and the single woman c.1950-75: the importance of a 'short' sexual revolution to the English religious crisis of the sixties

The English 'sexual revolution' has recently become increasingly conceived as 'long', lasting many decades, and by some historians as a gradual phenomenon, but reaching a peak with the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill in the 1960s. At the same time, the 'religious crisis' of the same decade has been attributed by some recent scholarship to liberal Christian revolt within the churches, and largely unconnected with sex. This article offers different views. First, based on the illegitimacy rate, it argues that, after a period of decline, restraint, and only minor change in the period 1946-59, the 1960s witnessed a sudden growth in pre-marital heterosexual intercourse before the pill's availability to single women, implying a cultural rather than a technological cause. Second, based on contemporary social surveys, it argues that there is clear evidence of a strong inverse correlation between levels of religious activity and levels of pre-marital sexual intercourse. Third, it argues that in the 1950s the dominant conservative Christian culture restrained single women from pre-marital sexual intercourse, but that from the early 1960s changing attitudes led to rising levels of sexual activity, led by single women, which reduced religious attitudes and Christian churchgoing, thus constituting a significant instigator of the religious crisis.     

The Four Corners of Our Brain

Throughout religious, scientific, and humanist literature on ideas one finds categorical subdivisions that are four in number: the four corners of the Earth, the four cardinal directions, the four proteins constituting DNA, Maxwell's four equations, Toynbee's four societies, Pythagoras’ four elements of arithmetic, Pythagoras’ four elements, Hayden White's four aspects of imagination. The list is endless. From where does the “four” come? Why not five, or six, eight, or nine? Andersen tracks back to the beginnings of arithmetic utilized in the architecture of conceptual thinking. He finds the answer not only in the quadration of the human body as having four sides and giving a stabilizing structure to the brain but equally in the architecture of memory. Using the slot-theory of short-term memory processing, he demonstrates how easily the four-count comes to mind and how the brain resists moving on to five.     

The First Circle and the Last Man: Solzhenitsyn's Political Science

The author examines David Hume's History of England to elucidate his thoughts on the subject of education. He argues that education's ability to improve moral judgments drives Hume's interest. With this in mind, the idiosyncratic review of English literature scattered throughout Hume's History can be seen in its proper light. Finally, the author suggests History represents Hume's best effort to develop a literary style capable of improving morals.     

Reinhold Niebuhr and the US War on Terror: A Response to Dr Gilkey

Abstract

Building upon Langdon Gilkey's reflection on Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, this article examines Niebuhr's enduring contribution in relation to two pressing international concerns: religious terrorism and the US War on Terror. As these two issues are characterized by their suppression of reason, I argue that Niebuhr's critical understanding of reason, a human rational capacity to consider interests other than one's own, offers an important resource in rectifying the disorder created by the two issues. Despite his stringent critique of a liberal idealistic view of reason, Niebuhr refused to completely deny the value of reason; although reason is always tainted by sin, it is not entirely ineffectual. This critical notion of reason is a necessary antidote to the unilateralism of the Bush administration and religious fundamentalism which altogether reject a dialogical, reflective value of reason. In an increasingly interdependent global society, a critical use of reason is indispensable for the achievement of global peace and justice.     

Derrida and fidelity to history

In the first part of this paper Hugh Rayment-Pickard challenges Mark Bevir's assumption that Derrida does not care about historical or other kinds of truth. A consideration of Derrida's early work on Husserl shows deconstruction to be a kind of skepsis or epoche launched in search of the truth. Yet deconstruction reveals the truth as ‘undecidable’, which means that Derrida's commitment to the truth must take the form of ‘faith’. The second part of the paper considers an example of definite intentional meaning given in Mark Bevir's Logic: Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux. On examination, Petrach's motivation can be seen to be radically divided between secular and religious concerns, a split vividly illustrated in his imaginary dialogue with St Augustine: The Secret. Finally, Rayment-Pickard looks briefly at Derrida's own dialogue with St Augustine, ‘Circumfession’, which also argues that human intentions are irreducibly complex and plural.     

Derrida and fidelity to history

In the first part of this paper Hugh Rayment-Pickard challenges Mark Bevir's assumption that Derrida does not care about historical or other kinds of truth. A consideration of Derrida's early work on Husserl shows deconstruction to be a kind of skepsis or epoche launched in search of the truth. Yet deconstruction reveals the truth as ‘undecidable’, which means that Derrida's commitment to the truth must take the form of ‘faith’. The second part of the paper considers an example of definite intentional meaning given in Mark Bevir's Logic: Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux. On examination, Petrach's motivation can be seen to be radically divided between secular and religious concerns, a split vividly illustrated in his imaginary dialogue with St Augustine: The Secret. Finally, Rayment-Pickard looks briefly at Derrida's own dialogue with St Augustine, ‘Circumfession’, which also argues that human intentions are irreducibly complex and plural.     

Philosophy,Sociability and Modern Patriotism: Young Herder between Rousseau and Abbt

Summary

In his early years Herder is known to have been a follower of Rousseau (via Kant). This article argues that there was indeed a substantial overlap between Herder's and Rousseau's ideas in Herder's early writings, particularly in terms of their joint critique of abstract philosophy and their understanding of the sentimental foundations of morality, as well as their commitment to the ideals of human moral independence and political freedom. Yet Herder's admiration for Rousseau's moral philosophy did not lead him to adopt Rousseau's critique of sociability even in this early period, and there was in fact a deep divergence between their political views. Herder attempted to combine a Rousseauian cultural critique, ‘human’ moral philosophy and philosophy of education with ideas inspired by Thomas Abbt's theory of monarchical patriotism. In contrast to Rousseau, and following Abbt, Herder posited the existence of natural patriotic feelings and underlined their importance in guaranteeing good government and political freedom. Thus, Herder could have a relatively optimistic view of the role of ‘human philosophy’ in regenerating patriotism in a modern setting. Herder embraced Abbt's emphasis on the positive aspects of modern monarchies and ‘modern liberty’ when compared to ancient republics, highlighting the compatibility of Christianity, international commerce and religious tolerance, and the general possibility of developing one's natural inclinations in modern monarchies.     

‘Subjective Testimonies’: Women Quaker Ministers and Spiritual Authority in England: 1750–1825

It was generally believed by historians that the increasingly formal regulation of belief and practice in the Society of Friends (Quakers) during the eighteenth century led to a decline in the influence and authority exercised by women in the denomination. Recent research has indicated, however, that although women were denied equal status and roles in the Society's new disciplinary bodies, the period also saw them beginning to outnumber men as the principal upholders of charismatic spiritual leadership through the ministry. These conflicting trends suggest that there were tensions and ambiguities within Quaker discourses on the meaning of gender and its implications for the exercise of religious authority. Using the testimonies of religious experience constructed by women ministers, this paper explores those discourses and illuminates the ways in which they were exploited, questioned and transformed by women. It argues that belief in the equal capacity of men and women for divine service was cut across by the conviction that sexual difference played a crucial part in shaping religious experience. Ministering women negotiated and manipulated the relationship between spirituality and femininity, both to understand themselves as instruments of divine power and to challenge the establishment of a male hierarchy in their church.     

The Swinging Gate: Katherine Mansfield's Missionary Vision

At the age of thirteen, Mansfield wrote “I want to be a Maori missionary” in her Book of Common Prayer. “The Swinging Gate: Katherine Mansfield's Missionary Vision” by Richard Cappuccio argues that Mansfield's initial diary entry is a lens through which one can read her interests in, rebellion against, and modifications of her Anglican background. The article discusses close readings of her poems “The Sea Child,” “The Butterfly,” and “To L.H. B.” as well as two of her stories — “Prelude,” and “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped.” In addition it draws on journals and letters to focus on a relationship between Maori systems of belief, her affinities with Frank Harris's “A Holy Man (After Tolstoi),” and her final observations about G. I. Gurdjieff.     

‘The innate yearnings of our souls’: Subjectivity,Religiosity and Outward Testimony in Mary Howitt's Autobiography (1889)

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in women's involvement in nineteenth-century religious cultures. However, the overwhelming focus remains firmly on the role of religion in providing motivation, sustenance and justification for women's involvement in feminism and other public campaigns. Questions of faith and devotion, spirituality and Christian selfhood, and the relationship of spiritual freedom to other liberations – religious issues that are at the heart of many women's life histories – remain largely unaddressed. This article focuses on the life of Mary Howitt, the popular nineteenth-century English poet, journalist and campaigner for women's rights, whose Autobiography (1889) describes an extraordinary religious journey. Raised in a strict Quaker household, Howitt resigned from the Society of Friends in the midst of a Unitarian interlude in the 1840s, became deeply involved with Spiritualism in the 1850s and 1860s, and finally moved to Rome, both physically and spiritually, at the end of her life. The article explores Howitt's representation of the Quaker piety of her youth as stifling and oppressive in its concern with outward forms of religious observance, particularly an emphasis on a traditional style of dress and on resisting ‘worldly’ activities, including poetry and art. A reading of the autobiography alongside her earlier writing reveals how themes become ‘composed’ into a coherent, stable life story, one shaped by later nineteenth-century public discourses that allowed for a greater religious fluidity and a new reflection on childhood experiences.     

Between Christianity and secularity: counselling and psychotherapy provision in Scotland

Counselling and psychotherapy services have become increasingly prominent within modern urban welfare. Although often perceived to be intrinsically secular, since psychoanalytic thinking and practice arrived in Scotland it has been shaped by the Christian culture it encountered. Early Scottish-born contributors to psychoanalytic theory, including Ian Suttie and W.R.D. Fairbairn, reframed Freud's ideas in ways that incorporated Scottish Presbyterian understandings of what it is to be human. A form of Christian psychotherapy supported by the Presbyterian, Catholic and Episcopal churches was being offered to members of the general public by the 1940s. Counselling provision expanded rapidly from the mid-1960s, with active church involvement. Tracing these developments via documentary sources and oral history testimony, I argue that counselling and psychotherapy in Scotland have never been secular. I illustrate evidence for ‘postsecular rapprochment’ operating since the 1960s, characterised by faith-by-praxis and collaboration between those with and without religious faith. I explore the interplay between religious and secular spaces in the development of this element of modern urban welfare.