Disciple or Renegade? On Reinhold’s Representationalism, the Principle of Consciousness, and the Thing in Itself

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Thing In Itself

The Revolutionizing of the Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
French Government ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In 1792, the French Revolution became a thing in itself, an uncontrollable force that might eventually spend itself but which no one could direct or guide. The governments set up in Paris in the following years all faced the problem of holding together against forces more revolutionary than themselves. This chapter distinguishes two such forces for analytical purposes. There was a popular upheaval, an upsurge from below, sans-culottisme, which occurred only in France. Second, there was the “international” revolutionary agitation, which was not international in any strict sense, but only concurrent within the boundaries of various states as then organized. From the French point of view these were the “foreign” revolutionaries or sympathizers. The most radical of the “foreign” revolutionaries were seldom more than advanced political democrats. Repeatedly, however, from 1792 to 1799, these two forces tended to converge into one force in opposition to the French government of the moment.

Schopenhauer’s Understanding of Schelling

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Judith Norman ◽  
Alistair Welchman
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Intuition ◽  
Thing In Itself

Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich William Joseph von Schelling. This chapter examines the motivations for Schopenhauer’s immoderate attitude and the substance behind the insults. It looks carefully at both the nature of the insults and substantive critical objections Schopenhauer had to Schelling’s philosophy, both to Schelling’s metaphysical description of the thing-in-itself and Schelling’s epistemic mechanism of intellectual intuition. It concludes that Schopenhauer’s substantive criticism is reasonable and that Schopenhauer does in fact avoid Schelling’s errors: still, the vehemence of the abuse is best perhaps explained by the proximity of their philosophies, not the distance. Indeed, both are developing metaphysics of will with full and conflicted awareness of the Kantian epistemic strictures against metaphysics. In view of this, Schopenhauer is particularly concerned to mark his own project as legitimate by highlighting the manner in which he avoids Schelling’s errors.

Force in Nature

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-160
Author(s):  
David Carus
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Core ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
The Will ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter explores Schopenhauer’s concept of force, which lies at the root of his philosophy. It is force in nature and thus in natural science that is inexplicable and grabs Schopenhauer’s attention. To answer the question of what this inexplicable term is at the root of all causation, Schopenhauer looks to the will within us. Through will, he maintains that we gain immediate insight into forces in nature and hence into the thing in itself at the core of everything and all things. Will is thus Schopenhauer’s attempt to answer the question of the essence of appearance. Yet will, as it turns out, cannot be known immediately as it is subject to time, and the acts of will, which we experience within us, do not correlate immediately with the actions of the body (as Schopenhauer had originally postulated). Hence, the acts of will do not lead to an explanation of force, which is at the root of causation in nature. Schopenhauer sets out to explain what is at the root of all appearances, derived from the question of an original cause, or as Schopenhauer states “the cause of causation,” but cannot determine this essence other than by stating that it is will; a will, however, that cannot be immediately known.

The absolute that is not absolute: an alchemical reflection on the caput mortuum, the dark other of logical light

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanton Marlan
Keyword(s):  
Dark Light ◽  
Object A ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
The Absolute

ABSTRACTThis paper challenges Wolfgang Giegerich’s sometimes sophisticated and at other times sophistic notion of absolute negative interiority. In contrast to his uroboric view of ‘psychology proper’, this author resists the successionist ideas of a post-Jungian, trans-human perspective and asserts the notion of an unassimilable and unsurmountable ‘not’. In this paper, the author revisions the traditional divide between Kant and Hegel, taking the ‘thing-in-itself’ as truly other than existing only for consciousness and arguing against privileging theunityof unity and difference. This paper entertains the alchemical ideas of a residue, acaput mortuum, and an archetypally cumbersome object, a real limit, which remains and unhinges the elevating process of spirit on its path to return to itself in absolute interiority. Rather, it acknowledges an abyss ‘behind the back of consciousness’, a non-reified living unconscious – a dark light, an absolute that is not absolute, but rather a gateway back to the beyond, at the root of imagination, wonder, and transformation.

MORAL OBLIGATION AFTER THE DEATH OF GOD: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON CONCERNS FROM IMMANUEL KANT, G. W. F. HEGEL, AND ELIZABETH ANSCOMBE

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Tristram Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Moral Pluralism ◽  
Moral Obligations ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Presence Of God ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
The Status

AbstractOnce God is no longer recognized as the ground and the enforcer of morality, the character and force of morality undergoes a significant change, a point made by G.E.M. Anscombe in her observation that without God the significance of morality is changed, as the word criminal would be changed if there were no criminal law and criminal courts. There is no longer in principle a God's-eye perspective from which one can envisage setting moral pluralism aside. In addition, it becomes impossible to show that morality should always trump concerns of prudence, concerns for one's own non-moral interests and the interests of those to whom one is close. Immanuel Kant's attempt to maintain the unity of morality and the force of moral obligation by invoking the idea of God and the postulates of pure practical reason (i.e., God and immortality) are explored and assessed. Hegel's reconstruction of the status of moral obligation is also examined, given his attempt to eschew Kant's thing-in-itself, as well as Kant's at least possible transcendent God. Severed from any metaphysical anchor, morality gains a contingent content from socio-historical context and its enforcement from the state. Hegel's disengagement from a transcendent God marks a watershed in the place of God in philosophical reflections regarding the status of moral obligations on the European continent. Anscombe is vindicated. Absent the presence of God, there is an important change in the force of moral obligation.

If Art is Knowledge, Then …

1979 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-294
Author(s):  
John H. Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Verbal Communication ◽  
The World ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
The Way

It is argued that visual art makes statements analogous to the statements of science, morals, etc. Such art statements are provided by entities like Guernica, The Fighting Temeraire, and pictures on the walls of the local gallery, and concern themselves with things-in-themselves. The whole point of art criticism is to make clearer this thing-in-itself. In the way that other sorts of statement shape the world, so art statements shape the world. We do not know the world and then superimpose art statements upon it; we know the world through the art statements. This thesis has curriculum implications. It indicates the need for art encounters and techniques of various sorts, since the knowledge of art statements can only be apprehended through engaging in art and from intense verbal communication with teachers about art and its qualities.

scholarly journals From transcendental idealism to transcendental empiricism and beyond: Kant, Deleuze and flat ontology of the art

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-156
Author(s):  
Andrija Filipović
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Transcendental Empiricism ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Paradigm Shifting ◽  
Ontology Of Art

In this paper I will show that the movement from Kant's transcendental idealism to Gilles Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and then to new materialisms and speculative realisms is what enables us to talk about the direct and non-mediated access to the thing in itself (or its dissolution). In other words, it's the change from the conditions of possible experience to the conditions of real experience that made possible current philosophical and theoretical discourses of materialisms and realisms. What is of particular interest for the purposes of this paper is how the change from conditions of possible to real experience relates to the current conceptualizations of art practices. More precisely, I will show how the ontology of art changed, or at least that there perhaps appears paradigm-shifting possibility of different aesthetics and ontologies of art, flat ontology being one of them, with the appearance of new materialisms and speculative realisms that were made possible by the change to the conditions of real experience.

scholarly journals Urgent Matter

Konturen ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Jonathan Monroe
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
German American ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Disciplinary Cultures ◽  
General Economy

Opening questions about “things” onto the bureaucratically-maintained, compartmentalized discursive, disciplinary claims of “philosophy,” “theory,” and “poetry,” “Urgent Matter” explores these three terms in relation to one another through attention to recent work by Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, the German-American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, and the German poet Ulf Stolterfoht, whose fachsprachen. Gedichte. I-IX (Lingos I-IX. Poems) Waldrop rendered into English in an award-winning translation. The difference between the "things" called "poetry" and "philosophy," as now institutionalized within the academy, is not epistemological, ontological, ahistorical, but a matter of linguistic domains, of so-called concrete "images" as the policed domain of the former and of "abstraction" as the policed domain of the latter. Challenging the binary logics that dominate language use in diverse discursive/disciplinary cultures, Waldrop’s linguistically self-referential, appositional procedures develop ways to use language that are neither linear, nor so much without direction, as multi-directional, offering complexes of adjacency, of asides, of digression, of errancy, of being “alongside,” in lieu of being “opposed to,” that constitute at once a poetics, an aesthetics, an ethics, and a politics. Elaborating a complementary understanding of poetry as “the most philosophic of all writing,” a medium of being “contemporary,” Waldrop and Stolterfoht question poetry’s purposes as one kind of language apparatus among others in the general economy. Whatever poetry might be, it aspires to be in their hands not a thing in itself but a form of self-questioning, of all discourses, all disciplines, that “thing” that binds “poetry” and “philosophy” together, as urgent matter, in continuing.

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