The Aesthetics of Disaster: Blok, Messina, and the Decadent Sublime

Slavic Review ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenifer Presto
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Lisbon Earthquake ◽  
The Face ◽  
Aleksandr Blok ◽  
Luca Signorelli ◽  
European Civilization

In this article, Jenifer Presto argues that the 1908 Messina-Reggio Calabria earthquake had an impact on Aleksandr Blok no less significant than that which the 1755 Lisbon earthquake had on writers of the Enlightenment and proceeds to demonstrate how it shaped Blok's aesthetics of catastrophe. This aesthetics can best be termed the “decadent sublime, ” an inversion of the Kantian dynamic sublime with its emphasis on bourgeois optimism. Following Immanuel Kant, Blok acknowledges the fear and attraction that nature's forces can inspire; however, unlike Kant, he insists that modern man remains powerless in the face of nature, owing to his decadence—a decadence endemic to European civilization. The decadent sublime is manifested in a host of Blok's writings, ranging from “The Elements and Culture” to Lightning Flashes of Art and The Scythians; it is intensely visual and is indebted to images of ruin by artists such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Luca Signorelli.

Luther, Lutheranism, and Post-Christianity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphne Hampson
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Large Step ◽  
The Face ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
Psychoanalytic Thought ◽  
Catholic Tradition ◽  
Europe Today

It would not be possible to say that the Lutheran tradition has led to the post-Christian world that is Europe today, the causes of which must be multifarious. Nevertheless, it is thinkers in the Lutheran tradition, as in no other, who have tackled the question as to what the coming of modernity means for the truth of Christian claims. It may be said that Luther himself and those around him took a large step from a Catholic, Aristotelian world into modernity. In the Enlightenment, it was notably German thinkers who had come out of a Lutheran context among them, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and Ludwig Feuerbach, who advanced a demythologized interpretation of scripture, seeing the Christian myth as a projection of human self-understanding; the form that their secularizing position took being profoundly influenced by their Lutheran context. Meanwhile, the basic paradigm of Lutheranism, a Christocentic faith set over against reason or works, allowed other Lutheran thinkers to proclaim a Christian apologetic in the face of the Enlightenment (Søren Kierkegaard), and 20th-century secularity (Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer). The Lutheran Christocentric apologetic would seem to have ended in incoherence, or to have become irrelevant, in a post-Christian context. It fits ill with forms of post-Christian spirituality. This notwithstanding, it remains the case that ways of thinking that derive from Lutheran thought have profoundly affected the modern world, its philosophy, culture, and psychoanalytic thought. It should be a cause for admiration, not derision, that those who have stood in this tradition—from Luther forward—have been ready to face the intellectual issues of their day and the challenges posed to Christianity. This stands in marked contrast with the comparative failure of the Catholic tradition in this regard.

Religion and Toleration from the Enlightenment to the Post-Secular Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Forst
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Pierre Bayle ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses the classical question of the relationship between enlightenment and religion. In doing so, the chapter compares Jürgen Habermas's thought to that of Pierre Bayle and Immanuel Kant. For, although Habermas undoubtedly stands in a tradition founded by Bayle and Kant, he develops a number of important orientations within this tradition and has changed his position in his recent work. The chapter studies this change to understand Habermas's position better. It also draws attention to a fundamental question raised by the modern world: what common ground can human reason establish in the practical and theoretical domain between human beings who are divided by profoundly different religious (including antireligious) views?

Die Legitimität der Aufklärung

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Schick
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

This study defends the legitimacy of the Enlightenment project by way of its different realizations in the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Today, Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan project with a global claim is often considered synonymous with Western chauvinism. The assertion of a universally binding reason is all too obviously inconsistent with the much-cited recognition of cultural differences. In contrast, it is the conviction brought forward in this book that an adequately understood Enlightenment is an unconditional right of every person taking an active interest in a self-determined way of life. Only the realization of this conception of Enlightenment can provide the required space for the reciprocal recognition of human differences to freely unfold.

scholarly journals A CONCEPÇÃO E A PERSPECTIVA FILOSÓFICA SOBRE O MODELO DE FAMÍLIA EUDEMONISTA FRENTE AO ENTENDIMENTO MAJORITÁRIO DE VÍNCULO BIOLÓGICO COMO ELEMENTO CARACTERIZADOR DA ENTIDADE FAMILIAR

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (204) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Gabriela Dantas da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Main Topic ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Philosophical Nature

The main topic of this article is to analyze the philosophical contributions on the subject and to criticize the State's actions as an entity that supports this family model. In a second moment, emphasis is given to the philosophical contributions of Immanuel Kant and Aristotle on morals and ethics, extending them to the family and social sphere. The concept of the Eudemonist Family with great Aristotelian influence, as well as some of the main contemporary family entities in brief contextualization, is also presented, to finally address the main problem of this article: the legal challenges of the Eudemonist family in the face of the majority understanding of biological bond as a characterizing element of the family entity. In conclusion, the philosophical nature is of great importance for the understanding of these new conceptions of the family, since the Brazilian legal system did not, in fact, contemplate the experience of society, not giving up texts that were expressly discriminatory and that excluded fundamental rights of individuals.

Music Transcendent and Sublime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip V. Bohlman
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Form Of Expression

The translations in Song Loves the Masses close with Herder’s final large-scale essay on music, published in 1800 as a chapter in Kalligone, the culmination of his aesthetic work. With this late essay Herder, a polemic against his former teacher, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), reveals the extent to which he has moved into a fully aesthetic domain in his concern for the universal history of humanity. Embodying the subjectivity of song and singing, music acquires the force of transcendence, and it therefore aspires to the Enlightenment ideals of the sublime. In Herder’s “On Music,” human beings are endowed with a degree of understanding that allows them to perceive the traits that make music unlike any other form of expression.

Two Crises for the Proof Paradigm in the Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
pp. 34-58
Author(s):  
William J. Talbott
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
David Hume ◽  
The State ◽  
Epistemic Rationality ◽  
Metaphysical Necessity ◽  
Important Respect ◽  
Naturalistic Epistemology ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Causal Necessity

In Chapter 2, the author critically discusses the epistemologies of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. The author distinguishes the skeptical Hume from the naturalist Hume. The author presents the skeptical Hume’s philosophy as a response to what he calls Berkeley’s puzzle. He argues that Hume’s skeptical arguments are self-refuting and self-undermining and that Hume’s analysis of cause is an example of an explanation-impairing framework substitution. Hume’s solution to his skeptical arguments was a new kind of epistemology, a naturalistic epistemology. The author presents Kant’s epistemology as a response to the state of rationalist metaphysics at the time of Kant’s first Critique. Kant’s epistemology was similar to Hume’s in one important respect. Just as Hume had psychologized the idea of causal necessity, Kant psychologized the idea of metaphysical necessity. The author argues that both solutions were a form of relativism. This chapter primarily serves to motivate a search for a non-skeptical, non-relativist, non-Platonist theory of epistemic rationality.

6. Religion

2016 ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Contemporary Philosopher ◽  
Good And Evil

Goethe was brought up in Frankfurt, a Protestant city where the Lutheran Church held sway, but was also introduced to key Enlightenment texts through his father’s extensive library. ‘Religion’ explains that an early Pietist phase strengthened the value that Goethe placed on tolerance in religious matters. Goethe’s standpoint was what the 18th century called ‘natural religion’. Goethe’s allegiance to the Enlightenment is seen in his work, including the poem ‘Prometheus’ (1774) and the neoclassical drama Iphigenie in Tauris (1786–7). Goethe seems to anticipate Nietzsche in viewing human life as ‘beyond good and evil’. What mattered to Goethe was individuality, which brings him close to the greatest contemporary philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing

2002 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Kochin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Law ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Moral Teaching ◽  
The Face ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Many

Strauss's historical investigation of the use of exoteric writing in Farabi, Maimonides, Halevi, and Spinoza, is in fact his history of the philosophers' exoteric accommodations to the permanent difference in human natures, the difference between the many who require a categorical moral teaching and the few who are capable of ordering their own lives in the face of the hypothetical status of all moral commands. The men of the Enlightenment aspired to render the moral law superfluous for all by constructing a machinery of government powerful enough to compel all to live justly. Strauss critiques this aspiration by leading his reader to face the permanency of the difference between the few and the many. Strauss uses historical scholarship to force the reader to rethink the possibility of contemplation of the eternal or permanent, the possibility that the Enlightenment's historicist epigones have sought to foreclose.

Cultural Differences in Mulan between Chinese Version and Disney Version

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1332
Author(s):  
Lei Wang ◽  
Bing Han ◽  
Guofei Xu
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Chinese Film ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Cross Cultural Research ◽  
The Face ◽  
Different Cultures

This article puts Chinese Mulan and Disney Mulan's plots as the starting point, analyzes of the adaptation of the plots to show the different cultural significance given by different nationalities. The purpose of this paper is to research the cultural differences reflected in the films made by Hua Mulan in different countries. In this era of globalization, and in the face of different cultures, only by taking its essence and its dross will produce masterpieces that attract worldwide attention. There are indeed many cultural differences between the Chinese film Mulan and the American film Mulan. After analyzing the reasons for the differences, this study summarizes the enlightenment of these differences to cross-cultural research and shows some views.

Dissembling Orthodoxy in the Age of the Enlightenment: Frederick the Great and his Confession of Faith

2016 ◽  
Vol 109 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kloes
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Friedrich Schleiermacher ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Prussian Academy ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

The name of Friedrich II and his nearly half-century reign from 1740 to 1786 are virtually synonymous with the advent and advance of the Enlightenment in Prussia. In his famous 1784 answer to the question posed by the Berlinische Monatsschrift, “What is enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant asserted that enlightenment could be partially conceptualized as a temporal epoch, one whose salient characteristics, especially in regards to religion, were manifested in the personal opinions and public policies of his royal Prussian sovereign. “We do not live in an enlightened age, but in an age of enlightenment – the century of Friedrich.” In a similar spirit, a generation after Kant wrote, Friedrich Schleiermacher delivered a paean to Friedrich II's memory in a January 24, 1817 address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences on what would have been Friedrich II's one-hundred-and-fifth birthday. Schleiermacher heralded Friedrich II as “a friend of the muses,” who doubtlessly conversed with Plato in the afterlife, the legacy of whose domestic initiatives had been to transform Prussia into a more cultured society, while his “heroic” and “glorious” victories secured for the Prussian Army its vaunted reputation for military prowess. As the 29-year-old king himself wrote in a February 24, 1741 battlefield letter from the frontlines of the First Silesian War, “I love war for its glory, but if I were not a ruler, I would be nothing but a philosopher.”

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