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Idealistic Studies

Volume 42, Issue 2/3, Summer/Fall 2012

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1. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
Gary Overvold Editor's Note
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2. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
Tom Rockmore Marx between Feuerbach and Hegel
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This paper is about the uses made of Feuerbach’s position in Marxist hagiography as part of the process of the conceptual and politi­cal canonization of Marx.
3. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
Dustin Peone Ernst Cassirer's Essential Critique of Heidegger and Verfallenheit
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In the past decade and a half, there has been a renewed interest in the philosophical disagreements between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. Entirely overlooked is the fourth volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, unpublished in the author’s lifetime, in which he asserts that Heidegger’s concept of Verfallenheit is the essential point at which their philosophies diverge. This paper re-examines the disagreements between Heidegger and Cassirer, in light of this crucial text. Two questions are considered: (1) What is Cassirer’s criticism of Verfallenheit? (2) In what sense is this matter the essential point of departure between their respective philosophies? I argue that, for Cassirer, the problem with the concept of Verfallenheit is that it undermines the possibility of transpersonal meaning and relegates cultural projects to inauthenticity.
4. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
Henry Southgate From Theodicy to Ontodicy: An Interpretation of "The Origin of the Work of Art"
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I interpret Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” in terms of his contemporaneous lectures on Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. I uncover several connections and similarities between the two works, which make possible a new reading of the artwork essay: namely, as an “ontodicy.” This term of Jean-Luc Nancy’s denotes the readiness with which Heidegger’s thinking on Being may be used to justify evil. I argue that Nancy’s term may be applied legitimately to the artwork essay also, i.e., that it can be read as a silent justification of evil.
5. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
David Kenosian "May the Holy Be My Word": Embodiment and the Remembrance of the Divine Word in Hölderlin's Later Poetry
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This paper shows how the authority of the poet in certain of Hölderlin’s later hymns depends on the remembrance of the sacred word. In the last three strophes of his “As on a Holiday,” the holy appears as the Kantian sublime: the divine intellectually elevates the poets while its overwhelming power makes them aware of human limitations. The poets’ physical act of accepting the word enables them to come to speech and signifies acknowledgement of limitation. But the speaker’s illicit effort to enter the realm of the deities results in speechlessness. In poems “The Only One” and “Patmos” Jesus emerges as the mediator between the timeless realm of the gods and temporal world of humans. God’s word—articulated by the God incarnate—gives meaning to finite human existence. Through the commemorative inscription of the divine word, poets gain their voice and speak of human existence as being unto the departed gods.
6. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
Adam Rosen-Carole Nietzsche's Modernism: Dialectics and Genealogy
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“‘[C]onscience,’” Nietzsche suggests early in Essay Two of On the Genealogy of Morals, “has a long history and variety of forms behind it” (II.3). Glossing over the explicit equivocity and irony of such statements, most commentators presume that the primary ambition of GM is to reconstruct the emergence and in so doing denaturalize and denounce the reign of conscience, which is treated as equivalent to both bad conscience and slave morality. Such presumption has obscured the central claims, operations, and stakes of the text, indeed of Nietzsche’s late work generally. Although they are intertwined, Nietzsche’s genealogy of conscience is textually, substantively, and strategically distinct from his genealogy of bad conscience, which in turn is involved in but distinct from his genealogy of slave morality. Textually, it is not until Essay Two, section four of On the Genealogy of Morals that Nietzsche begins to ask after the emergence and psychosocial (“physiological”) consequences of bad conscience, while the genealogy of conscience proceeds from the first essay. Substantively, the three genealogies are concerned with manifestly disparate objects. Strategically, the addressees of the three genealogies are diverse, thus are their modes of address: genealogy cannot be reduced to a uniform method.
7. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
Daniel Berthold The Author as Stranger: Nietzsche and Camus
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I argue that not only do Nietzsche and Camus share a sense of the world as fundamentally “strange,” but that each adopts an authorial position as stranger to the reader as well. The various strategies of concealment, evasion, and silence they employ to assure their authorial strangeness are in the service of what Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault would later call “the death of the author,” the disappearance of the author as authority over his or her own text. I argue further, however, that within this largely shared commitment, Nietzsche and Camus finally have quite different conceptions of the goals of their respective authorships and different manners of pursuing their deaths as authors. These contrasts leave us, finally, with distinct constructions of the author as stranger.
8. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
MaryCatherine McDonald Trauma, Embodiment, and Narrative
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We do not always survive trauma. Elie Wiesel said of Primo Levi, a holocaust survivor who committed suicide at age sixty-seven, “[he] died at Auschwitz forty years earlier.” Though Levi physically survived the holocaust, psychically he did not. And yet, there are countless stories of incredible triumph over trauma. What makes survival possible? What seems to separate those who recover from those who do not—at least in part—is the capacity and opportunity for adaptation. Adaptation is the phenomenon whereby the subject is able to make use of one or more coping mechanisms in order to adjust to traumatic disruption. In this paper I argue that narrative is an especially useful tool for adapting to trauma because it addresses that which is so disruptive about trauma: the inability to process the traumatic event.
9. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
Kyeong-Seop Choi Husserl and Deleuze: Edmund Husserl's and Gilles Deleuze's Contribution to Transcendental-Phenomenological "Regional Studies"
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It strikes readers as dubious and pointless to compare Husserl and Deleuze straightforwardly on the level of philosophy or history of philosophy, for their thoughts seem to be wide apart or even opposed. Nevertheless, each of their thoughts draws a trajectory of development into one and the same kind of qualitative research, i.e., non-scientific, non-conceptual, fieldwork research trying to grasp the immediately pre-given picture of being (or becoming). In this paper, I call such a qualitative research transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies.’ We might well interpret the concept of ‘life-world’ in later Husserl as ‘region’ and, therefore, his life-world phenomenology as such ‘regional studies.’ Moreover, the concepts of ‘desire,’ ‘force,’ ‘intensity,’ ‘field of immanence’ in Deleuze serve very well to describe the workings of ‘region’ at a deeper level. Therefore, we observe that, under the heading of transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies,’ disparate philosophical concepts in Husserl and Deleuze are meaningfully connected and networked. As a result, our exposition of transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies’ subsuming Husserl and Deleuze sheds not only new light on the philosophical dialogue between the two, but also introduces a radically new qualitative research on region, regional life and culture.
10. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
Hugo Edward Herrera Salomon Maimon on Intellectual Intuition
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One of the problems in post-Kantian discussions is the way in which the self procures access to itself. Kant rejects intellectual intuition in human knowledge. Nonetheless, he supposes an access of the self to itself as subject in all conscious knowledge. It is then fitting to ask how this access can occur. Because, if the self is to be taken precisely as subject, in other words as an activity that knows objects, this knowledge of the self should be of a different kind to that in which all the objects already constituted by that activity are known. Fichte or Schelling are usually taken to be the first to have addressed and tried to solve this problem. But Salomon Maimon had already done so in 1789 and had proposed a solution based on intellectual intuition. The aim of this article is to reconstruct Maimon’s arguments, evaluate his proposal, and specifically show that his attempt is the first in which the Kantian problem is addressed and a solution put forward.
11. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 42 > Issue: 2/3
Volume 42 Index
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