Cover of International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series

International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series

The Gift of Self
Shattering Emptiness, Betrayal
2005, ISBN 978-1-58684-043-3
Author: Stephen David Ross

Table of Contents

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1. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross General Preface to the Project: Gifts of the Good
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Sixth volume devoted to the good. Human, natural worlds filled with gifts. Nature, general economy of the good, earth's abundance, beyond measure. Gifts and giving, beyond having. Cherishment, sacrifice, plenishment: exposure to the good. Plato. The good grants authority to knowledge and truth. Anaximander. Injustice, restitution.Beauty, truth, justice gifts from the good. Precedence in Western philosophic tradition to gathering, assembling, and having being. Love of self as having. A self beyond itself, giving beyond having. Ethic responsive to the heterogeneous abundance of things in the earth.
2. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Introduction: The Subject of Myself
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[I]t is I, I and no one else, who am a hostage for the others. In substitution my being that belongs to me and not to another is undone, and it is through this substitution that I am not "another," but me. (Levinas, 5, 116)The ideas of being "true to oneself," of being one's own person, of being a self-actualized individual each refer us to the assumption that what is essential about the self is its separation from others: that it is "ownness" or "mineness" which defines the experience of self. (Wikse, AP, 1)1
chapter 1
3. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Self Knowledge
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When one is asked "What is the most important moral principle in ancient philosophy?" the immediate answer is not "Take care of oneself" but the Delphic principle gnōthi sauton ("Know thyself"). (Foucault, TS, 19)I can't as yet "know myself," as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. (Plato, Phaedrus, 230a)I certainly do not yet know myself, but whithersoever the wind, as it were, of the argument blows, there lies our course. (Plato, Republic, 394d)
chapter 2
4. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Self Care
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I wish to take up the subject ... in relation to a set of practices in late antiquity. Among the Greeks, these practices took the form of a precept: epimeleisthai sautou, "to take care of yourself," to take "care of the self," "to be concerned, to take care of yourself."The precept of the "care of the self" [souci de soi] was, for the Greeks, one of the main principles of cities, one of the main rules for social and personal conduct and for the art of life. For us now, this notion is rather obscure and faded. (Foucault, TS, 19)
chapter 3
5. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Self Identity
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Possession is preeminently the form in which the other becomes the same, by becoming mine. (Levinas, TI, 46)If perceptions are distinct existences, they form a whole only by being connected together. But no connexions among distinct existences are ever discoverable by human understanding. We only feel a connexion or determination of the thought to pass from one object to another. It follows, therefore, that the thought alone feels personal identity, when reflecting on the train of past perceptions that compose a mind, the ideas of them are felt to be connected together, and naturally introduce each other. (Burne, T, App., 635)The I think must accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought: .... they must conform to the condition under which alone they can exist altogether in a common self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me. (Kant, CPR, 76-7)
chapter 4
6. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Self Image
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The image, at first sight, does not resemble the cadaver, but it is possible that the rotting, decaying, cadaverous strangeness might also be from the image. (Blanchot, EL, 344; [my translation])But what is the image? When there is nothing, the image finds in this nothing its necessary condition, but there it disappears. The image needs the neutrality and the fading of the world: it wants everything to return to the indifferent deep where nothing is affirmed; it tends toward the intimacy of what still subsists in the void. This is its truth. But this truth exceeds it. (Blanchot, SL, 254)
chapter 5
7. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Self Love
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The ownership condemned with such rigor by the mystics, and often called impurity, is only the search for one's own solace and one's own interest in the jouissance of the gifts of God, at the expense of the jealousy of the pure love that wants everything for God and nothing for the creature .... Ownership, of course, is nothing but self-love or pride, which is the love of one's own excellence insofar as it is one's own, and which, instead of coming back completely and uniquely to God, still to a small extent brings the gifts of God back to the self so that it can takepleasure in them. (Fénelon: quoted in Nancy, SL, 94)Love defines itself as the absolute opposite and as the destruction of self-love. Self-love is not simply the love of the self; .... One can love oneself with a real love, and it might even be that one must do so .... But self-love, understood according to the signification the spiritual authors gave to it, .... is the love (which, from this moment on, is no longer one) of possession. It is the love of the self as property. (pp. 94-5)
chapter 6
8. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Self and Other
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To take up only the most beautiful, as yet to be made manifest in the realm of time and space, there are angels. These messengers who never remain enclosed in a place, who are also never immobile .... Endlessly reopening the enclosure of the universe, of universes, identities, the unfolding of actions, of history.The angel is that which unceasingly passes through the envelope(s) or container(s), goes from one side to the other, reworking every deadline, changing every decision, thwarting all repetition ... they come' to herald the arrival of a new birth, a new morning. (Irigaray, ESD, 15)In the absence of civil laws positively defining their real rights and duties, the only criteria women have to refer to are subjective ones....But as long as there are no laws or rules which all women-and all men-may refer to and invoke when making their decisions, there can be no democracy, however attractive the immediate allegiance of a collectivity to a proposition may be. (Irigaray, ILTY, 1-2)
chapter 7
9. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Self with Others
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Dasein is authentically itself only to the extent that, as concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it projects itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for-Being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self. (Heidegger, BT, 308)The more I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution, of my freedom as a constituted, willful, imperialist subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible; the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am "in myself" through the others. (Levinas, OB, 112)these singular beings [Daseins] are themselves constituted by sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others: other for one another, and other, infinitely other for the Subject of their fusion, which is engulfed in the sharing, in the ecstasy of the sharing "communicating" by not "communing." ... Thus, the communication of sharing would be this very dis-location. (Nancy, IC, 25)What defines the "self" is precisely what defines us as personsnamely, the various roles and relationships that link us to others. (Bockover, ERS, 56)
chapter 8
10. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Self and WorId
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Man, in the analytic of finitude, is a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible. (Foucault, OT, 318)Man is a mode of being which accommodates that dimension-always open, never finally delimited, yet constantly traversed-which extends from a part of himself not reflected in a cogito to the act of thought by which he apprehends that part; and which, in the inverse direction, extends from that pure apprehension to ... the whole silent horizon of what is posited in the sandy stretches of non-thought .... The question is no longer: How can experience of nature give rise to necessary judgements? But rather: How can man think what he does not think, inhabit as though by a mute occupation something that eludes him, animate with a kind of frozen movement that figure of himself that takes the form of a stubborn exteriority? (pp. 322-3)
chapter 9
11. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Shattered Self
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the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, ... calls me into question. (Levinas, EFP, 83)we are difference, ... our selves the difference of masks. (Foucault, AK, 130-1)There are no parts, moments, types, or stages of love. There is only an infinity of shatters. (Nancy, SL, 101)Only the body fulfills the concept of the words "exposition," "being exposed." And since the body is not a concept ... there is no "body." (Nancy, BP, 205)Sense is the singularity of all the singular ones, in all senses simultaneously.The originary sharing [partager] of the world is the sharing of Being, and the Being of the Dasein is nothing other than the Being of this sharing. (Nancy, SL, 103)Dasein is first of all thrown. (Derrida, EW, 269)Starting at "birth," and possibly even prior to it, being thrown re-appropriates itself or rather ex-appropriates itself informs that are not yet those of the subject or the project. (p. 270)
chapter 10
12. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Empty Self
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Zen-Buddhist nothingness is the nowhere is there something that is I, or conversely: the I that is the nowhere is there something. (Hisamatsu, FN, 25-26; quoted and trans. in Stambaugh, FS, 76)... it is empty of being. That means that it is beyond all measure ....... it is empty without emptiness. That means that it does not cling to itself.... it possesses nothing. That means that it doesn't possess and also cannot be possessed. (Hisamatsu, FN, 31; quoted and trans. in Stambaugh, FS, 77-8)The emptiness of what is called "emptiness" is referred to as "the emptiness of emptiness" (ʼsūnyatāʼsūnyatā), and it is explained in this way for the purpose of controverting any understanding of emptiness as a[n ontological reference to] "being." (Candrakīrti, EMW, 180)A skillful Zen student will strive to be awakened to an identity with all phenomena, the student him- or herself emptyand continually changing as the phenomena come forth. (Codiga, ZPSP, 108)Zen practice is a means for the enlightenment of bushes and grasses, an activity that has no beginning or end in the vastness of any empty universe. (p. 110)
chapter 11
13. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Responsive Self
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The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone. (Levinas, S, 104)Responsibility carries within it, and must do so, an essential excessiveness. It regulates itself neither on the principle of reason nor on any sort of accountancy. (Derrida, EW, 272)differance, trace, iterability, ex-appropriation, and so on ... are at work everywhere, which is to say, well beyond humanity. (p. 274)
chapter 12
14. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Self Betrayal
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At the centre of the principle, always, the One does violence to itself, and guards itself against the other. (Derrida, PF, ix)The One betrays itself in betraying the other.The self double crosses itself in double crossing the others.
15. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Notes
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16. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Bibliography
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17. International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series: 2005
Stephen David Ross Index
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