Pub Date : 2020-05-19DOI: 10.1163/24683949-12340071
G. Cipriani, Felix O. Olatunji
Volume 8.1 of Culture and Dialogue is devoted to aspects of African thought and in particular philosophy, whether theoretical or practical. This issue has been generously guest-edited by Felix O. Olatunji, of Ladoke Akintola University of Technology and Osun State University, Nigeria. As reflected in the selection of essays, the overall concern of this issue is not really to question whether there is such a thing as “African philosophy.” Thankfully, for many, the answer to this question is simply provided in the significant and multifarious corpus of texts produced across the continent of Africa and its history. Of course, any question concerning “African philosophy,” i.e. a specifically pan-African discipline with its own methods and forms, is partly different from that of “African thought” in general, for the latter includes not only processes of consciousness that reflect on the natural and human fields, but also practices whose very nature is to create or express specific cultural textures. Indeed, the choice of “African Thought” – rather than “African Philosophy” – in the title of this journal issue is a way of leaving the door open to thought-practices that would be considered as foreign or simply borderline to what is usually considered as philosophy by the Western establishment, that is, by those who have come to believe and persuade the rest of the world that the love of wisdom is the love of logos. For example, how practical, literary, or ethnological can philosophy be before it becomes something else? From this perspective, the question as to what constitutes philosophy “proper” within the context of Africa can understandably be, in itself, dismissed as a mere semantic one. This is not to say that endeavours to characterise, develop and renew a body of philosophical disciplines that is typically of Africa – African philosophy – is meaningless. Philosophy as a thinking-process that develops within specific natural and human environments, or as awakening to modes of being or the emptying nature of things or even to their relational nature, counts as one of the fundamental ingredients that contribute to building a voice for others to listen to, learn from, and in turn be renewed. On this account, what can be more justified and even natural than to seek to think through one’s own languages and customs? Of course, the histories of the countries and various regions and
《文化与对话》第8.1卷致力于非洲思想的各个方面，特别是哲学，无论是理论还是实践。本期由尼日利亚拉多克阿金托拉理工大学和奥松州立大学的Felix O. Olatunji慷慨地担任客座编辑。正如文章选集所反映的那样，这个问题的总体关注并不是真的质疑是否存在“非洲哲学”这样的东西。值得庆幸的是，对许多人来说，这个问题的答案简单地提供在整个非洲大陆及其历史上产生的重要和多样的文本语料库中。当然，任何有关“非洲哲学”的问题，即一门具有自己的方法和形式的泛非学科，都部分不同于一般的“非洲思想”，因为后者不仅包括反映自然和人类领域的意识过程，而且还包括其本质是创造或表达特定文化纹理的实践。事实上，在这期杂志的标题中选择“非洲思想”——而不是“非洲哲学”——是一种为思想实践敞开大门的方式，这些思想实践将被认为是外来的，或者仅仅是与西方机构通常认为的哲学相边缘，也就是说，那些已经开始相信并说服世界其他地方的人，对智慧的热爱就是对逻各斯的热爱。例如，哲学在变成别的东西之前，它能有多实用、多文学、多民族学?从这个角度来看，在非洲的背景下，什么构成哲学“适当”的问题本身可以理解为仅仅是一个语义问题。这并不是说，努力描绘、发展和更新一套典型的非洲哲学学科——非洲哲学——是没有意义的。哲学作为一种思维过程，在特定的自然和人类环境中发展，或者作为对存在模式的觉醒，或者对事物的空虚本质，甚至对它们的关系本质的觉醒，被视为有助于建立一个声音，让他人倾听、学习，并反过来得到更新的基本成分之一。在这种情况下，还有什么比通过自己的语言和习俗来思考更合理甚至更自然的呢?当然，还有各国和各地区的历史
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Pub Date : 2019-11-26DOI: 10.1163/24683949-12340062
G. Cipriani
Why devote an issue of Culture and Dialogue to “war and sovereignty”? The dialogue is at the heart of the question of sovereignty, its possibility, its need and justification. Aspirations for sovereignty do not only concern territories and proprieties in the concrete sense of the terms. We find issues of sovereignty in all layers of life; academia, science, business, the judiciary, or religion, amongst others. Questions of sovereignty have affected individuals as much as groups of people of all sizes in all parts of the globe. Drives to establish sovereignty have mapped the history of humanity and continue to do so. In other words the question concerning sovereignty is universal, both in space and time. Any conception of sovereignty thought to be inalienable and indivisible, as for Jean-Jacques Rousseau amongst others, is fundamentally misled. Worse, such conception can be the trigger of one of the ugliest demeanours of human experience: war – whether or not it is justified when it serves a commendable purpose outside of itself, as Carl von Clausewitz believed. Just as there is no immutable identity in-itself, there is no such a thing as the inalienability or indivisibility of sovereignty. This is not to say that sovereignty (or identity, for that matter) is a flawed conception that should be thrown into the dustbin of alleged progressive civilisations. Rather, sovereignty should be understood in relational terms, practised ethically, and determined according to circumstances. By nature and by definition, sovereignty understood as the practise of authority in order to create, preserve, or impose a closure, is profoundly relational; sovereignty is established according to criteria that determine the inside and outside of its own closure. It is at this point that metaphysical conceptions of sovereignty can pave the way for conflicts and other atrocities. Depending on the chosen criteria, insiders may feel the need to define themselves as outsiders; conversely, outsiders may resist a sovereign’s will or strategy to convert themselves to being insiders. There can be neither any abstract Leviathan nor a supreme individual, as in Jean Bodin, who operates at will regardless of the relation and circumstances. In other words, sovereignty must remain ethical before being metaphysical. Sovereignty is fundamentally human, and as such it must be chosen and decided by the very humans who enact such a sovereignty, that is, not by other individuals, ideologies, or even the divine. But even in the form of contract as
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Pub Date : 2019-05-07DOI: 10.1163/24683949-12340060
Robert Clarke
Can art, religion, or philosophy afford ineffable insights? If so, what are they? The idea of ineffability has puzzled philosophers from Laozi to Wittgenstein. In Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion and Philosophy, Silvia Jonas examines different ways of thinking about what ineffable insights might involve metaphysically, and shows which of these are in fact incoherent. Jonas discusses the concepts of ineffable properties and objects, ineffable propositions, ineffable content, and ineffable knowledge, examining the metaphysical pitfalls involved in these concepts. Ultimately, she defends the idea that ineffable insights as found in aesthetic, religious, and philosophical contexts are best understood in terms of self-acquaintance, a particular kind of nonpropositional knowledge. Ineffability as a philosophical topic is as old as the history of philosophy itself, but contributions to the exploration of ineffability have been sparse. The theory developed by Jonas makes the concept tangible and usable in many different philosophical contexts.
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Pub Date : 2019-05-07DOI: 10.1163/24683949-12340053
G. Cipriani
Culture and Dialogue 7.1 focuses on “Dialogue and Creativity.” Publishing an issue on a theme that pertains to “creativity” may, for some, appear to be simply a rehash of all-too-familiar debates. It is perhaps less common to understand creativity within the dynamics of the dialogue and from different angles, whether in the sciences or the arts, whether in terms of its forms or its dynamics, its temporality or instrumentality, its metaphysical or ethical dimensions, or, simply, in terms of its historical condition or renewing nature. Creativity may be exemplary of a rule that cannot be formulated, or, to put it in a less morally-loaded fashion, creativity may just be the renewing of worlds that do make sense to us. Creativity, therefore, is not in-nihilo. Of course not. Nor is it destructive. Or else, we should use another word. It may be destructive of the world it inexorably leaves behind, but this would already be a shift in interpretative focus. Perhaps it would be truer to say that creativity is an emptying movement that departs from the already-known, the self as we know it, the recognisable world with its laws and order; creativity leaves behind the very traditions and cultural values of all kinds that make it possible. Not only is history a necessary component of creativity, but for anyone to envisage its possibility one needs to make oneself available to the past and what has already been established. Creativity cannot therefore be ex-nihilo. Neither ex-nihilo nor in-nihilo. Creativity thus involves a double emptying movement, which – as one can easily anticipate – characterises the very nature of the dialogue: an availability to the formed world that metamorphoses into an availability to the world in formation. Creativity is therefore in essence ethical, and creative non-sense is no creativity at all. The genius artist or, rather, to avoid using a word this time as historically loaded as controversial in contemporary Western thought, the creative artist is the one who manages to almost encapsulate these two emptying movements with their respective temporal orientations into a single brush-stroke, word-stroke, sound-stroke, or body-stroke. Creativity in art becomes almost a-temporal and therefore eternal. It is the unfolding of the worldly scroll; the breath whose ethical essence owes to its nearing eternity; a virtually non-dual energy that conflates the emptying movements towards two poles, those of the formed world and the world to be formed. In this sense, creativity is not phenomenal but kinetic. Or, rather, as soon as one thinks of
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Pub Date : 2019-05-07DOI: 10.1163/24683949-12340057
C. Fitzpatrick
This paper examines the dialogical relationship between painting and mindfulness. This premise is explored with reference to the aesthetics of Mikel Dufrenne. Dufrenne’s arguments make use of a number of features that characterise mindful practice and reflect mindfulness philosophy. Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience centres on being present, focused, non-judgemental and attentive to the aesthetic object in order to realise its signification. These concepts are also given primary importance in Buddhist philosophy of mindfulness. Dufrenne’s theory lends itself ideally to understanding aesthetic experience in relation to mindfulness as well as how these experiences complement one another. Although Dufrenne does not prioritise painting, the present paper will explore painting in particular due to its embodied, gestural nature, which utilises the notion of style, reflecting the artist’s mode of being-in- the-world. Dufrenne’s ideas allow both mindfulness and painting to be understood in more comprehensive terms than that of their meanings considered individually.
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Pub Date : 2019-05-07DOI: 10.1163/24683949-12340058
Joshua M. Hall
Twentieth-century Greco-French philosopher, economist, psychoanalyst and activist Cornelius Castoriadis offers a creative new conception of imagination that is uniquely promising for social justice. Though it has been argued that this conception has one fatal flaw, the latter has recently been resolved through a creative dialogue with dance. The present article fleshes out this philosophical-dancing dialogue further, revealing a deeper layer of creative dialogue therein, namely between Castoriadis’ account of time and choreography. To wit, he reconceives time as the self-choreography of the sociohistorical, in which performance the sociohistorical plays two dancing roles simultaneously, both choreographer and choreographed dancer. More precisely, as interpreted by Castoriadis in a late essay, the creation and emergence of forms in time consists of a poetic “scansion” or “scanning” of time. Thus, the sociohistorical is both choreographer and dancer, poet and reader, reinterpreting the poetic text of time as the music for its evolving dance.
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Pub Date : 2019-05-07DOI: 10.1163/24683949-12340056
John Baldacchino
This essay starts off with a modern-day court jester (Nobel laureate Dario Fo) praising a Pope (Albino Luciani, who became John Paul I). Fo presents us with an historic moment: Luciani scandalises his Church by calling God “Mother.” With utmost seriousness, Fo appreciates the Pope’s kindness and warmth by which the artist perceives a way of scandalising the world out of complacency. In their idealised and situated presentations of the world, the sacred and the profane return the necessary to the contingent (and vice-versa) as moments of equal attention and distraction. Likewise, irony and satire mark our situated sense of the ideal by an inability to unlearn the certainties by which we are urged to construct our world. This is done by first presenting a situated pedagogical context that refuses to provide solutions presumed on measurement, certainty or finality. Secondly this begins to lay claim to the political, aesthetic and moral values that are gained through art’s ironic disposition. Thirdly, through our contingent states of being we begin to understand how education is culturally conditioned and why we need to shift it to another gear – that of unlearning through a weak pedagogy. An atheist, Fo suggests that thanks to Pope Luciani, we now could endear to the Holy Spirit as a spirito ridens, a spirit that laughs. Here one finds a kenotic sense that gives us a glimpse in how an ironic disposition owes its strength and effectiveness to a weak pedagogy. By dint of such weakness, the jester’s pedagogical disposition becomes a form of resistance, exiting the Court in order to be with the people and consequently transformed by the people.
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Pub Date : 2019-05-07DOI: 10.1163/24683949-12340059
Å. Andersson
{"title":"Observations of Lightness","authors":"Å. Andersson","doi":"10.1163/24683949-12340059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24683949-12340059","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":160891,"journal":{"name":"Culture and Dialogue","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122639685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-07DOI: 10.1163/24683949-12340055
Rudi Capra
The present paper identifies creativity as a crucial component in the pedagogical process envisaged by Chan masters in the Song era. In particular, the paper considers ritual dialogues between masters and students involving questions and answers (wenda 問答) taken from the renowned collection known as the Blue Cliff Record (biyan lu 碧巖錄). The first section is concerned with the definition of creativity and its role within the contextual framework of Chan pedagogy in the Song era. The second section analyses some significant ritual dialogues included in the Blue Cliff Record with the aim of exploring a variety of different creative expressions in the considered Chan narratives. The third and last section illustrates how the ritualized performance of dialogical encounters, and by extension the use of gongan literature, entails and promotes the recourse to creativity as a functional strategy in Chan practice.
{"title":"Raising Questions, Cutting Fingers: Chan Buddhism and the Cultivation of Creativity through Ritual Dialogues","authors":"Rudi Capra","doi":"10.1163/24683949-12340055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24683949-12340055","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The present paper identifies creativity as a crucial component in the pedagogical process envisaged by Chan masters in the Song era. In particular, the paper considers ritual dialogues between masters and students involving questions and answers (wenda 問答) taken from the renowned collection known as the Blue Cliff Record (biyan lu 碧巖錄).\u0000The first section is concerned with the definition of creativity and its role within the contextual framework of Chan pedagogy in the Song era. The second section analyses some significant ritual dialogues included in the Blue Cliff Record with the aim of exploring a variety of different creative expressions in the considered Chan narratives. The third and last section illustrates how the ritualized performance of dialogical encounters, and by extension the use of gongan literature, entails and promotes the recourse to creativity as a functional strategy in Chan practice.","PeriodicalId":160891,"journal":{"name":"Culture and Dialogue","volume":"352 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128955429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-07DOI: 10.1163/24683949-12340054
J. Pauley
This essay begins by demonstrating how conversations can end before they have a chance to authentically begin. Conversations are stultified by patterns in the human ecology. The first pattern identified is “self-obliviousness” in conversation. “Self-obliviousness” is then tied to patterns of both radical self-assurance and self-diminishment. The underlying idea and argument is that adequate self-awareness is a necessary condition for (authentic) conversation and this condition is only met as human beings recognize their own selves as relational. The argument then turns to remedies to the pattern. Metacognition as exercised in relation to literary art can reveal the conditions for identifying and recognizing the damaging patterns. By the end of the essay the conditions for creativity in conversation are conflated with the formation of empathetic dispositions and these are only possible through understanding the self in equal relation to other selves. The arguments and examples are from contemporary United States Culture, but the damaging patterns can easily be recognized as elements of the human condition generally.
{"title":"Conditions for Creativity in Conversation","authors":"J. Pauley","doi":"10.1163/24683949-12340054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24683949-12340054","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay begins by demonstrating how conversations can end before they have a chance to authentically begin. Conversations are stultified by patterns in the human ecology. The first pattern identified is “self-obliviousness” in conversation. “Self-obliviousness” is then tied to patterns of both radical self-assurance and self-diminishment. The underlying idea and argument is that adequate self-awareness is a necessary condition for (authentic) conversation and this condition is only met as human beings recognize their own selves as relational. The argument then turns to remedies to the pattern. Metacognition as exercised in relation to literary art can reveal the conditions for identifying and recognizing the damaging patterns. By the end of the essay the conditions for creativity in conversation are conflated with the formation of empathetic dispositions and these are only possible through understanding the self in equal relation to other selves. The arguments and examples are from contemporary United States Culture, but the damaging patterns can easily be recognized as elements of the human condition generally.","PeriodicalId":160891,"journal":{"name":"Culture and Dialogue","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127764304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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