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How might a phenomenologist engage the notion of the mysterious? If ‘the mysterious’ indicates what is beyond the reach of, but still related to, the phenomenal realm, one might begin with the notion of horizonality in Husserl’s description of the synthetic constitution of a world. A world, phenomenologically described, is a nexus of actualities and potentialities: conscious acts and objects of conscious...
In this essay I will make use of a procedure and concept of truth that emerged from the work of Brentano and Husserl that runs against the currents and idols of our age. In its most recent articulation in the work of Heidegger, truth asaletheiais an attempt to see the truth of Being as it discloses itself to understanding. In this way, truth is an activity of disclosure that has two moments: coming...
When Oedipus meets the Sphinx – a monster that plagues the city of Thebes – he doesn’t know that he is on his way to becoming a monster himself. The Sphinx proposes a riddle, the content of which would have remained a mystery had not some collectors of mythological gossip from the late antiquity included it in their anthologies. The most famous, most detailed, and most relied-upon version of the riddle...
I will argue here that Tennyson’s InMemoriamis an authentic, sustained response to what Derrida has called differance.1My reading ofIn Memoriamis informed primarily by Derrida’s essayDemeurea discussion of Maurice Blanchot’s short story, “The Instant of My Death,” which is the story of a young man, to some extent Blanchot himself, who is forced from his Château by French Nazi soldiers, sentenced to...
In the month of April1865Walt Whitman wrote of his anguish and the ancient mystery of pain as well as the sadness and grief of a nation that mourned the deathofitsPresident Abraham Lincoln. Whitman a poet particularly devoted toAmericaexpressed in his poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomedthe mysteryof pain in an individual and in a nation as he associated the meaningofthe lilac thebirdthe...
When we speak of the aesthetics of mystery, do we allow that mystery may differ from one culture to another? Is mystery the same experience to someone Chinese, for instance, as it is to someone English? This is one question about the phenomenology of mystery that this essay considers in the context of five short pieces by Jorge Luis Borges, drawn from his earliest collections of talesHistoria universal de la infamia...
The advanced and uncompromising Sufi’ism taught by some Persian poets makes ethics subservient to philosophy. Virtue, as they conceive it, is not an end, but a means: the end is union with God, through Love. Thus their poems are based on a transcendental pantheism; however, they work out from the moral, not the metaphysical, standpoint. Among these genuine Sufi poets, Jalaluddin Rumi is without a...
Fiction offers a lens through which one may see the world, as well as the person next door, as well as oneself. In both life and fiction, personal transformation may occur, and may be attributed to such things as a particular event, a resolved conflict, an epiphany. Occasionally, change occurs in a character for which there is no logical explanation. In J. M. Coetzee’s novel.DisgraceDavid Lurie’s...
What would Heidegger, Gadamer and Mamardashvili, two Germans and a Soviet-Georgian, heirs of German Idealism and an heir of Marxism-Leninism, a self-taught student of the Stalin era, have in common? It seems obvious that each of them would have a different path to walk on. Nevertheless, they were all pursuing the same goal: they wanted to recover philosophy from oblivion. All of them, Heidegger, Gadamer...
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s serial adventures of Sherlock Holmes comprise the best representatives of the subgenre of mystery writing called the ‘detective story.’ The word, ‘mystery,’ invites an inherent ambiguity and tension as it refers to the profound, the inexplicable, or the secretive. ‘Mystery’ carries both secular and non-secular references. The finite Being of humankind in its existential situatedness...
This essay examines how crucial incidents are to the artistic appeal of such African autobiographies as Ezekiel Mphahlele’sDown Second AvenueWole Soyinka’sAke: The Years of ChildhoodCamara Laye’sThe African Childand Peter Abrahams’sTell Freedom. In these autobiographies, incidents which the autobiographers utilize in the telling of their tales enable us to determine how much of what we read in the...
The following is from “The Voyage of Maildun.” Its original date of composition is unknown. It is has been found copied down into medieval Irish manuscripts such asLebor na hUidre(The Book of the Dun Cowca. 1100 AD) andLebor Buide Lecáin(The Yellow Book of Lecan). P. W. Joyce introduces this ancient tale as “an account of the adventures of Maildun and his crew, and of the wonderful things they saw...
Sometime ago, one of those people that would never be a real friend, told me that he intended to publish his autobiography and asked me to check a rough copy of it. I must confess that I was flabbergasted when I listened to him, for I had known his life through our conversations and I knew that there was nothing interesting to write about it, which was what I tried to tell him without offending his...
The drama of the Jacobean period explores evil with passion but also with an almost scientific determination and focus. The evil in the Jacobean tragedy is both insidious and violent, often politically motivated but interwoven with sexual intensity, eloquent though at times rhetorically overwrought, and, despite its fanciful theatricality, chillingly executed on stage. The evil in the plays of Marston,...
The concept of “translatability” may be analyzed within the framework of the discussion on the rationality of the standards that guide the processes of interpretation of the social sciences. In particular, the aspect of the comprehension of the meaning of a symbolic expression must be considered in that it presents different conditions depending on whether a “relativistic” or a “universalistic” position...
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