In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt reimagines the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Rather than treating them as two adjacent fields, she situates aesthetic perception before ideological thinking. If totalitarian movements are distinguished by their disdain for sensual reality, as Arendt argues, resistance must begin by rehabilitating the aesthetic sensibilities that ground ethical judgment and political action. In recent years, Arendt has been widely invoked as a prophet of the present, making The Origins of Totalitarianism a surprise bestseller. But the book ends with only a side glance toward the future, leaving the reader with a devastating diagnosis and no treatment plan. This article draws on Arendt’s conception of aesthesis as embodied perception to reassess how two of her contemporaries, Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Nabokov, sought to redefine the roles of philosophy and art in a culture dominated by ideology.
Engaging with how different generations of philosophers carry the formative influence of their teachers, I expose difficulties Ernst Cassirer's Enlightenment humanism created for his philosophy coming to terms with the Holocaust, even with his more generous sense of the mythical and non‐rational. I contrast this with Alasdair MacIntyre's sustained criticisms of liberalism and his anti‐capitalism as part of his critique of Enlightenment rationalism. In
After Virtue
and later, he develops his Thomistic Aristotelianism, showing how morality is historically and culturally woven into the fabric of communities, organised also, as he later acknowledges, through class, race, ethnic and colonial relations of power and violence. Analytic moral philosophy too often cuts morality off from its roots in history and tradition, thus limiting our visions of ourselves as ethical humans.
V. Seidler· Philosophical Investigation· 0 citations
The material and visual culture of late precolonial Andean societies-especially the Inka Empire-looked radically different from their predecessors. For millennia, the iconography of the ancient Andes was dominated by warriors, sacrificial rites, apex predators and chimerical beings whose bodies were amalgamations of multiple human and animal species. Yet by AD 1000, these images had almost entirely vanished. This study offers the first ever analysis of these dramatic transformations. Far more than simply a change of aesthetic preferences, or even a shift in ideology, it posits a series of metaphysical revolutions in which Andean sociality was fundamentally altered. The basis of personhood, the creation of value and the nature of political power itself all came to be refigured in far-reaching ways. Specifically, a once-dominant metaphysics focused on the predatory extraction of vitality from enemies disappeared, to be replaced by one grounded in reciprocal exchanges between human and nonhuman beings.
With the increasing globalization of literary studies, it is unsurprising that there should emerge numerous revisionist perspectives on previous forms of appropriation and erasure. While “literature” itself might be regarded as an embattled if not discarded concept, “British” or even “in English” might be equally contested. A debunking of traditional narratives and established canon might be anticipated, though it is perhaps less obvious what might replace them. Kim’s study opens with a consideration of “orientation” as spatial coordinate and sexual preference, followed by chapters on the evolution of the lyric subject (through Jones, Coleridge, and Shelley), on cosmopolitanism in Byron’s Eastern Tales, on female racialization in Hemans and Wheatley, and finally—and presumably of most interest to readers of this journal—on Blake, primarily The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem.
Steve Clark· Blake-an Illustrated Quarter...· 0 citations
The veil of Isis is a central image in the history of western esotericism, used by the Freemasons, Rosicrucians and Theosophists. At the turn of the nineteenth century, there was an uptick in interest in the veil from German philosophers, especially in its aesthetic dimension: with the veil, Schiller poetically considers the limits of subjectivity, Goethe explores the representation of nature, Kant exemplifies the sublime and Novalis constructs a syncretic narrative. This paper analyses these philosophers and argues that their recurring invocation of the veil of Isis reflects a fraught relationship between reason and its limits, offering an intriguing insight into the precarious status of rationality. I contend that the aesthetic figure of the veil serves a philosophical role as the site where reason grapples with its own boundaries, both critiquing and redefining the limits of reason at the emergence of modern European philosophy, suggesting that the irrational is not an impediment to thought but its very condition.