Dialogue and Universalism

This article tends to connect phenomenological research with the psychoanalytical approach by focusing on the issue of conflict as the crucial dimension of human nature and its dynamics. On this basis, it becomes clear that human nature cannot be explained through a strict causal schema; rather, it can be grasped by exploring the dynamic motivational structures of experience which are expressed in the ambivalent tensions and striving tendencies of persons as subjects of the lifeworld. I stress that conflict is not a mere additional and accidental characteristic of experience that can somehow be eliminated, but it rather affects the fundamental structure of personal experience and should therefore be understood as a constitutive moment of human nature. Thereby, my claim is that both self-experience and the development of community can only be understood in the light of motivational conflicts.

Gernot Böhme’s philosophical anthropology combines a historistic-descriptive and a normative approach (“historical models of man,” the axiological “sovereign man” project).The author describes both types of philosophical narrative in detail, together with the categorial and argumentative inconsistencies which appear on their crossing point. His thesis is that the German philosopher attempts to neutralize these aporias by reference to the category of “relief” (Entlastung) and an argumentative strategy close to the position of thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, who made use of the “relief” category in his critical bioethical analyses.

This article attempts to present Gehlen’s concept of language in the context of his project of philosophical anthropology. The emphasis will be put on showing the role of language in: 1) the formation of motor and sensory imagination, 2) the crystallization of human drives and, finally, 3) the development of cognitive competences. Gehlen refers in his project directly to the thoughts of Herder, and therefore—according to the chronological order—a reconstruction of the origins of “the linguistic anthropology” will start from outlining the main objectives of Herder’s philosophy of language (the first chapter), and then will consider Gehlen’s considerations devoted to the genesis of language competence and to the impact of speech for the constitution of human self-knowledge (second chapter).

This paper discusses the criticism of naturalism based on the irreducibility of first-person-perspective facts. This critique considers naturalism insufficient since it proposes the view of reality as a centerless dimension. However, simply reintegrating subjective facts into a naturalistic view of reality we eventually produce a split situation in which conscious and self-conscious forms of life require a special consideration, thus appearing as separated from the whole of reality. In order to overcome what turns out to be a dualistic interpretation of reality, this paper considers Helmuth Plessner’s nonnaturalistic approach. It elaborates the notion of positionality and aspectivity as characteristics of all natural forms of life, thus leading to the consideration of reality an essentially centered dimension and of humans as part of nature.

I analyse Brentano’s argumentative strategy from his lectures in the Deskriptive Psychologie and how he introduces and reframes his fundamental psychological theses. His approach provides us with the reasons why psychology can be distinguished into different domains of investigation and how the tasks of one of these domains—the descriptive-psychological one—imply a specific understanding about the structure of consciousness. Thereby a mereology of consciousness is developed, which offers the theoretical background to the aforementioned reframing of the Brentanian theses.

The paper offers a systematic account of Vasily Sesemann’s aesthetics. First, I argue that, due to the primacy this aesthetics grants to intuition, intentionality and the objectivity of aesthetic values, its underlying principles are decidedly phenomenological. Secondly, I offer an account of the general structures of perceptual acts and I contend that the distinctive nature of aesthetic perception lies in the unique disposition of the aesthetic attitude. Thirdly, I maintain that there are three fundamentally different ways in which one can speak of aesthetic truth: in terms of formal requirements, subjective material requirements, and objective material requirements. Fourthly, I open a short dialogue between Sesemann and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and argue that an artwork fulfills the objective requirements of material truth when it succeeds in disclosing those levels of experience, on which the theoretical and practical attitudes rest and from which they take their departure.

This paper attempts to answer questions about, first, the historical motives which brought the “race” issue into the focus of phenomenological reflection, and, secondly, the theoretical grounding for calling such reflection “phenomenological.” The basis for this reconstruction will be the psychological race theory developed in the 1920s and 30s by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, a somewhat forgotten student of Edmund Husserl, and its rooting in the history of the phenomenological movement. Discussed will be both, the theory’s historical background—which, in keeping with the paper’s main thesis, is best-expressed by Max Scheler’s reflections on “European patriotism”—and its relation to Husserl’s concept of phenomenology as a “strictly scientific philosophy.”

One of the constitutional moments of the structure of kinesthesia—that is the motions of the body—is the practical orientedness of motions towards something. In this article I will deal with this structural moment in the practical life of the subject. I will first differentiate between teleology in the instinctive movements of the body and the intentionality in the practical activities of the subject. Whereas the former refers to the primary and instinctive orientedness of the bodily motions toward something generally determined fulfilling the instinctive needs of the body, the latter is to be understood as the pre-reflexive orientedness of the bodily motions toward a goal in the practical sphere of subject-life. At the end I will examine Husserl’s idea of the universal teleological structure of reason, which has its roots in the primary instinctive life of the subject.

The question of the subjective and embodied character of appearing that was an important issue particularly in post-Husserlian phenomenology is posed in different ways and contexts by Edmund Husserl. One can see how—even according to the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. The second book. Phenomenological Investigations of Constitution subjectivity was not grounded in the acts of the I that it lent the body its subjective character—thanks to the originally egoic character of its own experiences my body also can be my own. In the paper this position is confronted with a deeper foundation of subjectivity than the I of acts. Husserl also sees in deeper levels of lived experience an immediate, non-intentional self-immersion in one’s own experiences. The question that we would like to outline here is: in what sense this self-experience is necessarily bodily, what is the mutual relationship between subjectivity and bodiliness in the later Husserl’s works in respect to his conception of phenomenality.

In the paper the concept of indistinctness is examined. In the author’s view, indistinctness is present in all the aspects of the world. The problem of indistinctness is apprehended in four steps, namely, by 1. claiming and proving that the world of indistinctness and vagueness enhances our creative intelligence; 2. examining who and when discovered the advantages of indistinctness; 3. maintaining that precision is usually of advantage, but not always; 4. proving the misery of reductionistic programmes.

The paper presents a new understanding of freedom. It refers to the concept of ideology and the interpellation of Louis Althusser. In this new perspective freedom is a phenomenon from the sphere of social communication, and, more broadly, a process of socialization, in which plays the role of a subtle medium of interiorization of ideological philosophical universalisms. This specific role of freedom and especially its prevalence in the contemporary world has its fundamental anchored in the common within the framework of capitalism society private ownership of the workforce.

Genealogy is a well-known philosophical method, often used by a disciplines of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. It is seen as part of a broader programme—one that offers critical tools for examining the modes of production of the modern political subject. The aim of this article is to show the usefulness of the genealogical method as a mode of critique separate from the philosophical programme it often belongs to. In order to do this, the paper examines the transformations of genealogy from Nietzsche to Foucault as well as the common lines of critique.

In my taxonomy, the tragic outlook is one of four types of outlooks, beside organological, mechanistic and personalistic. Its essence is the idea of non-integrity of being, non-integrity of man, and a dissonance between the quality-ridded scene of the becoming being and the creative actor. The tragic knowledge is a vital component part of the tragic outlook; it is inherent in Carl Jaspers and Christianity’s beliefs but as something transcended in the concept of salvation from the tragic. The Nietzschean challenge could be this “Be an affirming, creative way of life” upon seeing which the becoming “will not vomit.”

The future will tell whether or not the European Union is developing a political philosophy of its own. But the current trend indicates several interesting features structurally different, or asymmetric, to the experiences with the evolution of key notions of political philosophy in relation to the past experience with the development of statehood. The paper gives examples which call for deepened research and provides stimulating material for a new and innovative reflection on the process and substance of European integration, this most unique feature of political history in the course of the 20th century.

Karl Marx is forgotten as a philosopher today not because he failed, but because the praxis-philosophical core of his Critique of Political Economy has not been rightly perceived. Marx’s Critique of Political Economy is a negative theory which takes it upon itself to uncover the negative aspects of capitalist values theory. It is not selfgrounded, and substantiated solely by Marx’s earlier writings. It cannot serve as the basis for any kind of common, ecological economy, its importance lies only in its practical-philosophical conclusion that we must overcome the human- and nature-destructive value logic of capitalism.

The article is dedicated to the pragmatic social critique as one of the most influential patterns of contemporary social critique. It is focused on the evolution of Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology of the critique, which initially refused to play an overtly critical role and restricted itself to reconstructing the modalities of critique social actors recourse to in their everyday practices. In his most recent publication, however, Boltanski seems to return to Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of sociology as a critical sociology. According to Boltanski, the critical vocation of sociology is supposed to answer the increasing critical deficit that social actors experience in the context of contemporary societies with their complex forms of domination.The aim of our study is to make this two-sided transformation comprehensible by putting into question the underlying methodological and political arguments. The pragmatic sociology seems methodologically more convincing but politically weaker than Bourdieu’s critical sociology. Moreover, it seems more legitimate but less efficient in its critical effects. How could this dilemma of social critique opposing requirements of legitimacy and requirements of efficiency be solved?

The article aims to study the usages of the “people” as a critical idea in the texts of two contemporary radical political philosophers: Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. The author’s intention is not so much to point out the divergence between them, rather it is to grasp a common trend imposing the figure of the “people” as a main subject of the political and as a source of a desired, but hardly conceivable social change. The strong appeal to an epochal rupture, yet unsupported by any utopia, could be considered as a double crisis—of the institutions of liberal democracy as well as of the critical imagination itself.

Karel Kosík’s book Dialectics of the Concrete. A Study on Problems of Man and World, elaborated under the impact of the de-Stalinization process, is one of the important attempts to rethink Marxist philosophy; it was an attempt to overcome the theoretical stagnation caused by the Stalinist period. It considers the state of Marxist theory, its relations to the past theoretical tradition, as well as it attempts to develop a critical and creative dialogue with different contemporary theoretical conceptions, then hegemonic. Through his reading of Marx and his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy project, Kosík searches for ways of discussing different relationships between philosophy and economics in the contemporary world, and, in particular, he analyzes different theoretical or ideological forms of the reified characteristics of the pseudoconcrete world of care (starost), homo oeconomicus and economic factor.

The article takes on the problem of ideology, critical consciousness and social criticism and distinguishes two distinct ways of thematizing it. The first approach is developed within the post-Hegelian framework. According to this paradigm, critique of ideology is a means of transgressing the antagonistic forms of socialization and emancipating humanity from the false forms of consciousness and corresponding irrational and oppressive social institutions. The postmodern paradigm questions two basic assumptions of the modern approach: firstly, it denies that there exists a possibility to find purely rational and universal contexts, where ideological shackles could be exposed and thrown away; secondly, it rejects the idea that we can rely on the concept of self-awareness or critical reflection as informing our action and elevating our understanding of the social being to the higher level (self-enlightenment model), for critical consciousness has no direct consequences. While portraying the postmodern paradigm, Stanley Fish’s views, considered exemplary to the postmodern rendition of the problem of ideology, will be discussed in a more detailed manner. In the final section of the article a provisional attempt is being made to elucidate what is the task of social criticism within the postmodern paradigm.