Dialogue and Universalism

In the first part of the article the concept of associative duties and their justification as distinctive from general moral duties are analyzed. The second part considers associative duties to fellow citizens and distinguishing features of those duties such as reciprocity, mutuality and equal status. In the final part the author deals with specific cases concerning refugees and stresses arguments as to why the associative duties of cocitizens should overcome duties to refugees, as well as the failures of those arguments. It is argued that the status of refugees is different from the status of other non-citizens, such as immigrants, due to the lack of institutional representation and protection.

In the first part of The Aporias of Open Society the author enters a polemic with the views of Karl R. Popper, who links open society to capitalism, sees it endangered by totalitarianism, and considers Plato, Hegel and Marx as its intellectual fathers. In the second part she makes broad reference to the findings of global capitalism scholars, including Popper student George Soros, in defining the capitalist system’s self-destructive traits, which she sees as confirmation of Soros’ claim that open society’s most serious enemy today is itself.

The article discusses the political (and potentially emancipatory) meaning of refusal. Against the dominating philosophical perspective, praising participation and sense of community, it argues that the acts of refusal may (or even must) play an important role in resistance against power. Some elements of a possible theory of refusal are to be found in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, especially in his famous essay on Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, but also in Dialogues (with C. Parnet) and Mille Plateaux (with Félix Guattari), where he coins the crucial concept of becoming-imperceptible.

The article concerns the problem of master and slave in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Then I compare this problem with the issues discussed in the Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, an interesting book by Susan Buck-Morss, published in 2009.

In this paper the author tries to explore (or at least to indicate) the problem of the social function of philosophy in the contemporary world. This world is characterized by universal modernization and in the last decades by globalization and unification, but at the same time also by controversies and contradictions which reveal tendencies of human regression and degeneration. Philosophy must remain a study of general and fundamental nature of a human-produced world. As such philosophy produces potentialities of critical thinking, provides social investigations, and—at least in principle—gives people the power of an adequate understanding of our world, its fundamental characteristics and main tendencies. Thus philosophy is a ground for a reasonable social practice and adequate policies.

The paper examines the evolution of Marek Siemek’s “dialogical principle.” The early version of this principle, sketched in the essay “Dialogue and Its Myth” (1974), meets several criteria of the phenomenology of dialogue and even hermeneutics. However, Siemek has continued to change his concept of dialogue over the decades. In his recent book, Freedom, Reason, Intersubjectivity (2002), he explores transcendental preconditions of free and reasonable activism, i.e., the Fichtean “limitative synthesis” of I and Non-I and its applications in social interrelations. He no longer considers the empirical, anthropological, and phenomenological aspects of dialogics and mutual recognition. He also replaces mutuality with reciprocity, asymmetry with symmetry, and phenomenology with transcendentalism.

The aim of the article is to present Marek Siemek’s interpretation of modernity, focusing on problems related to understanding of the modern subject that arose (and still arise) from the reading of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Siemek seems to endorse a general drive of Habermas’ theory of intersubjective communication intended to overcome the dialectics of Enlightenment and to complete the project of modernity. However, his position is that its foundation can be traced back to the philosophies of Fichte and Hegel and their mutually complementary intersubjectivity models. Siemek seeks to reconcile the idea of the philosophy of intersubjectivity underlying Fichte’s and Hegel’s philosophies with the tenets of the philosophy of consciousness.

The paper analyses relations between Marek J. Siemek’s views and Louis Althusser’s Marxism. The French philosophical tradition, especially structuralism, plays an important role in Siemek’s standpoint which overcomes the opposition between Hegelian Marxism and the so-called Structuralist Marxism.

The paper discusses with critical intent Marek J. Siemek’s conception of transcendental philosophy. Firstly, theory of knowledge does not belong to the epistemic level of reflection (Siemek’s stance) but it is precisely the other way around; namely, it is due to transcendental philosophy (critique of cognitive faculties) that it was possible to distinguish metaphysical, ontological and epistemological questions. Secondly, transcendental philosophy enables us to discriminate between the ontological and epistemological questions (Emil Lask, Edmund Husserl) and, as a result, to take up within its scope traditional epistemological questions such as adequacy of cognition. Thirdly, Siemek’s Fichtean interpretation of transcendental philosophy is untenable. It overestimates the role of spontaneity and practical moment in the constitution of the world and underestimates the receptive moment in cognition. It seems that more plausible way of understanding transcendental philosophy can be found in the writings of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism where within the field of transcendental consciousness more objectified meanings and subject as such are being constituted.

I myself and Marek Siemek could never accept the philosophical standpoint of the other, nevertheless we agreed with each other in a very important respect. For both of us philosophy was always a vital questioning, and not a kind of neutral science about the world. To Marek Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was the starting point, to me Martin Heidegger, later Frierich Nietzsche; Marek wanted to create a new unified explanation of our world, I have denied to possibility of such a unified explanation.To make my attitude comprehensible, I gave in this paper a kind of report on the conference at which in different talks the crisis of our world was discussed. The standpoints of the early György Lukács, that of Edmund Husserl, and Heidegger, and that of Carl Schmidt were interpreting. All of them wanted to give a kind of solution to our existential crisis. To me the name of Nietzsche was lacking; I think namely that only Niettzsche was the philosopher at the beginning of our crisis of modernity, who could see: the “last man” who killed God, cannot do anything else as to accept his existential crisis. There is no solution.

My essay is based on the lecture I presented at the Conference “The German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration to the United States and United Kingdom. 1933–1945” (Bard College, Annandale, New York 12504, August 13–15, 2002, Session: “Happy End?”). I decided to publish it (for the first time) in honour of my friend Marek Siemek, because I think this theme is very actual, especially in light of the current crisis in Europe connected with the problems of fugitives and refugees. Ernst Bloch and Stefan Zweig, both Jews, reacted in opposite ways to their forced fate of being on the run from persecution and murder. They felt like strangers in their exile. Ernst Bloch, a stranger to English and other languages, wrote his Principle of Hope in his mother tongue. Stefan Zweig, a brilliant translator, felt himself “imprisoned in a language, which he could not use”: Europe was his homeland. Tired “of all ideas in the future” he committed suicide far away from home. Ernst Bloch came back to Germany after the Second World War—first to the German Democratic Republic, and then, in 1961 to the Federal Republic of Germany. He continued his lifework against resignation and despair in keeping with what he outlined in his Principle of Hope: with his “real utopia” social model, and existence “without expropriation and alienation in real democracy,” where “there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland.”

The article deals with the concept or the image of God in the Hebrew Bible and the various understandings and interpretations of it by Jewish thinkers through generations. The biblical text, full of contradictions and anthropomorphic assertions about God, was a source of discomfort for Jewish philosophers and theologians. Therefore, the sublimation and distillation of the text was necessary, and it was done by use of different hermeneutical methods. The article deals with various attributes of the biblical God, and presents different theological and philosophical interpretations of that issue by major Jewish thinkers.

The woman being is a human being. This paper critiques gender politics and questions the mistreatment, the second class status and some of the socio-cultural gender roles of women. It posits critical education of men and women, sensitivity and sensibleness as the surest way out of the quagmire.

I present—in an extremely sketchy form—a model of two-level, open, plastic and multidimensional human nature. Due to the included attribute of multidimensionality this model opposes the reductive conceptions of man dominating in today’s philosophy. The main objective of the paper is the ontological status of man, especially the ontic foundation of multidimensional man. I demonstrate that this status remains a riddle; one only knows that from the ontological perspective man is a wholly exceptional object, not explainable by to-date ontological constructions.

A growing number of geologists, geophysicists, and other Earth scientists now claim that human caused changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, oceans, and land are so pervasive as to constitute a new geological epoch characterized by humanity’s impact on the planet. They argue that these changes are so profound that future geologists will easily recognize a discernible boundary in the stratigraphy of rock separating this new epoch from the previous geological epoch, i.e., the Holocene. They propose to name this new geological epoch the “Anthropocene,” a term meaning the age of man. Common to this view is the claim that humans are now the ecologically dominant force on Earth. This paper compares the understanding of human self-identity developed by the defenders of the Anthropocene discourse with the understanding of human self-identity developed by radical ecologists. It concludes by arguing that only an ecologically and dialogically informed conception of human self-identity can provide an adequate point of departure for an ecologically benign form of human dwelling on this planet.

The author defines moralisation as cultural processes marked by a rise in moralistic argumentation (also in areas in which such argumentation has heretofore not played a meaningful role) to a degree which raises questions and doubts of a philosophical and sociological nature. This is developed on in detail in the sections “The moralisation of the world and suffering,” “The moralisation of everyday life and history,” “The moralisation of knowledge” and “The moralisation of human nature.” The closing section of the article, “Moralisation and morality,” focuses on the relation between the described moralistic approach and the changes broadly-understood moral awareness is undergoing in the contemporary world.

This paper examines four issues concerning human being as a multi-dimensional being. Firstly, the dualist and tripartite conceptions of human beings are discussed. The dichotomist (dualist, bipartite) view of human beings—according to which man comprises of spiritual soul and body—underscores in a strongly materialistic world the idea that faith, spirituality, belief, trust and confidence are soft options in daily life. Secondly, the author investigates the possibility of a differentiation and interchange of human fields of experience as components of human nature. In the African and Christian approaches taken into account in this paper, human being comprises a differentiated multiplicity of fields, components, dimensions and facets of experience integrated into a wholesome creature that experiences God, itself, other human beings and the natural environment. Each component of human being, though radically different, is of the same importance. Thirdly, the modern integral and differential conceptions of human being as a multi-dimensional entity are discussed. The approach in this paper is of postmodern non-reductionist type; according to it, human beings are comprised differentially of a multiplicity of fields, modes, dimensions and aspects of experience dynamically integrated in a union.

In the treatise on the construction of man De opificio hominis, Gregory of Nyssa argues that man is qualitatively superior to other natural creations of God. Man is created in the image of God, a condition not found, at least explicitly, for other creatures. It is up to him whether he will digest this image in question or not. Despite the superiority attributed to man, it is not claimed in any way that he shall behave towards the rest of nature by a way of domination.

The paper questions the scientific rather than ideological problem of an eventual biological successor of the mankind. The concept of superhumans is usually linked to Nietzsche or to Heidegger’s criticism or even to the ideology of Nazism. However, the superhuman can be also viewed as that biological species who will originate from humans eventually in the course of evolution.While the society is reached a natural limitation of globalism, technics depends on the amount of utilized energy, and the mind is restricted by its carrier, i.e. by the brain, it is language which seems to be the frontier of any future development of humans or superhumans. Language is a symbolization of the world and thus doubling in an ideal or virtual world fruitful for creativity and the modeling of the former. Consequently, the gap between the material and the ideal world is both produced by and productive for language.