TrentPhilosophersonFrenchPhilosophy
Monday 15 April 2013
Monday 5 March 2012
Bergson ,Time and the world we live in.
Friday 2 March 2012
Henri Bergson: Time and the calculation of life.
Merleau-Ponty on Cartesian Dualism
Lyotard, Knowledge
Creative Evolution
Creative Evolution
In Henri Bergson’s 1907 Book L’Evolution Creatice Bergson highlights the perceived flaws in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Bergson’s ultimate goal is to show that the fact of evolution must be seen as the product of a dynamic impulse namely the Élan Vital (or vital impulse) that is the principle of all life. This is the creative force within his early theory of Duration.
Bergson’s theory attacks the other two main contemporary theories of evolution; Mechanism and Finalism. Mechanism (for example Darwin’s theory) presents functionally unified structures (such as the eye) as the outcome of a multiplicity of small changes, each independent of each other but still leading to a functional result. Bergson points out that an immense number of variations are required for sight to be possible and even more improbable that the changes would be retained over eons to eventually become sight. Finalism suggests a final purpose and that life is following a blue print as the centuries pass, where our biology improves based on a predetermined path. The biggest problem that Bergson found with these two theories is that they share the idea that nature never produces anything new. The outcome of a biological process is always already present in the genetic material of the subject or imposed by a creator with a divine plan for example:
“reality appears to us as a uninterrupted surging of novelties, of which each has no sooner emerged in the present than it has fallen back into the past” (Bergson 1911)
Bergson held that change means growth, growth means creation and creation means freedom. This led him to develop his own theory. Bergson’s Élan Vital is a vital force that acts like the telos, except at the start of creation rather than the end. This explains where the additional genetic material is gained. For Bergson, evolution displays a form of progress, but not the gradual realisation of a divine plan.
The best way to explain Bergson’s evolution is, in own words, as more an explosion outward leading species down various paths rather than one grand progressive line.
Bibliography
Bergson H (1911) “Creative Evolution” Trans by Mitchell, A. Random House New York
Gutting G (2001) “French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century” Cambridge University press Cambridge
Thursday 1 March 2012
Felix Ravaisson: Of Habit in relation to morality
Derrida and Structure
The Structuralist project effectively ended with Derrida's essay "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences". For Derrida, Structuralism, and indeed the entirety of Western Philosophy (perhaps barring the pre-socratics), had been working on the presupposition of a centre, or "transcendental signified" that lent a system or structure a degree of stability that limited what Derrida calls "free play", the constant shifting of meaning, continual displacement. What comes next is deconstruction - broadly, the exposing of metaphysical presupposition in discourse, and unfortunately quite indefinable.
There is what might be called an ethical dimension to deconstruction; in any discourse there is an opposition between the privileged and the marginal, and what the seismic effect of deconstruction does is to continually displace and demonstrate the instability of the privileged's place as the privileged and the marginal's place as the marginal. The problem I find here is the relationship between theory, the world of which deconstruction unquestionably transforms, and practice. Although I might not be placing enough emphasis on the overlapping nature of the world of theory and the world of practice I find it difficult to envision the deconstructive mode of thought penetrating everyday practice, the solidity of which seems necessary for it to work. I am also aware that my difficulty itself has not yet been deconstructed.
Tom Cumming n0276389
Bibliography: Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference (Routledge: London, 2001)
Blanchot and Defining Literature
Blanchot and the Literary Text
Maurice Blanchot tries to resist canonisation when discussing literature. This could be potentially difficult as the literary piece would have to be something that no one else has ever read before so as to not fit into a literary canon. Themes and ideas frequently circulate and are recycled and rejuvenated throughout different novels in different eras so it’s not very often that anything new ever gets produced. However, Blanchot argues to consider every text in a singular manor to get the full extent and meaning of the words and this meaning will then transcend time to mean something to the next generation. This is the only true way to be able to read a text, according to Blanchot, and regardless of whether an understanding is gained from the text or not. Blanchot illustrates texts a have many interpretations all of which are valid in spite of them being different.
Furthering this, Blanchot believed that a literary text is solely individual to its self. This becomes hard to understand when taking into consideration the mass production of books that we know have in the twenty first century. Does this then reduce the meaning literary texts have because they are so easily accessible? Should we go back to the times in which texts were only produced and sold do those deemed worthy to read them? If that is the case then who would be worthy enough to read them in our society?
The mass production of books is not something Blanchot dwells upon because it is not the production of the literature that is important but the quality of the message within. All this reduces down to the text itself. The book is not just the words written on the page or whether or the message on the page is conveyed to the person but whether the deeper meaning and significance is felt by the reader. The continuation of the meanings held within literature, for Blanchot, shows the power that it has to be able to continue through time to enlighten others.
Natasha Ekin N0266642
Foucault, Sexuality
Wednesday 29 February 2012
Foucault, Madness
Ideas are often strengthened if they are contrasted with a concept deemed to be their opposite; by undermining one, the other seems more tangible. Foucault argues that madness can only exist through reason, and are therefore fundamentally tied to one another. Contrastingly, knowledge and power are two that can function independent of each other. It could be argued that it is the ‘madmen’ who think outside the box who possess a more knowledgeable, coherent understanding of the world, whilst it is society who possess the power to marginalise them. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was considered insane by Creationists, and yet the work of a genius by others. If it is possible for people to coexist in a society when their fundamental beliefs are so different, it is logical to expect the ‘normal’ and the ‘madmen’ to live with the understanding that for one person’s opinion to be considered rational, the other person’s does not have to be irrational.
The rejection of difference in society is inherent in Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’, in which Western society’s preconceived notions of the Orient has resulted in many people considering their way of living as abnormal. It is a system of thought and representations cultivated not from fact, but through imagined constructs present in literary and historical texts which portray the East as “Other”. If Western society was informed about the realities of the Orient, rather than its stereotypes, it could theoretically reduce cultural marginalisation. The same can be applied to the notion of ‘madness’. Marginalising people simply for thinking in a different way is illogical, as norms and values themselves are something that are socially constructed rather than natural. It is necessary that we challenge the division of reason and madness in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of it.
Emily Nelson, N0217820
Tuesday 28 February 2012
Foucault, The Prison System and Society by Victoria Ellis N0284959
Friday 24 February 2012
Maurice Blanchot, Literature and Revolution
In “Literature and the Right of Death,” Maurice Blanchot asserts that literature begins with a question which it addresses to language. For Blanchot, beneath the ruins of literature—the paradoxical “cliché” of the literary critique—there resides an exceptional “force laboring in the secrecy” of the literary object: “If literature coincides with nothing for just an instant,” Blanchot explains, “it is immediately everything, and this everything begins to exist.” [301-2]
Through the example of the ideation of the strove—emerging from the desire for warmth—that irrevocably transforms its constituent elements of stone and cast iron, Blanchot traces the enigmatic force at work in the literary object to Hegel and Marx, and their emphasis on the historicity of the object, as the embodiment of the changing state of things—the gesture of “denial and destruction” achieved through the work—that is exhibited in the particular—in the author—and in general, in the revealed existant of the literary object that leaves an indelible imprint on the world [313-14]: the movement from “nothing to everything.” [318]
This action of literature is, for Blanchot, analogous with revolution: not only in the conceit of it’s historicity, but also, in it’s “demand for purity,” it’s “absolute value,” and it’s inherent telos—“that it is itself the ultimate goal, the Last Act.” [319] In this respect, the inactivity of the author, his neglect of the reality of his “emancipation" is—itself—a realization of “absolute freedom” as an event, as instantiated “above time, empty and inaccessible.”[315]
“Freedom or death,” then, for Blanchot, is the slogan of literature. For the question of literature, is none other than a question of becoming; it is the “to be, or not to be” of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy; a monologue of revolution where, as Blanchot states, “life endures death and maintains itself in it.” But it is a death that is the “impossibility of dying,” a death viewed through a naked consciousness devoid of identity. [329]
Marlon Smith N0290682
Ref: Blanchot, Maurice, "Literature and the Right to Death" from M. Blanchot, The Work of Fire (Stanford University Press: Stanford,1995), pp. 300-344