Book Reviews by Thomas Pfau
Modern Theology, 2024
Review of Charles Taylor's _Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment" (Harvard Uni... more Review of Charles Taylor's _Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment" (Harvard Univ. Press, 2024)
Continental Philosophy Review, 2023
This review of Emmanuel Alloa's Looking through Images considers the author's arguments with rega... more This review of Emmanuel Alloa's Looking through Images considers the author's arguments with regard to their philosophical bearings and their significance for modern visual aesthetics. Particular attention is paid to the way that the traditions of Platonic and Aristotelian Realism are linked to modern phenomenological theory (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Marion). Alloa's elegant and lucid exploration of the image as a form of non-propositional cognition makes this monograph a landmark document in contemporary visual studies and aesthetic theory. Keywords Image theory • Phenomenology • Media theory • Plato • Aristotle • Husserl Considering the sharply divergent styles and concerns of Anglo-American and European philosophy, respectively, it is perhaps not surprising, though still regrettable, that it should have taken ten years for this remarkable book to be translated into English. Making at last its appearance a decade after its original publication in German (Das durchscheinende Bild: Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie, 2011), Emmanuel Alloa's Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Mediaably rendered into English by Nils F. Schott-should help establish its author on this side of the Atlantic as a leading thinker on the interconnected fields of phenomenology, visual studies, as well as image-, icon-, and media theory. English translations of a number of Alloa's essays had prepared the ground for this reception, as did his excellent introduction to the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Resistance to the Sensible World, 2017).
Building on my previous essay at this journal and on the conversation at last December's colloqui... more Building on my previous essay at this journal and on the conversation at last December's colloquium, I would like to respond to suggestions that genealogical method may yet have a significant role in, or can be effectively repurposed for Christian intellectual enquiry, it being understood that the scope and nature of such enquiry remain far from settled. Even so, any attempt to align theological and exegetical practices with genealogical method for such enquiry would have to operate with a substantially different concept of genealogy than the one spawned by European modernity, which I continue to regard as incommensurable with Christian thought and its underlying metaphysics. My earlier remarks conceived genealogy as the preferred and subsequently dominant conceptual framework for the project of critique developed during the long Enlightenment (c. 1660-1830). On this view, genealogical thinking understands itself as producing a counter-narrative at once parasitical on inherited modes of philosophical, theological, and political inquiry and intent on unmasking and supplanting them. Its underlying objective is one of sudden rupture (e.g., Descartes, Hobbes) or, alternatively, a dialectical, step-by-step "sublation" (Aufhebung) of inherited forms of moral and philosophical inquiry (e.g., Hegel, Comte). Either way, the central intention is substantially the same, namely, a comprehensive and definitive overcoming of the past, undertaken by finite human agents intent on consolidating their autonomy by asserting full narrative control over the flow of historical time.
What is this endeavor called aesthetics, and what prompted its rise in the mid-18 th century? Do ... more What is this endeavor called aesthetics, and what prompted its rise in the mid-18 th century? Do such theories typically, or perhaps only, arise when their main object of inquiry has become questionable, when (as Hegel avers) the end of art is upon us? Has the time for aesthetic reflection only come when the practice of art has drifted away from meanings that, at some earlier (though not easily specifiable) point in time, had been intuitively felt and practically embraced? Is aesthetics but a supplemental discourse, only called for under conditions of a modernity that, "estranged from the world, sees the world as severed into the purely factual and the hidden signification of metaphor, [whereas] the old image rejected reduction to metaphor"? 2 If Schiller's das Sentimentalische marks the moment when the production of art has become terminally self-aware, philosophical aesthetics attempts to re-legitimate practices now seemingly incapable of enduring without a conceptual warrant. As evidenced by the myriad prefaces, defenses, manifestos, and reviews that, from Romanticism to high Modernism, seek to frame works of art for an increasingly disoriented and distracted public, philosophical aesthetics is a belated attempt at legitimating symbolic forms that have manifestly become untethered from their millennia-old function. The result, as Hans Georg Gadamer notes, is the paradoxical situation in which "as far as so-called classical art is concerned, we are talking about the production of works which in themselves were not primarily understood as art." Their function, we may say, was to mediate human beings with an "order" (Grk. kosmos) that formerly could be seen, felt, and touched, but that human beings never claimed to have made or control themselves. Conversely, Gadamer goes on, "as soon as the concept of art took on those features to which we have become accustomed and … began to stand on its own, divorced from its original context," the result was the "emancipation of art from all of its traditional subject matters and … [its] rejection of intelligible communication itself." 3 The shift from a metaphysical order to the immanent frame of homo faber thus appears to have drained the very concept of mimêsis of 1 Presented at the Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) at Brown University, 23 June 2018.
I would like to draw attention to three aspects of Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation, a... more I would like to draw attention to three aspects of Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation, a book whose courage and ambition I applaud, if for no other reason than that it exempli es what an engaged form of historiography (and humanistic inquiry more generally) can and should do. The rst aspect has to do with the commercialization and commodi cation of knowledge in post-Reformation modernity and how it impacts advanced inquiry today. From it follows my second concern, which lies with the indebtedness of Gregory's own narrative to the fruits of modern, disciplinary and specialized inquiry. Finally, I wish to take up the question of whether Gregory's historiographical approach might be seriously compromised by the apparent absence of a focused hermeneutical engagement with the major voices (theological, philosophical, political, economic, etc.) widely credited with shaping the landscape of post-Reformation modernity, both secular and religious.
Plenitude: Writing the Image in Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology (working title) -A study of ... more Plenitude: Writing the Image in Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology (working title) -A study of the role of form and image and the phenomenology of their experience. In focusing on visual (rather than discursive and abstract-propositional) forms of knowing, this study explores the emergence of alternatives to, though not reactions against, the premises and objectives of Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism in particular. Part I undertakes an archeology of the idea of form and image in Plato, Aristotle, and in the Byzantine Iconoclast debate, followed by shorter discussions of how parts of that debate are recovered and inflected in the early modern era. Part II
History without hermeneutics: Brad Gregory's unintended modernity tif.ssrc.org/2013/11/06/history... more History without hermeneutics: Brad Gregory's unintended modernity tif.ssrc.org/2013/11/06/history-without-hermeneutics-brad-gregorys-unintended-modernity
Novel 48.1 (2015): 136-39
The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation (forthcoming)
Tilottama Rajan's Romantic narrative : shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Johns Hopkins, 2010... more Tilottama Rajan's Romantic narrative : shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Johns Hopkins, 2010) explores forms of narrative in British Romanticism, though one hastens to add that it is not simply a book about narrative but about the conceptual, formal-aesthetic, and ideological spaces in which Romantic narrative positions itself-sometimes agonistically, at others in more dialectical fashion-and especially vis-à-vis the lyric. For the established valorization of the lyric as the consummate embodiment of Romantic literariness has, among other things, caused the period's body of prose fiction to be assimilated to the sober and socio-political work supposedly performed by the Victorian novel. Rajan's objectives for Romantic narrative are thus both interpretive and metacritical in that she means to "question the association of narrative with what Peter Brooks calls 'reading for plot'," as well as the consequent "unigeneric reduction of narrative to the (Victorian) novel" (xii). A related objective of Romantic narrative is to rethink the axioms that prompted literary studies to "absorb 'Romanticism' into a Victorianized 'nineteenth century' which divides the cultural field of the novel between the nation-building of Scott's historical novels, and a private sphere disciplined by the Austenian novel of manners" (xiv). Opposing the premise that "the turn to prose metonymizes a turn to culture and responsibility" (xiv), Rajan challenges us to abandon the assumptions which a long-standing, uncritical privileging of the novel has itself licensed. Instead, the hermeneutic challenge posed by Romantic narrative is to think of the period's prose fiction in terms that do not preemptively assimilate Romanticism's prose production to subsequent aesthetic and historical constellations.
European Romantic Review 23.1
David Collings has given us a superb study of Britain's struggles -in the literary, political, an... more David Collings has given us a superb study of Britain's struggles -in the literary, political, and economic thought of the Romantic period -to come to terms with its own rapid social transformation. Rather than offering a material and social history of the period in question, Monstrous Society traces a crucial shift in the understanding of social order by focusing on Britain's evolving self-description of its social practices and class relations. In what amounts to a consistently lucid and valuable critical reappraisal of the volatile phase of modernity between 1780 and 1830, Collings approaches Romantic political thought and (Gothic) literary writing as an occasion for a type of critical thinking that is alternately wary, contemplative, and self-critical; the later Heidegger had called it Besinnung, a kind of all-encompassing reflection. Something of the sort is indeed needed since, as Collings notes, modernity's excessive utopian aspirations and its peremptory, leveling demands on individual and society alike make it exceedingly difficult to achieve a truly critical outlook on it. In fact, modernity cannot properly be "thought" at all unless we achieve a measure of distance and detachment from the conceptual, methodological, and disciplinary assumptions about the nature of knowledge, most of which this self-certifying epoch has bequeathed us since the seventeenth century. Focusing a good deal of his attention on the transformation of political and economic thought after 1789, Collings sees modernity -rather than the older absolutist, feudal, and ecclesiastic regimes that it stigmatizes and eventually supplants -as the truly monstrous creation.
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net
Studies in Romanticism 48.1
Modern Philology 108.3
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
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Book Reviews by Thomas Pfau
of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the
“image” (eikōn) as the essential medium of art and literature and as
foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our
“lifeworld,” Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics
and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims.
First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato’s later dialogues, being and
appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no
longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is
typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study
positions the image (eikōn) as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and
excess reveal to us its metaphysical function, namely, as the visible
analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations
unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John
Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and
Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin,
Turner, Hopkins, C zanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential
complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic
practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau’s previous
book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work.
With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of
philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.
Interpretation is essential to every humanistic discipline, and every interpretation is an act of judgment. Yet the work of interpretation and judgment has been called into question by contemporary methods in the humanities, which incline either toward contextual determination of meaning or toward the suspension of judgment altogether. Action is closely related to judgment and interpretation and like them, it has been rendered questionable. An action is not simply the performance of a deed but requires the deed’s intelligibility, which can be secured only through interpretation and judgment.
Organized into four broad themes—interiority/contemplation, ethics, politics/community, and aesthetics/image—the aim of this broad-ranging and insightful collection is to illuminate the histories of judgment and action, identify critical sites from which rethinking them may begin, clarify how they came to be challenged, and relocate them within a broader intellectual-historical trajectory that renders them intelligible.
Part I explores the genesis of the concept of the Will in Aristotle's and the Stoics' theory of judgment and then moves on to its consolidation in St. Augustine's De Trinitate and in Aquinas' Summa. Subsequent chapters focus on the increasing tension between willing and cognition, and on the ascent of voluntarist and irrational models of human agency in Ockham, Hobbes, and Locke. They are followed by chapters exploring the gradual dissolution of the concept of the Will and its displacement onto eighteenth-century models of the "passions." The focus here is on Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, and A. Smith.
Part II explores the later Coleridge’s philosophical theology, especially his unique and ambitious retrieval of conceptions of Person and Will via neo-Platonic philosophy and Trinitarian theology. The objective here is to trace how humanistic concepts and the Basisphänomene (as Ernst Cassirer calls them) they seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than “historicize”) their previous usages. Concepts like will and person are essentially interpretive, which is to say, not neutral tools but evaluative, heuristic frameworks that afford us orientation even as they are subject to continual re-interpretation. Readings in this second part take on Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, his later Notebooks, as well as the fragments associated with his Opus Maximum. From these texts, the argument leaps back to the emergent conception of human personhood in the Cappadocian Fathers, St. Augustine, Boethius, Richard of St. Victor, as well as forward to post-Coleridgean, Judaic models of personhood as constituted in the I-Thou relationship (in M. Buber and E. Levinas).
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https://www.dita10.com/plenaries/why-this-waste
A .pdf of my response has been uploaded here.
PART I - http://www.patheos.com/blogs/cosmostheinlost/2015/08/13/threatening-naturalisms-universal-authority/
PART II - http://www.patheos.com/blogs/cosmostheinlost/2015/08/14/no-theology-no-phenomenology-of-the-person/
An Interdisciplinary Symposium at Duke University, November 2-3, 2017
I argue that this pointedly formalist turn that aesthetic theory takes in Kant’s third Critique (with Lessing’s Laokoon as an important precursor) ought to be considered as a late phase in the project of iconoclasm. Thus, Kant’s engagement with the beautiful arts offers another instantiation of the fort/da game that philosophical rationalism had been playing with the realm of sheer appearance ever since Descartes. The game’s opening move has the project of delimiting secular reason open itself up to the specter of a wholly unregulated, pre-conceptual domain – the space of the pure phenomenon as event – so as to contain and absorb it once and for all. It is no mere coincidence, then, that the several antinomies structuring Kant’s third Critique had been previously put to analogous use in the long history of iconoclasm. However unwittingly, that is, Kant’s formalist aesthetics relies on tradition of iconoclast and aniconic theology that extends from Philo and Origen via Meister Eckhart all the way to Calvin and his 17th and 18th century Pietist heirs. Drawing on recent work by Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chretien, and Michel Henry, I will propose that this debt acutely, and perhaps terminally “unsettles” modern rationalism’s commitment to a purely immanent frame of explanation and justification.
Phenomenology to the Letter
Husserl and Literature
Reihe: Textologie, 7
Herausgegeben von: Philippe P. Haensler, Kristina Mendicino, und Rochelle Tobias
De Gruyter | 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110654585
ÜBERSICHT
INHALT
Regarding philosophical importance, Edmund Husserl is arguably "the" German export of the early twentieth century. In the wake of the linguistic turn(s) of the humanities, however, his claim to return to the "Sachen selbst" became metonymic for the neglect of language in Western philosophy. This view has been particularly influential in post-structural literary theory, which has never ceased to attack the supposed "logophobie" of phenomenology. "Phenomenology to the Letter. Husserl and Literature" challenges this verdict regarding the poetological and logical implications of Husserl’s work through a thorough re-examination of his writing in the context of literary theory, classical rhetoric, and modern art. At issue is an approach to phenomenology and literature that does not merely coordinate the two discourses but explores their mutual implication. Contributions to the volume attend to the interplay between phenomenology and literature (both fiction and poetry), experience and language, as well as images and embodiment. The volume is the first of its kind to chart a phenomenological approach to literature and literary approach to phenomenology. As such it stands poised to make a novel contribution to literary studies and philosophy.