Janus Head

Contemporary democratic theory, in its focus on the distinction between a private and a public sphere, tends to exclude emotions from political life. Arendt, Habermas, and Angus present critical theories of politi­cal action and deliberation that demand that emotions be left behind in favour of a narrower rationality. On the basis of a first step toward incorporating emotions into political life as accomplished by Martha Nussbaum – despite its limitations – and of a second step taken by Sara Ahmed, an outline of a theory of emotions becomes possible, and brings into question the distinction between private and public life. Emotions act as motivations that accompany every instance of participation or for non-participation, be it because of apathy or of disengagement.

William Thomas Beckford’s Vathek chronicles the eponymous Caliph’s struggle and ultimate fall into hell as a divine punishment for his unre­strained desire for knowledge. Around the time Beckford wrote Vathek, Immanuel Kant released the Critique of Pure Reason, whose central implication is that human knowledge is restricted to appearances. Drawing on textual evidence from Vathek’s first three editions and from Kant’s Critique, I explore ways in which knowledge is negotiated and mediated by the limits of human intellect and sensory perception as they intersect with the protean boundary between reality and appearance, and suggest that Beckford’s Vathek may be viewed as a literary instantiation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, as they both - albeit in different ways - impose severe limits on man’s epistemic ability.

This essay argues that the critically neglected work of the American mid-twentieth-century writer Jane Bowles is a rare attempt at realism in modern fiction that takes as its metaphysical premise the reality referred to in Spinoza’s pronouncement, “By reality and perfection I understand the same.” Bowles’ innately allegorical fiction is an effort to reveal the perfect reality of the world by prophetically creating the future rather than mimetically preserving the present and recovering the past, expressing a world that is existentially founded rather than representationally endured. The realism of perfection her prophetic creations strive to apprehend serves as a necessary reproof of the all too actual world reflected in merely mimetic fiction.

In Reasons and Persons (1984), the greatest contribution to utilitarian philosophy since Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (1874), Derek Parfit supports his Reductionist contention “that personal identity is not what matters” by turning to the neurosurgical findings of Roger Wolcott Sperry. Parfit’s scientifically informed argument has important implications for W. E. B. Du Bois’s contentious hypothesis of African-American “double-consciousness,” which he initially advanced in “Strivings of the Negro People” (1897), before amending for inclusion in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). An analysis of “Of the Coming of John,” chapter 13 in The Souls of Black Folk, helps to trace these ramifications, resituating Du Bois’s notion from the pragmatist to the utilitarian tradition, and revealing how his concept effectively prefigured Parfit’s scientifically informed Reductionism.

For the most part, interpreters of Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” have neglected his appropriation of C. F. Meyer’s “The Roman Fountain,” yet the poem deserves attention because its final description of water as it “streams and rests” provides a motif which Heidegger uses to work out his understanding of the relationship between “world” and “earth.” Richard Wilbur uses similar language to make a similar point in his own poem about Roman fountains, “A Baroque Wall- Fountain at the Villa Sciarra.” Juxtaposing Wilbur’s depictions of moving and resting water with Heidegger’s brings out a latent implication in Heidegger’s use of the imagery, the possibility that the moving and resting interplay will result in enhanced understanding.

The academic world, at least in the West, has traditionally always been suspicious when it comes to introducing in its quest for knowledge notions of materiality, touch, texture, or “haptics” – in other words what is generally associated with sensory-experience. In the human sciences and the artistic fields the practice of research has always privileged “textual reason” over “sensory texture,” the textual over the textural. Only in the recent past have so-called postmodern theories of all kinds attempted to overcome the hierarchical dichotomy between discursive reason and embodied thought. Unfortunately, this has very often created an unprecedented ragbag of epistemological confusions and identity crises. This essay shall attempt to explain and clarify the epistemological nature of materiality, touch, texture, or “haptics,” and the role it can play in academic research in the artistic fields with particular reference to ideas developed by French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas.

In this article, I begin with Kant’s notion of a “categorical imperative” as a framework from which to discuss the ontology of Franz Kafka’s writing. Since Kant’s moral law is a device for reflecting on our responses to challenging circumstances rather than one that tells us what we should always do in every situation, I draw inferences concerning Kafka’s own descriptions of his sense of being a writer in opposing phenomenal and spiritual worlds. Since Kafka cannot be understood exclusively from a Kantian perspective of autonomous will, I discuss Kafka’s experiencing in terms of the reciprocal interplay of being and non-being, and his awareness of finitude and the possibility of transcendence. I argue for a humanistic-existential vision of the reading of a literary text as an encounter that responds to the alterity of the Other and which, consistent with Kafka’s oeuvre, privileges being faithful to one’s own experiencing.