Topic of the issue :MODALITY AND FIGURE
Issue editors: Kristiyan Enchev and Sylvia Borissova
CONTENTS & Abstracts & Keywords & The authors in the issue
Kamelia Spassova (PhD. Assist. Prof. at the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”.)
Historicity of the Term Figura by Auerbach
Abstract: The term figura gives us the possibility to think about the critical limits of the entanglement between the political and the poetical on the fluctuating trajectories of the passing time (chronos) and the embodied time of the event (kairos). In Auerbach's article “Figure” (1938) the concept is defined as a dynamic with its own regime of historicity, connecting one particular person/event with another particular person/event. Such a regime presumes the kairotic logic of the right occasion, of the exceptional time of the context, where something that is suggested to happen, just happens. This is the process of real embodiment of figures. The main point of Auerbach is that the figura is a temporal, not only а special topological concept. It is characterized by its dynamic and radiant power, its own historicity inasmuch as it has inherited and preserves several temporal layers. In the end of this paper I shall make a distinction between a literary figure and a conceptual persona. Bartleby, the Scrivener is seen as a conceptual persona by Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Badiou, Ranciиre, Hardt and Negri, Agamben, Zupancic, Zizek, yet Bartleby is still a literary figure above all else – a literary figure that sometimes copies its own formation, and sometimes… simply prefers not to. The task of the current paper is to outline the stakes of modern literary history, composed through literary figures.
Keywords: figura; mimesis; kairos; еthopoiia; conceptual persona; pseudomorphosis; reconceptualization.
Sylvia Borissova (PhD. Assist. Prof. at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
The Figure of Genius: Variants of Borderness
Abstract: The word 'genius' has a particularly strong aura in the so-called 'star age of geniuses' (I. Passy) – during those memorable for modern Western aesthetics three decades from the late eighteenth – early nineteenth century, when in the face of Kant and the early Romanticists both an unprecedented flowering of the creative individuality with its endless labyrinth of inner worlds and attention to it were observed. Over time, the word 'genius' enters everyday language, which enriches the layers of its meaning. The pledge of this article is to typologize the basic nuances of the philosophical-aesthetic concept of genius, which means: to outline the main types of borderness of genius as an aesthetic figure.
Keywords: genius, aesthetic figure, borderness, Kant, Schopenhauer, Gadamer, Taine, Lukács
Maurice Fadel (Associate Professor, PhD, at NBU, Sofia.)
Beyond the Figure
Abstract: The article deals with the concept of the letter in its relation to the concept of figure. The research of the late Paul de Man is taken as a basis for the analysis of the letter. The author highlights an interesting twist in De Man. He is known as a theorist and apologist of the figure. It turns out, however, that in his later works De Man is more concerned with criticism of the figure, which does not mean returning to the traditional understandings of the correspondence between language and empirical reality.
Keywords: letter; figure; empirical reality; figurative meaning; literal meaning.
Historicity of the Term Figura by Auerbach
Abstract: The term figura gives us the possibility to think about the critical limits of the entanglement between the political and the poetical on the fluctuating trajectories of the passing time (chronos) and the embodied time of the event (kairos). In Auerbach's article “Figure” (1938) the concept is defined as a dynamic with its own regime of historicity, connecting one particular person/event with another particular person/event. Such a regime presumes the kairotic logic of the right occasion, of the exceptional time of the context, where something that is suggested to happen, just happens. This is the process of real embodiment of figures. The main point of Auerbach is that the figura is a temporal, not only а special topological concept. It is characterized by its dynamic and radiant power, its own historicity inasmuch as it has inherited and preserves several temporal layers. In the end of this paper I shall make a distinction between a literary figure and a conceptual persona. Bartleby, the Scrivener is seen as a conceptual persona by Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Badiou, Ranciиre, Hardt and Negri, Agamben, Zupancic, Zizek, yet Bartleby is still a literary figure above all else – a literary figure that sometimes copies its own formation, and sometimes… simply prefers not to. The task of the current paper is to outline the stakes of modern literary history, composed through literary figures.
Keywords: figura; mimesis; kairos; еthopoiia; conceptual persona; pseudomorphosis; reconceptualization.
Sylvia Borissova (PhD. Assist. Prof. at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
The Figure of Genius: Variants of Borderness
Abstract: The word 'genius' has a particularly strong aura in the so-called 'star age of geniuses' (I. Passy) – during those memorable for modern Western aesthetics three decades from the late eighteenth – early nineteenth century, when in the face of Kant and the early Romanticists both an unprecedented flowering of the creative individuality with its endless labyrinth of inner worlds and attention to it were observed. Over time, the word 'genius' enters everyday language, which enriches the layers of its meaning. The pledge of this article is to typologize the basic nuances of the philosophical-aesthetic concept of genius, which means: to outline the main types of borderness of genius as an aesthetic figure.
Keywords: genius, aesthetic figure, borderness, Kant, Schopenhauer, Gadamer, Taine, Lukács
Maurice Fadel (Associate Professor, PhD, at NBU, Sofia.)
Beyond the Figure
Abstract: The article deals with the concept of the letter in its relation to the concept of figure. The research of the late Paul de Man is taken as a basis for the analysis of the letter. The author highlights an interesting twist in De Man. He is known as a theorist and apologist of the figure. It turns out, however, that in his later works De Man is more concerned with criticism of the figure, which does not mean returning to the traditional understandings of the correspondence between language and empirical reality.
Keywords: letter; figure; empirical reality; figurative meaning; literal meaning.
Desislava Damyanova (PhD. Assist. Prof. at the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”.)
Creative Potency in Daoism as an Onto-Poetic Correlation
Abstract: The essential wisdom of a thinker is intangible, unknowable and unspoken: the synthesis of poetical and ontological experience. The basic principle of Daoist philosophy and poetry implies the non-differentiating awareness of the enlightened mind – the root of creativity lies in the spontaneity of nature and a certain state of consciousness without strict logical parallels. By his communion with the cosmic rhythm the poet finds a spiritual resonance with all things and living creatures (the myriad entities – wanwu). The creative process of Dao is also the potentiality of the artist who transforms his ego in the constructive act and becomes part of the universe following the 'self-so' (zhiran). The highest level of accomplishment is impossible without the transformation of the self through meditation and concentration in order to reach the creative potential that animates all things without any division, reflection and artificial distinctions.
Keywords: Dao poetry; ontological experience; creative potential; 'self-so'.
Chavdar Dimitrov (PhD at the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”)
Emotional-Narrative Existence
Abstract: The article is about a dimension, referable by the concepts of 'affectivity', 'emotionality' and 'sensitivity'. The issue addresses both the “disorder of habitual complicity with the world” and the fact that “our acting, talking, feeling and thinking begins as a response to 'something' indeterminable that comes from elsewhere”, i.e. to the narrative life experience in which there is enduring/undergoing or “being overwhelmed“ (Sabeva 2016: 241, 244). The subject-matter sets the task of explaining a common field. At its basis, sensitivity is the initial appearance of behaviors and things, because moods (Stimmungen) “throw” us or co-constitute us in the world; emotions are part of our worldly comportment where potential narrativity is equally important. Social attitude, which has its origin in existential “disposedness” (Heidegger 2005: §§ 29–31), sharеs some extraordinaries and gaps. In this process a limit of the self is reached, when one accepts the inevitability of what is being experienced, and self-understanding becomes alienated from one's own position. The claim of the research is to add a point to the understanding of social integration in interdisciplinary studies.
Keywords: affectivity; emotionality; sensitivity; disposedness (Befindlichkeit); narrativity; self-understanding
Creative Potency in Daoism as an Onto-Poetic Correlation
Abstract: The essential wisdom of a thinker is intangible, unknowable and unspoken: the synthesis of poetical and ontological experience. The basic principle of Daoist philosophy and poetry implies the non-differentiating awareness of the enlightened mind – the root of creativity lies in the spontaneity of nature and a certain state of consciousness without strict logical parallels. By his communion with the cosmic rhythm the poet finds a spiritual resonance with all things and living creatures (the myriad entities – wanwu). The creative process of Dao is also the potentiality of the artist who transforms his ego in the constructive act and becomes part of the universe following the 'self-so' (zhiran). The highest level of accomplishment is impossible without the transformation of the self through meditation and concentration in order to reach the creative potential that animates all things without any division, reflection and artificial distinctions.
Keywords: Dao poetry; ontological experience; creative potential; 'self-so'.
Chavdar Dimitrov (PhD at the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”)
Emotional-Narrative Existence
Abstract: The article is about a dimension, referable by the concepts of 'affectivity', 'emotionality' and 'sensitivity'. The issue addresses both the “disorder of habitual complicity with the world” and the fact that “our acting, talking, feeling and thinking begins as a response to 'something' indeterminable that comes from elsewhere”, i.e. to the narrative life experience in which there is enduring/undergoing or “being overwhelmed“ (Sabeva 2016: 241, 244). The subject-matter sets the task of explaining a common field. At its basis, sensitivity is the initial appearance of behaviors and things, because moods (Stimmungen) “throw” us or co-constitute us in the world; emotions are part of our worldly comportment where potential narrativity is equally important. Social attitude, which has its origin in existential “disposedness” (Heidegger 2005: §§ 29–31), sharеs some extraordinaries and gaps. In this process a limit of the self is reached, when one accepts the inevitability of what is being experienced, and self-understanding becomes alienated from one's own position. The claim of the research is to add a point to the understanding of social integration in interdisciplinary studies.
Keywords: affectivity; emotionality; sensitivity; disposedness (Befindlichkeit); narrativity; self-understanding
Jassen Andreev (PhD, Assist. Prof. at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology , Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.)
Die Seinsfrage in Terms of Both Its Formal Sense and Its Thematical Content. Preface to the Translation of Dorothea Frede's study The Question of Being: Heidegger's Project
Abstract: There are quite a number of controversially discussed difficulties that any interpretation of Heidegger's phenomenological philosophy faces. Prof. Frede's study on Heidegger and the question of Being provides a clarification of the sense(s) in which the Seinsfrage came to vex the young Heidegger, in his early writings and in Being and Time. The present preface to the translation of her study is limited in its aims to an outline of the very positions he occupies with respect to two of the notorious interpretative issues concerning Heidegger's project of fundamental ontology: (1) The problem of how to specify the very complex meaning (not of the Being per se, but) of the enigmatic Seinsfrage itself, since we must, to be sure, have some answer to the preliminary question “What exactly does Heidegger's problem of Being consist in?” in order to raise anew the question “What is the meaning of Being?”. It just cannot possibly be known “What is the sense of Being?”, without having recourse to the meaning of the Seinsfrage itself. However, as Heidegger's thinking evolved, the meaning of the question changed. (2) The problem of the different interpretative approaches (life-philosophical, existentialist, anthropological, metaphysical, scholastical, phenomenological, transcendental, hermeneutic-historical, deconstructivist, pragmatist) to the main exposition of the Being-question in Heidegger's magnum opus and their critical evaluation.
Keywords: difficulties of Heidegger's phenomenological philosophy, meaning and intelligibility, die Seinsfrage in terms of both its formal sense and its thematical content, the changing meaning of the problem of Being, Da-sein, phenomenology and language.
Dorothea Frede (Professor at the Hamburg University, full member of Academy of Sciences of Göttingen, of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, at and of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, first chairman of the Society for Ancient Philosophy - Munich.)
The Question of Being: Heidegger's Project (transl. Jassen Andreev and Stefan Dimitrov)
Abstract: Prof. Frede's study aims to analyze Martin Heidegger's famous Frage nach dem Sinn vom Sein in relation to his severe criticism of, and hidden dependence on, the tradition of Western metaphysics. The study offers an interesting pluralistic approach, according to which specific meanings of die Seinsfrage correspond to the different phases of the development of Heidegger's thinking. It traces above all the formulations that this remarkable question received in his early works (The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism: A Critical-Theoretical Contribution to Logic and Duns Scotus' Doctrine of Categories and Meaning) and in his magnum opus. The study represents a big and complex philosophical domain not only through historical-philosophical investigations, but also as a result of a critical account of basic statements of Heidegger's thought. It also clarifies some of the reasons why the forgetfulness of Being (die Seinsvergessenheit) was proclaimed by Heidegger as the most significant omission in the entire history of Western philosophy. But is this fateful omission capable of rectification, and can it be taken for granted that it is in need of some rectification?
Keywords: Heidegger's famous Frage nach dem Sinn vom Sein and the tradition of Western metaphysics, specific meanings of die Seinsfrage, judgment and logical psychologism, categories and meaning, the forgetfulness of being as omission (un)capable of rectification.
Vladimir Radenkov (PhD. Assist. Prof. at the UACEG)
Can the World be Shared? Heidegger's Understanding of the World and the Different Ways of Its “Inhabiting” and Sharing in Both the Authentic and the Inauthentic Existence
Abstract: The study focuses, first, on Heidegger's understanding of the world as a closed interconnection of “relationally” defined elements and as a horizon of ecstatic situatedness, and second, on the different ways of “inhabiting” and sharing the world in both the authentic and the inauthentic existence. It is divided into four parts. In the first part basic concepts of Being and Time are expounded that are essential for performing the research and for the clarity of its exposition. The second part is a detailed interpretation of Heidegger's analysis of the surrounding world. The third part thematizes some concepts crucial to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic way of being-in-the-world. In the fourth and main part, an attempt is made to show that, first, the surrounding world, which is shared with others in its “meaningful” explication, is an “organically” articulated horizon of a “typical” and enduring ecstatic situatedness, and second, that both the authentic and the inauthentic existence are simultaneously different modes of the complete structure of existence and moments of this structure which belong to each other and “invert” one another.
Keywords: ontic-ontological difference; authentic/inauthentic existence; Dasein; understanding; potentiality-for-being; being-in-the-world; surrounding world; ready-to-hand; present-at-hand; reference-wholeness; horizon; circumspection; interpretation; speech/language; meaning; signification; Oneself; idle talk; falling; situation.
Die Seinsfrage in Terms of Both Its Formal Sense and Its Thematical Content. Preface to the Translation of Dorothea Frede's study The Question of Being: Heidegger's Project
Abstract: There are quite a number of controversially discussed difficulties that any interpretation of Heidegger's phenomenological philosophy faces. Prof. Frede's study on Heidegger and the question of Being provides a clarification of the sense(s) in which the Seinsfrage came to vex the young Heidegger, in his early writings and in Being and Time. The present preface to the translation of her study is limited in its aims to an outline of the very positions he occupies with respect to two of the notorious interpretative issues concerning Heidegger's project of fundamental ontology: (1) The problem of how to specify the very complex meaning (not of the Being per se, but) of the enigmatic Seinsfrage itself, since we must, to be sure, have some answer to the preliminary question “What exactly does Heidegger's problem of Being consist in?” in order to raise anew the question “What is the meaning of Being?”. It just cannot possibly be known “What is the sense of Being?”, without having recourse to the meaning of the Seinsfrage itself. However, as Heidegger's thinking evolved, the meaning of the question changed. (2) The problem of the different interpretative approaches (life-philosophical, existentialist, anthropological, metaphysical, scholastical, phenomenological, transcendental, hermeneutic-historical, deconstructivist, pragmatist) to the main exposition of the Being-question in Heidegger's magnum opus and their critical evaluation.
Keywords: difficulties of Heidegger's phenomenological philosophy, meaning and intelligibility, die Seinsfrage in terms of both its formal sense and its thematical content, the changing meaning of the problem of Being, Da-sein, phenomenology and language.
Dorothea Frede (Professor at the Hamburg University, full member of Academy of Sciences of Göttingen, of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, at and of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, first chairman of the Society for Ancient Philosophy - Munich.)
The Question of Being: Heidegger's Project (transl. Jassen Andreev and Stefan Dimitrov)
Abstract: Prof. Frede's study aims to analyze Martin Heidegger's famous Frage nach dem Sinn vom Sein in relation to his severe criticism of, and hidden dependence on, the tradition of Western metaphysics. The study offers an interesting pluralistic approach, according to which specific meanings of die Seinsfrage correspond to the different phases of the development of Heidegger's thinking. It traces above all the formulations that this remarkable question received in his early works (The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism: A Critical-Theoretical Contribution to Logic and Duns Scotus' Doctrine of Categories and Meaning) and in his magnum opus. The study represents a big and complex philosophical domain not only through historical-philosophical investigations, but also as a result of a critical account of basic statements of Heidegger's thought. It also clarifies some of the reasons why the forgetfulness of Being (die Seinsvergessenheit) was proclaimed by Heidegger as the most significant omission in the entire history of Western philosophy. But is this fateful omission capable of rectification, and can it be taken for granted that it is in need of some rectification?
Keywords: Heidegger's famous Frage nach dem Sinn vom Sein and the tradition of Western metaphysics, specific meanings of die Seinsfrage, judgment and logical psychologism, categories and meaning, the forgetfulness of being as omission (un)capable of rectification.
Vladimir Radenkov (PhD. Assist. Prof. at the UACEG)
Can the World be Shared? Heidegger's Understanding of the World and the Different Ways of Its “Inhabiting” and Sharing in Both the Authentic and the Inauthentic Existence
Abstract: The study focuses, first, on Heidegger's understanding of the world as a closed interconnection of “relationally” defined elements and as a horizon of ecstatic situatedness, and second, on the different ways of “inhabiting” and sharing the world in both the authentic and the inauthentic existence. It is divided into four parts. In the first part basic concepts of Being and Time are expounded that are essential for performing the research and for the clarity of its exposition. The second part is a detailed interpretation of Heidegger's analysis of the surrounding world. The third part thematizes some concepts crucial to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic way of being-in-the-world. In the fourth and main part, an attempt is made to show that, first, the surrounding world, which is shared with others in its “meaningful” explication, is an “organically” articulated horizon of a “typical” and enduring ecstatic situatedness, and second, that both the authentic and the inauthentic existence are simultaneously different modes of the complete structure of existence and moments of this structure which belong to each other and “invert” one another.
Keywords: ontic-ontological difference; authentic/inauthentic existence; Dasein; understanding; potentiality-for-being; being-in-the-world; surrounding world; ready-to-hand; present-at-hand; reference-wholeness; horizon; circumspection; interpretation; speech/language; meaning; signification; Oneself; idle talk; falling; situation.
Silviya Kristeva (Associate Professor at the South-West University "Neofit Rilski". )
Modality of Judgments in Kant and the Transition to the Pure Transcendental Schema
Abstract: In his system of the logical functions of understanding Kant includes modality as the fourth class together with quantity, quality and relation. Kant defines modality briefly, though with the clear indication that modality has to put the judgment in the “relation to the thinking in general”. The present paper will argue that Kant has reached a new definition of modality. However, this can be demonstrated in the logical reconstruction of the system of judgments with the consistent course through the four logical types of judgments included. The specific functions of these judgments are formed on the bases of the logical possibilities of subject, predicate and logical relation. These components are gradually intensified with their inner subdivision and are formed on all other objects in the field of thinking. These general judgmental areas of subject, predicate and relation subdivision constitute the modality in its class. The modality acts through separating and producing the most certain and hardest connection between the judgmental components on the base of modal ground for the object and on the calculation of the whole field of judgment. Modality is realized as the most complex and covered construction of judgment in its own judgmental area. Exactly this general schema of modality is the base for transition to the second analytic in Critique of Pure Reason – the transition as an immediate and inner connection between the Analytic of Concepts and the Analytic of Principles. The schema of modality is generalized and assembled in a new logical formation – the pure transcendental schema with its logical structure and principles. This search has to give the answer to “the most important task” of transcendental logic: how can we build the object of the pure understanding through the logical form of the synthetic judgments a priori.
Keywords: Kant; transcendental logic; Table of Judgments; Analytic of Principles; schema of possibility; existence and necessity; schema of the power of judgment.
Iliana Ilieva ( PhD Graduate Student at South-West University "Neofit Rilski")
Origin of the Idea of Inner Sense in the Schelling's Early Philosophy
Abstract: The origin of the idea of inner sense in the early Schelling's philosophy represents a specific cognitive way which has the aim to make the concept of clear philosophical cognition. In the frame of German classical philosophy, the idea of inner sense has an absolute enlightening character in which we found references from Kant's and Fichte's philosophy. We reveal the deep metaphysical evidence of the idea of inner sense as an a priori necessity of pure thinking with the help of these paradigmatic relations.
Keywords: Schelling; inner sense; German classical philosophy; philosophy; metaphysics; German idealism.
Modality of Judgments in Kant and the Transition to the Pure Transcendental Schema
Abstract: In his system of the logical functions of understanding Kant includes modality as the fourth class together with quantity, quality and relation. Kant defines modality briefly, though with the clear indication that modality has to put the judgment in the “relation to the thinking in general”. The present paper will argue that Kant has reached a new definition of modality. However, this can be demonstrated in the logical reconstruction of the system of judgments with the consistent course through the four logical types of judgments included. The specific functions of these judgments are formed on the bases of the logical possibilities of subject, predicate and logical relation. These components are gradually intensified with their inner subdivision and are formed on all other objects in the field of thinking. These general judgmental areas of subject, predicate and relation subdivision constitute the modality in its class. The modality acts through separating and producing the most certain and hardest connection between the judgmental components on the base of modal ground for the object and on the calculation of the whole field of judgment. Modality is realized as the most complex and covered construction of judgment in its own judgmental area. Exactly this general schema of modality is the base for transition to the second analytic in Critique of Pure Reason – the transition as an immediate and inner connection between the Analytic of Concepts and the Analytic of Principles. The schema of modality is generalized and assembled in a new logical formation – the pure transcendental schema with its logical structure and principles. This search has to give the answer to “the most important task” of transcendental logic: how can we build the object of the pure understanding through the logical form of the synthetic judgments a priori.
Keywords: Kant; transcendental logic; Table of Judgments; Analytic of Principles; schema of possibility; existence and necessity; schema of the power of judgment.
Iliana Ilieva ( PhD Graduate Student at South-West University "Neofit Rilski")
Origin of the Idea of Inner Sense in the Schelling's Early Philosophy
Abstract: The origin of the idea of inner sense in the early Schelling's philosophy represents a specific cognitive way which has the aim to make the concept of clear philosophical cognition. In the frame of German classical philosophy, the idea of inner sense has an absolute enlightening character in which we found references from Kant's and Fichte's philosophy. We reveal the deep metaphysical evidence of the idea of inner sense as an a priori necessity of pure thinking with the help of these paradigmatic relations.
Keywords: Schelling; inner sense; German classical philosophy; philosophy; metaphysics; German idealism.
Andrey Leshkov