Will D. Desmond

Much has been written on love and friendship, but not a lot on the nature of an enemy, in a manner analogous to the nature of love itself. To understand something about what it means to be an enemy is not at all self-evident. And if we do not know what an enemy is, do we really know what a friend or a lover is? An understanding of what it means to be an enemy might offer us something like the reverse negative of love or friendship. From holding the reversed negative to the light perhaps we can also gain some sight of the "unreversed" original. The article discusses the fact that we live life as something that offers us a certain affirmative delight in the "to be" as good. It explores how this is changed in relation to different forms of threat. It situated the nature of an enemy in terms of the equivocal constitution of the human being as passio essendi and conatus essendi. Different kinds of enemy are investigated by considering the "reversed negatives" of these four forms of love: self-affirming love, erotic love, philia, and agapeic love.

Readers of Gadamer will be familiar with his focus on the importance of art in his Truth and Method. There his concern with art does not stand on its own but is part of a larger philosophical purpose. Perhaps for this reason commentators have not adequately focussed on this aspect of his thought. The present collection of essays, entirely devoted to issues of art, will help place Gadamer's concerns in a much better light. Yet these essays are illuminating in their own right and should not be seen as mere supplements to Truth and Method. What we have here is not a systematic aesthetic but a collection of essays published on various occasions, and not all directed exclusively to the professional philosopher. The opening chapter, from which the book takes its title, is a long essay comprising almost a third of the book and its first part. The remainder of the book is made up of a selection of eleven shorter pieces, almost all from Kleine Schriften.

The writer of the below thought he would do something clever and out of the way. I tried to dissuade him, but without success. I told him that readers would prefer a more sober scholarly approach. I tried to appeal to his other work and his systematic proclivities. Why not try like Schelling to produce a system of freedom? He looked at me queerly. I was a bit taken aback when he burst out laughing in my face, and blurted out: “You must not have read Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground!” I’m afraid he has spent too much time with the prodigals he has written about. He muttered something almost inaudible about Dostoevski’s double, but I said nothing.If I am not mistaken these pieces have to do with four great and very influential philosophers: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. To help the reader I have put the abbreviation K, H, M and N before each ‘monologue.’ In fact, I am not sure if the writer was mocking me: as if my sober efforts to talk of these four thinkers was being doubled with voices like and unlike; voices as if spoken from within, and yet said to have come from beyond; ego and alter; an odd twin of my scholastic sobriety.

I want to thank Professor Wang for a very interesting and informative paper. It is especially informative to one who is relatively ignorant of the complex history of China's involvement with notions of modernity, and the variety of its contacts with Western influences. On the whole, the paper offers much valuable information about significant historical landmarks, and the diversity of ways that Chinese intellectuals and leaders have responded to them. Overall, four phases or periods are differentiated for comment and elucidation.

Desmond: Talking to Richard on the way over, I proposed that our discussion would focus on the theme of autonomy and embeddedness or relatedness. This is a recurrent concern in all of Richard’s writing. I thought it would be a good idea to look at this issue of autonomy and embeddedness in a variety of different forms, in relation to different philosophers that have influenced the work of Richard, but also in a variety of different domains such as ethics, aesthetics or literature, romanticism.In the latter the question of the interplay between art and religion also comes up as a very important consideration. Another central theme in Richard’s work is the tension between aspiration and disappointment, between longing and the failure to reach a desired completion. Disappointment and the fact of failure are not, I would say, absolutized. Disappointment becomes the occasion of a possible renewal of striving or aspiration rather than marking a sceptical outcome in a merely negative sense.

There is a sense of doing justice prior to the juxtaposition of theory and practice, accounting for an ontological vulnerability prior to both social power andsocial vulnerability. Justice in the sense of “being true” involves fidelity to truth that we neither possess nor construct, preceding all efforts to enact justice. The charge to be just precedes any just act. There is a “patience of being,” or a receiving of being before acting, which we must then actively take up. All this has implications for the practices of philosophy, including transcending the will to power by not clinging to one’s own place in History. The philosopher stands back and enters the void space of the human soul which is vulnerable, both terrorized and capable of terrorizing. This void is a “porosity of the soul” rather than pure nothingness. Though it is no particular project or activity, it allows all openness, receiving, and self-transcendence, and out of it comes the practical energy that feeds activity. The poverty of philosophy means relinquishing meaningless activity of construction in a purposeless universe by a willingness to be nothing, understanding the patience of being before servility and sovereignty, and the justice beyond them.

This is a special edition of Ethical Perspectives devoted to the issue of autonomy. While the issue of autonomy has its own particular form in Anglo- American discussion, the essays in this issue focus, in the main, on questions arising in the more continental tradition. The essay by William Desmond examines certain dialectical equivocities in the notion of self-determination. These are related to an underlying sense of valuelessness marking modernity’s feeling for the ethos, to a propensity to privilege self over other in the process of self-determination, and to a temptation to evade the question of transcendence as other to human self-transcendence. These dialectical equivocities are explored especially with reference to such major thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche.

Richard Kearney's Dialogues attempts to speak across the divide between Anglo-American philosophy and recent Continental thought. The book does not sound any fashionable fanfares regarding rapprochement between these two traditions. More soberly, it tries to introduce to Anglo-American philosophers certain European thinkers who have recently exerted significant influence. Unlike a more conventional approach that would anthologize some representative writings of these thinkers, Richard Kearney here takes a different, more direct approach. He tries to let these thinkers introduce themselves through dialogue. The result is a very interesting introduction that preserves something of the human voice of the conversational occasion. In some cases also, given the directness of the questions put by Richard Kearney, we are offered a revelation of the authors not always vouchsafed by their written, hence more controllable, works. A further benefit to those already initiated into the written works of these thinkers is an additional perspective on the written works themselves. Hence the work will be of interest to those familiar with the thinkers interviewed and to those coming to recent European thought for the first time.

The current issue of Ethical Perspectives is a double issue reflecting significant discussions of ethical issues that occurred in Leuven in the very recent past. The volume is composed in the main of two seminars, one led by Michael Walzer, the other by Bernard Williams. These well-known and highly respected thinkers were guests at Leuven in the past year. Michael Walzer was the holder of the Multatuli Chair, while Bernard Williams was the holder of the Mercier Chair at the Institute of Philosophy. In addition to the responsibilities of offering a public lecture or lectures, both were generous with their time, and open to critical discussion of their work. The results are to be found in the intellectually stimulating seminars published here.Michael Walzer's contribution is threefold. First, we publish here the lecture he delivered to a wide public, as the holder of the Multatuli Chair. This was entitled: International Society: What is the Best We Can Do? The lecture was delivered on May 1, at a time when the whole issue of the international community and its moral and political responsibilities was widely discussed, with reference to the war in Kosovo. That war, and other considerations, might suggest something too optimistic about such discussions of the international community. Walzer is no stranger to the topic of war, as those familiar with an earlier work, Just and Unjust Wars, will know. Walzer's title, on the present occasion, indicates the modesty of his proposal: what is the best we can do? With a theme that might seem to include too much, his discussion offers a sober and ordered approach, which works towards its goal by strategic steps from the left and right extremes of a continuum of possibilities. Second, in addition to this Multatuli lecture, a workshop was convened on the theme of The Power and Impotence of Multilateral Organizations. Marc Hooghe and Bart Pattyn had prepared in advance papers bearing on the work of Walzer. Marc Hooghe wrote of: “The Notion of Complex Equality and the Beauty of Alcibiades”. Bart Pattyn offered: “Two Questions about the Meaning of Meaning.”Subsequent to his response to these, the discussion was again wide-ranging, touching on the themes of the Multatuli lecture, as well as Walzer's other works. This seminar was held at the Institute of Philosophy, but Walzer's third contribution was a further seminar on the themes of his work, this time in the Faculty of Theology, and among the participants were students and teachers who had just spent time carefully studying his work. Among other things, the issues discussed here reflected Walzer's own interest in biblical themes, with repercussions in religion, but also beyond.The seminar with Williams was ordered around the questions of a number of participants who had prepared some questions on the basis of their study of his work. Williams responded impromptu, and as the reader will see the terrain covered is extensive. Williams has been an influential philosopher in the Anglo-American world, notably with reference to his explorations in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.The seminar reflected some of the themes of that work. Williams raises questions about the obsession with theory in ethics, and seeks to explore a domain more ecumenical, so to say, than morality, understood in a more restricted sense, such as we find in forms of utilitarianism and Kantianism. The neutral universal is not enough. Or as he says pithily here: “I'm not living my life in order to exemplify a mathematical theory.” Ethics points to something more inclusive, and moreattentive to the nuances of concrete details and situations.This is not entirely unlike forms of thinking we find in Greek culture, whether among the philosophers, such as Aristotle, or among the poets and tragedians. Something of the latter is explored in Williams's Shame and Necessity. Among the many issues touched on in this discussion was the issue of universality, and as the reader will notice the seminar closed with an exchange with Jaap van Brakel over the nature of the `we.' The reader will find an extensive discussion of `we' in the paper that follows, indicating perhaps also that the `we' of the seminar itself had a post-seminar life.All in all, these different contributions provide us with lively and thought-provoking dialogue, from a diversity of ethical perspectives.