Eric S. Nelson

Diverging from the dominant Neo-Kantian and Positivist epistemologies of his era, Dilthey's works engaged and articulated the import of the historical for reflection (Besinnung) and knowledge (Wissen). Pursuing a double strategy, Dilthey's writings enact historical research with a philosophical intent while interpreting philosophy in relation to its historical referential contexts. Philosophy is not historical in being lost in the plural, the particular, the relative, and the contingent, as Dilthey's critics contend, but by experientially and self-reflectively encountering and interpreting the present through its lived expressions and objectifications and in its practical interests and needs. Philosophy is both historical and systematic for Dilthey in being informed by and responding to its times, and the questions that concern a generation, and by reflectively proceeding from empirical and factical conditions to concepts.

Early Daoism, as articulated in the 'Daodejing' and the 'Zhuangzi', indirectly addresses environmental issues by intimating a nonreductive naturalistic ethics calling on humans to be open and responsive to the specificities and interconnections of the world and environment to which they belong. "'Dao'" is not a substantial immanent or transcendent entity but the lived enactment of the intrinsic worth of the "myriad things" and the natural world occurring through 'how' humans address and are addressed by them. Early Daoism potentially corrects both anthropocentrism and biocentrism in environmental ethics by disclosing the things themselves in the context of the self-cultivation of life. Given increasing environmental devastation and the dominance of views, practices, and institutions reducing nature to a background and/or raw material for human activity, this "ethics of encounter" discloses the life of things as inexhaustibly more than human projects and constructs, extending ethical recognition and responsibility beyond social relations and the social self.

As a contribution to a responsive and critical materialist ethics of environments and animals, this essay reexamines the significance of nature and animals in the critical social theory of Theodor Adorno. In response to the anthropocentric stance of intersubjective discourse and recognition in recent figures associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, I argue for the ecological import of the aporetic dialectic of nature and society in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno's later works. Adorno's continuing confrontation with the "domination of nature" traces the tensions between the ideological construction and resistance of "nature" as well as the instrumentalization and implicit disruptive promise of sensuous life. These tensions indicate the material and bodily bonds between human and animal happiness and suffering and the ambiguous role of mimesis in both domination and emancipation. Adorno insisted on the critical prospect of an unforced and non-coercive freedom that brings us toward the object and responsibility for socially and historically mediated and non-identical natural life.

Leibniz's engagement with China is informed by his use of the principles of charity and understanding better. Leibniz defines justice as the "charity of the wise," and uses this principle not only in his practical philosophy but to interpret the statements of others in such a way as to maximize their coherence and meaning and minimize undue suspicion. Appealing to the example of St. Paul, Leibniz uses the principle of charity to critically interpret Chinese beliefs as consistent with natural theology and even "true Christianity." He rejected the suspicion of authors such as Malebranche who interpreted the Chinese as immoral, irrational, and irreligious. The second principle of "understanding better" is based on the early church fathers' reinterpretation of Hebrew and Greek texts as revealing Christian truths. The maxim of "understanding the author better than he understood himself" seems to coincide with the principle of charity. Yet, even though it can be said to preserve truth and maximize agreement, it threatens to transform charity toward others into assimilation to oneself.

_Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy's most pressing issues._ Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple-and accurate-oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection _between_ Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.

Eduard von Hartmann was one of the most influential public philosophers of his era, known primarily through his Philosophy of the Unconscious. A conservative nationalist in politics, he positioned himself as a cultural and religious reformer and modernist ad­vocate of a “religion of the future” of self-redemption (autosoterism), one that reconciled pessimism and a panpneumatic impersonal unconscious with rationality and individu­al responsibility. This paper traces how Buddhism served as a primary albeit imperfect exemplar in his thought, how his ethical and symbolic interpretative strategy, based on the unconscious, drew him into proximity and conflict with esoteric spiritist discourses, and how this context informed his Daodejing interpretation. German Idealism disclosed the unity of reason, will, and nature, while Buddhist teachings demonstrated the world’s fundamentally contradictory and illusory character through nothingness (emptiness), nir­vāṇa, and objective illusionism and phenomenalism. Hartmann’s secularized moral and symbolic adaptation of Buddhism entailed a resigned yet heroic embrace of suffering life rather than what he deemed ascetic and quietist acquiescence. His hermeneutics reveal his modernizing vision of Buddhism as an exemplary model (if suitably reformed to ac­centuate a heroic response to suffering and karma) for the future.

This chapter offers an outline of how the Yijing 易經 informed interpretations of nothingness and perfection in Chinese and early modern European discourses. Part one briefly traces the priority of nothingness in the Yijing commentaries of Wang Bi 王弼 and the later Neo-Confucian dyadic dynamic of limitless nothingness (wuji 無極) and the supreme ultimate (taiji 太極). Following Song-Ming era compilations, early modern European missionaries and intellectuals interpreted the Yijing in relation to their own cosmological, metaphysical, and theological models. Part two reexamines Leibniz's growing engagement with the Yijing and Chinese philosophy as a discourse on nothingness and perfection and its theological, ontological, and mathematical significance. Although Chinese influences in the formation of Leibniz's binary mathematics and first metaphysical principles of God and nothingness should not be exaggerated, they became interculturally entangled. Leibniz determined that ancient Chinese wisdom was closest to the truths of natural philosophy and theology because it conceived of the world not through matter but through the fundamental principles and dynamics of perfection and nothingness, expressed by 1 and 0. Leibniz identified his binary arithmetic, and specifically his metaphysical-theological interpretation of its meaning, with the dyadic progression of the Yijing’s hexagrams. Leibniz remained committed to a Christianizing interpretation. Since nothingness could not be generative by itself, it required a transcendent and active principle of perfection that he construed as the hidden truth of Chinese philosophy.

Critics have argued that Husserl’s analysis of Europe, rationality, and the lifeworld in his groundbreaking 1936 work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is ultimately Eurocentric. Others defend Husserl’s articulation of the cosmopolitan universalist aspirations of philosophy and a lifeform of individual autonomy and free rational inquiry in the context of his response to growing irrationalism and fascism. Both perspectives have their validity: Husserl’s genealogy addressed a unique Occidental history and ideal of rationality, identified with the idea of “Europe” in contrast to specific national identities, and his analysis retained Eurocentric elements that restricted its universalist cosmopolitan intentions. The present contribution outlines a more comprehensive perspective by differentiating Eurocentric, cosmopolitan, and intercultural moments in Husserl’s works in a liberalizing or pluralizing immanent critique that interculturally modifies Husserl’s phenomenology of rationality, history, and the lifeworld. By drawing on modern Chinese philosophy, his contemporaries such as Georg Misch, and Husserl’s phenomenology, I critically reconstruct how Husserl’s philosophy already indicates a more pluralistic and critically intercultural understanding of the lifeworld and reason beyond the dialectic of pseudo-universalism and ethnocentric particularism that continues to confront contemporary thought.

As a contribution to a critical yet responsive materialist ethics of environments and animals, I reexamine the significance of nature and animals in the critical social theory of Theodor Adorno. In response to the anthropocentric primacy of intersubjective discourse and recognition in recent figures associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Habermas and Honneth, I argue for the ecological import of the aporetic dialectic of nature and society diagnosed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s later works. Adorno’s continuing confrontation with the “domination of nature” traces the tensions between the ideological construction and resistance of “nature” as well as the instrumentalization and implicit disruptive promise of sensuous life. It indicates the material and bodily bonds between human and animal happiness and suffering, the ambiguous role of mimesis in domination and emancipation, and the critical prospect of an unforced and non-coercive freedom toward the object and answerability toward socially and historically mediated yet non-identical natural life.