Jason Wirth

Thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Tim Morton have heralded the end of our ideological constructions of nature, warning that popular “ecology” or the “natural” is just the latest opiate of the masses. Attempting to think what I call Nature after Nature, I turn to the Kamakura period Zen master Dōgen Eihei (1200–1253) to explore the possibilities of thinking Nature in its non-ideological self-presentation or what Dōgen called “mountains and rivers (sansui).” I bring Dōgen into dialogue with his great champion, the American poet Gary Snyder (who understands the process of sansui as “the wild”), as well as with thinkers as diverse as Schelling, Kundera, Žižek, Agamben, and Muir. Beyond Nature being any one thing, what Badiou derides as the “cosmological one,” I argue for the reawakening and sobering up to multiple Nature, beyond its appearance as an object to a discerning subject, as the bioregions which give us our interdependent and dynamic being.

This essay is devoted to an examination of the relationship between truth and laughter in the works of Nietzsche. My central text shall be the much malignedbook four of Zarathustra, with special attention paid to the braying of the ass. Laughter has been traditionally considered irrelevent to serious philosophical content and, at best, a stylistic quirk. I argue that this stems from a basic predjudice that is constitutive of a large part of the Western tradition, namely, the confusion of working hard (a sine qua non for philosophy) with taking oneself seriously. I then analyze laughter in Nietzsche’s works as the voice of truth itself. Laughter is the affirmation of a register of truth as the other beginning that has been lost in every thing that begins. Such an analysis involves a discussion of the nature of both truth and laughter. In so doing, I also distinguish Nietzschean laughter from three representative and seminal accounts of laughter provided by Hobbes, Bergson, and Kant.

This paper addresses the question of the earth. I center this effort on a reading of the figure of animality in the writings of Nietzsche and Bataille. I begin by accepting one of the decisive questions (die Entscheidungen) that Heidegger poses in the Beiträge zur Philosophie: "Whether nature is degraded to the exploitative place of calculation and furnishing and to an opportunity to 'have an experience' or whether nature as the self-closing Earth bears the opening of a world without image." In an attempt to think the Earth, I argue that the human as a natural kind emerges in denial or flight from animality. Animality renders natural kinds porous. It does not congeal into a categorically delimitable operation, but rather interrupts and multiplies such operations. Moreover, they multiply them with what Nietzsche called "transvaluative" force. Animality contests the closure of a discourse on kinds of animals.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Shinto: The Way Home: Dimensions of Asian SpiritualityJason M. WirthShinto: The Way Home: Dimensions of Asian Spirituality. By Thomas P. Kasulis. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 184.Thomas P. Kasulis wrote his fine new book Shinto: The Way Home: Dimensions of Asian Spirituality as the result of a promise made over a glass of scotch to Henry Rosemont, who is currently editing a series of volumes highlighting various Asian spiritual traditions. These volumes promise to be strong, advanced introductions, and it is already clear that they should be seriously considered as introductory texts for courses in the Asian spiritual traditions. However, feeling "queasy" about his promise, Kasulis confessed that he was "primarily trained as a scholar of Japanese philosophy and there is simply not that much Shinto philosophy to write about" (p. xvi). Yet it appears that the scotch did not inspire frivolous behavior. The book is written by someone who has much love-perhaps even a pure heart and mind (makoto no kokoro)-for the Japanese spiritual heritage, and hence it makes an outstanding introduction to the basics of the Shinto tradition and its many practices. "Reading this book should help readers begin, not end, their study of Shinto" (p. xvii).Kasulis argues that Shinto is for the most part not a religion in the conventional Western sense. In fact, the Japanese word for "religion," shūkyō, is a neologism to designate the teachings (kyō) that comprise a shū, that is, a "discrete religious community with common practices and teachings" (p. 30). Yet Shinto operates in the background for most Japanese people, and so does not necessarily originate or result [End Page 358] in a clearly articulated doctrinal position. It comprises part of the cultural ambiance of Japanese life. It shapes the Japanese wedding ceremony and governs the Japanese relationship to rice (including sake).More significantly, it helps ritualistically inculcate the rudiments of what might be called something like a deep ecology. Certain remarkable locations in nature, certain foci that are spectacularly aberrant or startlingly exceptional, are marked off by a sacred portal (torii) or rope (shimenawa). They are designated as places of awe and wonder, as places inhabited by the kami (gods). In this way, a Shinto ecological aesthetic contrasts directly with a classical Western sense of beauty. The latter is achieved when an object is in maximum proximity to its idea-when it deviates as little as possible from its inherent nature. In Shinto the kami are present in an awesome deviation from the norm (as in a gnarled pine or a wondrously twisted rock).Yet Shinto does not necessarily ghettoize the sacred space, truncating it from its circulation with all of nature. Rather, sacred spots (like sacred practices) are isolated in order to serve as an opening into nature as sacred. They are sacred portals to the sacredness of the whole-"they are holographic entry points for experiencing kami everywhere" (p. 23). Kasulis traces these themes from Japanese prehistory, including their eventual appropriation in the early-eighth-century chronicles the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki, both of which were commissioned by imperial decree. Furthermore, there was much in Shinto that was compatible with the emergence of Buddhism in Japan. The latter helped Shinto remain dynamic and nondogmatic (p. 93), and Shinto helped make some of the more difficult aspects of esoteric Buddhism (Shingon and Tendai) more accessible to commoners (p. 99).However, in the isolationism of the Tokugawa period, Shinto was slowly wrested from its ensconcement in Japanese Buddhism. The influences of Neo-Confucianism and the Japanese code of the warrior (bushidō), the demilitarization of Buddhist monasteries, the relegation of monasteries to census taking, and other measures helped the Tokugawa clan consolidate their own power and enervate Buddhism's hold on Japan. Shinto itself would have to be freed from its Buddhist housing. The most fateful instance of this purification process transpired inadvertently with Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) and the dawning of the kokugaku or "native studies" movement. Norinaga spent more than three decades deciphering and annotating the linguistic labyrinth of the Kojiki. Yet this was not a mere scholastic exercise. Norinaga assigned the Kojiki the status of scripture...

This essay seeks to explicate the ethical dimension of Schelling’s project. Schelling complicates the theory/praxis distinction by arguing that these two modalities are different sides of the same movement in thinking. I attempt to establish this by first examining Schelling’s early essay, Neue Deduktion des Naturrechts, and then by turning to his celebrated Freedom essay. Although I chiefl y examine an early work and then a work from his middle period, I contend that the ethical dimension governs all of Schelling’s thinking. I examine closely Schelling’s description of Mitwissenschaft (the conscience). I further develop my argument by contrasting Nietzsche’s understanding of this notion with Heidegger’s treatment of it in Being and Time. I then turn to Hannah Arendt and her discussion of “radical evil” and the “conscience” in order to deepen our appreciation of Schelling’s watershed contribution.

The essay seeks to bring William James into dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche around the issue of the nature of sickness, and its overcoming or convalescence. It is, at first glance, folly to reconcile religious rebirth with the convalescence that led Nietzsche to the “great health.” To try and see beyond this folly, we will consider carefully the site in which health emerges for both thinkers. This discussion is further motivated by an interest in the prospects for religion after the death of God

This essay is devoted to an examination of the relationship between truth and laughter in the works of Nietzsche. My central text shall be the much malignedbook four of Zarathustra, with special attention paid to the braying of the ass. Laughter has been traditionally considered irrelevent to serious philosophical content and, at best, a stylistic quirk. I argue that this stems from a basic predjudice that is constitutive of a large part of the Western tradition, namely, the confusion of working hard (a sine qua non for philosophy) with taking oneself seriously. I then analyze laughter in Nietzsche’s works as the voice of truth itself. Laughter is the affirmation of a register of truth as the other beginning that has been lost in every thing that begins. Such an analysis involves a discussion of the nature of both truth and laughter. In so doing, I also distinguish Nietzschean laughter from three representative and seminal accounts of laughter provided by Hobbes, Bergson, and Kant.

This is an appreciative examination of Matthias Fritsch’s significant new book, Taking Turns with the Earth: Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Intergenerational Justice. After analyzing the temporal axis of Fritsch’s intervention into the question of intergenerational justice in the context of the ecological crisis, I extend it to a complementary spatial analysis by following some of the book’s important cues. I develop this in terms of some recent North American Indigenous philosophy, including Winona LaDuke, Glen Sean Coulthard, and Leanne Simpson.

In this essay I hope to make some new contributions to the philosophical opening occasioned by John Sallis’ articulation of an “elementology” more broadly and by his turn to Guo Xi’s exquisite Song Dynasty shan-shui scroll painting, Early Spring more particularly. I do so by bringing the remarkable writings by the American poet and thinker Gary Snyder, especially in relationship to his reading of the great Kamakura Zen Master Eihei Dōgen, directly into the fray of contemporary Continental discourses on the elemental and the ecological. At the heart of this project is Snyder’s development of Dōgen’s elemental discourse of “mountains, rivers, and the great earth.” Like Sallis’ own efforts to recast language into a more elemental discourse, this essay will also focus on the manners of speaking specific to the philosophical and poetic self-presentation of the elements, including the relationship between the philosophical and the artistic as such.

Jørgen Bukdhal’s study is a quietly moving and deceptively simple corrective to Kierkegaard’s reception. First published in Danish in 1961, it dispels the image of a lonely, angst-ridden individual, hopelessly mired in interiority and oblivious to concrete social ills. By deftly and eruditely elucidating the problematics of his time and by following the full expanse of his philosophical career, Bukdahl’s Kierkegaard comes closer to someone like Levinas. For “what matters is to exist for the sake of every person, unconditionally everyone”.

This essay seeks to explicate the ethical dimension of Schelling’s project. Schelling complicates the theory/praxis distinction by arguing that these two modalities are different sides of the same movement in thinking. I attempt to establish this by first examining Schelling’s early essay, Neue Deduktion des Naturrechts, and then by turning to his celebrated Freedom essay. Although I chiefl y examine an early work and then a work from his middle period, I contend that the ethical dimension governs all of Schelling’s thinking. I examine closely Schelling’s description of Mitwissenschaft (the conscience). I further develop my argument by contrasting Nietzsche’s understanding of this notion with Heidegger’s treatment of it in Being and Time. I then turn to Hannah Arendt and her discussion of “radical evil” and the “conscience” in order to deepen our appreciation of Schelling’s watershed contribution.

This is a philosophical rumination on Shawn Loht’s important extension of “film as philosophy” into a Heideggerian phenomenological account of the philosophical response that cinema can engender. After considering the importance of these kinds of approaches, I turn to Loht’s phenomenological engagement with Terrence Malick’s early masterpiece, Days of Heaven (1978). After sympathetically reviewing his “interpretation”, I expand upon its delineation of “earth and world” to include the “fallenness” of the world as well as the possibility of a metanōetic awakening to the vocation of “mud doctor”, that is, to heal the rift between earth and world, a rift made more exigent by world war, economic exploitation, and the ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene.