Maria Balaska

In this paper I explore the differences between how Martin Heidegger and Wouter Kusters understand the role that anxiety as an encounter with the nothing plays for the origin of philosophy. Despite an important overlap between Heidegger and Kusters on the critical distance they take from the discourse of psychology and psychiatry and their valuable attempt to de-psychologize the discourse around anxiety and prioritize its existential insights, I argue that Kusters’ view of the nothing primarily as groundlessness and, subsequently, the view that anxiety leads to philosophy through the route of extreme skepticism is at odds with Heidegger’s view that anxiety as an encounter with nothing reveals the world as a whole.

I draw on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cora Diamond to argue that imagination plays a key role in moral consideration. By broadening our concepts and drawing similarities, our imagination can help us see nonhuman beings as fellow beings, namely as beings with whom we share a life. I address two related issues: First, how can we ensure that the exercise of imagination does not merely lead to nonsense? Second, can the imagination remedy the supposed incommensurability between beings with linguistic capacity and those without? An examination of these issues can allow for a conceptual refinement of imagination.

This chapter brings together the following themes from Diamond’s work: the idea that thinking is the kind of activity that guides thinking, the idea that in the face of a difficulty of reality a mind may break down, and a connection between hubris or narcissism with unintelligibility. To that purpose, I discuss the Greek story ‘The Murderess’, a story about evil, and I draw attention to the use therein of spatial metaphors of height in relation to a breakdown of thinking that accompanies evil—such as the metaphors of a mind growing tall, a mind going up in smoke, thinking high matters. I discuss two potential readings of these spatial metaphors of height: the mind growing tall to encompass a difficulty of reality and the mind growing tall as an expression of hubris that avoids the difficulty. In the latter case, I show how this amounts to misguided thinking, to thinking that has gone off the rails.

There is something paradoxical and possibly misleading in the title of this book. It has the form ‘X on y’, yet one of Diamond’s great contributions is her illumination of the idea that ethics has no particular subject matter; rather, it is ‘an attitude to the world and life, [which] can penetrate any thought or talk’. Unlike what happens in traditional moral theory, ethics in Diamond’s work is not demarcated with reference to certain concepts that are supposedly distinctively moral, like goodness, right, duty, obligation, virtue. This would make it difficult to demarcate in Diamond’s work a part of it that focuses on ethics; rather we could say that Diamond’s work bears on ethics as a whole insofar as it aims to clarify what possibilities our forms of life open for us, the complexity of our lives with concepts, what arises as significant therein. In Diamond’s work, the look that passes between two people, how one responds to music, how we disagree, how we relate to the concept of a gift or that of a stranger can very much be part of ethics.

This collection offers an in-depth look at Cora Diamond’s distinctive approach to ethics and its philosophical significance. It comprises a new essay by Cora Diamond on the policing of concepts, followed by ten original chapters by world-class scholars covering conceptual loss, moral theory, the category of the human, the moral consideration of animals, and the meaning of narcissism. Including comparisons to the work of other contemporary moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, Jeff McMahan, Rai Gaita, Eva Kittay, Christine Korsgaard, and Edward Harcourt, the volume also creates interdisciplinary links between Diamond’s work and other fields of study, including psychoanalysis and contemporary ethology. Showcasing the vital importance of Diamond’s contribution to philosophy, this volume is essential reading for scholars working in ethics, philosophy of language and literature.

This book brings together the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Lacan around their treatments of ‘astonishment,’ an experience of being struck by something that appears to be extraordinarily significant. Both thinkers have a central interest in the dissatisfaction with meaning that these experiences generate when we attempt to articulate them, to bring language to bear on them. Maria Balaska argues that this frustration and difficulty with meaning reveals a more fundamental characteristic of our sense-making capacities –namely, their groundlessness. Instead of disappointment with language’s sense-making capacities, Balaska argues that Wittgenstein and Lacan can help us find in this revelation of meaning’s groundlessness an opportunity to acknowledge our own involvement in meaning, to creatively participate in it and thereby to enrich our forms of life with language.

The chapter deals with what is here called ‘an experience of limitation’. I introduce this term as a combination of what Wittgenstein describes, in ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, as the ‘running-up-against paradox’, on the one hand, and, on the other, what Cora Diamond describes as the ‘difficulty of reality’ when she speaks of experiences which are painful and difficult or awesome and astonishing in their inexplicability (Diamond, 2008, pp.45–6). I argue that what Wittgenstein’s and Diamond’s kinds of experience have in common (and what the above-introduced term designates) is that they appear to have an absolute value, which looks as if it cannot be expressed in words, at least not without leading to our dissatisfaction with meaning.

What is it to see a stove as world (als Welt) and why does the early Wittgenstein use such a curious example to describe what it means to see something as significant (bedeutend)? I argue that Wittgenstein's odd choice can be best understood in the light of a conceptual relation between value and semantic meaning. To that purpose, I draw attention to his use of the word Bedeutung to denote value, and to the direct connection he draws between seeing as world and seeing with the whole logical space. To see a stove as bedeutend, I conclude, is to see it against the background of the propositional contexts in which a stove figures meaningfully.

I draw on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cora Diamond to argue that imagination plays a key role in moral consideration. By broadening our concepts and drawing similarities, our imagination can help us see nonhuman beings as fellow beings, namely as beings with whom we share a life. I address two related issues: First, how can we ensure that the exercise of imagination does not merely lead to nonsense? Second, can the imagination remedy the supposed incommensurability between beings with linguistic capacity and those without? An examination of these issues can allow for a conceptual refinement of imagination.