Rather than ask for certainty of one’s own being, because even an affirmative answer to that question is yes, Marion posits another, more fundamental question which he terms the erotic reduction: “Does anyone love me?” Only a positive answer to this question can answer vanity’s “What’s the use?”
The immediate objection that can be raised, and [...]
Tags: certainty, ego cogitans, Jean-Luc Marion, Other, phenomenology, self
Over the last few weeks, I have been working on Jean-Luc Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon in my dwindling spare time, and I have found it thoroughly enjoyable. In this book, Marion wishes to recover what philosophy has lost: a concept of love. At first, this may seem odd because one typically does not associate love [...]
Tags: certainty, Desire, ego cogitans, erotic reduction, Jean-Luc Marion, Love, ontothelogy, phenomenology, phenomenon, Subject
What is religion for Bataille? Most fundamental to his thought is his theory of world economics, of the play and movement of energy in its excesses and productions. What is most valuable or might be said to be his morality? I have been exploring a few of his writings for these answers, particularly wanting to [...]
Tags: Bataille, Consciousness, Immanence, morality, Object, paradox, Religion
In connection to my current study on desire, my interests have spread into the philosophies concerning food, humor, and horror. Thus far, I have only had time to do a moderate amount of reading on food, a nearly worthless bit on humor, and a more serious amount on desire in the broadest sense. Bataille is [...]
Tags: Bataille, Death, Desire, fear, Horror, taboo, transgression
What does Hegel mean by Desire? Most simply, Hegel says that “desire is self-consciousness,” but the natural question in following that is: what is self-consciousness? Or, for that matter, what is consciousness? I have not read enough Hegel to claim anything more than the most amateur level of expertise on this, and the answer is [...]
Tags: Consciousness, Desire, hegel, Object, Self-Consciousness, Subject
This week’s reading has brought me back to the well-worn yet still at least superficially complex world of Hegel’s Infinite. Hegel is the kind of writer that I think I understand when reading him and about him, but when I go to explain him, I inevitably stumble. Nevertheless, here I will venture a few thoughts [...]
Tags: Desire, Finite, hegel, Infinite, Infinity, Levinas, Other
My readings this week on desire delved into the relationship of desire to language and poetry, which have been recent fascinations of mine due to my studies of Paul Ricoeur. In poetry, or metaphor, there is an inherent excess of meaning through which language develops or gains new meanings. In a metaphor, or poetry, one [...]
Plato’s Phaedrus pictures a philosophy of love and the soul which, besides its characteristic queerness, contains many fascinating links to contemporary philosophy. One point in particular that I am struggling to understand, however, is the assertion that the beloved sees himself in his lover. What Plato means by that, I am not sure. I quote [...]
In Plato’s Symposium, Agathon asserts that Love is of surpassing beauty and goodness. After all, as he says, “since this god arose, the loving of beautiful things has brought all kinds of benefits both to gods and to men.” Although immediately flattering Agathon’s elegance, Socrates drastically changes the direction of the conversation by pointing out [...]
This evening I borrowed and perused the first half of James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom. His thesis involves the notion that because humans are not simply cognitive beings but actual desiring animals (embodied, and carrying in every action an implicit telos) Christian education needs to be about the forming of desires as well as [...]
Tags: campus programming, christian education, code of conduct, Desiring the Kingdom, Dordt College, james k a smith, programming students, residence halls, resident assistant, resident assistants, resident life
