Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Søren Kierkegaard was born on May 5, 1813 in Copenhagen. He was the youngest child of seven, born to parents of Jutlandish descent. He sometimes called himself a child of old age because his mother was 45 and his father 56 when he was born. Kierkegaard was influenced early in life by the devoutly religious teachings of his father which concentrated on Christ's suffering. In 1830 Kierkegaard went to study theology, philosophy and literature at the University of Copenhagen. In 1834 his mother died, and he began the famous journal that he would keep for 20 years. He had decided that he must know himself before he could know what he would do with his life. In 1837 he moved away from home to work teaching Latin at Borgerdydskolen. In 1838 his father died. In the same year, Kierkegaard published a critique of H.C. Andersen's novel Kun en Spillemand entitled Af en Endnu Levender Papierer. In 1840 he became engaged to Regine Olsen, a woman he had known since he had first moved away from home. He broke the engagement soon thereafter, however, believing that domestic responsibility would hinder him in his philosophical calling. He entered into a life of seclusion, writing and publishing constantly for the next ten years.

In 1840 Kierkegaard completed his doctoral dissertation entitled Om Begrebet Ironi (The Concept of Irony). Kierkegaard's first major book was this dissertation, published in 1841. This, along with many of his other books, was in conflict with Hegelianism, the dominant German philosophy of the time. Contrary to Hegel, Kierkegaard believed in personal immortality, and that human life cannot be rationalized in the way that Hegel's system would understand it. Kierkegaard argued that belief in God is a free act of faith, not a solution to a theoretical problem. Much of Kierkegaard's work expresses a deep interest in religious issues, including Frygt og BÊven: Dialectisk Lyrik (Fear and Trembling) (1843), Kierkegaard Begrebet Angest (The Concept of Dread) (1844), Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (1847), and Sygdomen Til Døden (The Sickness unto Death) (1849). Most of Kierkegaard's early writings were published under pseudonyms, and the "authors" didn't necessarily always agree with one another. At the beginning of his career he wanted to avoid committing to a single definitive religious or philosophical position.

In 1843 Kierkegaard published Either/Or. In this text he writes of the "aesthetic" and the "ethical" ways of life. The aesthetic life is based in temporally situated sensory pleasures, both intellectual and physical. The ethical life is based on moral codes, the infinite, and the eternal. One may only enter into an ethical way of life once one understands that an aesthetic life leads to angst and eventually despair.

1843 also marked the publication of Fear and Trembling and Repetition. Fear and Trembling is a study of the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which Abraham decides to sacrifice his son in obedience to God's command. Kierkegaard uses the story to work through the conflict between ethics and religion, looking particularly at the religious paradox that ethics may be disregarded if it is God's command. Kierkegaard claims that God may accomplish what we may see as absurd, and that we may recover what is lost to us by having faith in the absurd. Repetition works with a similar theme, working through his relationship with Regine by using the name Constantin Constantius for his own character. Kierkegaard had decided that he was free now that Regine was married to another man, and the book ends with Constantin devoting himself to the his work, the "idea."

In 1846 Kierkegaard published Afsluttende Uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (Concluding Unscientific Postscript), a critique of philosophical system building. The thesis of this work is that subjectivity is truth. He felt that the nature of Christianity was obscured by the Hegelian idea of an objective science of the human spirit. He argues against the way Hegel's system fuses logic with existence, claiming that existence cannot be explained objectively. He formulates that subjectivity is truth by showing that a person's relationship to the objective uncertainty of Christianity is a relationship to the highest truth available to an individual. He sees the condition of faith as an "impassioned interestedness," and does not see faith being possible as a result of objective scholarly deliberation. In 1847 Kierkegaard wrote Works of Love, a piece on love in its various forms, the perfection of Christian love, and the "offense" of Christianity.

In 1848 Kierkegaard had a spiritual crisis. His works after this point began to bluntly attack the church and Christendom's complacency. He hoped to anger his contemporary Christians enough to inspire in them a stronger relationship to their faith. In 1850 he published Indøvelse In Christendom (Practice in Christianity), under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. He felt this to be his most important book, and saw it as a reintroduction of Christianity. He felt that the removal of the offense of Christianity by the state church of Denmark made light of the message of Christianity. In a similar tone, he published Guds Foranderlighet in 1855 under his own name. He also wrote articles for a journal called The Fatherland criticizing the state Lutheran church for claiming that all people born in Denmark are automatically Christian. These articles are compiled under the title Hvad Christus Dømmer Om Officiel Christendom (Attack Upon "Christendom,"). While he was writing the articles that make up Attack Upon Christendom, Kierkegaard was stricken with a spinal disease. He died within a month of his diagnosis on November 11, 1855.

Kierkegaard's resistance to creating an all-embracing system of thought has resulted in a rich variety of influence on twentieth century philosophy and literature. Jaspers, Heidegger and Sartre were all heavily influenced by his work, and Existentialism owes much to Kierkegaard's thought, drawing on his analysis of freedom and angst. Although he didn't write much overtly political work, Marxists like Marcuse and Lukacs have shown interest in Kierkegaard's writings. He has also influenced theological studies, especially the work of Karl Barth, and he is admired for his literary innovations.

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Philosophers

Who is Padre Roque?

by Pamela Joy Mariano-Capistrano

Roque J. Ferriols, S.J.  (full name: Roque Angel Jamias Ferriols)  |  Roque Ferriols, S.J. has left his mark on several generations of philosophy students from the Ateneo de Manila University. Fondly known as "Padre Roque" to later generations of students, Ferriols can be credited with almost single-handedly promoting the teaching of philosophy in Filipino. More important and more lasting, however, is his determination to impart the necessity of pagmumuni-muni--of genuine thinking on one's situation, to his students. He has taught--and still continues to teach--at the Ateneo de Manila for more than 40 years.

Born August 16, 1924 at the Philippine General Hospital, Ferriols grew up in North Sampaloc. At home, he recounts, the adults talked to each other in Spanish or Ilokano. To the children, him included, "they talked--condescendingly, I felt--in something they called Tagalog." Ferriols would later call this distinctive brand of Filipino 'North Sampalokese', to distinguish it from the Tagalog spoken by the elite whom he first encountered in school. He recounts, "Trying to make friends in the playground, I talked to my peers in something I thought was Tagalog and was laughed at. In North Sampaloc nobody felt superior to you if you spoke a different accent or mixed Ilocanisms with your Tagalog. Not three kilometers away, the little sons and daughters of the Tagalese were enforcing elitist norms."

In 1941, Ferriols joined the Jesuits. During the preliminary years of his formation, he distinguished himself as an exceptional scholar in Greek and Latin, while at the same time living through the Second World War and the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines. After the war, he was sent to study theology in Woodstock, Maryland, as was the custom then for the Jesuits in the Philippines. Nearly fifteen years after entering the Society, in 1954, he was ordained a priest in New York. Ferriols, called to philosophy, finished his doctorate at Fordham University in New York with a dissertation entitled The Psychic Entity in Sri Aurobindo's "The Life Divine."

Upon his return to the Philippines, Ferriols first taught philosophy for three years at Berchmans College in Cebu, before returning to Ateneo de Manila--an Ateneo just beginning to settle into its new home in Loyola Heights. There, Ferriols, as chair of the Department of Philosophy, established the AB Philosophy program with the first Philosophy majors graduating in 1966--Salvador F. Bernal, the 2003 National Artist for Theater and Design, being its first departmental awardee.  Previously, philosophy in the Ateneo had been taught in the same scholastic tradition as in seminaries; this young department, on the other hand, was animated by the spirit of phenomenology that Ferriols encountered in his doctorate studies. His brand of philosophy was characterized by a return to “the things themselves,” to the lived experiences that become the trigger for philosophical reflection.

It was in 1969 that Ferriols began to teach Filipino, as part of a greater move towards Filipinization in the university--a move that was not at odds with phenomenology's emphasis on lived experience. At first, however, this method is not fully encouraged by the university's administration. After several attempts at preventing the classes from being held, Ferriols was finally allowed to teach the classes. He was given the oddest class hours, right at lunch time or before dinner—but this did not dissuade students from enrolling in his classes. Word then slowly but steadily spread among the students, and as each semester passed the classes grew in size. Today, nearly half of all philosophy classes taught by the Department of Philosophy are in Filipino.

Fpicture courtesy of The Guidonerriols' efforts at promoting the study of philosophy in Filipino also led him to translate, edit, and write various books. Among those published are Mga Sinaunang Griyego, a translation of selected texts from the Pre-Socratics to Aristotle; Magpakatao, a collection he edited, containing translations of texts exploring the theme of being human; and his original writings Pambungad sa Metapisika and Pilosopiya ng Relihiyon. These four books earned him National Book Awards from the Manila Critics' Circle. In 1989, the Ateneo de Manila University conferred him with the Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi.

In "A Memoir of Six Years," his chronicle of his first six years of teaching philosophy in Filipino, he writes, "In six years, one comes to know that, for human thinking, North Sampalokese is better than Plato's Greek." And this seems to be the spirit that has animated Ferriols all these years--the desire to propagate real thinking and to do away with the misconception that thinking is the ivory tower of the elite--a spirit that his students hope to keep alive.

http://www.admu.edu.ph/

Philosophers

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida, Ph.D., was born to an Algerian Jewish family in El-Biar, Algeria, in 1930 and died on October 9, 2004. At the age of 22, he moved to France and began studies at the École Normale Supérieur in Paris, focusing on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Of particular interest for Derrida is the analysis of écriture, the writing of philosophy itself. He published several articles in the 1960's for Tel Quel, France's forum of leftist avant-garde theory. During the first half of the decade, he taught at the Sorbonne in Paris. He wrote reviews on publications devoted to history and the nature of writing, which appeared in the latter half of the 1960's in the Parisian journal, Critique. These works would be foundational to Derrida's highly influential work, Of Grammatology. Derrida was introduced to America in 1967 by the Johns Hopkins University, where he delivered his lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."

Jacques Derrida taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieur from 1965 to 1984, dividing much of his time between Paris and American universities such as Johns Hopkins and Yale. He is currently the director at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales in Paris. Since 1986 he has also been Professor of Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine and continues to lecture in academic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Derrida published three books in 1967-Speech and Phenomena; Of Grammatology; and Writing and Difference, which outline the deconstructive approach to reading texts. In Of Grammatology, in part influenced by his friend and peer, Emmanual Levinas, Derrida analyzes and criticizes Western Philosophy beginning with the pre-Socratics to Heidegger. He challenges the fundamental privileging of "logos" in Western Philosophy with its claims to authenticity in the proposition of a direct link between speech and act in its form, which Derrida reveals as having the presence of a centre of identity and/or subjectivity. This privileging of logos denigrates the practice of writing, though paradoxically many philosophers attempted to reveal the nature of speech of the written text to reconcile the challenge. Derrida, however, would go on to develop a method of identifying such patterns within the act of writing, which he termed "deconstruction." Deconstruction seeks to identify logocentric paradigms, such as dichotomies, and show that the possibility of presence within any contextual language is in constant "play" and "differs" continuously in relation to something else, leaving only a "trace" of the subject/object. Derrida introduced words such as "trace," "presence," "difference," "deconstruction," "logos," and "play" to the lexicon of contemporary discourse in structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism and post-colonialism. The strategy is not an attempt to remove paradoxes or contradictions or escape them by creating a system of its own. Rather, deconstruction embraces the need to use and sustain the very concepts that it claims are unsustainable. Derrida was looking to open up the generative and creative potential of philosophy. Deconstruction has also been applied as a strategy of analysis to literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture.

Différance is a term Derrida coined in 1968 in response to structuralist theories of language such as Saussure's structuralist linguistics. While Saussure managed to demonstrate that language can be shown to be a system of differences without positive terms, it was Derrida who opened the full implications of such a conception. There is an unconceptualizable, unperceivable dimension in language in the thinking of difference without positive terms making difference itself the prototype of a remainder outside Western metaphysical thought -it is thus the very condition of the possibility of Western thought. Such a conception of difference is not brought into an order of the same in language through any concept, common sense or given identity, nor is difference an identity, nor is it between two identities. It is the deferral of difference — différance. Derrida developed terms whose structures are inherently double in this manner: pharmakon (both poison and cure), supplement (both surplus and necessary addition, and hymen (both inside and outside).

Further to Derrida's critique of structural linguists is the limited and colloquial definition of writing they used in the championing of speech. Writing is seen here to be graphic, empty of all complexities, fundamentally phonetic (and hence a representation of the sound of language) utile for memory but secondary to speech. Speech is considered by the structuralists to be closer to the thought, primary emotions, intentions and ideas of the speaker. Derrida introduces a graphic element into his spelling of différance that cannot be detected by the voice. The effect of punctuation and spaces in the body of the text is another example of the unrepresentable dimensions available to writing, revealing both that writing cannot be thought of as entirely phonetic, nor that speech is entirely auditory. Spaces in writing are perceptible as the unpresentable silences in speech.

Derrida's oeuvre could be viewed as an exploration of the nature of writing in the broadest sense as différance. To the extent that writing always includes pictographic, ideographic, and phonetic elements, it is not identical with itself. Writing, then, is always impure and, as such, challenges the notion of identity, and ultimately the notion of the origin as 'simple'. It is neither entirely present nor absent, but is the trace resulting from its own erasure in the drive towards transparency. Writing is neither essential nor phenomenal, it is not what is produced but what allows for the possibility of production. In meditations on themes from literature, art and psychoanalysis, as well as from the history of philosophy, part of Derrida's strategy is to make visible the 'impurity' of writing (and any identity), often by deploying rhetorical, graphic, and poetic strategies at once. Blurring boundaries between disciplines in his texts, such as in Glas (1974) or The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980), Derrida shows the inseparable nature between the poetic and/or rhetorical, signifying element of a text, and the content or meaning, the signified element of the text
Derrida has maintained a strongly political presence, fighting for the rights of Algerian immigrants in France, against apartheid, and for the rights of Czech Charter 77 dissidents. He seeks a consistency in his lived, political reality to his philosophy, attempting to live with as little dichotomy as possible. His works are of the most frequently cited by other academics in a wide range of fields, particularly in literary criticism and philosophy.

In 2003, Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Only one year later Jacques Derrida passed away in a hospital in Paris, France on the evening of October 8, 2004. His influence on contemporary philosophy is undeniable and he is beyond a doubt one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty first century.

by: http://www.egs.edu/

Philosophers

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche was born in Röcken, the Prussian province of Saxony, on October 15th, 1844. His father died when Nietzsche was five years old, hence, his childhood was spent with his mother, sister and two maiden aunts. At fourteen the young Nietzsche was awarded a scholarship to enter the preparatory school, Schulpforta, with the intent of training for the clergy. He excelled in religious studies, German literature, and classical studies. He also began to suffer from migraine headaches, an ailment that would trouble him for most of his adult life. He graduated in 1864, and continued studies in theology and classical philology and the University of Bonn. However, he soon gave up theology and transferred to Leipzig, where he was introduced to the works of Kant, the composer Richard Wagner and Schopenhauer and his recent text, The World as Will and Idea.

Although Nietzsche served in the army in 1868 his appointment was cut short by illness. However, he was thought to be a brilliant student, and rather than return to the army, the University of Basel called him to the chair of classical philology at the age of 24, even though arrangements to award him a doctorate had to be made shortly thereafter. Then during the Franco-Prussian war, he served as a medical orderly for a brief period, returning this time to Basel in ill-health, and though he managed to teach there from 1869-79, he was again forced by his health to retire.

It was in Basel that Nietzsche became a close friend of Richard Wagner, the second part of The Birth of Tragedy is devoted to Wagner's music. With the publication of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music in 1872 Nietzsche returned to Basel to lecture. Upon Nietzsche's rise to celebrity, he sought to bring his friend along, and together, they managed to convince the government to fund the construction of the Bayreuth theatre, built to feature Wagner's work. The theatre was completed in 1876, and Wagner's self-proclaimed masterpiece, The Ring of the Nibelung, was performed for the Emperor. Much to his despair, Nietzsche found that he hated the work, and began to question not only Wagner's work, but Prussian culture in general. His friendship with Wagner ended in 1878, at the time Nietzsche discovered the French Enlightenment. Tensions between the two rose as Wagner disapproved of the French and Nietzsche refused the cult of Wagnerian ideals in Bayreuth, particularly the anti-Semitism it propagated.

Nietzsche encountered more adversities in his life, the rejection of Lou Andreas-Salomé to his proposal of marriage, along with his ongoing resistance to Prussian citizenship (which he had given up in 1869), provoked a withdrawal of Nietzsche. He remained stateless for the rest of his life, preferring the life of a tourist-scholar and spending his time writing in boarding houses -the summers in Switzerland and the winters in Italy. During this time he published nine books, between 1872 and 1888, while preparing four others for publication.

In his first published book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy), he diagnosed that human beings are subject to Dionysian instincts — unconscious desires, impulses, or overwhelmingly self-destructive tendencies. Nietzsche pointed out that the Greeks had opposed Apollonian principles of sobriety and rationale to such destructive drives. These became to major principles in his future work, the Dionysian and Apollonian, one of chaos, dream and intoxication, the other one of order and the lending of form. These Nietzsche associated with an aesthetic disposition in which life be viewed as a work of art. He demonstrated that the Greeks had theorized the relation of the two principles in which art is a willed illusion and is composed of both form-giving and intoxication, and thus, art offers one a vantage point of life. Therefore, life itself becomes recognizable as unknowable in terms of an ultimate truth, as proposed by an idealist metaphysics.

Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) was formally published first in three parts in 1883-1884 and 1892. Central in his thinking is the notion of the will to power, the eternal return and radical nihilism, which together negotiate pain, suffering and contradiction as expressions of existence and its actual tensions instead of objectionable phenomena. Nietzche opposed ideas of the progress of the human species as theorized by Darwin, preferring instead the idea of an eternal recurrence with an accompanying positive power of heroic suffering. The ideal of 'man' for Nietzche is to be overcome along with all idealism, as such concepts bear no correspondence to reality. Zarathustra is the figure of the 'higher' man, and his thought is poetic. This superman rejects faith and morality upon the assumption that either "God is dead," or that his role in human development ended shortly after Creation. Nietzche believed that an ideal society should form its own morality outside of religious morality, suggesting even that the use of Judeo-Christian morality was often the cause of the avoidance of decisive actions or the acceptance of our fundamental existence in the material world. The failure to live, take risks and decisive actions is a failure to realize actual human potential — for nothing exists beyond life.

His most influential work, The Will to Power, published posthumously in 1901, was based on a series of notes in his journals and contains his strongest oppositions to idealism. This anti-idealist stance not only had an influence on thinkers such as Bataille, but continued to shape the thought of existentialists, post-modernists and post-structuralists well into the 20th century. The work is a continuation of key principles of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The will to power is foundational to his anti-idealist stance; it is an affirmation of life, a vision of the world itself as a will to power. The implications are profound — all simplistic oppositions between subject and object, between will and apathy, being and nothingness are divisions within the world as will to power itself. There is nothing else besides, and identity itself is to be constructed in the plurality of forces for which there is no unity of reality behind appearance. Following Kant's thought on the necessary affirmation of values, Nietzsche saw the revaluation of values as the equivalent of making values within the play of forces of the will to power.

Near the end of his life, Nietzsche's productivity ended in January 1889, when he suffered a mental breakdown upon seeing a coachman cruelly whipping his horse -this drama had him sobbing with his arms around the beast's neck. He was housed in an asylum at first, then placed in the care of his family. During his illness he was mostly pleasant, engaging in conversation when he was more lucid. However, his health deteriorated, and in the final decade of his life he was generally dysfunctional, dying in 1900 in Weimar. His sister Elisabeth secured the rights to his literary works as yet unpublished, and edited them for publication, although sometimes in rather disjointed form. To further complicate manners, Elisabeth was married to a prominent member of the German anti-Semite movement, which Nietzsche loathed; the supposed nature of his influence of Nazism served to make the interpretation of his texts difficult. He rejected biological racism and German nationalism, writing "every great crime against culture for the last four hundred years lies on their conscience." His ideas were first championed by the Danish critic, Georg Brandes, who lectured on Nietzsche in Copenhagen in 1888. Nietzsche's work has influenced among others Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, Albert Camus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Paul Sartre.

by: http://www.egs.edu/

Philosophers