Self-criticism in a broken mirror

If we have no transparent access to our self, what kind of self-criticism is possible? Neither modernists nor postmodernists yet this pragmatic issue correct

"Authenticity with Teeth: Positing Process"

The goal or criterion of "authenticity" for judging a change in art or ethics or culture is notoriously vague and can be dangerous. This essay proposes a version of authenticity based on a quasi-Hegelian version of the process of development rather than on any specific patrimony to be preserved. Oddly enough, the proposed criterion has many similarities with one proposed by a staunch anti-Hegelian, Gilles Deleuze

Hit Men and Midwives: Christian Witness at Work and at Worship

(Excerpt) Well, it has finally come to this: even a liturgical institute has to discuss evangelism. Almost certainly some people will look at the combination of liturgy and witness and observe from one point of view or another how this sort of thing could never have happened a generation ago

A Place Without a Form

The old spiritual masters told us to be in the world but not of it. We moderns have given this a secular twist. We are in our world — we have values, ways of life, world pictures — but not of it — we are to be aware of our freedom, aware of the contingency of our world and its dependence on factors many of which are or will be under our control. We both inhabit our world and enjoy the status of distanced controllers. Or, if our lack of control and our dependence on historical and social factors is being emphasized, we are to inhabit our world with a certain knowing irony, since we understand the process by which it came about, even if we cannot change it. We hnave found ways to institutionalize this split-level identity. Such institutions posit a separation of form and content. In the free market, in procedural justice, in free speech we live out that separation. This parallels cognitive and volitional theories of Kantian and Utilitarian descent, which make the same separation. All these give us freedom by having us seek our identity in a formal process above all content, but at the cost of introducing distance and irony. Martin Heidegger's response to modernity often sounds like a romantic flight from modern distances. He clearly wants to overcome our split-level existence, the uneasy balance of facticity and freedom, which for him is but another manifestation of the will to power which he fines lurking behind our tradition. But to what degree is his own overcoming of modernity also susceptible to split-level living and ironic distance

"Real Places in Virtual Spaces"

Despite what might seem to be the case, "Virtual" reality can be used to create fully "real" places with their own grammar and norms, where real events take place

"Hegelian Buddhist Hypertextual Media Inhabitation, or, Criticism in the Age of Electronic Immersion"

What can it mean to criticize when you are inside the work itself? In a immersive electronic or digital environment critic is not distanced on a platform based on firm principles. Yet criticism self-awareness and commentary remain possible. This essay examines various techniques for dealing with immersive environments critically

Impure Postmodernity -- Philosophy Today

Hegel, Heidegger, Postmodernity reconsidered after 20 years

Building together / buildings together

A discussion of the problem of creating unified places in a pluralistic multicultural society