Melancholy, Narcissism and Hope in Truth

The fate of a ‘correlational’ approach to truth, which defines contemporary epistemological theories of knowledge, is described as inescapable by Quentin Meillasoux. If Meillasoux is right, then we are far from being able to hope in truth, if we are to follow the philosopher, Andrea Bellantone’s identification of correlation with narcissism and melancholia in La métaphysique possible. In order to understand correlation as narcissism and melancholy, one needs to reconsider the ineluctability of a metaphysical perspective, which pivots around the ultimacy of both being or reality, and the disclosive power of mind. According to Bellantone, human existence is faced with the overwhelming, superabundant and inexhaustible circumstance of being and its multiplicity. In the face of this multiple donation, one cannot avoid offering a joyous response, an appropriate counter-gift. As to what this gift is to be, this depends upon one’s intuitive and interpretative understanding of the import of being as such. Although this question is unanswerable, one cannot avoid it. Even a single being presents a saturated presence to one: a stone does not disclose all of itself, or all of its infinitely ramifying connections with other entities. A metaphysical answer to reality, a certain ‘taking’ of the real, even though one must ceaselessly modify this taking, is unavoidable.</jats:p

Melancholy, Narcissism and Hope in Truth

The fate of a ‘correlational’ approach to truth, which defines contemporary epistemological theories of knowledge, is described as inescapable by Quentin Meillasoux. If Meillasoux is right, then we are far from being able to hope in truth, if we are to follow the philosopher, Andrea Bellantone’s identification of correlation with narcissism and melancholia in La métaphysique possible. In order to understand correlation as narcissism and melancholy, one needs to reconsider the ineluctability of a metaphysical perspective, which pivots around the ultimacy of both being or reality, and the disclosive power of mind. According to Bellantone, human existence is faced with the overwhelming, superabundant and inexhaustible circumstance of being and its multiplicity. In the face of this multiple donation, one cannot avoid offering a joyous response, an appropriate counter-gift. As to what this gift is to be, this depends upon one’s intuitive and interpretative understanding of the import of being as such. Although this question is unanswerable, one cannot avoid it. Even a single being presents a saturated presence to one: a stone does not disclose all of itself, or all of its infinitely ramifying connections with other entities. A metaphysical answer to reality, a certain ‘taking’ of the real, even though one must ceaselessly modify this taking, is unavoidable.</jats:p

Truth as Conformation in Herbert of Cherbury

The theory of truth as 'conformation' in the writings of Edward Herbert is not put forward as an epistemological theory, nor as a theory of representation. Indeed, one could hazard that it possesses features which anticipate postmodern critique, though it is necessarily rooted in a pre-modern and Renaissance sensibility. This essay explores the way in which, in De Veritate, Herbert is not arguing that the mind must ‘conform’ to things in their given evidence, and be constrained by this. Nor is he saying that the evidence which one receives through one’s senses must be ‘conformed’ to the way in which one’s mind works, or to its a priori categories of understanding. Rather, by conformation he is referring to a phenomenon of the Platonic metaxu, or of what William Desmond calls ‘the between’. Truthful understanding is possible because there is a natural relation, analogy or harmony between things and mind, a kind of occult or sympathetic echo or affinity. One’s understanding is an instance of the general analogy which pertains between one thing and another, of their inherent connectedness which cannot be understood in terms of mechanism, but rather of secret ‘affinities’, ‘emanations’, foreshadowings, and the construals of the ‘signature’ of one thing by another.N/

After Writing : On the liturgical consummation of philosophy

Oxfordix, 292 p.; 25 cm

Melancholy, Narcissism and Hope in Truth

The fate of a &lsquo;correlational&rsquo; approach to truth, which defines contemporary epistemological theories of knowledge, is described as inescapable by Quentin Meillasoux. If Meillasoux is right, then we are far from being able to hope in truth, if we are to follow the philosopher, Andrea Bellantone&rsquo;s identification of correlation with narcissism and melancholia in La m&eacute;taphysique possible. In order to understand correlation as narcissism and melancholy, one needs to reconsider the ineluctability of a metaphysical perspective, which pivots around the ultimacy of both being or reality, and the disclosive power of mind. According to Bellantone, human existence is faced with the overwhelming, superabundant and inexhaustible circumstance of being and its multiplicity. In the face of this multiple donation, one cannot avoid offering a joyous response, an appropriate counter-gift. As to what this gift is to be, this depends upon one&rsquo;s intuitive and interpretative understanding of the import of being as such. Although this question is unanswerable, one cannot avoid it. Even a single being presents a saturated presence to one: a stone does not disclose all of itself, or all of its infinitely ramifying connections with other entities. A metaphysical answer to reality, a certain &lsquo;taking&rsquo; of the real, even though one must ceaselessly modify this taking, is unavoidable

31. Beauty and the Beast

The project of a vertical reading of Dante suggests a ‘speculative’ – or all at once – grasp of the themes of the Comedy, as opposed to an horizontal running-through its various successive narratives, rhetorical appeals and snatches of dialectic. But if one were seeking a complete reading, one would need to combine a straight read-through with an horizontal succession of the parallel vertical readings. In order to try to arrive at this combination in microcosm, I will read the three canto Thi..

Senses of Sense

The emphasis in recent years on contemplation, prayer and ritual has raised new questions about the ‘site’ of theological reflection: is an inhabited the- ology newly disclosive? What are the implications of such an appreciation of the role of the body – of language, gesture, posture, sound, variations of light and space, the passage of time – for theological understanding? The attentiveness to physical and temporal mediations of theological truth goes hand in hand with an appreciation of participatory metaphysical frame- works, and a renewed interest in pre-modern resources in which modes of contemplation and devotion were not held in a hostile relation to the- oretical reasoning. These modes of enactment – contemplation, prayer and ritual – entail an integrative stance which brings together active and passive modes or dispositions, a radicalization of subject and object, and a subversion of our usual kinds of knowing and doing: they entail a per- ception of reality which is conscious of its own part in that reality; in con- templation, we move towards an object and yet already rest in it; human spiritual perception is realized not by a refusal of the body and time, but by their drawing in through ritual bodily practice, a drawing-in which reaches its apotheosis in liturgical activity which one might see as an outward and inward ‘common-sensing’, and the synaesthetic mingling of the different physical and spiritual senses which such activity involves.N

The phenomenological given and the hermeneutic exchange: which holds priority?

It has been argued that Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological mode, according to which phenomenology is the exhaustive content of a rigorous philosophy, is vulnerable to the criticism that no reality is given prior to signification and interpretation. This is the hypothesis that phenomenology is a moment within a more fundamental hermeneutic process, rather than vice versa. However, this hypothesis, together with the argument that phenomenology falls prey to ‘the myth of the given’, have been subjected to a critique by Marion himself, in his essay, ‘La Donation en son Herméneutique’ (2016), which throws light on his whole project. In this essay, I argue that Marion’s position is problematic, though many of his points are persuasive. I will claim that, for this reason, he hovers on the brink of a position that would undo his own attempted critique of metaphysics.No external sponsorshi

The role of affinity and asymmetry in Plato’s <i>Lysis</i>

Are the true and the good friendless, for Plato, or is friendship a mode of truth and value? This article will examine Plato’s exploration of the aporias of friendship and the broader relationship to the question of the status of finite mediation and participation, as presented in Plato’s Lysis. One can note at the outset that this wider bearing is indicated by the term philia itself, which, in addition to friendship, denotes ‘self-belonging’, and includes the relations that are conducive to such self-belonging, as well as indicating both befriender and befriended (Lysis 218d). The stakes of the discourse seem to concern the sustainability of this polyvalent word: is our self-belonging in true goodness compatible with relational affection, and does the self-belonging of the good encompass any exterior concern? Must the double implication of philia be prised apart

Metaphysics and Poetics

Abstract: Metaphysics concerns the whole of reality, including the human spiritual response to reality. Pre-reflectively we do not divide these two, but reality includes also the moment of reflection. For this reason, metaphysics and poetry are identical, and yet also distinguished. As distinguished, metaphysics must treat all as found, including the poetic and link individual monads to the single infinite entirety. Conversely, poetry must treat all as made through its own continuation of the making process; it must seek to express the infinite in its own monadic instances. Yet both activities look towards a re-unification and second innocence. In this regard, poetry assumes participatively the entire burden of creation, judgement and redemption, while knowing that it is fallible, and may demonically fail. Equivalently, metaphysics must hermeneutically track all of the particular in its varied positivity, all the monadic makings and arrivals of unique events. The poetic is only secure in the poetic event of the Incarnation, and metaphysics only complete in conceiving of the divine thought as itself Trinitarian poetic emergence, and all finite reality as participation in that emergence, only sealed by the arrival of the God-Man