The Ascetic IdealPub Date : 2021-08-12DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896889.003.0004
S. Mulhall
{"title":"Knowing, Framing, and Enframing","authors":"S. Mulhall","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192896889.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192896889.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The first half of this chapter is an exercise in the philosophy of film, which treats Christopher Nolan’s body of cinematic work as Nietzsche treats a Wagner opera in the final essay of the Genealogy—as a key cultural site at which the complex interaction of the elements of the ascetic ideal play themselves out. The second half takes the analysis into the realms of science and philosophy: taking orientation from certain of Nietzsche’s claims about how modern philosophy adopts a scientistic stance, it weaves together these suggestions with some complex and controversial arguments advanced by the later Heidegger, to defend the idea that our contemporary age is best understood as the age of technology, and how this has informed and deformed some central cultural projects—in art, particularly the advent of modernist painting and its continuation in contemporary photographic practices; and in philosophy, in its treatment of secondary qualities, and more generally in its willingness to regard physics as metaphysics.","PeriodicalId":440990,"journal":{"name":"The Ascetic Ideal","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114844809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Ascetic IdealPub Date : 2021-08-12DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192896889.003.0003
S. Mulhall
{"title":"Writing the Life of the Mind","authors":"S. Mulhall","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192896889.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192896889.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on the relation between philosophy, biography, and autobiography, as a way of tracking how the ascetic ideal informs our thinking about our relation to ourselves, and so about selfhood in general. Certain ascetic ideas about the possibility of self-identity and truthful self-characterization are shown to crop up throughout modern treatments of autobiographical theory and practice, and to generate opposition and criticism. The work of MacIntyre, Sartre, and Heidegger provides a general framework for navigating this part of the territory of life-writing; and the recent autobiographical trilogy by J. M. Coetzee is examined as a site within which ascetic practices of confession are developed, criticized, and then turned against themselves.","PeriodicalId":440990,"journal":{"name":"The Ascetic Ideal","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116973106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Ascetic IdealPub Date : 2015-12-01DOI: 10.1093/ACPROF:OSO/9780198755326.003.0006
S. Mulhall
{"title":"Authority and Revelation","authors":"S. Mulhall","doi":"10.1093/ACPROF:OSO/9780198755326.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ACPROF:OSO/9780198755326.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter tracks the ascetic ideal from its religious point of origin to some of its key manifestations in the realms of morality and aesthetics. It relates Nietzsche’s original critique to Kierkegaard’s critical advocacy of Christianity, and uses Cavell to show how the latter can help us to understand twentieth-century artistic modernism as genealogically related to religious and moral concerns. It also argues that contemporary debates between moral individualists and moral philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein (such as Raimond Gaita and Cora Diamond) can be understood as arguments over contemporary manifestations of the ascetic ideal in both religion and morality. The central themes of the chapter are then brought together in a reading of a novel by William Golding.","PeriodicalId":440990,"journal":{"name":"The Ascetic Ideal","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132381741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}