Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
The Website Against Philosophical Provincialism
Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Russia and Japan: A Comparative Philosophical Study
Lanham: Lexington Books, September 28, 2009. List Price: $60.00 Cloth 0-7391-3068-4 / 978-0-7391-3068-1 Hardcover, 174p. Go to Amazon.com.
Schrader: "In Japanese art there is a concept of mono no aware, sweet sadness, the pleasure of endings, of autumn and seeing a dying leaf."
Sokurov: "For Russia, sweet sadness and pleasant farewells are not possible. On the contrary, in the Russian sense of elegy, it's a deep vertical feeling, not a delighting one. It gets you deeply, sharply, painfully. It's massive."
Conversation between Paul Schrader and Alexander Sokurov
Russia and Japan are not only successful reformers but also the first "non-western" countries that develop a philosophy – in the "Western" sense – of their own and on a larger scale. Still it seems that, in spite of this striking parallel, no comparative research has been done on these two philosophical traditions. Studies on "Nishida and Heidegger" are numerous while topics like, say, "Nishida and Berdiaev" or "Watsuji and Trubetzkoy" have never been taken up for examination. This is the more so surprising because the comparative potential of such studies is obvious, be it simply for historical reasons. In Russia, the Eastern Orthodox Church passed by, for example, those Neo-Platonic dichotomies like 'body' and 'mind' that are, not coincidentally, assumed by the Western Church as well as for Western metaphysics (cf. Lopatin 1913). Also in Japan these notions had never been taken for granted. An ambiguous "Western" philosophy could adopt similar forms in both countries.
"An intellectual tour-de-force, Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Russia and Japan succeeds admirably on several fronts, including its presentation of the first sustained comparison of philosophies from Japan and Russia and the introduction of Botz-Bornstein's original concept of 'convergence' as a convincing countermeasure to the facile critiques that modern scholars have often leveled against the alleged 'totalitarianism' of major Japanese and Russian thinkers. This is a work of philosophy as well as on philosophy—a rare combination that makes this book required reading for anyone who cannot afford to ignore the world in which s/he lives." — Michael F. Marra, University of California-Los Angeles
Timeline
1725 "Modernizer" Peter the Great dies
1836 Petr Chaadaev "the first original Russian philosopher" (Mikhail Epstein) publishes the "Philosophical Letter"
1840 First Russian Slavophils gather in Moscow ("paternalist and conservative")
1848-49: Revolutions in Prague, Vienna, and Budapest
1848: First Pan-Slav Congress in Prague
1850: "Westernizer" Herzen's From the Other Shore
1858: Formal Foundation of Russian Pan-Slav Movement
1867: Meiji Restauration
1871: Danilevsky's Russia and Europe (the "Pan-Slavist Bible")
1887: Inoue Enryo founds the "Philosophical Institute" to promote the study of Buddhism 1881 Tsar Alexander II assassinated 1888 Soloviev, "the first Russian orginal systematical philopsopher" (Lossky) publishes The National Question in Russia 1901: Foundation of the Religious-Philosophical Society of St. Petersburg 1902: Symposium "Problems of Idealism" 1902: Okakura's Ideals of the East inaugurating the "Asian Spiritual Renaissance" 1904-1909: Articles by Symbolist writers appear in Vesy, inaugurating the "Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance"
1906: Kita Ikki's Theory of National Polity and Pure Socialism
1908-09: "Paternalist, conservative and rational" Chairs in "Colonial Studies" are created at Tokyo and Waseda Universities
1911: Nishida, "the first original Japanese philosopher" (Nakamura Yujiro) writes Zen no Kenkyu
1911: Sun-Yat Sen's Revolutionary Movement in China
1912: S. Trubetzkoy's Soloviev's Worldview
Russian Revolution of 1917
1918 Japanese Radicals around Okawa Shumei found the Rosokai Society
1921: Eurasian Manifesto Exodus to the East
1929: Kuki's The Structure of 'Iki'
Round-Table Discussions of right-wing philosophers "The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan
1935: Watsuji's Culture and Climate
1937: Last volume of the Eurasian Chronicle appears
1942: Conference "Overcoming of Modernity"
1943: Nishida's Principle of a New World Order
Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, Wong Kar-wai
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007, 176 pp. Paperback available.
Paperback List Price: $27.00 Cloth 0-7391-2187-1 / 978-0-7391-2187-0. Order from Lexington. Go to Amazon.com.
Read review by Costica Bradatan in Parallax 2009
From the Introduction: Dreamtense and the Art of Film
In his book Visual Thinking, Rudolf Arnheim points to the interest represented by a fundamental link between film and dream which becomes evident as soon as it is seen in relation with Freud's dreamwork:
"Freud raises the question of how the important logical links of reasoning can be represented in images. An analogous problem, he says, exists for the visual arts. There are indeed parallels between dream images and those created in art on the one hand, and the mental images serving as the vehicle of thought on the other; but by noting the resemblance one also becomes aware of the differences, and these can help to characterize thought imagery more precisely." [1]
In film studies it has been demonstrated that dreams can be (aesthetically) fascinating not only because their linguistic or structural elements can be traced back to elements which exist in reality. On the contrary, in films, the language of dream is an object of interest as just "another language," in the same way as one can be fascinated by language from another culture without having a particularly linguistic interest in it. Robert Curry writes that "... [dreams] show a vividness, originality, and insightfulness that quite escapes us in our waking life. If we compare our dreams to the fantasies of waking life, the latter reveal at a glance their stereotyped features and lowly origins in our desires and fears."[3] If we use dream theory in film studies, we are interested in dreams as aesthetic expressions and in the ways these particular expressions can be obtained. In the chapters contained in this book, dreams will be dealt with as such "self-sufficient" phenomena that are interesting not because of their contents but because of a certain "dreamtense" through which they deploy their being. Notes
[1] Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969), 241. [2] Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago), Vol. XII, 292. [3] Robert Curry, "Films and Dreams" in Journal for Aesthetics and Art Criticism 333:1, 1974, 85.
To discuss dream theory in the context of film studies means moving from the original, clinical context within which dream theory was initially developed, to an environment established by primarily aesthetic concerns. For Freud, dream research was to be used as a technical means of discovering essential facts concerning the development of neuroses, mental diseases, and other phenomena diverging from "normal" mental life. In his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud presents the study of dreams as an explicit introduction to the Neurosenlehre. Aesthetic considerations have never been at the centre of these elaborations just as they have never been central to psychoanalysis. Freud was aware of this but considered it rather as a general tendency linked to the psychoanalytical idea, and not as a methodological problem: "The psychoanalyst is only rarely motivated to undertake aesthetic examinations, not even when aesthetics is not restricted to the doctrine of beauty but defined as the doctrine of sentimental qualities."[2]
Place and Dream: Japan and the Virtual
Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi 2004. 216 pp.
ISBN: 90-420-1069-X. euro 45,-/US$ 59.-
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This is a book about space. On a first level, it reflects traditional Japanese ideas of space against various "items" of Western culture. Among these items are Bakhtin's "dialogicity", Wittgenstein's Lebensform, and "virtual space" or "globalized" space as representatives of the latest development of an "alienated", modern spatial experience. Some of the Western concepts of space appear as negative counter examples to "basho-like", Japanese places; others turn out to be compatible with the Japanese idea of space. On a second level, the book attempts to synthesize, by constantly transgressing the limits of a purely comparative activity, a quantity which the author believes to be existent in Japanese culture that is called "the virtual". Be it Kuki Shuzo's hermeneutics of non-foundation or his ontology of dream, Nishida Kitaro's virtual definition of the body of state, or Kimura Bin's notion of "in-between" (aida) that is so closely associated with the "virtual space" of Noh plays: what all these conceptions have in common is that they aim to transcend a flat notion of "reality" by developing "the virtual" as a complex ontological unity.
Contents:
Introduction: Space and the Virtual: An East-West Comparison
1. The Gamelike and Dreamlike Structures of Nishida Kitaro's Pure Experience
2. Iki, Style, Trace: Kuki Shuzo and the Spirit of Hermeneutics
3. Contingency and the 'Time of the Dream': Kuki Shuzo and French Prewar Philosophy
4. The 'I' and the 'Thou': A Dialogue between Nishida Kitaro and Mikhail Bakhtin
5. Ma, Basho, Aida: Three Japanese Concepts of Space at the Age of Globalization
6. Nishida Kitaro and the Politics of the Virtual Body
7. Nishida and Wittgenstein: From Pre-conceptual Experience to Lebensform
Postface: "Predicative Logic" and Virtual Stylistics
Appendix: Eight Western Paradigms of Onreiric Spatial Perception: Choraic Space, Aporiatic Space, Phronetic Space, Chronotopic Space, Mnemetic Space, Ur-Space, Dandyist Space, Unheimlicher Space
(Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, June 2006)
Pb: 978-90-420-2092-4 / 90-420-2092-X € 30 / US$ 38
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Vasily (Wilhelm) Sesemann is the most important Lithuanian philosopher of all times. Born in Vyborg in 1884 by parents of German descent, Sesemann grew up and studied in St. Petersburg. A close friend of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev P. Karsavin, Sesemann taught from the early 1920 until his death in 1963 at the universities of Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania (interrupted only by his internment in a Siberian labor camp from 1950 to 1958). Botz-Bornstein's study takes up Sesemann's idea of "experience" as a dynamic, constantly self-reflective, "ungraspable" phenomenon that cannot be objectified. Through various studies, the author shows how Sesemann develops an outstanding idea of experience by reflecting it against empathy, Erkenntnistheorie (theory of knowledge), Formalism, Neo-Kantianism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Bergson's philosophy. Sesemann's thought establishes a link between Formalist thoughts about "dynamics" and a concept of Being reminiscent of Heidegger. The book contains also translations of two essays by Sesemann as well as a translation of an essay by Karsavin. 
Author: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein. Preface by Eero Tarasti
CONTENTS:
Preface by Eero Tarasti
Introduction: Experience as a Subject of Philosophy in the Early Twentieth Century
Chapter 1: Sesemann's Life and Work
Chapter 2: Neo-Kantianism, Formalism, and the Question of Being
Chapter 3: New Approaches to the Psychic Subject: Vasilij Sesemann, Bakhtin and Lacan
Chapter 4: Intuition and Ontology in Vasilij Sesemann and Bergson: Zeno's Paradox and the Being of Dream
Appendix II: V. Sesemann: "On the Nature of the Poetic Image" (excerpts) trans. T. Botz-Bornstein
Appendix III: L.P. Karsavin: "The Foundations of Politics" (excerpts) trans. T. Botz-Bornstein
Appendix IV: A Letter by Henri Parland from Kaunas
Appendix V: Research Bibliography of Sesemann's Works
Bibliography
Index
Appendix I: V. Sesemann: "Socrates and the Problem of Self-Knowledge" (excerpts) trans. T. Botz-Bornstein
Culture, Nature, Memes: Dynamic Cognitive Theories
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Edited by T. Botz-Bornstein (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008)
Introduction
I. Culture
1. Paul van den Hoven: Cultural Discourse Analysis and the Cognitive Process
2. Axel Gelfert: Learning from Others: Testimony and the Cognitive Role of Culture
3. Barry Hartley Slater: Dreaming of Consciousness
II. Nature
4. Peter Simons: The Emergence of Intentionality
5. Simone Gozzano: Language, Thought and, Mute Animals
6. Heidi L. Maibom: Thoughts of Rivals, Thoughts of Failure: How Emotions Affect Our Thoughts
7. Mark J. Cain: 50,000 Innate Concepts? Pinker’s Attack on Extreme Concept Nativism
III. Memes
8. Sandra Egege: Culture and Language as Social Construction: A Case Against Cultural Difference
9. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein: Can Memes Play Games? Memetics and the Problem of Space
10. Francisco Gil-White: Common Misunderstandings of Memes (and Genes)
11. Yujian Zheng: Memes, Mind, and Normativity
Re-Ethnicizing the Minds? Cultural Revival in Contemporary Thought
Editors: Thorsten Botz-Bornstein & Jürgen Hengelbrock
Hb 90-420-2041-5 ---- EUR 100 / US$130
ORDER from Rodopi. Go to Amazon.com. Through recent confrontations with the theme of "globalization," the idea of "ethnophilosophy" appears again as interesting and attractive. In 1997, Fidelis Okafor published an article with the slightly curious title "In Defense of Afro-Japanese Ethnophilosophy." Okafor reevaluates qualities like "folkness," the "existential outlook," and "communal mind" as characteristics of a philosophy that takes a people’s Weltanschauung as simultaneously a point of departure and an objective. Surprisingly, Okafor restricts his analyses not to Africa but claims to see patterns of "ethnophilosophy" also in contemporary Japanese philosophy. The recurring interest in ethnophilosophy is understandable at times where networks of global communication are effective in philosophy as much as elsewhere.
The predominance and global expansion of homogenizing modes of production, consumption and information risks alienating non-Western and Western people alike from the intellectual and moral resources embedded in their own distinctive cultural traditions. In reaction to the erosion of traditional cultures and civilizations, we seem to be witnessing the re-emergence of a tendency to "re-ethnicize the mind" through renewed and more or less systematic cultural revivals worldwide (e.g., "hinduization," "ivoirization," "sinofication," "nipponification," "islamicization," "indigenization," "russification," "gallicization," etc.).
How do and should philosophers understand and assess the significance and impact of this phenomenon? Authors acquainted with the contemporary situation in Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, South-America, and Europe try to address and answer this question. While some discuss the possibility of a careful "ethnicization" and judicious "cultural revival" of traditions, others point to the dangers of "ethnocentrism" and "folklorization," or alternatively to the misuse, past and present, of ethnicity and cultural chauvinism as an instrument of political or ideological manipulation and exploitation. Still others seek to revaluate the importance of language for thought and how systems of meaning and narratives of self-identity are anchored in language. Finally, a few attempt to make a case for the unavoidability and even the desirability of cross-cultural contamination and fertilization. For the most part however, the contributions gathered herein converge in the belief that cultural particularity is a necessary condition for a properly reconceived and grounded plural universal humanism, yet they also recognize that any hierarchization of differences underwritten by an exclusive focus on the latter is philosophically untenable – for, differences only make sense against the background of similarities.
In the final analysis, the authors of this original and groundbreaking collection of essays plead for a full critical engagement with one's own particularity while at the same time rejecting any form of cultural, national or regional chauvinism that is confined to a rationalization and indiscriminate validation of traditional worldviews, beliefs, and values. They consider various ways in which Western and non-Western, local and global conceptions as well as practices can and already do judiciously inform and positively fertilize each other. At this juncture of history, they argue, societies and peoples must articulate their self-identity by looking critically at their respective cultural resources, and beyond them at the same time.
CONTENTS: Editor's Preface: Re-Ethnicizing the Minds? Cultural Revival in Contemporary Thought -- by Jürgen Hengelbock Editor's Introduction: Philosophy as Space: Goethe's Weltliteratur and the Spatial Potential of "World Philosophy" -- by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Africa
1. Emotion is Black like Reason is Greek: Remembering the Fight for the Africans' Recognition as Human Beings -- by Jürgen Hengelbock
2. A New Discourse on Universality -- by Benoît Okolo
3. Alexis Kagame on the Bantu Philosophy of Be-ing, Aristotle's Categoriea, and De Interpretatione -- by Mogobe Ramose
4. Redefining Ethnicity Within "The Complementary System of Thought" in African Philosophy -- by Innocent I. Asouzu
South-America
5. Latin America Between Horror and Beauty: A Critical Approach to the Effects of Globalization -- by Yolanda Angulo
6. The Historiography of Caribbean Philosophy -- by Richard Clarke
7.Globalization and the Alienation of Mentality in Brazil -- by António Sidekum
Asia
8. Social Darwinism, Liberal Eugenics and the Example of Bioethics in China -- by Ole Döring
9. Overlapping Identities: "Brain Circulation" in South Asia and the Concept of "Rational Irrationality" -- by Peter Saeverin
Europe
10. What is Russian About Russian Philosophy? -- by Evert van der Zweerde
11. Russian Philosophy of National Spirit from the 1970s to the 1990s -- by Mikhail Epstein
12. What is "Local Thinking?" (Can There be Finnish Philosophy?) -- by Tere Vadén
13. What is Ethnofuturism? Thoughts on Uralic Philosophy -- by Kari Sallamaa
14. The Logic of the Gift: Reclaiming Indigenous Peoples' Philosophy -- by Rauna Kuokkanen
Middle East
15. Encountering Modernity: An Islamic Perspective -- by Zain Ali
16. The Dialogical Self as Debated Among Contemporary Shiite Thinkers -- by Mahmoud Masaeli
17. Between Social Reform and Terrorism: Ethics as a Topic in the Muslim Renewal -- by Martin Leiner
18. Contemporary Arab Critique of Islamicization as a Form of Re-Ethnicization -- by Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab
19. Iraq and the Question of Philosophy -- by Bassam Romaya
20. Judaizing Ethical Politics: Levinas, Difficult Freedom, and the Messianic City -- by Miriam Bankovsky
Further Developments
21. Ethnophilosophy, Comparative Philosophy, Pragmatism: Towards a Philosophy of Ethnoscapes -- by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
22. A Fundamental Misconception of 'Culture': Philosophical and Political Implications -- by Nader N. Chokr
23. Cosmopolitism and Globalization Seen From a Hellenistic Point of View -- by J.M. Muglioni
24. Categorical Universalism and Cultural Pluralism Based on Man's Unconditional Duty -- by Jürgen Hengelbrock
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
(Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006)
Virtual Reality: The Last Human Narrative?
Contents
Introduction: Narrated Realities or Why We Are All Dreaming of the Japanese Clock
Feature Scene I: Cloned Realities: Eat Your Cake and Dream it
1. Eighteenth Century Rationalism and the Search for the Absolutely Real: When Friedrich Bouterwek Invented Virtual Reality
2. Towards the 'Condition Autiste?'
Feature Scene II: Your Face is a Scape: An Exercise in Facial Geomorphology
3. Virtual Reality and Virtual Irreality: On Noh-Plays and Icons
Feature Scene III: Liquid Grammar, Liquid Style: On the East-Asian Way of Using English or the Phenomenon of 'Linguistic Air-Guitars'
4. From Civilization to Culture: About the Dreamlike Character of Global Civilization
Feature Scene IV: The New Surrealism: Loft-Stories, Television-Reality, and Amateur Dream-Censors
5. Genes and Pixels: Bio-Genetics' Virtual Aesthetics
Feature Scene V: The New Mini and Japanese Pottery: Of Pasts and Pastes (followed by an interview with Raku Kichizaemon)
6. Wabi-sabi/kitsch/virtual: The Aesthetics of Frozen Dreams (with a comment on Mariko Mori)
7. From Perspective to All-Unity or the Narrative of Virtual Cosmology
Feature Scene VI: Overcoming the Logos - Overcoming Lego: From Imagined Space to the Spatial Imagination of the Bionicle World
8. Would You Accept a Politics of "Multi-Realism?" Comparing The Matrix with Tarkovsky's Stalker and Solaris
Bibliography
Index
Forthcoming, Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi 2009 in the 'Critical Posthumanism Series' edited by S. Herbrechter and I. Callus, 190 p.
L'Architecture japonaise contemporaine: Les choses et "l'entre les choses"
Revue DARUMA, numéro spéciale Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (dir.) Le document peut être téléchargé ici Une version en papier sera bientôt en vente
Photo: 'Refraction House' de Takeyama Table: Ouverture: "LightSpace" par Günter NITSCHKE Introduction: L'étrangeté contre l'exotisme. De la communication interculturelle en architecture par Thorsten BOTZ-BORNSTEIN Les Choses 1. Sauver l'héritage de bois de Kyoto par Riitta "Riho" SALASTIE 2. Les pavillions de Reima Pietilä et Kunio Maekawa à l'Expo 58. Une étude comparative par Rika DEVOS 3. Next 21 ou une manière différente de concevoir le logement dans les villes japonaises par Jean ENGLEBERT 4. Définition de l'architecte ou l'influence du rapport au monde dans le processus de création architecturale par Yann NUSSAUME 5. L'architecture d'Ando et la maison Stonborough: Deux approches inhabituelles vers la modernité par Thorsten BOTZ-BORNSTEIN 6. Nostalgie du Lu-Shan. Note sur les schemes esthétiques de l'habitat nippon par Augustin BERQUE L'"Entre les choses" 7. Avoir trente ans et être un architecte japonais: du 'quoi' au 'comment' par Kyoko MATSUOKA 8. Le temps du "Mu-I" par Kiyoshi Sey TAKEYAMA 9. La cathédrale gothique, Le Corbusier et Tadao Ando: Quelques réflections sur la lumière par Ryosuke OHASHI 10. L'Architecture au Corps: Des Temples de Kyoto à l'architecture occidentale au XXI siècle par Maurice SAUZET 11. Le jeu, le rêve et la recherche de la 'réelle' forme d'habiter: d'Aalto à Ando par Thorsten BOTZ-BORNSTEIN 12. Kukan - L'Espace vide par Günter NITSCHKE 13. Une "conversation philosophique" avec Tadao Ando Le directeur de la revue DARUMA est Yves-Marie Allioux (Université de Toulouse le Mirail).
