Abstract In this introduction to Daniel Kehlmann's Resurrection, which appears in the same issue of Common Knowledge, the editor puts the play in the context of a series of intense, alarming, experimental “dramaticules” that the journal has published, beginning in 1992. These include works by Donald Davie, Susan Sontag, Raymond Carver, Eugene Vvedensky, Péter Nádas, and Greil Marcus, along with commentaries on them by Sontag and Edward Albee.
Abstract This article explores asceticism as a means for society to play an active role in maintaining the order of the universe. Asceticism has served in several contexts (notably, in the Jewish and Christian societies of the early Byzantine empire) as an instrument for repentance, collective atonement, and moral correction that was meant to bring natural calamities under control. In late antiquity, fasting and self-denial were not only spiritual disciplines but tools for restoring cosmic balance. Likewise, the modern ascetic activism of Mahatma Gandhi depended on a moral framework for nature's reliance on human communal conduct. Gandhi's bodily discipline — through fasting, celibacy, and dietary austerity — channeled traditional Indian asceticism into political and ethical protest. This article moreover draws a parallel between these earlier forms of asceticism and the restraint, sacrifice, repair, and acknowledgment of human culpability that are called for today in response to global warming. As in antiquity, climate discourse is shaped by cosmologies — scientific, cultural, and spiritual — that link environmental collapse to human action. Asceticism has in this way reemerged as a symbolic and practical means of confronting ecological crisis and of reshaping society.
Abstract This essay calls for a synthetic turn in philosophy, moving beyond the emphasis in analytic philosophy on decomposition toward practices of problematization and constructive world-making. By examining definitions, judgments, ethical postulates, and disciplines, it demonstrates how synthesis expands conceptual horizons and generates new frameworks. In an era of artificial intelligence and virtual realities, philosophy had best evolve from analysis to design — becoming a kind of metaphysical engineering for the future.
Abstract The ascetic monk is often depicted as the opposite of a modern person. Mistrusting pleasure and preaching self-denial, the monk is readily described as repressed, self-persecutory, and obsessed with sin and abstinence. This essay analyzes Freud's attempt to move beyond the ascetic devaluing of pleasure. In Freud's early works, the cenobitic monk is a remnant of a past we have outgrown. Gradually, however, Freud abandoned this pejorative image. Looking at the modern history of psyche and self from the perspective of asceticism allows us to deepen our understanding of that history.
Abstract In response to Mikhail Epstein's claim that at the heart of all Russian philosophy are “pure negativity” and “dangerous intellectual poisons,” this essay offers the counterexample of Lev Shestov (1866 – 1938), known by his contemporaries as a Russian thinker of “radical optimism.” At the center of his work is the belief in miracles. The function of the miracle, in Shestov's conception, is to liberate humanity from the perception of necessity and compulsion in history. The existence of miracles guarantees that things could always have been (and can always still be) otherwise. Even in distant retrospect, the “facts” of history can be changed, if God so wills it. In a world that includes the miraculous, counterfactuality is an available, even if rarely taken, path to freedom, which is the goal of human existence. Building on the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, Shestov's optimism had a strong impact on both existentialists and Surrealists.
By tracing the history of asceticism through female weightlifting, this essay shows that bodybuilding has long provided a path to gender liberation. It explores how bodybuilding intersects with various religious traditions of body modification, including religious nationalist projects of body reform and New Thought ideas about exerting the mind over matter. Central to this discussion is the intersection of gender liberation and religious bodily disciplines.
This essay, a postscript to the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” analyzes the particular challenges that the climate emergency poses for representative democracy. It asks how ways of conducting political conflict can be shaped in a broadly speaking climate-friendly way. It also probes an institutional alternative to representative assemblies of winners in free and fair elections among political parties: mini-publics of citizens chosen at random. Some advantages of this alternative are identified, but doubt is cast on any attempt to have it replace elections and assemblies of professional politicians.
