This paper aims to investigate the question of community in Kierkegaard's thought, comparing it with Montaigne's concept of political friendships and Derrida’s policies of friendship. In order to highlight the possible connections between the concepts of friendship and of the political, I will discuss the way in which the three authors deal with two strictly interconnected themes: friendship and mourning. Following the Aristotelian-Ciceronian lesson on philia and the reading of his friend Etienne de la Boetie, Montaigne stresses the political dimension of friendship. He merges the classic criteria of similarity, equality and reciprocity with the grounding moment of a free and voluntary choice that constitutes individuals in confrérie. According to Montaigne, the decision is the political category of friendship, which in turn constitutes the microscopic level of society and the critical fault in the human tendency towards voluntary servitude. In Politics of Friendship, Derrida deconstructs the metaphysical tradition that had seen the basis of the political in friendship. Contrary to Montaigne, Derrida sees the typical characteristics of political friendship along with its possible degenerative outcomes. The political shifts towards a familiar configuration based on a naturalist assumption: family, state, nation, are intertwined with the myth of earth and blood. The political then is grounded on friendship that finds its condition of possibility in the dialectical suspension of enmity and therefore in the Schmittean couple Friend/Enemy. Montaigne’s saying, “O my friends, there is no friend”, becomes inseparable from the Nietzschean one: “Enemies, there are no enemies”. However, Derrida envisages the possibility of a friendship as unpolitical phenomenon and identifies it in the mourning-surviving relationship always present in friendship. Kierkegaard offers an alternative critical reading to the two previous interpretations: he describes friendship in Montaigne's terms and then shares it with love in their being preferential bonds. Since a friend is chosen because he corresponds to the classical criteria of friendship, his otherness is lost and the relationship is narrowed down to a narcissistic doubling of the ego. The more two egos become one by merging themselves, the greater the latter unified ego distances itself from the others outside the relationship. Since friendship as social cell is created in such an exclusive and excluding manner, Kierkegaard describes – ahead of his time – the whole political as intrinsically narcissistic. Enten-Eller's Symparanekromenoi, a congregation of the dead (such as the friendships between Lelio and Cicero, La Boetie and Montaigne) is the exemplum of isolation and camaraderie that characterize modern society. To these preferential bonds, Kierkegaard opposes neighbour-love and a model of Christian community as viable alternative to the paradigm of political theology. The category of neighbour suspends the difference between friend and enemy and thus proves to be absolutely unpolitical. At the same time, it opens up to a type of social bond, emblematically represented by loving the deceased, which replaces the construction of a common identity based on the resemblance (society), with the mutual openness to others that is at the same time a kenotic exposure and expropriation of one’s ego (community).

 

 

A teleologically-structured anthropological framework that underlies Kierkegaard’s thoughts, holds the individual self as a focal point for a transversal world of universality. Although it is constitutive for the reality, its indefinite nature causes the absence of any consistent and/or complete system of reference. This implies a disorder of the rational mind and the existential anxiety. With the awareness of the simultaneous coexistence of contradictory principles, Kierkegaardian single individual heralds “the crisis of the mind” as the source of all modern crises. The corresponding anxieties of the Modern age stem from the absence of meaning, purpose and faith.

The responsibility for world's destiny in making whatever values are chosen, with a constant threat of dissolution into the non-being, intensifies anxieties about individual, cultural, and environmental existence. However, the exit is not in the authoritatively imposed answers. It is rather in the acceptance of a dread freedom as the condition for action in which everything observed is not vain and nonsense, but under the influence of a single individual point of view. What is considered as an absurd for the rational mind, could become the inspiration for the creative intuition. It is an important step toward the existential turn into an epoch where the wholeness of human and non-human world has become inextricably entwined.

Key words: anxiety, existential turn, single individual, meaning, intuition

 

 

Mulier taceat in ecclesia!—In light of St. Paul’s exhortation that women should remain silent in the Church, history of women’s spirituality, no matter the degree of its specific outspokenness, can be seen as arising in constant tension between faith and orthodoxy. A gap that needs to be bridged or fully avoided and everything in-between: the strategies developed to address the divide at the heart of female religious endeavour are as varied and numerous as the women who embarked on life of the spirit. While looking at Marguerite Porete and the book that resulted in her condemnation as a pseudo-mulier—a quasi-woman—and eventually her death, The Mirror of Simple Souls, I would like to think about Porete’s specific response and, on a more general level, whether the strategies employed by religious women were themselves generative of faith: why did their truth need to be told?

 

 

The paper discusses the reception of Nyāya, a classical Indian school of philosophy, among European scholars in the second half of the 19th century. The Nyāya School is considered to be an authority on the topics of debate and argumentation. However, topics of rational debate and inference are addressed by other schools of philosophy on the Indian subcontinent, among them by Buddhist philosophers. The Nyāya School develops a five-membered scheme of inference (five avayava). In the West, the scheme becomes known as the Indian Syllogism, a term introduced by the British mathematician Henry T. Colebrooke in his essay The Philosophy of the Hindus: On Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika Systems (1824). By using the term, today considered an anachronism, Colebrooke created conceptual confusion in the field of early Indology as the structure of the five-membered inference is not similar to syllogistic logic and formal Aristotelian deduction. In Europe, differences between the Aristotelian and Indian Syllogisms gave rise to different interpretations and evaluations of Indian Logic. One of the first to recognize it as an autonomous and legitimate rational philosophy was the German philologist Max Müller (1823-1900). Others formed unfavourable opinions, fuelled by European colonialism and Orientalism. Some (Blakey, Hamilton, Ritter) argue that the five-membered inference does not meet the criteria for rational thought. Others develop softer denials of Indian Logic. One method is summarized in the didactic technique where students were shown a problem posed by Indian logicians and shown how the problem was (supposedly) better solved in the West (W. Muir, JR Ballantyne). The development of modern symbolic logic, methods of natural and experimental sciences broadened the contemporary understanding of Indian Logic and enabled its interpretation within different models and paradigms. Modern research compares it to induction and informal logic due to the role of the concrete example (udāharaṇa) in the five-membered inference.

Key words: Nyāya, Indian Syllogism, Indian Philosophy

 

 

The present article deals with the thought of German mystic, Master Eckhart. The great German mystic stands within the tradition of Neoplatonism, but it also surpasses it insofar it is not about Pantheism or Plotinism. Instead, it is more about the humility defined by Abraham`s revelation. The humility of the poverty of spirit, which is otherwise close to Socratic (un)knowledge, but is still based on the certainty of faith and grace. Doing so, the article touches upon the influence of Master`s word on Derrida in the sense of his deconstructivism. On the other hand, the article also deals with Master`s influence on Kierkegaard, the knight of faith.

Keywords: Eckhart, mysticism, individual, Derrida, Kierkegaard.

 

 

There are only three philosophical ideas of "great ethics" to nowadays:

 (1) Aristotle's idea of ​​distributive justice in a community (polis) determined by the "natural" limitations and ethnic reducibility of citizens with the fundamental virtue of prudence (phronesis);

( 2) Kant's idea of ​​a moral Law established by the action of an autonomous mental subject in a categorical imperative within the world as a cosmopolis;

(3) Lévinas' idea of ​​compassion with the sufferings of Others in a direct encounter beyond "nature" and "culture" as an event of the sanctity of life.

Greek and modern experience has always presupposed the existence of a political community. For the Greeks, it is a limited world-city-state (polis), and for the modern age, it is a nation-state political order with a regulatory idea of ​​a world order based on mental principles. In both cases, originally Greek and modern, ethics has its homeland, place, topology, it has its "world". In the case of the modern age, after the experience of the diabolical evil of the Holocaust and the "end of theodicy", the idea of ​​homeland, home, the abode of man no longer exists or is destroyed. Neither the city-state nor the nation-state is any longer the abodes of modern man. He is a wanderer and a nomad, an exile and stateless person in a world that becomes a network of structures and functions. Man is not only a planetary nomad in the age of technoscience, but he is essential without a homeland that becomes like in that Tibetan legend that Cioran mentions camping in the desert. Lévinas's ethics of the Other denotes the search for the abode of a man at the end of his tragic historical drama of wandering and the "useless suffering" of peoples and individuals. It is the source of this metaphysical ethic of the sanctity of the life of the Other in that of the selfless. It is terrible, and hence in its homelessness exalted as an absolute evil. In the face of it, the sanctity of life seems to be the last mystery of that encounter with the face of the Other, which radically changes all history so far. Ethics without a world necessarily requires the uncanny event of the creation of the world when everything is just either this or that violence in the name of freedom, equality, justice.

Keywords: Messianic, ethics, Lévinas, justice, cosmopolis, nomadism, Other, theodicy

 

 

The article talks about the heritage of mentality Miklavž Ocepek (1963-2005) and Goran Starčević (1963-2015). In doing so, the philosophical meditation is complemented by inspiration with rock music, which was very dear to both of them. It is a passionate and risky thought, which only so existentially open enables the living presence of the existing and a new mentality to not yet exist. Which is the very foundation for any existential turn. It is a thought that opposes the culture of the spectacle of consumer totalitarianism and offers an alternative in deepening the position of the single individual to take a responsibility for oneself and for the community. For ethical renewal, we need a new suprising thought of a new metaphysics and a political community, the reversal - turn of sociality into a new sociability. These two were announced by Ocepek and Starčević. The article also relies on the interpretation of the lyrics of the music group Deep Purple from their album InFinite.

Key words: Ocepek, Starčević, existential turn, new sociability, Deep Purple, InFinite.

 

 

The proposed paper intends to examine Gandhi’s philosophy in response to the critical question of the 21st century i.e. the relation between self and Others. It will first explore the basis on which self is related to the Other in Gandhi’s worldview. Arguing that in Gandhi's worldview self and the Other are related to each other with the notion of responsibility, the study wishes to discuss the nature of responsibility in Gandhi's worldview and examine on what ground Gandhi determines the responsibility of self to the Others. It also intends to address the basic question of the 21st century as to how to act responsibly in our social and political life from the Gandhian point of view. The paper will also explain the relationship between freedom and responsibility in Gandhi’s paradigm and demonstrate that in his worldview freedom does not only mean freedom from coercion and domination from outside, but it also means self-regulation through selfrestraint. The study also intends to highlight the feature that in Gandhi's worldview the self and the Other are not two different categories but the Other is one’s extended self. The paper will seek to examine these questions by investigating Gandhi's original writings as primary sources. It will use the unconventional ‘inside-out’ approach i.e. studying Gandhi on his own terms as a method to deal with the theme. In my view, this is the most appropriate method for the aforementioned theme as it allows us to unpack Gandhi’s apparently unconventional ideology.

Keywords: self, other, responsibility, freedom

 

 

Gandhi was often called a saint among politicians. His saintly adherence to non-violence brought him comparisons to St. Francis of Assisi, St. Paul, and even to Christ. And yet, when one thinks about it, that appellation bears a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, it would seem that politics with its power-mongering, amoral Machiavellianism, and its valorization of expediency over principle, and of successful outcomes over scrupulous means is an unpromising avenue for saintliness. Thus, Bal Gangadhar Tilak among others warned Gandhi before he embarked on a political career in India, “Politics is a game of worldly people and not of sadhus.” Bringing politics into the spiritual realm invariably coarsens and corrupts it. On the other hand, introducing spirituality into the political arena would seem to betoken naivete and ineffectiveness in an area driven by worldly passions and cunning. It is perhaps for these reasons that Christ himself appeared to be in favor of a dualism: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” Gandhi by contrast without denying the distinction between the domain of Caesar and that of God repudiates any rigid separation between the two. “To the hungry person God appears in the form of bread,” he often said, a statement that he meant both literally and symbolically. He weakens the traditional dualism between religion and politics and attempts to fashion a non-dual relation between the two. In this new conception religion seen primarily, though not exclusively, in ethical terms connotes a reverence for truth and a service to life which do not stop at the door of the meditation room or the temple but spill over necessarily into the social sphere. Politics in turn is reconceptualized as public service on the largest possible scale and is, at least ideally, far removed from the factionalism, raw ambition, and power-games usually associated with it. It is this Gandhian notion of ethics which mediates the non-dual relationship between religion and politics. On the one hand, Gandhi makes ethics both personal and social, the core of religion, and on the other this ethicized religion seeks its fulfillment in the realm of politics seen as the arena for both the realization of truth and the greatest potential public service. What I want to suggest in this paper is that the non-dual relationship that Gandhi sees between religion on the one hand and ethics and politics on the other gives his conceptions of all three domains a dialectical and fluid character, which allows for their progressive and mutual enrichment. But this dialectical mediation is not without the risks and dangers that any attempt at reconceptualization often carries. I shall divide this paper into three parts: first, I will provide an account of three key terms of Gandhi’s religious ethics; second, I shall offer a few reflections on Gandhi’s notion of moksha or spiritual liberation and its relation to dharma; and finally, I shall try to relate these Gandhian conceptions to our present day situation.

Keywords: God, religion, politics, moksha, dharma

 

 

Trusteeship is derived from three basic Gandhian concepts viz., non-violence, self-rule and equality. A society based on non-violence can only practice the ideal of equal distribution. And the more we work for equal distribution, the sounder will be the foundation of a non-violent society. Trusteeship is a method of socialization or communalization of wealth. After whatever is considered necessary or legitimate, the owner of wealth will have to relinquish all personal claims. Trusteeship is an attempt to secure the best use of property for the people by competent hands, Gandhiji’s basic belief was that everything belongs to God and is from God. He hoped that the ideal of Trusteeship would become a gift from India to the rest of the world. Being influenced by the idealism of the Isopanisad which inculcated that things of the world should be enjoyed by renunciation, Gandhi wanted the rich men to hold their wealth in trust for the poor or give it up for them. He wanted that the rich should become trustees of their surplus wealth for the good of society. Thus the society is to be regarded only as an extension of the family. We have to understand that the individuals are only the means to produce wealth and each holds it for the benefits of all. Gandhi argues that if the idea of trusteeship is accepted, the evils of both private enterprise and state enterprise would at once come to an end. The institution of trusteeship would eliminate all possibilities of class conflict and lead to the establishment of cooperative and harmonious relations between labour and capital. He does not believe that the capitalists and landlords are exploiters by any inherent necessity, or that there is a basic and irreconcilable antagonism between the interests of the former and those of the masses. In his opinion, what is needed is not the extinction of the landlords and capitalists, but a transformation of the existing relationship between them and the masses into something healthier and purer. Gandhi thinks that a healthy transformation in labour-capital relations can be brought about by the institution of Trusteeship. Gandhi, of Course, seems to make a distinction between legal ownership and moral ownership. Legally wealth belongs to the owner, morally to the whole society. In this sense of moral ownership, the labourers and the peasants and also owners as well as the landlords. That is why he considered that trusteeship means that joint trusteeship of capitalists and labourers over the wealth of society. In this paper, an attempt is being made to explain different interpretations of Gandhiji on Trusteeship. The relation between Trusteeship and the philanthropic attitude of Corporate Companies is being discussed.

Keywords: trusteeship, non-violence, society, ownership, wealth

 

 

Mahatma Gandhi – a global icon of peace and non-violence. The contributions of Gandhi to the cause of greater human freedom in the 20th century was greatly influenced by different streams of thought such as the Gita, the Upanishad, Buddhism and other religions, Marxian and anarchist thoughts, and by thinkers like Leo Tolstoy and Ruskin, just to name a few. Gandhi’s faith in collective will, shared destiny, moral purpose, people’s movements and personal responsibility are extremely germane to contemporary times. The central question emphasized by the paper is that whether in the 21st century’s globalized world the Gandhian message still has or could have any actuality in managing our century’s real challenges such as terrorism or the deepening moral crisis of the humanity. In order to be able to do this, the paper will first of all present, analyse and comment on the most important concepts we consider the Gandhian thought is based on such as satya, ahimsa and satyagraha. As we know, he personally declared that writing an academic text was beyond his power and he was not built for such kind of writings. Secondly, the paper will emphasize those aspects and concepts of the Gandhian thought which could give an answer to the core question of the paper, trying to prove that at least two of the presented concepts could be considered relevant and useful in our times, even if at first impression all of these key concepts of the Gandhian thought seem to be a utopia and useless. The violent conflict, terrorism, economic inequalities, socio-economic deprivation, pandemics and the looming existential threat of climate change are impacting people, states and societies. Leadership is crucial to addressing any and every one of these issues and the values promoted by Gandhi serve as moral compass for enlightened leadership. It seems that Gandhi, through his ideas and thoughts, “is still alive” and is among us after more than 72 years of his death. It seems that we, all human beings, still have to learn from the ideas, from the writings and acts of the Mahatma.

Keywords: Gandhi, Mahatma, truth, satya, ahimsa, satyagraha, leadership, relevance

 

 

I present Gandhi’s main ideas about satyagraha, viz. commitment to truth. This is Gandhi’s central ethical and spiritual guide. All other important concepts or ideas of Gandhi revolve around satyagraha, especially ahimsa (non-violence). Non-violence represents to him an unconditional value that stems from a commitment to the absolute truth within us. This commitment encompasses and permeates all other definitions and attitudes of people, not just for some particular ethical decision, side by side. Gandhi therefore equated the notion of God with the notion of (absolute) truth. Observing ahimsa causes the truth to become divine for us. Gandhi's satyagraha requires a fundamental ethical and spiritual orientation of individuals to a certain unconditionality (absoluteness), which is reflected in the everyday life and work of people, and not some special set of ideas, beliefs. I call it “radical humanity (Humanicity)”. Namely, I believe that it is from such an ethical and spiritual attitude of people as individuals, especially those who have the ability and power to govern other people, that the current world will survive and outgrow the current and future crises or will be misled into hopeless barbarism and self-destruction. Humanity as an ethical and spiritual orientation is an existential or spiritual expression of human universal relativity, i.e. the ability to find oneself in everything one is in a relationship with and to find everything in oneself.

Keywords: satyagraha, non-violence, God, absolute truth, radical humanity

 

 

Satyagraha is Gandhi's neologism composed of the words satya, truth, and agraha, firmness, devotion, perseverance. Satjagraha literally means “insistence on truth” or “confidence in truth”. This Truth establishes a political demand that must be enacted with non-violence. If Gandhian non-violence as a concept (ahimsa) were to be understood as a universal principle which renounces all forms of violence, it would be placed on the level of ideas that have nothing to do with Gandhi. Gandhian non-violence is not “passive resistance,” it is not a passivity that stems from the inability to employ violence. Nor is it some kind of an irrational belief in a universal renunciation of violence. Not even a loving concern or cheerful affection for all living things. The first step to Gandhian notion of non-violence is his insight that in human beings and societies, the threat or actual use of “brute force” or physical annihilation are ultimately aimed at establishing a power which is no longer a physical force but rather something that persists: the power of subjective belief in power. The power in the Symbolic, which precedes brute force, the power in which physical annihilation too culminates, at least for the survivors, is based in language as discourse, which is a social bond (Lacan). The power of Gandhian non-violence ultimately stems from established social bonds and also aims at a change in the Symbolic. This power is not based on the naively humanistic belief, that the opponent can be convinced of the Truth with arguments alone. As Gandhi writes before the beginning of one of the satjagrahas: “It is not a matter of carrying conviction by argument. The matter resolves itself into one of matching forces.” In order for a discursive subject to come into power, this requires the risk of taking action, an act whose axis is “measuring forces”. It requires a passage to the act (Dolar) – the subject becomes a pure object, but within the Symbolic, not in the form of psychotic foreclosure (Verwerfung) – and therefore requires satyagraha: a “non-violent” social or political struggle, a conflict with which Gandhi and his collaborators introduced a hitherto unknown concept of mass civil resistance to India in several campaigns between 1917–1922 and later. In satyagraha, non-violence becomes the subject: the empty space of the subject is repeatedly occupied by the very same gesture of separation from violence. It is as if the individual has repeatedly decided that non-violence is a means of asserting the Truth, that is, of a particular political goal s/he is pursuing – Gandhi's reason has evidently always been striking social injustice. The decision for non-violence is therefore primarily an act: it is a form of action in which the subject makes itself the object of the non-dialectically set content of Truth, without the support of violence. The power of the subject of ahimsa, who follows his/her truth in the process of satyagraha, is in the “traces” of social injustices, in the reasons for action, and thus in the Symbolic, however, these can only be judged by an opponent who is in the place of the Other. Non-violence as a subject in satyagraha excludes subjective violence, but not only does not exclude, it is even based on objective violence of discourse (ideology) and social violence produced by the “smooth functioning” of social mechanisms (Žižek), and places political decision-making in discourse.

Keywords: non-violence, act, subject, Other, Symbolic

 

 

There exists vast literature and many scholarly works on the influence the members of the Theosophical Society have had on the social and political life of India and life and work of M. K. Gandhi, therefore the present article is just a humble overview of this important impact. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in September 1875 by a group of prominent spiritualists under the leadership of H. S. Olcott and H. P. Blavatsky with the intent to ‘to collect and diffuse a knowledge of the laws which governs the universe’ and ‘to establish clear philosophy for the spiritualist movement’. In her first major work, Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky presented the idea of ‘India: (as) the cradle of the Race’ and proposed the existence of ages long ‘wisdom tradition’ and existence of ‘curators’ of this knowledge, the Mahatmas, she was in contact with. After the publication of Isis Unveiled Olcott and Blavatsky established contact with Dayananda Saraswati, leader of the Indian reformist movement Arya Samaj, merged for a short time the Society with this movement and permanently moved to India. In his first public lecture on Indian soil H. S. Olcott made an appeal to the audience to join the Theosophical Society in spiritual, cultural and economic renewal of their country, while A. P. Sinnet, editor of the Anglo-Indian newspaper Pioneer, and A. O. Hume, retired civil servant, started a correspondence with Mahatmas through Blavatsky resulting in Sinnet’s publication of Esoteric Buddhism, first presentation of ‘theosophical philosophy’, on one hand, and the establishment of Indian National Congress by Hume, on the other. Gandhi came in touch with theosophy as a young law student in London and became interested also in Hinduism and Christianity and about all in Vegetarianism. But it was in South Africa where he got deeper insight into various religions and was above all impressed by the theosophical idea of brotherhood and esoteric Christianity through the works of Anna Kingsford and Leo Tolstoy, realizing that way to God (Truth) leads through service and non-violence, and out of which he developed his method of political struggle, satyagraha or passive resistance. It was during Gandhi’s stay in South Africa when the Theosophical Society made major impact on India’s social and political life through its second president Annie Besant. She joined the Indian National Congress, launched the India Home Rule, founded the New India newspaper and promoted a number of educational (Central Hindu College) and other civic initiatives. However, she opposed to Gandhi’s passive resistance movement on his return to India, while he, who considered himself as a theosophist and democrat, didn’t sympathize with the secrecy practiced in the Society’s ‘inner school’ and maintained that because of the development of occult powers the Society has ‘lost sight of its central idea – the brotherhood and moral growth of man’.

Keywords: theosophical society, satyagraha, Truth

 

 

The paper focuses on the discussion of different segments of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophical path. In the first part, it enlightens the question about what the syntagma of Gandhi’s philosophy really denotes. Namely, Gandhi was no philosopher in the classical meaning of the word. In his quest and efforts for internal and external fulfillment on the path of acquiring Truth he designed a unique philosophical belief as a diverse intertwinement of numerous ideas and doctrines which he drew from a rich philosophical-religious tradition of India. In the process, he was establishing a dialogue with Western philosophical thought several times. Therefore, it is impossible to limit Gandhi’s thought on a system of always coherent and consistent teachings unambiguously, which, however, is not a weakness of his philosophy. Instead, it is the result of the belief which, among others, was also based on Jainist doctrines anekantavada (Skrt., the doctrine on diverse character of the world) and syadvada (Skrt., the doctrine on relative nature of standpoints) according to which entities in the world and standpoints are not based in ontic and epistemic privileged sense. From the latter, his experiment to understand all diverse perspectives of reality and the views on the truth (Skrt. satya) and non-violence (Skrt. ahimsa) are derived. Through inconsistency in his thought, as Mahatma himself stressed, a harmonious congruity flows – the same as the unity flows through an infinite diversity of the world –, which gives a special vitality and internal dynamics to his philosophy. In the second part, philosophical-religious doctrines which represented the pillars of Gandhi’s philosophical belief will be delineated in more detail. In the process, the paper will be based, among others, on some elements of the teaching of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, Advaita Vedanta, and Buddhism. Below, Gandhi’s peculiar fusion of ideas will be presented. Those ideas represented an inspiration and an occasion for his internal and also external, social transformation. At the same time, a display of the installation of these ideas to an unpredictable terrain of a universal test in practice will be presented where Gandhi’s philosophy takes its most authentic expression. Namely, the philosophy is primarily an experience beyond the edges of discursive which led Mahatma to the path of intimate, internal revolution. Secondly, it is an application of this experience to the exterior, a complex social reality. Even though Gandhi’s philosophy is not static – it is evolutional, dynamic, creative, experiential, experimental, and lived – it has a character of universality, timelessness, and universal relevance also beyond the borders of India.

Keywords: Gandhi's philosophy, truth, experience, internal-external revolution

 

 

In intersubjective relationships there is, according to Martin Buber, an “I” only in relation to a “Thou”. One of our basic words is actually a pair. An isolated ego does not really exist. This insight is shared by approaches as different as Buddhism and psychoanalysis. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan shows with his description of the mirror stage as a structural aspect of the formation of the ego how the identification with the specular image implies an ambivalent relation with the other, involving eroticism and aggressivity. In a dual relationship, the position of the persons involved is fixed and determined by power interests (Jessica Benjamin). Also in Buddhism one knows the “boundless terror” of interpersonal encounter (Nishitani Keiji). In my presentation I would like to explore the concept of the third or “Thirdness”. In a psychoanalytical context this concept is significant because it enables mutual recognition and thus seems to help to overcome communicative barriers in conflictual or anxiety-filled dual relationships. As a “quality of mental space of intersubjective relatedness” (Jessica Benjamin) it can mean the realm of the symbolic (Lacan), a shared pattern or rhythm (Benjamin), but also – as I will show – more abstract or differing concepts like “betweenness” (Watsuji Tetsuro) or “self" (Kierkegaard).

 

 

This presentation puts together modernity and existential crisis seen from an eastern perspective, through some of Tagore’s writings. Often recalled and celebrated as poet and artist, Rabindranath Tagore was also a life philosopher and dramatist whose thinking was shaped by a specific existential anthropology, and thus by what becoming a fully human self or personality entails. These notions come into play in answer to the guide question for this brief essay: How was modernity seen from outside the West? An answer laid out here references two ideas: that of modernity gone wrong,  and how having gone wrong constitutes an existential crisis.

 

 

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety famously concludes with a chapter dedicated to the idea of letting oneself be educated by anxiety. “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate,” [CA 155] declares Vigilius Haufniensis. And clearly the task involves learning anxiety in the right way rather than becoming obsessed with and consumed by fear.

And fear is what seems to have taken hold of man. In several widely read books, Frank Furedi, a sociologist by trade, developed the notion of the “culture of fear”. In so many words, it would seem that our perception tends to favour worst-case scenarios; fearing what could happen has become our second nature through years of media barrage of crime stories, accidents, war-reporting and more. Furedi’s account of the culture of fear doesn’t seek to mitigate the horror of war or crime, it rather points out the misbalanced prevalence of fear in the current western societies.

For my presentation, I choose, as a case study of sorts, the Chernobyl disaster. I will briefly comment on the eponymous 2019 HBO/Skye mini-series starring J. Harris, S. Skalsgaard, E. Watson created by C. Mazin. The hugely successful and highly acclaimed TV-series features radiation as—and this is one of my points—death itself. Radiation in its ubiquity, invisibility, inescapability, pervading and invading the fragile human body, produces death in relation to its intensity but also in relation to time. The longer one remains exposed to radiation, the shorter the life-span. And this specific quality of radiation makes it a material-metaphor of death itself: death as the unseen ticking of the clock. The fear mortifying audiences watching Chernobyl portrays the horror of death lurking unseen and catching up—in time—with its victims.

I wish to address the phenomenon of radiation-horror using Svetlana Alexievich’s immensely gripping collection of oral histories of the disaster published under the title Chernobyl Prayer [Чернобыльская молитва]. The Nobel prize for literature laureate gives voice to those who have sacrificed themselves, lost their loved ones, or have suffered the disaster in any of the myriad different ways Chernobyl has afflicted (especially) today’s Belarus. The narrators—strangely enough—had to learn how not to fear radiation all the time. Chernobyl Prayer presents many of those who see radiation as just one of many sources of fear, but eventually you have to learn how to live.

In the recent COVID-19 crisis many have pointed out how disproportioned our fear of the virus has become. As if avoiding contracting the virus delivered us from our fears in total. Fear the virus and nothing else! Kierkegaard understands fear as referring to something definite. It always points to something concrete. Anxiety, on the other hand, involves one’s existence, freedom, and faith. Anxiety opens up the possibility of a true human existence: this is its education.

What I really want to argue is that the point of the culture of fear we all participate in is: to avoid anxiety, to avoid the serious thought of our mortality, which is the same as to avoid the thought of existence. Watching the Chernobyl series provides the exquisitely unpleasant horror that one cannot stop watching, being drawn to the sympathetic-antipathy and antipathic-sympathy of the TV-induced semi-anxiety. And maybe this is the closest we get to anxiety as such, through screen-radiation.

 

 

In his Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard writes that being wrong is something that people - in contrast to Socrates - fear the least. When suffering from dispair one does not want to hear or know anything about herself and together with Kierkegaard we can say that one can find willful ignorance predominantly in our running away from ourselves, in our refusal to acknowledge our responsibility and become ourselves. This intimate disposition of ours can at the same time represent the vehicle of ideologies and totalitarianisms. Refering to Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's Insatiability, especially on "Murti-Bing pill" that turns people into happy subjects by removing all of their existential and ontological worries, Czesław Miłosz warns against existential foundations of totalitarianisms: people, espectially intellectuals, find it easier to accept totalitarian ideology and become cogwheel in the mechanism of ideology than face the wound of being amidst an individual's torn existence.

 

The overall scope of my contribution is to provide a phenomenological investigation of the negative correlation between religious virtues and discrimination. By pointing out the falsehood of a universally prescribed reciprocity between Self and Other, the aim is to show that religious virtues such as neighbor love can spur discriminatory practices, inasmuch as they remain bound to normative custom. I will conduct my inquiry on the backdrop of Kierkegaard's referral to the divine commandment in Works of Love: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. This crucial passage from the book of Mathew supports Kierkegaard's main objective, to show that neighbor love represents an absolute ethical imperative which is not restricted to commonality, i.e., a selected group or collective. Instead, it rests on genuine impartiality toward the other, as an absolute demand bestowed upon the religious subject. However, I will argue that Kierkegaard's focus on the divine commandment does not serve as an absolute affirmation of ethical impartiality toward alterity, i.e., a sacralization of difference, but rather discloses a falsely projected sense of community and equality in a phenomenological key. This, in turn, reveals a discriminatory worldview found in a universalistic understanding of Christian virtues. I will support this claim with the aid of various studies on Kierkegaard's Works of Love, accompanied byDerrida's lectures on hospitality as well as some recent research from the field of political theology and studies in religious pluralism.

 

Currently we live a collapse of the totalitarian looks and widespread neo-liberalism. It seems appropriate to discuss the social role of religion in the critical-social perspective of modernity and especially the humanism of the future. In this case I will limit my remarks to the maximum, because the subject is vast and complex. Therefore, in humility of rigor, I shall refer only to a basic aspect of the religious thought of Max Weber, taking as a point of contrast framing and critical view of Mesoamerican tradition (being I, as everyone knows, originally from Mexico). Max Weber argued that all religions were part of a world-historical process whose evolution is explained by the momentum of an internal logic traced by the irrepressible desire to rationalize ideas and life, especially in the case of salvation religions. Process that he considered as inevitable and whose outcome is modern religious rationality. This line of thinking with universalist claims leads us to question the validity of deterministic proposals that should already be limited to the western world and to European concerns - given their reductionism not only in the face of religious visions such as the one that Kierkegaard had about Christianity (for whom rationality did not was enough). In addition, it leaves out polytheistic conceptions and combinations derived from syncretism, such as the traditional conceptions of the peoples who were colonized (where monotheistic religions are nominal, because they did not follow the steps of the Weberian protocol), or that belong to Millennial civilizational horizons such as China, India or Mesoamerica, whose evolution does not necessarily lead to the rationality to which that German thinker refers.

 

 

According to Arthur Schopenhauer all the mystery of the world resides only in the world itself. Philosophy is essentially world-wisdom and must remain cosmology. Schopenhauer also developed a complex system of immanent metaphysics understood as universal metaphysics of experience. Everything which exists, from the simplest to the most complex forms, exist only thanks to Will, understood primarily as the Will to be, to exist, to live. This study emphasizes Schopenhauer's tendency to Pantheism which forms the basis of his philosophical rejection of monotheism because of its unqualified subordination of nature to man. According to Schopenhauer, life is equal in all its forms. This is why his philosophy stresses the sacredness of life and of the World−Being in general. He believes that this sacredness derives directly from the Book of the World, which means from the World itself, that is, from its true nature.

 

 

Among all the definitions of our common life, the adjective "post-religious" deserves special attention. Not so much because of the stubborn persistence of traditional or real flood of stupid modern religious practices, but primarily because of the mass illusory belief of functionally well-organized dividuals in form of “I Joint Stock Companies” or 21st century idiots about their own liberation from all forms of community, superstition, faith, and religious practices.

A look at common life through the genealogy of the cross as a fundamental religious symbol, from the pagan (zodiac), through the sacred (Christian), to the secular cross (over) people at the end of time (neo-liberal cross of market economy) shows that without religion we obviously can’t live. This is also evidenced by all personal attempts, or practices of true existence.

The relationship between man as an individual (person, hypostasis) and the community (spiritual connectedness) is fundamentally a religious phenomenon, which as such is accessible to thought through poetry, theology and philosophy, which do not give up the relationship to being and thus the differentiation between life and being.

In contrast, modern human sciences always observe, study, analyze and interpret only the relationship between man as a role / function and society as being in-machine, or the structure element of the system. The latter, because of this non-differentiation, instead of humanity (of person, hypostasis) and community, observe, study and exercise only the authority of the will to power (Nietzsche), the planetary essence of technology (Heidegger), the authority of Nobody (Hamvas) and the fragmentation of all forms of community and humanity (author). This allows them paradoxical escape from seeing themselves in the clarity of being through the constant self-overtaking.

With the help of humane sciences, therefore, obsessive neurosis is embedded in the very foundations of today's organized social life. Despite their own way of “being in machine and oneness” (in Slovenian language “u-stroj-enost”) and instrumentalization, the task of the human sciences today is to awaken on the basis of historical recall and prevent the restoration of the swastika on the ruins of neoliberal fragmentation of the community.

 

 

The paper will oppose two thinkers who have devoted a good part of their writings to the issues related to religion. The first, Søren Kierkegaard, brought out the distinctly personal aspect of belief, which establishes the subject in its uniqueness before God. This conception served as the basis for the critique of rationalist and idealist systems, which later developed into the literary-philosophical movement of existentialism. The other, Max Weber, viewed religion in a much more societal sense, as an ideological system that is fully embedded in broader social facts. With such a systematic approach to social realities, he laid the foundations for modern sociological science. At first glance, it may seem that we are dealing with a pair of thinkers who are far apart from each other and cannot be easily brought into a fruitful dialogue, but our more detailed approach will highlight the deep similarities and complementarities of their thoughts. The central point of the lecture will expose the focal point of soterioliogy in both thoughts and thus contemplate on the issues of modern rationalization of everyday life and its influences on religious processes (secularization).

Key words: disenchantment, rationalization, theodicy, sin, decision, salvation