Academic literature on the topic 'Ecstatic thinking'

Holy, holy, holy! The Lord of hosts! The fill of all the earth is His glory. In these few ecstatic words the prophet Isaiah captured the core of Jewish thinking about God, humanity and nature. If the idea of holiness points toward God’s transcendence, Isaiah’s balancing half-line comes down to earth, recognizing God’s presence throughout the world. This book is a philosophical exploration of that remarkable and distinctively Jewish idea—that God is everywhere, yet not in space. Here the author, long recognized as one of Judaism’s foremost living philosophers, explores what can be meant by God’

This fifth notebook seeks to examine the joyous passions of the multitude by displacing self-renunciation with a frenzied ecstasy. This notebook also takes up the concept of “the New Day” from chapter 14, “Founding the Public School,” in Black Reconstruction. Du Bois offers the concept as an affirmative instance in the history of black education that makes this ecstatic communal orientation a condition of possibility for the dark proletariat’s intervention in American education. This notebook does not promise a new model of education but tries to understand ecstasy’s significance to black study and the institutions issuing from that critical practice.

This chapter explains the ways that philosophical questions arise from and shape people’s lives in existential ways. The first section outlines the difference between transactional/information questions and questions that require knowledge; the second section explains epistemic curiosity and distinguishes between knowledge and thinking; the third section explains the existentially transformative nature of questions in people’s lives. The chapter overall argues that philosophical questions are ecstatic, taking people from where they tend to find themselves and out of a static sense of a Subject to return to themselves as always in process. The heart of philosophy thus lies in the ecstatic movement of authentic questioning.

This chapter analyzes the confluence in thinking about cinematic and architectural montage in the work of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. It describes their encounter in Moscow in 1928 and their shared admiration for the French architectural historian Auguste Choisy, whose description of spatial passage through the Athenian Acropolis is a key point of reference in the accounts the filmmaker and the architect develop of the role of narrative, movement, and editing in the apprehension of space. Although Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale is the manipulation of a body moving through actual space according to precise calculations of a visual sequence, the cinematic version, as staged by Corbusier and Chenal, faced the viewer with a surrogate or avatar body moving through space, but never presented the viewer with the scenes viewed by this body: an invisible, one might say ineffable merging of architecture with the image of an invisible architecture as a projection of a static viewer. Architecture in this sense achieves the status desired of the modernist machine universe, but in the process has been reduced to two dimensions, without perspective. Eisenstein, for his part, was in this sense able to “build” an architecture in film—not the imperfect static forms that one had to walk through or work hard to imagine their ecstatic movement, but through the moving image itself understood as the highest technological achievement of modernism, thus achieving the (ecstatic) dissolution, in image, of modernist architecture.

Chapter seven examines the prospect of unhoped-for discovery that colonial discourse analyst Albert Memmi brought to the figure of Lot’s wife in his first published work, The Pillar of Salt (1953). The novel presents a scrupulously confessional report on a life wrecked in the colonial endgame in the Maghreb and rehabilitated by a dream of flight to Argentina. The novel’s critical interest turns on the missed rendezvous between the boy’s conscious assent to the virulent legacy of Sodom and the critical rejoinder figured by the boy’s intuitive and gradually immersive contact with the forgotten face of Lot’s wife. This is the face that testifies, through action, to the ethical awakening born of intimate familiarity with the difficult edge joining home to homelessness. In essence, the novel presents a laboratory for thinking how Arendt’s critically willed hope in natality’s reparative power may speak to the risk and promise of kenotic hospitality at the heart of Levinas’s ethics of vulnerability. Crucially, the novel figures this thought as an echo of Augustine’s Confessions—the text that famously worries over the wounding conflict between the narrated and narrating self, and absolves the conflict through an ecstatic embrace of allegory’s world-making and world-repairing powers.