Actio, Passio et Creatio in the Endliche und Ewige Philosophie of Edith Stein

Abstract

What Jean-François Lyotard essentially expresses about the phenomenon called postmodernity is a temporal sense of “loosening”. This “loosening” or “slackening” is liberating in that it frees the individual from rigid pre-established rules governing various forms of thinking. There is a sense that human thinking is transcendent, a sort of itérabilité, in that it cannot be contained by the contrived universal categories of critical judgement of the Academy. “Un artiste, un écrivain postmoderne est dans la situation d’un philosophe: le texte qu’il écrit, l’oeuvre qu’il accomplit ne sont pas en principe gouvernés par des règles déjà établies, et ils ne peuvent pas être jugés au moyen d’un jugement déterminant, par l’application à ce texte, à cette oeuvre de catégories connues”.¹ With the rejection of rigid systems of determination, the subject is free to actualise its unique difference. Concomitant with this loosening of the rules of subjective determination, there is also the loss or slackening of the possibility of any foundational ground in which one can root one’s common experience of subjectivity. Lyotard expresses this reality when he proclaims the death of all grand narratives. In phenomenological terms, Lyotard’s insights render the grounding of Einfühlung (a common feeling of oneness) a near impossibility. The subject, in his or her difference, is rendered isolated or cut off from the larger community, despite Lyotard’s appeal for smaller communities of difference. Postmodernity, in emphasising difference, has rendered difference a universal logical category which has eclipsed the grand narrative of the being of the human person.

Nous sommes dans un moment de relâchement, je parle de la couleur du temps ...

Sous la demande générale de relâchement et d’apaisement, nous entendons marmonner le desir de recommencer la terreur, d’accomplir le fantasme d’étreindre la réalité. La réponse est: guerre au tout, témoignons de l’imprésentable, actuons les différends, sauvons l’honneur du nom.

Jean-François Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, Editions Galilée, Paris, 1988, pp. 9–27.