click the button to the left to play, in the middle tostop, and click the button to the right to end sound.
 

There are a few philosophers who seem to inspire a core group of PMTH conversationalists.  If you have read PMTH NEWS before, you probably know that two of these philosophers are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean-Francois Lyotard.  I have also often talked about Jacques Derrida, as well. 

I still believe these three philosophers are key for postmodern thought, but recently I have become convinced of the importance of two other philosphers for our discussions on a postmodern therapy list,  Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. 

And much of our conversation in the last weeks has been about all these philosophers, not only about their individual contributions, but also about some of the ways their philosophers are similar and different from each other.  I have a feeling, too, that this conversation will not be shortlived. 

So, I thought I would tell you not only a little about our conversation, but also give you a thumbnail blurb about each of the philosphers that is currently of interest in this postmodern realm.  You can page down and see the pictures and blurbs about each philosopher, and, while you're at it, you might note the dates and locations so you can get a sense of how they took their place in thie history of postmodern ideas.  Hopefully this will provide a useful framework for understanding why we find these thinkers interesting. 
 
 

Like Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1960) was a  philosopher whose creative work blossomed in the flower of French phenomenogical philosophy immediately after WWII.  He was a contemporary of Sartre, and much of his work refers to Sartre, whom he criticized as a kind of built in interlocutor. 
 

Merleau- 
Ponty's first key 
text was called, Phenomenology of Perception.  In that book he said that our words "sing the world" (p.187) rather than "express thoughts". He explains 
 

So, if you were to tell me you liked Jazz over classical music or preferred your martini stired not shaken, you would not be expressing thoughts that were sitting like unplayed tapes in your head, but rather you would be taking a position about music and Martinis.  It is hard to imagine something you might say that wouldn't constitute a way of taking a position in the world, or, a way of "singing the world." 

The last book that Merleau-Ponty wrote was not quite finished, but enough of the text and his notes was available to make a very coherent read for the generation to read.  It is called  the Visible and the Invisible.  It was this book was discussed in a recent conversation on PMTH. 

In the article to follow, Merleau-Ponty scholar (and PMTH subscriber), Brent Dean Robbins, describes Merleau-Ponty's work in illuminating article, much as he described it to me in our PMTH conversation. 

To learn a little more about Brent Robbins, just click on his name. 
 

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was, like Merleau-Ponty, one of the philosophers in whose work bloomed in France right after WW II. 

Helen Douglas provided PMTH with this additional piece of information about him: 

French was a fourth language for Levinas. He was born in Lithuania and grew 
up speaking Hebrew and Russian, then German at university in Germany, then 
French at university in France. In the second world war, he joined the 
French army as a translator but was captured by the Germans and spent most 
of the war as a POW. 

Levinas was made famous by Sartre who said that he had learned phenomenology by reading Levinas, and by Derrida.  Derrida made Levinas famous by writing the essay "Violence and Metaphysics" which purportedly shows fatal flaw in Levinas' key concept.  (Hopefully, I will get around to studying this paper soon, and give you my account of it.  You can read the paper yourself, however, in Derrida's book, Writing and Difference.  Also, you might like to read John Caputo's discussion of this paper in his The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.) 

Regardless of how Levinas became famous, he certainly is.  If you want to study him, you should know that he has two major texts in which he outlined his own philosophy, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974).  PMTH subscriber, Helen Douglas, suggested that I read a collection of his essays, as well, Entre Nous, which I have found helpful. 

Central to Levinas work is his study of man's relation to the Other. The Other is the person who inspires our sense of caring and obligation.   This relationship with with the Other is a relationship between two people, but consciousness, for Levinas, can be thought of as a matter of how we deal with the third party in our relationships -- which we must do because we cannot devote all our attention to any given person.  When our attention is diverted is when we run into dilemmas that require us to think in terms of being fair or just. 
 
 

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was the oldest of the four philosophers described here, but he was contemporarenous with all of them. 

However, Wittgenstein wrote in German and lived in England and the other three philosophers presented on this page published in French.  Language barriers can slow down communication even when authors would be very interesting to each other.  Only the youngest of these four philosophers, Lyotard, read Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein, himself, read none of the others. 

The problem of the language barrier was made greater because, , like Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein's text that would have been most interesting to Levinas, Meleau-Ponty and Lyotard, was published post-humously. It was titled, the Philosophical Investigations and published in 1953, seven years before Merleau-Ponty died.  I don't know when the first translation of this book was made in French, but the French version of Lyotard's key text, the Postmodern Condition, has him referencing Wittgenstein in English so we might presume that Lyotard read the English version of the Philosophical Investigations. 

In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein unravels traditional views of language and presents us instead with the idea that we use language to make things happen and that these linguistic activities construct our lived world.  In this posthumous book, he told us, "to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life."  What he meant by that is very close to what Merleau-Ponty meant by "singing the world." 
 

Jacques Derrida (1930 -     ), a French philosopher who introduced the school of deconstructionism and popularized the term in today's culture.  His popularity began in 1967 when he published three important books, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference and Speech and Phenomena. k They have served to define his work. 

Derrida's work undermines the traditional view of language that allows us to imagine that readers do not misunderstand in the process fo understanding.  The two occur together, necessarily, and might be called, in Derrida's way of talking (mis)understanding.  Deconstruction is a way of reading a text so that the reader can perceive the assumptions and rhetorical practices that are inevitable in language.  He describes it as a "destructuring that dismantles the structural layers of the system", p.86) and he maintains that it is not a destructive process. 

Rather, he says he wants to write texts that inspire other texts, texts that take off from his own writing and generate new writing by other auth0ors that bear his influence but do not imagine that they are not changing what is said. (p.157) 

Derrida's essay, Violence and Metaphysics, in one of his three important 1967, is often thought of as a major  source of Levinas' popularity. 

Derrida gave the eulogy at both Levinas and Lyotard's funeral. 

references are to 
Derrida, The Ear of the Other. 
 
 

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) is for many of us the key figure that launched the postmodern moment in philosophy.  Like Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, he was a French philosopher, although Lyotard was a generation younger. 

In his early career, Lyotard was a Marxist activist, but he later came to say that there were so many interpretations of Marxism that it "was no longer anything but a screen of words thrown over real differends" [1] where by "differends" he meant disputes resulting from people using words and phrases differently while each tries to dominate the other by insisting on their own definitions. 

Lyotard's philosophy took a remarkable turn, however, with the publication of his popular book, The Postmodern Condition.  Here he founded a social philosophy that was inspired by Wittgenstein's notion of "language games."  In that book, he described a new kind of conversation emerging ("paralogy") in which people talk with each other in spite of their different ways of using language and they do so without barbarism. 

1. Lyotard, Peregrinations. p. 63
 

As the new director of the East Side Institute, I (Lois Holzman), am pleased to share the news that our friend Lois Shawver is to be honored by us for her important—and unique—work.  The honor will be given at at our second  annual Psych Out Awards benefit.  (To read more about Psych Out, click here) 

All readers of PMTH NEWS are invited to come, to meet Lois Shawver and learn about the East Side Institute. 

The gala event will take place at the TriBeCa Rooftop in NYC on Wednesday,  January 29, 2003. 

In addition to Lois Shawver, the other honorees are: Olga Acosta, Ph.D. (a nationally recognized advocate for the creation of positive and effective mental health programs for children.)  Debra Pearl, C.S.W., (the director of the Long Island Center for Social Therapy and an inspired builder of the social therapeutic movement for 25  years.) Gloria Strickland, M.Ed., (a distinguished educator and founding director of  the New Jersey All Stars. )  Two social therapy clients are also being honored—Emily Formanand Tim Neiman. 

Contributions are tax-deductible, as is a portion of the ticket price. 
Friend ticket—$150; Sponsor—$250; Benefactor—$500 

To purchase tickets or make a contribution, contact Mary Fridley, 
Sales Director, at 212-941-8906 or email at mfridley@eastsideinstitute.org. 
 
 

For example, we all laughed together at the idea that Bush is postmodern.  Pretty hilarious.  (The concept of a "postmodern president" is convincingly portrayed by Richard Rose  in his book by the same name)  [1]

Rose distinguishes three types of presidents: 
 
 

Clinton is the example of an American  postmodern president. 

Click here to read a link provided by Val Lewis that shows President Bill Clinton articulating his postmodern stance.  He is an ex-American president with no official power, yet he shows us how one articulate postmodern can join an international conversation and help formulate new policy collaboratively. 

It was in this spirit, no doubt, that Arlene Giordano said: 
 
 

And Kiernan O'Rorke-Phipps espressed a comment sentiment when she said: 
 
 

And Ivan Kovacs contributed: 
 

And we aren't thinking black or white about this issue.  There are a number here who recognize there are rational reasons for distrusting Saddam Hussein.  For example, Val Lewis said: 
 
 

The problem is that we are not only destroying innocent people's lives when we attack their country, but we are also setting up America as imperalist.  This is not the traditional American stance.  Certainly the rhetoric, at least, has not recently been so imperalist.  We have some nostalgia here for the days in which the US did not engage in such aggressive posturing. 

And, with that in mind, we entertained ourselves and bolstered our sense of solidarity recently by playing another PMTH game.  We each add ideas as to why that Bush might want to "attack Iraq at this very moment in time."  Some of us let down our hair and tried to be comical and some of us spoke more seriously, from time to time.  But we continue to add to our list of reasons with the goal of reaching 100.  We are now at 47.  I'll give a you just a sample of what PMTH subscribers suggested as to the possible reasons that Bush is "wanting to attack Saddam": 
 
 

You get the idea.  But there were a few serious comments including a long articulate note by Judy Weintraub that began with: 
 

Those are some of the reasons here that people have suggested as to why Bush wants to attack Saddam right now, now, even without international support, even though, if they tell us correctly, Saddam does not have new weapons of mass destruction, maybe fewer than he had before the Gulf War, and, moreover, when and if the US goes in it will only take a week or two to dismantle his regime. 

Therefore, there seems to be some consensus here, even in this postmodern community where diverse opinons are the usual order of the day.  The consensus It is, "What's the hurry?" 

Of course, this may  be only a temporary consensus because, as Lyotard said, 
 

What's the endgoal of discussion?  Lyotard continues saying, 
 

____ 
1. Rose, Richard. (1988).  The Postmodern President: The White House Meets the World.  Chatham House Publishers: New Jersey.
 
 

In a long post I mused on PMTH about the distinction between the premodern, modern, and postmodern.  This invited some very interesting reformulations by some of the PMTH contributors.  I particularly liked the contribution by Penn Hughes.  Huges wrote: 
 
 

I agreed when Jonathan Diamond said: "Very nice Penn."  This doesn't mean that this is the final definition, of course, what could be a more postmodern compliment than to say, this was very thought provoking.  It's something about the way it's stated.  Don't you think so, too? 
 

Look up at our quote at the top of this issue of PMTH NEWS.  How can a postmodern like myself have selected George Spears' comment as inspirational? 

Well, first, I love the image.  Second, I like the idea of our gains oozing out if we try to tie them down too tightly, too logically, too rationally, with the format of premise and conclusion. 

I do believe that postmodernism teaches us something and will leave its imprint on tomorrow, but I also believe that it will ooze and remold itself in the conversation into ideas that are yet to be envisioned.  As Lyotard says, what is of value in the postmodern conversation is that which helps the listener to create a new production, something of value, for another generation of writings and speakings, another generation of thought. 

And, unless we are to continuously echo ourselves, then, anything we say that sounds vaguely like a premise, will need to ooze a way and make space for the premise to come. 
 
 

For the most part, I have no idea, what will come up on PMTH.  But there are a couple of topics that are promising themselves. 

One important one is that Katherine Levine is organizing a PMTH book club.  We are going to take articles and books that our suscribers have written  and spend some time studying them.  We will begin next month with the interesting book written by our subscriber, Jonathan Diamond.  It is called Narrative Means to Sober Ends.  Diamond is an articulate author who contributes not only ideas to the flow of PMTH conversation, but good humor and delight.  He isn't mentioned much in this issue of PMTH NEWS because he has been busy writing another book.  But that book is far enough along that I think he'll be with us for a while.  Expect to hear more about him in in the next issue of PMTH NEWS. 

And expect to hear more about Katherine Levine who is not only organizing the book club but who is an author in her own right.  Check out her book, Parents are People, too.

You might even hear more about my writing.  Yes, I have a book too, and a book to be written, and some articles and things like that.  Check out my most recent writing (on postmodern phillosophy as it relates to therapy and psychoanalysis) by clicking here. 

And, finally, I think there will be some more talk about Tom Strong's article in New Therapist on Allan Wade.  There is likely to be some more word games, as well.  Ah, I see one starting.... 

Oh, and there's lots more!  There is an online course that will be taught around PMTH, that will be taught by Lynn Hoffman, Val Lewis, and myself (Lois Shawver).  I'll tell you more about that in the next issue of PMTH NEWS, but if you would like to learn more about this course, and the online university graduate program it is a part of, please click here for your inquiry.  Thre will be a number of others teaching in this program that you might know from PMTH NEWS.  You might also check it out by going to TheVirtual Faculty Website.

If you would like to receive announcements for each issue of PMTH NEWS, click here and forward your request.
 

PMTH is a closed community for professional therapists, as well as scholars,professors and graduate students with specialities related to therapy. We keep our list reserved this way in order to have a special place for people who are concerned with doing good therapy to discuss their personal issues about therapy in some depth. We go to other lists to discuss things with people who don't fit this profile. If you want to invite one of us to a list you're on, there is a way to do that. Or, if you fit the profile for membership to PMTH, you can consider joining us. Whichever you want, you can write me, by clicking 
 

This will send a post to me, Lois Shawver. Tell me of your interest. If you are looking to join us, also give me a little information about yourself that tells me how you fit the profile for joining the PMTH online community. And, in either case, .tell me that you got the idea to write by reading PMTH NEWS. 
 
 
 
 
 

Would you like to tell someone about PMTH NEWS? Just fill out the form below and click on the "send" button. The invitation that goes out will include a special link that your friend can click on to arrive at this site. 

First, a little background on Merleau-Ponty. In his last work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty talks about our "perceptual faith" or our tendency to take the evidence of our senses as uncontestable. We are jolted out of this perceptual faith at times by the realization that our listeners do not share the same perspective. After such a jolt, people often look for a linguistically perfect way of characterizing the truth that is beyond mere perspective. This truth beyond perspective is what Merleau-Ponty calls "the invisible." The visible, on the other hand, is what shows itself to our senses. 

In other words, Merleau-Ponty begins with the traditional metaphysical distinction between truth from a God's eye point of view and truth from our human perspective. However, he wants to avoid constructing this dichotomy between the visible and the invisible, and at the same time he wants to avoid collapsing them both into one single thing. To illustrate an event that is both dichotomous and unitary, he uses the metaphor of a seed pod bursting open to describe the event of Being (or "flesh" as he calls it). He uses the term "chiasm" to describe the structure of this event as neither a dichotomy nor a unity, but something in between. 

As I was talking about all this in PMTH, Shawver said she was struck with the similarity between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. Both authors were keenly aware of how language has the power to structure experience. Merleau-Ponty wanted to remain aware of the force that seems to pretend that language is the innocent labeling of truth. Wittgenstein, too, begins his later work, The Philosophical Investigations, by unpacking the notion that language simply labels things. 

If language does not simply label things, and if people do not always understand what I have to say (since they are linguistically structuring things differently), then I am pressed to find more original ways to say things. I am called to do so from a desire to be understood but also from a desire to better understand my subject matter and even myself. This often requires me to enter into another's style of speaking and writing. I move toward them in order to articulate my point-of-view, but in that moving-forward, I am transformed in the process. What I had to say is changed. 

This kind of awareness of the way language structures perception is relevant to therapy. Without it, we think and respond to the world around us in habituated and sterile ways. But, if we can attend to our language and try out new metaphors and figures of speech, we can sometimes articulate what is unknown even to ourselves when we start to speak. In support of these musings of mine, Shawver offered a quote from Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible: 

"A genuine conversation gives me access to thoughts that I did not know myself capable of, that I 'was' not capable of, and sometimes I feel myself 'followed' in a route unknown to myself which my words, cast back by the other, are in the process of tracing out for me" (p. 13). 

Shawver also noted that Lyotard addresses this theme when he talked of the inventiveness of postmodern conversation, or what he calls "paralogy." In paralogy, as Shawver explained it, 

"My thoughts are inspired in a conversation to new formulations that I did not know myelf capable of. This is not something contained word for word in the passage of the other person. It is pulled out of me, in the process of listening to the other." 

So, as our conversation continued, it became increasingly clear to both Shawver and myself that Merleau-Ponty's work converges in a fascinating way not only to Lyotard but also to later Wittgenstein. In addition to what I have already noted, our conversation uncovered that both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein speak with a tone of perplexity. They do not engage the traditional style that critiques former thinkers and tries to assert a better theory. Rather they take their reader on a journey of reflection, inviting them to join in the process of thinking the unthought. 

All three of these authors are concerned with the way this creativity happens. Merleau-Ponty explains show it is possible by a replacing of "habituated speech" with speech that is "hyper-reflection." Wittgenstein talks about creating in the gaps and spaces between the rules of language (aphorism 68, Philosophical Investigations). Lyotard talks about this creativity developing out of postmodern conversations when he says: 
 
 

All in all, it seems to me, this was a pretty good initial conversation on PMTH. 
 
 

The Ethical Predicament

One of the things we talked about recently on PMTH was the ethical predicament that Levinas describes.  I described my reading of this predicament in a note to Helen Douglas, a Levinas scholar.  I said that for Levinas the face of the other person awakens caring and commitment, but I will inevitably be distracted by another face and betray my obligation to fulfill that commitment while working to fulfill a commentment to the the next person.  I added: 
 

So the predicament is that I cannot fulfill all my obligations to each person because some of them compete with others. 

Douglas responded graciously saying: 
 

I think she is right.  While it is true that Levinas has two ethics, the ethics of the person I am facing face to face, and the ethics of justice for those I am not facing at the moment, the ethics of justice is stamped from the beginning with the conscience I had awakened when I first looked at a person face to face and saw that I cared and was responsible. 

So, my predicament, within Levinas' system of thought, at least, is that I care about them all if I allow myself to do so and that I cannot, nevertheless, fulfill all my obligations to all as I would feel it.  Thus, we need this second ethics of justice. 

This brings me to a passage in Levinas that reminds me of Lyotard.  Levinas says: 
 
 

In other words, it is inhuman to be judged according to laws and rules that do not look me in the face and listen to my particular case. 

I think this is what Lyotard had in mind when he talked about "judging without criteria."  Rather than following strict rules, one judges from the heart. 
 
 

Plato's philosophy imagined that every object in the world is an imperfect copy of a pure version that exists in the heaven above the heavens.  This pure version was the form.  We never see the forms, but we recognize them in the distorted version that each physical copy presents to us. 

As Plato describes it through the mouth of his character Socrates, in the heaven above the heavens 
 

Plato's philosophy of forms is "philosophical realism."   Philosphical realism is  contested today by many who identify with the postmodern movement.  Those who think postmoderns do not believe in reality do not realize that the postmodern is typically protesting Plato's theory of forms, not the reality of the chair the desk that holds their computer. (click here for more details ). 

Derrida

For example, Derrida talks about the mesmerizing influence of the Platonic theory of forms as a particular western enchantment that he calls our logocentrism.  The deconstructive reading that Derrida devises is an attempt to help extricate the reader from our western logocentrism.  We are still mesmerized by this Platonic imagery, Derrida says, after deconstruction we gain a glimpse beyond the curtain of this Platonic imagery (Of Grammatology, p.14). 

Levinas 

Levinas begins his first masterpiece, Totality and Infinity, telling us about the metaphysical heaven that Plato set up, the true and realm in which the pure forms of being exist. 
 

I would paraphrase that passage like this: 
 
 

See how he emphasizes the flunctuations of the present rather than looking to the true "me" that exists in the realm of a transcendent heaven? 

PMTH  Steven Gans contributed a PMTH remark on this topic.  He said 
 
 

Gans is referring to the way in which Levinas claims that ethics is the foundation of Being, thus breaking from ancient Greek philosophy.Gans continues: 
 

So, what is this gift of goodness to the other?  Gans continues: 
 

I think Gans is saying it is something like honoring the other person we are engaging with and doing so by noticing our own lack of certainty.  It reminds me of the concept of 'not-knowing' in Harlene Anderson's postmodern philosophy of therapy. 

Lyotard

Gans remarks remind me of something said in his own efforts to overcome Platonism.  First, he told us what justice within the "Platonic problematic" was like 
 

In other words, for the Platonist, justice calls for a set of ethical principles that set up the "criterion of judgment" 

In contrast to using external principles, Lyotard recommends judging without principles (he calls this paganism) and to make this judgment based on careful listening, a listening that is not caught in a single language game, a single framework, a listening across frameworks.  Merely listening in this way allows us to judge much more justly, and, thereby escape our Platonic problematic: 

Lyotard explains,: 
 

Merleau-Ponty

The effort to overcome Plato's philosphical heritage is written throughout the writings of Merleau-Ponty.  Here's a statement that captures Merleau-Ponty's attempts to escape Platonism.  Notice how it, much like the Levinas quote above, has us focussing on process as opposed to things that remain the same and represent the true form of how they should be.  Merleau-Ponty said: 
 
 

Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein's later philosophy also works to overcome simple Platonism.  He approaches this task in numerous ways, but one way is with his concept of a "grammatical fiction" or "grammatical illusion" (see especially aphorisms 307 & 110). 

A grammatical fiction is the imaginative construction of some "thing" on the basis of certain imagery contained in our ordinary way of speaking.  For example, to say that "It is raining" doesn't imply that there is anything in particular doing the "raining".  It is just a manner of speaking. 

For the Wittgensteinian, there is much that we construct as grammatical fictions, tying down process and treating the process as a thing.  A trait, for example, might be thought of as a frequent style not as an existing thing. 

Summary

In sum, it seems clear to me that all these philosophers are busily trying to escape what Wittgenstein called the "fly-bottle" of our Platonism, and what Derrida calls seeing through the crevice. 

Yet all of them approach the task of deconstructing Platonism in a distinctive way, and, I believe, if you will read them, you will find the different paths they take you will lead into a profound intellectual adventure.  Nothing can be quite as intellectually exciting for those of us trapped in Platonism as to begin to see how the world appears when that curtain begins to lift. 
 

In this particular conversation, we are talking about our thuoghts as to whether postmodern philosophy has something to contribute the field of therapy or counseling.  There are contributions by: 
 
 

If you go the conversation by clicking here you will be able to click on the contributors names to learn a little about them.
 
 

Howver, look at what Ken and Mary Gergen have to say about the joys of growing old. 

Click here
 

In addition, yhowever, I want to give a special place, too, to Janus head, where Brent Dean Robbins is the editor.   You will see Brent's essay on Merleau-Ponty above.  Robbins is a new voice on PMTH, and I believe he has much to offer not only PMTH, but the postmodern community.  Also, his journal complements the New therapist.  Where the New Therapist is up-close-and personal, Janus Head is is deep and scholarly, taking you into the rich discussions that revolve around postmodern ideas.  If you are serious about familiarizing yourself with postmodernism, this is a hot journal to read. 

So, I hope you acquaint yourself with both.  Both stand on our postmodern frontier 

New Therapist

The September/October 2002 edition of New Therapist has just been published, selected articles and contents of which can be found on our web site at http://www.newtherapist.com 

Entitled The Big Ideas Edition, it covers some applications and thoughts about therapy which attempt to cast our focus well beyond the one-on-one approaches which have dominated for the past century. 

From Arnold and Amy Mindell's Worldwork ideas, through the thought provoking ideas of Allan Wade on how we acknowledge our clients' resistance to violence, to a look at the ambitious Antidote project to enhance emotional literacy on a community-wide level, this is a rare collection of the bigger ideas emerging from the therapy world. 

As always, this edition is available for order online at the back issues order page, as are copies of all of the previous 20 editions of the magazine. click here. 
to order 

Or, if you'd like to subscribe to the magazine for a year from $46 (incl. postage), visit our subscriptions page by clicking here.

Janus Head:  Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology and the Arts 

What is a “Janus head” and why would anyone want to name a journal after it? 

Stone-carved reliefs of the face of Janus were often placed above doorways of old Roman homes, such as the one at Villa Madama at the foot of Monte Mario just outside Rome. Placed at the threshold, the image of the god conveys both a welcome and a demarcation of boundary. The visage of Janus is double, each face poised in opposite directions, a pliable symbol extending itself to spatial, temporal, political, and personal planes. The phrase “Janus-faced” as it comes down to us means “two-faced” or “deceitful,” but the original signification of the two-faced god meant vigilance and new beginnings, as we think of in the first month of the year, January. To quote from Bergen Evans' dictionary of Mythology, “It was a peculiarity of this god that the doors of his temple were kept open in time of war and closed in time of universal peace. They were rarely closed.” 

From its inception in 1998, Janus Head, as an interdisciplinary journal, has aimed to be that opened door at the threshold of a newly charged dialogue among the disciplines. Disciplines themselves are human demarcations, boundaries built across the phenomenal field, both opening up and closing off the thought of one disciplinary domain or another. The interdisciplinary space, then, is one that seeks to give rise to other, provocative modes of revealing, to freshen the blood of the disciplines by interjecting and crossing different bodies of thought, to give credence to various manifestations of truth in human knowledge and experience. This journal is dedicated to the exploration of ideas and images as they unfold through both analytical and poetic modes of language. Visual art has its say in this space as well, for the immediacy and visceral amplitude of the image is the aesthetic reminder of the power of silence between words, the dense nexus of meaning that resides in the imagination before language. 

Janus Head has published essays ranging a broad scope of topics, from Heraclitean philosophy to Kantian ethics, from Melville to Rene Char, from Heideggarean ontology to Derridean language studies, to name just a few. Poetry, the avant-garde as well as the quietly lyrical, takes an honored place in the journal, because it is in poetry, as one of our editors wrote in an early editorial, that Being and language fuse. Past contributors to Janus Head include Alphonso Lingis, Robert Romanyshyn, Claudia K. Grinnell, Margo Kren, Elizabeth Mesa-Gaido, Robert Gibbons, Ouyang Yu, R. Flowers Rivera, Jamie O'Halloran, Ernesto Grassi, Peter Caws, Frits Staal, Antoine Vergote, Evans Lansing Smith, Louise Sundararajan, Michael Sipiora, and Frank Edler. 

Janus Head is published biannually, on-line and in print. The journal publishes essays, poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, art, and reviews. Annual volumes usually include one themed issue and one “open” issue, which considers submissions on any number of topics. Online readership has grown to a number of 10,000 unique visitors a month. In addition to presenting the current issue in full, the website offers access to the archives of past issues, as well as an extensive resource page featuring over 300 links to other journals, a listing of conferences and events, and reviews of books and films. 

We encourage readers to view the current issue featuring the proceedings from the 2001 George Washington University Human Sciences Conference, Knowing Subjects: Human Lives, Human Worlds. Lewis Gordon, Jonathan Moreno, David Goldberg, and Virginia Held are among the writers contributing to this special issue. 

Forthcoming in the fall is an issue centered on Magical Realism, featuring poetry by Virgil Suarez, Robert Gibbons, Todd Sanders, among others; and essays by Lois Parkinson Zamora, Wendy B. Faris, and Michael Wood. 

For more information, please write to: editors@janushead.org   or visit the website of Janus Head by clicking here.
 
 
 

If you think you would like to read past issues of PMTH NEWS, you would like to look over the table of contents of those past issues.  The Table of contents can be reached by clicking here and you can then link to the earlier issues you desire to read.