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A characteristic of Heidegger was his contempt for German high culture. In particular he shunned eighteenth-century Humanity, Humanitat. The idea that the beautiful work of art reconciled the human...

Dressage has been called the ability to get horses to dance. For the horse, everything depends on his athleticism, while for the rider, the skill involved is like playing a musical instrume...

This guest column marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Jacques Derrida. The journal in which it appears, Common Knowledge, was not especially receptive to deconstruction during Derrida's lifetime, but Lesley Chamberlain in retrospect sees reasons to reconsider his role in intellectual history now. The delicacy of Derrida's mission, she argues, has been misunderstood. He is best placed in the company not of the “deconstructionists” who thought to follow in his footsteps but, rather, in the company of the moralistic and theologically minded German philosophers and thinkers who inspired him, from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. A personal fear of being pinned down, coupled with his tragic Jewish witness to a philosophical quest for certainty gone astray, led the “Sad Rider,” one of many possible Derridas, to want to “erase” as much as he wanted to write — despite which, he was not spared being turned into an industry.

Heidegger responded to Darwin's displacement of the Created Universe by seeking value in a new materiality. His 1936 lecture The Origin of the Work of Art spelt out the need to get away from an Aristotelian concept of matter perpetuated by Aquinas and frame an approach more appropriate to a post-Darwinian age. The argument is not that Heidegger was a Darwinist or an evolutionist. It is that he responded to what Dewey called ‘the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions’.

Although they have a religious origin, the terms quietist and quietism have generally been used in the anglophone world in the context created by the French Revolution, which made them expressions of political abuse. Examination of classic instances of their use shows that in fact they were terms of psychological abuse, signs that men and women of political commitment could not understand, let alone accept, others who were not committed to one side or other in the revolutionary struggle. This paper takes issue with the egregious simplicity of that that attitude, while exploring aspects of the Idealist tradition in German philosophy which, also emerging from the challenge of the French Revolution, found positive terms and complex human explanations for behaviour that held back from definite political commitment. It concludes by suggesting the terms quietist and quietism have become redundant in a world that has moved on from a crude clash of revolution versus reaction.

This essay introduces the second installment of a symposium in Common Knowledge called “Apology for Quietism.” This introductory piece concerns the sociology of quietism and why, given the supposed quietude of quietists, there is such a thing at all. Dealing first with the “activist” Susan Sontag's attraction to the “quietist” Simone Weil, it then concentrates on the “activist” William Empson's attraction to the Buddha and to Buddhist quietism, with special reference to Empson's lost manuscript Asymmetry in Buddha Faces (and to Sharon Cameron's work on the topic in her book Impersonality). The author, who is also editor of the journal, argues against the effort of some contributors to substitute new terms for quietism and emphasizes instead what he calls (quoting Sontag) “the need for repose.”

The Cocktail Party is a testament to T.S. Eliot's improbable dramatic aspirations, as John Dexter's admirable 1986 production at London's Phoenix theatre showed. The piece has moved further away from realising its chief aim than when it was first staged at the 1949 Edinburgh festival, with Alec Guinness as the tyrannically compassionate Christian psychoanalyst Sir Henry Harcourt–Reilly. It has never truly been suited to pleasing a wide audience. The fact that the Edinburgh occasion drew crowds, and the production moved profitably to London and was followed by a successful season on Broadway, was surely deceptive. All three occasions owed the excess of their popularity to Eliot's living celebrity as poet and nobel laureate. In 1986, now Eliot's name has entered the museum for "difficult" poetry on A—level syllabuses, it was hard to fill more than a few front rows in the stalls, even with the most intelligent acting and attractive staging, and cut—price seats