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In 1970 Kenneth Smith pioneered creator-self-publication in 20th-century comics culture with his Phantasmagoria, a series of provocative and stunningly illustrated fantasy books in the form of magazines, and with his portfolios of fantasy art prints.

Many who are familiar with our classics in literature and philosophy do not realize that most of these groundbreaking works--by Blake, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, etc.--had to be privately published at the author's expense. Our system of radically commercialized publishing media--not unlike the system of academically controlled outlets--militates against profoundly novel perspectives more abortively than any totalitarian regime of censorship. Original thinking by its very concept must struggle to induce exceptional readers to take seriously issues that most people have excluded from their routinized lives and habituated mentalities. It is thus virtually axiomatic: each century's meager capital of rationality began as the heresy of the century before.

Respected in his primary profession as a teacher of philosophy but disenchanted with the irrelevance and complacency of academic culture, Dr. Smith resigned a tenured position for more creative pursuits. He wrote a controversial column in philosophical issues, "Dramas of the Mind," for the critical periodical The Comics Journal, then spent five years incubating new styles of thinking and writing to bring home to thoughtful readers the issues of late-modern existence to which modernity trains its inmates to be oblivious. In 1998 he returned to self-publication with the first title from Memnon Press, OTHERWISE.

OTHERWISE

100 parables, paradigms, and paradoxes --now published

OTHERWISE

100 PARABLES / PARADIGMS / PARADOXES

ON THE REALITY ALONGSIDE OF US.

Modern culture has elaborated a fabric of taken-for-granted ways of living and thinking that defines for its inmates the "only conceivable" way of seeing things, the conventional Normality of 20th-century mentality. But modernity's firmament is sand, and its "axioms" are the precepts of the European Enlightenment decayed into blind dogma. OTHERWISE reveals profound patterns of alternative understanding and values eclipsed by the modern Leviathan, and reanimates the concrete art of thinking and philosophizing, as a search for myth and wonder.

Philosophical intelligence is perspectival versatility, a polyglot fluency lost amid the sclerotic contemporary orthodoxies. Called "koans for the 21st-century mind," this collection reconceives myths & articulates enigmas in the vein of Kafka, Nietzsche, Borges, and Blake--anecdotal, aphoristic, allegorical. Philosophical issues are condensed into intense dreamlike episodes and woven into an Ariadne's thread leading out of the modern labyrinth. A striking expression of evocative, provocative germs of thinking: a book not to read but to reread and ponder. Enigmas and paradoxes capturing a way of living notoriously elusive to philosophical thought are made palpable enough to bite.

OTHERWISE offers an artery of incisive thinking, a revelatory dialogue in new forms of intelligibility: what at its most incandescent is the meaning of life at the turn of the twenty-first century? OTHERWISE has been called "a gold mine" by musicologist Dr. David Montgomery, "as revolutionary as Schlegel's aphorisms at the dawn of the 19th century." Pieces vary from two lines to four pages, from conflicts in principles between ancient and Christian civilization to the clash of modern culture with traditional individualism. Consciousness, mystery, custom, fate, wisdom, self-obliviousness, and other issues as perennial as humanity itself get turned and viewed from remarkable perspectives.

Quality paperbound, full-cover cover, illustrated throughout: (ISBN 0-9661057-0-2) 100 pp + 6 pp preface, $12 + $4 p/h. Signed/numbered ed. 1-100, w. tipped-in color pl. on special p.: $25 + $4 p/h.

PUBLISHED APRIL 1998, ADVERTISED IN UTNE & HARPER'S

SOME BRIEFER SELECTIONS FROM OTHERWISE:

3: TRANSIENTS Men cry and laugh and are angered and know not why. They pass out of existence like mayflies never having learned to understand themselves. Is this some kind of joke of the Gods?

5: LICENSE I wander from city to city in my dreams, asking like a simpleton what is permitted. But I am not permitted to ask, and no one is permitted to say. Even where it is said that all is permitted, it is not permitted to think what this means.

6: OBTUSENESS God when He made the world gave it this ballast to keep it on course: it would forever be too stupid to care what prophets, geniuses, revolutionaries, and poets thought of it. But this very saving grace became the handle by which the Devil would grip it firmly and make it his.

11: ULTIMATE Every eon has its own God defining what is credible for that eon and authoritative over it. But some Gods rule over a deluded and duplicitous eon that calls its God by another eon's name and believes itself more spiritual and rational than it can even grasp.

31: COMPLACENCY Men pay well to be assured the world is no wider or deeper than they are comfortable with. Religion, literature, politics, and education are that kind of soporific.

33: CONTRA NATURA One has to explain to men, as if they were children, what intrinsic and transcendent values would even mean. Twenty minutes later they have forgotten.

40: LINGUA FRANCA Indeed I heard money talk: it desperately needed to be loved. So it said to me. But then I overheard two coins talking between themselves: like a virus they could not replicate on their own. They needed the warm juices inside a human head, and needed to talk their way in. Each asked the other if any new ploys had come to mind. When they saw me they resumed clinking.

47: OBLIQUITY It is an art, looking at the sunlit world but never at the fierce furnace overhead. Always the head, the brows, the face, position themselves obliquely to avoid what is most obvious and notorious. So too the art of thinking which reads the world glancingly, avoiding the Medusa's face of truth: the mind has only a nodding acquaintance with it.

49: INVISIBILITY The perfect invisibility is inconceivability. What humans cannot bring themselves to believe or to comprehend is as good as nothing.

59: PSEUDOPHILIA What is true is difficult and contrary to what human beings want to believe. But what is false has been designed to appeal to the illusions of mind and language: always it is more tempting, appetizing, convincing--truer than the truth is whatever people want to, need to, believe. Truth is a foreign language to our minds.

67: WRIT LARGE BUT VAGUE History like politics--and religion, art and science--is the cryptography of human nature. What is not?

79: FOLLY Folly is: the self-enlightenment of the ineducable, the ingenious survival-tactic of the self-destructive, the absolute faith in what will dissolve every foundation, the wisdom of a mentality unfit to discriminate among ultimate principles and values.

81: HUMAN AND DIVINE What humans value the Gods do not respect. The Greeks believed whoever is left holding man's coin in eternity is a fool--that is why men give their last obol to Charon.

83: AWAKENING A God sleeps in everyone but awakens only in a few, who burn with a fire inhuman: to them time is an urgency, a river of fresh tasks, and life is crucified on eternity.

88: VALUES Values are the habits of civilizations, the riverbeds cut by the flow of living and thinking. Liquids rule solids. But how can individuals be expected to comprehend what encompasses them?

All selections c Kenneth R. Smith 1998.

WEBS

200 parables, paradigms and paradoxes

--to be published in 1999

WEBS

200 PARABLES / PARADIGMS / PARADOXES ON THE IDEOLOGIES THAT RULE THE ALL-RULING MODERN MENTALITY

WEBS presents a tour of the modern menagerie of presuppositions and ideologies in their variety. Philosophical anecdotes and anamorphic thinking or experimental distortionism serve as methods of perspectival variation or exaggeration to heighten consciousness of our own presuppositions. These explorations sensitize readers to the diversity of mindforms or deformative -isms with which modern minds are unwittingly riddled. When we think, what do we take for granted as a subtle landscape or physiognomy of ideas--the shaped inner sense of world that gives us clues how to pick our path through it, the "method" we intuitively follow when we make sense of the order in our world?

The ultimate premise of the modern technological cosmos was uttered two and a half millennia ago by Anaxagoras: "Mind rules all things," a nooarchy. But what unthought-about forces rule the mind? The Greeks termed -ismoi the narcotic or infatuating perspectives and manias that appear rational, lucid and even ultimate in the minds of their victims. In the absence of traditional forms of normative culture, i.e., philosophy and values, modern mentality has proved the ideal culture-medium for the proliferation of ismoi. Indeed it is argued in three extended prefaces that ideologies today covertly perform the coordinating functions once provided by culture and philosophy. Characteristically, moderns have no moral or intellectual prophylaxis against these deforming mindforms.

These explorations at the confluence of logic, myth, poetry, psychology and politics redesign what we presuppose to yield an array of abrupt insights into human nature and culture: taken together they describe an alphabet for literacy in -isms, a sharpened facility for recognizing their warpage and reclaiming some whole-minded clarity.

FORTHCOMING in 1999.

Quality paperbound, color cover, specifications not fixed at this time but about 50% larger than OTHERWISE. May be presubscribed at its projected retail price of $16 (publisher pays postage on presubscription orders).

A signed/numbered edition 1-100, with special illustrated page, will be offered at $30 (publisher pays postage on prepublication subscriptions).

SOME BRIEFER SELECTIONS FROM WEBS:

THE PRICE OF VALUE Money: who lacks it cannot buy respect from his fellows; who has enough of it can even buy away from others their own self-respect.

APOTHEOSIS Stadium: A temple where a people goes to worship itself via everything the Many honor and are impressed by. Through the miracles of technology now it need not leave its pathetic hovels to do this.

I AM NOT WHAT I AM There are individuals so pathetic it is painfully shameful to call them or even see them as pathetic--painful to them of course, but also to the one who calls or sees them in this way. The truth of what they are accuses us of successfully knowing it.

SHALL WE DANCE? Decisions are the cat's paw by which fate lures us out into existence--and implicates us in spite of ourselves in its logic, its metabolism, its undertow that draws the unwary toward the deeps.

GOATS Parents and teachers are authorities representing a culture that reviles authority and is too incoherent to be represented. They are guilty of guilt for inflicting such a world on another generation. To focus this guilt and give each resentful youth some meaning for his meaningless existence is their reason for being.

INSULT TO INJURY The most insidious aspect of our determinism of culture and character is that we are fated, in every age and society, to imagine that what we have is freedom. This incongruous condition alone must eventually drive every civilization mad.

POWER IS KNOWLEDGE Any sufficiently large organization will secrete its own atmosphere of virtual reality: it's in a position to dictate terms to reality. How could it resist the temptation? Why should it?

CRUSADERS Fatalities among movie stuntmen: casualties in the war against boredom.

UNDERTOW Not the deeds of individuals but the tides make history --and make us, knowingly or not, its flotsam.

FELLOWSHIP I stand next to another person and, until one word too many is spoken, imagine we are both in the same world.

ALTERNITY Philosophy: the discovery of the double-jointed mind. Only when it has slipped out of the socket of custom can one discover the most remarkable action of one's free intelligence.

CREED OF THE POSTCREDAL AGE . . .Pawns' opinions, even their profoundest certainties, do not constitute the rules of the game.

SPIRITED AWAY Children are warned about riding off with strangers. Adults too should be wary of free rides in another's karma.

THE RIVER CUTS ITS BED Culture trains us to make sense only by accustomed ways of decoding the meaning of things, like familiar melodies that for us become the rule of how all music should be.

SELF-THERAPY Cyberculture--the very thing modern psyches need, a new and more potent turbo-irreality-generator.

THE LIABILITY OF BELIEF Build not a house upon the sand--or a cathedral. Belief about what is eternal is not itself what is eternal. All religions are the spawn of history, and must rewrite it to make men forget this.

ADDICTION Ego: A naturally occurring hallucinogen of monstrous potency which every mind produces at will. The belief that this vice can be controlled, or is not a vice, is its own basal chemistry.

PANACEA "Think!" The most remarkable presumption, that thinking is per se a solution. But profound errors are only compounded by more thinking, the knot drawn harder and tighter. Medice, cura te ipse.

All selections c Kenneth R. Smith 1998.

MINOTAUR

200 parables, paradigms and paradoxes

--to be published in 1999-2000

MINOTAUR

200 PARABLES / PARADIGMS / PARADOXES ON THE LIMITS AND LIABILITIES OF THE MODERN MENTALITY

MINOTAUR follows up the arguments of OTHERWISE and WEBS: it synthesizes principles that Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka and other profound cultural contrarians raised as radical criticisms of the modern world-order and its stupefying mindways. What are the defining ideological reflexes that bind modern culture into a perversely stultifying but durable system? How can we comprehend its enveloping universe that tolerates no alien or external criticism and dissolves the very residues of philosophy and values in its inmates? By no accident the modern era has purged its understanding of what premodern cultures took for granted as essential principles, those of nature-centered antiquity and of spirit-centered medieval Christianity.

Modernity is the epoch of arbitrary will, bound by the authority neither of piety toward nature nor of creative divinity: only its own "autonomous" self-concept (dictated to it by its ambient culture) is recognized as authoritative over its reason and conscience. Modernity is an era notoriously plagued by problems of valuelessness, amoral-Machiavellian politics, anemic philosophy and hypocritical religion, trivializing education and escapist culture: the variant forms of nihilism latent in the concept of arbitrary will and its collateral notion of groundless reason (which together form abstract ego).

MINOTAUR consolidates resources for recognizing the modern ideological idioms. It shows in action some alternative perspectives on our engulfing Sahara of technophilic culture, to let us see modernity as others may someday see it. Like OTHERWISE and WEBS, it frames issues in the form of anecdotes, dialogues, aphorisms, allegories: it strategically approaches a complex universe from varied perspectives.

FORTHCOMING in 1999-2000.

Quality paperbound, specifications not fixed at this time but about 50% larger than OTHERWISE. May be presubscribed at its projected retail price of $16 (publisher pays postage & handling on presubscription orders).

A signed/numbered edition 1-100, with special illustrated page, may be presubscribed at its projected retail price of $30 (publisher pays postage & handling on presubscription order).

BRIEFER SELECTIONS FROM MINOTAUR

CHAOTOLOGY Life: a domain demarcated by high noise-to-signal ratio.

CAPTAINS AND OCEANS We need to put a face on our fate, because we are fated to feed a delusion that conscious will is indeed all-responsible.

BANAL TEMPTATION We have verbs, "allude" and "delude"--why not "illude"? Because we hardly can name its contrary; it forms the prosaic fabric of subjectivity, a body odor imperceptible for its very constancy.

THERAPIST Philosophies: playthings of the subtlest psychopathologies.

SILT Blessed are the meek, for they have not the audacity to demand their rights. They shall inherit a world they dare not even look at: a world whose consumables and sediment they shall be.

GENERIC EPITAPH Too smart to need to think.

REDUCED FOR QUICK TURNOVER What--expressed so simply even an idiot can understand it--is an idiot? One who knows only his own point-of-view. And now again, in terms an idiot cannot understand: Homo simplex, one-ply mentality --a Fachmensch, a fool of the world and of his own mind.

FOG DISPERSAL Politics, n. economics.

IN THE LONG RUN To do what is psychologically "healthy" or natural--to nurse illusions, avoid what is unpleasant or conflictive, let naive feelings stage-manage all one's perceptions--is to architect inadvertently a life from which rationality and farsighted self-responsibility vanish.

SLOTH Moderns live in a world so scrupulously tailored to their limitations that they no longer comprehend what these limitations are or even that they exist and are weaknesses--vices.

INCONGRUITY Modern: devoutly anarcho-fascist.

ACCOMODATION Shackles of the body are designed to be punitive, painful and resented. But shackles of the mind are the very epitome of comfort; a shackled mind only resents being reminded of them by having them rattled. How much wiser than the mind is the body.

PSYCHOSIS: A state of mind whose authority or actuality is demonstrated by the inability of anyone caught in its toils to know that he is caught, i.e. its existence is manifested by its inevidence.

MEMORANDUM Your inability to see something is not a law; although a law can decree that you may not see something.

ARISTOPHOBIA Every form of society founded on mindless conformism is dialectically haunted by a fear of the free one--the anomaly who proves that the herd is not God and not even human nature.

DEFLATION Incomprehensible: unorthodox; unprecedented. Audacious: averse to lying; principled. Paranoid: astute and incisive.

PROPELLANT OF POLITICS AND HISTORY What is self-evident to some is self-evidently absurd to others.

IN SITU The tactic of abstracting out of context itself has to be understood in context--in the flow of history and nature, and as an expression of habituated acts of intellect.--All the more imperative in modernity where such a tactic has become an engulfing strategy; the faith of entire institutions; a world-order unto itself.

FORTUNA Our investment strategies and funds are our Gods, our brokers are our priests. We find out from the Internet or financial pages whether we have bet on the right deity or not. In the ficklest God of all we trust.

All selections c Kenneth R. Smith 1998.

MILLENNIA IN MICROCOSM

THESES ON THE LOGIC AND LIFE OF CIVILIZATIONS FOR THE YEAR 2000 AND BEYOND

What is the meaning or significance of the age--the culture or ideology--that has formed us? How is modernity radically different in assumptions or worldview from the ancient or medieval era? What is our conception of human nature, social order, values, knowledge, freedom etc. in contrast to pre-Christian and pre-modern epochs? How and out of what matrix have our fundamental principles--even our defining simplisms--evolved?

In concise but rich treatments ancient culture is portrayed in essence as the regime of nature, the working of that fertile and dynamic organismic order called physis. Greek culture--character, philosophy, fate, democratic politics, tragedy, aristocracy, slavery, religion, art, and culture itself--is keyed to this fundamental principle. But central to the Christian era was creative free spirit or unworldly actus purus, which revolutionized ancient culture and is unintelligible except in contrast with it. Christianity first conceived God as spiritual and religion (human essence) as contranatural.

The modern era's essential terms stand radically opposed to both these worldviews: our civilization--its peculiar allure, ideological logic (in law, education, politics, religion, economics, family, etc.) and fatal shortcomings--takes our essence to be abstract or arbitrary will, neither natural nor spiritual, neither this-worldly nor otherworldly but alien to both. Is modern ethos now depleted and incoherent--in tragic and terminal collision with itself? Essential principles of the philosophy of civilization and history are clarified.

FORTHCOMING in 1999-2000. Now being serialized over the course of 1999 in condensed form in THE COMICS JOURNAL.

Quality paperbound, specifications not fixed at this time. May be presubscribed at the projected retail price of $15 (publisher pays postage and handling on presubscription orders).

A signed/numbered edition 1-100, with special illustrated page,may be presubscribed at the projected retail price of $30 (publisher pays postage and handling on presubscription orders).

BRIEF SELECTIONS FROM

MILLENNIA IN MICROCOSM

FROM "TIME, HISTORY AND NATURE"

(1.) The ancient worldview is naturalist, "physiocratic": nature is a dynamic order of existence that rules and runs itself on its own, that is, carries on autonomically like our breathing or digestive processes, or the evaporation and condensation of water through its meteorological cycles, or the regeneration of species by propagation. The genius of nature lies in its organic structure, the weave of parts into a whole that sustains itself: the cells make tissues and organs, and these organs make systems; individual organisms at another scale require the complement of families, mates, allies, clans. Cities and economies as well answer to this primal logic of nature dictating that whatever cannot subsist on its own must perish: autonomy (autarkia or self-rule) and self-sufficiency amount to a value inscribed in natural existence. Nature orchestrates the phases of things, so there is a seasonal cycle of growth and decline, and a child by cumulative overlay of masteries scales up to the full powers that are an adult's. Time and history from the standpoint of nature are cyclical, as one regime or order dovetails into another: all things in natural time are transient, they become and pass away as finite lives. Every death makes way for new life, and every growth is the death of what has fallen away in the process. Only the essence of what has passed on is retained, implicit in higher forms.

Nature has laid this regime and logic on everything living: every being and every system is either ascending toward its prime or decaying, descending into moribundity. Grow or die. . . .

(2.) The medieval or Christian worldview arose on premises contrary to ancient naturalism, of a God who was above and apart from Nature and who created this world out of nothing preexisting. The Greek Gods had been immanent in nature, at one with its forces, including its power to sway and intoxicate the psyches of men. The Gods of the ancients had been themselves subject to the overwhelming order of nature, of birth, lust, natural character, and all the other vices that proto-Christian Plato reviled them for. Christianity for the first time conceived a God obligated to be holy or transcendent over such natural flux; a spiritual God radically self-empowered, who made the world to be utterly His artificial contrivance, His Logos or system of order. Not obscure Fate (to which Zeus and the Olympians had to defer as a higher power) but the rational and moral Will of a benevolent Divinity was now the ultimate source of order, the ruling arche that accounted for the way the world is. The timeline of Christian history and nature does not recede into vertiginous obscurity but fixes a true Beginning, an absolute initial point before which there was nothing at all. And being designed by a single-minded God rather than a self-orchestrating polyphonic nature, this world-order unfolds linearly toward another unique and unrepeatable event, the coming of the reconciliatory God-man, the Christos or anointed one. This world will continue to play out the logic God has designed for it until the Second Coming when God's Kingdom will cast down sinful humans caught in the toils of nature. The authority of God defines both the origin and the terminus of this world's tenure, its Alpha and its Omega.

. . . Made in His image, Christian man is definitively different from animals: the doctrine imago Dei does not mean that finite man resembles infinite God, but rather that he reflects in a limited measure the remarkable world-spawning powers God demonstrated in creating the world ex nihilo.

. . . This is what man's modicum of spirit means, that he is architected to take responsibility in some measure for the terms of his existence.

(3.) The modern order defined its origination by a radically different modus, a way of arising and cohering that was neither natural nor divine. Its prophet was the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who contrived a new myth about the unique genesis of man: instead of being formed by nature or made by God, man was given the distinctive privilege of being left unfinished. Empowered to be his own creator, he could make of his life and character whatever he subjectively wanted. Pico conceived man's spiritual dignity not just to rule how he lived but also how he framed or shaped his original nature.

. . . Nature endowed animals to bear a natural teleology, so like compasses they inherently point the right direction for a creature composed as they are. God made angels likewise to have a wholly spiritual teleology, a "higher" nature. But man was by design formed to be irresolute, not determinate but merely determinable. He is a sheerly potential being, an isometric creature in whom there is no natural or spiritual bias in any specific direction: he is microcosmic or omnipotential according to Pico, containing all the seeds of possibility that other animals and even angels possess. Man exists in a unique metaphysical mode of virtuality, not definite or finite actuality as animals have: he sees himself therefore always in terms of what he has the potential to become, what is latent or promissory. Man is defined by his openness to self-definition, his distinctive willfulness or arbitrarial will. Man alone seems to be a radically artificial creature, the work of his own will: and he is necessarily also his own architect or legislator of his own laws.

But such a unique position cannot be explained in terms of natural evolution or teleology, and of course Pico had to invent his own myth ad hoc to make it plausible. Invoking a convenient fiction--hypothesizing or stipulating a metaphysical or theological premise that tells one what one wants to hear--may be after all a characteristically modern way (sophistic, self-intoxicated) of making sense of how modern world-order is thinkable.

c 1999 Kenneth R. Smith

KAFKA: ANTISOUL IN AN ANTIWORLD

Deemed by Auden the most important mind of our century, Kafka still remains obscure as a thinker. Have we asked the most apt and radical questions about his insights? No other writer captured so well the mood of modern life and its social and political culture; what is the essence of our ways of being and believing? Kafka portrays an encompassing mode of order hardly reducible to specific formulas. His thinking is related in this argument to Heraclitus, Socrates, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

How has modern order impacted the dominant forms of personalities and ways of thinking? In what ill-defined ways do we feel that order binding us, alienating us from what is natural or intrinsic to us--from what is soulish? Modern order is subtly destructive of our very ability to conceive it: it is normally incomprehensible to those formatted by its ultimate assumptions. To grasp it explicitly, first we must rupture--as Kafka did--its envelope of illusions and delusions that define what is thinkable and unthinkable.

FORTHCOMING, no date or specifications set.

PHOSPHORISMS

100 PARABLES / PARADIGMS / PARADOXES ON THE HUMAN ESSENCE

Like OTHERWISE, WEBS, and MINOTAUR, PHOSPHORISMS has a focus, in this case on the crucial issue of human essence. What core-principles explain our powers and limitations as human beings? Psyche, character, soul, spirit, will, rationality, ego, conscience, consciousness, personality, intellect--each of these terms gives a specific portrait of the laws and needs governing us, and each has a limited range of application and explanation. What is philosophy such that it can relate fluently to these implicit dimensions within us?

How do we evince these principles--how can they help us comprehend and order our lives, actions, and relations? How do they define what is distinctive--and dementing--about modern resources of self-comprehension and our biased spectrum of values and intelligibility?

FORTHCOMING, no date or specifications set.

STUDIES IN NIHILISM & IDEOLOGY

In 1974 Dr. Smith gathered six papers to provide for students "an interim report" on his research. Many readers of STUDIES have said its ideas and arguments are too important to remain in such a limited form. But Dr. Smith was already working far beyond these early stepping stones toward a more comprehensive grasp of issues.

The contents of this collection are:

I. Nihilism: 19th-Century Contexts of Nihilism

in Hegel / Marx / Kierkegaard / Nietzsche

The Extinction of Meaning Under Capitalism

(1) Alienation

(2) Art and the Market

Nihilism in Ethics:

Common-Sense Morality & the Negation of the Preconditions of Ethics

II. Ideology: 19th-Century Roots of Modern

Ideologies--Marx

On Fascism in Women's Lib

"Art and the Market" portrays the perspectival differences between our calculating, left-brained commercial culture and the intuitive, right-brained values and interests of artists.

"The Extinction of Meaning Under Capitalism" led to more comprehensive treatments of toxic modern culture: every dimension of the traditional essence of man--reason, will, soul--is now systematically exterminated by the logic of modern culture, and displaced by artificial simulacra (calculation, appetites, and ego).

"19th-Century Contexts of Nihilism" demolishes the facile notions of "nihilism" prevalent in writings about existentialism, to reveal a pathological mentality radically hostile to nature, humanity and values as such.

Quality paperbound, 93 pp + 2 pp preface, $10 + $3 p/h.

PUBLISHED 1974 by Phantasmagoria Press in a limited edition of 500 copies.

DIALECTICAL CONCEPTIONS OF THE SPIRIT: HEGEL, KIERKEGAARD & NIETZSCHE

Convinced that contemporary thinking had no clear grasp of the forces and structures at work in human subjectivity, Dr. Smith undertook to synthesize three 19th-century masters' work in the logic of subjectivity, the subtle laws binding it to specific ways of being. Academic research, too enmeshed in intellectualisms and methodologies, can no longer do the profound "field work" carried out by such seminal geniuses, who gathered from a posteriori sources the phenomenological evidence or expressions of the intrinsic or a priori nature of subjectivity, its "inward law of growth" (in Heraclitus' term) or self-metamorphosis.

Most enlightening were not just the problems of wrestling with these thinkers' arguments and issues but the more treacherous dilemmas of making their views and ideas comprehensible in contemporary academic terms. Thinking about subjectivity has overwhelmingly polarized into formalistic abstractions ("rational will," "ego," "subject," "self-identity," "consciousness") and more visceral intuitivist accounts ("presence," "conscience," "will," "psyche," "empirical ego") largely dismissed by academics as subphilosophical or psychological topics. Abstract or intellectual and concrete or psychological approaches, which this book attempts to synthesize, reveal the schizoid optics of modernity on its own self.

DIALECTICAL CONCEPTIONS, Dr. Smith's dissertation, completed after his first year as an instructor, was submitted to Yale and accepted in spite of its anomalous character. Leading to later explorations of the larger strategic perspectives of these philosophers, this study remains a close-focus investigation of the variant forms of the principles of activity and passivity in personality. These three 19th-century philosophers remain ill-digested into contemporary notions of what the history or evolution of philosophy has been all about--of what "philosophy" once meant.

No one doubts these thinkers belong loosely to a common movement profoundly influenced by the ancient Greeks, especially Heraclitus and Socrates, and also profoundly critical of the dominant strains in modern intellectual and moral culture. But establishing a common basis for interpretation and criteria among their diverse ideas has proved daunting.

Before Smith, only Karl Lowith had made these thinkers topically congenial; his book From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in 19th-Century Thought is unsurpassed and heartily recommended.

The contents of DIALECTICAL CONCEPTS OF THE SPIRIT, directed initially to academics and therefore involving formidable constructions and terminology [a cautionary note], are:

INTRODUCTION: DISTINGUISHING SUBJECT AND PSYCHE

I. Systematic Considerations

A. Principles Defining "Subject" and "Psyche"

B. "Subject" and "Psyche" Defined as Transcendental and Egological

C. Transcendental Explanation and Its Various Applications

D. Psychologism

E. Anthropologism

F. The Opposition of Psycho-Anthropologism and the Pure

Transcendental

II. Historical Considerations

A. Doxographic Obstacles

B. The Contribution of These Thinkers

C. Theoretical Adequacy of This Immanentalism

NIETZSCHE: SPIRIT WITHIN NATURE

A. Phenomenality and the Transcendental

B. The Will

C. Nature, Culture and History

D. Nihilism and the Justification of Existence

KIERKEGAARD: SPIRIT AS MEDIATED IMMEDIACY

A. Ego, Objectivity and Structure

B. The Esthetic

1. Immediacy and Desire

2. Reflection and Interest

3. Paradox and Despair

C. The Ethical: Transition

D. The Religious, and a Critique

HEGEL: SPIRIT AS INFINITE SELF-IDENTITY

A. Objectivity, Concept and Subjectivity

B. The Category of Infinity

C. Absolute Knowledge

D. Conclusions of the Study

Extensive quotes are included from the original sources, and a thorough apparatus of notes and references is appended.

Bound typescript, 220 pp + 14 pp notes & bibliography, $35 + $6 p/h.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 1972 by University Microfilms

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Everything that sets our minds free without giving us

mastery over ourselves is pernicious. --Goethe

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.

--Auden

It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.

--Nietzsche

Let language be the divining rod that finds sources

of thought. --Karl Kraus

For the conduct of life we need either right reason or a leash.

--Diogenes

Asked by how much the philosophically active differ from

those who are not, Aristotle replied, "As much as the living

from the dead." --Diogenes Laertius

The Greek word designating "sage" is etymologically

related to sapio, I taste, sapiens, he who tastes, sisyphos,

the man of keenest taste. A sharp savoring and selecting, a

meaningful discriminating. . .makes out the peculiar art of

the philosopher. . . . Philosophy is distinguished from science

by its selectivity and. . .discrimination of the unusual, the

astonishing, the difficult & the divine, just as it is distinguished

from intellectual cleverness by its emphasis on the useless.

Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without "taste,"

at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any

cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the

scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great

and the important insights. --Nietzsche

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TEACHING AND WRITING PHILOSOPHY since 1964, Kenneth Smith has been a provocative, penetrating educator making lucid and tangible the more difficult philosophies--Heraclitus, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, & Nietzsche.

His courses are marked by extemporaneous original thinking and robust discussions. One chairman called him "a model of what the liberal arts ought to be," whose "contribution to the undergraduate curriculum is second to none." His students and correspondents laud his energy and commitment: "You introduced me to concepts that proved. . .profoundly spiritual, not merely intellectual curiosities and academic distractions. . .It's like possessing . . .a reservoir of life concepts" (John Garland). "Thank you for the sliver of the divine stuff which inspired me. . .to reach beyond my limit" (Lynette Fenn). "Smith's rigorous ideas and zeal. . .tend to be. . .unsparing, and acerbic. His words, assertive and unremitting, play in the mind like nails driven into oak, that do not shift or wobble, that admit none but a single meaning. They provoke, prod, exhort, incite" (Burne Hogarth).

Although he studied with such world-renowned professors as John Findlay, Paul Weiss, William Arrowsmith, John Silber, and Klaus Hartmann, he learned the structure and dynamics of philosophy less from academic sources than from master-philosophies. He has taught courses ranging from ancient to modern to 20th-century philosophy, from ethics to philosophy of history, and from political philosophy to esthetics.

He has produced over 20 portfolios of imaginative art as well as six books of philosophical fantasy, the acclaimed PHANTASMAGORIA series. Born in Austin, Texas, in 1943, he received his doctorate in philosophy from Yale and now lives in Dallas, having taught at L.S.U.-B.R., U.N.T. and the University of Dallas. He and his wife Angela, a researcher in pediatric cancer pharmacology at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, have three children.

Text & illustrations c Kenneth R. Smith 1999.