Archives - Page 2
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Vol. 32 No. 1 (2016)
Even when figured conceptually, learning is never simply a matter of logic. There are just too many intertwined fibers in human experience that need language overlapses to disclose them to our consciousness. Each time we interact with texts or phenomena, are we examining or learning? We might say that ‘good’ texts make us learn something and ‘bad’ things urge us to examine what possibly went wrong. But whether good or bad, each experience challenges us to learn. Learning is a process that widely and subtly ‘moves’ every culture in the world, not in a dominating intention, but in a shock of recognition. We recognise the truth in learning, for it discloses itself without needing our genius. Logic is not everything.
Hence, there could not be learning by power, however reasonable is the process. Truth is true rather than simply reasonable. It refers to its own way, while reasoning to our way. Should we not learning instead of assessing? Melintas is here to ask some disclosive reading. The first writing observes the problems ignited by power in Nigeria, by looking at the use of power by the political actors, especially during the democratic dispensation. The author finds that the flagrant disregard for the rule of law as an abuse of power has been the bane to good governance. Power does not help to learn. The second writing explores the cultural claims of Seyla Benhabib towards a model of deliberative cosmopolitan democracy. Egalitarian reciprocity, voluntary self-ascription, and freedom of exit and association are three normative conditions supporting the culture as a social construct that is mixed and plural. The third writing sees the learning process in education inspired by a particular Sundanese text, Sewaka Darma, and its pedagogical implications. This text contains a particular model of education by way of teaching the wisdom of life to a student in order to be a knowing and integral person. The fourth writing looks at different approaches by Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Levinas in seeing transcendence. Transcendence can be viewed as a process from within the subject as well as an attraction from ‘the other’; it is simply sensed and cannot be mastered. The fifth writing explores Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, particularly on the experience of sense. The author walks through Merleau-Ponty’s critique on empiricism and intellectualism, to come to the ideas of sense experience with and through the body and bodily experience with and through the world.
Learning includes sensing through experiences. Changes are learned, not merely imposed. When reason(ing) is the only power governing our acts, we might not learn anything at all. Sensitivity is one of the most urgent requirements now in order that the world recognise the truth disclosively. A ‘sensible’ culture?Editor
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Vol. 31 No. 3 (2015)
Images are playing the game through ethics and religion. In redefining our relation to each of the philosophical and theological fields, images are flying around and waiting to be connected by our imagination. Connecting images and interpreting the narratives behind the phenomena are what keep discourses alive. And this cannot be done alone. We need a community which, in the world today, is growing and continuously shaping our relationships as human beings. More important than the individual speculation is the communal discourse needed by both philosophy and theology.
Discourses among communities will not happen coincidentally. It is clearly an effort towards ‘the other’. This edition of Melintas (re)connects the images and methods of different disciplines to retrieve the so-called communal discourse. The first article redefines ethics and culture in the virtual world. Today artificiality changes the game of ethics towards a different approach of ‘commonality’ that is no longer constructed based on conventional social bonds, but more on artificial bonds. Connection mediates and dissociates. The second article sees how video-mapping in digital culture can retell geographical memories and narratives in ways unimaginable before. The works of one of the film and video makers in Indonesia on the iconic buildings of some cities are examined phenomenologically. The third article inquires the quick growth of the Catholic Church community in Manggarai, Flores, Indonesia, with a phenomenology of conversion. By using theories of intellectual voluntarism and structural determinism, the author explores the political-economical, educational, social-services related, and religious-theological factors of the phenomenon. The author of the fourth article, inspired by Foucault, shows that the meaning of food ought to be extended from the nutritive intrinsic aspects towards the political or cultural aspects. Food is a means to construct subject, and in a sense, food governs or ‘normalises’ people in their social life. The fifth article sees reflectively the ethics of ‘homage’ and its practice in the Chinese tradition, especially among the Chinese Christians in Indonesia. This ethics is centered around the ethics of the family, but it might be tainted by the political-ideological content. Hence, it needs a ‘homage-theology’, which is more liberating and transforming.
To be communal, any discourse relates the individuals to the community, or communities. The flying images of community are not forever unrelated. When connected, they construct narratives—our contemporary narratives of being on this earth. We are not so much journeying back to the great narratives of history, as positioning ourselves within the network of the past, the present, and the future. We are just in time.
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Vol. 31 No. 2 (2015)
Death might not be in deadly embrace with life. Well, yes if one renders it absolute. Thinking with Sartre would simply break down everything into complete absurdity. It means that absolutising life, however positive the language and the images, brings the same implacable consequence. Heidegger, in spite of that, brings difference. Death is part of life, of being human. It is what makes us human in the fullest sense of the word. It does not stop us for being who we are, for it always offers moments to adjudicate. Our last minute dauntlessness recovers all the fragments of our being human and opens up the ‘alter-native’ of the self. A rebirth of the self, not in random and numberless events, but in a single and unparalleled transformation. Embracing the pitch-black part of our mind is probably not the end of our being exist. It is subsisting.
We may find truth in things that appear not true. In not resisting death and not absolutising life, we subsist. Thinking is both, hence Melintas continues to converse the dynamic relationship of philosophy and theology. The first article in this edition sees the ontological awareness of the existence of Dasein towards death as an authentic mode of existence. In health care idle talk or gossipping can cause Dasein to forget its authentic being, but narration provides assistance to the patient to affirm that illness is a mode of being as well. The second article attempts to reread Nietzsche’s ‘truth’ in the light of his unpublished essay (1872). It offers an interpretation that Nietzsche does not make a new theory of truth in the essay, but rather examines and constates truths that hold true. The third writing interprets the different layers of meaning in some parts of Samel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by using Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. This absurd drama not only portrays life in boredom, but also gives rise to fresh insights whenever one is engaged in its eventful discourse. The fourth writing reflects on the idea of God in the contexts of modernism, postmodernism, and John Henry Newman’s thought of illative sense. Newman might be considered as a constructive postmodern in offering a power owned by every believer to make sense God’s existence epistemologically. The fifth article sees how today the fragmented views of food have turned into a threat to humanity, but also a great opportunity to highlight the missing aspects of food in the midst of contemporary culture. This opportunity might help people experience the holistic, relational, and ‘sacramental’ aspects of food and eating.
Subsisting, now we may sense, is not simply existing. It is like an event of moving from one layer to another in our being human here and now, and not of departing to a completely different and unheard-of world. By not allowing the tendency to absolutise life or death, we might see things ‘other-wise’. Just move and subsist.
Editor.
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Vol. 31 No. 1 (2015)
Someone once asked whether God was a believer. If religion is truly divine, it must have come from God. Now that is where we were usually heading when the self-appointed dialogue was organised. It is nowhere, actually. We could be word-for-word when theologising. One can say philosophising as well, by the way. What makes the difference is when there is an elfin and negligible liaison that ignites translation. If that occurs, we will be shifting on and on till the cows come home, in a good sense. Translation is not a linguistic process, but rather a transforming adventure. Religions really need to walk the walk. Go somewhere on the feet. It is not that we will certainly find God, but that God will make us. Translating is about recognising different signs of peace from within each religious tradition.
When there is even nothing to read, we can continue interpreting anything. The world is a text, thus Melintas is here to present the ‘translation’. The first piece philosophically reflects on the world as a cultural stage reinterpreting and transforming the traditions. Art performance is seen as a retranslation of culture through the neverending conversation where traditions are reinvented, and extended to their unpredictable potentialities. In the next article Christianity is confronted with the inescapable fact of plurality of religions and thereby is called out to reformulate its self understanding contextually. The question of being inclusive or pluralistic is meditated in ‘dialogue’ with Edward Schillebeeckx. The third piece takes a break in the event of 50 years of the Second Vatican Council by considering the existing dichotomy between the liberal and the conservative in Catholicism. The Church’s responses need to be more inclined towards macro-ethics rather than micro-ethics. The fourth departs from Job’s suffering in the Scripture to find insights for the Catholics so as to experience their sufferings as part of life in God. Confessing one’s suffering in the same breath is confessing a God who can do all things. The fifth article presents a hermeneutics of Alquran in the thoughts of Hasan Hanafi. His unique hermeneutics sees Alquran as an ideal ‘mirror’ of the expressions of reality in life with the solution to particular problems in the banality of individual and communal life. The Scripture is both text and context.
When its meaning is outstretched, translation turns into recognition of signs among various languages, cultures, and traditions. It is always a process of learning, rather than teaching doctrines. When we walk the footway, conversation is fated. It is the connecting point where translation happens and transforms us. ‘The Other’ is in the network.Editor.
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Vol. 30 No. 3 (2014)
Is laughter rooted in humour? Put it differently. Should our expressions originate from values? Again, differently. Must there be reason for our being (alive)? Nonexisting black cat in a pitch black room. Mind can trace whatever into the logic of being. All this game might be nothing in the end. But the end itself is not an end. Philosophy for philosophy, if there is ever, is simply a game we have never played as being played by whoever we sigh as ‘the other’. What do we say again, about what value is? We really like to be admired with those oomphs and zings when we – philosophise. Not everyone would be happy, but it is a kind of intriguing. We know that something is wrong. There is a gap, again. There is a forever halt between our presence and our reason.
This edition of Melintas questions connections. Ideas can always be challenged by facts, and values by living actions. The first article explores John Dewey’s ethical values of democracy. The idea is that he does not only look for the solution of the problems of democracy, but also put democracy in living process. Actualisations must be sought through education. The second brings forward character education within the globalised culture. One of the keywords is ‘balance’ in assisting the growth of a person towards the so-called and hoped-for good characters. The author raises the thoughts of Ki Hadjar Dewantara. The third article relates a person to other persons based on Martin Buber’s notion linked to Emmanuel Levinas. Relations are brought back to the context of human being and meaningful relationship. We are not objects, undoubtedly. The fourth will table Axel Honneth’s thought that the theoretical foundation of intersubjective relationship is not only based on human communication dimension, but also the recognition dimension. The latter is not so much about communication method as a witness that we are just here. The fifth article will walk us through the path of laughter as a signal of transcendence, a call to be ‘humanum’, to be authentic, complete, and true human being. When we laugh, we live through our most fundamental life, if not also the sacred moment of blending with the divine. Are not these about our being present, rather than only reasonable? When bridging persons, philosophy can be brainless.
So what are values, again? The black cat was here. We just missed it. But most important is that we are au fait. We sense the traces and touch the surface. No one can be present intellectually, but indeed humorously. We do not need five seconds to answer the most difficult question in our life. Just smile. They can see us. You are recognised.
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Vol. 30 No. 2 (2014)
Perhaps one of the dangerous things in method development is intolerance. Some might feel shaky when assuming that everything is allowed in discussing knowledge apprehension. However, fear of this all-permitted access to knowledge has sometimes been hammed up. Elitist would want to incarcerate methods to a few people and soon after that the stigma of intellectual heresy, or ‘uncommonness’ if you like, is attributed to those seeing from different perspectives however rewarding their methods are. Methodological intolerance is a warning light to any thinkers who might have devoted knowledge only to the mainstream. Why is method development so late? Intolerance. If there is any ‘people power’ in philosophical and theological thoughts, this, as anticipated, cannot bring up only a few. The method of most people – again, if there is any – needs some of the most tolerant thinkers in the world to formulate and this will be against the mainstream. Yet after that it still has to face the judgement of the few. Sad.
Melintas is always crossing. It does not want to curb the exuberance of method exploration. In exploring methods, this edition presents different perspectives in tolerance with what happen and are experienced among the peoples and the cultures. These might have their own avenues and approaches that we cannot ridicule as not methodological. We will be enriched through the rereading of the biblical Kingdom of God within the context of armed conflict in Mindanao, the Philippines. The author raises the issue of how the kingdom of God which embodies God’s love, peace, liberation and justice should be understood and concretised in a way that it could inform and influence the different religious groups and organisations involved in the peace process. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of education will be discussed for the development of one’s integrity. When interpreted and applied critically, Humboldt’s ideas of education may contribute a great deal to the development of educational system as well as philosophy of education in Indonesia. Another article will discuss Jean-Luc Marion’s ideas that incorporate a phenomenological method to move towards philosophy of givenness and the saturated phenomena. Marion’s phenomenology allows us to describe any phenomenon in the form of, or order of, the other. Joh Henry Newman’s idea of the illative sense will be explored as a way of explaining the sensus fidelium, which is based not simply on the intellect but also on the logic of the heart. Newman’s illative sense is regarded helpful to understand the believers’ way of apprehension in matters of faith, for they might have adopted a particular way of apprehending the objects of faith. A particular discussion on the imaginative preaching in the Christian liturgy will be presented in the last article. A homily is a space that captures various images from the Scriptures as well as from the believers’ experiences and paints them through the verbal language, which is used not only to ‘explain’ something already known by the hearers, but to present a figurative language that may open the horizons.
Enrichment is a promise to experience only when these articles are skimmed through with tolerance to the methods of the peoples. These approaches are first of all making sense to those that are not always with the mainstream. They often do not need our judgement, but instead apprehension. Theories are what we formulate. Methods what we live by.
Editor.
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Vol. 30 No. 1 (2014)
Life is blue, or red, or white. Why not black? There comes the rationalisation. Might those be our eyes and not life itself? The mind will continue seeing, exploring and thinking of this life, but not always of the eyes that see and perceive it. Ethics could be ridiculous, but somehow it cannot be wiped out of human’s existence, for in it theology touches philosophy and vice versa. Those delving into the depth and reams of why we should or should not do this and that are often alleged to have nothing to do than wasting time and perhaps changing only a handful of people out of billions. If we side with this charge, there is no need for any talks in academy. No need for a journal. The death of thought. And death is not life anymore. Yet we are still here, reading and thinking, seeing and imagining.
Melintas in this beginning of the new year wants to see and reimagine life. This life is not only about human’s life, but also everything that is growing, breathing, changing. This journal is always changing. It opposes sameness, for the latter simply tends towards death. In an article, the death penalty, as a violation of fundamental human rights, is considered wrong even if it could be shown that it uniquely met a vital social need. What makes the use of the death penalty even more indefensible is that it has never been shown to have any special power to meet any genuine social need. We will read also that an aesthetic experience is moving between the directions of a pendulum, i.e., when the artwork appeared to the awareness of the subject and when the experiencing subject narrated the experience. Not only an aesthetic experience encourages a particular moral action, the artwork itself might stand as a medium of a moral struggle for the betterment of the people. Something good is found as well in humour and laughing. There is an article saying that through this aspect of language, human as homo ridens, a laughing being, is illustrated as a playful being, a social being, and a spiritual being. But human is not alone. There is the environment and we need an environmental ethics. Human behaviour is to be conceived of and conducted in line with an eco-philosophy. The politics of environmental law is the policy direction to be set by the government so as to achieve the goals and objectives in the protection and the management of the environment. Lastly, by referring to the variety of cultures that have emerged and flourished in Indonesia, an author tries to figure the depth of ‘belief’ in God in relation to the respective cultural and spiritual expressions, and through the rituals performed by the people of belief (kepercayaan) Sunda Wiwitan. Those articles are blue, red, white, and black. You name it. Again, it is not so much the essence of life as the eyes that see, explore and think of it.
Now we might have changed a little bit if we read anything. Life itself is not changing. Our eyes are. Perhaps we will awake to see that our life as well as others’ are not that bad anyway. We are moving towards a difference, one step at a time. Ridiculousness might be just another way of saying a difference, as stupidity of a brilliance.
Editor.
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Vol. 29 No. 3 (2013)
Editorial:
To some there is a clear discernible difference between using logic and doing it. Perhaps to some other the difference is the least of their worries. But when doing logic is required in very real situations, the worry is not a matter of thought or belief anymore. It is a matter of illogicality. Realness often reveals unreasonableness. If a human being has always been understood as a logical creature, then reality can be categorised as the only ‘illogical’ creature in this world. But cannot reality have its own story? Cannot ‘the Other’ – God, theologically – tell a different narrative of the same world where human live through all these centuries? It is not so much about respect as the existence of things we normally do not understand. Before knowing anything, we were simply seeing visions. Those visions do not make sense. They are artlessly real, taking place, effectuating. Hold the logic, for it only stops the realness.
This edition of Melintas attempts to honour ‘the other’ in various ways. It tells stories. Realness – kesunyataan – appears in contexts and methods, in errors and sins, in cultures and schools. The trauma of victimisation is reflected from the acts of violence, hatred, and crime. The role of forgiveness is explored in mitigating such feelings, but there must be opportunities for ‘the other’ to change. A post-critical understanding of the Kingdom of God using Ricoeur’s hermeneutics leads to a different ‘logic’ of a ‘vision’. Here vision functions as a meta-critical understanding that destabilises existing awareness and brings it to a futuristic horizon or eschatological openness. A cosmology among the Sundanese in West Java elaborated from their narrative poems and an old Sundanese manuscript reveals a down-upward journey to experience ‘moksa’ (the ultimate enligtment). The Sundanese enact the ‘mountain’ and the metaphor of ‘filled-nothingness’ as their cosmological model. Frankfurt School’s thought, which generally focuses its attention on the life of the society and the culture, is discussed from a different perspective concerning its assessment on theology. A narrative-analysis of the Scriptures in the context of Christian hermeneutics is explored so as to give weight to faith confession, liturgy, and catechesis. By entering the ‘narrative world’ constructed by the authors of the Scriptures, the reader participates in the ‘world of images’ presenting the meanings contained in it and that brings a useful faculty for the contextual praxis of proclamation. In all these articles, otherness is listened and appreciated. Again, we might hold our ‘logic’ in the act of listening.
Perhaps one of the absurdities of otherness is simply a new meaning. Listening to ‘the other’, like seeing the visions, means absorbing every different meaning into one’s story, which, in time, will be our stories. We will not be dealing with only ‘logical’ stories, for there is not one. It is like saying that not one of our theologies is ‘logical’, for those are merely our or sometimes claimed to be God’s stories as well. But at least one thing is undeniable. We only tell ‘our’ stories, that is, things that happen, take place, effectuate us. Realness happens.
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Vol. 29 No. 2 (2013)
Editorial:
Economy and sharing, would they be reconcilable? If truth is to be told hermeneutically, our discourse must be done in movement. The act of sharing cannot be talked about. It is an a posteriori which truth always comes late when put in discourse. An economy of sharing, as it were, might be efficacious when more and more actions are brought closer to discourse and vice versa. Sharing cannot stand under experience only. Sharing is the discourse in its essence, for every partition in our knowledge, like in a hard disk, parcels the same power supply. Some argue about the individual in our economic world, and some other would rather cross any rationalisation to emancipate the capital. The latter are in fact discoursing with ‘the other’, realising that any discourse cannot happen when I is only me. An economy of sharing is everything about we, all joking aside.
This edition of Melintas puts our economy into the actions. We know that truth is always plural, not because it does not like singularity; it just cannot help staying with itself. When those economic actions are discoursed, truth interrupts. A philosophical remark on Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition uncovers life under economic colonisation. Arendt’s insistence on direct participation in political life has reminded us that citizens must be able to take care of their own desires and interests. A revitalisation of a ‘consecutive sharing’ principle in the light of Antonio Negri is put forward. Negri’s account of the power of sharing of the multitude reminds us in order to revitalise the capability of sharing within our cultural heritages. A critique towards the concept of methodological individualism in economics is presented to distinguish it from political individualism. The aim is to open further possibilities for other methodology in economics. In the age of digital sharing, photography is reconsidered within the potentiality of a paradigm shift and the interpretation of truth. Perhaps “photography is dead” only if it is considered as a representation of the reality. Photography may not die if it is seen poetically as our interpretation of reality. A genetic and memetic structuralism study is employed on the social cognition process of ‘Batik Bogor’ considered as a particular social ‘action’ due to its tendency to create and develop its own distinction. These articles are of economy, sharing, and truth as captured in the society and the media. We all share the same power supply, that is, the energy of the world we live in. And this energy is not merely about capital.
Doing philosophy from actions is part of the movement in the whole idea of sharing. Pluralism is not a threat. It is a help. Our ways of photographing the movement of the truth are corroborated by the multitude around us. We may see each other’s exposure, for exactly in the flicker and manoeuvre towards ‘the other’ we are transforming from simply me into the vigour of we. This philosophy entails every movement to subsist, that is, to be there but always in relation to the other.
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Vol. 26 No. 1 (2010)
Editorial:
Sounds, songs, images, ‘image’, and moving pictures, when creating space and filling up time will unleash the hidden verve of imagination. Not only to the mystics and those who have their own religion, these ‘imagerial’ realities always bring necessary interruptions to the most non-spiritual people on earth. Our senses are no more of a lesser degree for any philosophical discourse. In truth, discourses are always a communal act involving people of very different angles but, frightfully, of mostly the same space and time. This is no more an age to decry what we see and hear and touch as something we can ‘under-stand’. Perhaps the most challenging attitude in our time is to share those standings in every possible community and connectedness.“Expert language is a prison for knowledge and understanding. A prison for intellectually significant relationships. It is time to move beyond the institutional practices of triviledge, toward networks and surfaces, toward the play of superficiality, toward interstanding” (Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, 1994). Thus we learn that our standing will have to be shared and told so as to cross the borders created by art, religion, mysticism, and even theology. This issue of Melintas brings you toward the borders by presenting the discourses over musician Carlos Santana, religion and cinema, images of the church and Christian imagination, mysticism without bounds in vachana songs, and Krisna Murti’s video artworks. We might find out that these are the world’s imagerial realities that even if we do not (want to) understand, we still are summoned to interstand them. Knowledge becomes an interstanding only when imagination is at work.
Communicating is positioning. Probably the most troubling restlessness of human beings is the hope for not being alone. And that is the very reason for them to be ‘in position’ among the others. Undoubtedly we cannot position ourselves without the presence of the others. We constantly want to be acquainted with where we are now. Therefore, a small spot of indifference is another forewarning light for us. Without going too much in contrasting the position of one or another, we always need others in the course of positioning or telling our standings and getting their responds appropriately. When we don’t get the appropriate responds, perhaps that's the time we sense that we don’t know where we are exactly.
At the end of the day, there is yet a circular path we all are by now familiar, that is, the epistemological circle from appearance to experience, and from experience back to appearance. We wish our readers a pleasant journey to the borders but don’t forget to come back home to day-to-day communal realities bringing fresh insights to share again and again.
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Vol. 25 No. 3 (2009)
Editorial:
One of the most problematic issues today is the concept of “self ”. The history of modern philosophy has always been struggling between the ambition of comprehending the objective reality of the universe ‘out there’ and its indispensable anthropocentric bias ‘in here’. Indeed Western modern philosophy had been characterised by the primacy of the self as the rational “subject”. However, at the end of the twentieth century the disourse ended up just in the contrary : in the “death of the subject” and in “the end of the self”. Philosophers seemed to have been aware more and more that reality is resistant to the human totalising system, and even worse, that the self itself is but the function of the operation of the very systems, systems of discourse in particular.
Nevertheless, what is often overlapping in such “death-of-the subject” discourse is the’identity’ and the ‘agency’ of the subject. One is not to be confused with the other. The former might be the product of systems, the latter remains –to some extent- the producer. Melintas of this issue revisits again the concept of the ‘self’ in terms of its agency, personal history, virtual non-spatial product, capitalistic greed, genetic engineering and filmic image creation.
Editor.
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Vol. 25 No. 2 (2009)
Editorial:
‘Faith’ in fact is such a strange word today, let alone ‘religious faith’. Strange, since despite its ubiquity, the word seems to have lost its vigour and credence. Perhaps this is on the one hand due to the violent excesses of religious faith, and on the other, related to the pretension of modern scientific rationality to be neutral -as if it has nothing to do with any sort of faith whatsoever.
Faith -in its broad sense-, however, is inevitable. The foundation of any kind of expalanatory system cannot be other than a certain kind of faith, a faith in something. This faith or the basic belief may be called ‘postulate’, ‘presopposition’ or even ‘rationality’ (an ultimate believe in the power of reason). In the predominance of modern scientific knowledge, the faith in reason is indeed the most basic. To this extent even religious faith is to be justified and rethought again and again in terms of reason.
Melintas of this issue discusses the position of Christianity as a particular kind of faith in the changing circumstances, the position of faith in general within the framework of rationality, the faith in the authenticity of the revelatory truth, and finally the faith in personal as well as collective memory within the course of history.
Last but not least, there is an important practical note concerning Melintas of the previous issue. We sincerely regret an omission in the previous issue: we did not mention that Henk Oosterling’s essay “Dasein as Design, Or: Must Design Save the World” (Volume 24, no.1, April 2009) was made available to us by Premsela. Dutch Philosopher Henk Oosterling gave a public lecture titled “Dasein as Design,” and Premsela organized this lecture at 1 April 2009. Premsela is a Dutch platform for design and fashion (www.premsela.org). Laura Martz has translated Oosterling’s essay and Premsela gave Melintas permission to publish this essay. Hereby we offer our sincere apology to Premsela for the omission.
E d i t o r
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Vol. 25 No. 1 (2009)
Editorial:
The cacophony of change and restructuring in almost every area of life today has made us realize more and more the contingency of human 'design': the precariousness of human cultural world. Cultural
boundaries keep shifting; virtual reality overlaps the actual; the present reconfigures the past; technology shapes more and more our intimate lives,
etc.
Indeed our conventional frameworks are no more sufficient for understanding the rapid change and the overlapping territories. Most of the articles in MELINTAS of this issue talk about the shifting paradigm. Humans as 'Dasein' is viewed as designing-animal, so to say, that the whole
cultural paradigm-shift can also be seen as sort of re-designing our human world. Technoculture also forces us to redefine the so called 'reality' in our
'Lebenswelt'. Technology is becoming more and more a decisive part of our perception. Even our perception of ourselves vis-à-vis strangers is not as clear and definite as it used to be. There is stranger or 'the other' even within ourselves. Hence a new way of conceiving 'boundaries', if at all, while being
more alert to see them as networks of flows.Editor.
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Vol. 24 No. 3 (2008)
Editorial:
In the age of transition from modern to postmodern paradigm today, the intersection between science, culture and religion is crucial. Lots of criticism have been leveled at science, be it in terms of ideology, epistemology or methodology. Notwithstanding the criticism, however, science is by no means passé. Along with technology as its material embodiment science in fact retains, and justifies, its central position in today’s human world. The problem is just that -as the consequence of the criticism- science should take into account different forms of life or different epistemic possibilities offered by other kinds of knowledge rooted in various cultures. This, in turn, requires a discreet analysis on the possible interconnection between science and cultural epistemology.
That said, the so called ‘culture’ is itself problematic. In most cases culture is inseparable from religion as its source. It is also the resurgence of religion that, among other factors, has raised up the sensitivity to cultural issues these days. Thus epistemological problems refers ultimately also to the position of religion as the source of knowledge and value orientation. Melintas of this issue discusses the complexity of the interconnection between science, knowledge, culture and religion.
Editor.
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Vol. 24 No. 2 (2008)
Editorial:
Today a city comprises the complexity and the ambiguity of human tendencies. If in terms of physical environment and institutions cities are now undergoing rapid transformation, so are human selves and their ways of looking at things. Various sentrifugal tendencies are in contestation with sentripetal instincts. This is palpable especially in certain areas such as sexuality, problems of gender, religion, culture and literature. In developing countries like Indonesia, for example, sexuality and gender are quite susceptible to political manipulations, particularly when they are connected to religious affair. In the realm of religion itself the dilemma oftentimes occurs around the problem of stereotyping, namely between the stereotype of the so called ‘fundamentalism’ on the one hand and of the ‘secular’ modern tendencies on the other. And when it comes to culture, the problem is, among other things, on the way ‘tradition’ is to be conceived of : for instance whether it is purely repetitive or transformative. But urban life is also characterised by the burgeoning of its literature, which is one of the most intimate outlets of its inner struggle, concerning what is considered good and evil in particular. Melintas of this issue puts all these into perspective.
Editor.
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Vol. 24 No. 1 (2008)
Editorial:
In an age characterized by transgression of boundaries nowadays, where culture seems to lose its distinctive territory, and any kind of systemic compartmentalization seems to implode, humans are compelled to redefine their concept of civilization, and rethink what today being civilized is supposed to mean. Yet , as soon as they do it they have to elaborate the indispensable fact of differences and even dichotomies - internal as well as external- such as : mind and body, individual conscience and social interests, the one and the many, male and female, private and public, politician and poet, etc. The emphasis on either side of the dichotomies will generate different concept and standard of civilization. In techno-scientific culture, for instance, body or matter prevailed over mind. Hence the predominance of material culture in modern life. The prevalent bias of male chauvinism or patriarchy in the conventional concept of civilization has resulted in the marginalization of women, hence problematic. Problems of democracy in many countries oftentimes have a lot to do with the difficulties in regulating the distinction between private conscience and public interests, political rhetorics and artistic sensibility to capture concrete reality. The list of examples can surely be longer. The problem, however, is that, while binary oppositions are the basic means by which to conceive reality or to make reality intelligible, this does not necessarily mean that the abovementioned dichotomies are irreconcilable. MELINTAS of this issue discusses the tacit layers behind, and the complexity of, the dichotomies.
Editor.
