Formation and Finitude: Jean-Luc Nancy on the Arts as Ontological Doorways
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| Title: | Formation and Finitude: Jean-Luc Nancy on the Arts as Ontological Doorways |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Chris Higgins |
| Source: | Educational Theory. 2024 74(6):873-887. |
| Availability: | Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 15 |
| Publication Date: | 2024 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Descriptive |
| Descriptors: | Art Education, Aesthetic Education, Relationship, Individual Differences, Intermode Differences, Liberal Arts, Interdisciplinary Approach, Global Approach, Self Concept, Diversity, Discovery Processes, Creative Thinking |
| DOI: | 10.1111/edth.12675 |
| ISSN: | 0013-2004 1741-5446 |
| Abstract: | In this article Chris Higgins considers two works by Jean-Luc Nancy -- "On Being Singular Plural" and "Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?" -- in light of the formative task to do justice to the diverse dimensions of oneself given the offerings and demands of the world, a task made difficult by our finitude and the existence of incommensurable goods. While Nancy helps us appreciate the value pluralism animating the (liberal) arts, Higgins argues, Nancy himself shies away from the full implications of his relational ontology. Rather than follow individual arts and artworks into the local habitations they open -- accepting the anguish of the arbitrary as the price of our finite but fulsome excursions into the reticulated real -- Nancy retreats to the level of a global account (if a lyrical one) of the local. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2025 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1459495 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwFt-q5c9VbVRWf9ua21rjJxAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDCh0Qicou6ZraIDYZgIBEICBm1IE44UvHlsLMHp2YzV1KMfBxPRQlumtn1UGSTYBwoGAI33rhEsq2_YgRJeF4fLc-cNCx7M6rOaWkYIheqhDVswxzLOAvEoI5FrlruenyaEb4aU-C8XKlCQGsXcqqMOzflbvCIJ4G7Aha-7bCK2pY2pIQh7kQ3gt0Ub6hYuU5To4h69syL_o-TlaogX8ckQiU1PoRKJaFBEVWZym Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0183953350;ety01dec.24;2025Mar25.06:59;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0183953350-1">Formation and Finitude: Jean‐Luc Nancy on the Arts as Ontological Doorways </title> <p>In this article Chris Higgins considers two works by Jean‐Luc Nancy — "On Being Singular Plural" and "Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?" — in light of the formative task to do justice to the diverse dimensions of oneself given the offerings and demands of the world, a task made difficult by our finitude and the existence of incommensurable goods. While Nancy helps us appreciate the value pluralism animating the (liberal) arts, Higgins argues, Nancy himself shies away from the full implications of his relational ontology. Rather than follow individual arts and artworks into the local habitations they open — accepting the anguish of the arbitrary as the price of our finite but fulsome excursions into the reticulated real — Nancy retreats to the level of a global account (if a lyrical one) of the local.</p> <p>Keywords: Jean‐Luc Nancy; ontology; value pluralism; finitude; the arts; liberal arts; formative education</p> <p>A human being is a "history" and he makes this "history" for himself out of his responses to the vicissitudes he encounters. The world he inhabits is composed not of "things," but of occurrences, which he is aware of in terms of what he understands them to be.</p> <p>— Michael Oakeshott[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>]</p> <p>Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life, as both Aristotle and Engels noted, we are always under certain constraints. We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making.</p> <p>— Alasdair MacIntyre[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref2">2</reflink>]</p> <hd id="AN0183953350-2">The Anguish of the Arbitrary</hd> <p>At first glance, Oakeshott and MacIntyre appear to be at odds. In fact, they are cornering the same educational truth from two sides. Oakeshott would not deny MacIntyre's conclusion that "we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co‐authors of our own narratives."[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref3">3</reflink>] Oakeshott himself stresses the contingency of our formative resources. "Each of us," he observes, "is born in a corner of the earth, lapped round with locality."[<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref4">4</reflink>] It is Oakeshott's hope that we will find time and space to engage with the fugitive question at the heart of liberal learning: What is worth wanting? But he is well aware that we pursue our formation "not in some abstract, ideal world, but in the local world we inhabit."[<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref5">5</reflink>] By the time we are self‐aware, what we are aware of is a self that is already defined by "its place in ... an identifiable mode of imagining," by its ability to "move about in an appropriate way among images of a certain kind."[<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref6">6</reflink>] We inherit local dialects, as it were, of "sensing, perceiving, feeling, desiring, thinking, believing, contemplating, supposing, knowing, preferring, approving."[<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref7">7</reflink>]</p> <p>At the same time, MacIntyre would accept Oakeshott's argument that we are self‐interpreting animals, that in crucial ways a person "is <emph>in</emph> himself what he is <emph>for</emph> himself."[<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref8">8</reflink>] Thus, both would endorse Iris Murdoch's anthropological epigram: "Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself then comes to resemble the picture."[<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref9">9</reflink>] This is not to claim that each individual makes their own pictures; MacIntyre is surely right that "we enter upon a stage that we did not design." Arriving in our corner of the earth, we find the shelves already filled with a "stock of stories" constituting the "initial dramatic resources" on the basis of which we understand, forge, and enact ourselves.[<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref10">10</reflink>] MacIntyre illustrates the point:</p> <p>It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.[<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref11">11</reflink>]</p> <p>Though MacIntyre's palette is somewhat monochrome, he shows how even a single tradition is heteroglot, as Roman myths speak to biblical parables and both converse with modern European fairytales. That we do not ourselves create such palimpsests does not mean that we lack freedom in relation to them. No two people encounter the same mix of stories, no story has a unitary moral, and there is no single way to assemble such stories into a hospitable narrative of the world and our place within it. Thus Oakeshott, and likely MacIntyre too, would also endorse Hans‐Georg Gadamer's remark that, when it comes down to it, "education is self‐education." This is not to claim that one goes it alone, only that one inevitably plays a role in the selection, interpretation, and synthesis of one's "influences."[<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref12">12</reflink>] There is agency in influence.</p> <p>This is a type of freedom so profound that most of the time we run away from it. Each person must seek out, select among, make sense of, and integrate various cultural resources into livable answers to the questions <emph>Who am I?</emph>, <emph>What is my situation?</emph>, and <emph>What is worth wanting, doing, and becoming?</emph> Our answers stake out a world of meaning and possibility, a world that both constrains and enables choices of various sorts. While this type of choice, this freedom of movement within worlds, is certainly important, what is at issue here is what we might call, somewhat dramatically, the choice of our choices. The fact that we inhabit worlds shaped by a chosen relationship to formative resources means that, with effort and time, it is possible to rework the terms of our self‐understanding and worldly engagement. It is possible to <emph>live one's way</emph> into a new world. I put it this way to distinguish the arduous and harrowing work of confronting the contingency of a lived world with the facile world hopping of the clever theorist shuffling a deck of worldview‐cards. Maxine Greene describes the former when she writes that "It has taken many shocks of awareness for me to realize how I existed within a tradition ... as within a container."[<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref13">13</reflink>]</p> <p>To break out of such containers can be exhilarating. Indeed, when traditions teach us to deny or devalue important parts of ourselves, escape becomes a matter of survival. At the same time, this power to choose our own choices is vertiginous. Without authoritative framings of who, what, and why, we may come — like the characters in Milan Kundera's famous novel — to experience life as unbearably light. Thus, Oakeshott follows Henry James in calling these moments when we catch a glimpse of our own worldmaking, "the ordeal of consciousness."[<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref14">14</reflink>] If we attempt to flee this freedom and the tremendous responsibility it entails, our actions begin to reek of bad faith. If our identity and place in the world is simply and definitively given, why do we — like Sartre's famous waiter — press so hard to etch the lines of its definition? And so we put off the ordeal of consciousness one shift at a time.</p> <p>If the word "ordeal" still seems overblown, consider how it relates to the task of forming ourselves. We can define formative education — in its later more active and conscious phase — as the effort to do justice to the diverse dimensions of ourselves in light of the offerings and demands of the world. "Doing justice" here stands in for several ideas. First, there is the fuzzy principle of well‐roundedness, which we could sharpen somewhat by stating it as a pointed proscription: Stunt no important dimension of your humanity! The product, "whole‐person education," should really come with a warning label: This treatment entails the search for self‐knowledge (what am I made of?), the cultivation of ethical judgment (what in me is in need of and most worthy of cultivation?) and the work of personal integration (how can I knit these variegated values and capacities into a coherent character and outlook?).</p> <p>As I note in my definition, this effort to form ourselves into a differentiated unity takes place not in a vacuum, but in light of what the world offers and demands of us. Formative education extends beyond the question of the whole person to encompass the question of a whole life, of how to lead a good life. This question extends in turn to the world in which that life is to be lived. We cannot decide what capacities are crucial without an understanding of what challenges will come our way. We cannot gauge what sensitivities are most needed without an understanding of what veins of significance marble the world. We cannot judge what virtues are most important without an understanding of the world's moral demands. However, neither of these two further stipulations — that self‐knowledge must be paired with understanding of the world and that formation requires ethical judgment about one's life as a whole — is as straightforward as it sounds. What complicates the first is the dialectical nature of experience. What complicates the second is our finitude.</p> <p>The dialectic I have in mind is that only through interacting with the world do we learn what we are made of; and, at the same time, it is only through developing our diverse capacities that we unlock hidden aspects of the world. We can grasp the first strand of this dialectical knot by noting that it is not only, or even mainly, failures of introspection that hinder self‐knowledge. Rather, entire aspects of ourselves lie dormant until they encounter the right worldly occasions to announce themselves. The classic example here is courage. We may hope that we possess this virtue of, without foolhardy obliviousness, putting fear in its place. But it may well be that we have never encountered the right situation truly to test our mettle. We can grasp the second strand by recalling John Dewey's distinction between surroundings and environment. Our environment is shaped by what we know how and care to notice within our brute surroundings. We enter each situation along a vector whose direction and magnitude are functions of past experience and present intentions. This "axis" of salience calls forth an effective world, the "things with which a man varies," from the repleteness of the real.[<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref15">15</reflink>] Now that we have tied it, it is easy to see how this dialectical knot complicates the task of formative education. For it rules out the possibility that we might pursue two separate lines of inquiry and development, one concerning the self and another the world. To encounter the world, we must develop our sensitivities; to discover our capacities, we must encounter the world. Would that we could first consult the guidebook about the terrain and then outfit ourselves accordingly. As it turns out, our preparations will have to be made en route!</p> <p>And this already broaches the issue of finitude, which centrally includes our temporal nature. As temporal beings, we daily deal with Søren Kierkegaard's paradox that "life must be understood backwards" even as it "must be lived forwards."[<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref16">16</reflink>] We find ourselves <emph>in media res</emph>, asking (postponing, losing, refinding) Socrates's question, <emph>How should one live?</emph> The wholeness of our lives is a moving target, a collage of each present's recollection and anticipation. We form ourselves not only with incomplete information but with finite resources. As Robbie McClintock explains,</p> <p>Problems of formative justice arise because persons ..., always facing the future, find more possibilities and potentialities before them than they have the energy, time, ability, and wherewithal to fulfill. They must choose among these and in doing so they are struggling to form their unfolding lives.[<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref17">17</reflink>]</p> <p>Situating the project of formation within the flow of time helps us to distinguish two affective dimensions of the ordeal, one proleptic and one analeptic. As we make our choices in light of projected futures, we experience Kundera's unbearable lightness. However, the anguish of the arbitrary also plays out in retrospection, as a special form of regret. Ordinary regret is bad enough. We are familiar with stories of too‐late reckonings of an earlier choice wrongly made. For example, one devotes oneself to a political movement centered on ideals that are gradually revealed as bankrupt. That this happens all of the time does not make it less tragic. Ordinary regret may also be spiked with a shot of epistemic incapacity. Imagine someone torn between two callings, between being a potter, let's say, and being a professor.[<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref18">18</reflink>] Having chosen the academic route, our protagonist finds it increasingly hard to find time at the wheel. Over time, her pottery practice dries up. Later, she realizes that in choosing academia it was her very self she had placed in a kiln. As Friedrich Nietzsche memorably put it, "turning every experience into a purely intellectual affair, a dialectical game of question and answer, and it is amazing how quickly [one] will shrivel in the process until reduced to a rattling skeleton."[<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref19">19</reflink>] Like the activist who now sees the movement as bankrupt, the professor now sees through the façade of academia. However, the professor's regret is made the more bitter by the radical unknowability of whether a potter's life would have been more vital, keeping her hands on the meta‐vocation identified by Dewey, ongoing "intellectual and moral growth."[<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref20">20</reflink>]</p> <p>Thus, temporality is a one‐way ticket, and both the activist and the professor see too late that they have chosen poorly. Unless you have been caught in its grips, it can be hard to imagine what it is to experience such life‐sized regret. And yet, this is not even the most haunting case. More disturbing than the story of the professor who comes too late to her Nietzschean realization is the case of the satisfied professor! I mean the professor who has been successfully socialized and now finds academic discourse quite stimulating and normal (failing to hear the rattling). Here the what‐if is more radical. For our choice of our choices has a way of covering its tracks. In the last example of the potter‐professor, the unknowability is simply of the form, you cannot go back. In the case of the satisfied professor, matters are more complicated since, if the world is framed by our capacities and by our vectors of interest and value, then we must reckon with the possibility that a world seems agreeable only because we have shrunk our sensitivities. This is why the question of liberal learning — What is worth wanting to have or do, to behold or become? — is uncanny and inevitably fugitive. It threatens to interrupt our ordinary sensemaking as it proposes to lift our gaze from our choices to the choice of our choices.</p> <hd id="AN0183953350-3">Why Are There Several (Liberal) Arts and Not Just One?</hd> <p>We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!</p> <p>— Ludwig Wittgenstein</p> <hd id="AN0183953350-4">A Relational Rhetoric?</hd> <p>Who could blame us for flinching at the anguish of the arbitrary, for fleeing the ordeal of consciousness and simplifying the tasks of formation? And one way to ease the pain is to seek a superordinate axiological principal. This is what is most important, in the world and in yourself: organize your formative efforts accordingly. And yet, we have historically conceived liberal education — the West's most robust tradition of formative praxis — as a simultaneous apprenticeship to several arts. The simultaneity is important. Though we like to talk about the academy as a division of labor — biology investigates life; history studies the past; economics deals with production and exchange; etc. — it is more illuminating to say that each discipline studies everything from a particular angle. However, this partiality only becomes visible when one moves across fields, as each discipline is prone to mistake its particular tradition of inquiry with inquiry as such, its angle of access to the world with the world itself. Liberal learning entails the experience of reversal. The concept of nature established in the morning bio lecture is redescribed in the afternoon history seminar as a time‐bound construction. The idea of growth presumed in Econ 101 is recast as a fiction in Lit 202. Indeed, even the question of what it means to be educated, and by extension to lead a flourishing life, is refracted by the disciplines, each of which offers us images of who we are and might become. Premised on a kind of value pluralism, liberal learning refuses to be captured by any single discipline's image of human being, knowing, and doing. Its formative principle is to learn something of this multiplicity of formative principles.</p> <p>Still, we might ask whether this is just an accident, perhaps even a mistake. Perhaps it is just an artifact of history in which a Greek idea was threaded through Rome and then gradually spun into the <emph>septem artes liberales</emph>, an idea that continued to transform with the rise and evolution of the university. And here is a related skeptical question: Is value pluralism just a preference? Do we just inventively multiply desiderata or is there some sense in which we can say that the good is given to us always already as a plurality of genuine and incommensurable goods?</p> <p>The work of Jean‐Luc Nancy speaks powerfully to both questions. His relational ontology shows that the multiplicity of value is rooted in the world itself. And he poses this very question about the plurality of the arts. Readers steeped in writers such as Oakeshott and MacIntyre will find Nancy's prose slippery, if not deliberately obscure. With his penchant for paradoxical formulations, his alternation of the conversational, the gnomic, and the lyrical, Nancy's Anglo‐steeped readers may find themselves in touch with their inner Karl Popper, pounding the table for some principle of disconfirmation. But if Nancy often seems to dance around an issue, he is at least forthcoming about why we might need to be light on our feet. In the Preface to <emph>Being Singular Plural</emph>, Nancy simultaneously introduces his style and offers an apology for it:</p> <p>This text does not disguise its ambition of redoing the whole of "first philosophy" by giving the "singular plural" of Being as its foundation... At the same time, ... the form of the ontological treatise ceases to be appropriate as soon as the singular of Being itself, and therefore also of ontology, is in question... (The philosophical treatise, and "philosophy" as such, is the neutralization of address, the subjectless discourse of Being‐Subject [<emph>l'Etre‐Sujet</emph>] itself.) ... A treatise, therefore, is not sufficiently discursive... Another ambition springs from this[:] ... to allow thinking's address to be perceived, an address that comes to us from everywhere simultaneously, multiplied, repeated, insistent, and variable, gesturing only toward "us" and toward our curious "being‐with‐one‐another," [<emph>être‐les‐uns‐avec‐les‐autres</emph>], toward our addressing one another.[<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref21">21</reflink>]</p> <p>Later, I will attempt to capture more of the dance; for now, let's simply try to block out the basic footwork. Nancy's project is ontological. His hypothesis is that the fundamental mode of being is "being‐with." Because with‐ness (if you will) simultaneously singularizes and connects, being unfolds as a series of unique co‐occurrences. As Nancy later puts it, "Being is singularly plural and plurally singular."[<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref22">22</reflink>] We do not first have discrete entities A, B, and C, followed by a series of relations A‐B, A‐C, A‐B, and A‐B‐C. Rather, we find A as it is "exposed" (as Nancy likes to put it) by B (as it is exposed by A and by C) and by C (as it is exposed by A and B), <emph>mutatis mutandis</emph>. What exists or, better, what happens is ABC, a singular plurality.</p> <p>As Nancy freely admits (and I have no doubt just demonstrated), this creates a rhetorical challenge. The traditional forms of ontological writing beg the question. If we try to offer a generalization about particulars, we subsume singularity; if we try to offer an account of individual entities, we erase plurality.[<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref23">23</reflink>] Even the most basic gestures of philosophical writing come under scrutiny. "I argue that such and such is the case." With that, we have assumed a world comprised of discrete objects perceived by a distantiated subject. If Nancy's hypothesis is correct, if relationality is baked into the real, then we must adopt an alternate grammar:</p> <p>Because there would no longer be a point of view that is exterior to being‐together[,] ... [t]here would be no "it is" and, therefore, no longer the "I am" that is subjacent to the announcement of the "it is"[.] ... Being could not speak itself except in this unique manner: "we are."[<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref24">24</reflink>]</p> <p>Nancy reasons as follows. If with‐ness is an essential feature of what exists, then our very attempt to understand what exists represents one of the moments of co‐exposure described above. The ontologist's knowing itself constitutes a singular‐plural event of being.[<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref25">25</reflink>] Therefore, to avoid a performative contradiction, the relational ontologist must learn to stop speaking <emph>about</emph> what exists and start speaking collectively <emph>from it</emph>, or rather <emph>from us</emph>, or perhaps <emph>as</emph> we. To capture the idea of philosophy as address, as a mutual exposure of beings, sentient and non‐sentient, Nancy offers this description of the enterprise: "saying we to themselves."[<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref26">26</reflink>] In other words, awkwardness comes with the territory.</p> <p>So what does it mean to write, to do philosophy in this relational key? Obviously, Nancy has some ideas. He has developed a style. But he also admits that this is an open question:</p> <p>We will speak: Who is this "we"? ... How do we think together...? How are we with one another? All of this is to ask: What is at play in our communication, in this book, in its sentences, and in the whole situation that more or less gives them some meaning? [This is the] question of philosophy as "literature," which is about asking how far it is possible to take the third‐person discourse of philosophy. At what point must ontology become ... what? Become conversation? Become lyricism? ... The strict conceptual rigor of being‐with exasperates the discourse of its concept.[<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref27">27</reflink>]</p> <p>Exasperating indeed. But we now have a better understanding of what drives Nancy to employ his rhetorical paraphernalia (scare quotes, italicized phrases, capitalized nouns, hyphenated words). There is something to this relational impulse, this idea of writing <emph>with</emph> and not merely, in a distantiated manner, <emph>about</emph> the way things are.</p> <p>However, what are we to make of Nancy's suggestion that bearing witness to the relationality of the real means finally and more fully embracing the literary dimensions of philosophy? While there is something intuitive about this idea of tempering philosophy's propensity toward telling, why stop there? Why not turn to crafts that fully embrace showing?[<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref28">28</reflink>] Why stop at abandoning the treatise? While we are at it, why not abandon the lyrical anti‐treatise as well? Isn't art itself already in the business of revealing the singular‐plural of existence? Who needs aestheticized philosophy when we have art? When Nancy says, "this is the question of philosophy as literature," perhaps he is being too precious. Maybe there is not much of a question at all. The answer is simply literature or, as I say, the arts in general. If there is a task left for philosophy, it would seem to be the negative one of showing, in a general way, that nothing all that interesting can be shown in a general way. On this reading, Nancy becomes a lyrical version of Wittgenstein. When we approach the philosophy seminar room, it is locked, and hanging on the door is a sign that reads "Back to the rough ground." In the end, this suggestion may indeed represent an alternative to rather than a development of Nancy's call for a new relational rhetoric for philosophy. What is striking, though, is that Nancy himself makes the case that the arts play a special role in revealing the singular‐plural of existence.</p> <hd id="AN0183953350-5">Multiplying Muses</hd> <p>You have to love it when someone reveals that an interesting question was just sitting under our noses. This was my experience of the title of the opening essay of Nancy's <emph>The Muses</emph>: "Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?"[<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref29">29</reflink>] "Their number may have varied, as well as their attributes," Nancy writes, "but the muses will always have been several. It is this multiple origin that must interest us."[<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref30">30</reflink>] It does seem that art operates on a different logic than, say, ice cream, which apparently originated in a single, camphor flavor in Tang China. Thankfully, we have since diversified the concept, but the point is that a single‐flavored world is possible since for a time it existed. By comparison, a world with only one art strains the imagination. What interests Nancy is that art seems simultaneously to be a coherent singularity and an irreducible plurality. In this way, <emph>The Muses</emph> (1994) already announces the theme of <emph>Being Singular Plural</emph> (1996).</p> <p>To force us to confront the question, Nancy begins by closing off two common escape routes. Some accept the plurality of the arts, but only as a simple empirical fact, treating their unity as a matter of labeling. Even as the labeler gets interested in various questions of classification — arts of time versus arts of space, and so on — "the ontological question of the <emph>singular plural</emph> of the arts is dodged."[<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref31">31</reflink>] Others search for a unitary essence of art, turning the multiplicity of the arts into mere accidents. In their search for "a principle of plurality," they abandon the effort to articulate "plurality as a principle."[<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref32">32</reflink>]</p> <p>Having secured the question, Nancy turns to its most famous answer: art is inescapably plural because we have multiple senses. While initially appealing, Nancy shows convincingly that this answer is beset by three problems, any one of which is enough to defeat it:[<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref33">33</reflink>]</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> <emph>We seem to have either too many senses or too few</emph>. If we take the conventional division into five senses, this maps poorly onto the diversity of art forms. Touch seems to have no single aesthetic analogue (more on this later), taste and smell relate to practices not usually included among fine arts (Nancy mentions cooking and perfumery), and seeing and hearing alone cannot account for the variety of art practices. Perhaps then we should abandon Aristotle's (<emph>De Anima</emph>) original roster of five senses for a more up‐to‐date and fine‐grained reading of human corporeal sensitivity. As Nancy points out, we engage in exteroception (e.g., sensing contact, pressure, vibration, light, temperature, electrical current, and the presence of chemicals), proprioception (sensing our body's location and acceleration, posture and extension, torsion and flexion), and interoception (awareness of the state and workings of a variety of organs and processes). Taking this route, however, saddles us with an open‐ended interpretive task of defining "a sense" and no clear heuristic for explaining the plurality of the arts (what art corresponds to our ability to track the digestion of our breakfast?).</item> <p></p> <item> <emph>In any case, we experience not isolated inputs but "sensorial integration."</emph>[<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref34">34</reflink>] The demands of life lead to a screening, selection, and merging of sensory data keyed to situation and purpose. The idea of separate senses is an abstraction from our "ordinary synesthesia." [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref35">35</reflink>]</item> <p></p> <item> <emph>This differentiation of senses is itself a product of our living with the arts</emph>. What we take to be hearing is shaped by the musical; what we take to be seeing is shaped by the visual arts. This points to a troubling circularity in the argument that the plurality of the senses explains the plurality of the arts.</item> </ulist> <p>For these reasons, we must reject a simple homology between the several senses and the several arts. However, these very considerations open up another path. Nancy proposes that the "living unity of perception and action," while necessary, is reductive.[<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref36">36</reflink>] To successfully navigate the world, we must scan and edit and blur. Our need for things to make sense short‐circuits our sensing. Here is where the arts intervene: "art dis‐locates 'common sense.'"[<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref37">37</reflink>] And it does this by isolating "what we call a 'sense,' or part of this sense; it isolates it so as to force it to be only what is outside of signifying and useful perception."[<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref38">38</reflink>] When we engage deeply with works of art, Nancy suggests,</p> <p>Difference proliferates, not only among the major sensorial registers, but across each of them: color, nuance, paste, brilliance, shadow, surface, mass, perspective, contour, gesture, movement, shock, grain, timber, rhythm, flavor, odor, dispersion, resonance, trait, duction, diction, articulation, play, cut, length, depth, instant, duration, speed, hardness, thickness, vapor, vibration, cast, emanation, penetration, grazing touch, tension, theme and variation, et cetera, that is multiplied touches ad infinitum. All have their Muses, or else all are Muses.[<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref39">39</reflink>]</p> <p>Some of these qualitative world aspects are visual, some auditory, and so on. For Nancy, though, all constitute "touches" in his special sense of the word. Nancy wants to reserve the word <emph>touch</emph> for an aspect of all sensing whether through eyes, ears, or fingertips. To touch is to sense that one is sensing and thus to tune into the zone of contact between self and other. By sensing connections we become aware of boundaries. This leads Nancy to declare that touch "<emph>forms one body</emph> with sensing, or it makes of the sensing faculties a body — it is but the <emph>corpus</emph> of the senses."[<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref40">40</reflink>] This is because touch has a built‐in reflexivity: we simultaneously feel what we touch and that we are touching. This reflexive moment "interrupts" my <emph>umwelt</emph> (the world as that which surrounds me) to confront me with an experience of "sensuous exteriority."[<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref41">41</reflink>] For Nancy, touch simultaneously establishes contact and spacing, giving us a sense of our own envelope. As he puts it: "Touch is proximate distance. It makes one sense what makes one sense (what it <emph>is</emph> to sense): the proximity of the distant, the approximation of the intimate."[<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref42">42</reflink>]</p> <p>This idea of touch as a meta‐sense leads to a twist in Nancy's account. It may seem from the "difference proliferates" passage that art is a means of dis‐integrating the world.[<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref43">43</reflink>] After all, as we move through life in the practical attitude, things have duration but we rarely focus on duration itself; we notice dispersed objects but not dispersion itself; and so on. Even if it is interesting to notice these qualities, these world slices, we must, as worldly beings, soon return to our everyday, integrated sensorium. So it might seem that Nancy is likening the art experience to a chef offering you the chance taste each ingredient separately before trying the dish itself. However, Nancy rejects this idea that art represents an "abstract breakdown into sensations."[<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref44">44</reflink>] "Art," Nancy insists, "exposes another world, not a 'visual' or 'sonorous' world but a 'pictorial' or 'musical' one."[<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref45">45</reflink>] Artworks are not magnifying glasses isolating aspects of a single world, but doorways between worlds. At one point, Nancy sums it up like this: "But the multiplicity of the world does not remain even the multiplicity of <emph>a</emph> world: it qualifies the world as heterogeneity of worlds <emph>in which consists the unity of the world</emph>."[<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref46">46</reflink>]</p> <p>The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,</p> <p>Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;</p> <p>And as imagination bodies forth</p> <p>The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen</p> <p>Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing</p> <p>A local habitation and a name.</p> <p>— William Shakespeare, <emph>A Midsummer Night's Dream</emph> (1842–47)</p> <hd id="AN0183953350-6">A Local Habitation</hd> <p>From the fact of their inevitable plurality, Nancy derives a view of the arts not as representations of the world but as exposures of the very process of worlding. The arts represent a "renewed demand to grant rights to the naked presentation of the singular plural of ... existence."[<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref47">47</reflink>] Here it is useful to return to <emph>Being Singular Plural</emph> where Nancy elaborates on the idea of worlding:</p> <p>This very humble layer of our everyday experience contains another rudimentary ontological attestation: what we receive (rather than what we perceive) with singularities is the discreet passage of <emph>other origins of the world</emph>. What occurs there, what bends, leans, twists, addresses, denies — from the newborn to the corpse — is neither primarily "someone close," nor an "other," nor a "stranger," nor "someone similar." It is an origin; it is an affirmation of the singular multiplicity of origins. The world always appears each time according to a decidedly local turn [of events]. Its unity, its uniqueness, and its totality consist in a combination of this reticulated multiplicity, which produces no result.[<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref48">48</reflink>]</p> <p>The world is a reticulated multiplicity, a network of openings to other networks. It is a space of spaces, of "local habitations," each with its own genius loci.</p> <p>But we drift into abstraction. We mistake these origins for coordinates on a single grid. We confuse these "endless ends" for so many means.[<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref49">49</reflink>] Art helps us tune in to the self‐presentation of the world in its ongoing emergence:</p> <p>The essence of Being is the shock of the instant [<emph>le coup</emph>]. Each time, "Being" is always an instance [<emph>un coup</emph>] of Being (a lash, blow, beating, shock, knock, an encounter, an access). As a result, it is also always an instant of "with": singulars singularly together, where the togetherness is neither the sum, nor the incorporation [<emph>englobant</emph>], nor the "society," nor the "community" (where these words only give rise to problems). It "assembles" them insofar as it spaces them; they are "linked" insofar as they are not unified.[<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref50">50</reflink>]</p> <p>Nancy warns us against our tendency to sum up countables, subsume particulars, and group individuals. Being emerges as singular constellations. For example, we find not a book and a mug of tea and a chair and a table and a window, but rather we encounter: This‐book‐on‐this‐table‐next‐to‐this‐mug‐of‐tea‐whose‐rising‐steam‐is‐visible‐thanks‐to‐these‐rays‐of‐light‐slanting‐downward‐from‐the‐window‐above‐the‐chair‐in‐which‐I‐am‐sitting.</p> <p>To describe things in this way is to fall into something as far from journalistic accounting as it is from standard philosophy. The genre it most closely resembles is Haiku poetry. Consider this understated marvel from Issa:</p> <p>  Its mother on guard,</p> <p>the foal laps water</p> <p>  from the pond.[<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref51">51</reflink>]</p> <p>Seventeen syllables — in fact only thirteen in this English version by Robert Hass — is a small canvas indeed. But that is more than sufficient, as relationships multiply quickly. The poet slows down perception, easing us, line by line, into the "shock" of the encounter with the event of singular‐plurality. We are approaching something. We will not know what exactly until we proceed further. We are about to stumble upon a horse, but even before we meet her, we bump into a possessive pronoun, an index of relatedness. Though we have not yet met the foal in question, it is already present announced in this maternal presence. Why are they here, this mother and foal? The mother is guarding the foal who is drinking. Drinking from what? Finally, in the third line, we get our answer. Here is a pond, except as Issa shows (no ontological treatise needed), there is no such thing as <emph>a</emph> pond. This is "the" pond. Which? The pond‐drunk‐from‐by‐the‐foal‐guarded‐by‐its‐mother.</p> <p>This is a good first pass, but we have left out a crucial character: ourselves. What we have come upon is a scene of guarded drinking. The mother is guarding the foal from us! Through its syntax of deferral (we learn of a pond by means of a lapping foal, which we learn of in turn through a guarding mother), our approach is itself rendered tentative, guarded. The poem's reticence stands in relief against the ease with which pond gives up its water to the foal (who "laps" it up). In this way, the poem stages our spacing‐as‐connection to the mother‐foal‐pond: we must be close enough to witness the moment but not so close that we scare off the mother and her foal. We encounter this guarded drinking, this exteriority, along with our own. Even as we ex‐pose the pond‐foal‐mother, we are exposed as onlookers (as intruders perhaps, or voyeurs, or fellow parents, or simply thirsty hikers respectfully waiting our turn).</p> <hd id="AN0183953350-7">Conclusion</hd> <p>Intrigued by Nancy's suggestion that if the real is relational, philosophical writing must evolve, we have wound our way from Nancy's call for "philosophy as literature" to literature as philosophy. To be sure, opening us to the withness of being is not the only thing we can or should want from philosophy. But insofar as this is one of the things we want, then what we need is not a more literary philosophy but art itself. By Nancy's own argument, the arts take us into the reticulated multiplicity and expose us to the singular‐plural event of being.</p> <p>This suggests two ways of reading Nancy. On the first, Nancy fully embraces this conclusion. Notice that in "Why Are There Several Arts?," he gives the last word to a poem. And he himself had a poetry practice and wrote art criticism. Perhaps, then, "On Being Singular Plural" is not the first of a new kind of ontological lyric. Perhaps it is an ontological anti‐treatise, closing down that particular shop so we can get on with reading Haiku, looking at paintings, and listening to music.</p> <p>On the second reading, Nancy resists this implication. What he wants is a form of philosophical writing, one that embraces voice, address, polysemy, the lyrical. To my mind, this position is problematic. I perceive an ambivalence in his work. Does he want us to embrace fully the contingent, the multiple adventures of the local; or does he want to produce a general discourse about reality as reticulated manifold? Does he want to distill a principle of plurality from the multiplicity of the arts, or does he want to follow each of the several arts where they lead? For Nancy, all of the arts testify to the plurality at the root of the world's appearing. So even if the destination is an ontological principle of plurality, it is still a singular destination, making it unclear whether it matters for Nancy which, or how many, artistic roads one travels in order to get there.</p> <p>There seems to be a tension between Nancy's universalizing phenomenological method and his pluralistic ideal.[<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref52">52</reflink>] Recall now the ideal of liberal learning considered earlier, that doing justice to the multiple aspects of one's humanity necessitates the study of multiple arts (of making, performance, inquiry, etc.). It is not clear to me that Nancy's view points in this direction. If a single art, dance, let's say, works to reveal for me the singular‐plural nature of existence, what need have I for architecture, film, music, poetry, painting, and the rest?</p> <p>To put my cards on the table, I wonder whether the attraction to the general and abstract, even if in a lyrical, addressive form, is not itself a consoling flight from the anguish of the arbitrary. After all, if the conclusion is that there are many worlds to explore, each staging what is and what matters according to a different hue and tempo, then we are immediately confronted with the question of which rabbit holes to plumb. We face the dilemma of formative justice described by McClintock. It is not just that I have one set of values and too little time to satisfy them. I also encounter, one after another, axiological forks in the world. The pluralistic universe is both gift and curse. Finitude is agony. On this, Nancy and I might agree. My worry is that ontology in the grand French manner, even if done precisely on the theme of the generativity of the local, ends up amounting to a flight from finitude. True, if we trade this, as my dog does, for investigating particular holes, we will have to contend with contingency and regret. Still I prefer this reading of Nancy's project, as a parting shot against philosophical ontology. If it helps, when we lock the door on the seminar room, we can add a note: "gather ye rosebuds while ye may."</p> <ref id="AN0183953350-8"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Michael Oakeshott, "A Place of Learning," in <emph>The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education</emph>, ed. Timothy Fuller (Yale University Press, 1989), 23.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref2" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Alasdair MacIntyre, <emph>After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory</emph>, 3rd ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 213.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref3" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Ibid.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref4" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Oakeshott, "A Place of Learning," 24.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref5" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Michael Oakeshott, "The Definition of a University," <emph>Journal of Educational Thought</emph> 1, no. 3 (1967): 130, https://doi.org/10.11575/jet.v1i3.43498.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref6" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Michael Oakeshott, "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind," in <emph>Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays</emph>, ed. Timothy Fuller (Liberty Fund, 1959/1991), 496.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref7" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Ibid.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" idref="ref8" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext> Oakeshott, "A Place of Learning," 19, emphasis original. Oakeshott opens the essay with this point that we are the kind of creatures who cannot help but weave and inhabit narratives about ourselves (17–18). The phrase "self‐interpreting animals" comes from Charles Taylor, "Self‐Interpreting Animals," in <emph>Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers</emph>, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" idref="ref9" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext> Iris Murdoch, "Metaphysics and Ethics," in <emph>Existentialists and Mystics</emph>, ed. Peter Conradi (Penguin, 1957/1998), 75.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> MacIntyre, <emph>After Virtue</emph>, 216.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Hans‐Georg Gadamer, "Education Is Self‐Education," <emph>Journal of Philosophy of Education</emph> 35, no. 4 (2001), https://doi.org/10.1111/1467‐9752.00243.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Maxine Greene, "Teaching for Openings," in <emph>Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Art, Education, and Social Change</emph> (Jossey‐Bass, 1995), 115.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> See Oakeshott, "A Place of Learning," 23, 28.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> John Dewey, <emph>Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education</emph> (Macmillan, 1916), 309, 11. Dewey speaks of "an axis which runs through an immense diversity of detail [causing] different experiences, facts, items of information to fall into order with another."</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Søren Kierkegaard, <emph>Papers and Journals: A Selection</emph>, trans. Alastair Hannay (Penguin Books, 1996), 161.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Robbie McClintock, "Formative Justice: The Regulative Principle of Education," <emph>Teachers College Record</emph> 118, no. 10 (2016): 1, https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811611801001.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> This example is loosely based on the life of Mary Caroline (M.C.) Richards who, thanks to the unique affordances of Black Mountain College, found a way to unite head and hands, flourishing as a teacher, critic, translator, poet, and potter. I discuss Richards and other exemplars of dynamic integrity in <emph>Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education</emph> (MIT Press, 2024).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Friedrich Nietzsche, <emph>Schopenhauer as Educator</emph> (1876), trans. William Arrowsmith, §6, in <emph>Unmodern Observations: Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen</emph>, ed. William Arrowsmith (Yale University Press, 1990), 204.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Dewey, <emph>Democracy and Education</emph>, 310.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Jean‐Luc Nancy, "Preface," in <emph>Being Singular Plural</emph>, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne (Stanford University Press, 2000), xv–xvi.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Nancy, "Of Being Singular Plural," in <emph>Being Singular Plural</emph>, 28.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> For his distinction between singularities, particulars, and individuals, see Nancy, "Of Being Singular Plural," 32 and 85. Particulars are countable units, registering only as "numerical difference" (32). An individual is "an intersection of singularities" (85).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Nancy, "Of Being Singular Plural," 33.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> This suggests a connection with Gadamer's conception of understanding as an event in an unfolding tradition. Similarly, it would be interesting to compare Nancy's relational ontology with Alfred North Whitehead and process philosophy.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Nancy, "Of Being Singular Plural," 3 (italicized in original). Nancy rejects theory's traditional subject‐object mode (I argue that x is y). Elsewhere, he adds: "Nor is it enough to dress discourse in the form of an address (for me to address you with the familiar "you" [<emph>tu</emph>] the whole way through)" (Preface, xvi). For Nancy, ontology is a first‐person‐plural enactment: we are. In the phrase "saying we to themselves," the third‐person "themselves" signals Nancy's desire to speak from "all of being, which does not speak but which is nevertheless — <emph>stone, fish, fiber, dough, crack, block, and breath</emph>" ("Of Being Singular Plural," 3 [the words italicized here are the only non‐italicized words in the original paragraph]).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Nancy, "Of Being Singular Plural," 33–34. The first two elisions are mine. The spaced ellipses are Nancy's, as in let's allow this idea to breathe for a second. The bracketed text is from the translator.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> See Jean‐Luc Nancy and Pierre‐Philippe Jandin, <emph>The Possibility of a World: Conversations with Pierre‐Philippe Jandin</emph>, trans. Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain (Fordham University Press, 2017). According to Jandin, Nancy wants "a thought that touches," not one "that shows," 24. But he embraces showing in relation to art. This, Nancy asserts, is "monstration," not demonstration, 113. The relational philosopher and the artist are letting themselves be addressed by the "patency" of the world, that is, the way "the world" is already "show[ing] itself to itself," 114 (see 113–117 for the full exchange between Nancy and Jandin on this point).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Jean‐Luc Nancy, "Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One? (Conversation on the Plurality of Worlds)," in <emph>The Muses</emph> trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–39.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 1.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 3 (emphasis in original).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 2.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 9–15. Nancy opens with the problem of circularity and then offers four further numbered problems, the fourth of which returns in a different way to the problem of circularity. My first problem combines his first and second. My second corresponds to his third. And I discuss the circularity problem in my third.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 12 (this phrase is set‐off in quotations in the original).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 22.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 21.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 22.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 21.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 22. As this suggests, and though he adopts the metaphor of the muses, which number nine in the most famous counting, Nancy ultimately concludes that "the arts are themselves <emph>innumerable</emph>," 23 (emphasis in original).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 17.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., (emphasis in original).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> "World" in the phenomenological tradition means something like a sphere in which things make sense to its inhabitants, a place (time/space/ethos) that houses us not only physically but existentially, a meaningful context for our planning and acting, wishing and waiting, doubting and believing, our entering and exiting.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Nancy, "Why Are There Several Arts?," 21.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 21.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 27 (emphasis in original).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 38.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Nancy, "Of Being Singular Plural," 8–9 (emphasis and interpolation in original). I have removed an interpolation and footnote from the translator pointing out that "appears" is a rendering of <emph>surgit</emph>, which might also have been translated as "emerges," "wells up," or "surges forth." See <emph>Being Singular Plural</emph>, 195n11.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Nancy, "Why Are There Several Arts?," 38.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Nancy, "Of Being Singular Plural," 33. Nancy puts "Being" in scare quotes because if Being is <emph>always</emph> an instance then we must be on guard not to let our language nominalize into existence some fictional preexisting ontological substrate. When we say, "Being is always an instance," we run the risk of thinking that there is some thing called "Being" that exists in its own right and then appears in this or that instance.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Robert Hass, ed., <emph>The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa</emph> (HarperCollins, 1994), 193.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> This somewhat obscure passage seems poised exactly between these two readings of Nancy's project: "The things of art are not a matter of phenomenology — or else they <emph>are</emph> themselves a phenomenology, according to an altogether other logic of this '‐logy' — because they are in advance of the phenomenon itself. They are of the patency of the world" (Nancy, "Why Are There Several Arts?," 33).</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Chris Higgins</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> <p></p> <p>CHRIS HIGGINS is Chair of the Department of Formative Education in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College, where he directs the Transformative Educational Studies major and co‐directs the PhD Program in Formative Education (email). He is the author of two books — The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice (Wiley, 2011) and Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education (MIT, 2024).</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref10"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref14"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref15"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref17"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref18"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref20"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref23"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref24"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref26"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref27"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref29"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref30"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl22" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref31"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl23" bibid="bib32" firstref="ref32"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl24" bibid="bib33" firstref="ref33"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl25" bibid="bib34" firstref="ref34"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl26" bibid="bib35" firstref="ref35"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl27" bibid="bib36" firstref="ref36"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl28" bibid="bib37" firstref="ref37"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl29" bibid="bib38" firstref="ref38"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl30" bibid="bib39" firstref="ref39"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl31" bibid="bib40" firstref="ref40"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl32" bibid="bib41" firstref="ref41"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl33" bibid="bib42" firstref="ref42"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl34" bibid="bib43" firstref="ref43"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl35" bibid="bib44" firstref="ref44"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl36" bibid="bib45" firstref="ref45"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl37" bibid="bib46" firstref="ref46"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl38" bibid="bib47" firstref="ref47"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl39" bibid="bib48" firstref="ref48"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl40" bibid="bib49" firstref="ref49"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl41" bibid="bib50" firstref="ref50"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl42" bibid="bib51" firstref="ref51"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl43" bibid="bib52" firstref="ref52"></nolink> |
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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: Formation and Finitude: Jean-Luc Nancy on the Arts as Ontological Doorways – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Chris+Higgins%22">Chris Higgins</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Educational+Theory%22"><i>Educational Theory</i></searchLink>. 2024 74(6):873-887. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 15 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2024 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Descriptive – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Art+Education%22">Art Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Aesthetic+Education%22">Aesthetic Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Relationship%22">Relationship</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Individual+Differences%22">Individual Differences</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Intermode+Differences%22">Intermode Differences</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Liberal+Arts%22">Liberal Arts</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Interdisciplinary+Approach%22">Interdisciplinary Approach</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Global+Approach%22">Global Approach</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Self+Concept%22">Self Concept</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Diversity%22">Diversity</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Discovery+Processes%22">Discovery Processes</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Creative+Thinking%22">Creative Thinking</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1111/edth.12675 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0013-2004<br />1741-5446 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: In this article Chris Higgins considers two works by Jean-Luc Nancy -- "On Being Singular Plural" and "Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?" -- in light of the formative task to do justice to the diverse dimensions of oneself given the offerings and demands of the world, a task made difficult by our finitude and the existence of incommensurable goods. While Nancy helps us appreciate the value pluralism animating the (liberal) arts, Higgins argues, Nancy himself shies away from the full implications of his relational ontology. Rather than follow individual arts and artworks into the local habitations they open -- accepting the anguish of the arbitrary as the price of our finite but fulsome excursions into the reticulated real -- Nancy retreats to the level of a global account (if a lyrical one) of the local. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2025 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1459495 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1111/edth.12675 Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 15 StartPage: 873 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Art Education Type: general – SubjectFull: Aesthetic Education Type: general – SubjectFull: Relationship Type: general – SubjectFull: Individual Differences Type: general – SubjectFull: Intermode Differences Type: general – SubjectFull: Liberal Arts Type: general – SubjectFull: Interdisciplinary Approach Type: general – SubjectFull: Global Approach Type: general – SubjectFull: Self Concept Type: general – SubjectFull: Diversity Type: general – SubjectFull: Discovery Processes Type: general – SubjectFull: Creative Thinking Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: Formation and Finitude: Jean-Luc Nancy on the Arts as Ontological Doorways Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Chris Higgins IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 12 Type: published Y: 2024 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0013-2004 – Type: issn-electronic Value: 1741-5446 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 74 – Type: issue Value: 6 Titles: – TitleFull: Educational Theory Type: main |
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