Book
A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education: The Play of the In-Between (Lexington: Lanham, 2020)
This book explores the ways in which both play and poetry orient us toward what surpasses us. Catherine Homan develops an original account of poetic education that builds on Friedrich Hölderlin’s idea of poetry as a teacher of humanity. Whereas aesthetic education emphasizes judgments of taste and rational autonomy, poetic education foregrounds self-formation and openness to the other. Critically engaging the works of Eugen Fink, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Celan, this book argues that poetry and play call for a particular stance in the world and with others. Open toward the infinite while simultaneously reaching toward its own finitude, the poetic work addresses us and invites our response. Poetry reveals the human condition as “in-between” and dialogical, even at the limits of language. Although many philosophers mistakenly view play as frivolous, Homan takes play seriously. Play—spontaneous and creative—resists mastery and instead requires an active attunement to the to-and-fro movement of the world, of others, and of ourselves. A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education demonstrates that poetic education, as learning to listen, provides vital resources for responding to alterity in meaningful ways that resist totalization.
Peer Reviewed Articles
“The Play of Being and Nothing: World, Earth, and Cosmos in Eugen Fink” in Philosophy Today, Vol. 63., No. 1, 2019.
The question permeating much of Eugen Fink’s work is whether a nonmetaphysical thinking of the world is possible. Fink views metaphysics as understanding the world merely from the side of beings and as a container of things. A nonmetaphysical thinking would be cosmological; it would think the world as a totality, as the origin of being, of beings, of time, and of space. This thinking requires a radical way of thinking that which cannot be thought: the nothing that allows being and beings to come to appearance at all. My analysis aims to articulate more clearly what Fink means by thinking cosmologically by tracing his understanding of world, earth, and cosmos and the interplay of being and nothing at stake in each. I clarify how Fink both inherits and goes beyond the philosophies of Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger to provide a way of thinking through that which resists articulation.
Concepción, David W., Melinda Messineo, Sarah Wieten, and Catherine Homan, “The State of Teaching Training in Philosophy” in Teaching Philosophy, 2016. Online First: dx.doi.org/10.5840/teachphil201621942
This paper explores the state of teacher training in philosophy graduate programs in the English-speaking world. Do philosophy graduate programs offer training regarding teaching? If so, what is the nature of the training that is offered? Who offers it? How valuable is it? We conclude that philosophers want more and better teacher training, and that collectively we know how to deliver and support it.
“The Play of Ethics in Eugen Fink,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 27, No. 3 2013, 287-96.
Central to Eugen Fink’s distinctive understanding of the context of ethical engagement is his way of thinking about being in the world. For Fink, ethics is fundamentally situated, communal, and playful rather than merely rational. I suggest that by emphasizing play, Fink allows for a more complex picture of the ethical self as characterized by playful openness and so accounts for her being in the world and with others. Not only is there something ethical that belongs to playful behavior, but there is also a playful dimension to ethics that deserves greater attention.
Translations
Eugen Fink, “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of Play” in Philosophy Today, Vol. 63. No. 1, 2019.
This lecture from 1946 presents Eugen Fink’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaphysics. Fink’s aim here is twofold: to work against the trend of psychologistic interpretations of Nietzsche’s work and to perform the philosophical interpretation of Nietzsche he finds lacking in his predecessors. Fink contends that play is the central intuition of Nietzsche’s philosophy, specifically in his rejection of Western metaphysics’ insistence on being and presence. Drawing instead from Heraclitus, Nietzsche argues for an ontology of becoming characterized by the Dionysian as the temporalization of time and the Apollonian as temporalized in time. The play of becoming is thus the cosmic coming to be and passing away of appearance. Playing, as the creative projection of such a play-world of appearing and concealing, is central to understanding the Nietzschean theme of the will to power as the revaluation of values.
Book Chapters
“Gadamer and Feminism.” The Gadamerian Mind, ed. Theodore George and Gert-Jan van der Heiden. (New York: Routledge), 487-500, 2021.
This chapter reflects on the ways in which feminist responses to Gadamer frequently criticize his account of tradition as being overly conservative and totalizing or identify it as dynamic and attentive to alterity. Turning to Gadamer’s understanding of tradition helps us make sense both of these ambivalent responses to his work and the tradition of feminism. By paying specific attention to tradition, we are better able to identify which voices continue to be silenced and where imperialism, racism, or sexism remain unthought.
“The Play of the World and World Beings.” Phenomenology, Metaphysics, Ontology: Essays on Eugen Fink, ed. Iulian Apostolescu. De Gruyter. (forthcoming)
A thread running through nearly all of Eugen Fink’s work is how to think the world. Fink’s challenge is how to think the world non-metaphysically, meaning that rather than conceiving of the world as an object over against subjects or as a fixed essence, we understand the world as the groundless totality that gives rise to humans as beings in the world. The world, as granting appearance, allows for humans, characterized by understanding, to relate themselves to the world. What specifically distinguishes human from nonhuman comportment is this ability to express this relationship symbolically. According to Fink, this symbolic expression occurs most clearly in play. The world is the playspace of being. When humans play, when they create and participate in playworlds, they symbolically express the totality to which they belong. Because the human symbolically expresses the world and participates in world creation, even though the world exceeds full cognition, what most characterizes the human is an orientation toward what exceeds her. In this chapter, I show that Fink’s project of thinking the world non-metaphysically is thus also a thinking of the human non-metaphysically with play as the connecting thread. Rather than animal rationale or the Cartesian subject most characterized by rational thought, Fink argues, the human is ens consmologicum. In other words, what distinguishes the human is not so much cognition as it is an intersubjective, interworldly understanding and a comportment toward finitude and alterity.
“To Be is to Play: Eugen Fink on Play, Symbol, and World.” Philosophy's Gambit: Play and Players in a Gamified World” ed. Jeremy Sampson. Vernon Press (forthcoming).
Both Hans-Georg Gadamer and Eugen Fink were students of Martin Heidegger and both published major texts in 1960 that discuss the philosophical significance of play and symbol, especially in responding to the tradition of metaphysics. Fink explains that play, as both real and irreal, actual and nonactual, allows humans to meaningfully comport themselves to the play of being and nothing of the cosmos. Gadamer similarly locates play as a significant part of human existence, such as in the to-and-fro experience of conversation and interpretation of art. Despite the parallels between their positions and philosophical inheritances, however, there is little recorded conversation between the two thinkers, save a few brief reviews Gadamer wrote of Fink’s Play as Symbol of the World and Oasis of Happiness and the occasional footnote in Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Gadamer clarifies that his work on play in his philosophical hermeneutics was taken up independently from Fink and reflects a different approach and aims. Whereas Fink strives to understand the world totality and human existence in terms of play, Gadamer instead attempts to think play more speculatively, such that the play of the world is understood as merely one, rather than the definitive, form of play. Thus, Gadamer takes his interpretation of play, and perhaps of philosophy more broadly, to be quite different from Fink’s. This chapter aims to address three questions: 1) How exactly do Fink and Gadamer understand play and symbol?, 2) Are their accounts mutually exclusive or is there less daylight between them than might be first suggested?, and 3) How does a consideration of these accounts of play itself demonstrates something fundamentally playful about philosophical inquiry? I argue that although Gadamer correctly identifies significant differences between his and Fink’s accounts, by engaging their positions more playfully than merely agonistically, we gain deeper insight into play, both as speculative concept and as fundamental, universal human experience. Moreover, I aim to show that the process of interpretation and re-interpretation of their positions itself sheds further light on this understanding of play.
“Whoever Cannot Give, also Cannot Receive: Nietzsche’s Playful Spectator,” The Philosophy of Play, ed. Emily Ryall, Wendy Russell, and Malcolm MacLean (London: Routledge), 98-108, 2013.
Friedrich Nietzsche argues that to be an artist is not merely to create a work of art, but also to lead one’s life in an artistic way characterized by creativity, independence, and play. However, he says very little about how spectators as non-artists relate to art and whether they, too, can have artistic lives. Drawing on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, I argue that by looking specifically at the role of play in artistic creation and artistic life, we can see that the spectator is not passive, but an active, playful participant who stands, like the artist, in an essential relationship to art and life.