Ecstasy (philosophy) - Wikipedia Ecstasy (philosophy) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search Term used in philosophy with different meanings in different traditions For other uses, see Ecstasy. For more informal use of the term, see Ecstasy (emotion) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Ecstasy" philosophy – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Ecstasy (from the Ancient Greek ἔκστασις ekstasis, "to be or stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere" from ek- "out," and stasis "a stand, or a standoff of forces") is a term used in ancient Greek, Christian and existential philosophy. The different traditions using the concept have radically different perspectives. Contents 1 Ancient Greece 2 Christian mysticism 3 Existentialism 4 See also 5 References Ancient Greece[edit] According to Plotinus, ecstasy is the culmination of human possibility. He contrasted emanation (πρόοδος, prohodos) from the One—on the one hand—with ecstasy or reversion (ἐπιστροφή, epistrophe) back to the One—on the other. This is a form of ecstasy described as the vision of, or union with, some otherworldly entity (see religious ecstasy)—a form of ecstasy that pertains to an individual trancelike experience of the sacred or of God. Christian mysticism[edit] Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1652, by Gianlorenzo Bernini Among the Christian mystics, Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Ávila had mystical experiences of ecstasy, or talked about ecstatic visions of God. Existentialism[edit] The term is used in existentialism usually to mean "outside-itself". One's consciousness, for example, is not self-enclosed, as one can be conscious of an Other person, who falls well outside one's own self. In a sense consciousness is usually, "outside itself," in that its object (what it thinks about, or perceives) is not itself. This is in contrast to the term enstasis which means from "standing-within-oneself" which relates to contemplation from the perspective of a speculator.[1] This understanding of enstasis gives way to the example of the use of the "ecstasy" as that one can be "outside of oneself" with time. In temporalizing, each of the following: the past (the 'having-been'), the future (the 'not-yet') and the present (the 'making-present') are the "outside of itself" of each other. The term ecstasy (German: Ekstase) has been used in this sense by Martin Heidegger who, in his Being and Time of 1927, argued that our being-in-the-world is usually focused toward some person, task, or the past (see also existence and Dasein). Telling someone to "remain in the present" could then be self-contradictory, if the present only emerged as the "outside itself" of future possibilities (our projection; Entwurf) and past facts (our thrownness; Geworfenheit).[2] Emmanuel Levinas disagreed with Heidegger's position regarding ecstasy and existential temporality from the perspective of the experience of insomnia.[3] Levinas talked of the Other in terms of 'insomnia' and 'wakefulness'.[4] He emphasized the absolute otherness of the Other and established a social relationship between the Other and one's self.[5] Furthermore, he asserted that ecstasy, or exteriority toward the Other, forever remains beyond any attempt at full capture; this otherness is interminable or infinite.[6] This "infiniteness" of the Other would allow Levinas to derive other aspects of philosophy as secondary to this ethic. Levinas writes: The others that obsess me in the other do not affect me as examples of the same genus united with my neighbor by resemblance or common nature, individuations of the human race, or chips off the old block... The others concern me from the first. Here fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship with the Other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others.[7] See also[edit] Absolute Being Face-to-face Hypostasis Noumenon Ontology Ousia Phenomenology Theoria References[edit] ^ J. Glenn Friesen, "Enstasy, Ecstasy and Religious Self-reflection", 2001. ^ As existentialist scholar Alphonso Lingis writes: "Existential philosophy defined the new concepts of ecstasy or of transcendence to fix a distinct kind of being that is by casting itself out of its own given place and time, without dissipating, because at each moment it projects itself — or, more exactly, a variant of itself — into another place and time. Such a being is not ideality, defined as intuitable or reconstitutable anywhere and at any moment. Ex-istence, understood etymologically, is not so much a state or a stance as a movement, which is by conceiving a divergence from itself or a potentiality of itself and casting itself into that divergence with all that it is." —Lingis, Alphonso. "The Imperative," Indiana University Press, 1998. ^ Nicholas Bunnin, Dachun Yang, Linyu Gu (eds), Levinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives, John Wiley & Sons, 2009, p. 19. ^ A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Phenomenology World Wide, Springer, 2003, p. 421. ^ Nicholas Bunnin et al (eds), 2009, p. 18. ^ Sociality is a "relation ... to the infinite" (E. Levinas, Le temps et l'autre, Presses universitaires de France, 1991, p. 8). The "relation with the Other" [rapport à autrui] is one among the "inevitable articulations of the transcendence of time" [articulations ... inévitables de la transcendance du temps] which are "neither ecstasy where the Same is absorbed in(to) the Other nor knowledge where the Other belongs to the Same" [ni extase où le Même s'absorbe dans l'Autre ni savoir où l'Autre appartient au Même] (ibid., p. 13). ^ E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 1981, Springer, p. 159. v t e Aesthetics topics Philosophers Abhinavagupta Theodor W. Adorno Leon Battista Alberti Thomas Aquinas Hans Urs von Balthasar Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten Clive Bell Bernard Bosanquet Edward Bullough R. G. 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(1929) Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) Black Notebooks (1931–41) Contributions to Philosophy (1936–1938) Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister" (1942) Letter on Humanism (1947) The Question Concerning Technology (1949) The Origin of the Work of Art (1950) What Is Called Thinking? (1951–2) What Is Philosophy? (1955) Only a God Can Save Us (1966) Heidegger Gesamtausgabe Film and TV The Ister Being in the World Human, All Too Human Related topics Heidegger scholars Heidegger Studies Relationship with Nazism Cassirer–Heidegger debate Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ecstasy_(philosophy)&oldid=919535587" Categories: Concepts in aesthetics Concepts in ancient Greek philosophy of mind Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata Articles needing additional references from November 2012 All articles needing additional references Articles containing German-language text Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version Languages فارسی Српски / srpski Edit links This page was last edited on 4 October 2019, at 07:48 (UTC). 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