Monday, December 31, 2018

Graham Parkes

Graham Parkes is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the School of Philosophy and Sociology at University College Cork, in Ireland, and a former senior fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions. Among his numerous publications, he is author of Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology; editor of Heidegger and Asian Thought and Nietzsche and Asian Thought; and translator of Nishitani Keiji’s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism and François Berthier’s Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden.

1.    Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. Translated by Graham Parkes, with
      Setsuko Aihara. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press,1990

2.    Nietzsche and Asian Thought, ed. by Graham Parkes, University of Chicago Press, 1991

Friedrich Nietzsche's work has had a significant impact on the intellectual life of non-Western cultures and elicited responses from important thinkers outside of the Anglo-American philosophical traditions as well. Bringing together thirteen internationally renowned scholars, this is the first collection of essays to address the connection between Nietzsche's ideas and philosphies in India, China, and Japan. (amazon) 

3.    Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche's Psychology, by Graham Parkes, University of Chicago Press, 1994 (abebooks, 2018-12-31) (received 2019-1-24) (may work on this one 2020-4-4)

Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo (1888), "That a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings—this is perhaps the first insight gained by a good reader. . . . Who among the philosophers before me was in any way a psychologist? Before me there simply was no psychology."

Composing the Soul is the first study to pay sustained attention to this pronouncement and to examine the contours of Nietzsche's psychology in the context of his life and psychological makeup. Beginning with essays from Nietzsche's youth, Graham Parkes shows the influence of such figures as Goethe, Byron, and Emerson on Nietzsche's formidable and multiple talents. Parkes goes on to chart the development of Nietzsche's psychological ideas in terms of the imagery, drawn from the dialogues of Plato as well as from Nietzsche's own quasi-mystical experiences of nature, in which he spoke of the soul. Finally, Parkes analyzes Nietzsche's most revolutionary idea—that the soul is composed of multiple "drives," or "persons," within the psyche. The task for Nietzsche's psychology, then, was to identify and order these multiple persons within the individual—to compose the soul.

Featuring all new translations of quotations from Nietzsche's writings, Composing the Soul reveals the profundity of Nietzsche's lifelong personal and intellectual struggles to come to grips with the soul. Extremely well-written, this landmark work makes Nietzsche's life and ideas accessible to any reader interested in this much misunderstood thinker. (amazon)

4.    Reading Zen in the Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden, by Francois Berthier, Graham Parkes, University of Chicago Press, 2000

The Japanese dry landscape garden has long attracted—and long baffled—viewers from the West. While museums across the United States are replicating these "Zen rock gardens" in their courtyards and miniature versions of the gardens are now office decorations, they remain enigmatic, their philosophical and aesthetic significance obscured. Reading Zen in the Rocks, the classic essay on the karesansui garden by French art historian François Berthier, has now been translated by Graham Parkes, giving English-speaking readers a concise, thorough, and beautifully illustrated history of these gardens.

Berthier's guided tour of the famous garden of Ryoanji (Temple) in Kyoto leads him into an exposition of the genre, focusing on its Chinese antecedents and affiliations with Taoist ideas and Chinese landscape painting. He traces the roles of Shinto and Zen Buddhism in the evolution of the garden and also considers how manual laborers from the lowest classes in Japan had a hand in creating some of its highest examples. Parkes contributes an equally original and substantive essay which delves into the philosophical importance of rocks and their "language of stone," delineating the difference between Chinese and Japanese rock gardens and their relationship to Buddhism. Together, the two essays compose one of the most comprehensive and elegantly written studies of this haunting garden form.

Reading Zen in the Rocks is fully illustrated with photographs of all the major gardens discussed, making it a handsome addition to the library of anyone interested in gardening, Eastern philosophy, and the combination of the two that the karesansui so superbly represents. (amazon)


5.   Parkes, Graham (2011) Heidegger and Japanese Fascism: An Unsubstantiated       Connection, in “Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto   School (Studies in Continental Thought)”, ed. by Bret W. Davis, et al., Indiana University   Press, pp. 247-265


6.    Parkes, Graham (2013) Heidegger and Nishitani on Nature and Technology


7.    Nishitani Keiji on Practicing Philosophy as a Matter of Life and Death, by Graham Parkes, in “The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy", ed. by Bret W. Davis, OUP, work in progress

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter offers an existential approach to those aspects of Nishitani’s philosophy that are motivated by a profound sense of the utter meaninglessness of existence and by the desire to confront that situation honestly. It examines his idea of the three fields of awareness: consciousness, (beneath it) nihility, and (at bottom) emptiness. Existence on the field of consciousness is too superficial to make for a fulfilling life. Drawing from Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as from the Zen tradition, Nishitani outlines the field of nihility as a place of death rather than life and argues that if we can endure facing our finitude there will come a turn to the deeper field, of emptiness. On this field, we are able to encounter things “on their home ground” for the first time and also our selves as participants in the network of relations that constitute the world as “a field of force.”