After much time in the fires of editorial purification, I am pleased to announce the release of Diaphany: A Journal and Nocturne. Diaphany is a collaborative project that I begun several years ago with Sabrina Dalla Valle, which grew out of ideas we were exploring under the auspices of the International Jean Gebser Society. With the founding of Rubedo Press at the end of 2014, Dr Jennifer Zahrt joined the editorial team, and after a period of intensive design and refinement, Diaphany was finally brought into being.

Reproduced below is the volume's Preface, along with the full table of contents, and links to the Rubedo Press website (where Diaphany is currently available for pre-order).

Preface

DIAPHANY is an international peer-reviewed volume dedicated to the living confluence of poetic, phenomenological, and empirical perceptions of reality. Drinking deeply from both the arts and the sciences, and then dissolving their boundaries, Diaphany weds the vital, experiential dimension of reality to rigorous, source-based research. By embracing the principle of qualitative presence, Diaphany seeks to breathe life into the academic logos in a way that infuses philosophical gravitas with a sweeping, visionary leaven.

The concept of diaphany is drawn from the work of German poet and Kulturphilosoph, Jean Gebser. For Gebser, transparency (Durchsichtigkeit) is that which renders both darkness and light present. Diaphany is designed accordingly as both a journal (from French jour, ‘day’) and a nocturne—a hymn to the night. Diaphany thus conceived is a matrix not only for the rational structures of consciousness (wakeful logos and light) but also for the pre-rational structures of consciousness (myth, dream, darkness).

Drawing on the romantic, integral, and phenomenological traditions in European philosophy, we use the word diaphany to evoke the process by which the nature of the whole shines through its parts; how, like the facets of a diamond, phenomenal surfaces are revealed as unique, living expressions of the deeper, holarchical reality from which they draw their life.

While strictly peer-reviewed, and while upholding the highest standards of academic research—including an unwavering fidelity to source materials—Diaphany is not a conventional academic journal. That is, Diaphany is not interested in so-called ‘objective’, ‘dispassionate’, or ‘impersonal’ inquiry for its own sake. Rather, Diaphany seeks work that is tempered in the fires of genuine wisdom rather than mere information; work that unveils the metaphysics of beauty through nondualistic perception; and work that emerges as much from a fervent, personal quest as it does from the perception of inexorable, impersonal realities.

Above all, Diaphany seeks to dissolve the artifical boundaries between philosophy, science, and art. It seeks philosophers in the strict sense—lovers of wisdom (sophia) whose work does not end in criticism for the sake of criticism, but in cultivating the life of the psychē in preparation for death (meletē thanaou); scientists sensitive to the Goethean ideal of ‘delicate empiricism’ (zarte Empirie), in which the harmonic structures of the cosmos are both poetically and pragmatically revealed; and artists of poēsis and presence who make the invisible visible and the eternal tangible according to a Kandinskian ‘inner necessity’ (innere Notwendigkeit).

Diaphany: A Journal and Nocturne

Preface

Contents

www.rubedo.press/publications/diaphany/