Abstract
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1951, p. 527). In similar vein to this metaphysical inquiry, this book seeks through the philosophization of fashion to answer the question, “Why is there something new rather than nothing new?” The distinction between concept and phenomena, i.e., between newness and new fashions of different kinds, can be pronounced through philosophical discourse, illuminating the epistemological meaning of fashion as both a concept and a phenomenon. This in turn will help us grasp certain attributes of modernity in the context of philosophy. The metaphysical question as to the genesis of something new, which is inseparable from the eternal return of the same that is in operation, is closely entwined with the period called modernity, during which fashion played a significant role. Metaphysics is often criticized for its detachment from the real world. However, by investigating fashion through metaphysical concepts and principles, certain esoteric aspects of metaphysics can be broken down, assisting us in finding some fruitful links between the most abstruse branch of philosophy and our objective world. Through this interdisciplinary journey, one should be able to see the salient connections between the thought processes presented in philosophy and the modes of life experienced in the course of modern times. Indeed, metaphysics represents a major point of departure in this unusual project. It is Immanuel Kant’s schematism that renders the theoretical basis upon which fashion is anatomized as an a priori concept of the understanding and as a phenomenal a posteriori appearance. The term fashion as used in common parlance is, in point of fact, a mode or style with countless examples that are often confined within the bounds of the body. On the other hand, the pursuit of something new in the form of fashion, originating as it does in the mind, requires synthetic a priori cognition. Kant offers clarifications about our intuitions of time and space, with which the metaphysical attributes of fashion become easy to identify. With recourse to Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, the pursuance of something new, the conceptual side of fashion, can be reckoned not only as part of the metaphysical domain arrived at by a synthetic a priori judgment, but also as an incessant attempt to seek one’s subjectivity.
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Notes
- 1.
See A. K. M. Adam, Making Sense of New Testament Theology: “Modern” Problems and Prospects (Macon: Mercer University, 1995), 13–25.
- 2.
Refer to the following remark by Norbert Elias.
There are always subjectivists and objectivists or those who try to intermediary positions and compromises. … There is no end to it, nothing can ever reconcile the polar views and solve the problems arising from the fictitious assumption of an existential gulf between human beings and the world they set out to discover and to control—the world of which they themselves form part. … Nothing new, no advances in the theory of knowledge and of sciences are possible as long as the assumption of an ontological gulf between “subject” and “object”, explicitly or not, remains the basis of these theories.
- 3.
Adorno states:
After everything, the only responsible philosophy is one that no longer imagines it had the Absolute at its command; indeed philosophy must forbid the thought of it in order not to betray that thought, and at the same time it must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth. This contradiction is philosophy’s element. It defines philosophy as negative.
- 4.
Refer to editor’s note 4 in Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. ed. Rolf Tiedemann. trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2006), 287–288.
The concept of the nucleus of time that Adorno constantly claims for his own is one which he does indeed owe to Benjamin. Benjamin’s use of it can be found in one of the notes for the [sic] Arcades Project: …
Also see editor’s note 18 in Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics, 260.
In his Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie Adorno makes it clear that he owes this crucial idea of a temporal ‘core’ or ‘nucleus’ of truth to the work of Walter Benjamin (GS 5, p. 141; Against Epistemology, p. 135).
- 5.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. R. Tiedemann (ed.) & H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), [N3, 2], p. 463.
Resolute refusal of the concept of “timeless truth” is in order. Nevertheless, truth is not—as Marxism would have it—a merely contingent function of knowing, but is bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden with the knower and the known alike. This is so true that the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea. [N3,2]
- 6.
For further discussion on this topic, see Chap. 4. “In Search of Unintentional Truth .”
- 7.
For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Chap. 5. “Universal Consciousness, Experience (Erfahrung) , and Fashion.”
- 8.
For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Chap. 3. “Fashion and Freedom: An Adornian Critique.”
- 9.
For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Chap. 8. “Fashion as A Utopian Impulse: The Inversion of Political Economy via the Consumption of Fashion.”
- 10.
For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Chap. 9. “The Dialectical Sublation by the Consumption of Fashion.”
- 11.
Refer to G. A. Cohen, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,” p. 5.
- 12.
Sociology also generally ignored bodies until the late 1980s, when Bryan S. Turner in The Body and Society (1984) called for the inclusion of the body in sociology. See Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. 2nd ed. (London: Sage Publications. 1996 [1984]).
- 13.
Refer to the following remark by Dunning and Hughes (2013, p. 202).
It is perhaps also not so controversial to claim that, at its current stage of development, sociology in Britain has no clearly distinct boundaries from the disciplines of cultural studies and philosophy.
- 14.
As stated in Lillethun, Abby, Linda Welters, and Joanne B. Eicher. “(Re)Defining Fashion,” Dress, (2012), vol. 38: 75–97, 79.
- 15.
Karen Tranberg Hansen “Anthropology and Dress and Fashion,”
https://www.bloomsburyfashioncentral.com/products/berg-fashion-library/article/bibliographical-guides/anthropology-of-dress-and-fashion#b-9781474280655-BG004-112 (accessed May 9, 2019).
- 16.
I used the term fashion anthropologists on the basis of the introduction of the “sub-discipline of fashion anthropology” Jansen and Craik have put forward, who write:
“In a search for an all-inclusive, non-Eurocentric definition and analytical framework for fashion, the emerging sub-discipline of fashion anthropology offers some important tools.” (M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik, “Introduction,” 7).
- 17.
For example, Edward Burnett Tylor states:
“Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, vol. 1 (London: Murray, 1871), 1.
Robert F. Murphy also writes:
“Culture means the total body of tradition borne by a society and transmitted from generation to generation.” Robert F. Murphy, Cultural and Social Anthropology : An Overture, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, 1986), 14.
- 18.
The words in parentheses are my own addition.
- 19.
Siedentop’s central argument in this book is that modern Western liberalism has its origin in Christian thought and moral assumptions and the concept of the individual was an outcome of the development of Western Christian values.
- 20.
Among others, see Sandra Niessen, “Afterword: Fashion’s Fallacy,” M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik (eds), Modern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity Through Fashion (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2016) .
“In the middle of the last century, Simmel (1957) pointed out that fashion was found in the West and not in non-Western contexts. Scholars continue to reiterate his claim whether directly or indirectly.” (209)
- 21.
As cited in Donald N. Levine. “Introduction,” On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), xii.
- 22.
Also see Turner, Jonathan H., Leonard Beeghley, and Charles H. Powers. The Emergence of Sociological Theory, 7th edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012), 252–253.
- 23.
Refer to Christian Helmut Wenzel. “Introduction,” An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics : Core Concepts and Problems (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).
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Kang, E.J. (2019). Fashion and Philosophy: An Overview. In: A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0814-1_1
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