Mock Mockers: Cynicism, Suffering, Irish Modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-194
Author(s):  
Ronan McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
Irish Modernism

Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Diogenes and Lucian, but has found contemporary valence in the work of cultural theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk. This article uses theories of cynicism to analyze postcolonial disappointment in Irish modernism. It argues that in the “ambi-colonial” conditions of early-twentieth-century Ireland, the metropolitan surety of and suaveness of a cynical attitude is available but precarious. We therefore find a recursive cynicism that often turns upon itself, finding the self-distancing and critical sure-footedness of modern, urbane cynicism a stance that itself should be treated with cynical scepticism. The essay detects this recursive cynicism in a number of literary works of post-independence Ireland, concluding with an extended consideration of W. B. Yeats’s great poem of civilizational precarity, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Post-Kantian Philosophy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Franks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Kantian Philosophy

This article examines three moments of the post-Kantian philosophical tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Kantianism, Post-Kantian Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism. It elucidates the distinctive methods of a tradition that has never entirely disappeared and is now acknowledged once again as the source of contemporary insights. It outlines two problematics—naturalist scepticism and historicist nihilism—threatening the possibility of metaphysics. The first concerns sceptical worries about reason, emerging from attempts to extend the methods of natural science to the study of human beings. Kant’s project of a critical and transcendental analysis of reason, with its distinctive methods, should be considered a response. The second arises from the development of new methods of historical inquiry, seeming to undermine the very possibility of individual agency. Also considered are Kant’s successors’ revisions of the critical and transcendental analysis of reason, undertaken to overcome challenges confronting the original versions of Kant’s methods.

Maurice

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-153
Author(s):  
Finn Fordham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Homosexual Orientation ◽  
The World ◽  
Resonant Term ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Edward Carpenter

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.

The Sovereign Logic of Jack London’s Sea Stories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hank Scotch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
The Self ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Spatial Differences ◽  
The Difference

Jack London’s maritime writing often interrogates the difference between the savage space of the “outside” sea and the relative domesticity of land’s civilized interior, as well as the ways in which this spatial distinction supports the sovereignty of space, society, and the self. But instead of maintaining these spatial differences, London’s work is all about exposing their increasing indistinction in the early twentieth century and the effects such a spatial destabilization had on sovereignty itself. This interrogation of the new world order and its effects on previous forms of sovereignty, the chapter argues, is what makes London’s contribution to American maritime writing (especially The Sea-Wolf and The Cruise of the Snark) so important. London’s sea stories not only acknowledge the world’s new “nomos” but the effects this order has on political and personal forms of autonomy and coherence.

EUGENICS AND PRAGMATISM: F. C. S. SCHILLER'S PHILOSOPHICAL POLITICS

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 661-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADMIR SKODO
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Formal Logic ◽  
The Self ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Psychical Research ◽  
Broad Scope ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Eugenics Movement ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
British Philosopher

The British philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937) was a leading pragmatist in the early twentieth century. His critiques of formal logic and his attempts to construct a humanist logic, derived from an anti-foundationalist humanism, are recognized as lasting philosophical achievements. But scholars have failed to consider that Schiller was passionately committed to the British eugenics movement. This essay explores the relationship between Schiller's pragmatism and his eugenicism. It argues that Schiller represents the broad scope of pragmatism in the early twentieth century through his involvements not only with eugenics, but also with psychical research as well. Underneath Schiller's various undertakings lies a common theme: the self, conceived in voluntaristic, historicist, and concrete terms. By tracing the trajectory of this theme in Schiller's thought, this essay demonstrates that Schiller's eugenicism was confined to the presuppositions of his pragmatist logic, which steered Schiller's eugenicism toward a distinctively nondeterministic and non-social-Darwinist kind.

‘What is a Beautiful Body?’

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 192-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murat C. Yıldız
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Young Men ◽  
The Self ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article examines the emergence and spread of the ‘sportsman’ genre of Ottoman photography in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Istanbul. The ‘sportsman photograph’ depicted young men posing shirtless or wearing tight-fitting athletic attire, flexing their muscles and exhibiting their bodies. These images were embedded in a wider set of athletic and leisure activities and constituted novel social and photographic practices. By tracing the deployment of ‘sportsman’ photographs in sports clubs and the press, I argue that they cemented homosocial bonds, normalized and popularized new notions of masculinity, confessionalized the male body and reconfigured the ways in which Ottoman Muslims, Christians and Jews performed and conveyed their commitment to middle-class notions of masculinity and the self.

scholarly journals A Revived Sāṃkhyayoga Tradition in Modern India

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Marzenna Jakubczak
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Right

This paper discusses the phenomenon of Kāpil Maṭh (Madhupur, India), a Sāṃkhyayoga āśrama founded in the early twentieth century by the charismatic Bengali scholar-monk Swāmi Hariharānanda Ᾱraṇya (1869–1947). While referring to Hariharānanda’s writings I will consider the idea of the re-establishment of an extinct spiritual lineage. I shall specify the criteria for identity of this revived Sāṃkhyayoga tradition by explaining why and on what assumptions the modern reinterpretation of this school can be perceived as continuation of the thought of Patañjali and Īśvarakṛṣṇa. The starting point is, however, the question whether it is possible at all to re-establish a philosophical tradition which had once broken down and disappeared for centuries. In this context, one ought to ponder if it is likely to revitalise the same line of thinking, viewing, philosophy-making and practice in accordance with the theoretical exposition of the right insight achieved by an accomplished teacher, a master, the founder of a “new”revived tradition declared to maintain a particular school identity. Moreover, I refer to a monograph of Knut A. Jacobsen (2018) devoted to the tradition of Kāpil Maṭh interpreted as a typical product of the nineteenth-century Bengali renaissance.

SELF, SPENCER AND SWARAJ: NATIONALIST THOUGHT AND CRITIQUES OF LIBERALISM, 1890–1920

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHRUTI KAPILA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Self In Relation ◽  
Liberal Nationalism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Individual Self

In giving a historically specific account of the self in early twentieth-century India, this article poses questions about the historiography of nationalist thought within which the concept of the self has generally been embedded. It focuses on the ethical questions that moored nationalist thought and practice, and were premised on particular understandings of the self. The reappraisal of religion and the self in relation to contemporary evolutionary sociology is examined through the writings of a diverse set of radical nationalist intellectuals, notably Shyamji Krishnavarma, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Har Dayal, and this discussion contextualizes Mohandas Gandhi. Over three related sites of public propaganda, philosophical reinterpretation and individual self-reinvention, the essay charts a concern with the ethical as a form of critique of liberalism and liberal nationalism. While evolutionism and liberalism often had a mutually reinforcing relationship, the Indian critique of liberalism was concerned with the formation of a new moral language for a politics of the self.

BURGLARY INSURANCE AND THE CULTURE OF FEAR IN BRITAIN, c. 1889–1939

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 1039-1064 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELOISE MOSS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Marketing Strategy ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Insurance Sector ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Culture Of Fear ◽  
State And Market ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Market Discourse

ABSTRACTThis article explores the representations of burglary and burglars created by the burglary insurance sector in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Two lines of argument are developed: first, that the marketing strategy of the burglary insurance sector exacerbated existing fears about the nature and prevalence of burglary in a calculated bid to attract custom; and secondly, that the depictions of crime and criminal used in marketing this form of insurance were subsequently revised in the contracts issued to customers as part of the industry's commercial transactions, thereby securing against supposed ‘negligence’ by homeowners as well as malicious attempts to defraud insurers. As the self-styled commercial ‘protection’ against burglary, burglary insurance became an ordinary household investment. Its prosperity therefore enables us to identify certain ideas about crime and criminal then current. Crucially, this research highlights the intersection of media, state, and market discourse about crime in weaving a specific version of burglary into the very fabric of everyday life, uniting three domains that historians of crime have traditionally treated separately.

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