BEYOND THE HUMAN CONDITION: DURATION AND VIRTUALITY IN HERACLITUS

Ramus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-69
Author(s):  
Richard Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
The Human Condition

Gilles Deleuze's engagement with Heraclitus is long-standing, going back to his early work on Nietzsche, and persisting through the collaborative volumes produced with Félix Guattari in which Heraclitus becomes a key exemplar of their own philosophical method, whereby thought and nature are said to fold into one another in creative configurations. For Deleuze, as before him for Nietzsche, Heraclitus’ conception of universal becoming and of the constitutive flows across codes—be they ontological, epistemological, political, or ethical—demands a radical re-evaluation of the place of the human in time, and of the boundaries of subjectivity. Elsewhere, Deleuze states that the very meaning of philosophy is ‘to go beyond the human condition’ by opening us up to the other durations—inhuman and superhuman—with which, and by which, we are disclosed. A further key interlocutor here is Henri Bergson, whose work on time as duration, with psychological and ontological import, is central to the development of many of Deleuze's philosophical positions, including those subsequently nuanced by his work with Félix Guattari. Before attempting to map the plane of affiliations upon which these thinkers move, it is necessary to begin from Heraclitus’ own words on philosophical method and the opposition he draws between the correct, though elusive, practice of νόος (‘thought’, ‘understanding’) and the inadequate model of πολυμαθίη (‘much learning’) adopted by his intellectual predecessors.

Marginalia as narratives of ordinary lives: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down to This

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942098111
Author(s):  
Silvia Julia Caporale-Bizzini
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Personal Journey ◽  
The Public ◽  
Big City ◽  
The Human Condition

This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter with the other (Butler, 2004). The text is written as a journal where Bishop-Stall describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in notorious Toronto’s Tent City. The characters’ unreliable and fragmented storytelling uncovers the lives of the faceless others. I contend that in Down to This individuals’ life stories are connected to realities which question binaries through the re/mapping of ordinary experiences and affects; they disintegrate the opposition materiality vs abstraction, or as I argue, exclusion vs inclusion (out of the ordinary/ordinary). Down to These bridges the private details of the residents’ life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition. I show my point by drawing on the of marginalia (Kistner 2014), and by analysing the characters’ narratives of precariousness through the notions of editing and affective assemblage (Gerlach, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017).

scholarly journals Consuming Desire in Under the Skin

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Yael Maurer
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Fictional Narrative ◽  
Porous Boundaries ◽  
Destructive Potential ◽  
The Human Condition

Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin is a Gothicized science fictional narrative about sexuality, alterity and the limits of humanity. The film’s protagonist, an alien female, passing for an attractive human, seduces unwary Scottish males, leading them to a slimy, underwater/womblike confinement where their bodies dissolve and nothing but floating skins remain. In this paper, I look at the film’s engagement with the notions of consumption, the alien as devourer trope, and the nature of the ‘other’, comparing this filmic depiction with Michael Faber’s novel on which the film is based. I examine the film’s reinvention of Faber’s novel as a more open-ended allegory of the human condition as always already ‘other’. In Faber’s novel, the alien female seduces and captures the men who are consumed and devoured by an alien race, thus providing a reversal of the human species’ treatment of animals as mere food. Glazer’s film, however, chooses to remain ambiguous about the alien female’s ‘nature’ to the very end. Thus, the film remains a more open-ended meditation about alterity, the destructive potential of sexuality, and the fear of consumption which lies at the heart of the Gothic’s interrogation of porous boundaries.

scholarly journals The Joy of Being as Anthropological Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-73
Author(s):  
Agapov Oleg D. ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Human Condition

The joy of being is connected with one’s activities aimed at responding to the challenges of the elemental forces and the boundlessness of being, which are independent of human subjectivity. In the context of rising to the challenges of being, one settles to acquire a certain power of being in themselves and in the world. Thus, the joy of being is tied to achieving the level of the “miraculous fecundity” (E. Levinas), “an internal necessity of one’s life” (F. Vasilyuk), magnanimity (M. Mamardashvili). The ontological duty of any human being is to succeed at being human. The joy of being is closely connected to experiencing one’s involvement in the endless/eternity and realizing one’s subjective temporality/finitude, which attunes him to the absolute seriousness in relation to one’s complete realization in life. Joy is a foundational anthropological phenomenon in the structure of ways of experiencing the human condition. The joy of being as an anthropological practice can appear as a constantly expanding sphere of human subjectivity where the transfiguration of the powers of being occurs under the sign of the Height (Levinas) / the Good. Without the possibility of transfiguration human beings get tired of living, immerse themselves in the dejected state of laziness and the hopelessness of vanity. The joy of being is connected to unity, gathering the multiplicity of human life under the aegis of meaning that allows us to see the other and the alien in heteronomous being, and understand the nature of co-participation and responsibility before the forces of being, and also act in synergy with them.The joy of being stands before a human being as the joy of fatherhood/ motherhood, the joy of being a witness to the world in creative acts (the subject as a means to retreat before the world and let the world shine), the joy of every day that was saved from absurdity, darkness and the impersonal existence of the total. Keywords: joy, higher reality, anthropological practices, “the height”, subject, transcendence, practice of coping

scholarly journals Intensifying and De-intensifying Distinctions

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 493-515
Author(s):  
Marin Terpstra
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Cognitive Operation ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Space ◽  
The One ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract In this article I explore different ways of imagining distinctions in the form of borders and on the attitudes that people assume towards them. A distinction is primarily a cognitive operation, but appears as such in human communication (people talking about differences and identities), and in constructions that shape the material space people live in (borders, buildings, and the like). I explore two extreme positions, the one de-intensifying distinctions by focusing on their logical and contingent forms, the other intensifying distinctions by making them a potential cause of conflict. The first one is exemplified by Spencer Brown’s and Niklas Luhmann’s reflection on the logical and sociological aspects of distinctions; the second one by Carl Schmitt’s theory of ‘the political’ and its key notion of the distinction between friend and enemy. Both positions are relevant to understand a major debate and struggle in the world of today between liberal cosmopolitans and authoritarian nationalists. I show in what way both positions are aspects of the human condition, and what makes that alternately the one or the other is stressed.

Exile

2021 ◽  
pp. 398-414
Author(s):  
Johannes Bartuschat
Keyword(s):  
Major Element ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Third ◽  
Vita Nuova ◽  
Moral Lesson ◽  
Other World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter examines the way the poet represents his exile. It is composed of three parts: the first considers the way Dante handles his exile in relation to authorship, and reveals how he constructs his authority from his position as an exile in the Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, and his Epistles. The second analyses exile as a major element of the autobiographical dimension of the Commedia. It shows that the necessity to grasp the moral lesson of the exile constitutes the very heart of the poem. The third part explores the relationship between exile and pilgrimage, the latter being, from the Vita Nuova onwards, a symbol of the human condition, and demonstrates how Dante interprets his experience both as an exile and as a wanderer in the other world in the light of pilgrimage.

Souster, Raymond (1921–2012)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Conrad Scott
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The City ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Human Condition

Raymond Holmes Souster has been described as a poet of place who invests Toronto, the city of his life-long residence, deeply into his writing. Having worked for some forty-five years at the downtown Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Souster’s immersion in a particular place certainly informed his poetic output; however, Souster the poet also ponders the human condition. On the one hand, he writes from a basis of experience: the destruction of war and the changes imposed by the rise of the modern era. On the other, his work seeks out and highlights that which is still precious despite the weight of the world he feels. Moreover, he clearly values poetry as a salve to the cacophonous imposition of modernity, and continually encourages poetic development: in addition to his substantial body of work, he has supported Canadian poetry by editing several anthologies, and as a creator of Direction (editor 1943–6); a founder of Contact (editor 1952–4); an editor of Combustion (1957–60); and a founding member of the League of Canadian Poets (president 1967–71).

Leadership–It's a System, Not a Person!

Daedalus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 145 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human History ◽  
Leaders And Followers ◽  
The Human Condition

This article argues that the leadership industry has been beset by a bias. This bias has been directed toward leaders and away from two other variables that equally pertain–and that equally explain the trajectory of human history. The first is followers, or others who are in any way relevant, even if passively. And the second is contexts, within which leaders and followers necessarily are embedded. Together these three parts, each of which is equally important and each of which impinges equally on the other two, make up the leadership system. This article suggests that the approximately forty-year-old leadership industry has paid a heavy price for its obsession with leaders at the expense of whoever/whatever else matters. For the industry has not in any major, measurable way improved the human condition, which is precisely why it should be reconsidered and reconceived.

“Words crumbled in my mouth like rotten mushrooms”

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 521-549
Author(s):  
Jana V. Schmidt ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ingeborg Bachmann ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Hermann Broch ◽  
The One ◽  
Exclusive Focus ◽  
The Human Condition

A near exclusive focus on Hannah Arendt’s concept of forgiveness from her major work The Human Condition has obscured the equally important model of reconciliation in her writings on aesthetics and in her Thought Notebook. By engaging Arendt in a dialogue with her contemporaries and friends Ingeborg Bachmann and Hermann Broch, on the one hand, and with the classic thinkers of tragedy, Aristotle and Goethe, on the other hand, I show how reconciliation responds to the situation of fatherlessness after 1945 and, as a “reconciliation with reality,” offers a new basis for intersubjectivity. Having, as Arendt writes, “enough of origin within” ourselves to do without pre-established categories cannot mean that we must begin to “father” ourselves but that, on the contrary, our inception as beings born to begin anew leaves us radically forlorn and yet equipped with everything we need to “make world” with one another. The essay contends that imagination, judgment, and understanding build a network of thought figures in Arendt that are tied to reality through the work of reconciliation.

Relational and caring partnerships: (re)creating equity, genuineness, and growth in mentoring faculty relationships

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Penelope Anne Cash ◽  
Pertice Moffitt
Keyword(s):  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Relational Ethics ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Faculty Relationships ◽  
Mentoring Practices ◽  
Critical Feminist ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract Mentoring in academia has traditionally and currently been prescriptive and institutionally driven. The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct these current mentoring practices with a critical feminist stance. New understandings are shared and gained through dialogue, relevant literature, and performativity to (re)create and name a caring and relational partnership. This caring and relational partnership is grown through a process of mutuality and reciprocity, and based on relational ethics, authenticity, and solidarity. By embracing ideologies of caring and relational ethics, mentoring blurs the lines of mentor/mentee to a perpetual state of walking beside each other in equity to learn and strengthen each other’s insights into our worlds. Material realities become illuminated through our shared journeys growing an appreciation and gift of the other. In turn, engaging in meaningful dialogue informs scholarship increasing our understandings of the human condition.

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