From the Double Movement to the Double Danger: Kierkegaard and Rebounding Violence

2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-352
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bagger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
The Other ◽  
Double Movement ◽  
The Face ◽  
Selection Of

In the introduction to Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience, Maurice Bloch makes some forthright admissions about the methodological and theoretical pitfalls threatening a project of the scope he undertakes in this slim, provocative volume. He acknowledges, for instance, the temptation, when arguing for what he describes as a “quasi-universal” religious structure, to present “a tendentious selection of examples, and make this structure appear to be present everywhere.”1 In the face of this danger, independent readers, who “choose to continue the exercise by trying to see whether what is proposed here stands up to the test of the other cases they know” become the most important critical constraint.2 In what follows I test Bloch's theory of rebounding violence against the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish theologian.

Postures of Trust

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madhuri M. Yadlapati
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Christian Theologian ◽  
The One

This chapter explores several articulations of faith as the consciousness of humility or dependence, on the one hand, and belonging to a world of meaning, on the other hand. These two forms of experience together identify some defining sense of trust in the sacred. Thus, the chapter begins with a discussion of humility, as treated by several Christian mystics and ritually enacted by Muslims in the five pillars of faith. Next, it considers nineteenth-century Christian theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher's treatment of religious experience and Christian God-consciousness. Finally, the chapter deals with the experience of reconciliation, whether as promise or as realized, and considers in detail a South Indian Hindu puja, the Satyanarayana vrata, as a ritual and mythic enactment of belonging to a larger world.

The Imperial Coronation of 1819: Awadh, the British and the Mughals

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Other ◽  
North India ◽  
Gangetic Plain ◽  
Indian History ◽  
The Face ◽  
English East India Company

The interaction among the expanding British, the regional rulers of the Gangetic plain, and Mughal Emperors stands central to Indian history during the first half of the nineteenth century. Each of these three groups determined to advance its own political and cultural values in the face of the conflicting expectations and assumptions of the other two. The English East India Company regarded itself as under the authority of the British Parliament and the sovereignty of the British crown. At the same time, the Company continued nominally to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Mughal Emperor, at least in India. The various regional rulers of north India, most prominently the rulers of the province of Awadh, acted and apparently perceived themselves as de facto independent of the Mughals while also symbolically submitted to Mughal sovereignty. The Mughal Emperors, whose power to command armies had faded to nothingness during the last half of the eighteenth century, continued to pretend to absolute sovereignty over virtually all of India until 1858. Each of these three groups wished to see the 1819 imperial coronation by the Awadh ruler as an overt proof of their own cultural values and of their understanding of their relationships to the others.

scholarly journals Confucian Exemplars and Catholic Saints as Models for Women in Nineteenth-Century Korea

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Deberniere Torrey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Marginalization ◽  
Lifestyle Choices ◽  
The Face ◽  
Didactic Texts ◽  
High Standards ◽  
Chinese Classic

Women in Joseon Korea (1392–1910) were held to high standards of virtue, which were propagated through didactic texts such as the “Chaste and Obedient Biographies” volume of Lienü Zhuan, the Chinese classic featuring biographies of exemplary women. Joseon women who converted to Catholicism were also educated in standards of Catholic virtue, often through the biographies of saints, which shared with the Confucian exemplar stories an emphasis on faithfulness and self-sacrifice. Yet, the differences between Confucian and Catholic standards of virtue were great enough to elicit persecution of Catholics throughout the nineteenth century. Therefore conversion would have involved evaluating one set of standards against the other and determining that Catholicism was worth the price of social marginalization and persecution. Through a comparison of the Confucian exemplar stories and Catholic saints’ stories, this paper explores how Catholic standards of virtue might have motivated conversion of Joseon women to Catholicism. This comparison highlights aspects of the saints’ stories that offered lifestyle choices unavailable to women in traditional Joseon society and suggests that portrayals of the saints’ confidence in the face of human and natural oppressors could also have provided inspiration to ease the price of conversion.

scholarly journals Levinas and the Significance of Passivity in the Christian Religious Experience

Open Theology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 511-519
Author(s):  
James Cyfko
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Active Agent ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Face

Abstract Analyzing the tendency of Christian believers to rationalize the religious experience of the face of the Other, I reveal through Levinas, how, in doing so, they paradoxically neglect to perceive God, who is love. I will focus on the appropriate response shown by both Levinas and Christ in the inter-human drama, specifically, that of passive kenosis, as opposed to self-preserving activity. In undergoing the an-archic passion of the Other, I encounter a possibility of transformation from my self qua ego which disconnects me from reality, to my self qua responsibility which throws me back into my finitude. This becomes most powerful upon experiencing the Crucifixion of Christ, as ‛I’, as active agent, become traumatically substituted by ‛me’, as passive recipient. When I surrender to this accusative gaze of the face of Christ which pierces my egoistic shell, I encounter, according to Levinas, the infinite demands of the vulnerable Other haunting me before ontological qualification. In this, I experience the trace of the inescapable Infinite who calls me to holiness. This holiness can only be reached if I cease to manipulate God, instead allowing him the freedom to do with me as he wills through the self-emptying passivity which Levinas describes.

scholarly journals The sexual selection of hominin bipedalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dale
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Selection ◽  
Selection Pressure ◽  
Dominance Hierarchy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bipedal Locomotion ◽  
Evolutionary Adaptation ◽  
High Fitness ◽  
Fitness Consequences ◽  
The Face ◽  
Selection Of

In this article, I advance a novel hypothesis on the evolution of hominin bipedalism. I begin by arguing extensively for how the transition to bipedalism must have been problematic for hominins during the Neogene. Due to this and the fact that no other primate has made the unusual switch to bipedalism, it seems likely that the selection pressure towards bipedalism was unusually strong. With this in mind, I briefly lay out some of the most promising hypotheses on the evolutionary origin of hominin bipedalism and show how most, if not all, fail in the face of the need for an unusually strong selection pressure. For example, some hypotheses maintain that hominins became bipedal so they could use their hands for carrying infants, food, or other valuable objects. But extant apes are able to carry objects in one of their front limbs (while walking with the other three), and thus it does not seem plausible that our hominin ancestors went through the troublesome transition to bipedalism just so they could carry objects a little more efficiently. After I show that past hypotheses are wanting in the face of this challenge, I argue that there is only one selection pressure powerful enough to instigate a strange and problematic evolutionary adaptation like bipedalism, and that is sexual selection. Specifically, from the fact that bipedal locomotion is an important strategy for intimidating others and ascending the dominance hierarchy in extant apes, I argue that for no particular selective reason bipedal locomotion became a signal for high fitness (much as a large and intricate tail became a signal for high fitness for peahens), and this led to the trait being continuously reinforced in spite of all its deleterious fitness consequences.

The Life of Words

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David-Antoine Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Paul Muldoon ◽  
Anne Carson ◽  
Structural Linguistics ◽  
True Meaning ◽  
Ciaran Carson ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

For centuries, investigations into the origins of words were entwined with investigations into the origins of humanity and the cosmos. With the development of modern etymological practice in the nineteenth century, however, many cherished etymologies were shown to be impossible, and the very idea of original ‘true meaning’ asserted in the etymology of ‘etymology’ declared a fallacy. Structural linguistics later held that the relationship between sound and meaning in language was ‘arbitrary’, or ‘unmotivated’, a truth that has survived with small modification until today. On the other hand, the relationship between sound and meaning has been a prime motivator of poems, at all times throughout history. The Life of Words studies a selection of poets inhabiting our ‘Age of the Arbitrary’, whose auditory-semantic sensibilities have additionally been motivated by a historical sense of the language, troubled as it may be by claims and counterclaims of ‘fallacy’ or ‘true meaning’. Arguing that etymology activates peculiar kinds of epistemology in the modern poem, the book pays extended attention to poems by G. M. Hopkins, Anne Waldman, Ciaran Carson, and Anne Carson, and to the collected works of Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, J. H. Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, and Paul Muldoon.

Background Studies in the Teaching of Latin

1953 ◽  
Vol 22 (64) ◽  
pp. 18-26
Author(s):  
F. W. Garforth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Mental Training ◽  
The Face ◽  
One Year ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

From the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century the teaching of Latin in England emphasized grammar and the formal aspects of language at the expense of subject-matter and of the general background of civilization. The tradition continued into the twentieth century and is still not dead. Protests against this formalizing and grammaticizing of a potentially liberal subject have been made regularly, at least from Elyot onwards. ‘By what time he [the pupil] cometh to the most sweet and pleasant reading of old authors, the spark of fervent desire of learning is extinct with the burthen of grammar’ (Governour, Book I. x). Milton, in the Tractate, writes: ‘Language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known.… We do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learnt easily and delightfully in one year’ (ed. Morris, p. 5). Locke makes a similar complaint (Thoughts, para. 165 ff.). During England's classical age protests were fewer; for the end—familiarity with Latin and Greek literature (or rather with a fairly narrow selection of it)—was so desirable that it justified the means, however unpleasant. In the nineteenth century the volume of protest grew again and was reinforced by the partisans of science; notably Spencer and Huxley. But the linguistic tradition was strengthened rather than weakened, at least for the time being; for its supporters, rationalizing their prejudices in the face of attack, conjured up the various mental-training arguments which ever since have confused the whole issue of the value of Latin in education.

African Sculpture

Africa ◽  
1928 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eckart von Sydow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
The Other ◽  
Art World ◽  
It Service ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
Successful Colonization

At first sight this sub-title may appear somewhat paradoxical, for what could be in greater contrast than the things denoted by the words ‘primitive’ and ‘European’? On the one hand, civilization with its highly developed technical methods in everything practical and theoretical, on the other, the world of simplicity in all practical activities. There—a mighty movement of expansion, irresistibly drawing into its sphere of influence all primitive life, to transform or destroy it, and in either case to make what remains of the primitive peoples and their countries do it service; here—vain resistance against the superior strength of the European, or the doubtful attempt to conform to European ideals. In the face of successful colonization by the cultured races of Europe, the last thing to be expected was any influence on Europe by the primitive peoples. Nevertheless, such an influence certainly exists, and that in the realm of art. After the period of realistic Impressionism in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a strong movement flowed through the art world of Europe, finding its most permanent expression as Futurism in Italy, Cubism in France, and Expressionism in Germany. This movement in Germany, in opposition to Realism, made it one of its principles to observe and express not the external but the interior world, while in France the desire for bold drawing of a decorative character prevailed. Both tendencies culminated in an art movement which felt for the primitive works of art a sympathy due to a sense of relationship: the Cubist appreciated their inherent architectural character, and the Expressionists the mystic emotional content.

Note on Selection of Coordinate Systems for Geodynamics

1975 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 395-407
Author(s):  
S. Henriksen
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level ◽  
The Other ◽  
Coordinate Systems ◽  
Mean Sea Level ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The One ◽  
Static Systems ◽  
Selection Of

The first question to be answered, in seeking coordinate systems for geodynamics, is: what is geodynamics? The answer is, of course, that geodynamics is that part of geophysics which is concerned with movements of the Earth, as opposed to geostatics which is the physics of the stationary Earth. But as far as we know, there is no stationary Earth – epur sic monere. So geodynamics is actually coextensive with geophysics, and coordinate systems suitable for the one should be suitable for the other. At the present time, there are not many coordinate systems, if any, that can be identified with a static Earth. Certainly the only coordinate of aeronomic (atmospheric) interest is the height, and this is usually either as geodynamic height or as pressure. In oceanology, the most important coordinate is depth, and this, like heights in the atmosphere, is expressed as metric depth from mean sea level, as geodynamic depth, or as pressure. Only for the earth do we find “static” systems in use, ana even here there is real question as to whether the systems are dynamic or static. So it would seem that our answer to the question, of what kind, of coordinate systems are we seeking, must be that we are looking for the same systems as are used in geophysics, and these systems are dynamic in nature already – that is, their definition involvestime.

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