Sophocles’ Ajax: A Matter of Judgment

Antichthon ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 18-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary M. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Emotional Appeal ◽  
The Human Condition

Ajax is unmatched among the works of Sophocles in its barren, cruel atmosphere and its repulsive view of society. The dominant mood is hatred; sometimes it simply breaks out; but always it is there in language and action. Ajax’ curious emotional appeal to us was noted by earlier critics. ‘Odysseus is the wise man, Odysseus adopts the correct attitude, but it is to Ajax that the heart goes out.’ More recently, Kitto and Knox have modified the conception of an Ajax deserving of our pity. His suffering is largely self-inflicted, and is admirable solely because he labours so fiercely to purge his reputation of the damage caused by his wrongdoing. ‘Ajax had little Wisdom in the handling of his life, and his lack of Wisdom destroyed him, but nevertheless Ajax was magnificent.’ This view typifies the conventional opinion. Knox finds the essential issue to be the inadequacy of the old morality (τούς μέν φίλους εΰ ποιεϊν, τούς δ’ έχϑρούς κακῶς — to help your friends, harm your enemies). Its disadvantages are illustrated in Ajax’ blind retaliation at whatever cost. Knox builds a superb case from the scene where Ajax awakens to the fluctuation of human relationships in his famous soliloquy about the inroads of time (646 ff.). The instinctive resilience and self-control of Odysseus make him the triumphant figure. Indeed, the emergence of these qualities softens and harmonizes a discordant presentation of the hybris-ate motif. ‘The nature of man’s life in time, its instability, is recognized by all three parties, Ajax, Odysseus, the Atridae. The only code of conduct proper to such a vision of the human condition is that of Odysseus, a tolerant and tragic humility.’

Bacon, Francis (1909–1992)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fionna Barber
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Emotional Appeal ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Human Condition

British painter Francis Bacon was one of the most important figures of international post-war modernism. During the 1940s and 1950s, he developed a characteristic painting format used throughout his career, generally featuring an isolated figure within an armature or stage-like setting. Bacon’s work is renowned for its raw emotional appeal, and also its ability to convey an existential sense of the human condition. Bacon’s painting developed sporadically until Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) attracted considerable critical attention. During the 1950s, a series of variations on Diego Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c. 1650) supported the development of Bacon’s international reputation, consolidated by a major retrospective at the Tate in 1962. In 1970, however, on the eve of his major retrospective exhibition at Grand Palais, Paris, his former lover George Dyer died of an overdose, a tragedy Bacon later commemorated in a group of triptychs. After this event he withdrew considerably from Soho Bohemia, in which he had played such a leading role during the previous two decades.

Violent Ideas Treated as Disease and Compassionate Reasoning as Treatment

2021 ◽  
pp. 131-169
Author(s):  
Marc Gopin
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Mental Health ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Future Orientation ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Health Official ◽  
The Human Condition

The tendency to obey bullies generates the most violent ideas, but they can be overcome by training in Compassionate Reasoning and elicitive peacebuilding. This entails drawing wisdom from each person, thus building peace between groups. Enter the sciences of medicine and public health. The helping professional—the nurse, the doctor, the epidemiologist, or the health official—makes moment-to-moment decisions in order to save lives. This includes honoring and listening to each patient and their unique needs. The practitioner looks at scientific studies of the human condition across cultures, and also contexts of mental health, family, community, and environment. Public health focuses on health more than illness. Compassion cultivation, imagination, self-control, meaningfulness, and a future orientation are essential. A focus on contagion and epidemiology can be applied by Compassionate Reasoning toward threats against compassion practice and moral reasoning, as well identifying opportunities for the positive “contagion” of compassion and collective reasoning.

John Dunne's Journey of the Mind, Heart, and Soul

Horizons ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Collinge
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Presence Of God ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractThis paper looks back over the eight books of John S. Dunne as forming a unified theological project in two phases, each comprising four books. Dunne's first phase is a “journey of the mind,” in which Dunne is concerned with knowing and unknowing, with understanding and insight, and his basic epistemological stance is developed. His second phase is a “journey of the heart,” in which he moves from the basic loneliness of the human condition, to the “heart's desire” for God, to the presence of God in the desiring. Several changes in Dunne's understanding of the human relationships with God, others, and self are traced here. Dunne's most recent book adds a “pilgrimage of the soul” to those of mind and heart, so this paper moves to a discussion of the meaning and development of Dunne's idea of “soul.” It concludes by considering Dunne's work as spiritual writing and as theology.

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Mushrooms ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Black Land ◽  
The Human Condition

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  

Das Internet der Tiere: Natur 4.0 und die conditio humana

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Alexander Pschera
Keyword(s):  
Industry 4.0 ◽  
Industrie 4.0 ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Conditio Humana ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Human Condition

"Neben der Industrie hat die Digitalisierung auch die Natur ergriffen. Die Tatsache, dass Tausende von Tieren mit GPS-Sendern aus- gerüstet und überwacht werden, erlaubt, analog zur Industrie 4.0 auch von einer Natur 4.0 zu sprechen. Dieses Internet der Tiere verändert den Begriff, den der Mensch von der Natur hat. Er transformiert die Wahrnehmung vor allem der Natur als etwas fundamental An- deren. Neben den vielen kulturellen Problematisierungen, die das Internet der Tiere mit sich bringt, lassen sich aber auch die Umrisse einer neuen, ganz und gar nicht esoterischen planetarisch-post-digitalen Kultur aufzeigen, die die conditio humana verändert. In addition to industry, digitalization has also taken hold of nature. The fact that thousands of animals are provided and monitored with GPS transmitters allows to speak of nature 4.0 by way of analogy to industry 4.0. This internet of animals changes our idea of nature. Most of all, it transforms the perception of nature as something fundamentally other. Beside the many cultural problems that the internet of animals implies, it can also outline a new, not at all esoteric planetary post-digital culture that is about to change the human condition. "

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document