Secularity and the Limits of Reason in Swinburne's “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hymn of Man”

As the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, some experiences of the secular have surprisingly little to do with the “self-sufficient power of reason” that Kant celebrates in “What Is Enlightenment?” This essay argues that Algernon Charles Swinburne offers such a novel strand of secularity in his “Hymn to Proserpine” and “Hymn of Man.” In these poems, time is a power external to the self that is not transcendent yet which the mind cannot fully grasp. Exploring the age of the Earth and the process of evolution, Victorian scientists had been suggesting that the depths of time lie beyond what the human mind may observe or understand, and this notion of time surfaces in Swinburne's poetry. “Hymn to Proserpine” attends to the limits of reason as it evokes deep time. “Hymn to Man,” in which humans channel the power of time, presents logos as both external and internal to the individual subject. By representing and formally registering deep time, Swinburne's poems restore awe and wonder to a world in which God remains absent. Swinburne presents an enchanted vision of the secular and contributes to the pluralization of nontheistic perspectives.

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Johann Joachim Becher (1635–1682), a little known opponent of Comenius’ Theory of Language and Language Learning

Historiographia Linguistica ◽

10.1075/hl.23.1-2.04hul ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 23 (1-2) ◽

pp. 73-88

Author(s):

Werner Hüllen

Keyword(s):

Language Learning ◽

Building Blocks ◽

17Th Century ◽

Human Mind ◽

Learning Abilities ◽

Word Classes ◽

Theory Of Language ◽

Situational Learning ◽

The Individual ◽

The Mind

Summary Concerning the methods of language teaching, Johann Joachim Becher (1635–1682), one of the encyclopedic philosophers of the 17th century, stood in opposition to Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670), the pedagogue of Europewide influence. He published Methodus didactica (1668) and Novum organon (1672), the latter being a universal nomenclator as they were popular in the 17th century. This nomenclator is organised according to Aristotelian categories which Becher saw expressed in word-classes. It assembles groups of synonyms in Latin and German under headwords which were taken as the simple notions, i.e., the building-blocks, of the human mind. Becher demanded didactic principles to be developed out of these linguistic assumptions. Whereas Comenius shaped his teaching methods according to the situational learning abilities of the individual, Becher regarded them as being dominated by the structures of language seen as structures of the mind, thus foreshadowing Cartesian thinking.

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Who Do You Think You Are?

Seeing Clearly ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190887506.003.0008 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 51-57

Author(s):

Nicolas Bommarito

Keyword(s):

The Self ◽

What Works ◽

Special Challenge ◽

Self Knowledge ◽

The Individual ◽

The Mind ◽

Tools And Methods

This chapter explores self-knowledge, which is critical for solving the practical problems involved in getting through life. An awareness of your own quirks, character, and preferences is important for figuring out what works for you. However, self-knowledge is also tricky because it is especially elusive. People commonly learn about themselves only indirectly; often it is only by reading the reactions of others that people can see how harsh, kind, or annoying they are. It is also because when trying to know the self, the thing the individual is trying to see is the very thing that does the looking. Buddhism offers many evocative images to illustrate this special challenge: Just as a knife cannot cut itself, the mind cannot be directed toward itself. This makes knowing the self, especially in a deep way, an especially difficult task. Knowing the self thus requires special kinds of tools and methods. The chapter then considers the concept of Buddha Nature.

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How Is Strength of the Will Possible? Concerning Francis of Marchia and the Act of the Will

Vivarium ◽

10.1163/156853406778169077 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 44 (1) ◽

pp. 151-183

Author(s):

Andrea Robiglio

Keyword(s):

Human Mind ◽

The Self ◽

Weakness Of Will ◽

The Will ◽

The Mind

AbstractFrancis of Marchia dealt at length in several different contexts with the nature of the will and willing. Here I examine just one of those discussions: the possibility for the will to go against reason's final judgment, a topic related to weakness of will and the source of sin. Marchia is clearly of a voluntaristic bent, holding that the will can indeed act against the determination of reason. After examining Marchia's argumentation for his position, I explore some of the background to Marchia's view in a distinctively later medieval understanding of the human mind as a system of internal acts and dispositions, with the possibility that several of them belong to the same faculty simultaneously. This increasingly complex conceptualisation of the mind mirrors a new, more complex conceptualization of the "Self".

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The Many-Minded Man

10.7591/cornell/9781501752346.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Joel P. Christensen

Keyword(s):

Social Context ◽

Human Mind ◽

The Self ◽

Sense Of Agency ◽

Human Identity ◽

The Many ◽

The Individual ◽

Therapeutic Model

This book explores the content, character, and structure of the Homeric Odyssey through a modern psychological lens, focusing on how the epic both represents the workings of the human mind and provides for its audiences — both ancient and modern — a therapeutic model for coping with the exigencies of chance and fate. By reading the Odyssey as an exploration of the constitutive elements of human identity, the function of narrative in defining the self, and the interaction between the individual and their social context, the book addresses enduring questions about the poem, such as the importance of Telemachus's role, why Odysseus must tell his own tale, and the epic's sudden and unexpected closure. Through these dynamics, the book reasons, the Odyssey not only instructs readers about how narrative shapes a sense of agency but also offers solutions for avoiding dangerous stories and destructive patterns of thought.

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Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198717133.013.13 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Zuckert

Keyword(s):

Charles Taylor ◽

Human Action ◽

Human Mind ◽

History Of Philosophy ◽

The Self ◽

Human Beings ◽

History Of

This chapter reviews Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. The book displays Taylor’s mastery not only of the history of philosophy, but of theology, poetry, and art. He also shares Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s commitment to synthesizing competing and conflicting elements of the culture. Unlike Hegel, however, Taylor does not see philosophy as the highest and truest expression of the human mind or spirit; rather he sees the artists—the poets most especially—as the ones who “can put us in contact with” what we as living and thinking humans need to be in contact with. This chapter examines Taylor’s arguments as articulated in Sources of the Self, especially his view that human beings are self-interpreting and self-misinterpreting animals and that self-interpretation has ontological significance. It also considers what Taylor identifies as a “phenomenology” of human action, his theory of morality and identity, and his concept of the “punctual self.”

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Sincerity, authenticity and profilicity: Notes on the problem, a vocabulary and a history of identity

Philosophy & Social Criticism ◽

10.1177/0191453718799801 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 45 (5) ◽

pp. 575-596 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Hans-Georg Moeller ◽

Paul J. D’Ambrosio

Keyword(s):

Identity Formation ◽

Social Systems ◽

Modern Society ◽

Functional Differentiation ◽

Second Order ◽

The Self ◽

Niklas Luhmann ◽

Basic Vocabulary ◽

The Individual ◽

The Mind

This essay attempts to provide a preliminary outline of a theory of identity. The first section addresses what the sociologist Niklas Luhmann has called ‘the problem of identity’, or, in other words, the mind–society (rather than the mind–body) problem: In how far can the internal (psychological) self and the external (social) persona be integrated into a unit? The second section of the essay briefly defines a basic vocabulary of a theory of identity. ‘Identity’ is understood as the existentially necessary formation of a coherence between the ‘self’ (the ‘I’ as it is experienced in thoughts and feelings), its body and its social ‘persona’ (the individual person with its social attributes). Three different major paradigms of identity formation are distinguished from one another: a sincere identity is constructed through a firm commitment of the self to its social roles; an authentic identity is constructed through the creation of a social persona on the basis of one’s unique and original self; a ‘profilic’ identity, as we call it, is shaped by successfully presenting a personal profile under conditions of second-order observation as they prevail, for instance, in the social media, but also in other contemporary social systems. In the third section of the essay, we present a sketch of the historical sequence of these three paradigms of identity. Although these paradigms are not mutually exclusive and can coexist, it seems that sincerity flourished in pre-modern society, while authenticity came to prominence along with the functional differentiation of modern society and is now, along with the increased significance of second-order observation, gradually overshadowed by the influence of profilicity.

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Rendering the hidden visible: subjected to “work on the self” in a local labour market measure

Journal of Organizational Ethnography ◽

10.1108/joe-04-2020-0012 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽

Author(s):

Jon Sunnerfjell

Keyword(s):

Labour Market ◽

Local Level ◽

Human Mind ◽

The Self ◽

Content Type ◽

Local Labour Market ◽

Local Labour ◽

The Individual ◽

Socially Excluded ◽

Practical Implications

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to complement the literature understanding present labour market measures as infused by a so-called neoliberal rationality, fostering self-managerial selves by means of self-inspection. It does so by providing a much-needed illustration of how such “work on the self” is achieved in practice.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork tracing the “active society” at the local level, depicting practices aimed at activating welfare clients in a local labour market measure organised in a rural Swedish municipality. Here, the author was offered to undergo a method aimed at enhancing participants' employability. As a result, data consists of ethnographic as well as auto-ethnographic accounts from this experience.FindingsThis analysis shows how destabilisation of subjectivity was central to the remoulding of individuals into employable and self-reliant selves. Moreover, by dispersing responsibility to the individual, it is shown how the organisation was able to refrain from accountability, hence reducing the levels of uncertainty and ambiguity that is part and parcel of people-processing welfare organisations.Practical implicationsThe article concludes with the warning that, in the wake of “local worlds of activation”, municipalities may sometimes draw on questionable assumptions of the human mind and behaviour, as well as the vulnerability of individuals' self-understanding, as a way of managing the “active society” at the local level.Originality/valueThe literature on activation lacks ethnographic accounts depicting concrete practices of turning the socially excluded into active and employable selves. Here, this article offers an illustrating example of such practices in action.

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Racialised Inequality, Anti-Racist Strategies and the Workings of the ‘Dialogical Self’: A Case Study in the Shifting Construction of Migrant Identity in Ireland

Irish Journal of Sociology ◽

10.7227/ijs.22.1.4 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 51-66 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Liam Coakley

Keyword(s):

Contact Zone ◽

The Self ◽

Individual Subject ◽

Cultural Contact ◽

Recent Immigrants ◽

Dialogical Self ◽

The Individual ◽

Specific Manifestation ◽

Dialogic Interaction

The theory of the dialogical self understands that identity is constructed from a shifting pallet of ‘I’ voices, each created from the dialogic interaction that takes place between the individual subject ‘I’ and multiple ‘others’. These positions are changeable and identity space is constructed in each context, out of the interaction that takes place between a situationally specific manifestation of the self and an ‘other’, who is deemed to be important and worthy of note. This article engages with this conceptualisation in an effort to illustrate how some recent immigrants to Ireland internalise the experience of life in a new cultural contact zone, against a background penetrated by experiences of racialised othering. This takes many forms, but after these experiences are extracted from research participants’ narrative stories, individual immigrants are seen to harness a series of different positions in an effort to internalise the experience of this racialised discrimination and negotiate its place in their lives. Two particular strategies are adopted. Racialised discriminations are seen to be anchored in notions of human nature, broadly based. Immigrants use this conceptualisation to divorce the experience from their aspirations for their future life in Ireland. Equally, Immigrants are seen to switch ‘I’ positions laterally in order to defect the experience of exclusion. In so doing, potentially new and intersectional migrant identity spaces are created.

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II. Models of the Self

New Surveys in the Classics ◽

10.1017/s0533245100022112 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 25 ◽

pp. 5-19

Keyword(s):

Social Relationships ◽

The Study Of Theological Sin And The Meaning Of Transformation Based On Romans 12:1-2

Journal Kerugma ◽

10.33856/kerugma.v3i1.158 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 60-76

Author(s):

Tony Andrean ◽

David Ming

Keyword(s):

Human Mind ◽

Additional Insight ◽

The Bible ◽

The Earth ◽

Real Change ◽

Genesis 1 ◽

In The Beginning ◽

The Mind ◽

Further Development ◽

The Universe

"In the beginning He created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and empty; pitch darkness covered the great oceans, and the Spirit of God drifted over the surface of the earth '(Genesis 1: 1). chaotic "or" irregular. "(Warren Baker, Study OId Testament. AMG publisher, 1994: 2-3G.). Then in the process of creating humans for maintain the universe, but man falls into sin so that his mind or intellect is dominated by sin. What is produced by the mind ruled by sin? The Scriptures state the following: first, the human character is in vain (Romans 1:21). Second, it is not fair for anyone to be wise (Romans 3.11). Third, the human mind becomes evil (Ephesians 5: 4, the human mind is hostile to God and results in evil deeds 1.21) In further development, the universe is not getting better, it's actually getting more and more damaged. Natural disasters occur everywhere, economic conditions are chaotic, laws are violated by the leaders themselves, society is socially hostile to each other, crime is everywhere. With the chaotic event, humans crave a real change and share of activities carried out to realize these desires, among others, with the current plasticity, the transformation movement. The author conducted this research and the results are expected to provide information and additional insight for parties related to the problem of understanding the doctrine of existence and the meaning of sin, thus understanding the meaning of transformation based on the Bible to be changed to not sin anymore. The expected benefit is to provide correct knowledge to the congregation and God's servants regarding the effects of sin in their lives. Especially in service, how they anticipate sin and experience transformation changes in their lives. Thus it can remind every believer to remain faithful and abstain from every action that brings sin

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