Autonomy beyond Voluntarism: In Defense of Hierarchy

2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefaan E. Cuypers

We haveconflictingpre-philosophical intuitions about what it means ‘to be true to ourselves.’ On the one hand, autonomy and authenticity seem closely connected to the lucidity of reflectiveness; on the other, they seem tightly interwoven with the immediacy of unreflectiveness. As opposed to a ‘Platonic’ intuition about the inferiority of the unexamined life, we have an equally strong ‘Nietzschean’ intuition about the corrosiveness of the examined life. Broadly speaking, the first intuition is more akin to the tradition of the Enlightenment, and the second, more to that of Romanticism; the one is reminiscent of Descartes and Hume, the other of Rousseau and Herder.The use of the technical term ‘autonomy’ and the concomitant term ‘self’ is primarily limited to philosophy, while in daily life ‘freedom’ and ‘person,’ respectively, are used instead. Unfortunately, in their deployment of these technical terms philosophers have generally failed to acknowledge the two modes of ‘being true to ourselves’ associated with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, for they usually employ the concept of autonomy in a unitary way.

Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.


APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.


Author(s):  
L. I. Ivonina

The article analyzes the main features of the Caroline era in the history of Britain, which were reflected in the cultural representation of the power of King Charles I Stuart and the court’s daily life in the 1630s. The author shows that, on the one hand, the cult of peace and the greatness of the monarch were the cultural product of the Caroline court against the background of the Thirty Years' War in continental Europe. On the other hand, there was a spread of various forms of escapism, the departure into the world of illusions. On the whole, the representation of the power of Charles Stuart and the court’s daily life were in line with the general trend of the time. At the same time, the court of Charles I reflected his personality. Thinly sensing and even determining the artistic tastes of his era, the English king abstracted from its political and social context.


2020 ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Pablo Ferrando-García

We present an analysis of the filmic representation of Funny Games to highlight its playful structure as a game of games. Through a series of narrative efforts, a double operation is carried out, aimed at a specular relationship with the viewer. On the one hand, Michael Haneke’s film offers a series of expressive mechanisms that are aimed at shifting the objective gaze to subjective in order to transfer the perception of the subject presented to the viewer. On the other, it presents a brutal clash between the registers of comedy and tragedy through the young psychopaths, Peter and Paul, who emerge as contemporary clowns, in the figures of Pierrot and Harlequin, whose negative resonances lead to the incarnation of absolute EVil. In turn, the family are the victims, and this is presented as the prototype of the family institution while Peter and Paul are mere archetypes. In this way, the cinematographic screen is turned into a device for interrogating its modes of representation and, in turn, offers a solid moral dimension. The ultimate objective of the Hanekian story is to cover it with “a pedagogical function: to familiarize the cinema, to bring it closer to a daily life so that it speaks from you to you to the experience –to the conscience– of the viewer” (Font, 2002, p. 16). Resumen Nuestra propuesta trata de desarrollar un análisis de la representación fílmica con el propósito de poner de relieve la estructura lúdica de Funny Games como juego de juegos. A través de toda una serie de gestiones narrativas se efectúa una doble operación dirigidas a una relación especular con el espectador. Por un lado, la película de Michael Haneke ofrece una serie de mecanismos expresivos que van encaminados al desplazamiento de la mirada objetiva en subjetiva con el fin de trasladar la percepción del sujeto de la enunciación al narratario/espectador. Por otro, presenta un brutal choque entre el registro de la comedia con la tragedia a través de los jóvenes psicópatas, Peter y Paul, que se erigen en los payasos contemporáneos, en las figuras de Pierrot y Arlequín, cuyas resonancias negativas conducen a la encarnación del Mal absoluto. A su vez, George y Anne Schöber son las víctimas y estos son expuestos como el prototipo de la institución familiar mientras Peter y Paul son meros arquetipos narrativos. De este modo, la pantalla cinematográfica se convierte en un dispositivo de interrogación sobre sus modos de representación y, a su vez, ofrece una sólida dimensión moral. El objetivo último del relato hanekiano es revestirlo de “una función pedagógica: familiarizar el cine, acercarlo a una cotidianidad para que hable de tú a tú a la experiencia –a la conciencia– del espectador” (Font, 2002: 16).


Author(s):  
Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld

This chapter highlights the various aspects of the daily lives of the poor. In Amsterdam, the poor among the Portuguese Jewish community ranged from the highly educated to the illiterate. On the one hand there were those whose sense of honour debarred them from asking for poor relief, and on the other there were those described as inveterate beggars. There were men and women; large, complete families and fragmented units; and there were people left completely on their own. Some were healthy or young or both, others old or sick or both, with all sorts of variations between them. Many applied for poor relief no more than occasionally; others relied permanently on outside help. The poor relief provided by the Portuguese community constituted no more than a supplement to income from work, private funds, and legacies, and help from friends, relatives, private charity, and other sources. Sephardi Jews who had no access to these sources, or who missed out in other ways, found themselves forced to seek their fortune elsewhere sooner or later.


Author(s):  
Gary Ferguson

Spanning the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—the 15th/16th to the 18th centuries—the early modern period in Europe sees a fundamental evolution in relation to the conception and expression of same-sex desire. The gradual emergence of a marginalized homosexual identity, both individual and collective, accompanies a profound transformation in the understanding of the sexed body: the consolidation of two separate and “opposite” sexes, which sustain physiologically grounded sexual and gender roles. This new paradigm contrasts with an earlier one in which masculinity and femininity might be seen as representing points on a spectrum, and same-sex desire, perceived as potentially concerning all men and women, was not assimilable to a permanent characteristic excluding desire for and relations with members of the other sex. These developments, however, happened gradually and unevenly. The period is therefore characterized by differing models of homosexual desire and practices—majoritizing and minoritizing—that coexist in multiple and shifting configurations. The challenge for historians is to describe these in their full complexity, taking account of geographic variations and of both differences and continuities over time—between the beginning of the period and its end, between different points within it, and between early modernity and the present or the more recent past. The tension between similarity, identity, and the endurance of categories, on the one hand, and alterity, incommensurability, and rupture, on the other hand, defies dichotomous thinking that would see them as opposites, and favor one to the exclusion of the other. In making such comparative studies, we would no doubt do well to think not in singular but in plural terms, that is, of homosexualities in history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 433-451
Author(s):  
Russell Winslow ◽  

During the Enlightenment period the concept of the infinitesimal was developed as a means to solve the mathematical problem of the incommensurability between human reason and the movements of physical beings. In this essay, the author analyzes the metaphysical prejudices subtending Enlightenment Humanism through the lens of the infinitesimal calculus. One of the consequences of this analysis is the perception of a two-fold possibility occasioned by the infinitesimal. On the one hand, it occasions an extreme form of humanism, “transhumanism,” which exhibits limitless confidence in the possibility of human science. On the other hand, the concept of the infinitesimal also contains within itself a source for a critical “posthumanism,” that is to say, a source which initiates the dissolution of the presuppositions of humanism while simultaneously announcing a different ontological organization. In , Tostoy’s novel takes up the problem of the relation between reason and motion and makes the two-fold possibility visible by presenting a contrast between its theoretical presentations and the lived experiences of the characters in the novel. Thus, is the setting in which the author has chosen to conduct this analysis.


Author(s):  
Jörn Rüsen

The paper starts with a systematical analysis of the interrelationship of humanism and nature. It proceeds to a historical reconstruction of this relationship in the development of Western humanism from ancient Rome via Renaissance till the Enlightenment of the 18th century. In both respects the result of the analysis is the same: The Western tradition of humanism is characterised by a gap between an emphasis on the cultural quality of human life on the one hand and nature on the other one. Men are entitled to dominate and govern nature and use it for their purpose. This fits into an idea of a progressing destructive relationship between man and nature in the West. On the other the tradition of humanism has put the gap between man and nature into a harmonising cosmological or theological context. In this context a simple destructive relationship between man and nature is not possible. The humanism of today has to pick up the challenge of the ecological crisis and to refer to its tradition where man and nature are mediated into a meaningful and sense-bearing interrelationship. Instead of simply referring to the traditional cosmology a convincing idea of this mediation or even synthesis can only be made plausible by referring to the already pre-given synthesis between nature and culture, the human body.


Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke

This chapter's overriding objective is to explain how both the invention of our modern understanding of the social sciences, on the one hand, and the post-Enlightenment establishment of the modern nation-state, on the other, encapsulated doctrines which severed modernity from the Enlightenment philosophy which is presumed to have inspired it. It offers illustrations not so much of the unity of political theory and practice in the modern world as of their disengagement. In providing here some brief remarks on how post-Enlightenment justifications of modernity came to part company from their Enlightenment prefigurations, it hopes to sketch an account of certain links between principles and institutions which bears some relation to both Enlightenment and Hegelian conceptual history.


1883 ◽  
Vol s2-23 (89) ◽  
pp. 177-212
Author(s):  
E. RAY LANKESTER ◽  
A. G. BOURNE

The facts set forth in the preceding memoir are to a large extent summarised by the plates which accompany it, and the explanatory description of those plates. The more general conclusions to which our observations tend may be gathered from the following tabular arrangement of some of the chief varieties of Arthropod eyes which are at present known. The technical terms which have been introduced in the present memoir and recur in the tabular statement are explained in a list appended. Without assuming to assign their due significance to all varieties of the Arthropod eye, some of which may very possibly (e. g. those of certain Crustacea) find no proper place in the scheme here submitted, we yet think that it is useful to tabulate the principal facts of structure known as to a large number of Arthropod eyes in the following way. We take as primary divisions those eyes with monostichous ommateum, the more archaic, and those eyes with diplostichous ommateum derived from the monostichous condition. A few examples clearly transitional between the monostichous and the diplostichous condition have been described by Grenadier (among Myriapods). It is especially to be noted in reference to the comparison of monomeniscous and polymeniscous eyes, that the comparison yields totally different results accordingly as we may choose to compare with the non-facetted eye of a Spider or of an Insect larva, on the one hand, a single eyelet of a "grouped" eye or of a "compound" eye, or on the other hand, the whole group or the whole "compound" eye.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document