Dialogue, Listening, and Ethics

Author(s):  
Josina M. Makau

Communication has the power to heal and to wound, to tyrannize and to liberate, to enlighten and to deceive, to inspire and to corrupt. Subjecting ideas to the scrutiny of others through engagements of difference has long been recognized as a vital resource for the fulfillment of communication’s constructive potential as well as a critically needed antidote to the corrupting influences associated with demagoguery, confirmation bias, ideological rigidity, and partisanship. Demographic shifts and technological advancements afford unparalleled opportunities for such open, deliberative engagements and related inquiries. Enriched by attentive listening, dialogic communication provides a particularly promising means of tapping these and other resources to reach across differences in pursuit of knowledge, understanding, truth, and wise discernment. Despite their potential, however, listening and dialogue face formidable obstacles. Among these are dominant narratives regarding the human condition, power imbalances, and privilege, and their implications for communication ethics. Absolutism, radical relativism, and related false dilemmas pose significant obstacles as well. A transformation of vision—from individual adversarialism to an ethic of interdependence—offers a pathway out of the thicket, enabling humanity to tap communication’s potential in shared pursuit of human flourishing across the globe.

Author(s):  
Jan van Vliet

Abstract This chapter demonstrates that the presence of poverty, and its associated pathologies, is of concern to all humankind whose innate desire is to seek the flourishing of fellow humanity. The traditional, often unsuccessful, methods of poverty alleviation have been challenged in creative, bold, and refreshing ways that are superior in both identifying poverty and moving agencies and pathways toward greater success. This involves a technical application of quantitative microeconomics which is paired with expertise and insights on human behavior gleaned from the behavioral sciences. It turns out that human behavior is often better explained by behavioral categories such as hope than by traditional assumptions of rationality. Drawing from the western philosophical and Christian theistic traditions (between which there is considerable overlap), this innate desire to hope is explained as part of that triad of virtues—faith, hope, and love—that comprise the epicenter of the human condition. The Christian-theistic tradition postulates that this condition of hope for a physically and metaphysically-redeemed humanity requires certain lived behaviors in the present, even as we approach, ultimately, the very telos of our existence. Paramount among these behaviors is the pursuit of socio-economic justice. Much use is made of narratives to illustrate the lived reality of those living in desperation but buoyed by hope.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (36) ◽  
pp. 01-28
Author(s):  
Marcos Ribeiro de Melo ◽  
Michele De freitas faria de Vasconcelos ◽  
Edson Augusto de Souza neto

in this article, we experience the exercise of a screen ethnocartography in agency with the film Beasts of the southern wild (2012) by the director Benh Zeitlin. We tested a film experimentation that led to a renewed writing (our) ways of life. We bet on cinema and childhood as possibilities for creating cracks and a stutter of language for the creation of new worlds and ways of living. In cinema images less as a representation, and more as art that proposes incompleteness, fissure, a hole in appearances. In childhood as an exercise of differentiation and resistance to dominant narratives in a given context. In childhood as a limiting experience of/in language, tirelessly exposing the human condition in front of the world. Thus, accompanying the main character of the plot, little Hushpuppy — a six-year-old resident of the “Charles Doucet Island”, experienced as “the Bathtub” —, we are shaken by the forms of life there, considered bestial and not recognized by city humans. Hushpuppy, his father and friends resist attempts to destroy their existence by the forms of the state that try to domesticate them, imbued with the logic that primitives must come to civilization, just as children must become adults. 


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

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.


Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars

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.  


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Alexander Pschera

"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. "


Author(s):  
Leticia Flores Farfán

Assuming with Georges Bataille that men is a being who is not in the world “like water within the water”, that is to say, in an immanent and lack of distinction state, but that its destiny is shaped in the permanent significant joint or logos to which its unfinished nature jeopardizes him, we analyze the form in which the mythical story, characterized like a sacred word with symbolic and ontological quality within the perspective of Mircea Eliade, gives account of the wound or the original tear that constitutes the human condition.


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