Dionysus

2020 ◽  
pp. 475-526
Author(s):  
John Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Affective Response ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Positive Core

The twelfth chapter treats the religious dimension of Nietzsche’s values, expressed in his ideas of Dionysus and eternal return. It might have seemed that he wants to replace gods with the superhuman or Übermensch. He attacks belief in gods as false and as spoiling our relation to values: we view them as commanded by gods, whereas our task is to make them for ourselves. Nevertheless Nietzsche still has use and need for gods and for religion more broadly. The universal Yes amounts to a “sanctification” of the world, demanding a strong affective response that is the positive core of religion that he wants to save. Its disadvantages for belief and will are outweighed by its support for a special feeling that is crucial to his new values. His evocations of Dionysus play this role, as does his thought of eternal return. We conclude with this most evocative of Nietzsche’s ideas.

“When You Stop Pretending That You Know”

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
D. Marcel DeCoste
Keyword(s):  
Family Members ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The World

Abstract Increasingly addressing the religious dimension of Cormac McCarthy’s work, critics have frequently rooted it in a Gnosticism which holds, first, that the world is a place of evil and suffering and, second, that salvation is attained through knowledge made available only to the elect. The Stonemason, however, seems intent on refuting just such a thesis. Focusing on Ben and his grandfather Papaw, a centenarian stonemason, the play presents Ben as seeking, through mastery of the mason’s secrets, to become custodian to knowledge that will unlock the mysteries not just of a trade but of the cosmos. Yet this Gnostic quest fosters in him a moral negligence that leads to the deaths of two family members. Indeed, Ben’s tragedy stems precisely from his Gnostic prizing of secret lore and indifference to the Christian lessons Papaw himself most values—lessons not in god-like knowledge but in the practice of faith, humility, and love.

Counterterrorism and the Western Response

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-75
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Affective Response ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
The U.S ◽  
United Nation

There has been a neglect on the part of Western governments with focus on the U.S. to take seriously the internet campaign that ISIS has been waging since 2014 and the affective response that still draws citizens from across the world into their promise of a civilized, united nation for Muslims. It is possible that the West, even with a severely increased commitment to fighting the Islamic State, may be too late. This chapter will explore responses by Western governments including the United States to fight internet-enabled terrorism.

Fr. Tadeusz Sroka. Dziennik izraelski czyli religijny wymiar ludzkiego losu (An Israeli diary, or the religious dimension of man's fate). Warsaw: Spokania. 1985.

2004 ◽  
pp. 411-415
Author(s):  
Stanisław Krajewski
Keyword(s):  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World

This chapter looks at Fr. Tadeusz Sroka's An Israeli Diary, or the Religious Dimension of Man's Fate (1985). An Israeli Diary takes the form of excerpts from a diary written in the years 1970–71. Each entry opens with press news about political events in the Middle East, followed by pondering over the Bible or the fate of the Jewish people. There are hardly any data concerning contemporary Israel, except a few facts showing Arab intransigence and the hopeless situation of Israel ‘in human terms’. The author says very little about Jewish history and nothing about Judaism; the Talmud is not mentioned, even in places where it could have been useful, for example in reflecting on capital punishment. The author's perspective is metaphysical; he assumes that the election of Israel is eternal. This, incidentally, is the official standpoint of the Catholic Church today, confirmed more than once by John Paul II. As a result, Israel is seen as the centre of the world. Next, the fate of the Jews reveals the ultimate perspectives of the human condition: on one pole the Holocaust, on the other the re-creation of the state by visionaries, in defiance of reason. Israel is a sign for the world, and today's secular Israel is an appropriate sign for the contemporary materialistic world.

scholarly journals The Real Western War of Religion

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 17-29
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Grasso ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Real ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City takes its place alongside James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars as one of the two truly indispensable books on today’s Culture Wars. It advances our understanding of today’s conflict by situating it historically and focusing our attention on its religious dimension. Smith argues that today’s conflict is the latest episode in a longstanding conflict between immanent forms of religiosity which locate the sacred in the world of space and time, and transcendent forms of religiosity which locate the divine beyond space and time. As compelling as it is, the volume’s argument would have been strengthened by a more sustained treatment of the nature of the political community and the essential role played within it by the truths held in common by the members concerning God, man, nature, and history.

scholarly journals Happy Christmases are All Alike; Each Unhappy Christmas is Unhappy in its Own Way

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-184
Author(s):  
Vivien Blanchet
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Postal Service ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
The World ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
Ritual Practices

The French postal service has been opening a bureau for Father Christmas every winter since 1962. Sixty employees are responsible for responding to letters to Father Christmas. In 2018, more than one million children corresponded with him. But what would happen if someone were to write to Father Christmas, developing a close epistolary relationship with him? This short story explores such a scenario. Pierre M. and Father Christmas have during many years maintained regular and personal correspondence. Yet Father Christmas’s attitude seems to have changed. Pierre M. reveals the evolution of their secret relationship to his mysterious friend. On substance, the short story offers an original perspective on modern marketplace mythologies. Previous studies depict myths as liminal spaces in which people negotiate contradictory meanings, practices and realities. The myth of Father Christmas thus involves compromises between ignorance and knowledge, life and death, the sacred and the profane. The short story tells how they evolve to define the identity of the protagonists and the world they live in. It highlights how they are embodied in hybrid artefacts like letters to Father Christmas and extraordinary servicescape. The short story also questions the performative force of the myth. It shows that it results from the interpretative work and ritual practices of the protagonists involved in an unstable actantial system structured around an enlightened person, an ignorant person and a mythical character. This is constantly negotiated throughout sociotechnical interactions, which, as in the case of witchcraft, may or may not realize the myth. On form, the short story adopts the principle of the eternal return inherent to the myth: it is plotted as a series of small variations on recurring themes and structural repetitions. Intertextual references to academic publications, literary tradition and popular culture enrich the narrative by extending it beyond its textual boundaries.

The Originary Wherein: Heidegger and Nishida on “the Sacred” and “the Religious”

2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. M. Krummel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Nishida Kitaro

AbstractIn this paper, I explore a possible convergence between two great twentieth century thinkers, Nishida Kitarō of Japan and Martin Heidegger of Germany. The focus is on the quasi-religious language they employ in discussing the grounding of human existence in terms of an encompassing Wherein for our being. Heidegger speaks of “the sacred” and “the passing of the last god” that mark an empty clearing wherein all metaphysical absolutes or gods have withdrawn but are simultaneously indicative of an opening wherein beings are given. Nishida speaks of “the religious” dimension in the depths of one’s being, that he calls “place,” and that somehow envelops the world through its kenotic self-negation. In both we find reference to a kind of originary space—the open or place—associated with quasireligious themes. I also point to their distinct approaches to metaphysical language in their attempts to give voice to that abysmal thought.

scholarly journals Lord of the Maya Creations on his jaguar throne: the eternal return of Elder Brother God L to preside over the 21 December 2012 transformation

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (S278) ◽  
pp. 203-213
Author(s):  
John B. Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Rites Of Passage ◽  
Classic Maya ◽  
Ancient Maya ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Late Classic ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Scholarship

AbstractSpeculation about what ancient Maya texts have to say about 2012 is becoming a global phenomenon in popular culture. This speculation, largely apocalyptic, is more often based on acquaintance with historical Western interpretations than on familiarity with the texts themselves and their cultural contexts. This paper approaches the 2012 phenomenon through close readings of Maya texts and images considered within the contexts of historical and contemporary Maya culture and Western scholarship. It focuses on images of mythological events depicted on two Late Classic Maya vessels: the ‘Vase of the Seven Gods’ (Kerr no. 2796) and the ‘Vase of the Eleven Gods’ (Kerr no. 7750). These images are interpreted as representing deities, gathered in ‘cosmogonic conclave’, preparing to re-create the world with their sacrifices at the last completion of a great cycle and the beginning of a new 5,125-year 13-Bakˈtun Maya ‘Long Count’. The rites of passage are presided over by an enigmatic Venus-warrior/sacrificer deity previously known only as God L. God L's principal name and nature had remained undeciphered and his identity obscure until the author's researches resulted in the decipherment and ‘reading’ presented here. This study offers an explication of why God L, whom the author has demonstrated is the Maya god of tobacco among his many aspects, takes the senior role in presiding over these 13-Bakˈtun completion rituals and why it is reasonable to hypothesize that the same entities would be back for the fulfillment of the present cycle in 2012.

scholarly journals Kultura i mit — iluzje demitologizacji

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-46
Author(s):  
Leszek Kleszcz ◽  
Krzysztof Sztalt
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Protective Atmosphere ◽  
Story Telling ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World

One of the most fundamental existential experiences is the “indifference of the world”. Faced with the awareness of the insignificance of human fate, the lack of meaning, the indifference of the world, man creates various strategies of depotentialising reality. One of them is “story-telling”, working on a myth. Nietzsche also believed that “life needs a protective atmosphere woven from illusions, dreams, delusions”, so he tried to create a myth to fill the void left by the “death of God”. He began with Wagner’s “aesthetic myth” and went on to create a “myth of the aestheticisation of existence”. His next attempts to give meaning to human life were the story of the Übermensch and the revitalization of the myth of eternal return. Another myth which can be found at the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy is “the myth of the myth-maker”.

scholarly journals Zarathustra’s dance: Nietzsche’s creative aesthetic

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erzsébet Lamár
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
World View ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Ascetic Ideal ◽  
The World ◽  
Metaphysics Of Presence ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
New View

Nietzsche criticized the tradition of Western metaphysics (based on the principle of representation, the duality of subject and object of representation, the metaphysics of presence as Derrida puts it) and its language use. In place of this he presents a world view he calls Dionysian: it is a possibility of cognition in which the individual disappears and the tragic subject is merged with archaic substance in an experience that eliminates the dualism of appearance and reality. Nietzsche claims there is a basic tension between life and cognition in Western metaphysics, but this is a symptom of the ascetic ideal which manifests itself in illness and in wanting nothing. Instead the ascetic ideal a new kind of sensibility is necessary which affirms life and gives rise to a new view of the world and to new values. Deleuze claims Nietzsche’s philosophy has three basic tenets: evaluation, affirmation, and the superman as a new way of life. He adds that “Nietzsche attributes such importance to art because art has already achieved the whole program.” The paper shows that Nietzsche’s aesthetics is a creative aesthetic, a selective ontology based on the principle of double affirmation. The paper argues that Dionysus is the one who returns to Nietzsche eternally, and together with him haunts the idea of creative aesthetics, a key element of the idea of eternal return.

scholarly journals PECULIARITIES OF THE CHRONOTOPE THROUGH THE PRISM OF IDENTITY PROBLEM OF THE URBAN NOVEL CHARACTER

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaya Semih
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Closed Space ◽  
Main Principle ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Identity Problem ◽  
The West ◽  
Temporal Space ◽  
Urban Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
East West

The article analyses the chronotope of the novel by Orhan Pamuk Silent House through the prism of identity problem. The purpose of the article is to establish a connection of this problem to the peculiarities of the interpretation of the chronotope (which is a result of analysis of the opposites capital-country and East-West. The urban issue of the Silent House grounds on the eschatological paradigm and the cyclic concept of the world, the concept of eternal return; this attests a postmodernist understanding of the categories of time and space. Hence, the composition of the novel is a peculiar spatial and temporal mosaic and narrative polyphony. In the temporal space of the Silent House the spatial (home and provincial town) and temporal (past and present) images, motive of travel (real and metaphysical in the form of memories), of the travelers acquire the semantics of existential metamorphosis that lead to moral and spiritual initiation. And the closed space of the novel — the house of Mrs. Fatma and the provincial Turkish town — appears as a special topos-gerontope, the main principle of which is a freezing of the time. In this way Pamuk realizes typical for his works problems of relations between the West and the East and self-identification.

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