Introduction: The Design of Culture and the Culture of Design

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Orr
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Footprint ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral System ◽  
To Come ◽  
Universe Story ◽  
The Universe

Environmentalists are often regarded as people wanting to stop one thing or another, and there are surely lots of things that ought to be stopped. The essays in this book, however, have to do with beginnings. How, for example, do we advance a long-delayed solar revolution? Or begin one in forest management? Or materials use? How do we reimagine and remake the human presence on earth in ways that work over the long haul? Such questions are the heart of what theologian Thomas Berry (1999) calls “the Great Work” of our age. This endeavor is nothing less than the effort to harmonize the human enterprise with how the world works as a physical system and how it ought to work as a moral system. In the past two centuries the human footprint on earth has multiplied many times over. Our science and technology are powerful beyond anything imagined by the confident founders of the modern world. But our sense of proportion and depth of purpose have not kept pace with our merely technical abilities. Our institutions and organizations still reflect their origins in another time and in very different conditions. Incoherence, disorder, and violence are the hallmarks of the modern world. If we are to build a better world—one that can be sustained ecologically and one that sustains us spiritually—we must transcend the disorder and fragmentation of the industrial age. We need a perspective that joins the hardwon victories of civilization, such as human rights and democracy, with a larger view of our place in the cosmos—what Berry calls “the universe story.” By whatever name, that philosophy must connect us to life, to each other, and to generations to come. It must help us to rise above sectarianism of all kinds and the puffery that puts human interests at a particular time at the center of all value and meaning. When we get it right, that larger, ecologically informed enlightenment will upset comfortable philosophies that underlie the modern world in the same way that the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century upset medieval hierarchies of church and monarchy.

Abdelkébir Khatibi

2020 ◽  
pp. 261-278
Author(s):  
Lucy Stone McNeece
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
Continuous Transformation ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Abdelkebir Khatibi ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Rational Individual ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Church

Despite the considerable acclaim that Khatibi’s work has received, critics are frequently challenged to describe it. It is often considered « hybrid, » because it cannot be contained by the genres and categories of thought that we associate with Literature. I will argue that Khatibi’s work is less hybrid than « hermetic, » and that the difficulty felt in classifying or even analyzing his writing, is due to the presence of echoes and traces of archaic traditions. Khatibi devoted years of his life to studying other cultures as well as his own, finding that it was a rich fabric of varied influences, just as he found that other cultures bear material traces of many buried encounters. The influences present in Khatibi’s writing include Sufism, the traditions of Asia, such as the Tao and the Vedas, but also the esoteric sciences originating in Mesopotamia and Egypt that found their way to Greece, and which were revised and translated by Arabs and Eastern Christians. These entered into Europe from Andalusia and also through Italy, under the sponsorship of the Medicis, and contributed substantially to the revolution in the arts and sciences of the Renaissance. These cultures entertained a different relation to signs and images than that which has predominated since the Enlightenment in Europe. They also had a less binary and hierarchised conception of the world and man’s place in it. They imagined the universe as the space of a continuous transformation of diverse elements, a view opposed to that of the rational individual as master of his environment. Ostracized by the Church and the State, they remained in shadow, treated as heresies. I will try to show that many of the unorthodox traits of Khatibi’s thought and writing can be attributed to the influence of these archaic traditions, whose poetic and ethical values have much to teach us in the modern world.

A Russian Mystic Faces the Age of Rationalism and Revolution: Thought and Activity of Ivan Vladimirovich Lopukhin

1967 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-188
Author(s):  
Alexander Lipski
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Peter The Great ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Western Influence ◽  
The World ◽  
Extreme Degree ◽  
State Of Mind

It is generally accepted that even though rationalism was predominant during the eighteenth century, a significant mystical trend was simultaneously present. Thus it was not only the Age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Holbach, but also the Age of St. Martin, Eckartshausen and Madame Guyon. With increased Western influence on Russia, it was natural that Russia too would be affected by these contrary currents. The reforms of Peter the Great, animated by a utilitarian spirit, had brought about a secularization of Russian culture. Father Florovsky aptly summed up the state of mind of the Russian nobility as a result of the Petrine Revolution: “The consciousness of these new people had been extroverted to an extreme degree.” Some of the “new people,” indifferent to their previous Weltanschauung, Orthodoxy, adopted the philosophy of the Enlightenment, “Volter'ianstvo” (Voltairism). But “Volter'ianstvo” with its cult of reason and belief in a remote creator of the “world machine,“ did not permanently satisfy those with deeper religious longings. While conventional Orthodoxy, with its emphasis on external rites, could not fill the spiritual vacuum, Western mysticism, entering Russia chiefly through freemasonry, provided a satisfactory alternative to “Volter'ianstvo.”

scholarly journals Digital Economy : A Journey Through 21st Century Towards 22nd Century with Respect to India

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-94
Author(s):  
Dr. Pradipta Mukhopadhyay
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Big Data Analytics ◽  
Digital Economy ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
22Nd Century ◽  
The World ◽  
The Difference ◽  
To Come

Digital Economy refers to an economy which is based on digital computing technologies and can also be referred to as internet economy or web economy as the business activities are conducted through markets based on the internet or the World Wide Web. A Digital Economy also refers to the usage of various digitised information and knowledge to perform various economic activities and uses various new technologies like Internet, Cloud Computing, Big Data Analytics to collect, store and analyse information digitally. This way the modern digital economies are helping the local and regional business organisations to come out of their local boundaries and step into the global scenario to take advantages of the modern liberalisation policies of the governments along with reduced trade barriers throughout the world. This paper will study the importance of digital economy in the modern world along with the difference between the traditional economy and the digital economy and the current state of digital economy in India. This Study has been casual, exploratory and empirical in nature and the data needed for research work has been collected by using both direct and indirect method of data collection.

PRIMORDIAL SYMBOLS – THE COMMON TREASURY OF MANKIND

2021 ◽  
pp. 223-238
Author(s):  
VESNA GAJIĆ
Keyword(s):  
Wide Distribution ◽  
Active Imagination ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The World ◽  
Mundus Imaginalis ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Universe

The paper explores the wide distribution of symbols whose religious and folklore interpretations are the same or similar among different cultures. The definition of symbols and their origin are considered, with reference to the theory of the "Mundus Imaginalis" of the orientalist Henry Corben, and its similarity with the "active imagination" of the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. The resemblances of the legends about the Cosmic man and the Centre of the world are followed through various mythologies, folklore traditions and cults. The Cosmic man – the first human being – who usually makes a sacrifice in order for the world to emerge and survive, in many cultures represents the embodiment of the highest virtues, towards which one should strive. The human form as the basis for temples or various sacral diagrams can be found in all ancient religious traditions and always symbolizes Imago Mundi – image of the world. At its center is the "navel" of the world, the Pillar of the Universe, Axis Mundi, which connects the earth with the sky and the underworld, and represents the axis around which the world revolves. Exploring these sets of symbols, we see that their essential aspect should not be understood as geographical places to be located, or personifications of some historical figures whose true identity needs to be interpreted. On the contrary, the symbols indicate that the search for meaning is, above all, internal; immersing ourselves in the domain of the archetype, we reflect on the essential questions of the purpose and origin of the universe, the nature of the self, kinship with the rest of humanity, which is why the symbolic layer of the human psyche helps us fight against the general alienation of the modern world.

A Science So-Called

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Megan Faragher
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Inherent Difficulty ◽  
Group Psychology ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The University ◽  
The Universe

H.G. Wells’s life extends the radical evolution of psychographics outlined in the Introduction, but his oeuvre also proves the inherent difficulty in aestheticizing the emergent age of social psychology—a point evinced when producer Alexander Korda demanded Wells revise the script version of his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come three times to make it “filmable.” While Wells’s novel imagines a peaceable future wherein social psychology becomes the “whole literature, philosophy, and general thought of the world,” the film adaptation instead symbolizes this philosophical transformation by starring a sole philosopher-king who, against the people’s will, seeks to control and colonize the universe. This chapter argues that the conflict between these two Wellsian visions is prefigured by his intimate and conflicted relationship to sociology and group psychology. As early as 1906, Wells sought out the position as the first British chair of sociology at the University of London. But Wells was immediately to become a gadfly in academia: he engaged in scathing critiques of sociology for denying its utopian impulses and refuted theories of group dynamics put forward by Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter. Incorporating readings across Wells’s literary career—including Anticipations, An Englishman Looks at the World, and In the Days of the Comet—this chapter contends that Wells’s writing captures a life-long effort to reprise the scope of sociology from outside academia, and captures the writer’s foundering efforts to aestheticize the institutional promise of social psychology—efforts that inevitably succumb to Wells’s fetishization of pseudo-authoritarian technocracy.

A New Quarrel

On Universals ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Étienne Balibar
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
To Come ◽  
Question Today ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

This chapter assesses the new “quarrel of universals” that now occupies philosophy and other overlapping disciplines. In this new quarrel, the question today is not only whether one is for or against the universal; the question is also how one defines the universal—a term whose surprising equivocity has become increasingly clear. Still more fundamentally, the question is how one should articulate the relationship between three related but heterogeneous terms whose widespread use has prompted conflicting claims: the universal, universality, and universalisms. The chapter begins by situating the question of the universal and its variations within the field that seems to constitute the strategic site of intersecting domains: philosophical anthropology, understood as the analysis of the historical differences of the human and of the problem that those differences pose to their bearers. It then outlines the difficulties which can be identified in every philosophical and political usage of the universal and its “doubles” according to three aporias. The first is the aporia of the multiplicity of the “world,” or of the universe as multiversum; the second is that of Allgemeinheit or All(en)gemeinheit, in other words, the irreducible gap between the universal and the common (or community); and, finally, that of co-citizenship, the form of belonging to a political unity to come, a unity whose law of belonging (membership) would be the heterogeneity within equality or the political participation of those foreign to the community.

Puritan Radicalism and the Enlightenment

1960 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 424-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
George L. Mosse
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Religious Truth ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment presents a subtle and difficult problem. No historian has as yet fully answered the important question of how the world view of the eighteenth century is related to that of traditional Christianity. It is certain, however, that the deism of that century rejected traditional Christianity as superstitious and denied Christianity a monopoly upon religious truth. The many formal parallels which can be drawn between Enlightenment and Christianity cannot obscure this fact. From the point of view of historical Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, the faith of the Enlightenment was blasphemy. It did away with a personal God, it admitted no supernatural above the natural, it denied the relevance of Christ's redemptive task in this world. This essay attempts to discover whether traditional Christian thought itself did not make a contribution to the Enlightenment.

scholarly journals The Culture of Poverty in Paris on the Eve of the Revolution

1967 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffry Kaplow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Culture Of Poverty ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
Wage Earners

At the very beginning of the investigation, it is necessary to find a word to describe the European masses before the coming of the twin revolutions, the French and Industrial, that have contributed so much to the making of the modern world. “Proletariat” is clearly anachronistic; “wage-earners” is inadequate in a society where cash wages were far from being the most common form of payment for labor. “Working class” is too much identified with nineteenth century developments and, what is worse, conjures up an image of a homogeneous group that does not conform to eighteenth century realities. “Laboring poor” is by far the best, for it emphasizes two primary facts about the people with whom we are concerned: first, that, to one extent or another, they earned their living by doing manual labor, and, second, that they were being continuously impoverished, as Professor Labrousse has shown. The category has several virtues as a tool of historical analysis. It is large enough to take account of the complexities of eighteenth century social conditions, stressing the mobility and social intercourse that existed, albeit on a diminishing scale, between the master artisans and shopkeepers, their apprentices and journeymen on the one hand, and the domestics, beggars, criminals and floating elements in the population, on the other.Classes laborieusesandclasses dangereuseslived side by side and recruited their personnel from one another. They did in fact form a whole, whom contemporaries called“les classes inférieures”. If we look toward the future, we see that the French Revolution Was to bring about a temporary split in their ranks by politicizing those among them who became the sans-culottes, and that the Industrial Revolution was to complete this division on other bases by allowing some of the laboring poor to become petty capitalists, While forcing the majority to become proletarians or to fall further still into the nether world of the lumpen-proletariat. In sum, the use of the concept of the laboring poor enables us to come close to the reality of eighteenth century paris and to watch the disagregation of that reality with the passage of time.

scholarly journals The key to the solution of the world crisis we face

Human Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39
Author(s):  
Nicholas Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
World Crisis ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Great Danger

Abstract Humanity faces two fundamental problems of learning: learning about the universe, and learning to become civilized. We have solved the first problem, but not the second one, and that puts us in a situation of great danger. Almost all of our global problems have arisen as a result. It has become a matter of extreme urgency to solve the second problem. The key to this is to learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second one. This was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment, but in implementing this idea, the Enlightenment blundered. Their mistakes are still built into academia today. In order to le arn how to create a civilized, enlightened world, the key thing we need to do is to cure academia of the structural blunders we have inherited from the Enlightenment. We need to bring about a revolution in science, and in academia more broadly so that the basic aim becomes wisdom, and not just knowledge.

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