Metaphysical Exile

Author(s):  
Robert Pippin

This is the first detailed interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy as a whole. Robert Pippin treats the three “fictions” as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, and they have all had most of the memories of their homeland “erased.” While also discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness, a version that characterizes late modern life itself, and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. So, the state of exile is interpreted as “metaphysical” as well as geographical. In the course of an interpretation of the central narrative about a young boy’s education, Pippin shows how a number of issues arise, are discussed and lived out by the characters, all in ways that also suggest the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. Pippin also offers an interpretation of the references to Jesus in the titles, and he traces and interprets the extensive inter-textuality of the fictions, the many references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, Wittgenstein, and others. Throughout, the attempt is to show how the literary form of Coetzee’s fictions ought to be considered, just as literary—a form of philosophical reflection.

Author(s):  
Monika Frąckowiak-Sochańska ◽  
◽  
Marcin Hermanowski

This paper aims to analyze the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the individuals’ mental conditions, focusing on psychotherapy clients. The sources of knowledge about mental condition changes analyzed here are psychotherapists’ reports. One of the research purposes was to examine to what extent the problems resulting from the pandemic are visible from the perspective of psychotherapists’ offices. Moreover, the authors explore the changes in psychotherapists’ functioning and the adjustments of psychotherapy understood as one of the expert systems in a late modern society affected by social changes’ trauma. Adopting the theory of social trauma (Alexander 2004, Sztompka 2002) as the frame of analysis enables examining the relation between personal but repeatable experiences of emotional crises and their global context determined by the pandemic. This paper’s empirical foundation is the survey research on a sample of 384 Polish psychotherapists carried out between August 10 and September 30 as a part of the project „Psychotherapeutic work in the pandemic time” supported by the Faculty of Sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University. The research results enable registering the increased intensity of problems resulting from social stress among people searching for psychotherapeutic support and those working in the helping professions. Simultaneously, changes in the functioning of the whole expert system of psychotherapy may be interpreted as the attempts to compensate for the social order destabilization that results in the growing stress and overburden of individuals.


Author(s):  
Camilla Fojas

Postcrisis U.S. popular culture generated stories that put the capitalist social order in question by engaging the dialectics of personhood and dehumanization, normativity and deviance, freedom and imprisonment, and mobility and stasis. Many of these stories merely revise capitalism and reignite its appeal, offering outcomes that promise renewal and a return to financial and moral stability. Even the Great Gatsby returns after the Great Recession as a permutation of the many cautionary narratives about overweening economic ambition leading to inevitable failure and ruin. These postcrisis stories also contain moments of liberation from the coercive power of capitalism--moments that, if drawn together, might create an entirely new way of imagining the social order and, perhaps, encourage fantasies of liberation that might lead to their realization.


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 356-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A Shweder ◽  
Usha Menon

The return of anthropological interest to the descriptive study of the moral foundations of social life is a very welcome development. Nevertheless, if there is going to be a new anthropology of morality, it must have something new to say about some very old questions. The first is the analytic question: what counts as a morality? The second and third are descriptive questions: is some idea of an objective moral charter a feature of human social life and individual judgment; and what is the scope, generality and detail with which various aspects or domains of the social order (from gender relations to food customs) are understood and experienced as extensions of a moral order from the ‘native point of view’? Finally, why do the many peoples of the world apparently disagree with each other so much in both their spontaneous-habitual-unreflective-internalized-‘embodied’ (and hence implicit) judgments and in their reflective-reasoned-thoughtful-spelled out (and hence explicit) judgments about the rightness or wrongness of specific actions? Those are questions that no anthropology of morality, old or new, can or should avoid.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Sabih

The conflicting and different reactions to Covid-19 pandemic, ranging from a willingness to cooperate with health authorities to a violent rejection of all decisions and measures suggested or taken by local and international authorities are but expressions of framing meanings of and finding answers to why Covid-19 broke out on a such global scale beyond biological boundaries. This is to show why epidemics such as Covid-19 deserve to be investigated within their broader cultural, political, scientific, and geographic contexts. Religion or the religious rationale once again has made itself a site of interest in the public space; both as one of the many competing explanatory frameworks and as a scapegoat for contributing to the breakdown of the social order and for promoting unscientific, irrational and superstitious understandings and interpretations of Covid-19. As a matter of fact, certain religious communities across all the Abrahamic religions do present theological and eschatological interpretations of the pandemic. As we shall see, Messianic Jewish groups actually present a hermeneutical framework that consists of a theological-eschatological framework of the Covid-19 pandemic and a socio-political pantheism plan of action the aim of which is to maintain the believer immune to the attacks of secularism and its ills. On the latter point, I find Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak’s explanatory framework of the Covid-19 pandemic very informative as both to how the religious rationale is still at work in post-secular societies, and why Jewish ultra-orthodoxy’s theological-eschatological explanation and social pantheist response are worth investigating. In this article, Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak’s “perception, interpretation and response” to the Covid-19 pandemic and its global impact on both the biological and the social aspects shall be the primary subject of our analysis.


2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 101-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Bourdieu

On Interests and the Relative Autonomy of Symbolic Power: A Rejoinder to Some Objections This article is a rejoinder to different attempts to apply the framework of Bourdieu’s theory. In order to clarify the many misconceptions of his work, he spells out once again his notions of “interest“ and “strategy“ as being an integral part of his theory of habitus. The relation between habitus and the field(s) and social po¬sitions that produced it is explained as a sort of ontological complicity, a complicity that manifests itself in what is called the sense of the game, an in¬tentionality without intention, which functions as the principle of strategies devoid of strategic design. A major question of this article is various mis¬un¬derstandings concerning Bourdieu’s theory on the relative autonomy of symbolic power. To condense his argument: when he writes “knowledge“, his critics read connaissance connaissante, scholarly knowledge, conscious knowledge; the specific mode of thought of the scientist, is projected into the mind of the observed agents. This is what Bourdieu calls the scholastic fallacy: encouraged by the situation of scholé, the practical bracketing of the necessities of practice. Another reason for his critics misunderstanding Distinction is that they read the empirical analyses in a realist and substantialist way and thereby reduces, what Bourdieu un¬derstands as “the specific logic and autonomy of the symbolic order“, to a mere reflection of the social order. In the final section of the article he comments on the problem of social classes and a number of other specific question.


Al-Ulum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-364
Author(s):  
Saifullah Saifullah ◽  
Hasbullah Hasbullah ◽  
M Ridwan Hasbi

Based on the social phenomena of the society, specifically in the city of Pekanbaru, rapid social changes occur with unlimited communication, tend to be materialistic, secularistic and rationalistic. Thus, they arouse various psychological and physical problems. One of psychological problem is a disease that comes from the loss of a divine vision. The vision is blunts to see the reality of life and life itself. Treatment with sophisticated tools and chemicals develops in such a way, but in reality is unable to fully solve the many problems of disease, then switch to alternative-spiritualistic treatment. This study used a qualitative approach by conducting in-depth interviews with subject who practices sufistic therapy. In Pekanbaru, the tendency of people to seek treatment through sufistic therapy can be seen from the amount of sufistic medicine houses. The results of this study show that sufistic therapy or sufi healing is a new trend among modern society which seems to have experienced a saturation point with various patterns of material orientation, thus,  the spiritual world becomes an alternative


1958 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 158-160
Author(s):  
LAWRENCE SCHLESINGER

1946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgene H. Seward
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
ROY PORTER

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).


Author(s):  
S. A. Druzhilov

Drastic transformations of the social and labor sphere have led to the emergence of new health risks and sanitary and hygienic problems associated with unreliability of employment. A new socio-economic and psychological phenomenon “precarity” has emerged, which has aff ected the employment conditions of employees, so the description of the phenomenon “precarity” needs to be clarifi ed.The forms of labor employment that diff er from the typical model and worsen the employee’s situation are considered. The criteria based on which non-standard employment is considered unstable are given.Generalized types of unstable employment are identifi ed, the specifi city of which is determined by a combination of two factors: working time and the term of the contract. Unstable working conditions are possible not only in informal employment, but also in legal labor relations. Unreliability and instability of labor has an objective character and is a natural manifestation of the emerging economic and social order. The phenomenon of “precarity of employment” appears as a new determinant of the health of employees. The main feature when referring employment and labor relations to the phenomenon of “precarity” is their unreliability.Specifies the terms used: “precariat”; “precarious work”; precompact; the precariat. An essential characteristic of precarious employment is the violation of social and labor rights and lack of job security. A significant indicator of precarity is underemployment. Precarity induces the potential danger of dismissal of the employee and the resulting stress, psychosomatic disorders and pathological processes in the psyche.Precarious employment and related labor relations have become widespread. Many employees are deprived of social guarantees, including those related to labor safety, payment for holidays and temporary disability, and provision of preventive measures. Th is leads to a violation of the state of well-being, as well as the deterioration of individual and public health.


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