Rethinking the Daoist Concept of Nature

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 259-274
Author(s):  
David Chai
Keyword(s):  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Levels Of Reality ◽  
One And Many ◽  
The One

Recent years have seen an increased turning to the “wisdom of the East” when addressing issues on the environment. The risk of misappropriating its tenets in order to make them conform to the Western system is extremely high however. This paper will lay bare the early texts of Daoism so as to disprove claims that Nature is mystical, antithetical to technology, and subservient to human consciousness. It shall argue that Nature not only arises from a non-anthropocentric source in Dao but that this arising takes place across three levels of reality: Dao’s mystery, the cosmogony of the One-and-Many, and the fourfold comprised of Dao, Heaven, Earth, and man. The result is a vision of Nature no longer bound to a singular actuality but one whose presence is felt across an endless range of possibilities as the substantive realization of Dao.

Gadamer and the Yijing’s Language of Nature: Hermeneutics and Chinese Aesthetics

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 174-192
Author(s):  
Andrew Fuyarchuk
Keyword(s):  
Value Judgments ◽  
Art Of Medicine ◽  
Chinese Aesthetics ◽  
Practical Life ◽  
Interpretive Method ◽  
One And Many ◽  
The One

Although their value-judgments diverge, neo-Confucian and American continental philosophers agree that Gadamer’s hermeneutics is anti-foundationalist. Neither side, however, has asked why he frequently appeals to standards of harmony, or why he models the art of medicine on the order of nature. These indicate a commitment to trans-historical foundation of One and many that forms the basis for comparisons with Chinese aesthetics in the Yijing tradition. These foundations are grounded in Gadamer’s reading of Plato and shape his onto-dialogical interpretive method. In contrast to Whitehead, Gadamer cements the One and many in practical life by removing the contradiction through a transformation in human ethos.

Social Systems on the Cross

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marinos Diamantides ◽  
Anton Schütz
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Darwinism ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
The One

While early 20th century Social Darwinism has been discredited, post-WW2 theories have re-emphasized Darwin's notion of the environment. On this basis, and substituting social systems for natural species, society has been analyzed as a system-in-evolution, a machinery that, reflexively or self-referentially, produces itself at every moment anew. Modern society, according to social systems theory, continuously makes itself, thanks to countless simultaneous communications taking place at once. There are two equally disquieting lessons here. On the one hand, modern law, understood as the communicative system that applies the distinction lawful/unlawful to everything that gets in its way, is placed within an environment constituted by other communicative social systems (the economy, politics, religion, art etc) and the conditions created by those. On the other hand, social systems at large are separated from the realm of human consciousness, i.e. of collective or individual identity (the ‘psychic systems’). While ‘social' and ‘psychic’ systems never meet, they rely on absolute indifference with respect to their other side, as only this indifference enables especially social systems to assure their (superior) fact-creating potential. Our own project consists in spelling out the implications of this scissile sense of ‘meaning’, at once understood as a shorthand for what is actually happening (fragmented communications) and as consciousness-as-identity (imaginary unity).

Division and Classification

2019 ◽  
pp. 34-54
Author(s):  
Paolo Crivelli
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Location ◽  
One And Many ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Spatial Locations ◽  
Different Parts

The Philebus presents some arguments for the paradoxical claim that the many are one and the one many. The most serious of these arguments concerns the multiple spatial locations of an attribute. For instance, since the attribute man belongs to many men, it is in them, and it is therefore both one and many (for it is in them either by having different parts of itself contained in them or by being wholly contained in each of them). Plato maintains that this argument goes astray. He appeals to division and collection, the procedures linked with definition and classification. He probably has in mind a mereological model of particulars, whereby perceptible particulars are mixtures whose ingredients are the attributes which they partake of. Among the ingredients of a perceptible particular there are properties that specify its spatial location, so the problem of the multiple spatial location of an attribute evaporates.

Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi al-Din (1164–1240)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neal Robinson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Inner Experience ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
One And Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Southeast Spain ◽  
The Way

Ibn al-‘Arabi was a mystic who drew on the writings of Sufis, Islamic theologians and philosophers in order to elaborate a complex theosophical system akin to that of Plotinus. He was born in Murcia (in southeast Spain) in AH 560/ad 1164, and died in Damascus in AH 638/ad 1240. Of several hundred works attributed to him the most famous are al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations) and Fusus al-hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom). The Futuhat is an encyclopedic discussion of Islamic lore viewed from the perspective of the stages of the mystic path. It exists in two editions, both completed in Damascus – one in AH 629/ad 1231 and the other in AH 636/ad 1238 – but the work was conceived in Mecca many years earlier, in the course of a vision which Ibn al-‘Arabi experienced near the Kaaba, the cube-shaped House of God which Muslims visit on pilgrimage. Because of its length, this work has been relatively neglected. The Fusus, which is much shorter, comprises twenty-seven chapters named after prophets who epitomize different spiritual types. Ibn al-‘Arabi claimed that he received it directly from Muhammad, who appeared to him in Damascus in AH 627/ad 1229. It has been the subject of over forty commentaries. Although Ibn al-‘Arabi was primarily a mystic who believed that he possessed superior divinely-bestowed knowledge, his work is of interest to the philosopher because of the way in which he used philosophical terminology in an attempt to explain his inner experience. He held that whereas the divine Essence is absolutely unknowable, the cosmos as a whole is the locus of manifestation of all God’s attributes. Moreover, since these attributes require the creation for their expression, the One is continually driven to transform itself into Many. The goal of spiritual realization is therefore to penetrate beyond the exterior multiplicity of phenomena to a consciousness of what subsequent writers have termed the ‘unity of existence’. This entails the abolition of the ego or ‘passing away from self’ (fana’) in which one becomes aware of absolute unity, followed by ‘perpetuation’ (baqa’) in which one sees the world as at once One and Many, and one is able to see God in the creature and the creature in God.

Mathematical Entities without Objects. On Realism in Mathematics and a Possible Mathematization of (Non)Platonism: Does Platonism Dissolve in Mathematics?

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Thierry Paul
Keyword(s):  
Dynamical Systems ◽  
Real World ◽  
Ground Level ◽  
Ground Floor ◽  
Mathematical Platonism ◽  
Levels Of Reality ◽  
Upper Level ◽  
The One

By looking at three significant examples in analysis, geometry and dynamical systems, I propose the possibility of having two levels of realism in mathematics: the upper one, the one of entities; and a subordinated ground one, the one of objects. The upper level (entities) is more the one of ‘operations’, of mathematics in action, of the dynamics of mathematics, whereas the ground floor (objects) is more dedicated to culturally well-defined objects inherited from our perception of the physical or real world. I will show that the upper level is wider than the ground level, therefore foregrounding the possibility of having in mathematics entities without underlying objects. In the three examples treated in this article, this splitting of levels of reality is created directly by the willingness to preserve different symmetries, which take the form of identities or equivalences. Finally, it is proposed that mathematical Platonism is – in fine – a true branch of mathematics in order for mathematicians to avoid the temptation of falling into the Platonist alternative ‘everything is real’/‘nothing is real’.

The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Lu
Keyword(s):  
One And Many ◽  
The One

Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in 'The Dynasts'

2004 ◽  
Vol 99 (3) ◽  
pp. 757
Author(s):  
Jane Thomas ◽  
G. Glen Wickens
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
One And Many ◽  
The One

‘Each in our open-ended way, we are multitudinous’—Les Nombres, by Andrée Chedid

1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-254
Author(s):  
Sara Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Andree Chedid ◽  
Theatrical Space ◽  
One And Many ◽  
The Voice

The Lebanese-French playwright Andrée Chedid begins her play, Le Montreur (1967), with a song sung by ‘une—ou plusieurs—voix’. As the voice becomes voices become voice, the song addresses the audience saying, ‘Ce soir, ce soir, ce soir, amis, / Le Sire Montreur nous dévoilera: / L'unité et la pluralité des choses!’ Like the image of many voices among one voice, the trope of the ‘unity and plurality of things’ is arguably Chedid's vision of human consciousness—a consciousness that is both one and many; a consciousness that is embedded in a relationship with the other, which is figured as a connectedness that makes society. In Les Nombres (1965) and Bérénice d'Egypte (1962), through her writing and use of theatrical space and sound, Chedid constructs a unique vision of consciousness—configured as a vital empathy with the multitudes. She centres her revolutionary vision of consciousness on her women characters, who, by interacting with ‘the multitudes’ (le peuple, la foule, les nombres) open the possibility that human connectedness can make consciousness multiple and thereby transcends the dichotomies of self and other.

scholarly journals Posthumanizm i „syntezoidalny mimetyzm” w komiksie „Vision” Toma Kinga i Gabriela Hernandeza Walty

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 467-479
Author(s):  
Oskar Meller
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Time Work ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One

Cultural texts on the subject of posthuman can be found long before the post-anthropocentric turn in humanistic research. Literary explanations of posthumanism have entered the conventional canon not only in terms of the science-fiction classics. However, a different line follows the tradition of presenting posthumanist existence in the comic book medium. Scott Jeffrey accurately notes that most comic superheroes are post- or trans-human. Therefore, the transgression of human existence into a posthumanoid being is presented. However, in the case of the less culturally recognizable character of Vision, a synthezoid from the Marvel’s Avengers team, combining the body of the android and human consciousness, the vector of transgression is reversed. This article is an attempt to analyze the way the humanization process of this hero is narrative in the Vision series of screenwriter Tom King and cartoonist Gabriel Hernandez Walta. On the one hand, King mimetic reproduces the sociological panorama of American suburbs, showing the process of adaptation of the synthesoid family to the realities of full-time work and neighborly intercourse, on the other, he emphasizes the robotic limits of Vision humanization. Ultimately, the narrative line follows the cracks between these two plans, allowing King to present, with the help of inhuman heroes, one of the most human stories in the Marvel superhero universe.

scholarly journals L’albero della conoscenza: la dialettica del mito eterno dell’uomo secondo Hegel

Problemata ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 193-213
Author(s):  
Martina Barnaba
Keyword(s):  
Natural State ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Negative Element ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Genesis 3 ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Hegelian Philosophy

This paper aims to investigate the dialectical nature of the myth of original sin as described by Hegel. For introductory purposes, I will briefly highlight the process by which Hegelian philosophy operates the translation from religious representation to concept, demonstrating how this reading is at the basis of the interpretation of the myth. Then I will analyze the functioning of the dialectical movements of the biblical episode of Genesis 3 within the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, in order to discuss the issues of good and evil, innocence and guilt, will and arbitrariness. In this reconstruction the dialectic will emerge in its importance as a structure that permeates human consciousness as well as reality in general. In the specific case of the tree of knowledge, we will witness the concretization of this eternal conciliation of contradictions in two specific areas, which will be treated in the last section: the question of evil on the one hand, which will be demonstrated as a necessary negative element that triggers the dialectical movement itself, and the question of freedom on the other, which will appear as the result of the emancipation of the subject from the natural state in which he finds himself in the so-called "garden of animals".

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