Gaston Bachelard and Phenomenology: Outline of a Theory of the Imagination

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Thiboutot ◽  
A. Martinez ◽  
David Jager
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Phenomenological Psychology ◽  
Gaston Bachelard ◽  
Human Habitation ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractGaston Bachelard's thought remains a continual source of inspiration for a phenomenological psychology that takes human habitation as a fundamental given and as an abiding mystery of the human condition. the following essay explores the ideas Bachelard developed in the course of his study of poetry. It examines in particular his vision of imagination as a unique passage way by means of which we reach an inhabitable, intersubjective and fully human world. Within that perspective, our lives are constantly renewed by the appearance of a revealing image or a telling metaphor. Each time that we are awakened by this appeal we commemorate the birth and rebirth of a human world.

scholarly journals H. ARENDT‘S INTERPRETATION OF NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL IN THE POLITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE HUMAN CONDITION / H. ARENDT NATŪROS IR ARTEFAKTO INTERPRETACIJA ŽMOGAUS BŪKLĖSPOLITINĖJE FENOMENOLOGIJOJE

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-102
Author(s):  
Gábor Kovács
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Human Condition

Modernity, in philosophical and sociological literature, has “traditionally” been presented as the age when artifacts supplant nature and destroy the originally given natural environment. The process of modernization, from this point of view, is the process of de-naturalization. This widely shared conviction has basically been questioned by Hannah Arendt. During the centuries of modern age, in the detriment of the commonly created and uphold human world, process of re-naturalization has been taking place, Arendt argues. This means, from other aspect, that modernity is the age of world-alienation. It is one of the results of modern science that human beings lose their confidence in the reliability of their senses. The Arendtian critique of modernity, which has deeply been influenced by Martin Heidegger's philosophy, takes a difference between the notions of Earth and world. In Arendt's theory technology enhances the processes of re-naturalization. The problem of the relation of natural and artificial, in The Human Condition (1958), has been inserted in two narratives; one of them is the narrative of cultural criticism and another is that of political philosophy. These narratives have been embedded in different contexts borrowing ambivalences and inconsistencies to Arendt's argumentation. Santrauka Filosofinėje ir sociologinėje literatūroje modernybė „tradiciškai“ buvo pristatoma kaip epocha, kai artefaktai išstumia gamtą ir griauna pirminę natūralią aplinką. Šiuo požiūriu modernizacijos procesas – tai denatūralizacijos procesas. Šį plačiai paplitusį įsitikinimą iš esmės ginčijo Hanna Arendt. Pasak jos, moderniosios epochos šimtmečiais bendrai kurto ir puoselėto žmogaus pasaulio nenaudai vyko renatūralizacijos procesas. Kita vertus, tai reiškia, kad modernybė – tai pasaulio atskirties epocha. Viena iš moderniojo mokslo pasekmių yra ta, kad žmonės praranda pasitikėjimą juslėmis. Arendt modernybės kritika, giliai paveikta Martino Heideggerio filosofijos, atskiria Žemės ir pasaulio sąvokas. Arendt teorijoje technologija sustiprina renatūralizacijos procesus. Natūros ir artefakto santykio problema Žmogaus būklėje (1958) buvo įterpta į du naratyvus; vienas jų – tai kultūrinės kritikos naratyvas, o kitas – politinės filosofijos naratyvas. Šie naratyvai įsitvirtino skirtinguose kontekstuose, Arendt argumentacijai suteikdami dviprasmiškumų ir neatitikimų.

Historicizing Distinctions

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 153-172
Author(s):  
Beltrán Undurraga ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
New Varieties ◽  
Human World ◽  
Vita Activa ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Human Condition

This article expands Patchen Markell’s (2011) seminal problematization of The Human Condition by examining the impact that the modern developments in science and technology had on Arendt’s signature categories. Whereas Markell is interested in the systematic “architecture” of the book, I attempt to historicize Arendt’s distinctions in light of the story she tells about science and technology. From the invention of the telescope to the splitting of the atom, technoscience has provoked shifts in the hierarchies within the vita activa; spawned new varieties of “labor,” “work,” and “action”; and blurred the traditional boundaries between “nature” and the “human world.” These reconfigurations draw the contours of a new, “modern world” that is different from the world whose story and conceptual tradition Arendt set out to articulate. Largely as a result of the activities of science and technology, the experiences that informed the categories of the “Western tradition” correspond to a world that is no longer our own.

Bodily Selves: Identity and Shared Realities among Humans and Spirits in Zanzibar

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjersti Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Social Positioning ◽  
People’S Daily ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
People's Daily ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractThe paper explores the ways in which spirits calledmasheitaniormajinni(singl.sheitaniorjinni)engage in people’s daily lives in Zanzibar Town, Zanzibar. It is argued that the phenomenon of spirits and other forms of ‘spectral’ beings may offer clues to an improved understanding of society and a more precise perception of the various concerns and paradoxes people cope with in their everyday lives. Reflecting on matters of identity, the concept of the person, and the human condition, it is suggested that to most people the human world appears to be rather unpredictable and chaotic while the world of spirits, in contrast, is seen as stable and predictable. The spirits’ involvement in people’s everyday lives and, moreover, the extent to which peoples’ relationships with different kinds of spirits affect negotiations of identity and social positioning are discussed with reference to the ethnographic material.

scholarly journals On the Dialogue of Aesthetics and Philosophical Anthropology

wisdom ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Georgia APOSTOLOPOULOU
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Open World ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Helmuth Plessner ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Pictorial Form ◽  
The Human Condition

After the alleged ‘ends’ of metaphysics, of history, and of art, aesthetics reorganises the field of its enquiry. While retaining the question of the meaning of art for the human as the background justification of its theorising, aesthetics meets philosophical anthropology and enlarges its field. Philosophical anthropology explains that the instability of the human condition demands culture as the artificial stabilisation of the human world as well as of the human in the world. Expressivity, artificiality, and the aesthetic are interweaved with the meaning of the human world. In this context, pictures have priority over concepts and justify art as the eminent pictorial form of meaning. Since the human lives in nature and culture, the stabilisation of its open world is possible through creation of spatial correlates and of objects as well. Thus, aesthetics does need to expand enquiry beyond the discourse on art, so that it includes the issues concerning the aesthetic character of the human world and its spatial correlates. While Wolfgang Welsch and Richard Shusterman argue for a revision of aesthetics, Joseph Margolis and Helmuth Plessner support the stronger dialogue between philosophical anthropology and aesthetics in different ways. Further, Arnold Berleant explores aesthetics of human space.

scholarly journals Robak i robactwo w twórczości Władysława Syrokomli

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Igliński
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Frequency Of Occurrence ◽  
Pest Insect ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Metaphorical Meaning ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Human Condition

The aim of this article is to determine the frequency of occurrence of the terms “worm” and “insects” in the works of Władysław Syrokomla. An assumption is made that these themes have animportant function in the poet’s works, and that their occurrence indicates something of significance. The article considers both the functionality and repeatability criteria, which is the necessary foundationfor recording these items. The conducted analyses indicate that Syrokomla’s insects (regardless of whether they have a literal or metaphorical meaning) in most cases signal something evil. Sometimes it is an ordinary pest (insect) damaging plants, but more frequently the insect refers to the human condition, characterising it in three dimensions: as the worm of death, as the worm of internal suffering or as the worm of insignificance. In other cases, worms or insects represent curses or sin. The diversity of how such zoomorphic connotations are presented and applied deserves attention. Moreover, although the majority of them have long-established cultural and literary traditions, in Syrokomla’s works they gain a new context (for example, historical, folk or social). They indicate sensitivity to injustice and evil. The poet frequently presents the human world by analogy to the world of nature.

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

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.

Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

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.

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Mushrooms ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Black Land ◽  
The Human Condition

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.  

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