The Ugly Psyche: Arendt and the Right to Opacity

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-198
Author(s):  
Anne O’Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Public Life ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
Specific Question ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Sensus Communis ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract Arendt was famously dismissive of the work of psychologists, claiming that they did nothing more than reveal the pervasive ugliness and monotony of the psyche. If we want to know who people are, she argued, we should observe what they do and say rather than delving into the turmoil of their inner lives; if we want to understand humanity, we would be better off reading Oedipus Rex than hearing about someone’s Oedipus complex. The rejection has a certain coherence in the context of her understanding of public life as the realm of appearance and opinion, but examining it through the specific question of ugliness complicates that understanding. While beauty invites us to contemplate the world and admire it, ugliness repels our attention and sows the seed of a worry that the world might not want to be known. Working with Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, the Kant lectures and a striking Denktagebuch entry in which she reacts with revulsion to Matisse’s Heads of Jeannette, I argue that Arendt’s response to the ugly psyche requires a re-examination of the sensus communis. If the psyche does not want to be known, and if not all points of view are open to imaginative occupation, the ideal and practice of enlarged mentality must reckon with a right to opacity.

The diary of a madman, seventeenth-century style: Goodwin Wharton, MP and communer with the fairy world

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Porter
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

SynopsisGoodwin Wharton (1653–1704) was a nobleman's son and a Whig MP who played no small part in English public life. His manuscript journal shows, however, that he also lived a bizarre secret life of the mind of a kind which, in later generations, would have led to his confinement as suffering from mental illness. Above all, through the offices of his medium and lover, Mary Parish, he entered into elaborate relations both with the fairy world and with God and His Angels. This paper examines our records of Wharton's consciousness

scholarly journals Peace Education in India: Possibilities and Challenges

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (S1-Dec2020) ◽  
pp. 34-36
Author(s):  
Anu Chandran ◽  
P Nagaraj
Keyword(s):  
Peace Education ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Root Cause ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
The World ◽  
Education In India ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Peace And Reconciliation

Peace education is an emerging field of study that has attained full acceptance in many countries, and is on its way towards development in many other parts of the world. The world is becoming more of an unsafe place to live in. There are threats in many forms against survival. Peace has become devoid in the day to day lives of people in all spheres of society, culture, politics and economics. Therefore it is essential to impart knowledge about peace and reconciliation post conflict, as that would help build a nonviolent approach towards conflict, and encourage to develop skills and values promoting reconciliation, and nonviolence. Once the right knowledge, skills and values are transmitted, transformation begins as people understand the root cause of conflicts and explore ways to address the challenges. Peace education is both educating on the peace content as well as educating for peace. The paper discusses the objectives of peace education and how it can be implemented as an effectualacademic discourse either by integrating it within the curriculum or through extramural activities. It also looks into the challenges and possibilities of a higher learning that shapes the mind and spirit of the learners as much as their intellect.

Philosophers-Citizens

In Our Name ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Beerbohm
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Justice As Fairness ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter challenges an account of citizenship that treats us as political philosophers or perennial deliberators and instead proposes the model of the philosopher-citizen who exhibits a computationally intense life of the mind. It first describes the ideal of the philosopher-citizen before considering how a theory of justice is to be employed by well-intentioned citizens by taking into account the views of John Rawls. It argues that the model of the philosopher-citizens tends to be monistic, collapsing the diversity of moral achievements that citizens can make in a democracy, and that this ideal should be separated from an account of the citizen's decision-making obligations. The chapter also examines the principles for citizens and for representatives in the context of Justice as Fairness and concludes by outlining the essential assumptions of a nonideal democratic theory.

The Life of Cognition and the Cognition of Life (Kant)

Forms of Life ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 77-122
Author(s):  
Andreas Gailus
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Symbolic Life ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Sensus Communis

This chapter examines the conceptualization of life as formative form around 1800. Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment is the first book in the German tradition to articulate the new dynamic notion of life as a convergence of mind and nature. For Kant, aesthetic experience is important because it involves an intensification of the life of the mind (including the social dimension of mind as sensus communis) and enables us to develop a regulative notion of organic life. Kant's claim is that to understand the peculiar organization of natural beings, we must view them as products of an intrinsic formative activity, and hence as in some way analogous to the mind's power of cognitive and perceptual synthesis, which we experience most vividly in our encounter with beauty. Aesthetic experience allows us to grasp the nature of human, or symbolic, life and its place within the natural world.

scholarly journals Fulfilling the self through food in wellness blogs: Governing the healthy subject

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110557
Author(s):  
Kaisa Tiusanen
Keyword(s):  
Healthy Subject ◽  
Food Consumption ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Personal Journey ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Ideal

In the world of wellness, food and eating are fundamentally important to one’s subjectivity: the self in this sphere is created and maintained through food consumption along a plant-based, ‘wholesome’ and healthy personal journey to well-being. This article focuses on the analysis of wellness food blogs run by women, aiming to map out the technologies of the self through which the ‘ideal wellness subject’ is created. The analysis examines technologies of subjectivity as they aspire towards (1) balance, (2) healing and (3) narrativization of the self. The article suggests that the subjectivities related to wellness culture draw from postfeminist and healthist ideologies and are based on a neoliberal discourse of individuality and self-control. The sociocultural indifference of wellness culture and its prerogative to police the self through culturally hegemonic pursuits based on (the right kind of) consumption makes the language of wellness a prominent neoliberal discourse.

scholarly journals The right to die with dignity and conscientious objection

2015 ◽  
pp. 52-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose Henrique Rodrigues Torres
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Development ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
Right To Die ◽  
Life Project ◽  
The World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Independent Decision ◽  
The Right ◽  
Limits Of Medicine ◽  
The Ideal

he project of life is linked to freedom, as a right of each person to choose their own destiny. (...) The project of life fully encompasses the ideal of the American Declaration (of the Rights and Duties of Man) of 1948, which proclaims the spiritual development as the supreme end and the highest expression of human existence. Colombia's Constitutional Court, at guaranteeing the fundamental right to live and die with dignity, in the liberating expression of human rights, did not forget the mythical image of Charon ferrying the dead in his boat to Hades . In Colombia, the struggle against death, stubborn and limitless, contrary to the expression of the patients' will, cannot anymore be accepted as a duty or as a right of the doctors, who now must resign themselves to the conscious and independent decision of their patients, understanding the dimension of existence and of human dignity against the limits of medicine and science, to lead them, just with the necessary palliative care, in crossing the River Styx, to the "world of the dead ". Denying euthanasia, in terms of the decision of the Constitutional Court, constitutes a flagrant violation of the patients' "life project", who have, in the established circumstances, the right to legitimate anticipation of death.

scholarly journals Super-humans: Super-language?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasil Penchev
Keyword(s):  
Reference Frames ◽  
Quantum Computer ◽  
Biological Species ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Quantum Model ◽  
Ideal World ◽  
The World ◽  
Vocal System ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Ideal

“Super-humans” is usually to be linked to Nietzsche or to Heidegger’s criticism to Nietzsche, or even to the ideology of Nazism. However, they can be properly underlain by philosophical and scientific anthropology as that biological species who will originate from humans eventually in the course of evolution. There is a series of more or less well-established facts in anthropogenesis, which would be relevant to the philosophical question about the “super-humans”: bipedalism, cooling by sweating, specific hair or its lack, omnivorous-ness, thumb opposition and apposition, vocal system of speech production, human brain, long childhood; our species is evolutionary young (about 200 000 years old), but it is the last survived descendant being genetically exceptionally homogenous (<00,01% genetic differences) of the genus “homo” (about 6 000 000 old). All this generates a few main features of our population: society, technics, language, and mind, which guarantee the contemporary absolute domination of mankind. The society has reached a natural limitation of earth. The technics depends on how much energy is produced. The mind is restricted by its carrier, i.e. by the brain. Thus only the language seems to be the frontier of any future development inducing a much better use of the former three. The recent informational technologies suggest the same. Language is defined as symbolic image of the world doubling it by an ideal or virtual world, which is fruitful for creativity and any modeling of the real world. Consequently, a gap between the material and the ideal world produces language. The language increases that gap in turn. Furthermore, the ideal world is secondary and derivative from the material world in origin and objectivity: Language serves for the world to be ordered. Thus language refers to the philosophical categories of ‘being’ and ‘time’. Any “super-language” should transcend some of those definitive borders of language and be a generalization. The involving of infinity can extend the language. Any human language is finite and addresses some finite reality. Thus the gap between reality and any model in language can be seen as that between infinity and its limitation to any finite representation: Finite representations dominate over society, technics, and the mind use. A “super-language” as an “infinite language” can be approached in a few reference frames: Husserl’s “Back to the things themselves!” if “phenomenon” in his philosophy is thought as the ‘word’ of the language of consciousness; the semantic and philosophical theory of symbol: from consciousness and language to reality; the concept of infinity in mathematics and its foundation: set or category theory; quantum mechanics and information: the coincidence of the quantum model and reality; quantum computer. Mankind is approached the problem of infinite language as the language of nature

Educational Thinking and the Conservation of the Revolutionary

2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 488-508
Author(s):  
Eduardo Manuel Duarte
Keyword(s):  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Digital Archives ◽  
Little Rock ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Background Context ◽  
Educational Thinking

Background/Context Prior work on Hannah Arendt and education has focused on democratic education, multicultural education, and conservatism in education. Most of these studies have concentrated on her essay, “The Crisis in Education.” While this study extends that work, it does so by taking up the lesser studied but equally relevant piece, “Reflections on Little Rock.” Furthermore, sparse attention has been paid to Arendt's work on thinking in relation to work on education. This piece seeks to fill these gaps in the scholarship on Arendt and education. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Following Arendt, my inquiry is concerned with what we might call “the life of the student mind.” Two central questions guide this inquiry: What are students qua students doing that prepares them in advance for renewing a common world? How, as students, are they engaged with the world without being asked to take responsibility for it? Research Design This study is a comparative exegesis of Arendt, reading her early essays, “Reflections on Little Rock” and “The Crisis in Education,” through the lens of Thinking, the first volume of her final and posthumously published work, The Life of the Mind. The study is heavily supported by research conducted in the Arendt digital archives. Conclusions/Recommendations This exegesis reveals new insights into Arendt's mapping of the educational sphere and the principal activity taking place therein, namely, educational thinking. The close comparative reading of Arendt's early and later work produces a philosophical construction of the educational sphere as a liminal zone between past and future, a gap between the private sphere of the home, and the political sphere of the public realm. In turn, the primary result of this study is the articulation of a distinctly Arendtian conception of educational thinking as occurring in an existential space of solitude where students, withdrawn from the continuity of everyday life, engage in an activity that enables them to reflect upon and critically reimagine the world and thereby prepare for world-caring.

AN OBJECTIVITY OF THE IDEAL IN A MODERN PHILOSOPHY

2021 ◽  
pp. 28-37
Author(s):  
Evgenii M. Dmitrievskii ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Social Consciousness ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Objective Existence ◽  
Form Scheme ◽  
The Ideal

The article analyzes the ideal from the position of antipsycholo- gism (objectivism), which is opposed to psychologism. The proponents of psy- chologism attributed the ideal only to the mind of an individual. Objectivists considered the existence of the ideal not only in the mind of a separate indivi- dual, but also outside of it, as a rule, allocating their own area for it in reality. But the objectivists also understood the objective existence of the ideal differ- ently. E. Husserl connected the ideal with the pure laws of logic and mathema- tics, comprehended intuitively. G. Frege extended the ideal, including the laws of nature, linking it with the meaning of the sentence. He also formulated the concept of three regions of reality, including the ideal. K. Popper extended the ideal to cultural objects and also introduced the principles of evolutionism into the world of the ideal. M. A. Lifshits connected the ideal with all objects, both the natural and cultural. He pointed to the activity of the ideal in relation to the subject. E.V. Ilyenkov understood the ideal not as an abstract image, but as a form (scheme) of human activity in the rational transformation of the reality objects revealed in social practice. He believed that the ideal exists objectively in the forms of social consciousness.

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