Conditions for Creativity in Conversation

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30
Author(s):  
John A. Pauley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Ecology ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
Contemporary United States ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This essay begins by demonstrating how conversations can end before they have a chance to authentically begin. Conversations are stultified by patterns in the human ecology. The first pattern identified is “self-obliviousness” in conversation. “Self-obliviousness” is then tied to patterns of both radical self-assurance and self-diminishment. The underlying idea and argument is that adequate self-awareness is a necessary condition for (authentic) conversation and this condition is only met as human beings recognize their own selves as relational. The argument then turns to remedies to the pattern. Metacognition as exercised in relation to literary art can reveal the conditions for identifying and recognizing the damaging patterns. By the end of the essay the conditions for creativity in conversation are conflated with the formation of empathetic dispositions and these are only possible through understanding the self in equal relation to other selves. The arguments and examples are from contemporary United States Culture, but the damaging patterns can easily be recognized as elements of the human condition generally.

On the Harm of Genocide

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Paul Kucharski
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Community Or ◽  
The World ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Individual Human ◽  
The Human Condition

My aim in this essay is to advance the state of scholarly discussion on the harms of genocide. The most obvious harms inflicted by every genocide are readily evident: the physical harm inflicted upon the victims of genocide and the moral harm that the perpetrators of genocide inflict upon themselves. Instead, I will focus on a kind of harm inflicted upon those who are neither victims nor perpetrators, on those who are outside observers, so to speak. My thesis will be that when a whole community or culture is eliminated, or even deeply wounded, the world loses an avenue for insight into the human condition. My argument is as follows. In order to understand human nature, and that which promotes its flourishing, we must certainly study individual human beings. But since human beings as rational and linguistic animals are in part constituted by the communities in which they live, the study of human nature should also involve the study of communities and cultures—both those that are well ordered and those that are not. No one community or culture has expressed all that can be said about the human way of existing and flourishing. And given that the unity and wholeness of human nature can only be glimpsed in a variety of communities and cultures, then part of the harm of genocide consists in the removal of a valuable avenue for human beings to better understand themselves.

Leonard Woolf’s Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo: Satirical Heritage as Apocalyptic Prophecy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vara Neverow
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Closing Time ◽  
Genetic Elements ◽  
Zoo Animals ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Animal Farm ◽  
The Human Condition

Leonard Woolf, in his 24-page satirical pamphlet, Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo, was published in 1925 and was the seventh work in the first series of Hogarth Essays. In the work, Woolf explores the inherent attributes of the human condition from a highly ironic viewpoint, presenting his argument through the discourse of animals. Victoria Glendinning (Leonard Woolf: A Biography) categorizes the work as a “satirical squib” and describes how “the supercivilized zoo animals hold a debate after closing time to discuss Man.” The elephant, all too familiar with human nature, states emphatically that, “Human beings delude themselves that a League of Nations or Protection or armies and navies are going to give them security and civilization in their jungle.” Glendinning not only aligns the heritage of Woolf’s essay with the caustic social critiques of Swift and Kipling but also observes that Fear and Politics “casts a beam ahead toward Orwell’s Animal Farm” (Glendinning 240-41). By situating the essay in the context of its hereditary, genetic elements, Glendinning highlights how Woolf’s work is also passed on to another heir.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
The World ◽  
Subjective Truth ◽  
The Human Condition

Introduces some of the central ideas of existentialism—including subjective truth, finitude, being-in-the-world, facticity, transcendence, inwardness, and the self as becoming—as relevant to an individual living in the contemporary moment. Highlights existentialist concern both for human individuality and for commonly-shared features of the human condition. Emphasizes existentialist attention both to the despairing aspects of human life and to the affirmation of existence as worthy of wonder. Introduces a few key thinkers—Kierkegaard, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche—while also indicating the diversity of existentialism to be emphasized throughout the book. Addresses what existentialism may have to offer in the context of contemporary challenges to objective truth and communal forms of meaning.

The Revolting American Elites: Christopher Lasch and his Enemies

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. HEALE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Dark Night ◽  
American Life ◽  
Christopher Lasch ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Human Condition

Christopher Lasch completed this book under “trying circumstances,” which presumably included the knowledge that he was dying from leukemia. Its final sardonic section is entitled “The Dark Night of the Soul,” and contemplates the pitiable plight of modern and secularized man, who denies himself the discipline of religion and is compelled to seek security in the easier and probably falser gods of science or therapy or identity politics. Lasch's last, racking examination of the human condition as it is displayed in the United States is not exactly despairing, because the human agency means that there is always hope, but his subjects are unfulfilled beings in a dysfunctional society. In short, Lasch has not used his farewell address to reprieve his fellow intellectuals of the charges he has previously levelled against them; rather, the indictment has been intensified. In many ways this a perfect Parthian shaft, gathering together and synthesising into one compelling critique the many misgivings that Lasch had long been developing about American life.

scholarly journals The Vulnerable (Post) Modern Self and the “Greening” of Spiritual Personhood through Life in the Spirit

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 194
Author(s):  
Mary Frohlich
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Social Esteem ◽  
Life On Earth

In the period now being called the Anthropocene, the fatal vulnerabilities of the modern way of constructing selfhood are becoming ever more evident. Joanna Macy, who writes from a Buddhist perspective, has argued for the need to “green” the self by rediscovering its participation in ecological and cosmic networks. From a Christian perspective, I would articulate this in terms of an imperative to rediscover our spiritual personhood as radical communion in both God and cosmos. In this paper, “self” refers to an ever-restless process of construction of identity based in self-awareness and aimed at maintaining one’s integrity, coherence, and social esteem. I use the term “person,” on the other hand, to refer to a relational center that exists to be in communion with other persons. How—within the conditions of the dawning Anthropocene—can the tension between these two essential aspects of human existence be opened up in a way that can more effectively protect human and other life on Earth? This would require, it seems, harnessing both the self-protective and the self-giving potentials of human beings. The proposed path is to give ourselves over into the rhythms of the Spirit, being breathed in to selfless personal communion and out to co-creation of our refreshed selfhood.

From consumer to construer: Travels in human subjectivity

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 504-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Fuat Fırat ◽  
Nikhilesh Dholakia
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Extant Literature ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
The Human Condition

A key component of how human beings organize their lives is how they perceive and make sense of what it means to be human, that is, their subjectivity. Human subjectivity has taken on different dominant forms across history, the consumer being one of the most dominant contemporary forms. Based on current and potential trends, we argue, with a deliberate tone of optimism about transformative potential of the human condition, that if the contemporary iconographic culture is transcended, there is the possibility of a subject that transcends the consumer, a construer subject. In contrast to what largely exists in extant literature – extrapolating from the consumer subjectivity to posthuman subjects – we envision the possibility of an epochal cultural change that will provide the ground for a construer subjectivity to emerge. We offer some preliminary insights into what such subjectivity may entail.

Plato's Critique of Hedonism in the Philebus

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT C. BARTLETT
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Human Good ◽  
Self Knowledge

No one can claim to have thought seriously about the question “How ought I to live?”, the guiding question of political philosophy, without having confronted the powerful answer to it supplied by hedonism. In thinking about hedonism today, we may begin from that thinker who was both very important to and early in its history: Plato. Of the dialogs that have come down to us as Plato's, only the Philebus takes as its direct aim the examination of pleasure's claim to be the human good. The Philebus culminates in the suggestions that the need for self-awareness or self-knowledge may finally be more fundamental to all human beings (and hence to hedonists) than is even the desire for pleasure, and that the experience of at least some pleasures constitutes a great obstacle to precisely the self-knowledge we seek. The Philebus is important today not only because it contains a searching analysis of hedonism but also because it compels us to raise the crucial question of the precise nature of “the good” with which we are justly most concerned—our own or that of others—a question whose centrality to self-knowledge we are in danger of forgetting.

scholarly journals The Joy of Being as Anthropological Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-73
Author(s):  
Agapov Oleg D. ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Human Condition

The joy of being is connected with one’s activities aimed at responding to the challenges of the elemental forces and the boundlessness of being, which are independent of human subjectivity. In the context of rising to the challenges of being, one settles to acquire a certain power of being in themselves and in the world. Thus, the joy of being is tied to achieving the level of the “miraculous fecundity” (E. Levinas), “an internal necessity of one’s life” (F. Vasilyuk), magnanimity (M. Mamardashvili). The ontological duty of any human being is to succeed at being human. The joy of being is closely connected to experiencing one’s involvement in the endless/eternity and realizing one’s subjective temporality/finitude, which attunes him to the absolute seriousness in relation to one’s complete realization in life. Joy is a foundational anthropological phenomenon in the structure of ways of experiencing the human condition. The joy of being as an anthropological practice can appear as a constantly expanding sphere of human subjectivity where the transfiguration of the powers of being occurs under the sign of the Height (Levinas) / the Good. Without the possibility of transfiguration human beings get tired of living, immerse themselves in the dejected state of laziness and the hopelessness of vanity. The joy of being is connected to unity, gathering the multiplicity of human life under the aegis of meaning that allows us to see the other and the alien in heteronomous being, and understand the nature of co-participation and responsibility before the forces of being, and also act in synergy with them.The joy of being stands before a human being as the joy of fatherhood/ motherhood, the joy of being a witness to the world in creative acts (the subject as a means to retreat before the world and let the world shine), the joy of every day that was saved from absurdity, darkness and the impersonal existence of the total. Keywords: joy, higher reality, anthropological practices, “the height”, subject, transcendence, practice of coping

scholarly journals Le problème de l’identité culturelle dans les romans Tout s’effondre de Chinua Achebe et Un nom pour un autre de Jhumpa Lahiri

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 243-260
Author(s):  
Nadejda Ivanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Cultural Conflict ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
Native Community ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
The Human Condition

The novels Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri approach an acute and sensitive problem of the effects of colonization and of the self-exiled emigrant man. Each of the protagonists of these two novels expresses an upheaval, an inner cultural conflict. It turns out that their destiny is in a close connection with their images and emotional valences, strongly fed by a collective imaginary, by the deep reality of collective life. Thus, adherence and communication with the archetypal resources of the native community, with the essential that precedes the human condition, proves to be a vital necessity, of overwhelming importance for our protagonists.

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