The horizon of another world: Foucault’s Cynics and the birth of radical cosmopolitics

2021 ◽  
pp. 019145372098786
Author(s):  
Tamara Caraus

The ancient Cynic Diogenes was the first to declare ‘I am a citizen of the world ( kosmopolitês)’ and the other Cynics followed him. In The Courage of the Truth, Michel Foucault analyses the Cynic mode of parrhēsia and living in truth, however, his text expands the cosmopolitical amplitude of Cynics since the Cynics’ true life contains an inherent cosmopolitan logic. Identifying the core of the Cynic true life in the care for the self that leads to the care for the others within the horizon of the possibility of another life and another world, Foucault shows how the Cynic establishes ‘an intense bond with the whole of humankind’, cares ‘for all mankind’ and for the whole world as a ‘functionary of humanity’ and, as ‘the scout of humanity’, the Cynic prefigures the future and exercises the ‘government of the universe’. This article argues that Foucault’s account on Cynics maps the very first moments of becoming cosmopolitan and offers an insightful perspective on the process of achieving a cosmopolitan subjectivity, a process displayed by different expressions of cosmopolitanism, and especially the ‘insurgent cosmopolitanism’ from the bottom up.

Author(s):  
John L. Culliney ◽  
David Jones

We describe the foundations of the fractal self in relation to the Chinese notion of personal development and enhancement of adeptness in the world and mutualism with the other. This seeking, described in the codified system of Daoism, is a pathway that may progress to the highest level of achievement of such a self: that which defines a sage. The chapter introduces the view that a sage is a fractal self that achieves a peak of intimacy and constructive interaction with the world. We detail the development of human beings on this pathway, emerging beyond the core embodiments of empathy, sympathy, and rudimentary morality observed in apes. The self for the early Chinese was always a being that was embedded in the world and dynamic flow of forces. This self was defined in intimate terms as adaptable and adept, seeking to be a microcosmic contributor to some holistic macrocosm. In this chapter, Daoism leads our thinking on how the fractal self engages with the world. In turn, this way of understanding selfness and its potential to enrich its system from within resonates with discussions of the interactive self of Buddhism and was also in the minds of Pre-Socratic thinkers in the West.


Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer

This chapter details events in 1973, when the issue for France and the world was whether revolution or counter-revolution should prevail. In every country where the government was at war with the French Republic in 1793—in Britain and Ireland, in the United Provinces and in Belgium restored to the Emperor, in the Austrian Monarchy, the small German states and the Prussian kingdom, in the Italian kingdom of Sardinia—there were groups of people whose sympathies lay in varying degree with the declared enemy. Wherever the French Revolution had been heard of there were men who wished it not to fail. Their concern was not only for France but for the future of some kind of democratization in their own countries. For those, on the other hand, who hoped to see the whole revolution undone, these first months of 1793 saw a revival of the exciting expectations of a year before. The Republic seemed a sinking ship, crazed, in addition, by mutiny in its own crew.


2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-491
Author(s):  
John Deely

How anything acts depends upon what it is, both as a kind of thing and as a distinct individual of that kind: “agere sequitur esse” — action follows being. This is as true of signs as it is of lions or centipedes: therefore, in order to determine the range or extent of semiosis we need above all to determine the kind of being at stake under the name “sign”. Since Poinsot, in a thesis that the work of Peirce centuries later confirmed, the proper being of signs as signs lies in a relation, a relationship irreducibly unifying three distinct terms: a foreground term representing another than itself — the representamen or sign vehicle; the other represented — the significate or object signified; and the third term to or for whom the other-representation is made — the interpretant, which need not be a person and, indeed, need not even be mental. The action of signs then is the way signs influence the world, including the world of experience and knowledge, but extending even to the physical world of nature beyond the living. It is a question of what is the causality proper to signs in consequence of the being proper to them as signs, an indirect causality, just as relations are indirectly dependent upon the interactions of individuals making up the plurality of the universe; and a causality that models what could or might be in contrast to what is here and now. To associate this causality with final causality is correct insofar as signs are employed in shaping the interactions of individual things; but to equate this causality with “teleology” is a fundamental error into which the contemporary development of semiotics has been inclined to fall, largely through some published passages of Peirce from an essay within which he corrects this error but in passages so far left unpublished. By bringing these passages to light, in which Peirce points exactly in the direction earlier indicated by Poinsot, this essay attempts a kind of survey of the contemporary semiotic development in which the full vista of semiosis is laid out, and shown to be co-extensive with the boundaries of the universe itself, wherever they might fall. Precisely the indirect extrinsically specificative formal causality that signs exercise is what enables the “influence of the future” according to which semiosis changes the relevance of past to present in the interactions of Secondness. Understanding of this point (the causality proper to signs) also manifests the error of reducing the universe to signs, the error sometimes called “pansemiosis”.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-180
Author(s):  
Besse Tenriabeng Mursyid

In terms of the economic development of a nation it cannot be separated from economic activities that are stable in a country, on the other hand it is undeniable that now the world is struggling against the Covid-19 pandemic which is known together with all countries is intensively making movements aimed at Minimizing the spread of the corona virus, recorded based on data from the Google news site related to the development of Covid-19 cases throughout the country, the total cases worldwide were recorded at 50,794,593 with cases of patients dying as many as 1,262,199 Various policies were created by the government in order to attract the attention of foreign investors to enter Indonesia to invest, one of which is the open door policy to improve the country's economy after the Covid-19 pandemic in the future


Author(s):  
Jennifer Hawkins

Chapter 12 explores radical personal change and its relationship to well-being, welfare, or prudential value. Many theorists of welfare are committed to what is here called the future-based reasons view (FBR), which holds (1) that the best prudential choice in a situation is determined by which possible future has the greatest net welfare value for the subject and (2) what determines facts about future welfare are facts about the subject and the world at that future time. Although some cases of radical change are intuitively prudentially good, many cases of really radical change are not. Yet FBR has trouble explaining this. Many people instinctively reach for the notion of identity to solve this problem—arguing that really radical change cannot be good because it alters who someone is. Yet, as the chapter argues, there are reasons to doubt that appeals to identity are appropriate. The chapter ends with the suggestion that prudential facts may explain why and when retaining identity matters, rather than the other way around, and points to a possible way forward for a theorist of welfare committed to FBR.


LOGOS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Leo Agung Srie Gunawan

The true religious feeling is rooted in adoration. The taste of adoration is derived from the experience of God which indeed shake one’s soul. On one side, the experience of God leads to the recognition of God as the Great Creator of the universe. In this case, God is experienced as the everything. On the other side, it causes that human being encounters the self-recognition as a helpless creature. One feels as a nothingness of creature here. The feeling of adoration, therefore, has a religious structure in human soul that has a direction to God. As the structure of soul, the adoration is likely to be subjective which means that the subject experiences God (the world of ideas) and at the same time, it is objective that God is experienced by the subject (the real world). The object of the experience of adoration is, particularly, transcendent. Finally, the sense of adoration is needed to revive the living of faith for the believers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.


Edupedia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-53
Author(s):  
Ilzam Dhaifi

The world has been surprised by the emergence of a COVID 19 pandemic, was born in China, and widespread to various countries in the world. In Indonesia, the government issued several policies to break the COVID 19 pandemic chain, which also triggered some pro-cons in the midst of society. One of the policies government takes is the closure of learning access directly at school and moving the learning process from physical class to a virtual classroom or known as online learning. In the economic sector also affects the parents’ financial ability to provide sufficient funds to support the implementation of distance learning applied by the government. The implications of the distance education policy are of course the quality of learning, including the subjects of Islamic religious education, which is essentially aimed at planting knowledge, skills, and religious consciousness to form the character of the students. Online education must certainly be precise, in order to provide equal education services to all students, prepare teachers to master the technology, and seek the core learning of Islamic religious education can still be done well.


Author(s):  
Daphna Oyserman

Everyone can imagine their future self, even very young children, and this future self is usually positive and education-linked. To make progress toward an aspired future or away from a feared future requires people to plan and take action. Unfortunately, most people often start too late and commit minimal effort to ineffective strategies that lead their attention elsewhere. As a result, their high hopes and earnest resolutions often fall short. In Pathways to Success Through Identity-Based Motivation Daphna Oyserman focuses on situational constraints and affordances that trigger or impede taking action. Focusing on when the future-self matters and how to reduce the shortfall between the self that one aspires to become and the outcomes that one actually attains, Oyserman introduces the reader to the core theoretical framework of identity-based motivation (IBM) theory. IBM theory is the prediction that people prefer to act in identity-congruent ways but that the identity-to-behavior link is opaque for a number of reasons (the future feels far away, difficulty of working on goals is misinterpreted, and strategies for attaining goals do not feel identity-congruent). Oyserman's book goes on to also include the stakes and how the importance of education comes into play as it improves the lives of the individual, their family, and their society. The framework of IBM theory and how to achieve it is broken down into three parts: how to translate identity-based motivation into a practical intervention, an outline of the intervention, and empirical evidence that it works. In addition, the book also includes an implementation manual and fidelity measures for educators utilizing this book to intervene for the improvement of academic outcomes.


2020 ◽  
pp. 174387212098228
Author(s):  
Stephen Riley

Drawing upon Kant’s analysis of the role of intuitions in our orientation towards knowledge, this paper analyses four points of departure in thinking about dignity: self, other, time and space. Each reveals a core area of normative discourse – authenticity in the self, respect for the other, progress through time and authority as the government of space – along with related grounds of resistance to dignity. The paper concludes with a discussion of the methodological challenge presented by our different dignitarian intuitions, in particular the role of universality in testing and cohering our intuitions.


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