The Importance of Bearing Witness

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-319
Author(s):  
Delia Popescu
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
The World ◽  
View Reconstruction ◽  
Bear Witness

This essay considers the notion of bearing witness as an analytical path for assessing and applying the legacy of Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless. Havel’s account of disempowerment is connected to the role of ideology in creating the “environment of power” as a tool that enables participation in one’s own disempowerment. Havel dissects the process of becoming powerless and then reconstructs empowerment by reflecting on the journey of the archetypal post-totalitarian subject, the greengrocer. In Popescu’s view, reconstruction is based on the mechanism of bearing witness to one’s own presence in the world and its constitutive effects on the lives of others. To bear witness requires a search for evidence of the ontological match between world, self, and human meaning. In this context, acts of dissenters are the exemplary manifestation of a potentiality that seems to reside in us all. Dissenters bear witness to alternatives—reflecting what Havel considers a baseline of humanity: the natural multiplicity of human experience.

Being Able to Survive and Thrive

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-46
Author(s):  
David L. Blustein
Keyword(s):  
Time Perspective ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Financial Security ◽  
Comprehensive Review ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Boston College ◽  
The World ◽  
Work Volition ◽  
Psychology Of Working

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of the ways in which the needs for survival and power intersect with working. Beginning with an overview of Maslow’s need hierarchy (which indicates the need for survival is fundamental to our existence) and the psychology-of-working framework, vignettes from the participants from the Boston College Working Project provide an in-depth perspective about the complex ways that striving for survival intersects with relationships, financial security, and thriving. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of time perspective and work volition in relation to the need to survive. The chapter makes clear that the drive for survival is an essential aspect of being alive in the world. Creating opportunities for people to meet this integral aspect of human experience, naturally, is a challenge that requires the best of our inner spirits and a commitment to nurturing the needs of the entire spectrum of people in our communities.

Paradox as Vision: Recovering Transcendence Within the World

Horizons ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-43
Author(s):  
Charles J. Sabatino
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Bear Witness

AbstractThe stories which Jesus told, as well as the manner of his life and death, bear witness to his fundamental vision that the last are first in the Kingdom of God. With this paradox, Jesus offers a clue as to how the divine mystery is present in human experience. When this vision of Jesus is related to certain parallel images in Buddhist thought, it can help us understand transcendence as an ultimate meaning present within the human world itself. With this perspective, we may then be able to apply the paradox toward understanding the meaning of Jesus' resurrection.

scholarly journals Rural Landscape as a Value of Cultural Heritage

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Wieruszewska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Rural Space ◽  
A Value ◽  
European Landscape Convention ◽  
The World

The Author – ethnologist and anthropologist of culture – defends the thesis that rural landscape is an important component of cultural heritage. Virtual “cyberspaces” as - sume the role of an alternative life environment. Physical space loses the basis for explaining the world and for shaping human experience. The degraded rural cultural landscape is the proof of erroneous conceptions and rural space gathers the effects of a deficit of sensibility to “long continuance”. In opposition to postmodernist assessments the Author objects to the attempts at destabilising culture. Culture is significant. The protection of rural landscape as a particularly sensitive and valuable quality has a sense. In the conclusion of her article the Author suggests that a more thorough humanistic reflection is needed to make it possible to optimally implement the recommendations of the European Landscape Convention.

scholarly journals The value of ‘bearing witness’ to desistance

2016 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 408-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Probation Officers ◽  
The Body ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Moral Space ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Bear Witness

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on making probation practice ‘desistance-focused’. It does this through considering the body of knowledge on responding to trauma through ‘bearing witness’ to the person’s story – attending to their values and lived experience – and applying this to probation practice. It addresses why the literature on trauma has relevance to work with people who have offended. Then it explores the epistemological, performative, moral and political dimensions of ‘bearing witness’ and the relevance of each of these to desistance. It highlights the potentially critical role of the audience (in this case the probation practitioner) in the co-construction of the desistance narrative. Additionally, the paper argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the moral space in which such narratives are co-constructed. In a context where the voices of people who have offended are silenced and their experiences of victimisation or structural violence are written out, I suggest that ‘being present and being with another’ (Naef, 2006: 146) enacts a moral responsibility to support a transition from object to subject and to recognise and endorse the humanity of those who have committed crimes. The paper provides a practice example of ‘bearing witness’ to desistance. Finally, it addresses potential challenges in asking probation officers to ‘bear witness’ to desistance.

Methods in cognitive linguistics

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-36
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Muradovich Rakhimov
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The World

Cognitive linguistics is a direction in linguistics that explores the problems of the correlation of language and consciousness, the role of language in the conceptualization and categorization of the world, in cognitive processes and generalization of human experience, the connection of individual cognitive abilities of a person with the language and the forms of their interaction.

Visual Representations of the Genocide

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Elander
Keyword(s):  
Khmer Rouge ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Complete Representation ◽  
Killing Fields ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Primary Form ◽  
Key Questions

It is often stated that it is not possible to completely understand genocide: its horror and suffering defy complete representation. For those not immediately affected by the horror, representations of genocide through photography and film are often the primary form through which genocide is encountered. It is possible to discern two key questions underpinning scholarship that engages with representations of genocide in photography and film: First, to what extent can photos and film document and thereby provide evidence of genocide? One version of this question is linked to that of examining “truths” about genocide—whether genocide occurred and understanding its intricacies. Another leads to questions about the role of photography as evidence and its limits in providing “truths.” The second central question in the scholarship concerns the role that photos and film hold in bearing witness to genocide. Here, the scholarship tends to be framed not so much a question as an impetus to “never forget” or “never again.” During the Khmer Rouge genocide, somewhere between 1.5 and 2.25 million people were killed. While most killings do not meet the legal elements of genocide, the event is nevertheless colloquially known as genocide. Among the most known photographs from the period are the photographs taken at the security center S-21. Today, they stand as representative of the victims of the Khmer Rouge and have appeared at genocide museums, research archives, institutions of art, and as illustrations for various legal claims. The debates that have accompanied these appearances are illustrative of the debates on images of genocide more generally, focusing on, for example, limits of representation, the appropriate place for such photographs. and claims of voyeurism. Numerous films have been made about the Khmer Rouge period, some of which have been major commercial successes, others have been independent documentaries. Films such as The Killing Fields and The Missing Picture can be seen as bearing witness to the genocide, whereas documentaries such as S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine pose intricate questions about responsibility. Finally, it is noteworthy to pay attention to the way film appears within criminal proceedings, as this sheds light on the different understandings of evidence when the task is to bear witness and assign responsibility.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald A. Landes
Keyword(s):  
Applied Sciences ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Phenomenology Of Perception ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) was a key figure in twentieth-century French philosophy and one of the principal proponents of existential phenomenology. Through his subtle and wide-ranging descriptions of lived and embodied experience, particularly in his major text Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty made significant contributions on a variety of topics, including behaviour, perception, habit acquisition, language, expression, history and politics. His broader interests in the philosophical consequences of these descriptions led him to address many classical philosophical problems (for example, freedom, temporality, the relation of the soul and body, ontology, etc.). Perhaps his most lasting contribution was in directing philosophical inquiry to the role of the lived body in the operative structures of meaning across all human experience. This aspect of his work has been a starting point for contemporary studies of embodiment in both philosophy and other disciplines, from new approaches in cognitive science to phenomenological contributions in performance studies, gender studies and applied sciences. Merleau-Ponty’s interests evolved throughout his career, leading to a greater engagement with structuralism in the early 1950s and to a more explicit attempt to answer ontological questions about nature and philosophical methodology in the late 1950s. At the time of his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty was developing a phenomenological ontology in a manuscript that was published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible (1964). He argued that human experience is marked by a certain reversibility in that we are at once subjects and objects, touching and touched, seeing and seen. Our bodies are both of the world and open to the world; we are a node or a moment in the flesh of the world. For Merleau-Ponty, in this unfinished ontological project the notion of ‘flesh’ appears to name an ontological principle or element by which a folding back occurs via a self-reflexive experience and thus the spacing takes place where experience and being can appear.

The essence and causes of the spiritual and moral decline of mankind in the XX century

1998 ◽  
pp. 124-127
Author(s):  
V. Tolkachenko
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Social Force ◽  
The World ◽  
Role Of Religion

One of the most important reasons for such a clearly distressed state of society was the decline of religion as a social force, the external manifestation of which is the weakening of religious institutions. "Religion," Baha'u'llah writes, "is the greatest of all means of establishing order in the world to the universal satisfaction of those who live in it." The weakening of the foundations of religion strengthened the ranks of ignoramuses, gave them impudence and arrogance. "I truly say that everything that belittles the supreme role of religion opens way for the revelry of maliciousness, inevitably leading to anarchy. " In another Tablet, He says: "Religion is a radiant light and an impregnable fortress that ensures the safety and well-being of the peoples of the world, for God-fearing induces man to adhere to the good and to reject all evil." Blink the light of religion, and chaos and distemper will set in, the radiance of justice, justice, tranquility and peace. "

The problem of periodization of the history of religion

1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Role Of Religion

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.

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