scholarly journals A Rhapsody in Pink: Reflections on Seducing Nature through World Philosophies by way of James Joyce’s Ulysses

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-264
Author(s):  
David Jones

Through a reflection on color in the natural world by way of James Joyce’s Ulysses, this paper is an ebullient, rhapsodic, and free-flowing associative meditation on the embodied place of humans in nature. Various sources are employed through a variety of philosophic literature: ancient Western, such as Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaximander, and Plato; the Continental philosophical tradition, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty; and Asian sources, especially Buddhism (Dōgen and Thich Nat Hanh) and Daoism (Laozi and Zhuangzi). The meditation metaphorically opens with an encounter of the color pink, which is allegorically represented as our entry into the natural world, and how this color has been neutralized through its human intensification in the color red, which in its attempt to exaggerate pink and the natural accomplishes the opposite – the covering up the self-same reality of the world and the human place in the world. The liberation of the feminine by way of Joyce’s character Molly Bloom is heralded as a call to turn again to nature’s world as the only means of human redemption. This turn, or return, is a returning to the natural order by means of learning afresh how to seduce nature to love us as a species again; and in turn, nature holds out an existential challenge to our species – how to say yes, again and again, to who and what we truly are. And the what and who we are is to be in and a part of nature once again.

Author(s):  
Kathleen Long

In the early modern world, exceptional bodies are linked to knowledge, not as the production of knowledge of the self through the scrutiny of those who have been ‘othered’, but as a means of inducing self-scrutiny and awareness of the limitations of human understanding. Exceptional beings and phenomena entice us to consider the world beyond that which is familiar to us and raise questions concerning our knowledge systems based on notions of what is natural or, in our modern era, normal. Rather than reacting with horror, disgust or pity, we can learn to respect the variety, mobility and resilience of the natural world in our contemplation of that which we see as exceptional.


2019 ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Harrison

The appeal to laws of nature as an explanatory principle is often regarded as fundamental to naturalism. Yet when the idea that there were immutable, mathematical laws of nature first rose to prominence in the seventeenth century it was deeply connected to a theological understanding of natural order. Descartes thus imagined laws of nature to be divine commands, and attributed their immutability to the immutability of their divine source. For Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, the invariable uniformity of nature was understood as a consequence not of God’s withdrawal from the world, but of his direct and incessant engagement with it. It followed that the world was to be investigated empirically, because this was the only way in which the otherwise inscrutable will of God could be discerned. Over the course of the following centuries, however, laws came to be reimagined as simply observational generalizations, or brute features of the natural world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 39-67
Author(s):  
Christopher Stokes

This chapter illustrates a strong connection between prayer and what I term radical interiority—a self defined by the authenticity of a supposed depth or secrecy—across the work of Evangelical poet William Cowper. Expressing this inward and grace-filled self is always accompanied by and conceived on the model of intense prayer; by contrast, prayerlessness equals spiritual desolation. The connection is particularly torturous in melancholic early texts such as Adelphi (his spiritual autobiography) and the Olney Hymns. In his most famous poem The Task, a poetics interlinking prayer and interiority continues: despite an initial elision in favour of hymning the natural world and focusing outside the self, it is reasserted through a quietist turn. Cowper’s final praying self retreats from the world, meditatively into itself but also in occupying hidden physical spaces as prayer closets, a combination inspired by his translations of French mystic, Madame de Guyon.


1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-267
Author(s):  
Clare Palmer

AbstractAlfred North Whitehead's and Charles Hartshorne's process thinking presents a complex and sophisticated metaphysical underpinning for a theory of self and self-identity. Their construction of the self has significant implications for understanding of the (human) community and the natural environment. Process thinking, I argue, undercuts the idea of self unity; of self-continuity over time; and of self-differentiation from the world. When combined, these three elements mean that it is hard to separate the individual, personal self from the community and the natural world. I compare these implications from process thinking with what might seem similar implications from radical ecological philosophies. Although there are ethical and metaphysical differences between process thinkers and deep ecologists, both kinds of theory need to be treated with caution in application to our thinking about the environment.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Tekatch

"In this paper I would like to articulate a mode of perceptual participation, primarily an aesthetic mode, whereby humans enter into relation with the natural world around them. In order to elaborate on the mode of this participation I will draw examples from artists and thinkers that I believe have determined to make the notion of 'participation' an integral part of their work. The purpose of this paper is to situate my project in a larger tradition and theoretical framework. Over the last two years of study I have been drawn to a number of artists and thinkers who have influenced me a great deal. The common feature among them, or the relevant feature to me, has been the theme of the interaction between the self and the world, the organism and the environment, to use John Dewey's terminology, and how this interaction speaks of humanity's carnal and perceptual inherence in the world. Among these artists are Charles Olson, Jack Chambers and Stan Brakhage, and I would like to discuss their work in relation to this interactive process of self and world."--Pages 2-3.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 326-343
Author(s):  
Lamont Rodgers

Eric Mack defends a version of John Locke’s proviso. Mack applies his proviso to original appropriations, uses, and systems of private property. His proviso precludes severely disabling the world-interactive powers of others. Mack specifically warns against using concrete features of the natural world as a baseline for determine whether the proviso has been violated. While his proviso is plausible, I argue that he cannot. eschew employing the receptivity of the natural, unowned world to the extent that he suggests. We cannot determine whether one’s powers are disabled or diminished without knowing how receptive the world would be to those powers had a system of private property not arisen. The upshot of this paper is that the requirements of a well-formulated proviso is an empirical matter.


Author(s):  
Monika Szuba

Contemporary Scottish Writers and the Natural World examines the work of four Scottish poets – John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Robin Robertson and Kenneth White – in the light of philosophical considerations of the subject’s relation to the natural world and environmental thought. Drawing in particular on the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on embodiment and Martin Heidegger on dwelling, the study explores the organic intimate interrelation between the self and the world, including human and non-human relations. The poets’ work is discussed in the context of the main premises of the phenomenological tradition that address the self’s relation with the world, focusing in particular on the sense of place, the vegetal and animal worlds, and foregrounding the dialogue between poetics, the subject and the landscape. The study considers a chiasmic human-non-human animal intertwining as particularly important in the poetry because of its lived experience of the world. Proposing a theoretically-informed discussion, which includes various modes of ecocritical apprehension, it analyses the subject’s perception of intimacy with the materiality of the natural world and the role of language in the registration of perceptual experience as explored in contemporary Scottish poetry.


Dialogue ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Amy Mullin

Nietzsche writes about the common temptation to take the capacity for consciousness as constituting the “kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude. One denies it growth and intermittences. One takes it for the ‘unity of the organism’.” The very description of the nature of this unified organism is indicative of reasons one might wish to believe in it. It is “abiding” and “eternal.” Nothing in the world poses a threat to its existence or survival. This temptation and Hegel's complicated response to it are the subject of this essay. In particular I will investigate the accuracy of Adorno's claims that Hegel is untrue to his own insights into the dialectical nature of the self, and that Hegel's self-betrayal is due to the the fact that “like Kant and the entire philosophical tradition including Plato, Hegel is a partisan of unity.”


Author(s):  
Alla V Kokova ◽  
Tatiana Yu Tameryan

In the article, on the material of interviews with women entrepreneurs in the Russianlanguage press of the North Caucasus, the selfimage of a business woman is built. In sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives, the self conceptualization of a business woman is carried out through the analysis of feminine principles of management. Based on cognitive, semantic and conceptual approaches cognitive features, ethnic and gender marked values characteristics of the concept and language means of its representation in the female ntrepreneurs Russian-speaking picture of the world in the North Caucasus are established.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Tekatch

"In this paper I would like to articulate a mode of perceptual participation, primarily an aesthetic mode, whereby humans enter into relation with the natural world around them. In order to elaborate on the mode of this participation I will draw examples from artists and thinkers that I believe have determined to make the notion of 'participation' an integral part of their work. The purpose of this paper is to situate my project in a larger tradition and theoretical framework. Over the last two years of study I have been drawn to a number of artists and thinkers who have influenced me a great deal. The common feature among them, or the relevant feature to me, has been the theme of the interaction between the self and the world, the organism and the environment, to use John Dewey's terminology, and how this interaction speaks of humanity's carnal and perceptual inherence in the world. Among these artists are Charles Olson, Jack Chambers and Stan Brakhage, and I would like to discuss their work in relation to this interactive process of self and world."--Pages 2-3.


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