scholarly journals Hans Jonas and Vasily Grossman: Reflections on the Human Condition after Auschwitz

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245
Author(s):  
Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Hans Jonas ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Human Condition

The article endeavours to compare the reflections on the Shoah of two of the most celebrated intellectuals of Jewish origin of the 20th century, namely the German philosopher Hans Jonas (1903-1993) and the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman (1905-1964). Both Jonas’ essay on The Concept of God after Auschwitz (1987) and Grossman’s novels and reports, such as The Hell of Treblinka (1944), Life and Fate (1980), and The Sistine Madonna (1989), are characterised by a thorough enquiry into the ambivalence of the human condition, that tries to shed some light on the disturbing abyss of Auschwitz and the Shoah. Although neither Jonas nor Grossman considered themselves as religious believers, thanks to the Shoah they recollected their Jewish roots and developed peculiar and innovative thoughts on the meaning and vulnerability of life, human freedom, immortality, and God. The article endeavours to highlight the main similarities and differences between these two authors, who tackled the issue of thinking after Auschwitz.

scholarly journals Gud og menneske – Skabelsesbegrebet i moderne jødisk tænkning

2014 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 276-296
Author(s):  
Claudia Welz
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Hans Jonas ◽  
Freedom And Responsibility ◽  
The Human Condition

This article explores the meaning of the notion of ‘creation’ inthe Jewish tradition of the 20th century – both in regard to God as creatorand the human being as creature. With reference to Franz Rosenzweig,Margarete Susman and Hans Jonas, the first part of the articlefocuses on the question of whether God, after Auschwitz, can still beunderstood as an omnipotent and righteous creator of the All, while thesecond part investigates the human condition as described by HannahArendt and Emmanuel Levinas: what does it mean to be created as or inthe image of God? In particular, creaturely freedom and responsibility,natality and creativity are highlighted and discussed in the context ofpost-Holocaust theology.

: Visions of Freedom

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noël O’Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Method ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Michael Oakeshott ◽  
Genuine Knowledge ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter considers four of the most influential visions that characterized the response to totalitarianism, and in particular the various concepts of limit they provide, since those are the basis of the opposition which each vision sought to oppose to the totalitarian ideal. The first vision is the positivist one of Karl Popper, for whom the logic of scientific method offers the only genuine knowledge of man and society. The second great vision is that of Berlin, who abandons positivism and instead presents the human condition in tragic terms, on the grounds that it is intrinsically characterized by a plurality of incommensurable and conflicting values. A third vision situates positivism in a naturalistic portrait of the human condition. Finally, there is the ‘civil’ vision of Michael Oakeshott, which is ultimately grounded in a radical, anti-reductionist conception of human freedom.

scholarly journals Pieśni rozpaczy w czasach pogardy Wokół cyklu poetyckiego Márciustól márciusig Istvána Vasa

2019 ◽  
pp. 209-220
Author(s):  
Kinga Piotrowiak-Junkiert
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
The Human Condition

The article offers an interpretation of the poetic cycle Od marca do marca [From March to March] by István Vas, a Hungarian poet and writer of Jewish origin. The author treated each of his poems as a notebook, where he recorded his reflections on the situation of Hungarian Jews, the human condition, the siege of Budapest, etc. For Vas, each piece is a separate testimony to the time of the war. The entire cycle is steeped in irony and a harsh judgement of the society’s moral fall. Vas wrote his poems during the period of Nazism but published them during the communist regime, when he wanted to answer a question about the role of art in the process of recovering historical memory, and whether a literary text could offer protection from the hostile reality.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Benatar
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Human Predicament ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Human Condition

Life’s big questions are introduced and an outline of the book is provided. It is suggested that while existential questions are momentous, they are not as hard to answer as many people think. It is proposed that the human condition is a predicament. The concepts of “pessimism” and “optimism” are clarified and discussed. Similarities and differences between the human and nonhuman animal predicaments are outlined, and it is explained why the book focuses on the former. Finally, the introduction engages the question whether pessimistic views, such as those defended in The Human Predicament, should be disseminated, given the danger that they may make people’s lives even worse.

scholarly journals Technological Drive, the Self and the Ethical

MANUSYA ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-49
Author(s):  
Michael Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Hans Jonas ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
Motivating Factor ◽  
Genealogy Of Morals ◽  
Dimensions Of Technology ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Human Condition

I want in this essay to change the way we approach the promise of technology. In bringing out the philosophical substance packed into the highly critical diagnostic portion of Virilio’s work, I focus on Virilio’s observations concerning the human psychological relation to technology. I argue that a form of resentment similar to that found in Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals provides the motivating factor in the push for continual and increasingly rapid technological innovation: technological drive follows from fallen man’s desire to reconcile his mortality. Understanding this drive brings home the direness of the human condition that makes technological promise so attractive and technological resistance so difficult. Given this conundrum, we must articulate an ethic of technological modesty. An ethic of technological modesty encourages (1) the resistance of capricious urges for technological satisfaction and (2) the subjection of technologies to a rigorous phenomenological investigation that weighs their potential benefits and reductions, as well as the conditions that might precipitate and exacerbate these benefits or reductions. This ethical plan pushes Virilio’s phenomenology of the “accident” of technology, and comes in the phenomenological/pragmatic tradition of Hans Jonas’ imperative of responsibility and Don Ihde’s phenomenological investigation of the dimensions of technology that amplify and reduce natural human capacities.

Experiment Human – On early concentration camp testimony

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Krochmalnik
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Race Ideology ◽  
The Human Condition

The atrocities that the prisoners in the concentration and extermination camps actually suffered in the 20th century can hardly be understood by outsiders like us today, especially if one takes a closer look at the experiences of the survivors, who offer cruel testimony on the human beast. This is also the case with the concentration camp testimonies in Daniel Krochmalnik’s contribution, which tell of the deadly experiments of the so-called ›Overman‹ and how he, inspired by the National Socialist master-race ideology, assumed an almost divine mission to exterminate everything human in his victims, so that death often seemed to be the only salvation. In view of such descriptions, which pervade the entire concentration camp literature, one inevitably has to ask oneself, as the author does, about the human condition and whether one can still place hope in people after all this – because the shocking experiences of the homo carceris in the concentration camps and gulags of the last century fundamentally shake the self-understanding of the human as a moral being, who can in fact transform into an angry beast at any time, especially under the influence of totalitarian systems of thought and rule as that Chapter »Homo homini lupus« shows. Nevertheless, in the end the author does not want to give up all hope in ›humanistic moral resources‹, even if the very existence of the »camp man« seems to contradict this.

To Fall from High or Low Estate? Tragedy and Social Class in Historical Perspective

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Hall
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
New City ◽  
City State ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Human Condition

In a famous essay, the agnostic bertrand russell hailed tragedy as the highest instantiation of human freedom. tragedy results from human beings' persistence in the conscious, imaginative representation of the plight of humanity in the inhumane universe. Tragedy “builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; … within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty” (53-54). Russell's “servile captains of tyrant Fate” are the instruments by which metaphysical compulsion tortures humans—Death and Pain and Despair. Man, instead of allowing himself to be terrorized as “the slave of Fate,” creates tragedy “to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life” (57). By transforming the human condition into tragic art, humans create their own world of resistance, in which they can be the truly free “burghers” of a dauntless new city-state of the mind.

scholarly journals Mellem asoteriologiske aforismer og sort gnosis: Emil Cioran, Peter Sloterdijk og Peter Sloterdijks Cioran

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-206
Author(s):  
Erik Sporon Fiedler
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
English Abstract ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
The Public ◽  
River Seine ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Emil Cioran ◽  
The Human Condition

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This article presents an introduction to the Romanian author Emil Cioran’s life and work. Cioran lived most of his life in self-imposed exile in Paris, where he kept himself out of the public gaze. From his small attic at the left-bank of the river Seine he published numerous books of collections of aphorisms and essays dealing with his own miserabilism and permanent existential despair. Further, in his books he is reflecting on the human condition in a world where humans have no possibility of receiving nor acquiring salvation or redemption. This presentation of Cioran leads to an investigation of his influence on the work and thought of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. I show that Cioran in fact plays an important and long-lasting role throughout Sloterdijk’s authorship by analysing texts from three different periods of his oeuvre. Thus, I seek to construct a picture of Sloterdijk’s Cioran and understand why he is important to him. DANSK RESUMÉ: I denne artikel gives en generel præsentation af og introduktion til den rumænske forfatter Emil Ciorans liv og værk. Cioran levede størstedelen af sit liv i selvvalgt eksil i Paris uden for offentlighedens søgelys. Fra sit lille loftskammer på den venstre bred af Seinen publicerede han løbende samlinger af aforismer og essays omhandlende sin egen miserabilisme og permanente eksistentielle ulykke. Endvidere reflekterer han i bøgerne over den menneskelige eksistens vilkår i en verden, hvorfra mennesket ikke har nogen muligheder for at blive forløst. Præsentationen af Cioran fører til en undersøgelse af hans indflydelse på den tyske filosof Peter Sloterdijks værk og tænkning. Gennem en analyse af tekster fra tre forskellige perioder i Sloterdijks forfatterskab viser jeg, at Cioran spiller en vigtig og vedvarende rolle igennem hele Sloterdijks filosofiske arbejde. Således forsøger jeg at konstruere et billede af Sloterdijks Cioran og at forstå hvorfor han anser ham for vigtig.

Play and the Human Condition

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Henricks
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
The World ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
Play Styles ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Human Condition

This book brings together ways of considering play to probe its essential relationship to work, ritual, and communitas. The book examines the causes, consequences, and contexts of play. Focusing on five contexts for play—the psyche, the human body, the environment, society, and culture—the book identifies conditions that instigate play, and comments on its implications for those settings. The book explores how we learn about ourselves and the world, and about the intersection of these two realms, through acts of play. Offering a general theory of play as behavior promoting self-realization, it articulates a conception of self that includes individual and social identity, particular and transcendent connection, and multiple fields of involvement. It also evaluates play styles from history and contemporary life to analyze the relationship between play and human freedom. The book shows how play allows us to learn about our qualities and those of the world around us—and in so doing make sense of ourselves.

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