The meaning of life between the self and the normative process of self-realisation

Human Affairs ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-496
Author(s):  
Giovanna Caruso
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Fundamental Feature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Self Reference

Abstract Self-research becomes a starting point for the question about the human being in contemporary anthropological approaches. Accordingly, human life is not viewed anymore as the theoretical object of philosophical investigation, but as the concrete performative execution of the individual’s life. Following this existential paradigm, this paper shows, on the basis of Heidegger’s ‘analytic of Dasein’ and Angehrn’s ‘hermeneutic of the self,’ that the meaning of life can be identified with the process of self-realization much more than with any possible meaningful achievements, engagements or qualities. In fact, understanding human being as a self-interpreting being, Heidegger grasps human life based on the analysis of the ‘understanding,’ the ‘mineness’ and the ‘potentiality-to-Being’ as one’s own reflexive process of self-reference. Angehrn discloses this process as an endless self-understanding process, during which the self forms itself, and defines it as the process that characterizes human being. In this sense, the human being is ‘condemned to meaning.’ By grasping man as such a process, one fundamental feature is expressed: his constitutive unfathomability. For the task of becoming, the self comes from the self that has to become. This means that the self is constantly in the process of becoming self-existent and exists only as this process and remains unfathomable to man in his completeness. In this infinite process of self-realization, in this task of becoming oneself consists the meaning of life. And here, its normative-reflexive character arises. For the ‘must’ to become self has its origin in the self that has to become.

scholarly journals A Psycho-Pragmatic Study of Self-Identity of Kurdish EFL Learners in Kurdistan Region

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Ayad Hameed Mahmood ◽  
Zana Mahmood Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Kurdistan Region ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Learning English

This paper is an extract from a PhD dissertation on the impacts of learning English on the self-identity of Kurdish EFL learners. Language is a distinctive feature of human being. Similarly, identity is considered as a sign humans are recognized by. So, scrutinizing the relationship between these two related components of human life is revealing. Most of the research papers in this area focus on how language is used as a tool to express someone’s identity. However, this research focuses on how the process of learning English makes possible changes, if any, in the learners’ self-identity. A Likert-questionnaire of 30 questions is given to 150 EFL learners from three main universities to understand the differences that might happen in the learners’ self-identity as a result of learning English. Finally, some conclusions are drawn based on the collected data and the references are documented.

scholarly journals MÍSTICA E DIREITOS HUMANOS

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (115) ◽  
pp. 375
Author(s):  
Manfredo Araújo de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Mystic Experience

O artigo se propõe explicitar o horizonte de compreensão antropológico a partir de onde se procura exprimir a inteligibilidade da fé e da experiência mística e sua vinculação à problemática dos direitos humanos. Vai concentrar-se na elucidação da constituição ontológica do ser pessoal que é sua abertura intencional à totalidade do ser e assim em última instância sua abertura a Deus. Daqui se compreende a fé como acolhida da autocomunicação de Deus ao ser humano e de seu projeto amoroso para a vida humana e a mística enquanto experiência intensificada do encontro com Deus, o que nos conduz à compreensão da exigência de promoção da vida.ABSTRACT: The article intends to explain the horizon of anthropological understanding starting from where one tries to express the intelligibility of the faith and of the mystic experience and its relation to the problem of human rights. It will concentrate on the elucidation of the ontological constitution of the personal being that is his intentional opening to the being’s totality and, likewise, ultimately to his opening to God. The faith is then understood as reception of the self communication of God to the human being and of his loving project for the human life and the mystic while intensified experience of the encounter with God that leads us to the understanding of the demand of the promotion of life.

Morpho-Semantic Evidence of Emerging Subjectivity in the Language of the Nahḍah — A Proposal

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-252
Author(s):  
Stephan Guth
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Verbal Nouns ◽  
Actual Experience ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The Many ◽  
Basic Features ◽  
Oriented Approach

Abstract This article reviews some key concepts of the Arab(ic) Nahḍah with the aim of highlighting the usefulness of a more genuinely linguistic, i.e., grammar- and etymology-oriented approach for a deeper understanding of some basic features of the foundational period of Arab modernity. My contention and starting-point is that the Nahḍah was, among other things, an era in which the Arab subject came to sense its own agency. This is reflected not only in the many phenomena we are used to associate with the Nahḍah — the emergence of the intellectual, of critical journalism, of historicism, sentimentalism, new literary genres, etc. — but also in the morpho-semantics of key Nahḍah terminology. I argue (a) that the self-referential t-morpheme that features in many words signifying important Nahḍah concepts, such as taraqqī, taqaddum, or tamaddun, can and should be seen in the same light, i.e., as an indicator of a new emphasis on the self. Moreover, I argue that both the grammatical form of the new vocabulary (e.g., the -iyyah suffix for abstracts, verbal nouns, the causative patterns of form II and IV) and its “original”, “basic” (root) meanings underline (b) secularisation and the concomitant centrality of the human being, as well as (c) proactivity, energetic verve, and creativity, i.e., the subject’s being a cause of change in time (hence history). Thus, each new conceptual term is a little ‘Nahḍah in a nutshell,’ containing the very essence of Nahḍawi thought and the actual experience of feeling “modern”.

The Reality of Love: An Affirmative Vision of Christianity Based on Kierkegaard’s Interpretation of the Maxim: Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-203
Author(s):  
Andrzej Słowikowski
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Fundamental Relation ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Negative Element ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
God's Love ◽  
Religious Writings ◽  
The Law

AbstractBased on Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the maxim Love is the fulfillment of the law the present article seeks to show how consistent use of Kierkegaard’s terminology can aid in discovering the affirmative vision of Christianity implicitly contained in the philosopher’s religious writings. The starting point is in this case the Christian, spiritual account of love as established by God in every human being which fully manifests itself in the love for one’s neighbor. Only such a love is able to fulfill the law, that is, to make the temporal, human life entirely comprehensible and full of meaning. In order to approach this thesis properly, a differentiation between the possibility of love (law, nature) and the reality of love (love, eternity) is introduced. In effect, it is shown how the concepts of law and love, related to each other dialectically, are able to explain the fundamental relation of the temporal to the eternal in human existence. The pattern as to how this relation of love to the law should be played out is Jesus Christ, as one who, by his love for God, fulfilled the law of God’s love for man. In this act, he created for every human being the possibility of reconciliation with God and established Christianity as a positive religion, one in which there is actually no negative element in existence.

On the Beginnings of Media Theory in Hesiod and Plato

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-146
Author(s):  
Frank Haase
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
Self Reference

The history of Western thought and philosophy takes its starting point in the invention of the Greek phonetic alphabet around 800 BCE. Only in the course of this medial break does a new way of thinking begin to emerge, which previously knew nothing comparable in the advanced civilizations of the Near East. Although these advanced cultures had been written cultures for more than 2,500 years, it was only the Greek vocabulary that made a media-based thinking based on self-reference fundamental. Over a period of more than 500 years, the formation of ontological–metaphysical thinking takes place on the basis of a media structure, as exemplarily formulated for the first time in Hesiod’s Theogony in mythological form. It is, after all, Parmenides, who develops in his doctrinal poem an ontology and epistemology, which is unfolded and continued by Plato and which inaugurates human thought itself as a medium of truth. In the dialogue of Phaedrus, Plato induces along the legend of the demigod Theuth and his medial inventions the foundations of a principle circuit that opens up from the self-thinking of the medium of thinking. This circuit of principles based on three basic operations is the ontological foundation on which later Neoplatonism bases its philosophizing and Christianity develops the doctrine of the Trinity.

Being Born

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Stone
Keyword(s):  
Social Power ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Account ◽  
The Way

This book gives the first systematic philosophical account of how being born shapes our condition as human beings. Drawing on both feminist philosophy and the existentialist project of inquiring into the structure of meaningful human existence, the book explores how human existence is natal, that is, is shaped by the way that we are born. Taking natality into account transforms our view of human existence and illuminates how many of its aspects hang together and are connected with our birth. These aspects include dependency; the relationality of the self; vulnerability; reception and inheritance; embeddedness in social power; situatedness; and radical contingency. Considering natality also sheds new light on anxiety, mortality, and the temporality of human life. This book offers an original perspective on human existence which bears on many debates in feminist and continental philosophy and around death and the meaning of life.

Gorky’s ‘old men’: Trial, faith and life across time

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-158
Author(s):  
M. S. Kiselyova
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
First Year ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Personal Choice ◽  
Old Men ◽  
The Revolution

In its examination of M. Gorky’s play The Old Man [Starik] (1917) the article deals with the question of whether a person’s discretion to judge another human being conforms to Christian ethics. The article approaches the problem, first of all, in the sense of one’s understanding of the meaning of life in the context of one’s past and present, and, secondly, in relation to the events of Russian history between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the first year of the Bolsheviks’ dictatorship. In addition, the author draws parallels with other types of ‘old men’ in Gorky’s books. The main node of the plot is presented as a merger of three topics: the passing and purpose of a human life, the (im)possibility for a man to judge another man, and manifestation of faith. The author highlights the differences in the writer’s treatment of the Old Man from the eponymous 1909 vignette, where he is shown in the modus of personal choice, and the Old Man from the play, using the epic modus of time and fate. The author argues that the play returns the same verdict to the society as in Gorky’s Untimely Thoughts [Nesvoevremennye mysli] (1917–1918), in which he analyzes the chaos of the revolution and peoples’ abuse of discretion.

scholarly journals PERANAN PENDIDIKAN DALAM PENGUKUHAN KESEJAHTERAAN HABLUM MIN AL -NAS DARI PERSPEKTIF al-QURAN [THE ROLE OF EDUCATION IN STRENGTHENING THE WELFARE OF HABLUM MIN AL-NAS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE QURAN]

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-137
Author(s):  
Ahmad Fakhrurrazi Mohammed Zabidi ◽  
Mahfuzah Mohammed Zabidi ◽  
Noorsafuan bin Che Noh
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Affective Domain ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Good People ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Universal Values ◽  
Culture And Language

The world of education is the backbone in building well-being in human life. It covers three domains, namely cognitive, affective and psychomotor. The affective domain is the most important to be polished so that the value in hablum min al-Nas in the reality of human life can be tasted. Every human being who has various differences from various aspects including religion, race, culture and language, remains no exception in carrying out the role of maintaining this well-being. The four principles of hablum min al-Nas together with the five values ​​of humanity are described in this article, to be taken into consideration in the world of education as a whole. As a result, the formation of 'Good People' through the emphasis on the aspect of manners must be done by making the Qur'an as the best 'humanitarian reference' even for non-Muslims. The universal values ​​contained in the Qur'an as well as its conditions that are sure to be protected from any deviation are the starting point in this matter. Dunia pendidikan adalah tulang belakang dalam membina kesejahteraan dalam kehidupan manusia. Ia meliputi tiga domain, iaitu kognitif, afektif dan psikomotor. Domain afektif adalah yang paling penting untuk digilap supaya nilai dalam hablum min al-Nas dalam realiti kehidupan kemanusiaan dapat dikecapi. Setiap manusia yang mempunyai pelbagai perbezaan dari pelbagai aspek meliputi agama, bangsa, budaya dan bahasa, tetap tidak terkecuali dalam menjalankan peranan untuk mengekalkan kesejahteraan ini. Empat prinsip hablum min al-Nas bersama-sama lima nilai kemanusiaan dihuraikan dalam artikel ini, supaya diambil perhatian dalam dunia pendidikan secara menyeluruh. Natijahnya, pembentukan ‘Insan Baik’ melalui penekanan aspek adab mestilah dilakukan dengan menjadikan al-Quran sebagai ‘rujukan kemanusiaan’ yang terunggul hatta bagi non-Muslim sekalipun. Nilai sejagat yang terkandung dalam al-Quran serta keadaannya yang pasti terpelihara daripada sebarang penyelewengan menjadi titik tolak dalam perkara ini.

Self-Consciousness as a Living Kind: On the Fourth Chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Lucian Ionel
Keyword(s):  
Life Form ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Unity Of Consciousness ◽  
Social Form ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Living Being

Abstract This paper discusses Hegel's conception of self-consciousness in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It argues that Hegel articulates self-consciousness as a living being's capacity to conceive of itself in light of the life-form it instantiates. I start by critically reassessing the prevalent readings of the Self-Consciousness chapter, each of which focuses on one of three constitutive aspects of self-consciousness: sociality, corporeality or practicality. Second, I reconstruct how the opening of the chapter aims to reveal that the initial rift between the sensory and the conceptual capacities of consciousness is resolved by the unity of consciousness as a life-form. Third, I discuss the specification of this life-form as Geist and argue that, by introducing the notion of Geist, Hegel indicates that the generic capacity of the human being to conceive of itself in light of its life-form always particularizes itself in a conception of human life that determines a historic and social form of life. Fourth, I outline how the master-slave dialectic illustrates the interdependency between sensory and conceptual capacities. Hegel's tale undermines the assumption of a self-contained capacity for reason by displaying how conceptual capacities, actualized by a living being, rely from the outset on objective constraints. I conclude by contending that the Self-Consciousness chapter paves the way for the central role that the idea of life plays in the Logic in exemplifying the objectivity of the concept.

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