Kierkegaard, Metaphysics, and Love

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Alternative Reading ◽  
The Way

AbstractNoting Heidegger’s critique of Kierkegaard’s way of relating time and eternity, the paper offers an alternative reading of Kierkegaard that suggests Heidegger has overlooked crucial elements in the Kierkegaardian account. Gabriel Marcel and Sharon Krishek are used to counter Heidegger’s minimizing of the deaths of others and to show how the deaths of others may become integral to our sense of self. This prepares the way for revisiting Kierkegaard’s discourse on the work of love in remembering the dead. Against the criticism that this reveals the absence of the other in Kierkegaardian love, the paper argues that, on the contrary, it shows how Kierkegaard conceives the self as inseparable from the core relationships of love that, despite of death, constitute it as the self that it is.

Hope

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Watts Miller
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
The Core ◽  
Conscious Control

Writing during the occupation of France in the 1940s, the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel sees the core authentic form of hope as “I hope in thee for us.” A strength of Marcel's account is that it drives home the importance of hope-in and hope-for, against preoccupation with hope-that. The trouble is that he then marginalizes hope-that, in a worry over its vulnerability to defeat and in a quest for an absolute hope. Marcel in fact emphasizes and interlinks two quite general hopes-that—rock-bottom hope that all is not lost, and transcendent hope of salvation. He also sees imprisonment—by illness, in a land under occupation, in an actual jail—as a paradigmatic case of hope's struggle against despair. Accordingly, there are important similarities with Emile Durkheim's classic account of the two main modern routes to suicide. One is the egoism of a cold intellectual atomistic world of the self, cut off from the warmth of social feelings. The other is the anomie of a raging bonfire of desires, impossible to dampen down and bring under conscious control.

AFRICAN WOMEN AND FORBIDDEN GROUNDS: FEMALE SEXUALITY AND SELF-DETERMINATION IN AFRICAN LITERATURE

Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-54
Author(s):  
Oyeh O. Otu
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
African Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
African Women ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Sexual Repression

This article examines how female conditioning and sexual repression affect the woman’s sense of self, womanhood, identity and her place in society. It argues that the woman’s body is at the core of the many sites of gender struggles/ politics. Accordingly, the woman’s body must be decolonised for her to attain true emancipation. On the one hand, this study identifies the grave consequences of sexual repression, how it robs women of their freedom to choose whom to love or marry, the freedom to seek legal redress against sexual abuse and terror, and how it hinders their quest for self-determination. On the other hand, it underscores the need to give women sexual freedom that must be respected and enforced by law for the overall good of society.

The image of a modern shaman. A literary example of Ida Brzezińska

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-134
Author(s):  
Angelika Moskal
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Way

Abstract: The shaman figure is most often associated with primitive communities, inhabiting, among others Siberia. The shaman plays one of the most important roles in them - he is an intermediary between the world of people and the world of spirits. Responds to, among others for the safe passage of souls to the other side and protects her from evil spirits. However, is there room for representatives of this institution in contemporary Polish popular literature? How would they find themselves in the 21st century? The article aims to show the interpretation of the shaman on the example of Ida Brzezińska, the heroine of the books of Martyna Raduchowska. I intend to introduce the role and functions of the „shaman from the dead”, juxtaposing the way Ida works (including reading sleepy margins from a rather unusual dream catcher, carrying out souls and the consequences that await in the event of failure or making contact with the dead) with the methods described by scholars shamans. The purpose of the work is to show how much Raduchowska tried to adapt shamanism in her work by modernizing it, and how many elements she added from herself to make the story more attractive.

scholarly journals The Experienced Self and Other Scale: A technique for assaying the experience of one’s self in relation to the other

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Erel Shvil ◽  
Herbert Krauss ◽  
Elizabeth Midlarsky
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Factorial Structure ◽  
Factor Solution ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Venn Diagrams ◽  
Self In Relation ◽  
Higher Power ◽  
Perception Of Self

The construct “self” appears in diverse forms in theories about what it is to be a person. As the sense of “self” is typically assessed through personal reports, differences in its description undoubtedly reflect significant differences in peoples’ apperception of self. This report describes the development, reliability, and factorial structure of the Experience of Sense of Self (E-SOS), an inventory designed to assess one’s perception of self in relation to the person’s perception of various potential “others.” It does so using Venn diagrams to depict and quantify the experienced overlap between the self and “others.” Participant responses to the instrument were studied through Exploratory Factor Analysis. This yielded a five-factor solution: 1) Experience of Positive Sensation; 2) Experience of Challenges; 3) Experience of Temptations; 4) Experience of Higher Power; and 5) Experience of Family. The items comprising each of these were found to produce reliable subscales. Further research with the E-SOS and suggestions for its use are offered.  DOI:10.2458/azu_jmmss_v4i2_shvil

scholarly journals Computer Gameplay and the Aesthetic Practices of the Self: Game Studies and the Late Work of Michel Foucault

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
The Self ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Practices Of The Self ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This paper aims to critically introduce the applicability of Foucault’s late work, on the practices of the self, to the scholarship of contemporary computer games. I argue that the gameplay tasks that we set ourselves, and the patterns of action that they produce, can be understood as a form of ‘work on the self’, and that this work is ambivalent between, on the one hand, an aesthetic transformation of the self – as articulated by Foucault in relation to the care or practices of the self – in which we break from the dominant subjectivities imposed upon us, and on the other, a closer tethering of ourselves through our own playful impulses, to a neoliberal subjectivity centred around instrumentally-driven selfimprovement. Game studies’ concern with the effects that computer games have on us stands to gain from an examination of Foucault’s late work for the purposes of analysing and disambiguating between the nature of the transformations at stake. Further, Foucault’s tripartite analysis of ‘power-knowledge-subject’, which might be applied here as ‘game-discourse-player’, foregrounds the imbrication of our gameplay practices – the extent to which they are due to us and the way in which our own volitions make us subject to power, which is particularly pertinent in the domain of play.

The Failure of Self-Consciousness in Sartre's Being and Nothingness

Dialogue ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-756
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wider
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reflective Consciousness ◽  
Central Tenet ◽  
Ultimate Failure ◽  
The One

The central tenet in the ontology Sartre describes and seeks to defend in Being and Nothingness is that being divides into the for-itself and the in-itself. Self-consciousness characterizes being-for-itself and distinguishes it from being-in-itself. What it means for a being to exist for itself is that it is self-conscious. How Sartre characterizes self-consciousness in Being and Nothingness is, however, a question that remains to be asked. There is no simple answer to this question. For Sartre, there are really several levels of self-consciousness: the self-consciousness of consciousness at the pre-reflective level, at the level of reflection (both pure and impure) and at the level of being-for-others. There is a profound difference between the self-consciousness of being-for-others and impure reflection, on the one hand, and the self-consciousness of reflection and pre-reflective consciousness, on the other. With being-for-others and impure reflection, self-consciousness involves the attempt to grasp the self as an object for consciousness. Although the nature of this attempt and the reasons for its ultimate failure differ at each level, these levels are bound together by a common sense of self-consciousness as a consciousness of the self as an object.

Strange Cases: Jekyll & Hyde Narratives as Rhetorical Strategy in Sir Alexander Morison’s Physiognomy of Mental Diseases

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-170
Author(s):  
Madeline Bourque Kearin
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Fluid Dynamic ◽  
Physical Symptoms ◽  
The Self ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
The Core ◽  
Mental Diseases ◽  
Radical Transformation ◽  
The Way

Abstract Sir Alexander Morison’s Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (1838) was created as a didactic tool for physicians, depicting lunatics in both the active and dormant states of disease. Through the act of juxtaposition, Morison constituted his subjects as their own Jekylls and Hydes, capable of radical transformation. In doing so, he marshaled artistic and clinical, visual and textual approaches in order to pose a particular argument about madness as a temporally manifested, visually distinguishable state defined by its contrast with reason. This argument served a crucial function in legitimizing the emergent discipline of psychiatry by applying biomedical methodologies to the observation and classification of distinctly physical symptoms. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “quintessentially Victorian parable” serves as a metaphor for the way 19th-century alienists conceptualized insanity, while the theme of duality at the core of Stevenson’s story serves as a framework for conceptualizing both psychiatry and the subjects it generates. It was (and is) a discipline formulated around narrative as the primary organizing structure for its particular set of paradoxes, and specifically, narratives of the self as a fluid, dynamic, and contradictory entity.

The Philosophy of the Myōken: The Ethics of the Dead and Bodhisattvas

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Fumihiko Sueki ◽  
Anton Luis Sevilla
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Religious View ◽  
Japanese Buddhism ◽  
Lotus Sutra ◽  
The World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Mahāyāna Buddhism ◽  
The Way

AbstractToday, the modern value systems that once held sway have fallen apart, and people throughout the world are wandering in an aimless state. Amidst this, we are pressed to ask, “What kind of a new ethics might we construct?” We need to consider the possibility of an ethics that focuses on the religious view of humankind (previously ignored by modernity), that goes beyond this life, and includes the next life. In this article, I examine the way of being of bodhisattvas in Mahāyāna Buddhism via the Lotus Sutra. According to the Lotus Sutra, human existence is one that necessarily relates with the other, and this relationship is not confined to this life, but continues from past lives to future lives. Here, I refer to this as “bodhisattva as existence.” On this basis, it is possible to think of an ethics of “bodhisattva as praxis” that considers the benefit of others even after death. This view of bodhisattvas in the Lotus Sutra lives on in Japanese Buddhism and can be said to point to a new possibility for ethics today.

Crossing the European boundary: The conjoined figures of colonizer and migrant in Zama (Martel, 2017) and The Other Side of Hope (Kaurismäki, 2017)

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-38
Author(s):  
Ali Rıza Taşkale ◽  
Erdoğan H. Şima
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Boundary Crossing ◽  
European Identity ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
European Cinema ◽  
The Way

Abstract Caught between the seemingly contradictory imageries of particularity and universality, 'European identity' could in fact be presumed but as a shorthand for ontological anxiety. The ('euro-') centric ontology that it denotes is marked by an ongoing ambivalence that both recoils from and accepts the superfluousness of boundaries. The obverse of this ambivalent concern with boundaries, we suggest, are the narrative efforts to consign it to the singular agency of the 'impossible' boundary crossing. Cinematographically speaking, the otherwise mute ontological anxiety is contained in the precariousness of the figures of colonizer and migrant. The way a 'European' cinema relates to these figures becomes all the more significant where 'Europe' denotes a challenging relationship, and not a 'thing'. It is in view of the ways in which they respond to this challenge that we examine Zama (Martel, 2017) and The Other Side of Hope (Kaurismäki, 2017). The focus, in other words, is on what nevertheless escapes their efforts: while Zama's out-of-place 'colonizer' obscures the inherent placelessness of colonial agency, Hope's symbiotic relationship between the self and the other withholds the reversibility of the 'self/other' dualism. In the instrumental visibility of their singular figures, we hope to show, both films contribute to the incidental visibility of the 'European' claim to transcend its own dualisms. The figures of colonizer and migrant are in fact the relatively visible symptoms of a cinematic labour whose ambivalences remain otherwise invisible.

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