scholarly journals The ‘body politic’ in ancient China

2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chun-chieh Huang
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Core ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Inside Out ◽  
Chinese Philosophers ◽  
State Functions

The ‘body politic’ occupies the core position in traditional Chinese political thinking. This is strongly supported by the fact that, for most ancient Chinese philosophers, self-cultivation was taken as the starting point of a programmatic way leading to the management of the world. The aim of this essay is to analyze the meaning and significance of the prevailing ‘body politic’ of ancient China.In section two, the Chinese ‘body politic’ is placed within a comparative frame with the ideas of Plato (428–347 BCE) and Hobbes (1588–1679). It is argued that the ‘body politic’ in China is far from an abstract or theoretical discourse; the state was epistemologically taken as an extension of the human body, which is integral and organic in itself. Thus the body served as a metaphor or symbol to explain the organization and functionality of the state.Section three details the ‘body politic’ in three ways. First, due to the comparability between the state and the body, the ruling of the state, as that of the body, should also commence with a kind of inside-out, morality-concerned self-cultivation. Second, there is a complicated interdependency between state functions, which are similar to those of the body. Third, if there is a center of dominancy gathered through the interactive process of the body, then a kind of political autocracy can thus be extrapolated in by the ‘body politic’.The conclusion points out that, in ancient Chinese body-thinking, the mind-heart had its socio-political dimensions, and the ‘body’ is no less than a psychosomatic one. Since the unification of China in 221 BCE, Confucianism had gradually gained the political vantage and become the imperial ideology. However, the ancient ideal of the ‘Confucianization of politics’ was thus transformed to the reality of the ‘politicization of Confucianism’.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

The Mind and its Tenement; Their Mutual Relations

1856 ◽  
Vol 2 (18) ◽  
pp. 479-494
Author(s):  
C. Lockhart Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Law ◽  
Mutual Relations ◽  
The Mind

“The knowledge concerning the sympathies and concordances between the mind and the body” saith the founder† of modern science, in discoursing of human philosophy, or the knowledge of ourselves, as he terms it, is “fit to be emancipate and made a knowledge by itself. The consideration is double: either how and how far the humours and effects of the body do alter or work upon the mind; or again, how and how far the passions and apprehensions of the mind do alter or work upon the body. The former of these,” (the influence of the body on the mental state,) continues Bacon, “hath been enquired and considered as a part and appendix of medicine, but much more as a part of religion or superstition. For the physician prescribeth cures of the mind in phrensies and melancholy passions; and pretendeth also to exhibit medicines to exhilarate the mind, to confirm the courage, to clarify the wits, to corroborate the memory and the like: but the scruples and superstitions of diet and other regimen of the body in the sect of Pythagoreans, in the heresy of the Manicheans, and in the law of Mahomet do exceed. … The root and life of all which prescripts is besides the ceremony, the consideration of that dependency, which the affections of the mind are submitted unto, upon the state and disposition of the body.”

Introduction: Questioning the Punitive Paradox

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Insa Lee Koch
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The State ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
The Core ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
State Coercion

The introduction starts with what many have seen as a worrying paradox: the illiberal turn that liberal democracies have taken with, or perhaps because of, popular support. While commentators have focused on ‘why’ liberal democracy has taken an illiberal turn, the book proposes an alternative starting point that focuses on the ‘how’ and the ‘what’: what democracy means to some of Britain’s most marginalized citizens in the first place and how these citizens engage with the state. It is by shifting the analytical focus to these questions that a more encompassing legacy of state coercion than commonly acknowledged in narratives of the punitive turn can be brought into focus, as well as the possibility of its critique and subversion. The introduction sets out council estates as a historical and ethnographic setting for such a project, outlines the methodology, and introduces the anthropological framework at the core of the book.

The Road to Brexit

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Andrew Ryder
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Road

The chapter follows the course of events and debate during the referendum and initial negotiations and legislative attempts in Westminster to enable Brexit. The chapter gives an overview of the speech acts and associated stratagems to facilitate or to frustrate Brexit. It includes a number of vignettes presenting some key or insightful moments in the referendum campaign. A key focus of the chapter is analysis of the Leave and Remain campaigns (Vote Leave, Leave.EU and Stronger In) and what became known respectively as ‘projects hate and fear’. The chapter concludes with an inquest into the state of British democracy and how fundamental weaknesses in the body politic enabled Brexit, among which is the emergence of ’post-truth’ politics and the influence of the tabloid media.

Corporate Life in the University of Paris, 1249–1418, and the Ending of Schism

1989 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-523
Author(s):  
Osmund Lewry Op
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
University Of Paris ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church

As many had done long before, John Henry Newman, in his sermon of 1842 on ‘The Christian Church an imperial power’, drew his model of the corporate life of the Church from the state: ‘We know what is meant by a kingdom. It means a body politic, bound together by common law, ruled by one head, holding intercourse part with part, acting together’. This description, little changed, could have applied as well to the university community of Newman's Oxford, and it is not implausible that an experience of fellowship there, strained and divided as it sometimes was, could have provided an unconscious model for his understanding of the ecclesial community. Even if it did not become explicit in Newman's thought, the analogy of head and members was present to the thinking of university men at Paris with regard to their own corporate life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly when relations were strained and division of the body threatened. Whatever the origins of conciliarist theory, then, in the reflections of canonists and theologians, there was an experience of ecclesial community in the corporate life of medieval Paris that could have given living content to speculation about the Church in the most influential intellectual centre of Christendom. The shaping of that experience deserves some attention as a matrix for conciliarist thought.

The Glorious Excess of Peace in Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis

Theoria ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (159) ◽  
pp. 23-51
Author(s):  
Richard A. Lee Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua ◽  
The Right

In Defensor Pacis Marsilius of Padua grounds the legitimacy of the kingdom, or the state (civitas), on the peace that rule provides the citizens. Looking at Aristotle’s claim that the civitas strives to be like an animal in which all parts in the right proportion for the sake of health, Marsilius argues that ‘the parts of the kingdom or state will be well disposed for the sake of peace [tranquilitas].’ Marsilius goes on to define peace as the agreeable ‘belonging together’ of all members of the kingdom or the state. In this way, Marsilius moves away from a theological ground of the legitimacy of the state towards one that is entirely secular. However, the ground is an unstable one in that it acknowledges the fact that the ‘members’ of the body politic are characterised by difference. As such, the ground of legitimate authority will be characterised as much by force as by peace or by the relation of force to peace.

Classical Daoist Meditation, 400–100 bce

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold D. Roth
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Attentional Focus ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemplative Practice ◽  
Meditative Practice ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

Daoism is the indigenous Chinese religious tradition that has been a major feature of this culture for over two thousand years. It is grounded in a comprehensive cosmology of the Way (Dao) that derives from the ancient practice of a meditation that emphasizes attentional focus and mental tranquility attained through an apophatic (self-negating) practice of systematically emptying consciousness of its normal contents. These foundational ideas are present in a series of surviving works that include the famous Laozi and Zhuangzi, which have recently been supplemented by newly excavated texts and newly appreciated extant ones known for millennia. They contain a meditative practice that has been called “inner cultivation” and that emphasizes methods that develop concentration in order to empty the mind of all common thoughts, desires, emotions, and perceptions. These lead ultimately to self-transcending experiences in which adepts experience a complete union with the non-dual Way. The return to dualistic consciousness is accompanied by a fresh and transformed cognition in which adepts are able to spontaneously and effortlessly act in harmony with all new circumstances. This flowing cognition is able to effect transformations in other people and in the body politic and so becomes part of the arcana of government advocated to local kings by the scholar-practitioners of this tradition. These apophatic methods constitute one of the main contemplative practice streams within the Daoist religious tradition and its continuities with later Daoism are detailed by Louis Komjathy in another chapter of this volume.

Sulla’s Phthiriasis and the Republican Body Politic

Mnemosyne ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (6) ◽  
pp. 949-971
Author(s):  
Brian Walters
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body

AbstractIt has long been suspected that Roman moralizing and the slander of political enemies lay behind the story of Sulla’s horrific death by vermin. This study traces the evocative logic of Sulla’s affliction to a constellation of Roman attitudes about corruption, self-mastery, and the body politic. It also argues that Sulla’s own rhetoric about the health of the state played a formative role in shaping narratives about his gruesome end.

The lives of subjects

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship of the state to its subjects as necessarily physically embodied beings. The primary way in which the commonwealth commands its subjects is through the medium of its law. The law is for the common good and obliges the community as a whole, and thus the ontological status of the law—as distinct from any particular command of a superior to an individual—is intimately tied to that of the body politic. The question, then, concerning the relationship of the state to the natural body of the individual can be framed in terms of the extent of the obligation of the civil law.

From Sovereignty to the State The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger’s The Bondman

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-174
Author(s):  
Bernadette Meyler
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Charles I ◽  
King Charles I

Philip Massinger’s 1623 play The Bondman appealed to a number of very different audiences, from King Charles I, to republicans resisting Charles II’s return to England, to spectators after the Restoration. This chapter argues that the play proved so versatile because it placed priority on the preservation of the state over any particular form of sovereignty. This political orientation derives in part from The Bondman’s debt to Senecan stoicism. Stoicism shapes the play’s approach to mercy as well. Rather than relying on a sovereign pardon, the play emphasizes a kind of rule based on equity as well as a variety of clemency derived from Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s De Clementia. Clemency as presented by the play entails preservation of the body politic through enlargement of the sovereign’s compass of concern.

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