scholarly journals Totalitarianisms as systems of lawlessness (Miłosz’s remarks)

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Kaźmierczyk
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
The Ideal

The article accounts for the gnostic individualism in Miłosz’s records. It shows that its essence is not freedom, but self-will. It argues that its premises are existential. Among them we can find the fundamental data of existence: the passage of time, death, growing old of the body, the decomposition of matter, experiencing biological drives as violence and the laws of nature and history as necessity. If existence is experienced that way it bears self-will. The author argues that Miłosz fell into a crisis of gnostic self-will as he realized it leads to the inner split between the evil world and the ideal super-world. He was also aware that this duality implies the aversion to the earthly life and nihilism. The author shows that the experience of self-will served as a tool in the Nobel laureate’s writings to study totalitarianisms. From this perspective Nazism seems to be the self-will inspired by Darwinism, while Communism – the quintessence of Enlightenment idealism. As a result of the deviation of freedom the Nazi Germany and the Bolshevik Russia became the mine of genocide.

Whitman and the Phrenologists: The Divine Body and the Sensuous Soul

PMLA ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Wrobel
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Spiritual Awareness ◽  
Single Identity ◽  
Mystic Union ◽  
Divine Body ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Ideal

Insisting that the “Me” is the center and meaning of all experience and that reality is indistinguishable from the self, Whitman turns to the phrenological concept of the soul as the agent that makes the physical self susceptible to the spiritual and the infinite. He insists that it is the soul's office, literally, to translate the sensuous data apprehended by a physiologically endowed man perfectly attuned to the universe into the spiritual truths that are integral in the mystic union of all Being. So closely does Whitman identify robust health with spiritual awareness that this forms the basis of his materialistic monism, arguing that the body and the soul are merged into an indivisible One. Since the body is the soul, the sensible is in fact the suprasensible, and matter is mind, dualism presents no problem. Instead of the two principles, in Whitman a single identity is achieved when the active soul “charges” the surrounding universe and perceives the ideal in the actual. Major phrenological ideas also inform Whitman's unique equalitarian transcendentalism, his sensual mysticism, and his poetic catalogs where the persona, fusing with a cumulative imagery, signals his union with the larger Oneness where all contradictions are resolved.

The ideal self is me: Deconstructing the self-evaluation process

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey L. Guenther ◽  
Kathryn Applegate ◽  
Steven Svoboda ◽  
Emily Adams
Keyword(s):  
Evaluation Process ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ideal Self ◽  
Self Evaluation ◽  
The Ideal

‘A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust’: The World and Self in Thomas Hardy's Poems

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Body Subject

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.

NEUROTIC SYMPTOMATICS RELATED TO PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS IN YOUTH

2019 ◽  
pp. 2014-2019
Author(s):  
Milen Dimov
Keyword(s):  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Responsiveness ◽  
Training Process ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
School Year ◽  
Real Behavior ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
The Ideal

The present study traces the dynamics of personal characteristics in youth and the manifested neurotic symptoms in the training process. These facts are the reason for the low levels of school results in the context of the existing theoretical statements of the problem and the empirical research conducted among the trained teenagers. We suggest that the indicators of neurotic symptomatology in youth – aggression, anxiety, and neuroticism, are the most demonstrated, compared to the other studied indicators of neurotic symptomatology. Studies have proved that there is a difference in the act of neurotic symptoms when tested in different situations, both in terms of expression and content. At the beginning of the school year, neurotic symptoms, more demonstrated in some aspects of aggressiveness, while at the end of school year, psychotism is more demonstrated. The presented summarized results indicate that at the beginning of the school year, neurotic symptoms are strongly associated with aggression. There is a tendency towards a lower level of social responsiveness, both in the self-assessment of real behavior and in the ideal “I”-image of students in the last year of their studies. The neurotic symptomatology, more demonstrated due to specific conditions in the life of young people and in relation to the characteristics of age.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The book’s epilogue explores the place of musical portraiture in the context of posthumous depictions of the deceased, and in relation to the so-called posthuman condition, which describes contemporary changes in the relationship of the individual with such aspects of life as technology and the body. It first examines Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to view how Bernard Herrmann’s score relates to issues of portraiture and the depiction of the identity of the deceased. It then considers the work of cyborg composer-artist Neil Harbisson, who has aimed, through the use of new capabilities of hybridity between the body and technology, to convey something akin to visual likeness in his series of Sound Portraits. The epilogue shows how an examination of contemporary views of posthumous and posthuman identities helps to illuminate the ways music represents the self throughout the genre of musical portraiture.

Embodying the culture of achievement: Culture between illness and perfection is a ‘thin line’ – obtaining the ideal female body as an act of achievement

2021 ◽  
pp. 1354067X2110040
Author(s):  
Josefine Dilling ◽  
Anders Petersen
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Study ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Thin Line ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Body Ideals

In this article, we argue that certain behaviour connected to the attempt to attain contemporary female body ideals in Denmark can be understood as an act of achievement and, thus, as an embodiment of the culture of achievement, as it is characterised in Præstationssamfundet, written by the Danish sociologist Anders Petersen (2016) Hans Reitzels Forlag . Arguing from cultural psychological and sociological standpoints, this article examines how the human body functions as a mediational tool in different ways from which the individual communicates both moral and aesthetic sociocultural ideals and values. Complex processes of embodiment, we argue, can be described with different levels of internalisation, externalisation and materialisation, where the body functions as a central mediator. Analysing the findings from a qualitative experimental study on contemporary body ideals carried out by the Danish psychologists Josefine Dilling and Maja Trillingsgaard, this article seeks to anchor such theoretical claims in central empirical findings. The main conclusions from the study are used to structure the article and build arguments on how expectations and ideals expressed in an achievement society become embodied.

Circadian tuning of motivation. A little organ of yesterday?

1995 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Daan
Keyword(s):  
Internal State ◽  
External Environment ◽  
Animal Behaviour ◽  
The Body ◽  
Biological Clocks ◽  
Motivational Systems ◽  
Regulatory Principle ◽  
The Face ◽  
Temporal Organisation ◽  
The Ideal

The analysis of motivational systems underlying temporal organisation in animal behaviour has relied primarily on two conceptual functional frameworks: Homeostasis and biological clocks. Homeostasis is one of the most general and influential concepts in physiology. Walter Cannon introduced homeostasis as a universal regulatory principle which animals employ to maintain constancy of their ‘internal milieu’ in the face of challenges and perturbations from the external environment. Cannon spoke of “The Wisdom of the Body”, the collective of responses designed to defend the ideal internal state against those perturbations.

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