scholarly journals Beyond the Threshold – Autobiography, Dialogic Interaction, and Conversion in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s and W. Abdullah Quilliam’s Poetry

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. SV57-SV74
Author(s):  
Martin Kindermann
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
The Self ◽  
Spiritual Journey ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Conversion Experience ◽  
God's Call ◽  
Dialogic Interaction

The intertwinement of poetic life writing and theological reflections has a long-standing history in British literature. This paper shows how two Victorian poets – Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. Abdullah Quilliam – use dialogic strategies to establish an autobiographic voice, which becomes an essential poetic means of the text. Through the representation of dialogic encounters, the poems establish an autobiographic mode of speaking, which is used to articulate individual conversion experiences and to negotiate conversion as an encounter with God. Based on the works of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, I will show how a dynamic understanding of text and conversion experience is essential to a reading that seeks to explore the poetic construction of Hopkins’s as well as Quilliam’s works. The representation of the dynamic encounter of the self and the Divine in the contact zone of the text provides a frame in which the authors locate themselves with regard to the religious majority of Victorian Britain. The texts link the spiritual journey of conversion to the self as being caught in the world, responding to God’s call as an answer to the world’s condition.

‘The Organized Selfishness of Empire’

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-28
Author(s):  
Sandra den Otter
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Self ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Welfare State

This essay examines T. H. Green’s evolving ideas on empire. Professor of moral philosophy in Oxford until his death in 1882, Green was the most prominent and respected philosophical idealist in Victorian Britain. The influence of his personal example and of his ideas has been traced by Jose Harris and other historians of the welfare state down to the 1940s. Initially enthusiastic for the civilizing mission of empire, Green came to see that any political system or relationship imposed by force, or dependent on coercion or control, was intrinsically incompatible with the ideals of citizenship, voluntarism, and solidarity that define the good community and make possible the self-realization of individuals within it. The essay opens up a new field for discussion and research: the relationship between idealist welfare thinking and imperialism. It argues that empire had a major impact on idealist notions of social welfare.

scholarly journals The identity/alterity nexus in international relations: two cases of encounter with difference

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-247
Author(s):  
Erica Resende
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Different Levels

The aim of this article is to survey the implications of the identity/alterity nexus in international relations (IR) as related to processes of othering for understanding conflict and violence in global politics. I will offer what I could call an ontology of difference in global politics, where I stress the reliance of understanding othering practices in global politics, as I explore two cases from which I ask the following questions: How do identity and identity formation processes occur and develop at different levels, times and dimensions? How do discourses of differentiation and identification help construct state identities and interests? Following Emmanuel Lévinas, I will argue that by seeking ways to reach out towards the Other, we free ourselves from the restraints of selfishness, from indifference and isolation. Finding and coming to terms with a composition of the Self that also includes the Other enables us to take responsibility for him/her inasmuch it prevents the conditions for violence and conflict.

Tracing Sexual Difference

1998 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Pamela Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The Difference

A reading of Luce Irigaray suggests the possibility of tracing sexual difference in philosophical accounts of personal identity. In particular, I argue that Irigaray raises the possibility of moving beyond the aporia of the other which lies at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's account of self-identity. My contention is that the self conceived in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another is male insofar as it is dependent upon the patriarchal monotheism which has shaped Western culture both socially and economically. Nevertheless there remains the possibility of developing Ricoeur's reference to 'the trace of the Other' in order to give a non-essential meaning to sexual difference. Such meaning will emerge when (i) both men and women have identities as subjects, and (ii) the difference between them can be expressed. I aim to elucidate both conditions by appropriating Irigaray's 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love.'

Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas: An Ethical Query

2001 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice Friedman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Martin Buber

Gabriel Cercel: Martin HEIDEGGER, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges; Attila Szigeti: Emmanuel LEVINAS, Positivité et transcendance. Suivi de Lévinas et la phenomenology; Cristian Ciocan: Jean-Luc MARION, Crucea vizibilului; Gabriel Cercel: Mądąlina DIACONU, Blickumkehr. Mit Martin Heidegger zu einer relationalen ästhetik; Cristina Ionescu: Mark WRATHALL, Jeff MALPAS (eds.), Essays in Honour of Hubert L. Dreyfus; Cristian Ciocan: Ion COPOERU, Aparenţą şi sens. Repere ale fenomenologiei constitutive; Cristian Ciocan: Michael INWOOD, A Heidegger Dictionary; Cristian Ciocan: Linda FISCHER, Lester EMBREE (eds.), Feminist Phenomenology; Mądąlina Diaconu: Renato CRISTIN, Fenomeno storia. Fenomenologia e storicità in Husserl e Dilthey; Cristian Ciocan: Michel HAAR, La philosophie française entre phénoménologie et métaphysique; Gabriel Cercel: Otto PöGGELER, Heidegger in seiner Zeit; Roxana Albu: James RISSER (ed.), Heidegger toward the Turn, Essays on the work of the 1930s; Cristian Ciocan: Virgil Ciomoş, Timp şi Eternitate. Aristotel, Fizica IV 10-14, Interpretare fenomenologicą; Cristina Ionescu: William D. BLATTNER, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism; Bogdan Mincą: Gino ZACCARIA, L'inizio greco del pensiero. Heidegger e l'essenza futura della filosofia; Mądąlina Diaconu: Ute GUZZONI, Wohnen und Wandern; Bogdan Tątaru-Cazaban: Emmanuel LéVINAS, Totalitate şi infinit; Mihail Neamţu: Jean-Luc MARION, étant donné. Essai d'une phénoménologie de la donation; Gabriel Cercel: Robert PETKOVŠEK, Heidegger-Index (1919-1927); Cristian Ciocan: Einar ØVERENGET, Seeing The Self. Heidegger on Subjectivity Mihail Neamţu: Rolf KüHN, Husserls Begriff der Passivität. Zur Kritik der passiven Synthesis in der genetischen Phänomenologie.

2001 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 319-435
Author(s):  
Gabriel Cercel ◽  
Attila Szigeti ◽  
Cristian Ciocan ◽  
Cristina Ionescu ◽  
Mădălina Diaconu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Self ◽  
Feminist Phenomenology

“I” and the “Other”

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petrus Van Ewijk
Keyword(s):  
Alcoholics Anonymous ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Language Game ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Infinite Jest ◽  
I And Thou ◽  
To Come

In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the presence of Alcoholics Anonymous can be considered as an attempt to come up with a solution for both the addiction and the solipsism of the characters. AA tries to accomplish this by reconnecting the addict with the “Other”. The assimilation of the “Other” by the totalizing tendency of the self is dropped in favor of an earnest connection. This article focuses on the similarities between AA’s methods, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of the language-game, Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of the “Other” and Martin Buber’s I and Thou. It illustrates how, in light of this knowledge, a reader might be able to uncover moments of earnestness in Infinite Jest, as well as pick up on the rules necessary to counter contemporary American solitude.

“Companionable Being”

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-71
Author(s):  
W. Clark Gilpin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
The Self ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Single Issue

American religious thinkers of the mid-twentieth century regularly included appreciative comments about Martin Buber’s thought in their books and essays, but they seldom stated specifically what they were drawing from Buber. Their comments did, however, tend to circle around a single issue: modern social, political, and technological changes were destabilizing both the sense of “the uniqueness of human selfhood” and the possibility of its distinctively “religious existence.” They sought a third way through the modern cultural and religious problem of the self, and they took Martin Buber as their guide.

scholarly journals Self-transcendence and Eros: The human condition between desire and the infinite

2011 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornel W. Du Toit
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Self Transcendence ◽  
The Impact

This article treats self-transcendence – like all transcendence – as a fact of human life. Inter alia this means that the human mind perforce operates in terms of binary concepts such as finitude–infinity, inner world–outside world, self–other, desire–fulfilment, separation–union and the like. We find these concepts in most myths of origin. The concept of desire (Eros), combining unfulfilment and the infinite, particularly epitomises self-transcendence. Ralph Waldo Emerson is cited as a precursor of the mid-19th century transcendentalists, whose ideas are resurfacing in present-day secular spirituality. In this article, we examined desire in the Christian conception of the Fall as envisioned by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and by Hegel, who integrates mind and nature in his philosophy of Spirit. The works of Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur are used as points of reference to help us understand self and other in a framework of self-transcendence. The impact of these ideas on a postmetaphysical epistemology was also explored. Affectivity is a neglected area in Western thought and displays the same infinitude as rationality. The article concluded with present-day strategies of self-construction in a techno-scientific consumer culture.

scholarly journals Levinas and the ethical turn: a Nietzschean critique and response

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Thut
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ethical Obligation ◽  
Imaginary World ◽  
Continental Tradition ◽  
Philosophical Project ◽  
The One ◽  
Ethical Critique ◽  
Nietzschean Critique

The contentious ‘ethical turn’ in continental philosophy motivates this project. Emmanuel Levinas is among the leaders of this movement to draw renewed attention to ethics in the continental tradition. Levinas describes the transcendence that transpires in the self-Other encounter as the source of ethical obligation. However, given Friedrich Nietzsche’s ethical critique, his followers view the category of transcendence with suspicion. They think it presupposes an ontology of unchanging being. Since Nietzsche and his disciples reject ontologies of unchanging being, preferring immanence instead, they think that transcendence inevitably appeals to some imaginary world beyond the one we inhabit. Consequently, they view all philosophers of transcendence as escapist. To assess whether Levinas’ philosophical project is viable, I draw from Nietzsche’s work to mount a Nietzschean critique of Levinas. I subsequently consider a Levinasian reply to the Nietzschean critique, arguing that Levinas’ transcendence provides a compelling alternative to a Nietzschean ethics of immanence.

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