scholarly journals Bodily Contemplation: On the Question of the Truth of the Perception of Physical Objects in Chinese Landscape Painting

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-310
Author(s):  
Yiqun Wang

This article analyzes the views of representatives of the scientific community on ancient Chinese landscape painting, emphasis is mainly placed on views that concern the spiritual qualities of landscape painting, as well as rethinking concepts that ignore the significance of sensual perception. Landscape painting is usually considered as a spiritual work of Taoism: landscape painting developed from Taoist thought, Taoist philosophy determined the identity of the artistic style and the inherent spirit of landscape painting. Moreover, some researchers even believe that bodily contemplation of landscape painting means setting the very original nature of mountains and waters, and the "knowledge of the truth" is a spiritual process that is more blocked by the human capacity for sensual perception. Some of the scientists completely deny the possibility and truth of sensual perception of physical objects in landscape painting. The author of this article believes that the spiritual component of landscape painting lurks precisely in the value of sensual perception, and bodily contemplation of mountains and waters is impossible without the participation of the body, clear confirmation of which we find in the ancient Chinese theory of arts. Ancient Chinese works of art traditionally had a close connection with sensual perception through bodily contemplation. This process is not simply about capturing object information, but when the subject takes an active part in the vision of the object, when the subject gives feedback to the object, and through acquiring the object its meaning is transmitted. Only through bodily contemplation, the individual can fully feel the artistic value of landscape painting, and Taoist philosophy thus gains a real existence in landscape painting, becoming a kind of emotional thinking.

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-54
Author(s):  
Jerzy Kosiewicz

Abstract In the presented text the author points out to anthropological as well as axiological foundations of the boxing fight from the viewpoint of Hegel’s philosophy. In the genial idealist’s views it is possible to perceive the appreciation of the body, which constitutes a necessary basis for the man’s physical activity, for his work oriented towards the self-transformation and the transformation of the external world, as well as for rivalry and the hand-to-hand fight. While focusing our attention on the issue of rivalry and on the situation of the fight - and regarding it from the viewpoint of the master - slave theory (included in the phenomenology of spirit), it is possible to proclaim that even a conventionalised boxing fight - that is, restricted by cultural and sports rules of the game - has features of the fight to the death between two Hegelian forms of selfknowledge striving for self-affirmation and self-realisation. In the boxing fight, similarly as in the above mentioned Hegelian theory, a problem of work and of the development of the human individual (that is, of the subject, self-knowledge, the participant of the fight) appears. There appears also a prospect of death as a possible end of merciless rivalry. The fight revalues the human way in an important way, whereas the prospect for death, the awareness of its proximity, the feeling that its close and possible, saturates the life with additional values. It places the boxer, just like every subject fighting in a similar or a different way, on the path towards absolute abstraction - that is, it brings him closer to his self-fulfilment in the Absolute, to the absolute synthesis. The Hegelian viewpoint enables also to appreciate the boxing fight as a manifestation of low culture (being in contrast with high culture), to turn attention to the relations which - according to Hegel - take place between the Absolute and the man, as well as to show which place is occupied by the subject both in the process of the Absolute’s self-realisation and in the German thinker’s philosophical system. Independently of the dialectical, simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic overtone of considerations connected with the very boxing fight (regarding destruction and spiritualisation on a higher level), it is possible to perceive farreaching appreciation of the human individual in Hegel’s philosophy since the Absolute cannot make its own self-affirmation without the individual, without the human body, without the fight aimed at the destruction of the enemy and without the subjective consciousness and the collective consciousness which appear thanks to this fight. Thus, it is justified to suppose that the foundation of the whole Hegel’s philosophy is constituted by anthropology and that in the framework of this anthropology a special role is played by the fight and by work, which changes the subject and his(her) environment. Admittedly Hegel does not emphasise it explicitly, nevertheless his views (with their centre, which, according to Hegel himself and his interpreters, is constituted by the Absolute) have, as a matter of fact, an anthropocentric character and the main source of the subject’s development is the struggle which, irrespectively of its result, always primarily leads to the destruction or even to the death of one of the sides, just like in the boxing fight. However, it is also a germ of the positive re-orientation of the subject, the beginning and a continuation of that what the phenomenology of the spirit describes as a movement towards absolute abstraction.


2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (04) ◽  
pp. 245-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Rosse ◽  
J. F. Brinkley

Summary Objectives: Survey current work primarily funded by the US Human Brain Project (HBP) that involves substantial use of images. Organize this work around a framework based on the physical organization of the body. Methods: Pointers to individual research efforts were obtained through the HBP home page as well as personal contacts from HBP annual meetings. References from these sources were followed to find closely related work. The individual research efforts were then studied and characterized. Results: The subject of the review is the intersection of neuroinformatics (information about the brain), imaging informatics (information about images), and structural informatics (information about the physical structure of the body). Of the 30 funded projects currently listed on the HBP web site, at least 22 make heavy use of images. These projects are described in terms of broad categories of structural imaging, functional imaging, and image-based brain information systems. Conclusions: Understanding the most complex entity known (the brain) gives rise to many interesting and difficult problems in informatics and computer science. Although much progress has been made by HBP and other neuroinformatics researchers, a great many problems remain that will require substantial informatics research efforts. Thus, the HPB can and should be seen as an excellent driving application area for biomedical informatics research.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Andrey Krushinskiy ◽  

The epoch-making discovery of the phenomenon of non-linear organization of the ancient Chinese text by the remarkable Leningrad sinologist-philosopher V.S. Spirin (1929–2002) radically expanded the horizons of our perception of the written heritage of Ancient China, outlining the way to overcome the prejudice about linear reading of the ancient Chinese classics as supposedly the only acceptable. At the same time, Spirin’s discovery of the multidimensionality of the ancient Chinese text seriously challenges the concept of the subject in the context of ancient Chinese discourse. After all, a break with the linear ordering of the text is tantamount to destroying the unity of the speech intention and the subjectivity of the speaker corresponding to it, constituted by his speaking. Accordingly, the figure of a storyteller telling a story should either disappear, leaving behind a void of subjectlessness, or give way to a completely different subjectivity. The proposed article raises the question of the nature and character of this subjectivity, which is fundamentally different from the narrator’s figure. It is shown that the synchronous integrity of the multidimensional image (Xiang 象), which distinguishes the Chinese hieroglyphic writing, has its own temporality, which allows it to be an alternative to the diachronic unity of the narrative. It is argued that the temporality of the image-xiang extends to gestaltic multidimensionality of hexagram graphics, endowing the latter with the corresponding multidimensional temporal structure. It is the hexagram time (guashi 卦時) that assumes the functions of a narrative for the temporal unification of the past and the future, thereby providing the necessary prerequisites for the emergence of a special kind of subjectivity. The guashi-hexagram time is determined by the graphic structure of the hexagram. This is the most general characteristic of the meaning of a particular hexagram as an era, providing space for the game between the era and the individual. As a result, we have a two-person game, constituting a game subjectivity, consisting of the game interaction of an individual and a hexagram time. It is argued that it is precisely the subordination of the line of discourse to the course of the game that sometimes makes it loop, and then the text lining up along this line requires its reader to read it backward, so to speak.


1998 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 209-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe

This article explores some textual dimensions of what I argue is a crucial moment in the history of the Anglo-Saxon subject. For purposes of temporal triangulation, I would locate this moment between roughly 970 and 1035, though these dates function merely as crude, if potent, signposts: the years 970×973 mark the adoption of the Regularis concordia, the ecclesiastical agreement on the practice of a reformed (and markedly continental) monasticism, and 1035 marks the death of Cnut, the Danish king of England, whose laws encode a change in the understanding of the individual before the law. These dates bracket a rich and chaotic time in England: the apex of the project of reform, a flourishing monastic culture, efflorescence of both Latin and vernacular literatures, remarkable manuscript production, but also the renewal of the Viking wars that seemed at times to be signs of the apocalypse and that ultimately would put a Dane on the throne of England. These dates point to two powerful and continuing sets of interests in late Anglo-Saxon England, ecclesiastical and secular, monastic and royal, whose relationships were never simple. This exploration of the subject in Anglo-Saxon England as it is illuminated by the law draws on texts associated with each of these interests and argues their interconnection. Its point of departure will be the body – the way it is configured, regarded, regulated and read in late Anglo-Saxon England. It focuses in particular on the use to which the body is put in juridical discourse: both the increasing role of the body in schemes of inquiry and of punishment and the ways in which the body comes to be used to know and control the subject.


1912 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-261
Author(s):  
Sutherland Simpson

To determine whether the diurnal variation in body temperature is due to the combined effects of the various influences which are known to act upon it, such as muscular exercise, the ingestion of food, sleep, etc., or is present independently of these, the daily routine of the individual who is the subject of the experiment may be reversed artificially by causing him to work during the night and rest and sleep during the day, or it may be modified in another way, viz. by rapidly changing his longitude in a journey from west to east, or vice versa. If the temperature of the body is dependent on the influences mentioned, then a total reversal of the daily routine, or any modification of it, should produce a corresponding change in the diurnal temperature curve.


Author(s):  
Christopher Bass

Of all the disorders characterized by symptoms in the absence of disease, conversion disorders are perhaps the most difficult to explain. How, for example, can one explain functional blindness or a loss of function of both legs in the absence of conspicuous organic disease? The ancient Greeks recognized that if we suffer emotional disturbance as a result of some serious stress (such as personal injury or bereavement), this causes a change in the nervous system which leads in turn to symptoms in different parts of the body according to the underlying pathophysiology. Nineteenth century neurologists made significant advances when they identified specific ideas at the root of the symptoms. In the early nineteenth century Collie also observed that the significance of, and attention to, a symptom or set of symptoms may depend more on what they mean (or their value) to the individual than on the biological underpinnings of the symptom itself. Spence has recently argued that the problem in hysterical motor disorders is not the voluntary motor system per se: rather, it is in the way that the motor system is utilized in the performance (or non-performance) of certain willed, chosen, actions. This model invokes a consciousness that acts upon the body and the world. By contrast, the psychodynamic (‘conversion’) model, which Freud introduced and which held sway for most of the twentieth century, invokes an unconscious mechanism ‘acting’ independently of consciousness, to interfere with voluntary movement. Spence has further argued that hysterical paralyses are maintained not by unconscious mechanisms, but by conscious processes. The maintenance of these symptoms requires the patient's attention, a characteristic of higher motor acts; the paralyses break down when the subject is distracted, consciousness is obtunded, or when it (the ‘paralyses’) is circumvented by reflexive motor routines. Hysterical paralyses, Spence avers, are quintessentially disorders of action (or inactions), which the patient disavows, when faced with some overwhelming situation, which threatens the identity of the self. One regrettable development of psychiatry's adoption of Freudian theory was the fracture in communication between the disciplines of psychiatry and neurology, which has only recently been restored by the sort of collaborative research currently being carried out by neurologists and psychiatrists. In the last decade there have also been exciting advances in neuroimaging, which have stimulated research into the neurophysiology of hysteria, and these will be described later. This chapter will also emphasize contemporary approaches to management of these difficult clinical problems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 235-250
Author(s):  
Arthur Simões Caetano Cabral ◽  
◽  
Vladimir Bartalini ◽  

"The central objective of this article is to raise questions about the relationships between identity, imaginary and landscape, which occur both at the individual and collective levels and which manifest themselves both in the body and in the landscape. Supported in different fields of knowledge related to the subject, such as anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, we seek to highlight the instabilities, ambiguities and ambivalences responsible for the wealth of meanings and contradictions that such relationships present."


1866 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 327-327
Author(s):  
William Turner

The author, after referring to variations in the external form of the body in different individuals, and to the relations between external form and internal structure, proceeded to discuss the subject of variability in the different organic systems. He showed that internal structural variations conferred upon the individual characters as distinctive as any peculiarities in external configuration. It was argued that in the development of the individual a morphological specialisation occurs, both in internal structure and external form, so that each man's structural individuality is an expression of the sum of the individual variations of all the constituent parts of his frame.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-21
Author(s):  
Celi Hirata

This paper seeks to examine two moments of the subject’s identification with substance in modernity, namely, the body in Hobbesian philosophy and the individual substance in Leibnizian thought. In Hobbes, to be a subject signifies to be subjected (to imaginary space, to the movements transmitted by means of shock, as well as to the sovereign), so that the body-substance is characterized by not having in itself its principle of movement. In Leibniz, for his turn, a subject (understood as substance) is that which contains in its own nature everything that can be truly predicated about it, implying that it is the foundation and principle of its own activity, or, in a word, it is self-sufficient. Nonetheless, although Hobbesian body is characterized by its inertia and Leibnizian substance by its self-sufficiency, it is my purpose to indicate that the former is more crucial than the latter to the constitution of the modern conception of subjectivity, i.e., of the subject as the center of action and as a founding power, capable of establishing a new order by its decision. This is not possible in Leibnizian philosophy, for, according to it, human activity, like that of any other substance, consists solely in the actualization of the divine plan of the best of all possible worlds.


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