scholarly journals Against deflation of the subject

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 1102-1121
Author(s):  
Janko Nesic
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Subjective Character ◽  
Combination Problem ◽  
Common Strategy ◽  
The Subject

I will argue that accounts of mineness and pre-reflective self-awareness can be helpful to panpsychists in solving the combination problems. A common strategy in answering the subject combination problem in panpsychism is to deflate the subject, eliminating or reducing subjects to experience. Many modern panpsychist theories are deflationist or endorse deflationist accounts of subjects, such as Parfit?s reductionism of personal identity and G. Strawson?s identity view. To see if there can be deflation we need to understand what the subject/self is. One aspect of consciousness left unexplored and unappreciated by panpsychist theories is pre-reflective self-consciousness/self-awareness. Theories of the self, inspired by phenomenology, that are serious about subjectivity, could be of use in arguing against the deflationary reductionism of the experiencing subject. These theories show that there is more to the subject of experience than just its experiences (qualities). Even without arguing for any precise account of the nature of the self, it can be shown what phenomenology of subjective character of consciousness and pre-reflective self-awareness contributes to the combination problem debate.

The Story and the Dilemma

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Clinical Aspects ◽  
Body Consciousness ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Theoretical Account ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Religion And Art

This section tells the story of my mother's stroke and what I have learnt from it about mind, body, consciousness, and the self, arguably the most cross-disciplinary topic of all. What gives us our sense of personal identity – our body? Our mind? Their union? And what if one of them is diminished – say, as a result of an accident; what then, do we stop being ourselves? This opening chapter sets the scene for the debate that follows, on this most fascinating mystery of all – our own self and consciousness. We question the still dominant dualist approach of the mind, seeking a more holistic view of the self; to this end, we believe that adding relevant experiential aspects will help complement the theory. Thus, an interdisciplinary, trans-theoretical account is needed in this endeavour. In this chapter, we introduce the dilemma and draw the main lines of argumentation related to it. In Chapter 2, we discuss the first experiential (in other words, the clinical) aspects of the mind, and neuroscientists' view of it, followed – in Chapter 3, by social aspects and psychologists' contributions to the subject. Chapter 4 will add more idiosyncratic aspects to the debate, such as the spiritual profile of a person, more often discussed in philosophy, religion, and art.

Screaming in a Vacuum: Some Adolescents' Search for Meaning

1973 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Eisen
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Self ◽  
Clinical Material ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Late Adolescents ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Therapeutic Task ◽  
Special Risk

Late adolescents, often in conflict over establishing an adequate personal identity in a discordant world, are at special risk. Some feel an ideational and affective emptiness and an absence of meaningful “external” experience, which can be likened to screaming in a vacuum. Clinical material from three adolescents is described. Theoretical formulations incorporating the long-term impoverishment of object relationships and lack of definition of “the self” are seen as central issues. The therapeutic task, aimed at establishing an acceptable and reliable self-awareness, is discussed.

scholarly journals The Heideggerian critique of Kant’s moral subject

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gábor Tóth
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Functional Model ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Moral Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Physical Features

The paper discusses Kant’s concept of the subject through Heideger’s critique. Heidegger deconstructs the structure of Kant’s idea of personal identity as the moral subject. In the 13th paragraph of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), Heidegger distinguishes three basic aspects of Kant’s idea of the self: the personalitas transcendentalis, the personalitas psychologica, and the personalitas moralis. The personalitas moralis is defined as the sphere of pure morality, the intelligible realm of freedom. This is an aspect of the individual beyond physical features and also beyond the determinism of laws of nature. The causality by freedom forms the basis of practical actions ordered by moral law. Therefore, it acts as the highest level determinism of Being in human existence. Heidegger’s conclusion shows Kant’s failure in delineating a functional model of the moral subject but accepts Kant’s contribution to laying the foundations of such a theory.

scholarly journals "The City as Muse": A Context-Oriented Meta-Historical Reading of Toyin Falola's A Mouth Sweeter than Salt

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahim A. Odugbemi
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
Prose Literature ◽  
The City

A number of scholarly and critical arguments have explored the poetics of nonfiction, otherwise called life writing, as a sub-genre of prose literature. Against the common expectation of a detailed concentration on facts about the subject (the self or the other) which has made nonfiction to be seen in some quarters as a concern of history, such critical arguments have shown that this genre has its peculiar, predominant pattern and structure, which make it arguably a concern of the literary enterprise. A part of such argu­ments theoretically postulates that nonfiction is a meta-history, based on its identification of some textual and contextual properties and patterns of narra­tion which transform the life account of the self or other into a meta-historical (and not historical) expression, and therefore makes such writing a concern of literature. In extension of this argument, this paper examines Toyin Falola's memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, as a genre of life writing and, especially, a form of autobiography, by showing how the setting, Ibadan, in its cultural and social formations, is depicted as having contributed to the self-awareness, self-image and identity of the subject, and how this reflection makes the nar­rative a meta-historical expression.

Personal Identity and Literary Personae: A Study in Historical Psychology

PMLA ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh M. Richmond
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
Religious Controversy

AbstractIn the Renaissance, religious and political confrontations generated an intensified awareness of the self which marks a decisive phase in the evolution of human personality, whose study may be entitled Historical Psychology. Alienation from religious and political strife turned the interests of Petrarch and Montaigne toward their own minds, Marot's persecution for heresy developed his self-awareness in L'Enfer, followed by Ronsard's self-defensive autobiography in his Reply to Insults. Such models prefigure Milton's authorial intrusions of Paradise Lost. Shakespeare illustrates the creative impact of religious controversy by enriching the hints of Lollardry in Falstaff with a wide variety of Puritan affectations in the Elizabethan period. The Protestant attacks on Machiavelli also help in developing the character of Richard III and similar introverted creations, as T. S. Eliot notes. By the time of Marvell, personality is considered essentially artificial and willed—an inheritance from which Swift, the Romantics, and many modern authors have profited. Historical Psychology is thus a necessary tool if we are to handle the development of literary tradition.

scholarly journals The Big and the Great: A Reconstruction of Zhuangzi’s Philosophy on Transcendence

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Limei Jiang
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Rational Thinking ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Ideal

This essay attempts to demonstrate the logic of Zhuangzi in his different attitudes toward “debate on big and small” by bringing into discussion the two versions of translation in the English languages, which provide a new approach to analyze the difference in the controversial commentaries on Zhuangzi. This essay points out that the ideal of “free and easy wandering” is a type of positive pleasure. By means of rational thinking and imagination, one’s searching for the external values is turned into the internal pursuit for wisdom in the transformation of things. Zhuangzi’s theory of transcendence not only provides the subject with multi-perspectives, but also substitutes the self-identity with self-value. Through the interaction between self-awareness and self-reaction, the subject can be unified with the great Dao through purposive activities. However, Guo Xiang’s commentary cancels the necessity of self-cultivation and negates the purposefulness of the subject, which underestimates the value of Zhuangzi’s construction of transcendence.

scholarly journals The Sea in the Poetry of Judita Vaičiūnaitė and Vizma Belševica

Lituanistica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Inga Stepukonienė
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Urban Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Complex World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lyrical Poetry ◽  
The Subject

The lyrical poetry of Judita Vaičiūnaitė (Lithuania) and Vizma Belševica (Latvia), modern poetesses of the second half of the twentieth century, vividly reflects the realities of urban culture. However, the centre of their lyricism, the woman, is projected not only in the urban environment, but also in nature. The four mythological elements (water, air, earth, and fire) are given special powers and are highly important in both Belševica’s and Vaičiūnaitė’s work. Water in their lyrical poetry becomes an inexhaustible source of spiritual and stylistic variations. In the poetry of Vaičiūnaitė and Belševica, the sea is not a metaphor for harmony, but for anxiety, which contrasts with the representation of earth, sky, and clouds. These elements are often opposed to water paradigms like lakes, rivers, rain, snow or frost, which hide mysterious worlds. The representation of the sea is rather controversial: the overall image is shaped from a multitude of different impulses and impressions that arise from different situations of life. One of the most typical lyrical themes in Vaičiūnaitė’s and Belševica’s work is the past and remembrance of things, people, events, and phenomena. They reflect on the existence of prominent past personalities by representing their vivid images; the reader can feel the spiritual motion and projection of dynamic actions into the future. Meanwhile, memories related to the realm of water often project passiveness. The poetry of Vaičiūnaitė and Belševica reflects a strong symbolic link between the sea and the woman. The lyrical “I”, like the sea, is silent, deep, mysterious and, at the same time, turbulent. The sea also embodies the feeling of global insecurity. The seabed metaphorically represents the threshold between the safe and the dangerous states of a woman, separating the complex world of earth from the inscrutable water world, which may instantly transform the woman’s status. The sea also implies the seme of purity and purgation, the axis of morality and value as discussed by Bachelard. Purity is one of the main value-determining categories, inseparable from the self-awareness of the lyrical “I”, which stands in opposition to the other. In their experience of nature, they share the same motif of “motherly water”. It is not by chance that the poetry of Vaičiūnaitė and Belševica merges the elements of the sea world and reality – images of love appearing in the subconscious of the subject are directed to “the shelter creature, the nourishment creature symbolic of the mother”. This semantics of the sea brings together the poetry of the two Baltic poets.

scholarly journals Varieties of Self-Apprehension

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 186-220
Author(s):  
Anna Giustina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Information Acquisition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Reflective Awareness ◽  
Current Topic ◽  
Central Tenet ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Philosophical Debates ◽  
A Current

The Brentanian idea that every state of consciousness involves a consciousness or awareness of itself (Brentano 1874), which has been a central tenet of the phenomenological school, is a current topic in contemporary philosophical debates about consciousness and subjectivity, both in the continental and the analytic tradition. Typically, the self-awareness that accompanies every state of consciousness is char­acterized as pre-reflective. Most theorists of pre-reflective self-awareness seem to converge on a negative characterization: pre-reflective self-awareness is not a kind of reflective awareness. Whereas reflective self-awareness is attentive and descriptive, pre-reflective self-awareness is non-attentive and non-descriptive.This paper aims to show that the reflective/pre-reflective dichotomy overlooks a finer-grained distinction. The first part is devoted to arguing that the typical use of the adjective ‘pre-reflective’ conflates two properties (non-attentiveness and non-descriptiveness), which are in fact separable. Accordingly, not only can there be non-descriptive and non-attentive self-consciousness (i.e. pre-reflective self-awareness), but also non-descriptive but attentive self-consciousness. I call the latter primitive introspection. The second part of the paper is devoted to arguing that, whereas both pre-reflective self-awareness and primitive introspection enable the subject to apprehend the phenomenology of their experience, the kind of apprehension each allows for is different. By analyzing the notion of apprehension in terms of information acquisition and personal-level availability of information, it is proposed that, although both pre-reflective self-awareness and primitive introspection allow for acquisition of the maximal amount of information about the experience, only primitive introspection makes all such information personal-level available.

scholarly journals The Romantic subject as an absolutely autonomous individual

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-85
Author(s):  
Miljana Cunta
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Treat All

This essay deals with the Romantic subject as a philosophical and literary category. Recog­ nizing the diversity and complexity of literary production in the Romantic period, this study does not attempt to treat all the many aspects of this subject, but it instead focuses upan a few: the role of nature, the status of imagination, and the subject's relation to the transcendental reality. In its rela­ tion to these issues, the Romantic subject appears as an absolutely autonomous individual, one who finds no satisfaction in claims to transcendental certainty made by any source outside the self, but relies on his immanent powers to achieve the self-awareness that is the only sure access to truth. Special attention is given to the Romantic mystical experience, whereby the subject eames into relation with the transcendental reality. Here what are termed mystical feelings are contrasted with religious feelings proper so as to stress the peculiarities of the Romantic religious experience. In providing a theoretical framewok for the religious experience, we have recourse to Rudolf Otto's definition of the "numinous," which denotes the feeling response of the subject to the divine aspect of reality. In comparison with the true religious experience, the Romantic type is seen as pseudo­- religious, thus confirming the proposed definition of the Romantic subject as a truly autonomous individual. The essay's second part contains an interpretation of selected poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge with a view of extrapolating from them some aspects of the Romantic subject.

Richard Rorty’s Critique of the Self in Term of Interaction Between the Self and Others

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-153
Author(s):  
Trung Kien Do
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Reciprocal Effect ◽  
Living Entity ◽  
Independent Entity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Self

Abstract The experiential self in interaction with an object is not, as Richard Rorty emphasizes, an inherent attribute that exists before real interactions, nor is it an entity with fixed characteristics. What Rorty constantly highlights is that the interaction in forming the self must achieve self-awareness as an entity impacted, acknowledged, and evaluated by others. This line of interpretation leads to two important concepts regarding the self’s formation that need to be clarified: First, when an individual expands his/her ability to manage space outside the reach of his/her physical person and visual perception, it is imperative that the individual is aware that he/she is controlling his/her own body. Second, the reciprocal effect from others cannot make the individual self-aware of his/her own existence as an independent entity if there is a lack of the other’s skepticism and questioning of the subject himself/herself. In this step of the self-experience process, the self’s attributes and its existence in relation to its surroundings are questioned. This article will focus on the explanation of the feasibility of perceiving the self as a form made up of biological premises and the awareness of the self as a living entity with contingent and flexible characteristics.

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